Nathan Rabin

Lives and dies on the strength of individual gags, most of which are clever, but none of which quite make up for the absence of a strong narrative drive. Sometimes being funny isn't enough.

It isn't gangsta, but it's winning all the same.

Director Craig McCall approaches Cardiff with something approaching awe, though his subject views his accomplishments with the good-natured humility befitting a proper English gentleman.

Ted is never stronger than when Wahlberg and MacFarlane's Ted hang out, riff, and luxuriate in an easy friendship, but as it lurches to a conclusion, Ted unwisely devotes far too much of its time to a plot it would be better off ignoring.

Seconds is certainly a flawed film, and it's easy to see why it flopped during its initial release: It's a relentlessly depressing, claustrophobic movie that offers no sense of catharsis whatsoever. Nevertheless, it's strangely touching, and as a portrayal of identity and alienation in suburban America, it's about a hundred times as creepy and sincere as David Lynch's thematically similar Lost Highway.

Teacher underutilizes a smartly cast-against-type Timberlake and the perpetually winning Segel, but Diaz ultimately earns a rooting interest in the unlikely redemption of her scheming opportunist.

Where "Crash" relentlessly pushed every conflict to a fever pitch, Elah takes its cues from Tommy Lee Jones' low-simmering lead performance.

While the film's social-satire elements are flat and overly familiar, its dry absurdity is unmistakably Lynchian.

Quinceañera sketches its characters and conflicts with warmth and empathy.

Ember is seldom riveting, but it's consistently compelling, and its uncompromising literal and metaphorical darkness renders its climax enormously satisfying.

Nowhere is Araki's most accomplished film yet, and if it never quite comes together, it's still a wildly entertaining film.

Delivers pretty much exactly what its audience wants and expects: big, dumb, campy fun so deliriously, comically macho, it's remarkable that no one in the cast died of testosterone poisoning.

Never as edgy as it imagines itself to be. Bangkok may swallow innocents whole, but director Todd Phillips has a lucrative franchise to protect, so the film's flirtation with the comic abyss gets compromised into something that looks more like a rock-solid mainstream comedy with a prominent dark side.

A good cast, terrific soundtrack, and genial spirit all help the film go down smoothly.

Bad Milo! gets nasty laughs out of putting its overmatched hero through a gauntlet of comic humiliations, but it works just as well as a dark allegory about the way we handle our demons.

It’s modest, scrappy, and resourceful, a low-budget comedy that makes the most of a central setting and a cast packed with gifted improvisers.

There's a tight, urgent, and timely film hidden inside Shot In The Heart, but it's not always worth forging through all the gratuitous bells and whistles to find it.

A surprisingly fresh and funny feature-length look at an unrelentingly filthy vaudeville gag that's been passed down from comic to comic like an urban legend, often changing with every telling.

Strongman is a heartrending character study of a man blessed with superhuman strength, but defeated and overwhelmed by the everyday bullshit of life.

Faithfully recreates a bygone era of larger-than-life filmmakers and stars.

An unforgettable tribute to a remarkable life, Sister Helen is inspirational in a way a film about a more conventionally pious religious figure could never be. Travis seems to be the antithesis of a cardboard saint.

It isn’t a terribly intimate portrait of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Chapin, or Nixon, but it is revealing in its own right, as a fascinatingly warped and aged Polaroid of an epic life that’s grown more compelling with the passage of time.

The Inevitable Defeat Of Mister & Pete is a raw, often moving coming-of-age story.

Time Is Illmatic is a documentary worthy of its subject. It’s no masterpiece, but it’s a strong, substantive look at an album whose greatness was apparent immediately, but that’s still grown in stature since its release.

Thankfully, Big Men doesn’t have heroes or villains. It’s a deep dive into an endless pool of moral and political ambiguity in which very little is clear-cut, except that the desire for wealth and power.

It’s ambitious, drug-infused, psychedelic, and fractured in strange and interesting ways.

Grim but never gratuitous.

