Michael Phillips

Gigante represents the sort of artful low-budget accomplishment that could, and should, be coming out of distressingly stingy Chicago once a year — whatever the subject, whatever the sensibility.

The movie's lovers and its haters can agree on one thing. The third section, set in Greece and dealing with another, less interesting magic spell cast on Hoffmann's soprano sweetie (Ann Ayars), ranks as the weakest. [10 Apr 2015, p.C4]

The way director and co-adapter Armfield shoots it, the film's awfully pretty in its grimness, in the way "Leaving Las Vegas" managed to make train-wreck alcoholism more fake-lyrical than grungy.

By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.

It sets a tone, all right. A lot of gamers (sorry, "filmgoers") may well enjoy writer-director Michael Davis' ultraviolent lark. It's not meant to be taken seriously. But films like this are worth taking seriously because they're genuinely cruddy and hollow and, yes, vile.

It's a strength of this carefully composed, almost obsessively controlled picture that it has no interest in the conventional biographical focus on a subject.

Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.

Toward the end, G-Force starts making no sense at all, neither tonally or narratively. It may not matter to the target audience, though the look on my son's face when it was over was pure Buster Keaton. He says he liked it well enough. Me, a little less.

The Last Song is primarily for teenagers looking for something disposable to cry about for a couple of hours, though I did find it a tad easier to take than "Dear John."

As in “Pan’s Labyrinth,” The Orphanage relies on a risky blend of clinically realistic horrors and poetic suggestions of an alternate world, one that can be visited, but at a price.

Has its satisfactions, thanks mainly to a cast skillful enough to finesse what is effectively two films sharing the same screen.

Nothing is harder and more elusive than successful slapstick onscreen. Nothing.

At its best, this uneven work represents Moore at the peak of his argumentative skills.

It lacks the rutting nuttiness of "Basic Instinct," even as it recycles much of that film's kiss-or-kill premise.

Hinges on humiliation and vengeance, which makes it like most other modern horror titles. Its focus on sexual assault, however, puts it in a different, more primal league.

The movie is a paradox. It's ostentatiously restrained. You cannot say Corbijn lacks rigor. You can, however, say that when a talented director's approach too precisely mirrors the tightly calibrated performance strategy of his leading player, a movie risks stalling out completely.

This exercise in racked nerves makes most of the year's thrillers look like flailing maniacs by comparison.

It is an actors' showcase, without being showy, and Moreau and Tukur reveal radically different personalities with just enough in common to make things interesting.

Doesn't provoke bittersweet inquiries regarding one poor actress' grisly fate. Nor does it stir up much provocation on the matter of why, as a popular audience, we're still taken with this lurid symbol of sex and dread and desire. Rather, the movie raises a much simpler question: Huh?

Gives dumpster-divers a chance to slum in the antiseptic safety of a multiplex. (Planet Terror ** (out of four) / Death Proof ***1/2 (out of four).

Isn’t eye candy; it’s a drool-worthy slice of eye pie.

The movie won't be for everyone -- it's a little rough for preteens, and it doesn't throw many laughs the audience's way -- but along with "Sweeney Todd," this is Burton's most interesting project in a decade

The second film lingers less determinedly on the degradation of Lisbeth and concentrates more on moving the narrative furniture around. The relationship between the main characters is the glue holding the balsa wood together.

The filmmaker's access was impressive, the results moderately entertaining.

Jim Carrey is good as Scrooge. There’s surprisingly little shtick in his performance.

Catfish is fascinating. At the same time, it emits a condescending, pitying odor.

A nerve-racking noir from Australia.

The Departed exists in a movie-place about as far from personal statements as a storied director can get. Maybe those days for Scorsese are long gone. But Scorsese's sense of craft remains sure.

Sunshine is near-classic modern science fiction, hobbled only by a chaotic final reel and some casting missteps in the white-male department.

It's a bit schematic and sweet-natured, perhaps to a fault, yet the faces linger. Smith and his mixture of actors and non-actors remind us that an act of generosity is all it takes to change a life.

Ballast strikes me as one of the few American pictures of 2008 to say what it wants to say, visually and narratively, about a specific situation and part of the country, in a way that transcends regional specifics.

