Michael Atkinson

The characters are barely characters, the story barely a story, and the elliptical filmmaking style that so besots Denis' many fans could drive you to drink.

The bubble-kid moms can whine all they want, but Bubble Boy is a liberated movie --liberated from tastefulness, of course, but also from logic, suffering, consequence, and temperance.

Cursed--but ironically!--with stomach-churning '60s decor, Slevin might round off in Park Chanwook country, but the lingering sense of it is as an amusement park for the actors, who are as infectiously overjoyed for the bouncy badinage as preschoolers on Christmas morning. Like tired parents, our enjoyment is primarily vicarious.

Disheveled tripe pieced together with the good intentions.

Michôd wants a Greek epic but doesn't have the material. Animal Kingdom is a work of obvious ambition, and seeing a debut filmmaker swing for the fences like this is its own kind of moviehead satisfaction.

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.

Wastes a ton of potent material.

Saraband doesn't ask to be considered prime-cut Bergman, and it isn't, although its slightness may not matter to the art-film starving class.

Can't surmount its own ineptitude.

Wenders's The Million Dollar Hotel is something of a monstrosity -- liquored self-indulgence taken to its own astral plane.

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.