Nick Pinkerton

With neither the moral bite of satire nor a voluptuary surrender that really basks in shallowness, this is a vague, unsatisfying work.

Almost as much as the play itself, the rehearsals are staged; the inmates learning to act, then, are acting like inmates who are learning to act. This leads to some on-the-nose scenes in which they observe the parallels between the text and their own lives.

The film's genius is how completely it tunes in to his 
experience, delicately outlining Joey's private moments of shame, elation, despondency, and pride.

It's the kind of thing you feel you should laugh at through a phlegmy, hacking cough-and it does get laughs, if inconsistently, predictable given the circumstances of production.

John Dies at the End is a product of a parallel universe where slacker flippancy never got old-and, oh, it is terrible.

Despite the efforts of many interviewees to seem broad-minded, Nicoara has a knack for ferreting out moments that reveal actual Romanian attitudes.

The proximity of horrible headlines scarcely matters - released on any day of any calendar year, Gangster Squad would be a crime against cinematic sensibility.

Van Sant knows how to display the common touch, but the movie is a hard sell whose ending is never in doubt.

Here is one glimmer of truth in what's otherwise a deliberately unfinished fraud - another "primitive" postwar antique repurposed for boutique sale.

Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.

Greatest-generation stoicism meets gushing contemporary sentiment in Honor Flight.

The Collection doesn't have much to recommend it beyond a first-reel bloodbath rivaling "Blade" and "Death Ship."

The roaring popular success of Peter Chan's Wu xia in China - renamed Dragon for export - is no mystery: It's an adept genre exercise with rare primal depths.

In spite of Bulger's errors of tone, the movie stands as an engaging tussle with the question of what is permissible with the excuse of art. One former collaborator of Baker's, John Lydon (a/k/a Rotten), comes up with the most eloquent absolution: "I cannot question anyone with end results that perfect."

Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative.

It's all here, from the design contests to the farcical series of ribbon-cuttings, including a photo op cornerstone-laying, to the stupid Jeff Koons balloon that recurs as an incidental sight gag.

Just as the characters created by Tolstoy the artist got the advantage of Tolstoy the polemicist - at least until the end of his life - so these confoundingly good performances gradually win the movie from Wright's puerile conceit, giving us an Anna Karenina if not for the ages, than at least for an evening.

The least one should hope for from another adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons is savory, salacious trash, but nothing in Hur Jin-ho's tony new version approaches the dizzying depths of Sarah Michelle Gellar spelling out the conditions of her sex bet with Ryan Phillippe ("You can put it anywhere . . .") in 1999's "Cruel Intentions."

The title almost suggests manhood as something trifling. The film, however, confirms it's a mighty hard ideal to reach.

The cumulative impression is of figures being lightly traced in the sand only to be inevitably washed away, intentionally ephemeral and quite charming for it.

If Iron Fists is sometimes badly made, it is refreshingly badly made. It has a homemade charm that comes from a sense of having gestated in a lifelong obsession.

It is not surprising that Zemeckis's handling of spectacle would be undiminished, but he hasn't lost his touch with actors, either, coaching Washington into one of his rare performances that suggests much more than it shows.

Each segment feels more like an extended trailer for itself than a sound narrative unit. Maybe this incompletion is purposeful, but it's a problem when what's invariably elided or taken for granted is the very human connection and commiseration that is supposedly the most vital force in the universe.

Although the movie is overreliant on chintzy-looking and rather corny historical reenactments, these are counterbalanced by anecdote-rich interviews, including descendants of Huberman's first orchestra, human testament to the family tree of Israeli musicianship that he planted.

The imagery has all the solemn ravishment of Béla Tarr's similarly darkening "The Turin Horse" with none of the epochal portentousness, while Rivers's work owes more to Billy Bitzer than most gallery art contemporaries.

Boom was produced under the auspices of pal Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, which has a tendency toward broad-comic morality tales and multiplex populism that often shades into remedial-level pandering.

Hawke's taut performance - lightly parodying his own career doldrums while playing an egotistical hack who's a close cousin of John Cassavetes's self-loathing actor in Rosemary's Baby - is totally credible.

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.

On every level this production - from Robinson's callow performance to Vila's hackneyed handheld camerawork, punching beats in the stead of the actors - remains firmly on the level of the obvious.

