Nathan Rabin

James has a sweet, appealing presence, but the dreary, joke-light script and generic direction do him no favors.

10 has the rare and wonderful quality of being simultaneously a perfect sociological document of the era that created it, and strangely timeless in its obsessions.

Like its protagonist, Management is dopey and impractical, but strangely winning all the same.

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.

London has a distinct Off-Off-Broadway feel. There's a stagebound quality to its handful of claustrophobic locations, its endless assault of intense coke talk, and its third-rate invocation of David Mamet, David Rabe, and Neil LaBute.

A celebration of brotherly love in the form of a documentary about a possible mercy killing. It explores, with mercy and compassion, the paradoxes inherent to the concept of mercy killing, a crime of love rather than hate.

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.

If ever a film needed a double shot of espresso and a swift kick in the caboose, it's this one. At best, the film is hypnotic; at worst, it challenges--no, dares--audiences not to fall asleep.

It loses its superficial charm during a labored third act that gets bogged down in tired, groan-inducing subplots.

The film almost redeems itself with what may be the longest, most elaborate post-film/pre-credits sequence in film history, but it will still disappoint anyone expecting more than watchable trash.

Director Kevin Asch takes protagonist Jesse Eisenberg on a dour, depressingly straightforward trip from naïveté to spiritual exhaustion.

A rancid new Yuletide comedy.

Like few of his filmmaking peers, McCarthy understands and respects the power of quiet, and how a whisper can be as explosive as a shout.

Lunchbox-toting time-waster.

The pounding prelude to a cultural and cinematic revolution, Watermelon Man nearly bubbles over with the rage that exploded outright with Van Peebles' follow-up, Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song.

The central romance is terminally bland, while Evigan's woozy family melodrama seems borrowed from countless superior dance movies.

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

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.

Heavily indebted to the early work of Jim Jarmusch, both for its evocative use of black and white and its tone of deadpan quirkiness, Suddenly is typical arthouse fare, long on atmosphere and fine acting but short on urgency and ambition.

White's gently perceptive film is a funny, poignant, emotionally honest minor-key character study.

Reggaeton has officially come of age: The burgeoning subgenre now has a terrible, opportunistic exploitation movie to call its own.

God-awful.

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

Darts around maniacally before congealing around a touchy-feely message of personal empowerment whose secular humanism and moral relativism is bound to strike fundamentalists of all stripes as downright Satanic.

How can any comedy with Jack Black as a Mexican wrestler not be gut-bustingly hilarious? Nacho Libre provides an all-too-convincing answer.

Nobel Son sadistically resurrects the Tarantino knockoff--an unloved, foul-mouthed little bastard of a subgenre that should now go away forever.

Dancy’s character has difficulty processing information and dealing with emotion, but even he could probably see through this schmaltz.

Malibu's screenplay inexplicably required the creative efforts of four screenwriters (including Kennedy), which works out to about half a funny gag apiece.