Watching Loeb opposite Berg, you're reminded of the miracles of chemistry and the luck of the draw when it comes to casting a show -- any show.

The most charming comedy in town, writer-director-editor Katsuhito Ishii's 2003 piece is a modern Japanese variation on "You Can't Take It With You," with some lovely fantastical flourishes.

Diane Keaton--now there’s a trouper for you. She will not be caught giving less than 110 percent, even in a drab little heist comedy.

The neatest effects in U2 3D are simple ones. The wow/coolness of watching a revered superstar tilt his mic stand toward the camera creates a simple but irresistible feeling of being there in the flesh, with a phalanx of expensive digital 3-D cameras.

21 isn’t pretentious, exactly, but it’s damn close, and in trying to whip up a melodramatic morality tale the film becomes an increasingly flabby slog.

Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.

It's a very small film, undermined by a puttering rhythm and Pinter-worthy pauses in the second half and a resolution neither satisfyingly oblique nor conventionally pleasing.

A small but droll big-box comedy.

Style is a tricky, elusive thing, and this film doesn’t so much have it as strive for it, constantly. But something in Watson’s story endures: The wish-fulfillment truly satisfies. And with the war clouds gathering by story’s end, the fairy tale acquires a bittersweet edge, nicely cutting all that whipped cream.

I enjoyed Eliza Dushku's mad poetess, probably for the wrong reasons, but with a project this meager, you take your artful sneers and scenic diversions where you can get them.

The script is half-a-fortune at best, and visually the picture is staid. But you stick with it, because it's Williams and because certainly no one since Williams has written this sort of embroidered dialogue.

What are the odds that the year's most compelling mystery would end up hanging its hat on the year's richest love story

To what degree does Zoo test our limits of tolerance? In the end, not much, which is why Devor's strange, carefully composed objet d'art is a limited achievement.

There’s something of the harlequin in Leigh’s conception of this bright, manic young woman.

Now, about the spider. Julia Roberts voices Charlotte in a way that suggests ... not much, I'm afraid. She may be a genuine movie star and can be a good actress, but her voice -- and what she does with it -- never has been one of her strengths.

Around the midpoint Alpha Dog becomes less sociological and more personal, developing a real sense of suspense.

Full of interesting little grace notes, and the cast is excellent, yet it grows more and more frustrating.

Desplechin's films are great, chaotic, unsettling fun. This one's scored, elegantly, to a mixture of standards and classics and original music by Gregoire Hetzel.

In the end Tropic Thunder is an expensive goof about an expensive goof, and the results are very impressive and fancy-looking.

Eastwood's foursquare directorial aesthetic tends to heighten, rather than camouflage, a screenplay's shortcomings.

I can't imagine Anvil! not appealing to anyone interested in any aspect of showbiz, and the drug of fame, and the lives people lead in pursuit of the next fix.

Padding disguised as a feature-length screenplay, adapted from Belber's one-act.

Baumbach’s achievement stings. It also has the sureness of tone and direction of a Chekhov story.

An Israeli-on-Arab version of "Shampoo," You Don’t Mess With the Zohan is terrible in many ways, and shoddy in every way that has to do with filmmaking. But politically it's sort of interesting.

As Premonition zigzags toward its solution it loses its head completely, packing a risible final reel with left-field religious disquisitions and heartfelt warnings against infidelity.

Jenkins and The Visitor”make lovely music together. It’s a case of a veteran character actor slipping on a leading role like the most comfortable pair of pants in the world.

Agora has everything except real drama.

100 percent right about our corrupt and hypocritical industry-controlled movie ratings system. Being right, however, doesn't automatically make for a strong documentary. I enjoyed a lot of it. Yet fully half of what's on screen is beside its own point.

Just about everything in the video-gamey World War I picture Flyboys rings false, although the planes certainly are terrific.

Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.

While not everything in Jindabyne works, especially in its final, redemptive third, the film and its faces stay with you.

I did like seeing the (fakey-looking) sheep take flying neck-high leaps at various human throats, in scenes recalling the killer rabbit in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." And I enjoyed the Kiwi dialects. And I suspect King's next film will be better.

Fox's cleavage is the only camera object that catches Bay's attention for more than a millisecond.

