Nick Schager

Queen to Play does slightly buck convention by depicting intellectual development (rather than lovey-dovey triumph) as the key to reshaping identity, as well as a form of class advancement and spiritual enlightenment. Such notions, however, are drowned out by deafeningly creaky conventions of cutesy self-discovery.

It's simply one wearisome '90s crime-cinema cliché after another.

Despite its scattered frenzy, Hop-thanks to its fondness for smushing together seemingly incongruous elements and Marsden's goofy, bug-eyed mugging-is just demented enough to deliver a fleeting sugar rush.

Regrettably, both the condemnation of capitalist avarice and violence and the sanctification of nature and youthful innocence are dramatized only in simplistic black-and-white terms.

The plotting is two-dimensional, but in the tormented visage of Taloche (James Thiérrée)-a clichéd holy simpleton enlivened by irrepressible physicality-the film seethes with full-bodied fury and anguish.

Without a complex thought about narcissism, merit, or addiction, Limitless is content to be an empty, one-note, satire-free fairy tale of avarice and corporate-political ambition.

Not a single arresting image is found amid the sci-fi rubble, though unintentional laughs eventually arrive courtesy of a cornball motivational speech by Eckhart's hero.

Foreign Parts engages in sociological inquiry without narration or contextual handholding, utilizing incisive, striking aesthetics (a panorama of hanging side mirrors, worn shoes trudging through grimy puddles) to elicit potent subcultural immersion.

Imagination is in short supply, with rubbery heroes repeatedly plummeting (down chutes, primarily) or hopping and running in slow motion-images that (to state what has now become the obvious) are seldom enhanced by pedestrian IMAX 3-D effects.

Tin-eared, corny attempt at fairy-tale interpretation.

For all its genre-bending cleverness and technical dexterity, Rango's overstuffed plot fails to consistently blend its brainy pretensions with its chase-and-slapstick family-film obligations. Like Dirt's H2O supply, laughs are scarce.

John Whitesell's extraordinarily witless movie operates as a checklist for cultural and racial clichés.

Nothing but a million little pieces from prior superhero series and the "Twilight" saga.

Overflowing with super-slow motion, color filters and the clunkiest of flashbacks, The Last Lions frequently amplifies the melodrama to borderline-excessive proportions.

As with its protagonist, Unknown boasts tantalizing issues buried deep beneath its frantic exterior, but little idea how to unlock or address them.

Director Icíar Bollaín mixes Even the Rain's various storytelling modes with an obviousness that ultimately negates enlightening intellectual or emotional discovery.

The movie's overall lack of imagination is the real tragedy.

Short on genuine suspense and long on righteous anger, the film is bolstered by a sturdy performance by Darín that brings emotional nuance to an underwritten role.

A redundant if nonetheless occasionally thrilling follow-up bolstered by star Donnie Yen's precision combat skills.

Unfortunately, Mumbai Diaries addresses these weighty concerns with such delicacy that they barely make an impact, thus calling further undue attention to the creakiness of the warhorse plot.

Remember the "Seinfeld" episode in which Jerry and Elaine try to become friends with benefits, and set up unsustainable ground rules for their new arrangement? Imagine it rewritten by the Romantic Comeditron 2000 as a profanity-laced schmaltzfest, and you've got this tone-deaf dud.

Summer Wars surprisingly celebrates togetherness and bravery as much as binary-mathematics expertise, all helped along by a kick-ass synthesis of traditional hand-drawn scenes and fluid, rainbow-explosive CG artistry.

Romanycheva exudes cunning carnality, yet her wiles are as rote as the rest of this B-grade genre flick, which feigns interest in post-Communist Eastern European power dynamics but favors listlessly staged shoot-outs and heists devoid of emotional, psychological, or sociopolitical substance.

With both hostility and compassion, the damaged duo slowly come to understand themselves and their respective pain-a familiar path that's energized by subtle lead performances, a tactile sense of place and surprising insight into the way people connect as they help each other heal.

The result is a work that radiates a boozy, Bukowski-esque downward spiral, all alcohol-fueled anger and aimless sadness.

Contextualizing the prime minister's rise to power within a larger portrait of a nation under constant internal and external siege, Bhutto conveys a forceful sense of tectonic social and geopolitical shifts, as well as the courageous, heartbreaking personal sacrifices its subject made in service to both her homeland and ideals.

