Nick Pinkerton

Picasso and Braque's primary merit is its archive-raiding evocation of the period discussed through vintage nitrate images.

None of the dialogue, presumably arrived at through improvisation, is either funny or memorable.

There's a human tragedy somewhere here-but aggrandized puppy-love romance and stylish revenge fantasy is all that lingers.

When every injury is repaid with interest, this self-destroying work has nowhere to go but to the credits. Such symmetry is a dismal, barbarian sort of perfection.

Those with a higher tolerance for bumptious jestering-from a yipping and mincing Xiao, or Cheng Ye as a bucktoothed jelly-belly-may, however, cry Masterpiece. They are instructed to seek out the longer Chinese cut, which apparently packs in more such interminable shtick, broad as the Yangtze.

An epic by Scandinavian standards, Manus's period re-creation is lavish-but the too-polished rental décor doesn't create a living past.

Likable enough to wear you down with its eager-to-please capering.

The result is a poetic documentary of quiet American surfaces and intimately eavesdropped people.

The inevitable all-you-can-eat orgy of zombies pulling stringy mouthfuls away from red, wet rib cages may satisfy gorehounds, but big set pieces showing how atrophied Romero's cutting and tactical framing have become is depressing to anyone who has valued his films for more than just splatter.

With a small, well-chosen cast, sly script, and slippery, ambivalent characters, The Last Exorcism gives a welcome titty-twist to the demonic-possession movie revival.

Were it the only film Kurosawa ever made, his name would be rightfully engraved on film history.

It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.

Every gag is smothered by the prevailing tone of labored zaniness and generic, plucky "mischief music" alerting discerning viewers to abandon all hope of laughter.

All might be good for a flask-to-the-theater laugh, if not for the unconscionable price gouging.

French director Céline Sciamma doesn't quite have the stun of discovery--mortified adolescent sexuality is something of a national specialty, after all--but she inexhaustibly endeavors after the indelible image.

Bracingly inept.

More than once does To's grandiose imagism miraculously grant this rote thriller a gleam of the sublime, as in a trash-dump face-off staged as an epic field maneuver, or a campground shoot-out timed to the fickle light of the moon.

Performances are made crystalline through a sixth sense for camera placement and curt cutting from director John Flynn, whose 2007 passing was little noted, though his no-BS way of laying down a story is a rare commodity in any era.

Splice is a queerly funny movie, attuned to the absurd.

It all smacks of that overdone "passion for literature" common in English teachers who send any healthy-minded kid running from books.

A sumptuous austerity, paralleling Mishima’s disciplined decadence.

In lesser hands, it would be young-adult fiction, but the coda-“Maybe life’s not supposed to make sense”-is anything but kid stuff.

Cage will likely not earn a second Oscar here, but he and director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure) make leftovers into fine PG malarkey with their hokey naïveté and prankish hocus-pocus.

Undeniably long, Panavision-wide, but of questionable depth.

Ball, who can't conceive of human motives beyond the hypertrophic, smutty sexuality that's his stock in trade, primly divides his characters into avatars of Sick Repression or Healthy Liberation.

Ten interviews with 10 "name" American and European directors--including Todd Haynes, David Lynch, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat--diced into a documentary as asinine and fawning as its title suggests.

All the drug-slinging material's counterfeit, but the script is refreshingly straight-faced in looking at the strange relationship between white boys and rap.

While Sandler has never trafficked in epigrammatic wit, there's a difference between, say, Billy Madison's "Of course I peed my pants--everyone my age pees their pants" or "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry's" shakedown of hetero squeamishness, and this lazy stuff--the difference between smart-dumb and plain-dumb.

Following the clues, The Other Guys turns more hectic than antic, and somebody didn't pack enough comedy for this long trip.

Playboy "gave us some of the best literature of our time," opines noted literary critic Tony Bennett, among a cast of mostly ridiculous and redundant talking heads.

The Dry Land does slip inside the inescapable, closed-circle logic of despair, and O'Nan's shy, precarious performance keeps you with him to the edge of the abyss.

You, the Living flips through 50-some single-panel vignettes, many very funny.

An unnecessary retelling of rock's dingiest "legend"--ever get the feeling you've been cheated?