Mark Feeney

The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.

The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.

What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.

The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.

Lawless is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.

To those of us in the audience who might be strangers in paranormal precincts, it looks suspiciously like a séance.

Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).

People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.

Robot & Frank isn't sure whether it's a comedy or drama, buddy movie or sci-fi fantasy, family melodrama or social satire.

The novel is extremely funny. It's hilarious as well as horrific (all sorts of bad things are going on outside the limo - and a few inside of it, too). Yet whenever the movie is funny, it feels like a mistake. Comedy has never been a Cronenberg strength.

Premium Rush has a lot of energy - too much, it's kind of exhausting.

Put Christian Bale behind the wheel, and Hit & Run would make a billion bucks - except then there'd be no room for Shepard, and that movie would hardly be worth watching.

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

You feel embarrassed for Streep and Jones (Streep especially) because of the situations, often sexual, they're put in. They're definitely not mailing in their performances.

It can seem sometimes that Hollywood has a monopoly on stupid, obnoxious comedy. Anyone who sees Klown will learn otherwise. Comedy can be just as stupid and obnoxious in Danish.

Much of the film is pure romantic comedy and a good one. Yet the filmmakers want it to be more.

In some ways Easy Money recalls Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." They have drug dealing in common, of course, but also a sense of constant swirl and density of onscreen population.

It's superb filmmaking, uncluttered and utterly assured. Miike places us in the household of Li, offering up rich, deep colors, with an almost painterly exploration of fields of depth and volume.

One of the movie's strengths is how we see the revolution - or, rather the anticipation of it - not from the perspective of royal or radical but courtier and servant.

Say this for Auteuil: He has a sense of movie history. The closing credits include the equivalent of an Easter egg for lovers of film and especially for lovers of French film.

Sacrifice wants to have it both ways. It's willing neither to give itself up to the goofy sincerity of genre conventions nor to make the demands on viewers that serious drama requires. The sacrifices Chen's characters make would signify that much more if he'd made a sacrifice or two himself.

The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.

The movie has elements of road picture, social satire, and odd-couple romance, but mostly it's about lack of pacing and tone. Somewhere very (very) deep in here is a whiff of "Citizen Ruth," and who knows what Alexander Payne might have done with this material. Instead we know what writer-director Robbie Pickering has done with it, and that ain't much.

Rules and regulations, which the military is very good at, are about behavior. Law is about justice. The Invisible War makes all too clear that the military isn't very good at justice.

Reviewing a Tyler Perry movie is a bit like reviewing the weather report. People who want to watch it are going to do so, regardless of what anyone says about it. And that's not even factoring in Charlie Sheen.

What's most vexing about Portrait of Wally is its lack of nuance.

The Turin Horse is in a very gray black and white. It looks the same way it feels: bleak, pure, forbidding, transfixing. Watching it, frankly, can be a bit of an ordeal. There's hardly anything in The Turin Horse you would describe as entertaining, but there is a very great deal that's beautiful and absorbing.

A bland, insistently amiable comedy that doubles as road movie.

Debt is bad, we can all agree, as is its conceptual cousin, greed. It would have been intellectually bracing, though, to have a Gordon Gekko equivalent on hand to argue otherwise.

Glawogger has the good sense mostly to stay out of the way and let the material speak for itself.

Beyond the Black Rainbow has a doomy, dreamy, druggy, draggy feel that's impressively sustained - until it becomes oppressive, then pointless, then laughable.

Chazz Palminteri's the best thing in the movie. He now has the look of a slightly beefier Steve Buscemi. But where Buscemi is all nerves on edge and something bad waiting to happen, Palminteri has a winning ease.

Is The Story of Film worth 15 hours of your viewing life? Well, that's between you and your kino conscience. The first part certainly is. Cousins is extremely good at laying out the emergence of a film grammar. More important, he communicates the sense of wonder and excitement that characterized the emergence of so astonishing a medium.

More to the point, the title doubles as accusation. Progress is dangerous and requires survival tactics, just as a hurricane or avalanche does.

Its anti-abortion stance aside, October Baby looks and feels like a Lifetime movie waiting not to happen.

Hipsters is also kind of amazing, thanks to headlong enthusiasm and an endearing obliviousness to just how ghastly the whole thing keeps threatening to become.

The man we meet is intelligent and good-humored. "They do what they want," he says with a shrug, indicating a set of just-completed canvases. "I planned something different."

"I've seen the look on people's faces when I've brought them there," Whedon says of the convention. "It's the look I had on my face. 'My tribe, my tribe, I've found my tribe.' "

Under a different set of circumstances - in a different society - the development might have flourished. But The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is a documentary, not fantasy.

