Michael Atkinson

The blood is raspberry syrup, the gags gag, and the film virtually falls over itself informing us how lame it is.

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

Obsessives can be seductive, and Toback is interesting for the same reasons his films are often unendurable: He's not an artist so much as a giant pop-cult testicle pumping absurd energy in a rampaging, self-justifying gout.

An overproduced, video-director remake, slick and grue-marinated and loud as a sonic boom.

If you're expecting an experience approximately as dumb, badly acted, and childish as a pro wrestling match, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

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

There's precious few yucks, for one thing, but you can't say you're surprised that the astonishingly humorless Lyne hadn't noticed or cared that the Nabokov original is a droll comedy of errors first and a self-pitying romantic tragedy second.

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

By far the most independent independent-genre flick to grift screen space in Manhattan since Douglas Buck's "Family Portraits," James Bai's Puzzlehead has only its ideas and speculative frisson to sell it.

A bone-tired tale underneath.

Without the intrusion of voice-overs or interviews, Mylan and Shenk attained a remarkable intimacy with the strapping, earnest, startlingly beautiful teenagers.

Brilliant, mind-boggling.

May be Jordan's wildest mis-shot yet, so dense with dying fizzle and limp ideas that I began to wonder if Jordan has an evil twin, or if there are in fact several Neil Jordans, among them at least one literate stylist and one humor-handicapped village idiot.

This movie doesn't just kill time but tortures it.

Squint through the humbug, and there's some genuine life going on.

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.

It'll make you cyberlaugh, it'll make you cybercry, just like cyberlife -- One thing is certain: your boredom

15 Minutes settles into Richard Donner-style goulash.

A watchable mediocrity at best.

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

Go see this movie and you'll be...yup. You should save your money; Norm Macdonald should save his career, by quitting movies altogether.

The ride is remarkable.

Seasonally it's more appropriate as a May Day bacchanal, but in any month Demy's movie makes for an evocative globe-paperweight tableau of its place and time, and a concise demonstration of the disquietude inherent in classic fairy tales.

First-timer Dylan Kidd's film isn't Molièrian in its misanthropy, but rather as boneheaded as an hour of talk-radio hobgoblin Tom Leikis.

Too amateurish to lampoon or evoke either film industry, Bollywood/Hollywood is a movie that owes its presence in theaters to a certain ethnic soccer comedy still circulating like a virus.

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."

A ponderous stage adaptation that expends only the mildest effort to overcome its staginess.

Sitting through the film is like Chinese water torture, for sure, and for reasons beyond the forced, idiotic campiness of the thing. For one thing, there is not one word of dialogue.