Although it doesn't worry itself with dialectic complexities, Hotel Transylvania succeeds on the level of entertainment.

Working from a story by all-around genre specialist Jonathan Mostow, director Mark Tonderai steers the story cleanly around its queasy hairpin turns, perversely toying with one of pop cinema's most cherished clichés: the audience's inculcated desire to side with the underdog.

To the atheist, the various interpretations might seem as so many angels dancing on the head of a pin, but any admirer of good talk will be impressed by the scholasticism and pulpit-trained oratory here, as well as some choice fighting words: "Evangelicism in America is what the pharisees were to ancient Egypt."

Here is the irony: Trouble With the Curve embodies all of the values it espouses - it is an old-fashioned, proficient, amiable, and decent movie - but it has no instinct.

Anderson['s] lavish visual imagination is matched to a placeholder idea of character that's almost avant-garde in its generic stylization, dialogue buffed of personality by passing through 10,000 previous movies.

The narrative often seems at odds with the director's pictorialism, trudging when it should be striding toward the climax, isolating the performers on their marks when everything depends on taut blood-ties interconnection.

The Apparition is not a great or even good haunted-house movie, but it does have the advantage of a memorable setting.

There is a lot of silly bike-is-life philosophy, including Wilee's personal credo of "Fixed gear, steel frame, no brakes," none of which I can speak to because I don't care a tinker's damn about bikes, but I do have an abiding fondness for compact and coherent action movies, and this is surely one.

It is dreary to envisage the viewer who could become emotionally involved in The Victim, but it does have the kind of slack watchability - lugubrious driving scenes and girl-talk flashbacks pad the movie toward feature length - that make for good late-night TV.

These self-imposed limitations prevent Teddy Bear from having the breadth of a great work, but they give it the coherence of a good tale, simply told.

That even the criminal class has gone sensitive and finicky eco-conscious has some potential for comedy-or drama, as in Oliver Stone's undervalued Savages-but there's no single detail that might convince a viewer that the characters played by Dax Shepard and Bradley Cooper might ever have been compelled to steal for a living, and this alienates the crime picture from any social context or sense of actual danger, making it essentially a celebrity goof-off.

Has the parallel between the actor and the mercenary's trade ever been so overt?

Hall's committed performance validates even the maddest developments, and she slips into the period well, recalling Virginia Woolf in her lank, swan-necked bearing and tremulous suffering.

It is an affecting movie - who cannot be affected by the mountains of discarded eyeglasses and shoes and children being dumped by way of slides into mass graves? - but ultimately, The Lion of Judah is no more essential than the sum of its stock footage.

Delpy, of course, finds her father charming because he is her father, misses her mother for the same reason, and treasures her neuroses because they are her own. What viewers miss is anything inviting us to feel the same way.

Christian "Direct-to-Video" Slater lends not a shred of credibility to the role of Craig MacKenzie.

It's the latest installment in what now forms a lightly likable trilogy of films based on Jeff Kinney's Wimpy Kid books.

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

Chodorov follows the first-person tradition accordingly, entering the subject through his own early immersion in these films via his father, television presenter Stephen Chodorov.

There's material from a phone-in psychoanalysis center, the dumping grounds of London's surveillance-camera feed, and the detox tent at some massive biergarten - like much of the film, mordantly funny in a kind of pursed-lips, arched-eyebrows way.

A hideously funny tabloid noir.

She (Kazan) also wrote the screenplay, which begs interpretation as a frustrated actress's commentary on the way that even ostensibly serious writers write women - that is, for maximum convenience. Still, the direction, from Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine), is never more than workmanlike.

It is absolutely terrible.

The Dark Knight Rises is a shallow repository of ideas, but as a work of sheer sensation, it has something to recommend.

It's quibbling to draw up columns denoting what Lanthimos, a difficult but undeniable talent, does right and does wrong. He's seemingly working intuitively here, and whatever missteps he makes while feeling his way forward, he manages to pass quite near to one of the essential conundrums of being human.

Much as I want to believe in Cortés, who is clearly talented and ambitious, there is just too much in Red Lights that encourages agnosticism.

A hit in its native Sweden as "Snabba Cash," the English title is a piece of cheap irony; this is a crime thriller where no one gets away clean, and every action has its irrevocable reaction.

The exuberant editing and puke-into-the-camera edginess indicate a film more interested in boasting of hell-raising than in exorcising it.