Despite spending nearly 15 years documenting this phenomenon, Lilien proves wholly uninterested in investigating his human subjects' habit of vigorously anthropomorphizing, and projecting their personal hopes, dreams, fears, and Daddy issues onto the striking hawk.

An overall lack of adventurousness negates any genuine sense of surprise, but credit this Indian-themed indie for spicing up a familiar and routine dish with reasonably tasty flavor.

Even with the grungy aesthetics and earnest preaching, Inhale is really nothing but crass topical exploitation, milking this social issue for every salacious drop.

It’s material primed for mushiness, yet Eastwood shrewdly marries sentimentality to both self-deprecating humor (including a late bullhorn gag) and darker, more desolate undercurrents.

Stallone yearns to investigate the loneliness of a man who can’t get over the past, an endeavor which entails unwieldy speeches (delivered by the actor in his patented “yews guys” patois) and reflective shots of the city’s skyline.

Bolstered by superb lead turns from Chris O’Dowd and Andie MacDowell, as well as a formal structure that enhances the roiling emotions propelling its characters into a downward spiral, Love After Love is an assured debut feature that announces its writer-director as a formidable new American indie voice

Provides a remarkable snapshot of the war crimes that—as the daily news reminds us—are still being perpetrated today

Neither as scary nor as funny as its premise might be, The Pod Generation instead coasts along on a placid, self-satisfied wavelength.

Wholesome to the point of being dull.

The definitive spaghetti Western parody.

Somewhere buried beneath Peters’ new-day-rising clichés and superficial celebration of electronica stars, there’s an intriguing documentary about Cuba’s transformation struggling to break free.

Melville’s 1967 masterpiece, which—through assuming the same systematic attention to detail as its iconically cool protagonist—achieves an atmosphere of mesmerizing, otherworldly beauty and grace.

They Drive by Night never coalesces into a coherent whole, but as far as sturdy ’40s Hollywood melodramas go, it’s a pretty sweet two-for-one movie deal.

Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.

Merely a paint-by-numbers condemnation of social intolerance. It's a slog of a sermon.

Though Point Blank is rife with existential malaise, it is also one of the most ferociously sexy crime movies ever made.

Paul Schrader blends lethargic self-referentiality with anemic political jabs in The Walker.

As incisive as it is thrilling, Carpenter’s film is also gorgeous. Carpenter’s imagery is a thing of propulsive beauty that both enhances suspense and expresses his characters’ ever-changing relations to one another. It’s a fleet, ferocious piece of genre craftsmanship.

A film whose each subsequent plot turn makes less sense than the last, Passenger 57 is just about the epitome of clichéd 1990s action nonsense—and as such, it’s the perfect vehicle for Wesley Snipes and his particular brand of over-the-top, don’t-tread-on-me heroism.

Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.

McPhee's latest saga neither conjures the humanistic heart of "Babe" nor addresses father-son separation issues with the sobriety of "The Water Horse." Instead, it's merely a compendium of photocopied elements, cartoonish special effects, and easy-bake happily-ever-afters.

It's the wooden plotting and cornball sentimentality--and, most unpleasant of all, the full-frontal nudity of Jamie Kennedy--that truly make this AVN-themed fairy tale, ahem, hard to swallow

Sitting through Peckinpah’s controversial classic is not unlike watching a lit fuse make its slow, inexorable way toward its combustible destination—the taut build-up is as shocking and vicious as its fiery conclusion is inevitable.

Cribbing from countless Tinseltown efforts, this music-video-cum-perfume-ad is awash in excessively melodramatic flashbacks, car chases and references to the domestic illegal-immigration debate.

A true masterpiece of unintentional comedy...fantastically surreal.

An illuminating history lesson about the Kentucky metropolis's artistic vision and philharmonic orchestra.

Conspiracies are everywhere in Poolman, although the greatest mystery might be how anyone involved was attracted to this tidal wave of dire kookiness.

Stacy Keach engages in highway warfare in Road Games, an Australian thriller that drums up suspense from its assured plotting and direction, and generates humor from its star’s charismatic lead performance...Taut all the way through to its well-staged finale, it’s a superior genre import—and one that also features, in Quid’s silent travel partner Boswell, the finest big-screen performance ever by a dingo.

