Paul Malcolm

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.

If you can't count on a British con movie to deliver at least a few moments of entertaining color, well, then what can you count on? Director Richard Janes' slight and wobbly Fakers comes close to shattering one's faith in a just and orderly universe.

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.

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.

A movie with a lot on its plate, but nothing interesting on its mind.

A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.

The film at times feels less than objective, in part due to Douglas' often breathless narration.

Though the two-hour film can go slack with excess explication, Shiri compensates with an overheated drive that forces the myopia of current events toward a broader field of vision.

Unfortunately, it's our knowledge of what's actually to come that puts much of the chill and complexity in Hopkins' rather formulaic script.

A Rumor of Angels beats its wings furiously, only to sink back into spiritualist goo.

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

So many romantic cliches it's laughable.

The convoluted plot unfolds mechanically and with little atmosphere as if sex and death in the Oval Office would provide enough gravity on its own. That it doesn't is a sign of mediocre filmmaking as well as a measure of just how cynical the times have become.

Struggles to achieve a giddy eccentricity that never fully emerges.

Bounces through the bush in search of good will and comes up with recycled charm as it reintroduces most of the original's major characters.

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.

A satirist such as Shearer should need a license to go hunting on terrain so rich with easy targets; he tries to bag them all, and it leaves the film to founder in aimlessness.

Nothing comes together after the first ten minutes.

Despite the lack of zing in Hogan's frequently self-deprecating zingers, director Simon Wincer repeatedly lets scenes dribble on until an awkward silence engulfs everyone onscreen.

Whatever the cause, everyone involved takes this blend of slick Verhoeven sleaze and Deliverance-brand musk way too seriously.

A film that plays like warmed-over "Cold Mountain."

Director Ernest -- doesn't skimp on style in a film that bluntly exploits social conscience to pump up its taste for gore.

Kazantzidis struggles for the flavor of classic romance, with a string of standards on the soundtrack to little avail.

It's finally a hilarious and cuddly flashback from the dog's point of view, to his training as a pup, that marks the moment when the film finds its sweetly moronic legs.

Written by a team of three, the script is more plagued by groupthink than is the film's future Earth.

Torem drifts into formula and his initially promising film goes unbearably soft.

More of the same -- only less so.

Despite their appeal to patriotic horror fans, the makers of An American Haunting end up doing more harm than good to domestic fright production.