An agent of spiritual regeneration and showman, Perry's dramaturgy is as subtle as a Bible-thump, but until a logy last act that has Levy disguised as a faux-Frenchman, his instincts are on-target here.

Ultimately, however, People Like Us is infected with the "life-affirming" pox; this means making a narrative priority of redeeming everyone before adequately explaining them.

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

A cinematic event. It's not every day, after all, that you get to see two great American traditions - guitar/bass/drums rock music and Tin Pan Alley musical theater - so thoroughly, mutually degraded.

"Love" is a quicksilver thing that can't be held in the present tense. It is somewhere between nothing and everything, and no one pinned down more of its complexities and contradictions than Maurice Pialat, hunting barehanded for slippery truths.

With Solondz's old-hat funeral deadpan and his efforts to pass off Abe's adolescent rage as elevated insight, Dark Horse is neither incisively black-comic nor particularly attuned to human behavior - proof that some directors, at least, do end up the way they started out.

With this overreaching Prometheus, Scott seems a bit like David carefully arranging his hair in imitation of O'Toole's Lawrence. He can still mimic the appearance of an epic, noble, important movie - but the appearance is all.

Add to this that it takes place in the town of Merkin, and you'll get an idea of the labored spirit of dirty-old-man humor that prevails.

It is plodding, lazily filmed, gassy with James Horner's score, and pads its runtime only by way of tolling repetition.

For all this Snow White's visual ornamentation, there's no sense of narrative priority - the filmmakers can't see the Dark Forest for the trees.

The novel and wickedly funny topic is mined for only a portion of its potential, but a little ironic astringency is certainly more unsettling than by-the-book slum drama.

Despite such ubiquitous timidity, one can pluck out a few pleasing distractions here.

It can't sustain interest in the endless unraveling of Molly's psyche, which, as handled by Sánchez, has all the interest of watching an inexplicably untreated wound fester.

While making a priority of squeezing in every usable bit of celebrity face-time, Mansome passes by potentially interesting digressions without more than a wayward glance.

All of this builds into the film's last image, Elena's family finally welcomed into Vladimir's apartment, as the cautious, controlling, abstemious bourgeoisie are overtaken by the heedlessly fertile lower orders, the temporary inheritors of a terribly weary earth.

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.

Shea's documentary is a well-arranged if rather drawn-out parade of talking heads telling Wally's story, including a trenchant and funny Morley Safer, never missing a chance to knock the art world.

The interplay between Murray and Barr is closely and carefully handled, but when the monotonous squib-popping subsides, the movie is often static and talky, lapsing into criticism-hedging qualifications and anti-everything speechifying.

"Wood" is still by far Depp and Burton's best collaboration, exhibiting the balance of tone between kitsch parody and zealous fantasy that's missing in Dark Shadows, less a resurrection than a clumsy desecration.

There are moments when the tedium loosens you to melt into the landscape, and you swear you can hear the moss on the rocks start talking.

Mother's Day is distinguished, at least, by De Mornay's porcelain-smile lampoon of castigating matriarchy.

The plot twists are about as venerable as the cast and predictably affecting when performed with such old-hand proficiency.

A Little Bit of Heaven demands miracles of its cast to keep proceedings from becoming grindingly mawkish and does not get them.

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

Richard Linklater's Bernie is the rarest of rarities: a truly unexpected film. It might be classified as a black comedy, for it deals with the murder of an 81-year-old woman in a fashion that is not exactly tragic.

A script that consistently finds fresh outlets for its running gags makes for a sufficiently rollicking pleasure cruise.

Like Rohmer, Hong is wonderful with atmospheric effects, using whirling snowfalls to place his characters' inchoate longing in relief.

The language of ground-and-pound fighting remains untranslated for those not fluent in MMA, though ample space is given to the men's discussion of their individual warrior philosophies, illustrated with quotes from Nietzsche, P.T. Barnum, and Virgil.

Arguably a good lesson for kids about preserving our environment, To the Arctic is definitely a threat to our equally endangered good taste.

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

Refraining images of the mind-controlled sleepwalker Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seem to submit Adrien as a Svengali-like figure to the kids, even as his "Iggy used to say . . ." pickups to fresh-faced scenesters don't seem to pay off.

Lockout is, not unexpectedly, a potluck of derivative references.

