Michelle Orange

Nymphomaniac is a jigsaw opus, an extended and generally exquisitely crafted riff. Story, theme, and character (despite Gainsbourg's captivations) bow to von Trier's gamesmanship, which makes his own promiscuities the film's true subject.

If only the director had learned Mr. Han’s most important lesson: Being still and doing nothing are two very different things.

The latest from brothers Mark and Jay Duplass (who co-wrote and directed) seems to expose the limits of a certain kind of realism by stretching them one man-child too far.

A pleasant dramatic caper that wears out its welcome, The Concert is the houseguest who sings a little too loudly and too long for his supper, tone deaf to the line between charm and imposition.

"Mandela" is not without the capacity to move.

The result is like a sugar rush after a visit to the vintage candy store.

One of the most chilling things about Trust is how well it lays out the grooming strategies used by expert predators.

Manages to surprise with a charm and wit all its own.

Wilson's unflappable, deeply sympathetic affect and aging golden-boy visage have a very Jack-like smoothing effect on the story's rough patches.

It's difficult to get a firm grip on most of what Disco and Atomic War, constructed in a mish-mash collage style, has to offer.

A companion film to "Days of Glory," Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 feature about Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II, Outside the Law is another historical drama with a heavy heart and a knack for genre.

Though the picture is lovingly and often quite strikingly shot and styled, there are too many dangling and swiftly clipped threads for the film to amount to more than another tasteful Sunday matinee set against one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century.

What ultimately makes the film compelling is the extent to which it uses the shared language of cinema to telegraph the caustic feelings of a people toward their own history.

Embedded in The Lie is a sharp look at the moral limbo of a complacent life, the self-defeat of committing by halves, the self-interest of false equivalencies - but only the shallowest attempts are made to chip its themes out.

I'd say you had to be there, but over the course of Magic Trip we learn that the majority of the people who were there didn't want to be there.

When the recessive style works with the characters and the kooky international-incident story, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has an absorbing, old-fashioned sweetness.

More redux than sequel, the final Shrek is more parent- (and specifically dad-) oriented than ever; it may also produce the first twinge of nostalgia in the kids who thrilled to the original at a formative age.

A few shots of full frontal and an actual devil to point to are poor substitutes for exposure and depth of character.

Best in show is the final chapter, by "Jesus Camp" directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing. "Can A Ninth Grader Be Bribed To Succeed?" is as straightforward a title as the others are oblique.

Because the film is overproduced and unconvincing in telegraphing its several gestural themes, its excellent lead performances get lost in what feels like an aesthetic tug of war over what a movie should be, and do.

The film presents the rare instance of a true story that has been fictionalized and yet seems bent on cleaving to its least useful facts.

In its most tiresome moments, Noodle Shop overestimates the wit of its formal exertions, and feels less like a film than an exercise that will leave fans of the original comparatively cold.

Despite this careful (and successful) depiction of a warm and decent person, Perry the pop star remains stubbornly two-dimensional.

As Mr. Albert Nobbs, Close wears a discreetly waved cap of cropped ginger hair and the bright, blank expression of a small animal caught mid-nibble.

Inter-chimp and territorial fighting are facts of nature, but the extreme anthropomorphism of Chimpanzee makes what is natural feel bizarre.

Generation War seeks the epic, creating multiple, lavishly realized worlds and moving with confidence between them. What it finds of both history and its individuals is less complete.

The writing is relaxed in the right places and heightened to a largely effective degree when it counts.

No longer silent but still the lesser talker between them, Ilya is marvelously fluent in spatial forms.

Despite heavy-handed characterizations, Devine and Bassett make their stake in the union felt, and it's anything but superficial.

Despite an admirable mastery of both Russian and French, Mikkelsen has no shot at making a proud (Russian!) musical genius a believably lovesick puppy.

Has just enough genuine warmth to compensate for the coolness you might feel toward its generic trappings.

With its small cast and focus on performance, Union Square promises to be a welcome showcase for Sorvino, and the early rhymes with Miss Linda are intriguingly open-ended.

Rao's ultimate achievements - including a balanced, doleful tone and moments of city symphony elegance - are undercut by the arrangement of her characters into narrative castes that cross paths but can't quite connect.

8 is most coherent as a chilling confirmation of both the mind-warping power of an institution like the Mormon Church and the extent to which politics is, above all, a marketing game.

The degree to which they are willing to share their bodies with the world, seeming to reach out for it with each impossible extension, drawing it in with every reeling arabesque, suggests a desire for engagement that is visceral, human, and true in all the ways this film is not.