A true feat of daring and one of the craziest films of the year.

The stalwart American hero of Turistas comes off as a dislikable blank in the hands of Josh Duhamel, of the TV series "Las Vegas." More relaxed is Melissa George, who co-stars as the Aussie.

The way Moncrieff has structured The Dead Girl, it's catnip for actors: Divided into five chapters, the script affords juicy roles requiring only a few days' work from each member of its impressive ensemble.

A grandly kitschy rendering of Genghis Khan's early years.

This is one of the screen's most rewarding explorations of the teacher/student relationship in any language.

Farmiga has never been better than she is here. Rarely does she get to do comedy, and she and Clooney give Up in the Air's sustained air of engaging disengagement a heartbeat as well as a romantic charge.

As robust and clever an actor as Cox is, he can't make Jacques any less of a blowhard; Kari's wit simply doesn't come through in English, at least with this script.

Predators, plural, starts well and ends poorly, and in the middle it's in the middle.

The movie itself is hyperactive and a jumble.

Nearly two hours long, 30 Days of Night makes you feel the cold (though it was shot in New Zealand) and feel the fangs, but it also makes you feel like 30 days is a pretty long time.

Director Barry Poltermann’s sweet little evocation of a show business career captures Reilly at “the twilight of an extraordinary life,” in Reilly’s words.

Mainly it’s a very solid dance picture, which is the point.

What are Jolie and Freeman and McAvoy doing here, besides acting cooler than Clive Owen in "Shoot ’Em Up"? Cashing a check, that's what. Bekmametov may have talent, but the arrested-adolescent "escapism" of this picture emits a pretty bad odor.

Some of the comic inventions are inspired: Muntz has a pack of dogs equipped with electronic voice boxes, which means they're talking dogs, only they speak as if they've learned English from a poorly translated Berlitz guide.

Not-funniest comedy of the year so far.

Cinematographer Zhao Xiaoding manages some lovely images, and some of Spottiswoode’s compositions remind you he's capable of fine work. But Hogg never comes to life, on the page or on the screen.

Ledoyen in particular humanizes the story-within-a-story strategy. Her character's sly verbal hesitations become part of a mutual seduction, more theoretical than practical, but enticing nonetheless.

Vivid, assured and extremely suspenseful.

This is an exceptional film about nearly unendurable circumstances, endured. You will come out the other side of it a markedly enriched filmgoer.

Effective dialogue doesn't necessarily mean witty dialogue, but wit certainly helps, and you tend not to get much of it in a low-key legal thriller. Fracture is an exception.

A whopper this isn't. It's not even a Whopper Junior. It's the paper the Whopper Junior came in.

The acting is exceptional. If parts of A Secret veer toward soap opera, the ensemble work reduces the suds to a minimum.

The film has an easygoing, inquisitive spirit, heightened by Webb's visual conceits

Peter and Michael Spierig's earlier, campier horror outing, the zombie picture known as "Undead," was even bloodier than this one. The movie-makers are after bigger game here, and a subtler mixture of speculative nightmare and action film.

Some films aren't revelations, exactly, but they burrow so deeply into old truths about love and loss and the mess and thrill of life, they seem new anyway. A Single Man is one such film, one of the best of 2009

As big-budget comic book adaptations go, this one's a gratifying freak--the right kind of conflicted, as well as quick-witted. It's a lot of fun.

The material may be formulaic, but the spirit of the piece is friendly.

Zack and Miri has a bright, chipper look to it, thanks to cinematographer Dave Klein, a frequent Smith colleague. Wintertime in Pittsburgh never looked so good.

I Am Love makes no apologies for its style. None needed: The film, a two-hour swoon, is a cry for romantic freedom, perched on the edge of self-parody, as all good melodramas are.

It may not look like anything he's done before, but Inland Empire joins "Mulholland" and the whatzit "Lost Highway" (1997) to form the strangest show-business triptych around. All three concern artists whose identities demand more than one body. The films give new meaning to the phrase "dual citizenship."

If Beyond the Gates were merely a well-intentioned bore, the reality might seem jarring. As is, the coda fits and feels like the only possible ending--proof that surviving to help tell the story of a genocidal nightmare is the best revenge.