Taken altogether, the Pie movies offer a cohesive worldview, showing each of life's stages as the setting for fresh-yet-familiar catastrophes, relieved by a belief in sex, however ridiculous it might look, as a restorative force.

Laughton, of course, is elegant rotundity in motion, a naughty, moonfaced cherub in his drunk scene, later sweetly surprised when finding himself elevated into a man by the Gettysburg Address, a recitation of which is the film's palpitating heart.

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.

Scaling new heights of inessentiality is The Beat Hotel, which chronicles the period, roughly 1958–63.

When considering the moral implications of such gladiatorial violence, the film comes out squarely in favor, asking what's crueler: enjoying the spectacle of blood on ice or taking away a livelihood from those who can't do anything else?

Plumbing disquieting depth, Deep Blue Sea investigates the insoluble dilemma of romantic love: the expectation, contrary to experience, that we can or will find every quality that we want in a single person.

Seeking Justice is the kind of effective middle-range pulp thriller that has lately become an endangered species.

The humor doesn't only target south of the border. Like any good genre product, Casa also smuggles in rude social criticism.

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.

Good for Nothing has a nice comic sense of the brushfire eruptions of Western violence.

Silent House does superficially spiff up the haunted-house movie, but it's not built to last.

Par for the course in blowout CGI adaptations, a great deal of detail and bustle is gained at the expense of charm - for all the miracles these armies of animators can achieve, they have yet to successfully reproduce a humble artist's line.

A send-up of a communal project made of vague goals and empty postures that is ultimately indistinguishable from its target.

In every swelling musical cue, Billion Dollar Movie displays open contempt for friendship, family, love, sex, heroism, and everything lofty and beautiful that multiplex movies have reduced to cant.

Di Gregorio's performance sets the tone of dim hope and quiet forbearance, telling the story through reactions: an ever-accommodating smile that shades into a wince; sparkling, heavy-lidded eyes betrayed by vexed brows.

Though Wanderlust finally laughs off the real discomforting conclusion that it's edging toward, it's gut-busting funny when mocking their hopeless options.

The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.

Cage-ophiles will find some delectable freakouts in Blaze's transformation - or near transformation - scenes. Otherwise, the committee-penned script combines yokel-friendly haw-haw irreverence (non-sequitur cutaways to the Rider pissing in a flamethrower pattern) and sweaty monologues about "controlling the Rider" (the character is basically a mean drunk's superhero).

Not everything that is human is naturally interesting, and Schleinzer approaches his subject not as an investigator, but as though covering up a crime scene and scrubbing it of anything that might provide insight or empathy or psychological traction.

The cocky presumption of charm that isn't actually there is precisely the problem with action-comedy This Means War.

It should be mentioned that Garriott's father, Owen, was himself a Skylab astronaut, a fact of which much is made - but that only more obviously shows Man on a Mission for what it is: a puffed-up home movie.

Firmly in the unassuming indie vein, Return treads lightly and leaves little imprint.

It speaks eloquently about the disappearance of most any indigenous working-class culture.

An experience comparable to starting down the road with an empty sack then, over the course of the journey, having it weighed down steadily with rocks until you can't go on. But this backbreaking effect cannot be called an artistic failure. It is exactly what Tarr sets out to achieve.

More irksome, the clips, often improperly masked or displaying conversion issues, are rarely drawn from the best available materials. This scruffiness would be easily forgiven if there were something sufficiently "innovative" in Cousins's approach to transcend the cut-rate production value. Instead, this Story, for all its claims of rewriting, is too reliant on received film-buff wisdom.

Like any good study in couple's psychopathology, a familiar relationship is visible here, but in a parodic, mutated form.

It's this youthful denial of vulnerability that makes West's slow-sidling haunted-house movies work. He understands the kidding way that his audience approaches horror and seems to play along with that jokey imperviousness - until rudely tearing up the all-in-good-fun contract, gouging us with actual pain.

Rogosin was showing a vital culture on the brink, at the moment when it was calcifying into the form it would hold for more than three decades to come.

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.

Taken together, the whole thing is good for approximately one laugh, generated by the shabbiest CGI reptile since "Anaconda."

The entire production is single-mindedly, earnestly devoted to serving up feats of BADASS, and it succeeds in this devotion to the exclusion of everything else. Allegedly in 3-D, though I didn't notice at the time.

