Michael Atkinson

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.