Nick Pinkerton

Given something as simple as Theseus's rousing prebattle speech, maximalist Singh is helpless, but when he gets whole armies in on the act, you've got something to behold.

Here, the familiar tale is retold with concessions to feminist self-determination and camp humor, bending the Grimm Brothers' tale without infringing on its basic beauty.

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.

There's no matching the sinister village faces in Peckinpah's cast or the psychological acuity of his scene-making, but Lurie shows himself man enough for the material.

"Arrested Development's" Tony Hale nearly overcomes the gently worthless script, playing Annie's dork suitor, and convincingly transforming himself from toad to prince.

(It) notably liberated itself from the fusty tradition that a sex comedy should either titillate or tickle an audience.

Possibly worth seeing if you are 13, as the hot Rihanna-looking chick shows sideboob.

The most spot-on scenes show passive-aggressive hipster clerks snorting at Keith's flyers for a comeback fundraiser rave and a city suffocating on its own cool.

Miral is a very flat, fuddled movie, an at-odds-with-itself partisan work, its convictions diffused in a warm soak of style.

Taken 2 rarely embodies the values of concision and focus that it extols, and any breathing room from the hurtling narrative illogic only allows the audience opportunity to notice slips in Mills's father-knows-best infallibility.

It's one of the most obnoxious movies ever made.

The crazy-barista melodrama-slapstick collision seems not like a nimble twist, but tone-deaf blundering-what once came naturally now seems like trying too hard, as the Farrellys face their own mid-life crisis.

This is action as timeless as the reptilian brain-and if The Expendables is no classic, for about 20 minutes, it blowed up real good.

Sauvaire, hesitating between a protest picture and a glam-squalid imagist orgy, only succeeds in scattering human rubble across the screen.

Cage's avenger is named Milton; this reference to the author of Paradise Lost is the sole hint that Old World culture ever existed in Drive Angry's convoy of hyperbolized-unto-parody Americana: bad drawls, obese gawkers, roadhouse demonology, coochie-cutter shorts, and engines revving under guitar stomp.

The archetypal names are pure Walter Hill, the single-minded grudge mission borrowed from Donald Westlake's Hunter books - fine antecedents, though director George Tillman Jr.'s style is anything but terse, indulging rote slo-mo swagger set to secondhand musical cues.

Rule of thumb: If a movie about how life is messy features someone lecturing about how messy life is, that movie is not nearly messy enough to do justice to life.

It's a pathetic missed opportunity - and one occasion of actually going broke by underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

Devil is a Night Gallery reject worth experiencing only to gape at a "spirituality" that falls somewhere between Dostoyevsky and Jack Chick, and to laugh that such daring feats of narrative illogic were undertaken with a straight face.

Killer Elite is distinguished by one no-mercy, eye-gouging, testicle-punching brawl, and one whoppingly indifferent screenplay.

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.

There are fleeting moments, but Morgan's narrative promiscuity leaves 360 feeling only spread out and empty.

It is uncertain, though, how this material is served by disheveled cinematography, shooting handheld on the Hi 8 camcorder I had in high school, apparently editing on two VCRs, and flooding the mix with Forever 21 dressing-room music.

To understand Apart's Time-Life Mysteries of the Unknown tommyrot any better, one would need a psychic bond to first-time writer/director Aaron Rottinghaus, for his movie doesn't do much of a job explaining it.

Possible resulting "fun" is only slightly mitigated by contemplation of the wearisome decadence of American popular culture.

It's not a total wash. Faris's ample talents are squandered with a should-I-stay-or-should-I-go romantic dilemma, but there's just enough of Demetri Martin doing a prick act, and Fogler excels as a Rabelaisian dynamo.

And when the F-14s came out for a triumphant flyover, I looked around the room to find the moron who was applauding only to realize that it was me.

Ry Russo-Young's character study of a gal passing the worst years of her life in cool North Brooklyn, leads off with a scene that lets you know right away that you're in the good hands of a young director sensitive to the idiosyncratic details that breathe life into a movie.