It's an overloaded, overwrought, profligate production inclined to hysteria and, in cumulative effect, something like being pelted with scenes until buried alive - but it helps keep it from being boring.

Where faux-empowering "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" confines sexual power play to the old rape-revenge matrix, Haywire is a real war-of-the-sexes tournament, briskly paced with a tickling sense of black humor.

The forced horseplay is entirely without ensemble chemistry, probably because the leads were hired principally as singers/musicians, as this, the directorial debut of former Law & Order: Criminal Intent star Vincent D'Onofrio, is that rarest of mongrel movies: a slasher/musical.

Neither intellectually nor viscerally engaging, what The Divide finally offers audiences is the not-terribly-edifying, stagnant experience of being locked in a basement with a pack of assholes.

No one, however, could mistake Contraband for anything but what it is: a shift-job genre movie - not a bad day's work, content to match the blocky trudge of its star rather than attempt panache.

Eldard, with eyes projecting adolescent vulnerability and a body lost to awkward midlife chub, is enough to redeem Cuesta's indie commonplaces.

Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.

Our subject retains a noticeable streak of pride in his expertise, though falters when discussing the killing of women. Hoping for his own salvation, the converted killer now claims the scales have fallen from his eyes, but his executioner's hood remains in place to the end - as does the mephitic air of timeless evil that hangs over El Sicario.

Adventures is an awesome movie mechanism, but awe comes at a cost. The Tintin character is something like a blank spot at the movie's center, most vivid (unfortunately) as a plucky, priggish motivational speaker when he coaches Haddock out of a drinking problem.

Such an abundance of "epiphanies," one after another, amount to a tactical assault on viewer sentiments. The deluge of tears is Daldry's idea of pathos, but to these eyes, it's Oscar-trolling 9/11 kitsch.

If the M:I films are immune to the tarnish on the Cruise brand, it's precisely because their spectacle requires us to be impressed by Ethan Hunt, not to like him.

More often, Mekas's focus on "names" comes off as a cloistered insensitivity to the wider world.

Rather than viewing moral chaos from the eye of a storm, director David Pomes watches his movie blow off into the storm itself.

Lackluster screenwriting and the absence of actorly communion are breezed past with monotonous banter, as is the fleetingly visible plot.

Once that point is made, this push-pull settles into a certain lulling monotony, wandering a wilderness of wires, cooling towers, and a thousand other inscrutable devices, but it is a monotony with an undertone of menace.

Like one of its yakuza bigs, Outrage commands respect but no affection.

Though the PR bit is right on, Khodorkovsky goes some way toward questioning the guilt.

It is suggested that Trungpa was in possession of yeshe chölwa-the title's "crazy wisdom" - and, as a sort of holy fool, his apparent misbehavior could be read as a manifestation of higher spiritual truths. If you're determined to see something, it's easy to find it - so those inclined to interest in Tibetan Buddhism will discover something here.

Améris's recipe here calls for everything in moderation, resulting in a movie that never threatens to offend nor, particularly, to delight, though it does offer a good view on a modestly charming actors' duet.

Arthur was made, in co-production with Sony, by Aardman Animations, the U.K. company best known for Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit shorts, and the character animation has some of the same homely charm.

Really, the movie has absolutely everything except the light touch required for unaffected charm - the mugging is savage - a single piece of memorable original music, or a production number that's celebratory rather than trampling.

Rid of Me is a bad movie, but at least it's a flailing, innocent badness.

The film is flecked with moments of interest, though this decidedly minor and not particularly cinematographic affair is clearly best suited to television.

It's impossible to imagine how anything this convoluted could have already earned a sequel, but it has.

Weixler is an alert, mobile comedienne who deserves better than this awkward pause, nervous stammer, social-anxiety comedy.

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.

This is intended as one of those kid's comeuppance stories, in which a new maturity is won through contact with salt-of-the-earth types and honest labor but is done with an almost total lack of charm.

It might be sufficient that Dog Sweat exists at all - but only if you believe intention trumps execution.

Gigandet fills every close-up with flirtatious face wrinkles, embarrassed smiles, and anything else he can think of, to the point where Jake seems downright spastic; although not terribly good at acting, Gigandet seeks to compensate for this fact by doing a lot of it.

Farina is un-self-conscious and true enough to alchemize cliché.

