Nathan Rabin

The Bitter Buddha closes with Pepitone pondering whether he’s wasted his life by focusing on comedy rather than family, but everything that’s come before suggests that decision has led to a life that’s a triumph rather than a tragedy.

Madness lacks sympathetic characters and a well-structured plot, but its manic energy takes it far.

The Mack certainly wasn't the first film to invite audiences to identify with a gleefully transgressive antihero, but its combustible take on sex, class, capitalism, and race made it an important touchstone not only for black film, but also for hip-hop culture.

Bennett never lets us forget that his character is in profound pain, even while attempting to perform oral sex on a transsexual blow-up doll. It's a daring, sweet performance that almost single-handedly elevates The Virginity Hit from a standard Superbad knock-off into a film that feels raw, painful, and real.

In its loose, ramshackle, gleefully profane first half, Role Models suggests "School Of Rock" with Tourette's, or the original "Bad News Bears" without the baseball.

As with "Black Dynamite," many of Casa De Mi Padre's sharpest, most inspired gags riff on the source material's ingratiatingly amateurish production values and exuberantly incompetent stylistic choices.

As a moody drama, it falls short, but as lightweight escapism, it sets off sporadic but irresistible explosions of pure cinematic delight.

Jeff begins with its protagonist discussing a Hollywood movie and ends by embracing the worst excesses of commercial American filmmaking, but there are enough moments of magic and wonder in the interim to make it worthwhile.

Bible doesn't take itself too seriously, and boasts a disarming undercurrent of gleeful prankishness.

It's a flawed film, hampered by weird tonal shifts and an overpopulated cast. But, 31 years later, Catch-22's chilliness seems forgivable, its vision of a military (and a nation) ruled by gung-ho capitalists, shameless opportunists, and evil yes-men as prescient and incisive as ever.

What begins as a scathing but loving satire of materialism loses its way once it turns into a warmhearted after-school special about a nice young Jewish boy discovering the true meaning of the bar mitzvah.

Bugsy is part tormented character study, part old-school Hollywood glitz. Its fabulist protagonist acts like he's stuck in a '30s gangster melodrama, but Levinson's lushly stylized film gives his story the A-list treatment.

Hatchet II is distinguished both by a funky, frisky sense of humor, and gore of great quality and quantity.

Decomposition bears powerful, uncompromising witness to man's inhumanity to man, which is one of the most important things any documentary can do, though, it's also one of the most grueling.

The Interview is mannered, implausible, and stagy, but queasily compelling all the same.

As usual, Corben's style is caffeinated and a little rough around the edges, but he's a tenacious journalist, and his yen for sensationalism gives Limelight an irresistible tabloid pop.

Bogdanovich’s affection for film’s embryonic beginnings informs every frame, from the machine-gun crackle of snappy banter smartly executed to meticulously choreographed pratfalls and comic fights to silent-movie-style intertitles.

Ffor all its clumsiness, Sir! No Sir! movingly captures the raw excitement of grunts discovering their power and their voices in their ability to resist.

Though it grows silly and sentimental, Funeral scores enough big laughs to make its shortcomings eminently forgivable.

With Piranha, Dante delivers a superior Jaws rip-off with a light, goofy touch that anticipates the anarchic, gleeful mayhem of his later work.

As befits a heartfelt ode to working-class values, Diggers puts in lots of hard, honest work that finally pays off in a wholly predictable yet unexpectedly moving conclusion.

"May" uses the quirks and well-worn traditions of horse racing as a vehicle to quietly explore idiosyncrasies of the human condition.

It's a mess, but its best moments are exhilarating, getting hopelessly lost in Pargin's surreal, completely disorienting world.

In the wrenching final scene, the concept of "dying with dignity" becomes much more than just a catchphrase used to justify a controversial practice.

Wah-Wah can't sustain the mastery of its superior first hour, but it maintains a core of truth that sets it apart from less-convincing depictions of boys becoming men.

Without its mesmerizing lead performance, Traitor easily could have devolved into direct-to-DVD fodder.

The new Burke & Hare offers many pleasures, chief among them the return of the Landis of old.

In a medium generally about action and momentum, Factotum is largely concerned with inaction and inertia.

Entertaining, casually satirical crowd-pleaser.

It’s A Disaster is lively and assured before a third-act twist takes the film in an even more bracingly bleak direction. The twist is one tonal shift too many, but the film otherwise manages to find the levity, as well as the pathos, in the prospect of total annihilation.

Maxed Out sacrifices depth for breadth and like a lot of low-budget documentaries, it's done no favors by its grimy, no-fi aesthetic. But the film's scattered ruminations on credit card mania add up to a powerful indictment of a culture of mindless consumption spinning out of control.

The Wiz is a weird, ugly film that nevertheless attains strange, fleeting moments of grace.

Well-acted and artfully (though conventionally) made, The Way Back tells a compelling story, regardless of whether it's based on truth or a fabrication.

Writer-director Davaa allows the drama to emerge organically out of the characters, the beautifully captured setting, and the conflict between the past and the present.

When American films were addressing social turmoil like never before, Brooks used his clout to turn back the clock by combining silly sight gags, show-biz satire, silence, and celebrity cameos in 1976's aptly named, ingratiatingly goofy Silent Movie.