Robert Altman’s most overlooked gem.

Nightmare’s skill wasn’t that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its ’70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states.

Supremely awful.

Despite its often-overwhelming nonsensicality, there’s ultimately something irresistibly fiendish about Silent Hill, which not only condemns holier-than-thou religious zealots, but also—if I understand its gruesome finale—seems to be firmly on the side of the Devil.

The film strikes a poignant chord with its chilling portrayal of a state-sponsored euthanasia program that utilizes movie-watching as a narcotic designed to help the sick and elderly die peacefully.

Whereas the film is a marvel to look at, it’s unfortunately not much in the song or story department, as Danny Elfman’s musical numbers are—save for the opening’s boisterous “This Is Halloween”—generally banal and unmemorable, and the plot, despite only having to fill out a paltry 76 minutes, ultimately as emaciated and insubstantial as its leading bags of bones.

Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.

Ray’s plaintive artistry lends this weepy noir a melancholic beauty.

Their sense of superiority toward the petty SUV drivers and rude midlife-crisisers who frequent the lot is matched by introspective considerations of traditional social contracts.

If it’s all more than a bit silly, not to mention derivative, Krull manages to cast a fantastical spell courtesy of Peter Yates’ direction.

Not particularly complicated, and sometimes as confused as it is concise, 1972’s Joe Kidd is nonetheless a lean, reasonably satisfying slice of Clint Eastwood outlaw badassery.

Snyder attaches no larger significance to his arresting visuals. He’s only intent on eliciting “Whoa, dude!” reactions, of which there are fewer and fewer once it becomes clear that there’s nothing sustaining the centerpiece razzle-dazzle sequences except awful dialogue and no-dimensional characters.

To hell with equivocation or beating around the bush: Terrence Malick's 1978 Days of Heaven is the greatest film ever made. And let the word film be emphasized, since Malick's sophomore masterpiece earns this exalted designation from its position as a work of pure cinema. [22 Oct. 2007]

There's only one thing worse than a leaden moral fable that tackles issues of forgiveness with sledgehammer contrivances, and that's one that attempts to mask its manipulative corniness with an air of trumped-up gravity.

From a bevy of cheesy jolt scares (alarm clock! barking dog!) to the embarrassing sight of Zellweger and Ian McShane treating this Orphan-style B-movie silliness with grave seriousness, the film proves to be one hokey-horror riot.

Revisionist mythmaking of the most bland variety, the Jerry Bruckheimer produced King Arthur purports to tell the true tale of the ancient British hero and his valiant Knights of the Round Table by stripping away the magic, mystery, and majesty of the fable and replacing it with grim n' grimy realism.

An underrated entry in the horror subgenre, generating consistent unease through long, ominous pans—up and down staircases, through hallways—that assume the perspective of its searching-for-peace specter.

It's Gruber's own remembrances (and a wealth of accompanying archival photos and film footage) that best mark her life as a case study in pioneering feminist courage, ambition and individualism.

Subscribing to the belief that the eyes are the windows to the soul, Tarkovsky locates Stalker’s spiritual center in his protagonists’ weathered countenances.

A late-act tragedy drenched in bloodlust slow-mo epitomizes the film's poseur bleakness, with its treatise on individual and institutional amorality sabotaged by broad-stroke characterizations and a knotty narrative too reliant on twin modern-day horror tropes: preposterous decision-making and lousy cell phone service.

Shallow to its core and as propulsive as a runaway locomotive, it's the most blatantly summer movie-ish of the Mission Impossibles. And also, surprisingly, the most viscerally entertaining.

Remains a mesmerizing time-capsule portrait of ’80s-era hopes and fears about computers.

A dog in wolf's clothing, Lionsgate's drab, anthropomorphic animal saga does little more than reconfirm the preeminence of Pixar.

Entertainingly goofy.

Schlesinger’s portrait of his two characters’ scheme, which comes to involve transactions with KGB handler Alex (David Suchet) and unravels courtesy of Andrew’s burgeoning heroin habit, is consistently suspenseful, thanks to swift pacing and a script that mires itself in its protagonists’ confusion and paranoia.