There's an overapplication of split-screen and woozy soundtrack cues to this end, but Lister Jones and Rosen do an appealing back-and-forth with lively dialogue, not dulled in the interest of realism.

More than the marquee names, the second bananas keep the movie bobbing along: Broderick's pharmaceutically vague hangdog act is perfect ("If you need me, I'll be living in this box"), while Peña turns out to be a fine comedian, an enthusiastically yipping dumb puppy here.

The idea is to show love in incidentals rather than big scenes, but the fragments selected do not build to any significance - this is a rote story, arbitrarily scattered into abstraction.

Emmerich's movie is sporadically enjoyable trash with better performances than it has any right to: Hogg's verminous villain leaves a trail of cold, oozing hisses.

Fight fans will still find much of interest, including some surreptitious footage of Don King unsuccessfully wooing the young brothers by "playing" Mozart on a player piano.

The rather unappealing character of Axel is indulged with every opportunity for redemption, as Spacey is indulged with every opportunity to showboat.

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.

The plot is a chaos of underdeveloped relationships and frayed loose ends, but every so often, Mann does something so right that it makes this seem less a matter of narrative disorganization than a commentary on the anarchy intrinsic to any investigation.

The result is not without beauty, though at a certain point, one begins to notice that each new muse rather resembles the previous, a uniformity that restrains the film from true symphonic swell.

If the success of epic storytelling were determined by the sheer number of unnecessary on-screen name tags, 1911 would be a masterpiece. But the small matters of characterization, audience identification, and scene-making are entirely absent here.

Based very loosely on a short story by "I Am Legend" author Richard Matheson, Real Steel in fact comes closer to road-bonding movies featuring children and hesitant papas: "Paper Moon" or "Over the Top," say.

Slater's book was evidently an ax-grinder, and the resulting film, directed with tone-deaf comic rhythm by S.J. Clarkson, shows pity and bemusement for the people raising Nigel but rarely human interest in them. More damning still, even the food looks ugly.

Puncture is proudly "Based on a True Story." As is so often the case, this means an indifference to "true" human relationships in favor of crusading self-righteousness.

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

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.

A pretend poison pen letter to Hollywood sleaze and excess, Prince of Swine is in fact Toma's application to join the club - hopefully denied.

An extraordinary example of both art-historical interpretation and CGI as passport to unknown lands, The Mill and the Cross, based on a book by Michael Francis Gibson, is a moving-image tribute to the still image, with its ability to "wrestle the senseless moment to the ground."

This crude, overlong chunk of kung-fu kitsch lays its scene in a 1920s Republican China, torn by internecine fighting and weighed down by drably expensive production design.

Old line-gargler Nolte remains an effortlessly moving presence, while Hardy and Edgerton embody their archetypes and handle the physical demands.

Aspires to nothing more or less than carrying along an audience through a string of unremarkable kills, often involving high-jumping fish.

Koechlin, a striking woman with a slim frame, horse mouth, and big turbulent eyes, has screen presence enough to kick along the frequently-stalling psychodrama up to an ending that seems like a tossing up of hands.

Scenes showing the tricky process of acclimatizing a child to new surroundings, and the patchwork of experiences that make up an education - both Asia's and Tairo's - are grounded by entirely affectless performances, not least that of little Asia Crippa.

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

Park's view - clearly inscribed in his well-structured, practically chapter-headed ("After Hours," "Payday," "Back at the Village") documentary - is that the hideous working conditions and low wages are due to man-made avarice; the workers, though, tend toward a fatalism based in religious predestination.

The most genial professed social Darwinist you could ever meet, Rice has never stopped to explain how much of his persona is a goof. Likewise, Larry Wessel's documentary portrait Iconoclast doesn't bother to synopsize its subject for the novice before setting off on its four-hour journey.

The aura of a life lived in extremis, undergirded by faith, clings to the film. Even nonbelievers in Senna's sport and church will find it difficult to visit Kapadia's cinematic shrine without emotion.

As tight as the parallel homo sapiens storylines are lax, Caesar's prison conversion to charismatic pan-ape revolutionist is near-silent filmmaking, with simple and precise images illustrating Caesar's General-like divining of personalities and his organization of a group from chaos to order. All of this is shown in absorbing, propulsive style, as Caesar broodingly bides his time like a king in disguise awaiting restoration.