Nobility with little pacing, imagination, or energy tends not to work too well on the screen. Rahim has the eyes of the young Mandy Patinkin. If only he had some of the wildness.

Nearly all the interviews are with the professionals. That's fine, since these guys are almost as good at talking as they are at smiling.

The biggest problem One for the Money faces is trying to have it both ways: gritty-ethnic inner city vs. girly-girly comic.

A treatment of Foster so reverential it verges on camp.

The Eamery, as some called it, was highly successful as a business - and, more important, as an exercise in tastemaking. "We wanted to make the best for the most for the least,'' the Eameses like to say.

The family snapshots are more revealing. The sight of Colby wearing a tie at family picnics really says something about the sort of man he was. But they're not that much more revealing.

The most interesting part of this lively, likable documentary is the journey.

Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.

Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.

It swoops, it pans, it noses around. The camerawork is almost as agitated as the editing. The directors seem to be trying to compensate for all the speechifying with as much random motion as possible.

It's slambang in pacing, bald in exposition, and offers cast-of-hundreds spectacle.

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

Rapt is smooth, cool, and efficient. It's a movie with very little wasted motion - or, for much of its length, wasted emotion.

Achache's direction is deft and assured. She lends the film a nice, easy rhythm that conceals the story's alternating whimsy and melodrama and almost compensates for them (almost).

It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.

This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.

Joffe's biggest mistake isn't visual, it's chronological. What makes Pinkie so terrifying in the novel is that he's just 17.

The problem is that the heart of the movie is McGowan. He's just not a very compelling figure. He's a bit doughy and inert.

As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.

The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.

Bride Flight is pretty predictable once the basic situation gets established.

Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.

What starts out as a beautifully depopulated filmic exercise - it's 14 minutes into the movie before Guzman introduces any people - becomes toward the end a nearly unbearable examination of good and bad in the human heart.

Hey, Boo is the documentary equivalent of a group hug, right down to the segments showing middle schoolers in Westchester County, N.Y., and Birmingham, Ala., discussing the book in class.

You marvel all the more at Litondo's and Harris's performances, considering how much claptrap Ann Peacock's script requires them to put up with.

There is a great and perhaps unique French cinematic tradition of braiding together love and manners and the past. Think of "Children of Paradise," "Casque d'Or," "The Earrings of Madame de . . .," "Elena and Her Men." Now one can think of The Princess of Montpensier, too.

Priest is based on a series of Korean graphic novels. What it's really based on, though, is other movies - a whole lot of other movies.

In fairness, putting holiness onscreen is an enormous challenge. It can be done, as several directors have shown, most notably Dreyer and Bresson. Bad enough that Joffe is the poor man's Lean. He's also the nonbelieving man's Dreyer and Bresson.

The best thing about the picture (unless you like exploding cars, in which case the rest of the movie is just so many interruptions between getting to see all these big old '70s boats going boom) is its proudly hammy supporting cast.

A marvel of energy, wit, and visual imagination, The Man With a Movie Camera remains one of the most exhilarating movies ever made. [06 Feb 2015, p.G5]

Truly, there is no looniness like looniness with lineage.

The miraculous thing about Let's Get Lost is that Weber has managed to create something that's both impossibly stylized and unmistakably moral (not judgmental, moral).

A deeply felt, and numbingly partisan, documentary about how the Mormon Church both bankrolled and masterminded passage of the initiative.

In Ran, color plays a role not unlike that of language in "Lear": a kind of ground bass of beauty, a product of pure imagination, that both affirms life and surpasses it. Yet Kurosawa uses that beauty more as negation: a reminder not of what man is capable of but how puny he is in comparison.

"This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''

Vividly captures a period of movie history. It’s just that the period seems less vital -- sleepier, if you will -- than it once did.

For such a small place (officially a city, Sidney sure feels like a town), it's strikingly diverse.

Killer of Sheep is a drama that’s hardly at all dramatic, which makes it all the more moving. It’s quiet, unhurried, understated, unblinking. Mood matters more than style, dailiness more than incident. All movies are about other movies. A few are also about life. “Killer of Sheep” is one of them.

There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.

Alice Creed isn't as good as Tarantino's directorial debut, or another movie it calls to mind, "A Simple Plan.'' But the genetic resemblance to those two films indicates how good much of this extremely assured picture is.

As Altman misfires go, Brewster McCloud is one of the better ones. [25 Jul 2010, p.12]