Michael Atkinson

Earthsea seems to be a stupendously dull place. It would try the patience of any kid.

At its most indulgent and posturing, Piñero plays like a movie the man himself might've made, between scores.

Yim's film is kneecapped by its soundtrack twice over.

Sheridan seems terrified of the book's irreverent energy, and scotches most of its élan, humor, bile, and irony. What's left wouldn't have substantiated a memoir of any reputation, much less a movie.

Sandler is less goofy than spitefully self-absorbed, and most of the comedy feels like child abuse.

Allegiance to Chekhov, which director Michael Cacoyannis displays with somber earnestness in the new adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, is a particularly vexing handicap.

The commonest sort of cultural pasteurization.

It is merely another inept teen movie ripping off better horror movies.

There's something dull and evasive at the film's center--for one thing, contrary to its festival buzz, Bad Education tiptoes around the issue of priesthood pedophilia; lovelorn gazes are as desperate as it gets.

Its sluggish, amateur-Kiarostami character would be off-putting if the material weren't so powerful.

For the discouraged filmgoer, Erice's tone poem will be a ray of hope itself.

An explosive experience...and you have to love the movie's rabid energy and lust.

Requiring an enormous amount of suspended disbelief, the original Rings may be a culture-specific phenom; despite strenuous efforts to Americanize Nakata's field of bad dreams, the preview audience did a lot of cackling.

An earnest but fatally amateurish and stereotypical melodrama about fraternity hazing.

Packed with melodrama, and often it works in the passionate, easy-to-watch manner of an old-fashioned "woman's film."

A tepid, pretentious indie that flies from the memory like a tissue in a twister.

A pale, derivative little Brit ditty that will be forgotten almost as speedily as it was dumped...into theaters.

Bani-Etemad's generational melodrama observes a blue-collar dynastic collapse worthy of Lillian Hellman, but stays steadfastly fixed on the quotidian of Tehran life.

Naturally, the worm turns again and again in this demi-Hitchcockian death trap, and Nakata knows how to shoot scenes of breath-holding paranoia: from a distance, simply, in real time. (We'll see how the inevitable remake, directed by Jonathan Glazer, measures up.)

It's gibberish, but when X works at all, it works not on the brain, but on the gut.

An informative if shrill primer on the last 35 years of Peruvian plight, the new doc State of Fear may only be effective as an educational tool for Americans, whose media have told them next to nothing about one of the Western Hemisphere's most horrifying killing fields.

Can only be enjoyed with a skullful of Old Bohemian and a faceful of high school crotch.

Has an unforgettable artery of hot-blooded talent coursing straight through it.

The summer's best cinematic equivalent to a lazy afternoon in the shade with a cool drink.

Romero's fourth-grade dialogue doesn't help matters, but anyone seeking out the latest achievements in cranial ruptures, spewing-blood gouts, and ground-beef spillage need look no further.

A sealskin-slick, cat-and-mouse romance-caper trifle with a hard-on for wealth that feels downright Trumpian.

Laughton understood Agee's proximity to Grimm vaudeville, and fashioned the most intensely expressionistic movie of its day.

Clumsily staged (a bike accident any 15-year-old Super-8 maven could’ve cut better), lit like a soap opera, and acted with all the bribed relish of a peanut butter commercial, Majidi’s movie is merely the simplistic bid being made by every national industry impatient for mass audience attention. Gallingly, it may succeed.

Les Mayfield's unintentionally wry American Outlaws just smells -- of filmmaking manure as well as yard-sale revisionism.

The movie is trite like the ocean is big.

From the (prolific) output of a largely unfashionable director, Wyler's Wuthering Heights has a distinctive look that elevates it above the blandness Goldwyn productions are so often charged with.

Being French, the film at least has indelible details -- something a Hollywood remake would fix but good.

Vertical Limit's real problem is its digitized sheen. Every shot seems to have been CGI-enhanced, so the movie has an overpasteurized, Velveeta-like glow -- processed movie food.

Assiduous, temperate, and a lot more honest about government and politicians than any other Hollywood film of the last few decades, Thirteen Days is nevertheless too little, too late.