As a director Hedges is smart enough to allow his actors to share the frame and interact and let the material breathe.

The Witnesses may be schematic, but it lets each character live and breathe. The film captures a time and place that seems very distant now.

The new film seems a little nervous about the religious content; it's more interested in the swoony bits between Charles and Julia.

The film works a bit better than the 2004 "Punisher" installment, the one starring surly, dislikable Thomas Jane as Frank Castle.

The results feel a little harried, as if the focus issues were never really solved.

A rich, vexing experience.

I like the end-credits sequence best, which has nothing to do with hoary complications or the miseries of stardom or the magical spellbinding powers of a cheap wig.

Tone is everything here. While likely influenced by Chilean absurdists of another era, such as playwright Egon Wolff, in The Maid Silva treads an ultra-fine line between caricature and character, leaning toward the latter without weighing down an essentially featherweight creation.

Stoopid fun, From Paris With Love doesn't do much for Paris or love, or your brain cells, but it flies like a crazed eagle on uppers and comes from the talented, propulsive schlocketeer Pierre Morel.

It is not an easy film to watch, nor should it be. It is, however, beautifully made. Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, the co-directors, wrangle their information and lay it out clearly, vividly and with a sharp sense of focus.

All you want from a movie like this, really, is a little brainless fun, and it keeps holding out on you. Everyone looks fatigued. Even Cage’s toupee seems ambivalent about having signed on for a sequel.

Unfortunately it’s all a bit dull.

The director is Kevin Macdonald, a documentary filmmaker making his fiction film feature debut. (He won an Oscar for his Munich Olympics hostage chronicle, "One Day in September.")

Gray’s writing lacks the punch and zing that might take your mind off such rickety plotting.

The story should have made for charming results on screen. Instead - and I truly don't enjoy saying so - co-adapter and director Rob Reiner's picture lands somewhere between synthetic nostalgia and the texture of real life.

The tragedy is that the performance comes to nothing. Nearly everything else in the film is vile.

Frank's dialogue owes a little something to Elmore Leonard, but it's less comic and heavily brocaded.

This is the sort of film where a character says “Here we are, having a high-minded debate ...” and you wonder if countless moviegoers will be rolling their eyes in unison.

The preposterous 88 Minutes is a serial killer movie starring Al Pacino's festival of hair.

The film has a compelling way about it. All five of the immediate Block family members emerge in full and affecting portraits.

It’s a close call, but Grace is Gone is worth seeing for the way John Cusack works with Shelan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, two of the least affected and most affecting young actors to hit the screen this year.

"Superbad” got a deserved R rating for its unmitigated and gleeful raunch. Drillbit Taylor is cleaner in mouth but far uglier in spirit. Wilson and Mann do what they can to tone it up, but their scenes belong to a different film, and a fresher one.

Unabashedly theatrical and richly cinematic, even when it's falling apart.

Twenty or 30 minutes into Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium the urge to flee may rise within you like an oceanic tide. But stick with it. The film is very sweet--in fact it represents the dawn of a new sport, Extreme Whimsy.

So what is it? Primarily it's a showcase for Vincent Cassel, who dines out on the role and won a Cesar award (the Gallic Oscar) for his efforts.

It's funny what you buy completely onstage and resist completely, or nearly, on-screen. Case in point: Mamma Mia!

Revanche has an unusual rhythm: Once it leaves the grotty urban despair behind for the deceptive calm of the countryside, it relaxes and explores the character’s interior lives.

The superb United 93, from the British writer-director Paul Greengrass, does not waste time defining the undefinable. Nor does it strain for poetry when, with this story, prose is enough.

Eragon is a bit cheesy, but I rather liked it. It's sincere cheese... The special effects -- which include glowing-eyed heroes and villains, and flights over the mythical land of Alagaesia depicted in "dragon vision" -- are refreshing in their slightly out-of-date air.

It is personal filmmaking of the highest order, recognized with an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film.

Dermot Mulroney takes the largest male role, that of the driven ex-soccer star and patriarch of the onscreen family. From certain angles he looks like a Shue too.

The film, which really is sloppy, slips around in terms of tone and goes every which way.

