Michael Atkinson

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

The voyage is never less than interesting, even when you have no idea where it could possibly go.

The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.

Farnsworth brings a smidgen of scary energy to the social hellfire, and his newbie cast often out-act the pros.

Possibly the most Rorschachian film of all time, a symbol-only text that effortlessly conforms to any political present, and finds a foothold in your social sphere whether you're a free radical or reactionary wing nut.

Hardly gay camp for nothing, sword-and-sandal epics cannot help but teeter on the brink of self-mockery, and Troy, for all its grim seriousness, embraces both the clichés and the beefcake.

The material it does pull off is daring and sharp.

Rodriguez has made a movie for kids, and the most and least that can be said about it is that parents, while hardly being catered to, will experience profound relief that the movie knows how to entertain and does so.

Overshadowed by its own marketing hurricane and popular rage, Code struggles for significance as a movie experience and flies a weak flag as a provocation.

At times you can feel Van Sant trying to loosen the movie's windpipe-folding collar, but he doesn't get far, except with Busta Rhymes, as Jamal's gone-nowhere big brother.

Arresting, visually accomplished documentary.

Even at 70 minutes, The Charcoal People becomes repetitive and hopeless.

It's a small movie trying to seem epic, or a bloated monster trying to seem lean (real B movies don't have 14 producers), but it's clear that at 99 minutes, 16 Blocks should've been at least 20 minutes shorter still.

The filmmaking is fresh and unemphatic, and the acting is generally gripping.

An unassuming, unadventurous, but likable dramedy about dying and grief.

It's a small, unassuming movie grasping at whole-hog homo psychopathicus, with its feet planted squarely in Texan grave dirt and its head lost in the ether of Christian derangement.

The unaddressed incongruities are as stupefying as the music.

A shallow Brazilian trifle.

This poor movie is like an abandoned car without plates: Nobody wants to admit it's theirs.

Repetitive, aimless, and as frustrating as you'd imagine any two-hour music video to be.

An earnest, roughshod document, it serves as a workable primer for the region's recent history, and would make a terrific 10th-grade learning tool.

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.

If this silly retread works at all, it's because of Coogan, who comes at the creaky premise with almost Streepian commitment and who is destined, it would seem, for better things.

The dilemma is simple: Living, making art, and then dying does not constitute much of a story.

For all of its careful realism, Lan Yu is constructed around clichés, plummeting toward a modestly heroic sacrifice and a tearjerking act of fate. But Kwan is a master of shadow, quietude, and room noise, and Lan Yu is a disarmingly lived-in movie.

Desperately avoiding the risk of even a half-second of boredom, the movie is wall-to-window-to-door noise, babbling, and jokes.

Naturalistic, gritty, and unrelenting.

The carload of codgers in Fred Schepisi's Last Orders merely bellyache, philosophize, crack unfunny jokes, and ruminate simplemindedly about Death.