One senses that The Guard is McDonagh's eulogy for the brusque, warts-and-all character of a passing generation of tough, working-class Irishmen, much as Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino" was for vintage Americanism.

Ignoring all but the most obvious tensions in the Uday-Latif symbiosis, Devil's Double is static drama, with Michael Thomas's script establishing relationships as if perfunctorily pressing buttons marked "Father-Son Dynamic" and "Forbidden Love Affair," failing to dignify these themes with individuality.

Director Jon Favreau's experiment in genre crossbreeding - a Western-sci-fi mashup pumped full of inspirational all-in-this-together spirit - is a cute, crowd-pleasing idea, though more decadent than a revitalization of either genre.

A Pacific shore whose rolling tide is rendered as a field of static is the final, remarkable image - though the water cycle film might work best on loop.

Graynor is a muddle of kooky indie girlfriend and materialistic fortune hunter; Hanks has neither threat nor pathos at his command.

Punctuating views of the bucolic countryside and sky attest to nature or God's indifference to human suffering, but such formalist touches don't overwhelm the responsive ensemble work in this resourceful, taboo-prodding sickie.

While Ironclad captures the casual cruelty and flesh-and-bone violence of the 13th century, it fails to do the same in the more intimate material set in the downtime between assaults.

Never the same movie for five minutes straight, Septien can't sit still.

Carpenter does what he's always done well here: individualizing shorthand personalities in a group under siege. This is Carpenter's first all-female ensemble, and the inmates are uniformly well-played.

Delhi Belly's rare singing-and-dancing production numbers play classical Bollywood glitz for pure kitsch, the Ram Sampath–composed soundtrack otherwise tending toward up-tempo sing-along rock, including a hit song ("DK Bose") with a subliminally dirty chorus.

It is part of the film's premise that the movies are only a pretext to serve personal needs. Given how little the murky finished product offers an outside audience, this comes across all too convincingly.

The long takes and lack of theatrical affect are presumably meant to heighten the realism by dispensing with film - fiction artifice, but in the process, everything that might lure a viewer - the seduction of style and plot or an engagement with characters - is forgotten.

As de-mythologizings go, Trollhunter has neither the wit, nor art, nor social insight to honor the legacy of George A. Romero's "Martin."

The screenplay is by Variety editor Steven Gaydos, and it combines a working knowledge of on-set dynamics with corny cinephile in-joking, frequently elevated by the fresh evidence of Hellman's craft in the tranquil, largely nocturnal atmosphere, until the closing-credits song ruins everything.

Though Submarine isn't a dull head-movie, amid the bells and whistles, Roberts seems less its star than its cameraman.

The best bits - the powerful instrument called Five Blind Boys of Mississippi, for example - more than speak for themselves.

The self-esteem booster shot provided by the sudden discovery of a prodigious talent is conveyed in a shy, self-surprised amusement by Onetto, accompanied by the slightest loosening of the joints.

The same laxity given to the performers extends, unfortunately, to the film's structuring, a lazy Susan rotation between storylines and monotonous settings.

Unrelentingly mundane, as if made with the sole purpose of draining the topic of adultery of any prurient interest.

Better than a masterpiece - whatever that is - The Tree of Life is an eruption of a movie, something to live with, think, and talk about afterward.

If Skateland is the sort of work Ritchie's future holds, it's proof that some talents are better off staying home.

Director Alan Parker (still living) nicely describes the tightrope teeter of Cardiff's hothouse imagery: "It's great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again." Or is he summing up cinema itself?

The Makioka Sisters is a Whartonian work of compassionate nostalgia tinctured with irony.

It's clear that Something Borrowed finds it easier to tell us about relationships than to show us them under way.

Katie Wech's script is a carousel of reassuringly familiar plot lines, kept smoothly revolving.

Perhaps something important was spirited away with the 20 minutes of footage shorn for this U.S. release, but the combatants are scarcely distinguishable here even before disappearing under layers of mud and guts.

Like a child bluffing at knowing a secret, St. Nick teases and frustrates.

Anyone who's seen a martial-arts picture expects a certain amount of thumb-twiddling between the big numbers, but director Andrew Lau's handling of exposition is markedly poor, distended with rubbish plotlines, flashy sadism, and overwrought jingo.

The Double Hour sustains a minimum of attention thanks to the naturally beguiling presence of long-stemmed Rappoport-but what might've a less cautious director done with the material?