If the writers had the guts (and the jokes) to fashion a bittersweet comedy with a fully earned happy ending, Unaccompanied Minors probably wouldn't have been made. As is, it's a prefab slapstick-'n'-pathos stew that doesn't taste like anything.

Cassavetes, who wrote the script, proves her skill with actors in this woozy push-and-pull of slurred compliments and shaky hopes for whatever lies beyond the next day.

The tone of The Host is slippery in the best way; you're never sure if you're in for a joke or a shock, yet nothing feels random.

The first great film of the year. It’s beautiful but so much more—full of subtle feeling, framed by a monstrous, eroding landscape.

It all comes together as formidably detailed and easy-breathing craftsmanship.

Numbingly gory when it isn’t just plain numbing.

We have to take the sexual tension on faith, as with everything in this formulaic glob of a script.

Malick's nature documentarian impulse has never been more flagrant than in The New World, yet it has never made more organic sense. The film, which is superb on every technical and design level, has both greatness and fuzzy-headedness in it.

A large amount of dope is smoked in The Pick of Destiny, perhaps the most since the salad days of Cheech & Chong. This may be the problem. Pot rarely helped anybody's comic timing.

The results are corny beyond measure. Yet there's something sweet about them, in part because there's something sweet about hearing the line "Congratulations! Why didn't you tell me you pledged?" outside the realm of comedy.

The more you like Leone's work the more you'll likely respond to To's latest. Which is odd, considering Exiled is a gangster picture by strict definition.

For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."

“Elephant” may have won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but it really didn’t have anything to say about anything. Modest and artful, Paranoid Park says a great deal.

Newell has done some fine work in all sorts of genres, from “Four Weddings and a Funeral” to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” but in “Cholera” he seems to be chronicling a half-century of events, passions and desires as a tourist, not a native.

It boasts a generous exuberance and, as entertainment products go, it's surprisingly sweet.

It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.

This film was not based on a video game, but that's the vibe and the aesthetic at work here: YEAH! KILL!, followed by a few muttered expressions of the horror, the horror.

Without the brute vigilante junk, this 82-minute picture would be approximately 2 minutes long.

This film, calm but full of feeling, relays an intriguing story brought to life by some beautiful actors.

Monaghan’s comic timing saves this go-nowhere affair from 100 percent lousiness.

It takes something like a miracle to unlock the magic in his exquisite aggravations, the essence of the human comedy. This film is indeed something like a miracle.

Accomplishes what "Snakes on a Plane" did not: It offers a merrily idiotic movie to go with its willfully idiotic title.

The film doesn’t hold together. But it’s the work of a real director, however fantastic his sensibility.

Mother of Tears can't rival the David Lynchian otherworldliness of "Suspiria," but at least you know you're in the hands of a director.

Provides some compensatory satisfactions, thanks mostly to the actors, as they make the most of a series of pencil sketches.

Macy's character finds romance with the Madrid, N. M., diner owner played by Marisa Tomei. They're the only two people on screen who relate in any way. But there's no movie here. There is only a tired "City Slickers"-inspired idea for a movie.

Director and co-writer Eytan Fox is going for a sexually democratic, politically aware variation on story themes familiar to "Sex and the City" viewers. (At one point Lulu is referred to as "Miss Israeli Carrie Bradshaw.") Surprisingly, it works, and the entire cast is excellent.

It is well made as far as it goes. I wish it went beyond its own carefully prescribed limits of the commercially acceptable.

Midway through I started wondering why I wasn't laughing more. "Baby Mama" was not written by Fey and/or Poehler, which may be the reason.

The scenery's nice. But once you've said the scenery's nice, you're no longer talking about a movie worth talking about.

The film's emotional claustrophobia may not be for everyone.

I wish it were truly special instead of an interesting near-miss.

The movie is ALL revenge, all the time

Through good scenes and derivative ones, Adams is disarming.

By the end of this modest, strange venture, Leto made me believe it was worth being forced to hang out on the sidewalk with this man, if only to get a creeping sense of what that might’ve been like.

After the insufferably dense mermaid mythology of "Lady in the Water," Shyamalan clearly wanted to keep things simple. He whizzed straight past "simple" to simplistic.