Bellocchio's film, which enlivens the grim realities of months in a stuffy apartment with striking bursts of lyricism, is often a powerful cautionary tale about the dangers of becoming a slave to ideology.

Gondry’s latest demands a high tolerance for whimsy, and will undoubtedly prove anathema to his skeptics. Yet for those willing to abandon logic, suspend disbelief, and give themselves over to Gondry’s crazy, deeply immersive world of play, the result is a wildly inventive head film that’s mood-altering and mind-expanding in its own right.

Despite its numerous missteps and miscalculations, What Dreams May Come is often a powerful, affecting piece of filmmaking.

It’s compelling throughout, and profoundly moving at times, even when it rings false, which is often. It’s a divisive, shadowy conversation-starter of a movie that’s as much fun to talk and think about as it is to watch.

The film executes its bad-taste gags with such delicacy and unexpected emotional truth that they don’t even seem like jokes. This is attributable largely to Hollyman’s fearless, convincing lead performance, which grounds the movie in a believable reality, no matter how crazy things become.

With "Super Troopers" and Club Dread, Broken Lizard has cranked out two genuinely funny movies in a row.

Hopkins delivers such a warm, winning performance that it's hard not to be won over by his loopy charm and monomaniacal passion. The film is about a man whose need for speed takes on an existential and spiritual dimension, but it's precisely its rambling, meandering, unhurried affability that makes it such a low-key pleasure.

With dialogue as spare as its harsh landscapes, the film is so tonally dry that it makes Aki Kaurismäki look like the Farrelly brothers--it begins at a snail's pace before speeding up to a turtle's drowsy crawl.

Along with producer Laurie David (who was also behind Inconvenient Truth) and director Stephanie Soechtig, Couric has made an unabashed muckraking documentary that ends with a call to action that’s half inspirational, half grating. It’s propaganda, to be sure, but effective propaganda.

Besson doesn't need dialogue to convey his worlds' nuances, because there are none, especially in Unleashed, which achieves such a sustained pitch of hysteria that it makes past masters of melodrama like Douglas Sirk, John Woo, and Sam Fuller look positively austere by comparison.

Roth's novel was at heart a howl of rage against a corrupt, hypocritical, judgmental world, but Benton's austere adaptation--stunningly shot by the late Jean-Yves Escoffier--speaks largely in muted tones.

Psycho II doesn’t live up to the original, but doesn’t dishonor it either, even though its allegiances are clearly with Hitchcock’s film rather than Robert Bloch’s words. Psycho II isn’t perfect or brilliant. But it was good enough to successfully bring a beloved cinematic fixture back into action after an extended hibernation, and savvy and soulful enough to realize that what makes Norman Bates such an icon isn’t his monstrousness, but his trembling, eminently relatable humanity.

A textbook example of how a remade '70s show can feel like an enjoyable lark rather than cultural recycling run amok.

Combining raunchiness and sweetness in a slapdash but generally effective manner.

In the wrong hands, or with a different cast, such quirky material could easily have devolved into a grotesque parade of cartoon freaks. But Almereyda finds exactly the right tone: a loopy, understated deadpan that invites empathy rather than ridicule. Twister has the outline of a broad comedy, but the inspired cast–particularly Amis–brings such conviction to its performances that the drama registers as strongly as the comedy.

Where "Quiz Show" elevated its story to the level of Shakespearean tragedy, Clooney's film is too lightweight to reach such tragic heights. In part, it's too short--at 90 minutes, including musical interludes and lengthy monologues taken whole-cloth from the historical record, Good Night breezes by effortlessly when it really needs time and space to build up to appropriately epic dimensions.

Finds a winning formula: Chan provides the action, various exotic lands serve up props begging to be employed in Chan-style combat, Coogan brings the dry wit, a minor constellation of surprise guest stars provides razzle-dazzle, and a steady stream of mild chuckles helps the whole fandango fly by painlessly.

Everything "Blade" should have been but wasn't: stylish, fast-paced, and comfortable with its own ridiculousness.

