Paul Malcolm

Malkovich and Dafoe play off each other with a devilish hamminess.

The film's plainness, and the understated force of van der Groen and Petersen's performances, sharpen its complexity of feeling until all mawkishness is cut away.

Spins a warm and fuzzy tale about love and happiness in the cutthroat art business.

Captivating coming-of-age story.

A pure font of high-flying kung fu artistry, the likes of which has since transformed the way Hollywood's good guys and bad kick the crap out of one another.

It's Garrison and Burnam who hold the film's center, however, with a natural magnetism. Newcomers both, they take the same clean approach to their roles that their characters bring to their tags.

Whether on the high seas or in the Holy Land, the film exhibits a colorful, bouncy sense of the epic (the whale's Jaws-inspired arrival even elicits a few chills), while its saving grace is a consistent sense of its own absurdity.

At 60 minutes, the film never stops feeling like a guided tour, while we're wishing it was a sleepover.

Thraves escapes formula by shaping the film around low-key incidents instead of speeches or overt lessons. There are plenty of side streets here.

The film's jarring shifts in tone ultimately serve well the complexity of the film's narrative entanglements; they feel more honest than similar Hollywood offerings.

The old hands still seem to be having a good time, so why the hell shouldnít we?

Bowman and production designer Wolf Kroeger do an excellent job of evoking a twice-baked England, while writers Gregg Chabot, Kevin Peterka and Matt Greenberg keep the script devilishly pitched just shy of preposterous (it's McConaughey who stumbles beyond).

While Stiller and De Niro can play hilariously off one another, the film -- despite its happy ending -- feels unresolved.

It's whiz-bang, techno fun, with a touch of Latino flavor.

Slight but charming comedy.

Maquiling offers us the unexpected pleasures of taking the side streets in a film about how even minor-key adventures can make a life stuck in low gear something to look back on.

There’s a lot to like in writer-director Ray Yeung’s low-key romantic comedy, once you get past its overly enunciated identity issues, which were, according to Yeung, the film’s raison d’être.

Grisman's warm, loving home movie in the guise of a documentary.

The stadiums and performance halls of Pyongyang become staging grounds for massive, highly choreographed political pageants that make the Nuremberg rallies look like dinner theater. You’ve never seen anything quite like these dazzling displays of groupthink.

What feels genuine in the film -- mother-son bonds, the wedding party -- is surrounded by overdetermined and formulaic scenes lifted from other films.

It would all be too obviously feel-good if Ducastel and Martineau weren't also tuned in to the liberating drift of the open highway and a sharp native humor that adds needed flesh and blood to their walking metaphors.

Director Chang builds some chilling suspense into the cop's grim investigative routine -- as well as generous helpings of blood: It runs, splashes and sprays as the amputations continue.

A hyperreal, visually layered period style that finds film noir shadows creeping in at the edges of a blue-sky, get-along-to-go-along America.

Fate plays both prankster and deliverer in Firode's never-too-clever scheme, buoyed, like his often-winsome images, by romantic fancy.

Softley starts out a little awkwardly, as he tries to capture turn-of-the-century flux by opening several London scenes from disorienting, too-obvious camera positions.

A conventional if appealing tear-jerker, The Way Home would like to grandmother us all.

For the most part it delivers the goods.

Between spy training and sensitivity training, the two (Murphy/Wilson) prove nicely matched comic foils.