Watching bear cubs and walrus pups struggling to survive against increasingly tough odds, and on ever-slushier ice shelves, has both its shamelessly manipulative side and its dramatically necessary side, as handled here. This proves one thing: Unlike global warming, some stories really do have two sides.

The film itself, which has everything from erection jokes to a computer-generated tornado, comes down to a battle between the interpreters and a screenplay riddled with convenience, cliche and well-meaning contrivance.

You always get more than one genre with this filmmaker. Volver draws upon all sorts of influences -- a little Hitchcock, a little Douglas Sirk, a little telenovela -- but from those sources Almodovar and his collaborators, both on screen and behind the camera, make an improbably organic whole.

Then there's screenwriter Steve Conrad. He's interesting. He likes his protagonists to suffer a little en route to finding a better place, and not in the usual sitcomic ways.

As skillful and charismatic as Gere is, I never get the sense he's really in there, conversing with his fellow actor.

Seven Pounds has a heart as big as all outdoors. Unfortunately it's made out of high-fructose bull.

A genial, sloppy, minor affair, offering a smidgen of inside baseball, which includes a gag at the expense of the forgotten, late '80s Lucas-produced epic "Willow."

Campbell’s film offers not surprises, exactly, but craftsmanship and low, brute, cunning satisfactions.

Originally titled "Orchestra Seats," Montaigne takes a page from the "Amelie" playbook, without the fancy visuals or magical realism.

The film is responsible, earnest, well-intentioned and, as it was in Sundance, maddeningly inconsistent.

Glib and charming in roughly equal measure.

The result is a Jewish “Death Wish,” to borrow Pauline Kael’s description of “Marathon Man,” amped up to epoch-changing proportions, made by a gentile writer-director with an unlimited appetite for celluloid, right down to its highly flammable properties.

What strikes me about the new Robin Hood, directed by Ridley Scott, is how its preoccupations and sensibilities lie almost precisely halfway between the derring-do of the 1938 film and the harsh revisionism of the '70s edition

The Brave One is "Death Wish" with a guilty conscience, and while it may be a bit of a hypocrite as vigilante thrillers go, the internal contradictions of the thing make for a very interesting picture.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

Not even Smith's charisma can mitigate the chaos that is Hancock.

Kasdan has inherited much of his father's surface skills; he knows how to round out a scene and keep things on story point. But In the Land of Women doesn't for a moment feel messy and chaotic where it counts.

Freshman Orientation is not incompetently made. Nor is it badly acted. But there’s not a fresh idea in it, and everyone on screen seems to be in a different comedy.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

Dempsey's pleasant enough, but he hasn't yet learned how to play against a mediocre script's obviousness. Monaghan has, which is gratifying.

A coming-of-ager that nearly slaughters you by minute 30 with the relentlessness of its protagonist's voiceovers.

The eerily precise Heigl, who provided confident back-court support as the exile in Guyville also known as “Knocked Up,” has no trouble filling a leading lady’s shoes. She’s just snarky enough to be interesting, and she knows how to take a fall.

This film is very different: chilly, methodical, a slave to 10-ton metaphor as opposed to metaphoric provocation.

Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.

Certain things in Three Monkeys can only be described as brilliant.

A funny thing happened to Larry Doyle's 2007 debut novel on the way to the multiplex. It turned into its own ring of coming-of-age comedy hell.

Levinson has written and directed in many genres. But rarely has he made a film as indecisive and diffident as Man of the Year.

Warts, entrails and all, I had a ball at Zombieland. It’s 81 minutes of my kind of stupid.

Porumboiu's picture, small and pungent, lacks the resonance of "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu," Cristi Puiu's masterpiece of contemporary Romanian malaise released in the U.S. last year. But this one's less forbidding, and it has a satisfying shape and fullness.

The title of The Hunting Party doesn’t evoke much in particular. “War Correspondents Gone WILD!” would be more like it if the film itself--messy, but fairly stimulating--had more of the scamp in its soul.

The film disappoints particularly in relation to "Young Adam," an earlier picture about sexual obsession from writer-director David Mackenzie; this one's more in line with the creamy tones and surface readings of "Asylum."

At times the film appears on the verge of morphing into a singing-cowboy musical.

