Michael Atkinson

Has storytelling rambles and lapses that no amount of electrifying jump-cuts and original image-making can compensate for.

Built to outrage, appall, and indict.

Documentarian Anailín Lucy Mulloy’s eye for the decaying textures of modern Cuba on the ground is sharp, and there are passages—as the dull characters mope and kill time and work up snits—in which you wish the movie were simply nonfiction. As it is, everything feels fake except the Centro Habana barrios themselves.

A pleasant old man's movie, in the end, but not one for which Boorman will be remembered.

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.

The film's blast of self-mocking overkill can be charming.

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

The storytelling is eloquent and genuine, but the Manns' unadventurous approach (compared to, for instance, last year's intimate road movie "Fighter") rarely hits emotional pay dirt.

A remarkable debut, and its first half is a genuine jolt.

In its details, though, Juan José Campanella's movie works beautifully: The actors are all superb when the florid demands of the story allow them elbowroom.

As homey as old sweats.

Likable, but frustratingly lazy, Ghost Dog has coolness running all through it, but little substance.

Zesty in a workmanlike sort of way, providing supporting henchmen Jason Statham and Mos Def with pleasingly unsensational characters given to subtle twitches of idiosyncrasy.

His movie (Jordan's) winnows the original's existentialist fable into a busy caper thriller, copping plot devices from Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11" and even straining to Wong Kar-wai its camera's way around the fleshpots of Nice. It's all pizzazz, and the pizzazz is all borrowed.

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.

How enlightening you find Damian Pettigrew's obsessive film depends on whether you're as adoring of Fellini as he was of himself; for the devoted, it's a gold mine.

To many eyes, Berlin was the saddest city in 20th-century Europe, divided and lost, and as city symphonies go, Siegert's is pragmatic and optimistic.

Less Bollywood than Generic Asian Family Drama Lite, when it's not a flat-out sunset-choked infomercial for Ahmedabad and its annual rooftop kite-flying festival.

Nominated last year for a short-doc Oscar, the featurette is a lovely modern mini-myth, sarcastic and Beatrix Potter–y in turn.

Plays best as a dry exercise in historical doublespeak and rationalization.

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

Spear's portrait of unpaid, passionate fastpitchers could give filmmakers of all budgets a notion of how real Americans speak.

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.

Better, as they say, than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick -- but only just.

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?

This peculiar and sweet film--which lushly scores the silent tournaments with Henry Mancini and Tommy Dorsey--more or less leaves it at that, exploiting the poetic surreality of the overdressed Zulus in Pierre Cardin primping in the basements and barren fields of the Transvaal but resisting the urge to contextualize or explain it.

Confessions keeps its cards close, and Kaufman is perfectly capable of starving his screenplay to save it, and perfectly happy with being misunderstood.

Despite terrific comic acting...and an atomic first hour, Fight Club makes a few wrong turns and ends up lost itself.