Nathan Rabin

Makes a terrific case for the group's historical importance, even though its performances seem more fun to discuss than watch.

It’s a film of stunning beauty and deep underlying sadness, a self-financed labor of love filled with impossibly gorgeous, oft-unclothed men and dazzling eye candy.

Spectacularly, unimpeachably, relentlessly preposterous.

It’s a soul-stirring tribute to a man whose vision was too bold and revolutionary for his lifetime, or the convention-bound ways of the music industry, but was ultimately too powerful to be denied.

Sensual but profoundly silly, Silk is ultimately little more than softcore porn with arthouse trappings, a moony, dopily romantic "Red Shoe Diaries" variation for the NPR set.

Goes to great lengths to show the man-child behind the barfly, but in its rush to deify its subject, it lacks critical voices and context.

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.

Any pretensions of satire, moral ambiguity, or social commentary get lost in a hurricane of empty, mindless spectacle.

By giving Taylor the last word, Dig! becomes little more than a self-serving, unconvincing infomercial for a musician who comes across as functional and bearable only when compared to his counterpart.

Jesse Eisenberg stars as a kinder, gentler version of the insufferable faux intellectual he played in "The Squid And The Whale."

It's a huge improvement over the Attenborough film; given the film’s non-fiction roots, it seems poetically apt that a documentary take is much more satisfying and engaging than the Hollywood treatment.

Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy, the film ends with rehearsals for yet another money-grubbing comeback tour.

It's no surprise that when it ultimately tries to pluck at the heartstrings, it rings hollow. The film lives and dies by speed.

In a star-making performance, Evan Rachel Wood stars as essentially a younger version of Nicole Kidman's media-age femme fatale from "To Die For," an aspiring 15-year-old actress who hides a sharp, calculating mind behind a façade of vapid, chattering self-absorption.

A Cinderella Story banks far too heavily on its audience's affection for Duff, who's dreadful in a terrible role.

It does justice to a subject who made his life and death works of art.

It's the ultimate pop-culture sacrilege: a movie about soul music that has no soul.

So much fun that its considerable worth as history and sociology seems almost incidental.

James Brown, B.B. King, and a dazzling array of top African, Afro-Cuban, and African-American talent finally gets its own solo spotlight in Soul Power.

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

A quirkily funny, startlingly assured comedy-drama.

A low-key, tough little thriller punctuated by casual bursts of brutality and deadpan humor, Charley Varrick is informed by a quiet professionalism that suits a movie about feds and criminals doing their jobs, whether that means laundering money, making fake passports, or robbing banks.

Harsh, unsparing, unsentimental, and uniformly well-acted, The Mother bravely and intelligently tackles subject matter widely ignored in cinema--the sexuality of a plain-looking woman edging toward the twilight of a life of quiet desperation.

Unless this is an unusually great year for comedy, there will be few funnier or more quotable movies than What We Do In The Shadows.

Submarine is the film "Youth In Revolt" should have been, an achingly sad yet ribald account of a hyper-verbal oddball's ascent/descent into manhood.

A funny, boozy, ramshackle party.

Shockingly, he's (Jonathan Demme) pulled it off, replicating the original's tricky feat of investing a paranoid plot with timeliness, psychological complexity, sociopolitical acumen, and almost frightening conviction.

Bittersweet and beautifully realized, harsh but humane, Greenberg is a self-consciously small film that nevertheless leaves an indelible mark.