Paul Malcolm

It is, however, Tortilla Soup's cultural transposition that feels most phony. Where Lee brings depth and subtle observation to his middle-class ensemble piece, Ripoll has simply added a thin Latino glaze.

An overly mannered film drowning in the symptoms of dysfunction but unable to tap the root causes of this WASPish clan's pain except in the most oblique and cursory ways. This might be Freundlich's point, considering this family deals with its problems through avoidance.

The sharpness of Eyre's opening, however, ebbs away when he takes up the story of Rudy (Eric Schweig) and Mogie (Graham Greene), two brothers with neatly opposed responses to the reservation grind.

Sabu takes an already wildly original concept and launches it toward brilliance.

Sympathy is disturbingly cast aside so we can wallow in the pathetic. It’s a bad trip, man.

Struggles to achieve a giddy eccentricity that never fully emerges.

Chop Suey really captivates with surfaces; look away for an instant, and the spell is broken.

The movie's real charms lie in its surprisingly dark atmosphere and its almost subversive sense of humor.

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.

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.

The film lapses too often into sugary sentiment and withholds delivery on the pell-mell pyrotechnics its punchy style promises.

Hartnett's pitch-perfect sexual panic can be hilariously funny.

In the end, Macartney and screenwriter Stuart Hepburn decide that love conquers all, which may have been the way it happened but doesn't leave the film with much going on.

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

Kessler frames it all with an ironic eye (Stiller's misfit mogul holds court in cheap motels and burger joints) and with enough big-hearted tenderness to keep the humor from going sour.

The Kornbluths don't offer much visual style -- the film is as flat and sterile as its corporate environs -- but they build an excruciating tension from Kornbluth's confounding inability to lick a few stamps.

Manipulative filmmaking at its most gently persuasive.

What I mean is that to watch The Phantom Menace as a lifelong "Star Wars" fan is to engage in constant, fragile negotiations between a cherished familiarity and the shock of the new.

He (Berlanti) shoots for bland entertainment and scores.

Nemesis never feels true to itself, its energy never fully engaged. Even with Earth on the line in its climactic space battle, the film seems embarrassed that it couldn't have found a better way to work through its issues.

Unfortunately, none of the characters -- despite the film's strong cast -- ever seems worthy of the attention.

None of it rings true, and it distracts from the film's real heart, which, on its own, would have made for a strikingly original first film.

Achieves a level of hypocrisy astounding less for its brazenness than for its sheer stupidity.

A soulless affair.

What makes the film compelling is the filmmakers' ability to blend a studied (occasionally academic) dissection of cultural and sexual decadence with a potboiler plot.

Salva falls back on dull, jumbled action and an awkward subplot as he lurches toward a sequel.

Writer-director Avi Nesher and co-screenwriter Roger Berger -- upon whose real-life investigations the film is based -- deliver on the hard-boiled promise of this low-key thriller with plenty of gritty twists and turns.

Suggests that we're supposed to take this love story as something more than farce. Please. Tom Hanks fucking that volleyball would have been more convincing.