Nick Pinkerton

Sillen ennobles the havoc of his life with a measure of down-and-out romance, but no moments really puncture a viewer, and the darkness is all too easily shaken off.

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.

With erratic success, Heartless tries a number of different veins-urban fairy tale with "There was no magic, it was you all along" twist, supernatural family drama-but it's on firmest footing as a macabre comedy.

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.

Apted seems too often to think like an old-hand action director and not enough like the 12-year-old boy who probably read Lewis's book. To enter Narnia, to really go giddy with the bright, laughing promise of a quest, a young viewer with no convenient magic portal of his own needs characters to bring him along. This is, I believe, the difference between a classic and a successful franchise reboot.

This self-consciously modern movie contains classical pleasures.

All Good Things patina of fictionalization has not prevented the cagey Durst Organization from threatening a lawsuit. They need not worry, though. The film succeeds only in indicting its authors.

Leyser's collation of interviews and stock footage is polished enough to effectively perpetuate the Burroughs legend.

The group is frequently drunk, but writer-director Joseph Infantolino's handling is lucid, a necessity to keep up the sense of vague dread and walking-on-eggshell egos.

It's clear that Hughes knows his Midnight Oil, but he's ignorant of the craft of economic action filmmaking. However arguably noble his film's intent to redress historical grievance, a poorly filmed shoot-out is never more than exactly that.

The production design is nice enough, but Bouchareb's four-country co-production isn't an epic-it's just long.

Penn's lachrymosity and hotheaded indignity seem cartooned against Watts's contained conviction-though more incongruous couples have certainly existed-but the film's assertion of Plame and Wilson as real people rather than characters consists mostly of draining them of anything compelling.

Vision is more immediate and immersive when dealing in the jealous attachments among sisters; when circumstance and politics tear Richardis from Hildegard, Sukowa's performance rears to towering heights of abjection.

Where "The Last Exorcism" was sustained by artfully balanced skepticism and a feel for character, Paranormal 2, putatively directed by Tod Williams, can only hold an audience with the understood promise of big jolts around the corner.

It's all slight enough to blow away, and rare enough to warrant seeing it before it does.

There is the impression, deadly to the sense of fun, that the talent here actually thought they were remaking a classic.

It’s a great work of the Discover America Seventies.

It’s basically the equivalent of a sensitively wrought read from the Young Adult shelf, and there’s naught wrong with that.

"We're all mixed bags" is the conclusion of unwieldy mixed bag Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

A homely bit of international Cold War cloak-and-dagger, starring badly dressed bureaucrats instead of chic spies, Farewell is based on a vital early-'80s espionage break involving the KGB, DST French intelligence, and the CIA.

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.

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.

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.

Devotees will perhaps find something new in this deep pool of archival footage, and newcomers will get an appropriate introduction to the beguiling charisma of a most media-savvy isolationist.

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

Doing The Most Dangerous Game is, for action directors, what covering "Satisfaction" is to bar bands; if you hit most of the notes, it'll do.

It's good enough at least that you wish it was better.