The characterizations never comfortably accommodate Haroun's pat metaphor, though his stoic visual storytelling has an oblique gravity.

The finest Western you'll see this year is set in aristocratic 16th-century France, in the heat of Counter-Reformation.

The film is a burdensome two hours.

The enjoyable moments are limited to Alison Brie, funny as Sidney's publicist, and the final recasting of the movie as a backstage diva drama. As ever, the self-reflexive horror stuff is superficial, loveless, and constant-a ladled-on sauce to disguise what you're eating.

Greene may intend Kati's story as a quiet tragedy, but the native feeling of that's-just-the-way-it-is lethargy ("Only in Alabama can you be a home-school drop-out") is rather convincing.

Danhier has made a lifestyle-nostalgia oral history after the popular "Please Kill Me" model, but gets none of the tall tales and internecine grudging that made that tome so entertaining.

Ceremony is a callow movie: Winkler exhibits no comprehension of the class anxieties he addresses, and extends precocity into adulthood. That callowness is Ceremony's subject scarcely makes it funnier.

Your Highness plays like a dirty-joke blooper reel made by the cast of a junky sword-and-sorcery epic.

"Afterschool Special" stuff, but the ensemble rings quite true in their coping processes, as director David Schwimmer proves adept at tracking rogue emotions that no closing "Ordinary People" clench can satisfactorily resolve.

We need visionaries-but also solid craftsmen who seem to enjoy their work. Insidious is the product of the latter. It doesn't build a better haunted house but, when on its game, reminds us of the genre's pleasures.

His (Snyder) mash-up set pieces ("Call of Duty" meets "Castlevania," etc.) blend into so-awesome-they're-awful slo-mo monotony, and the awful sisterhood stuff in between makes you anticipate the action as though waiting for the bus.

The subjects, plainspoken and insightful, attempt to extract the objective lessons of the political past from their subjective fortunes. This struggling to untie the personal-political knot makes for compelling oral history.

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

Bereavement-miraculously as dull as its title-is neither far gone enough to be funny nor well thought-out enough to be disturbing.

The most avid fans of merciless mugging will be the sole admirers of the bookending story of Liu Xiaoye's Butcher.

Though director Jonathan Hensleigh (The Punisher) perks up when filming violence, the atmosphere throughout is past-prime, stymieing any strut.

Mendelsohn's first film since 1999's "Judy Berlin" is devoted to finding descriptive correlatives to liminal emotional states through the cast's eloquent reaction shots and the camera's depiction of homely environments - with ornate, flowing visual vocabulary.

"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'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.

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 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.

Too scattered in its arguments and piecemeal in its sources to weave together a convincing institutional condemnation.

It is draggily paced and lacks felicity of form; the 3-D is a rip-off and the songs are pap, save a snippet of Etta James singing "At Last" while Bieber's glossy fringe sways in slow-motion.

It's exactly what you thought it would be: A plagiarized, campus-set "Single White Female" pitched to teens.

Playing an ignoble protagonist, Dobrygin keeps his motives always quietly evident; later, lost in a fog painted red by an emergency flare, he's an abject vision of man in a hell of his own making.

Kekilli, more than an unofficial spokeswoman for rebellious Euro-Muslim youth, sells a simple and deterministic story through her sheer presence and precise reaction shots.

Michael's motivations remain arbitrary and inscrutable, right down to his entry into the seminary. This is brought up by a number of characters, who interpret his implausible career decision as A Sign. It is-of bad writing.

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

The grungy setting and unflattering photography are only camouflage for callow, creeping sentimentality.

The makeup department's glommed-on plague pustules are fantastic, but the concession to modern technology in a badly rendered last-act CGI demon, cut and pasted from a Diablo II screen-grab, is so eminently lame as to cure all fear of hellfire.

de Oliveira's film is a musical of a sort, its quietude occasionally lifted by work songs or chorales.

Black, looking like an unwashed clothes pile and capering in familiar "Uncle Jack" style, is a good babysitter, his cross-dressing turn in a doll's house a highlight.

Game performances and a couple of half-laughs, sure, but this is the screen comedy equivalent of the televised Yule log.

With Hadewijch, he (Dumont) endorses something like the Dardenne brothers' rugged, squalid secular humanism, offering the barrier-breaking embrace as vague alternative to Despair, Church, or Capital.

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.