Carny feels like a throwback to the ’70s. It’s an evocative character study with a firm grasp on its subject matter that may be traced back to Robertson, an ex-carny who also produced and co-wrote the story.

The Yes Men's brilliant lies unlock explosive satirical truths, but the film runs out of steam a bit toward the end.

It maintains a strong enough sense of squirmy humanity that its characters' epiphanies and emotional growth feel both hard-earned and richly deserved.

Title aside, what distinguishes The Fluffy Movie from a standard stand-up special is its willingness, even eagerness, to dive into some seriously heavy shit. It’s funny, to be sure, but also unexpectedly substantive.

Unexpectedly heartwarming documentary.

A Most Wanted Man is a cold film that examines its characters from a clinical distance, but its iciness gives way to raw emotion in a powerful final sequence.

The filmmakers behind Our Vinyl Weighs A Ton benefit and suffer from an excess of fascinating subject material.

Beneath all The Double’s cynicism, misanthropy, intense stylization, and distance lies a core of genuine tragedy, and that’s what gives the film an emotional resonance beyond its aesthetic achievements.

Like the rest of the film, Beckham's climax is surprisingly satisfying, however, in large part because director Gurinder Chadha films the competing big game and big fat Indian wedding of Nagra's sister with equivalently bursting levels of color, panache, and verve.

Far better than you'd expect. Despite its intelligence-insulting premise, Mouse Hunt is a well-crafted, surprisingly smart film that benefits tremendously from the winning chemistry between Lane and talented newcomer Evans.

T3, while far from a classic, is an overachieving, mercenary sequel that's short on thrills, but surprisingly long on laughs and surprises.

Rize eventually gets a little preachy and sentimental, but a little sermonizing seems a small price to pay for such an industrial jolt of kinetic electricity.

Fine lowbrow entertainment, a fast, funny pastiche of science-fiction, horror, and teen-movie archetypes that is, aside from the original Scream, perhaps the most entertaining, fully realized film of the current postmodern horror/sci-fi cycle.

Convoy has one huge advantage over the song that inspired it: It’s one thing to hear about a mighty convoy, but it’s quite another to see it. There’s a certain tacky, truck-stop grandeur to witnessing so many huge vehicles traveling together like a pack of steel, gasoline-fueled animals.

The always-dependable and chameleon-like Craig has the chops and substance for that kind of film, but Vaughn prefers to keep matters brisk and superficial.

Unforgettably documents the kind of journey that leads not to easy answers, but rather to an even thornier knot of questions.

Jeepers Creepers aimed for the archetypal primal spookiness of a scary campfire tale, and halfway succeeded. Here, Salva makes it work virtually every step of the way.

Mann's moody Collateral unravels toward the end, faltering at its conclusion but dispensing enough atmosphere, characterization, and world-weary humanism along the way that audiences would be wise to enjoy the ride without worrying too much about the final destination.

Essentially just an above-average Hong Kong action movie, but as such, it's still far better than just about anything else Van Damme has done.

While Cat People feels like an early Bruckheimer production, it’s also permeated with the themes that personify Schrader’s work as a screenwriter and filmmaker: obsession, sex, the strange permutations of destiny, and man’s bottomless capacity for cruelty and violence.

Curse Of Chucky gets wilder and crazier as it goes along, but it surprisingly doesn’t sacrifice atmosphere or tension for laughs, even as it circles back to the raucous comedy of Seed Of Chucky and Bride Of Chucky in its final minutes.

As Overnight progresses and its title grows increasingly ironic, it paints a mesmerizing portrait of a profane, overbearing monster engaged in a drawn-out act of professional suicide.

Entertainingly captures the camaraderie and spirit of competition among the affable boarders as they battle nature in the form of imposing mountains, regular avalanches, and jagged rock formations.

More than anything, though, It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World embodies comic hugeness, for better or for worse. It isn’t the best comedy of all time, but it’s one of the largest and broadest.

The Kill Team tells a compelling story, but the 79-minute runtime leaves that story feeling incomplete.

