Nathan Rabin

The Cartel frequently veers into the realm of black comedy, as Bowdon uncovers instances of nightmarish teacher behavior, but the dark comic elements would be better served by deadpan detachment.

Gehry is a fascinating subject, a strangely magnetic combination of rumpled, aw-shucks humility and Herculean ambition and hubris, but every time Pollack stumbles onto a fascinating topic like Gehry's battles with anti-Semitism, he pulls away instead of delving deeper.

Withnail And I works as a comedy, but it's a comedy of desperation, and the ever-present specter of failure, overdose, and addiction haunting its leads lends it an aura of lyrical sadness.

Delivers a steady stream of cheap B-movie thrills, plus two positive messages for young people: Be nice to animals, and when in doubt, always aim for the tendons.

Before Cooties is a zombie movie, it is an earnest-young-teacher movie that diligently subscribes to every cliché of the form.

Weitz has a winning way with a one-liner, and he's recruited a stellar cast that gets the most out of his material.

It’s a fascinating story, it doesn’t always make for a fascinating documentary.

Brewer's Footloose has sex, swagger, and even an edge of danger, but in the end, he's hamstrung by the project's innate ridiculousness.

Though certainly dull and didactic at times, Tout Va Bien is remarkable foremost for its sustained twilight mood of exquisite resignation, of exhausted sadness and bone-deep world-weariness.

Longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator Frank Marshall is smart enough to know his core audience of kiddies came to see the dogs, who take center stage in many of the film's best sequences, especially a jolting leopard-seal attack that's as terrifying as anything in "Jurassic Park."

The film plays like a strenuous tug of war between the inhuman machinery of a wildly misguided plot and the low-key humanism of Melanie Lynskey's warm yet unsentimental performance.

For much of its duration, December is poignantly bittersweet, but the closing sugar rush washes its pleasing ambiguities away.

It's amusing but facile, reasonably clever but hopelessly glib.

As the conceptually similar documentary "Spellbound" proved, spelling bees are innately dramatic. But that doesn't keep Atchison from constantly pushing the film toward theatrical moments instead of letting the drama arise organically from the story.

Though The Eclipse travels a sleepy route to a shrug of anticlimax, it’s refreshing to see a film acknowledge that life and love don’t end at 50, even in the outsized shadow of a soulmate’s death.

It's good to have Seinfeld back, even in this watered-down form.

Snitch toys with moral ambiguity and fatalism before losing its nerve and delivering the action-movie goods in a climax that hews closer to fantasy than the keenly observed realism of the film’s solid center.

While there are moments throughout when the film looks primed to break out of the indie arthouse ghetto, it never quite pulls it off.

Angio captures the outlandish twists and turns of Van Peebles' life with humor, color, and a welcome lightness of touch.

The emotions of soul music are irresistibly universal. The same is true of soul-music clichés. Based on a true story, The Sapphires tells the tale of four ambitious young Aboriginal girls from Australia who come of age performing before American serviceman in 1968 Vietnam. And yet the film is afflicted by a curious lack of cultural specificity.

Love looks and sounds great, but in depicting N’Dour as a lofty symbol for music’s power to bridge worlds and inspire, it sometimes loses sight of the man.

By this point, the rhythms of Smith's dialogue are as predictable and mannered as haikus, and like sitcoms, Clerks II is mostly appealing in its familiarity, from the rat-a-tat cussing to the cameos from Smith's repertory company to the extended riffing on "Star Wars" and geek culture.

Zwigoff has a rich comic gallery of pretentious boobs to lampoon. But his satirical target just seems too easy this time around: It's hard to spoof institutions that already veer so close to self-parody.

It’s about just about everything, so while the subject might seem niche it’s actually so broad and expansive the film strains to cover it properly in a trim 82 minutes.

Tyson can be brutal with himself, but Toback's fawning documentary lets him off easy.

Throughout its first two acts, Bandslam is charming, sweet, and funny enough to merit inclusion in the upper echelon of teen comedies. Then comes a third act weighed down with arbitrary romantic conflicts, leaden melodrama, and a tiresome subplot.

Though a painless time-passer, Joyeux Noël ultimately contributes little to the venerable anti-war genre beyond its curious message that to some degree, war is hell because it prevents soldiers from making really neat friends and pen-pals from different counties.

An extraordinarily faithful—though schmaltzy and ultimately pointless— 1983 remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 farce.