Michael Atkinson

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.

The film is more stale than crisp, with dialogue that is at least 50 percent old aphorisms, homilies, and clichés.

Kim's movie rocks -- I saw it cold a year ago, and I don't think I've been as entranced and appalled by an Asian film since Shinya Tsukamoto's "Iron Man."

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

The even faintly informed will see only a cut-rate vision of flabby white men defending their own bloodthirsty opportunism.

I'd take the stakes driven right through my platform pumps over listening to Bruce Vilanch jokes, but that's me.

It's not the freshest scenario, and Baker lets Lucky sputter and moan about his fate for so long that we wonder, as his sensible girlfriend does, why we're bothering with such undiluted dickness.

The story is little more than overdetermined trials and triumphs. Kids won't care, but they won't fall for it either; unsurprisingly, it doesn't stand a chance of providing them with the memories the book provided their parents.

What can a movie tell us about the painter that the paintings do not? The effort has done no favors for Picasso or Rivera or Bacon.

Perhaps a radical re-editing of Fear X-like Lynch did on “Mulholland Drive”-could rescue the film's workaday unease from the dread taboo of derivative weirdness. It's half a movie, but a half that hums.

Though we're never allowed a close-up, Hofstätter's performance comes off as an unselfconscious tour de force, painfully real and culturally lost.

Wang mistakes affectless storytelling and character conception for rigor, and as a result huge portions of Beijing Bicycle are dull and repetitive.

After 9-11, a sick, scandalized lame-duck mayor became a national hero for simply keeping his composure on TV. Keating's film is a comet out of the past, but it's focused, if only circumstantially, on the future.

Irritatingly repetitious and piled high with long-foreseen conclusions.

Dano, with his remarkably guileless meta-teen puss, is thoroughly convincing, which is more than can be said for the film's shameless climactic steal from "Five Easy Pieces."

Stylish, sullen, and a little predictable, Tell Me Something is the match of any American film in its quasi-genre, though you suspect that without a world market to target, it might've been even more anxious and intrepid.

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

A bone-tired tale underneath.

Shot in DV by Lisa Rinzler, Joseph Castelo's modest drama struggles for verisimilitude, but it wears clichés like concrete boots, down to the cycle-of-intolerance-and-violence message that we hear every day on NPR.

Now, we have Jeremy Renner as another Treadstone mega man (there were nine, apparently), and though he is a likable enough pug-nosed action figure, the Damonlessness is sorely felt.

At its most contemplative, The Trilogy is a stirring and shrewd portrait of lives lived in oblivious parallel. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.]

Tiresomely simple, the film introduces a subplot involving betrayal and political informants in the eleventh hour, but by then you're either smitten by these guileless Zulu lads experiencing "freedom" on the waves or you've checked out.

Musters gobs of atmosphere and touristy menace without attending much to story or character.

Apart from the historical eminence of the poetry itself, Pandaemonium is about nothing much at all.

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

Dryly cynical; the scenarios pit plump, amoral, industrialized Jews against draconian, wife-beating, tribal Arabs.

White’s revelation-free, nostalgia massage of a film works the archivals with genuine fondness.

Uncompromising in its way, the film's portrait of codependent compulsion is so organically conceived, you start to smell the sulfur of traumatized childhood, no exposition needed.

Messy, frantic, and repetitive, Everybody Famous! takes on both vapid pop culture and the mindless hoi polloi that consumes it.

Promiscuously inhabiting several planes at once, Reygadas's restless inquisition may already be this year's movie to beat.

Turturro's movie is all surface, all artifice, and little substance. Actors love artifice; the rest of us wait for it to clear so we can find something meatier.

Its realism is patient and inclusive.

David Mamet takes on the digi-tech, hard-Clancy-core intel thriller most often inflated by Tony Scott and like-minded plodders, and typically he elevates it, botches it, and exploits it for searing political comment.

The actors all function as best they can as glowering clichés, though the narrative's temporal jump presents difficulties.

It's a warped kind of romantic comedy in which the whole is substantially less than the sum of the parts.

Basinger takes her shuddery Stanwyckness very seriously, but everyone else has a ball.

Red Dragon's formula is so risible and rote by now that the natural reaction to scenes of peril, torture, and suffering is flippant laughter.

A dead-eyed, lyrical art film that kicks you in the throat.

Stilted as a beach house, the movie crawls from one harangue to another.

The movie is a shambles, a rambling, disjointed love tragedy with a story that amounts to little more than a mess of fade-outs, sloppy montages, and dramatic sketches.

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

Only Nthati Moshesh, as a single black mother working as a housekeeper wooed by a displaced Congolese (Eriq Ebouaney), makes a dent in white-American-expatriate Mark Bamford's toothless scenario.

Agazzi's movie rather provincially hints at sexiness, humor, and satire without actually manifesting them.

It's a polished, beautifully made movie with a rotten heart.

Bumrushed onto American screens like late-breaking news, the Japanese TV doc Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times is a relatively thin slice of Chomskiana -- a chapter from any of the man's many interview volumes, or even an hour of his C-SPAN dialogues, has more political substance.