It may eventually champion love as the guiding light amidst so much homicidal darkness, but Meyer’s film—happy ending be damned—resonates most deeply when confronting the ugly, inescapable reality that man’s murderous past is likely also his future.

This behind-the-curtain portrait winds up revealing only the most superficial-and glaringly obvious-of truths.

The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.

The film retains a measure of tempered hope, born not simply from the father's command-cum-wish to his slumbering offspring ("Don't become a miserable apple-polisher like me, boys"), but also from a final act of youthful compassion that binds Ozu's intensely human characters in glass-half-full solidarity.

It's a sloppy, tossed-off collection of parodic gags of vampire flicks and gratuitous pop-cultural references (oh, there will be pointless Lady Gaga gags!) that are below bottom-of-the-barrel.

The titular “stuff” is shown to be a combination of courage, determination, and recklessness, but, as Kaufman’s stirring epic reminds us, an equally important motivation for greatness is the fear of being merely second best.

Errol Flynn’s wicked, wicked charm helps keep this high seas adventure afloat.

Exuding nobility, modesty, and down-home wit, Henry Fonda assumes the iconic top hat as America’s 16th president in Young Mr. Lincoln. Far from a traditional decades-spanning biopic, John Ford’s drama instead provides a snapshot of a moment in Lincoln’s life.

Yet Newell, he of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," is ill-suited to steward such sword-and-sandals adventure, his direction--while slightly eschewing modern genre practitioners’ penchant for slicing-and-dicing skirmishes into visual incoherence--is too pedestrian and partial to clumsy slow-mo effects to truly energize the story.

Even if historical erroneousness intermittently undermines the film’s outlandish attempts at lionization, They Died with Their Boots On endures as one of the finest Flynn-de Havilland collaborations, providing a grand stage for the duo’s playful, poignant rapport.

The ubiquitously involved star’s charisma can’t completely overshadow a sluggish plot... Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir.

Were it not for the participation of Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley, it would be an insufferable groaner rather than merely an inoffensive one.

By acknowledging and publicizing its subjects’ writing, the film proves a stirring tribute to those who fight; in their stories, it offers a potent reminder that war is a hell suffered both externally and—more permanently—internally.

Hickey's overarching arguments about war, diplomacy, and American intelligence aren't just muddled, but altogether nonexistent, leaving his comedically challenged film Iraqi-desert-level barren.

Asylum was written by Robert Bloch, the author of the original novel Psycho, and produced by the U.K.’s Amicus Productions, which was responsible for a series of horror anthologies during the ’60s and ’70s. Asylum remains, by far, their finest offering, in part because of its pitch-perfect gothic mood, and in part because its stories present varied perspectives on the depths of obsessive madness.

There may be no American movie more patriotic than Yankee Doodle Dandy, a jingoistic biopic of famed Broadway star George M. Cohan that transcends its innumerable genre clichés through the sheer willpower of its star.

Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout, whether in the writer-director's traditionally structured setup-punchline scenes or his strange non sequiturs

Of all the questions raised by The Amityville Horror, the most vexing one revolves around the external range of a haunted house’s supernatural powers. Because while it makes sense for a demonic abode to slam windows shut on small children’s fingers, let loose with swarms of buzzing flies, and turn bearded wood-chopping fathers into homicidal paterfamilias, it’s not quite as clear why such a structure would have the ability to sabotage the brakes of a sedan driving on the highway, or to cause a woman’s briefcase, sitting on her car’s passenger seat, to magically burst into flames.

The director’s grim commitment to shocking his audience is fanatical to the point of being enthralling, as he dramatizes one bit of extreme, rancid cruelty after another for little reason other than to turn viewers’ stomachs. It’s far from a noble goal, but there’s no denying its effectiveness.

Despite the subtitles, it's basically a slice of formulaic Hollywood-style mythmaking, writ large and woefully empty.

Notwithstanding its cop-out upbeat ending, Red Rock West solidified the expert neo-noir credentials of John Dahl (The Last Seduction). A taut, nasty bit of crime-genre business, Dahl’s tale (co-written with brother Rick) is in most respects archetypal.

Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.

With quiet, seething intensity, Kinski turns Dracula into a simultaneously sinister and sympathetic creature—one whose viciousness curdles the blood, even as his fanged ferocity comes across as merely a wounded-animal reaction to his eternal loneliness.