Full of well-observed supporting riffs, Crash might've accumulated more frisson had it cast a clearer eye on how social tension actually plays.

The film will come to share the video store shelf with Harlin's infinitely stupider rendition soon enough, but it's a shame they couldn't have been released theatrically head-to-head -- a death match-cum-clinical trial that might've supplied some objective stats on how much condescension the American moviegoer actually enjoys.

This sweet, pensive gabfest is neither conventionally romantic nor pornographic.

The acting, by a large cast of little-known young Brits chewing on South London accents like dog bones, is uniformly splendiferous.

Nothing if not confrontational.

Strains our patience with overacting and photography so sumptuous you can't help but ponder why so much bloodshed and mayhem is being so expertly prettified.

Moody, pretentious, but potent.

The movie is typical Hill-pulp: modestly scaled and efficiently cheesy.

As the full-length sorta-satire it has become, Edmond is all sizzle and little meat, a veritable tangent act dropped from "Glengarry Glen Ross" because it was several marks too silly.

A brooding, stunningly realistic portrait of familial self-destruction that raises far more questions than it can possibly answer.

Following is modest and engaging, but in being strenuously clever, it surrenders any dibs it might have on being relevant, or original.

Nonchalantly freaky and uncommonly pleasurable, Warm Water may well be the year's best and most unpredictable comedy.

Watching it is a smidgen like listening to the same monkey-walks-into-a-bar joke for the 105th time, but for the Spierig brothers, it is clearly a demonstration of fast-cheap capabilities and a one-way ticket straight out of Queensland.

There's no denying bespectacled, brace-ridden, homely wild child Eliza (Lacey Chabert), who can speak to animals and emerges as one of the most stirring heroines in contemporary media.

Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.

There's enough rosy-cheeked drama, triumph, and sacrifice for a ready-made Hollywood remake.

Merely an indulgent vehicle for Mrs. Ritchie -- and Madonna is so spectacularly convincing as a hateful, self-absorbed, nouveau riche ogress that her character's third-act transformation is as preposterous as her overmuscled physique.

Easily the year's most trying, tormented, and thrilling movie ordeal.

Far from creating a pungent portrait of a society gone mad with blood and greed, Schroeder's movie strives for political points while it's whiffing on simplicities like character, motivation, and believability.

The question of whether this is a movie about reincarnation or fate or middle-aged delusion remains unaddressed far beyond our capacity to care. Many of the admirably long conversational scenes are pointless; some, like Harden and Linney's climactic bitch-fest in a hotel room, are flat-out absurd.

Broad and pleasantly idealistic, and the evident ardor for 150-year-old graphics (especially Dore's Ancient Mariner masterstrokes) is hard to argue with. But is it a movie or the best-designed episode of "Nova" ever?

In a culture clogged with appropriated effluvia and remake cop-outs, Willard is wittier and nastier than we deserve.

It's an easy movie to loathe, but it's designed imaginatively and enjoys the committed attention of its cast.

Zeta-Jones is merely ravishing, but Clooney owns the film. Ordinarily best at sardonic, man's-man confidence, he strides through Intolerable Cruelty with fantastic screwball zest. To see Clooney tenderize, season, grill, and serve this ham hock of a role is to see an old-fashioned virtuoso in perpetual motion.

It's a simple pleasure watching an American movie that respects genre, knows its limitations, and genuflects at the memory of Don Siegel in the age of Spielberg.

Topsy-Turvy is flawless, borne along by a savagely witty screenplay that Leigh directs like the gears of a clock.

Doyle loves bad jokes and his story has no rhyme or reason, dissolving in its last third into a bungled heist and jailhouse face-off.

Self-involved, amateurish, and unoriginal.

Filthy fun, if not much more.

Oak-stiff and witless, but a few scenes muster up embarrassed chuckles.

So feel-sniffly-good it could make you revisit lunch.

Heist is a neat, bouncy, minor-key crime procedural that shakes no rafters. Glorious, freestanding Mametisms are dropped into it like beef hunks into clear soup.

