Melissa Anderson

The King of Comedy, which Film Forum is presenting in a new 4K restoration for a week-long run, brilliantly keeps viewers unmoored, the result of its consistently off-kilter tone. Though filled with sight gags and corny jokes, the movie is also darkened by genuine menace.

Aiming to be a seriocomic movie of ideas but desperate not to offend or challenge, Let It Rain soon settles for being another smug comedy of bourgeois manners.

Though the redemption/coming-of-age narrative is highly predictable-with Glover appearing intermittently only to dispense bromides-Clarkson, at least, remains reliable.

An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.

Little music from the concert itself is heard. On display instead are inane, occasionally borderline offensive portrayals of Jews, performance artists, trannies, Vietnam vets, squares, and freaks.

Most of the culinary footage is devoted to documenting-in flat, dull DV-the finalists' piece montée, or "sugar showpiece," in which sucrose is manipulated for its chemical properties, and dessert becomes a weird, often tacky sculpture.

Likably stoopid, the latest from comedy troupe Broken Lizard (Super Troopers, Beerfest) mines plenty of jokes from eating out and being served.

Like her namesake, the filmmaker Lizzie Borden took an ax...to cinema conventions and tidy political resolutions in her 1983 landmark Born in Flames.

As far as teen comedies informed by 10th-grade English syllabi go, Easy A, partly inspired by "The Scarlet Letter," is remedial ed compared with "Clueless" and "10 Things I Hate About You."

35 Shots is Denis's warmest, most radiant work, honoring a family of two's extreme closeness while suggesting its potential for suffocation.

Lang's film, the last he made in the U.S., exposed the immorality of the death penalty; Hyams's retread offers only more plot and longer, louder car chases.

The film courageously shows its reprobate hero sliding further, not redeeming himself.

Tellingly, it's not the queers, but a cop--Seymour Pine, the 90-year-old retired NYPD morals inspector who led the raid on the Stonewall Inn--who gets the last word.

An earnest, if inert, civil rights docudrama clearly shot on the cheap (many of the wigs appear to have been borrowed from the Black Dynamite set).

Extraordinary, groundbreaking documentary.

Formally spartan, Ousmane Sembène's Black Girl (1966) is dense with cool fury.

Plays like both a supremely outmoded chick-lit adaptation and an outrageously obscene gesture as the economy continues to swallow up livelihoods, homes, and hope.

In its rushed, implausible moment of reckoning, Douchebag ends up validating the frat-boy credo: Bros before hos.

Bitton, best known for her 2004 nonfiction film "Wall," about the barrier Israel is building along its border with the occupied territories of the West Bank, questions her interviewees calmly and dispassionately (though her voice is heard, she is never seen). It's a strategy that yields damning revelations.

Surveillance is the work of a director who has made significant strides in both storytelling and control of the medium, deftly interweaving a grisly thriller, a sicko "Rashômon," a switcheroo, a psychotic love story, an imaginative paean to children, and an inspired resurrection of Julia Ormond.

In any language, the actress (Kristin Scott Thomas) does what she can to best serve her scripts, even when they're hopelessly beneath her.

The principals, especially Ejiofor, rise above the starchiness that often hampers portrayals of recent, monumental history.

Serious Moonlight has a backstory much more intriguingly dramatic than what's onscreen.

Writer-director James C. Strouse's The Winning Season respects its misfits (and its audience) by not stripping away their foibles in the service of sports-movie clichés.

To Save a Life wants to rescue kids from the Satanic messages of "Gossip Girl"--a benign, even worthy enough objective, but must alternatives to empty, materialistic adolescence require baptism in the Pacific?

Fonda is a co-conspirator with the filmmakers, slyly tweaking her own offscreen activities.

Daughters of the Dust abounds with stunning motifs and tableaux, the iconography seemingly sourced from dreams as much as from history and folklore. But however seductive and trance-inducing, the visual splendor of Dash's film is never vaporous.