The film's bleak conclusion becomes unbearable in context: Hypatia's death also signals the end of women in positions of intellectual prominence and the beginning of a period known -- not coincidentally -- as the Dark Ages.

The film is so busy rifling through genres that it fails to develop a coherent flavor of its own.

Well-paced, well-performed and full of visual wows, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader bobbles a hectic story by stopping just short of committing to its grounding themes. Its hardly sacrilege, but it does seem like a shame.

The talking animals, though less tough to look at than those in "Marmaduke," are murder on the ears: Maya Rudolph as a neurotic giraffe and Sandler voicing a monkey could take the paint off of a Buick.

Relies almost entirely on its tunnel-vision, single-player style for its scares. It’s a strategy that stalls out halfway through, which means it works for twice as long as it should.

A concerted effort to make a scary movie without spilling a drop of blood, Insidious is earnest to the point of suffocation about scaring you silly.

As it is, The Devil's Double, a handsome and occasionally dazzling thriller with at least one dynamo performance from its star, is ultimately dominated by its style.

If you've ever wondered how a bunch of blockheaded white boys would handle a bullet wound, you're in for a treat.

For a movie with a comedic premise this simple – essentially: can you believe we made a movie with a premise this simple? – Casa de Mi Padre can feel pretty exhausting.

Burns handles the more dramatic moments - divorce, accidental death, betrayal - with invention, using abrupt cuts and impressionistic editing to keep the film from settling into a rut.

A film loaded with interest that somehow fails to be interesting, La Soga is inspired by true events and not much else.

Minor but still quite enjoyable. And like other minor Woody Allen pictures it becomes more interesting when placed in their larger context.

The assessments offered in 21 Years manage to feel like too little arriving a little late.

The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America--he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese--but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard.

Amid the macho poses and reloading of his unbelievably enormous weapon, I was distracted by the notion of Brody’s participation as a kind of privately satisfying performance art (a similar impulse found James Franco doing a guest stint on "General Hospital").

A film so tightly rigged that even its star's centrifugal charms can't keep you fully checked in.

The disconcerting thing is how easy it is to fool viewers into being satisfied with not being involved, or even entertained - as long as they can RELATE.

Aside from the showy, overwrought credits sequence, it's silly and self-conscious and still scary as hell.

Prom has sweetness, nonthreatening conflict, and enough personality to distance it from the chilling anodyne of Disney's television vehicles.

More helpful is Ice Cube's endearing performance as an aged sparring partner of Leon Spinks and Muhammad Ali who provides cover and advice for Kevin as he tries to hold onto both his wits and the ticket.

Like the Inuit and their many words for "snow," Jake has a thousand squinty faces and they all mean "Bugger off."

I salute the effort to go somewhere strange in Mars Needs Moms; if only a fully realized idea - and not the same, barely concealed right-wing rap, different planet - had been the destination.

Though the movie is largely vanilla in its pleasures, film lovers will eat it up.

Off-handed and yet quite artfully observed, The Happy Poet's winsome deadpan offsets its skewering of class and sustainability issues, right through to a tricky ending that, like Bill himself, may not be what it seems.

Disappointingly ordinary film.

Based on a true story which director Marco Amenta explored 12 years ago in documentary form, The Sicilian Girl feels powered by unfocused preoccupation, rather than by a more compelling creative ambition.

The problem is, whether real, not real, or some Spector-headed stepchild of the two, meltdowns are still not inherently interesting.

You'll have to hang on to something to get through the hairpins in The Perfect Host, a chamber piece hostage thriller black comedy undone less by its twists than by the stretches of bad road between them.

Dark and queer enough to catch your attention but lacking the story power to hold it, Metropia is an aesthetic in search of an author.

Because of the movie's episodic structure and lack of expository detail, the visuals bear the greatest narrative burden.

Loose, flinty, and a little in love with itself, Perrier’s Bounty struts the fine line of self-consciousness drawn by neo-gangster capers like "The Usual Suspects," "In Bruges" and "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels."

The Dilemma is bad in a way that seems to parody all the ways in which a film like, say, "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" was good.

A party disaster movie targeted at kids who find the "Hangover" franchise too sophisticated.

Girl in Progress feels a little trapped by its own conceits: It plays with the idea that all rebellion is in some sense performed and makes a caricature out of the immature, attention-hungry mother, but it never liberates its characters from their molds.