A pleasant and surprisingly polished fish-out-of-water comedy.

Just isn't funny enough to sustain the lunacy.

An utterly empty-skulled genre mechanism and nothing more.

Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a dusty, calloused, primal Odyssey, as forceful and single-minded as a bullet train.

Exactly the sort of mysterious and almost holy experience you hope to get from documentaries and rarely do, Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol is something like a homegrown slice of Herzog oddness, complete with true-crime backfill and juicy metafictive upshot.

For some viewers, this will seem a trial of predictability and unrelenting sweetness; for others, it's more than enough.

The gooseberry Harlin came up with will win no proselytizers, but it does have a pleasant matinee modesty, a cool sepia-period look, and an interesting flashback relationship with Nazis.

What's abundantly clear is how far this kind of moviemaking has come from any knowledge of real criminal life; it's a geek's ineffectual daydream of mayhem.

All of the filmmaker's fine work and good intentions cannot make this repetitive and finally tiresome saga fly.

To say that it's dull barely scratches the surface.

A self-adrenalizing, self-destructing pop-culture whirligig.

Mychal Judge, the popular gay FDNY chaplain who perished in the fallen towers and was the day's first official casualty, has been so designated by this treacly, worshipful doc, something he would surely have deemed ridiculous.

A drearily over-cynical farce.

A superb, wise, and witty Taiwanese film about being single and what to do about it.

If the movie stops short of exploring its own baggage, the actors still make for unforgettable company.

Maddin's movie is, frame for frame, the densest and most spectacular (albeit cardboard-cheap) film playing anywhere.

It is only once the movie has exhausted its roster of "weird" notions and contrived images that it finds its emotional footing, leaving you with one half of a lovely, woebegone film.

A mess, bouncing nonsensically from one style of farce to another, leaving large vacuums and dead spots — which may themselves, of course, be deliberate.

All of the stories are conceived as ongoing plights, and have no third act. Which would be an improvement on Haggis's hyperbolic civics lesson if Avelino had the chops to master realism and embrace ambivalence. The acting is pro enough to keep your blood up, but the reverb is minimal.

An overwhelming portion of Saved! is wall-to-wall Jesus-Jesus-Jesus talk, closer to dead air than social spoof. At times, the screenplay (including Mary's voluminous narration) has the monotonous cadence of a recruitment sermon.

Collateral is a slim drink of thin beer, remarkable only as evidence that Mann might have a modern masterpiece in him if he were cut loose and allowed to roam around in his own obsessions.

Hitting the ground in his ultra-naturalistic mode, Assayas only uncages his star's formidable smile once or twice and never demands our empathy, making Clean a uniquely pungent portrait of dependent personalities and the strain they put on the social weave.

Though Maclean uses every trick available to make up for the missing inner voice, we never get into Crudup's mellow loser like we should. Maclean's got an incisive eye, but it's poised on the outside of the terrarium looking in.

One of those hellishly predictable digital-monster gauntlets that makes you pity the actors.

A near-perfect confection, a beautifully executed Hollywood all-you-can-eat salad bar of glamour, plot twists, breathtaking Mediterranean vistas, and jazz.

C&C hardly coalesces, but then again, it doesn't try to--never more or less than what it appears to be, the film is a slow honky-tonk thud-beat, only intermittently punctuated by a joke or idea.

Although inexplicable brogues and burrs appear and disappear, and although Stone post-produces the dickens of his movie trying to generate the maximum spit-fog of sound and fury, Alexander manages to be as dull as the Victor Mature films of the 1950s, which barely moved at all.

Somehow manages to stay afloat on a sea of pretension, thanks largely to some splashy visuals.

The climax comes at you like a thrown cream pie, but given its faux-mythic nerve, it's tolerable. Too bad this latest station in Costner's ongoing self-crucifixion is such small potatoes until then.

Still, the vapor traces of farce and policier that waft from this terribly earnest film never coalesce -- perhaps our own cultural remove allows what plays straight at home to be experienced as slightly daffy.

Metropolis is "A.I." without tears.