Paul Malcolm

While the film is well-paced, visually it is deathly dull.

A soulless affair.

The rough, watercolor washes of its city backdrops mark the film with nostalgia while its story carries us along at an amiable, buoyant pace.

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

Temple doesn't just highlight the contemporary relevance of Coleridge's liberated words and themes, he shows us how high they still soar.

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

Slight but charming comedy.

Hyams ("End of Days," "Timecop"), who is his own cinematographer, has no idea how to shoot or compose Xiong's wired choreography.

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

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.

While Slums of Beverly Hills may sound like a downer, Jenkins tempers the family's downbeat circumstances with sympathetic humor, a quirky camera style and lo-fi retro flavor.

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

Consistently undermined by a script that swings between the duller side of quirky and facile sentiment.

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.

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.

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

Performances that are natural yet weighted with history and frequently heart-wrenching.

Both funny and furious -- on why black people are different from white people.

Its tone is as disjointed as if this were a first effort.

At times, both swans and humans appear oddly out of sync with their flat backgrounds, while the film's few musical flights of fancy never achieve visual liftoff.

With a brisk pace and satiric blend of nostalgia and violence, it's the sharpest, funniest comedy so far this year.

It's a refreshing change from the self-interest and paranoia that shape most American representations of Castro. At the same time, Bravo anticipates that such a view will drive some nuts.

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.

It's abundantly clear that Lozano and company have been re-watching "Pulp Fiction" for the last decade, pausing long enough to pick up the fluid rhythms of "Y Tu Mamá También" and "Amores Perros" while completely missing those films' social and political edges.

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.

Manipulative filmmaking at its most gently persuasive.