Problems aside, this is a good, twisty, absorbing work.

The Holiday is a 131-minute romantic comedy for those who, if they had their way, would still be watching "Love Actually."

Until a leaden third act, it IS reasonably entertaining.

The latest, Untraceable, owes everything to “Lambs,” and to “Se7en,” and to all the “Lambs” and “Se7en” knockoffs made by directors less talented than Jonathan Demme and David Fincher. In addition to being dull, the Portland, Ore. -set Untraceable is a monster hypocrite, wagging its finger at the mass audience’s appetite for strictly regimented, “creative” torture scenarios.

Even with its limitations, I find Silent Light spellbinding.

Something has gone slightly awry, however, en route from the 11-minute film to the 79-minute edition of 9.

The best thing in Diggers, besides the close-up of the back end of the Vista Cruiser, is the interplay between Rudd and Tierney. They really do seem like brother and sister, adults yet not entirely grown up.

This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.

If Wal-Mart, the Lucifer of multinational corporations in many liberal eyes, sees the fiscal sense in stocking an increasingly wide array of organic foodstuffs, consumer habits truly are changing. Not fast enough, though, for documentary filmmaker Robert Kenner.

Too often The Express sidelines its own main character in favor of the lemon-sucking, jaw-jutting glower patented by Quaid.

The movie slam-jams its overpacked story in a frenetic, needlessly complicated manner. It lacks for nothing in setting and atmosphere but comes up short where it counts: the characters.

Why does “New Moon” basically work, even with its grave self-seriousness? A few reasons. Weitz lets the material breathe, and his actors interact. The film does not try to eat you alive.

Jackson has not cast himself well, though. He has slathered the imagery in the wrong kind of wonderment and hyperbole, both on Earth and in heaven.

The climax of Transformers contains all that is proficient and slick and all that is drecky and soulless in Bay's work.

The film is reasonably effective all the same, though Affleck has yet to learn how to conduct each scene like a musical score, paying attention to matters of tempo and dynamics.

It's refreshing to hear some old-fashioned percussive tension in service of a director who knows what he's doing. Even when the screenwriter is losing his way.

You live in a free country, you put up with crud like Hostel Part II. It truly is crud, though.

An estimated 4 million Latinas leave one or more children behind when they travel north to find work. They deserve a more nuanced film, but this one’s often affecting.

I wish the film version of Astro Boy provided a stronger antidote to mediocrity.

Astonishingly, Angels & Demons IS the same sort of lumbering mediocrity.

The filmmaker's documentary training pays off in detail after detail.

Aside from Henry, Gunn's cast is on a collective wavelength. Banks, whose perkiness carries a slightly demented edge, matches up well with Nathan Fillion, who plays the lovelorn police chief.

It's outlandishly gory and bluntly political, the latter being more interesting than the former. It wears out its welcome, though, long before la revolucion and sequels are promised.

The film version of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” came out in the year in which An Education is set, and beyond the hairstyles, there’s something of the willful, gleeful Golightly reinvention expert about Jenny.

I don't know if what the Safdies endured growing up was akin to what audiences experience in Daddy Longlegs. But I'm very glad they survived to make a very good film about it.

True to form, Guest's newest doesn't pull out the long knives. On the gentleness scale, this one's way over here, as opposed to the film of the moment, "Borat," which is way, way over there.

Bride Wars really does not capture the mood of the moment. It comes from a different time, a different planet.

The Marx Brothers in one of their messiest, sloppiest, greatest Paramount comedies. [27 Feb 2015, p.C5]

Knocked Up is more verbally adroit than it is visually. But Apatow's awfully sharp as a chronicler of contemporary romantic anxieties.

I liked the movie mainly for Barrymore. The way she handles the crucial, early "I love you" moment (he's saying it to her, and the camera shows us what she's thinking), you think: This is one canny actress.

The latest, meticulously atmospheric and wonderfully acted Potter adventure lands happily--broodingly, but happily---near the top of the series heap, just behind Alfonso Cuaron's "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."

The nuttiest hunk of junk in many months.

The actors do a lot to dimensionalize the material. Parker's Chavis is especially sharp, creating a man with a subtly burning fuse.