The Weird World Of Blowfly at times recalls "The Wrestler," only instead of schlepping his aging body from city to city to don outrageous costumes and wrestle, 69-year-old soul-music legend Clarence Reid schleps his hunched-over frame to gigs where he performs X-rated parodies and scatological ditties as incorrigible proto-hip-hopper Blowfly.

The film never even attempts to peer behind the curtain of Jay’s colorful existence; it’s content that the show in front of it is spectacle enough. But Deceptive Practices would be a richer, deeper experience if the filmmakers had penetrated Jay’s fierce boundaries even a little.

A smiley-face ending feels like a lazy copout, but the end credits, which put faces to all the names in the uniformly fine cast, underline this shaggy sleeper's greatest strength: creating a slew of characters worth getting to know.

The early, explosively funny skits and a loose, engagingly adventurous spirit are enough to ensure this uneven but often delightful project the cult fame that accompanies pretty much everything associated with Stella mainstay Wain.

Skips right past depressing on its way to apocalyptic.

Rosner works for famed Democratic strategist James Carville, who stops just short of dry-humping the camera lens in his hunger for the spotlight here. Our Brand Is Crisis is full of strangely resonant parallels to American politics.

Madden's dark, moody, complex exploration of guilt and identity taps into a rich vein of moral ambiguity, but the filmmakers should know that in the face of unspeakable Nazi evil, the romantic problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans.

Maines' big mouth and winning candor got her into trouble, but Shut Up & Sing suffers from filmmakers who are intent on playing it safe.

It's easily the most painful comedy of the year; in the sadomasochistic world of Knoxville and friends, that isn't criticism so much as high praise.

Squad joins The Lost Boys, Fright Night, Gremlins, and Poltergeist in a winning '80s subgenre dedicated to ghoulies invading the suburbs.

Project provides an unmistakably one-sided view of rap as God's gift to the poor, angry, black, and young, but given the beating rap has taken in the press lately (please Oprah, don't hurt 'em!), the film's pro-rap cheerleading couldn't be more timely or necessary.

Alternately hypnotic and headache-inducing.

At its best, Caramel boasts a quietly engaging slice-of-slice casualness.

The Man With The Iron Fists has the same advantages of many musical debuts. It's the product of a man who has been storing up ideas, setpieces, characters, and gags for a lifetime, in preparation for the magic moment when he'd be able to unleash his full vision on the big screen.

The film's subjects are almost uniformly likable, self-deprecating, funny, and hyper-verbal, and their peculiar passion for crosswords and the sense of genial camaraderie among buffs proves surprisingly infectious.

In the film's funniest scene, a coked-up Day rocks out to The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" in a car in a state of ecstatic frenzy.

A very pleasant surprise, Next Day Air is the rare crime comedy that does justice to both sides of the equation.

Foulkrod's film covers little new ground, but some painful truths are worth repeating.

Admission ultimately can’t quite figure out what kind of a film it wants to be, so like a lot of promising but unfocused contenders, it never quite lives up to its potential. But there’s value to be found in its meandering.

The Razor's Edge never quite reaches its destination but there are all manner of minor pleasures to be gleaned along the way.

Compassion and sociological acuity can only take a film so far, however, and clunky dialogue, comically broad supporting characters, and often-amateurish acting sabotage much of Suburbia's plot-and-dialogue-heavy second half. But it still shows enormous empathy and sensitivity in capturing the angst and alienation of American youth, making it seem both rooted in a specific time and place and strangely timeless.

The film is largely redeemed by an unexpected emotional resonance befitting a Steven Spielberg production.

Reno 911's anti-heroes are doomed, deluded losers, but they engender a strange sympathy all the same.

If Barnes ultimately emerges as a heartless, duplicitous villain, he's nevertheless got the devil's slippery, seductive charm.

Boogie Man doesn't delve too deep into its subject's private life, beyond some cheap psychology positing his brother's horrible early death as the root of his winner-takes-all philosophy. But then, Atwater's work was his life.

Missouri Breaks begins as a ramshackle comedy and ends as a dour tragedy about the death of the old west with Brando serving as its singularly warped Angel of Death.

It's not quite as charming as Top Hat or Shall We Dance, and the plotting drags heavily in spots, but whenever it gets free from the demands of farce, it's a dizzy delight.

Though the film seldom strays from formula, there's something strangely moving about Swank's conviction that, in spite of everything, people are really good at heart.

Quietly heartbreaking.

Though the filmmaking is playful at times, the film is essentially 90 percent message, 10 percent movie.

Unlike its subject, Amazing Grace won't change the world, but its quasi-religious sense of conviction proves rousing. Apted's unexpected crowd-pleaser is inspirational, but also surprisingly entertaining.

Carlos Cuaron's otherwise terrific new comedy Rudo Y Cursi barely survives its third-act "Goodfellas" descent into seedy coke-and-crime drama.

Take My Eyes might look and sound like an earnest message movie, but its bone-deep understanding of the tricky psychology of abuse feels effortlessly authentic.

Like "Hustle & Flow," Moan succeeds on languid atmosphere and the conviction of its leads. But it'd be nice if the execution matched the startling audacity of its premise.

In a stunning lead performance, Goldblum stars as a brilliant, apolitical jester.