In catsuits, swimsuits, and skimpy underthings, Saldana is as potently elusive as a shadow can be.

As an insult comic, Madea has gone the way of her low-hanging bosom. There's little pleasure in watching her go off, and Perry's direction is reliably drab: Sitcom setups dominate, with strange blown-out lighting occasionally swapped in for the flat tones of a WB soundstage.

A movie about childhood nightmares that plays too much like an actual, incoherent nightmare to make a good movie, Intruders is a psychodrama divided against itself.

Though he lavishes praise on his subjects for being hyper-masculine and free-thinking, Stone is downright girlish in his devotion, scoffing at charges made against the leaders rather than examining them.

Portman is also a producer of Hesher; it is the first of her new company's films. It's not too tough to see what might have drawn a producer to the project: The story's mix of the mythical and the mundane has become an indie staple, and Hesher's edge might have proved artful instead of shredding everything in its path. For any actress, however, the part of Nicole is embarrassingly thin.

Country Strong rides pretty high in the saddle, confident in the remarkably realized world Feste has created for her characters.

The result is way out there - so far that you won't quite recognize the terrain, and still feel strangely at home. The look has the impossible feel of a CGI soundstage: Not cheap, not even necessarily fake, just… weird.

Built for speed, and for an action-savvy audience who can appreciate a throwaway vengeance flick for exactly what it is.

While Survival of the Dead does its best to work up a decent allegorical bent -- this time involving territorial pissing matches within a country under siege -- its power is diffused (and frankly, confused) by its execution.

There's something immobile at the center of The Lady, a kind of Botoxed biopic with an unlikely director - Luc Besson - manning the syringe.

As in "Country Strong," Meester's crack timing and irresistible poignancy illuminate a part that would leave other actresses simpering themselves off the screen.

On the whole Bel Ami is highly watchable.

Designed to be both essential history lesson and costume weeper, Princess Kaiulani comes up short on both fronts: Deadly earnest intentions and lack of dramatic gumption ensure that the story of Hawaii’s favored daughter remains under-told.

Oblique and thickly layered with rhetoric, this account does little to illuminate Mumia the man, but it sets Mumia the statue aglow.

It's hard to tell what Wild Target is offering, besides the pleasure of its company.

It's still a kick to watch Kathleen Turner don a housedress and trade soothing pieties with Richard Chamberlain. The Perfect Family feels like it could have been more than that, but I suppose counting its blessings is the more Christian thing to do.

The plot might be summed up this way: America's having a war, and everybody's invited!

Kári relies too heavily on the fleeting rewards of situation for the film to come together as an involving story.

Beastly manages to show you all the ways it might have worked by missing every available mark, sometimes by the gaping expanse between Alex Pettyfer's ears, sometimes only by the feline curl of Vanessa Hudgens' smile.

Like the recent and only slightly less fantastical "Never Let Me Go," Inhale manages little more than a gesture toward untying its bundled moral knots.

Tainted by a script (by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore) so risibly broad it makes "Wedding Crashers" look like Bergman in the Hamptons.

Despite these two actors' decent - and occasionally very charming - performances the film stacks the odds of the audience caring about Heigl and Duhamel against a narrative vacuum that favors eye candy and cheap effect over emotional logic.

It wouldn't go so far as to say it feels like you went through Jeremy's ordeal for nothing, but I did wish I had come to know as much about Dorff's character as I did about the size and shape of his nostrils.

It would be a real shame, with this much money and this many effects artists, if there were not a few purely visual wows. Wrath manages exactly two, and not where you might expect.

The film is being released in both 2- and 3-D, and from what I could tell the 3-D version is still almost 50-50. What use is made of the technology is hardly worth the effort, unless you've always wanted to experience a cascade of cheesies in 3-D.

Mirren tricked out in mid-70's pimp wear -- ahead of her time, she even brandishes a cane -- has a certain charm, but novelty alone can't keep Love Ranch's tiresome tropes and plodding storyline from dragging the film down through the Nevada dust.

It really is just sensory bombardment, and in two dimensions you have even less of a grasp of what's happening and of what you're looking at than the poor bastards on-screen.

I found myself forgetting The Art of Getting By as it unfolded, as though the Looney Tunes art department were two steps behind the characters, rolling up the scenery like so much carpeting.

It's not that The Watch is terrible – it's not not terrible, but there are sufficient diversions and more punitive ways to spend your evening – but that it's one of those smoke bomb comedies that seems to disappear even while you're watching, leaving no trace of itself behind.