A terrific cast, stylish direction, and elegantly choreographed mayhem help make it far better than it might have been -- Though ultimately silly, Equilibrium's shopworn but stylish synthesis of ammo and ideas is surprisingly engrossing.

Film doesn’t suit Alan Partridge as well as other media, but Coogan and company have nevertheless delivered a consistently lively satirical comedy that would stand on its own merits, even if it wasn’t weighed down by expectations more than 20 years in the making.

Brody's Oscar victory and newfound star power might have secured Love The Hard Way its theatrical release, but his depth and charisma are what make the film haunting and surprisingly resonant.

The Coens engineer a funny, entertaining battle of the sexes here, but the preponderance of indelible male characters and less memorable female roles render it something of a mismatch.

Hokey and convoluted, but as a sticky-hearted fable of redemption, it's surprisingly seductive.

While Sleepwalkers fails spectacularly as a horror movie, it triumphs as a loopy camp comedy. Sleepwalkers gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, which is saying something, as it starts out batshit insane.

An auspicious debut for writer-director Michael Burke, the film makes a superb actor's showcase for Hirsch as well as Guiry.

The film lets audiences be third parties in Coogan and Brydon’s dinner conversation. For lovers of words, comedy, and conversation, that’s an awfully hard proposition to pass up.

Wolf Creek is the kind of well-executed sleazefest that makes audiences feel not just creeped-out but downright dirty, as if it would take a three-hour-long shower just to wash all the grit and grease away.

Kink sometimes feels like a promotional film not just for the website it empathetically chronicles, but also for the sex-positive ethos it embodies. But it’s also unexpectedly convincing, and at times even moving in its paradoxical conception of liberation through degradation, and empowerment through submission.

At its best, Lost Embrace conveys, with real warmth, the hopelessly intertwined pasts and shared futures of a community of outsiders and immigrants. At worst, it's a sitcom without a laugh track.

Palindromes becomes a strangely compelling fractured fable, a grim cinematic fairy tale heightened by Nathan Larson's delicate, bittersweet score.

For neophyte cinephiles, A Decade Under The Influence should serve as a lively primer on a seminal film era, but its reverent tone is antithetical to the rule-breaking spirit it celebrates.

Surprisingly successful blend of goofy political farce and sober family drama.

A pleasant piece of commercial filmmaking, but as a satirical comedy, it's devoid of laughs and insight.

A slick new meta-romantic comedy selling a transparent yet strangely irresistible fantasy of upscale romance among the beautiful but guarded.

Thankfully, it boasts a story that doesn't require a surplus of style to be compelling.

Weekend Of A Champion is an immersive chronicle of a specific time and place in racing, but it’s also a film in a familiar Polanski mode, exploring a strong man at war with forces that could destroy him.

The story told by e-dreams is inherently compelling, full of dark humor drawn from a deep well of hubris and historical irony, but the film would be a lot sharper had the filmmakers not fallen under Park's charismatic cyber-spell.

A harrowing, unblinking look at the crimes committed by the Khmer Rouge, the genocidal regime that by some accounts killed off more than a quarter of Cambodia's population between 1975 and 1979.

Favors unforgettable images over in-depth storytelling, and prioritizing electrifying moments over narrative arcs.

There’s an element of self-deprecation to Hogan’s performance—a winking, grinning acknowledgment of the character’s absurdity that nicely undercuts the macho fantasy.

I went into Big Trouble with exceedingly low expectations and was pleasantly surprised...Much of what makes the film so unexpectedly endearing is that Falk's incorrigible drifter seems motivated less by greed than by a boyish spirit of adventure gone horribly awry.

Undertow may prove the least immediately satisfying of Green's films, but it remains an achievement, emotionally rich and rife with biblical and mythic undertones.

There's something disconcerting and strained about plastic smiles and speed-fueled peppiness of dancers in old musicals, a forced bonhomie that's borderline creepy. Pennies brilliantly exploits that blatantly artificial pep in queasy, disquieting ways.