It's a shame that, somewhere in his mystagogical handstanding, Fresnadillo forgot the real world.

It is, like most, an unnecessary remake, but the new, digitally boosted Dawn of the Dead brings it on with a 10-minute overture that might be the most upsetting tin-can apocalypse modern movies have ever seen.

All in all, Hijacking is less a movie than a litany of arguments intended as, or at least only useful as, a brickbat in the discourse, aimed at your neighbor's Republican noggin.

Iconic in its very grain, the film toggles effortlessly between toast-dry farce and vogueing postwar hipitude, and like the balletic swimmers performing mid-pool state executions, it's a thing of insensible beauty.

Patronizing from toe to chin, the film opts continually for self-congratulation and cheesy aphorism, and could've-should've been comfortable slotted into a half hour of airtime on TJC.

If you see it, the sequel will be your fault.

At once arch, derivative, and, in the end, bizarrely lyrical.

Hardly a ripping, inspired children's film.

As hokey as "Braveheart" and yet much more apocalyptic, Thanit Jitnukul's muscular jungle bloodbath outdoes Hollywood's recent efforts at combat ultra-realism.

The Dance of Reality may be Alejandro Jodorowsky's best film, and certainly, in a filmography top-heavy with freak-show hyperbole and symbology stew, the one most invested in narrative meaning.

Women of a certain age will kvell, but the point might be better made for the rest of us by rewatching the autumnal Rampling in Ozon's "Under the Sand."

An orgy of bad decisions and cheap ideas.

What should have been an idiosyncratic 20-minute short is distended by repetition and loads of standard indie-film time-killers.

Has one of the most stupendously tasteless premises in cinema history, and much of the time when this movie tries to beckon a smile, the effect is closer to astonished nausea.

The film survives on a thick diet of genuine acting moments...Probably no other actor (Hurt) standing today could've brought this much juice to such a potentially simplistic character.

Feels repetitive and impacted.

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

May not quite be more than the sum of its creepy parts, but as a reality-is-fear launch into workaday darkness, it clearly points toward the horror genre's best destiny.

Opting for this refried mash over Lee's rentable beauty is like choosing canned beans over an Asian feast.

Kid-pulp screenwriter Goyer (Dark City, Blade I and II) manages some mature textures but his movie never surmounts its manipulative ideas.

Prince Chatri Chalerm Yukol's movie is lovely, large, and tedious, subscribing blindly to storybook stereotypes (this warrior is brave, this prince is noble, this consort is evil) and acted, for the most part, in a passionless monotone.

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

Foer's ironic ideas have a lovely roundness to them, and somehow the film achieves Holocaust-fiction balance without much ado or melodrama. It may be substantially less ambitious than its source material, but that may be what saves it from implosion.

May not have enough story to sustain its narrative momentum, but Gray just might be our best shot at a new Coppola.

It's not a movie you could call dispassionate, however aimless and unfocused. It's a Molotov cocktail tossed in several directions at once.

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.

Resuscitates the filmgoing summer with a vital jolt of pure piss and vinegar.

You're not sure what this is till it's over, but certainly Hawke's performance is his nerviest and most sincere in a decade.

Might be structured like a soggy house of cards, but it's shot beautifully and acted expertly.

As amusing and sharply performed as it is, Lisa Picard quickly grows thin and dull. Perhaps it would have been better as a real documentary, with Kirk and DeWolf simply playing their pathetic selves.

Madagascar's relaxed density is a relief given the DreamWorks tendency to overbear, overblast, and overcaricaturize.

Not only is the dialogue endless...it's like driving behind a 15 mph geezer on a one-way street.

Invoking unpleasant memories of "Caligula" (only without the sex), Titus does no justice to Shakespeare.

Strangers With Candy regularly lampoons junkie-reparation melodramas and after-school specials, but with so little focus it's never clear what the film, or even Sedaris's vaudeville buffoon incarnation, is supposed to be parodying. That may be its fascination for some--it's a satire without a baseline, free-floating in its own self-indulgent ether.

Though rife with incidental plot holes, Foote's movie feels right even when nothing important is happening...which is much of the time.

Manure of a relatively clover-scented variety, George Hickenlooper's The Man From Elysian Fields is at primal odds with itself.

Israel's one-man new wave, Amos Gitai, surveys his nation's hardscrabble quotidian in Alila, which dallies with both Kiarostamian spirit and Altman-esque fabric, examining the intersecting lives of a dozen or so Tel Aviv residents.

Far from engaged, the film practically surrenders in an arthritic faint.

May worship heedlessly at Duras's memory, but it's a testament to Moreau alone.

However misjudged and evidently cobbled together in the editing room, Dark Blue does have the nerve to drive right through the riots with Russell's saber-toothed bigot, implicitly linking the two phenomena and not being shy about the suffering on either side of the combat.

It's easily the most disarming and inventive movie made for genre geeks in years.

Appears to have been written and directed by a grade-school dropout snorting airplane glue.