It is enraging yet nuanced, an elusive combination for any documentary.

Remarkable documentary filmmaking, unflinching and full of unlikely grace.

The funniest American comedy of the summer.

The Sun sheds only so much literal light on its chosen subject; it's a film of shadows and silence, the calm before and after the storm. But everything you see and hear carries weight and an eerie poetic undercurrent.

A remake for schlemiels, or at least easy marks when it comes to formulaic Hollywood comedy. But the film's peculiar sluggishness and nagging hypocrisy probably won't get in the way of its popularity.

Ludicrous and overstuffed, it plows through the Big 10 of Biblical plagues.

As pure craftsmanship, No Country for Old Men is as good as we’ve ever gotten from Joel and Ethan Coen. Only “Fargo” is more satisfying (it’s also a comedy, which this one isn’t).

Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.

Shine a Light is one of those lions-in-winter affairs, and Jagger, who has a body fat count of negative 67, can still dance like a maniacal popinjay, and Richards still looks like a satyr who has stayed up all night every night of his adult life.

Moving slowly these days, Reynolds does less than no acting in this role, and he’s still the best thing in Deal.

Each performance in this plaintive work is superb, but Kyoko Koizumi's gently melancholy portrait of the businessman's wife keeps Tokyo Sonata true and affecting, even when the later passages go a little nuts.

Director Burr Steers milks them dry, like an overeager farmer at milking time, which is a paradox since this is the wettest picture of 2010, what with the sea spray and Efron's tear ducts and the general metaphysical mist.

While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.

After playing one too many sullen poseurs it’s clear Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes had a ball making an inky black comedy seething with grandiose invective.

There's about 10 good minutes out of 85.

This complicated but absorbing tale is not told through primarily American eyes ( Willem Dafoe plays a CIA. figurehead); primarily it's about French and Soviet brinksmanship, and those who succeeded at it, or failed, and one man who died for the risks he took.

If you want a relationship comedy that feels like last year's stuff, doesn't go far enough in any direction and is made watchable only by an overqualified ensemble, there's The Ex.

I doubt even rabid fans of the first two will consider Shrek the Third a worthy addition to the franchise.

Early in the movie, Hal Holbrook (as the paranoid NASA administrator who sets the fake-out in motion) unloads an expository speech on Brolin (as one of the astronauts the administrator needs to convince to go along with his insane ruse). Is it a long speech? Dear reader, “long” doesn’t quite measure it. It’s endless. It’s an event horizon of a monologue and by the time it’s over, you can’t believe the coronavirus hasn’t left yet.

Still, it's a pleasant surprise about an unpleasant guy brought to life by an ingratiating paradox, a movie star who has turned into a wily character man.

Keanu Reeves plays Klaatu, confining his usual two-and-a-half-note vocal range to half that.

Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.

Assuming your psycho-pigtailed-killer memories extend back as far as "The Bad Seed," Maxwell Anderson's play filmed by director Mervyn LeRoy in 1956, Orphan may remind you of the icon made famous by Patty McCormack.

Sharp, well-acted film.

At the end, director Wright wraps the whole thing up with a fairy-tale coda more Shakespearean than Austen-tine. Yet it all works.

The court scenes are rarely funny, either in the trash talk or the slapstick.

It's Complicated isn’t: It’s pretty simple. It’s simply a good time.

The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question

Ladron plays like a telenovela without the melodrama. The characters are brightly drawn archetypes, and the humor's very broad. But the tone is nice and brash.

Half the time I wasn't sure what Lee was going for in terms of tone, or style, or focus. It was a tricky assignment to begin with, because McBride's novel, and his screenplay, is part socio-historical corrective, part magical-realist folklore, part wartime procedural.

The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.

The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.

A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.

Michael Clayton is a here’s-how-it-happened drama, cleverly but not over-elaborately structured.

Swift and compelling, winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign-language picture, The Counterfeiters may not be destined for the large international audience that embraced last year’s winner, “The Lives of Others.” But it’s the better, tougher film, with a more provocative moral dilemma at its center.

Keeps you off-balance as it establishes a world where every conversation is a flirtation, and trouble and heartbreak sneak in on little cat feet when no one's looking.