Paul Malcolm

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.

The editing looks like it was done in a blender, and the images of death and grief are so genre-primal that the Pangs hardly bother with dialogue.

The film stinks from start to finish, like a wet burlap sack of gloom.

Jalil penetrates a carnivalesque subculture of self-reinvention and obsession, emotional need and materialist greed, with a camera that is, by turns, cruel, kind and incisive.

Director Olli Saarela, who co-wrote the script with Antti Tuuri, offers up a trembling romanticism that gradually hardens -- like Eero's consciousness -- with exposure to the horrors of war.

Storaro's gorgeous cinematography imbues every frame with an enthralling subjectivity.

Ultimately, Jolie's efforts to establish a character are dashed against the film's increasingly inane dialogue.

Extraordinarily witty (nothing new for this director) while coming off as a taunt to anyone who'd dare to follow in his wake.

Writer-director Fabián Bielinsky's devilish Nine Queens serves as further evidence that Argentina's film industry is at the forefront of a resurgent Latin American cinema.

A rosy, hearthside fantasy of acceptance that's so assured in its writing and direction, it's nearly impossible not to believe.

Shooting Fish wants to hang with the hip crowd--witness the vibrant colors, the flashy camera work and the stream of catchy pop songs--but its heart just isn't wild enough.

Lamely engineered and thoroughly exploited tragedy.

A deft exercise in atmospheric horror and insanity. Which is why it's unfortunate that, ultimately, Anderson steps back from the brink.

Far too complex and provoking.

A half-baked classic.

If you're above the target age of 5, Thomas may coax you into a naplike stupor.

How Miike gets us from amiable point A to debilitating point B is a remarkable act of manipulation and control that may leave you feeling sucker-punched, even brutalized, but you won't forget the experience anytime soon.

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.

The film gives good action (amid more tired spy business) but comes riddled with contradictions.

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.

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

Mechanical revenge fantasy that skirts every serious issue it raises along a slick, cynical trajectory.

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

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

A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.

It's a nice try, but the film remains a pinhead's idea of softcore fetish material.

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.

A remarkably moving and disturbing film about the possibility of belonging and the genealogy of violence.

While the film throws a solid pop punch, you could still swear you've seen it all before.

It's cheap thrills all the way, served up with the kind of situational purity that only Carpenter seems to care for these days. It's that simple and that much fun.

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

Kusturica's always masterful orchestration of chaos, coincidence and caricature really pays off as a sweet, soulful celebration of old friends, new loves and the mad scramble of life at the fringe.

A meta-horror film that hilariously parodies the genre's clichés with smarts to spare. It's also the scariest fucking movie Craven has made since the first "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

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.

Rollerball pushes the Hollywood action movie to stratospheric new levels of incoherence; pounding at the senses, it's mashed story, character, time and space into a chunky hash.

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

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 betrayal of all things Buffy, not to mention a complete waste of Gellar’s strengths as a young actress. Even the most hardcore of her fans would do well to give it a miss.

Wears its lack of originality in a crowded slasher marketplace like a red badge of desperation.

Proves too sincere to exploit its subjects and too honest to manipulate its audience.

Captivating coming-of-age story.

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

Opens the floodgates of cartoonish villainy and pitiful sentiment.

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.

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

If only they had the courage of their crassness.

It's supposed to be post-feminist breezy but ends up as tedious as the chatter of parrots raised on Oprah.

Climaxes in a flood of revelations that, like so much of the film, take us where we least expect to go.

It's all such a spectacular show.

Racing flick results in a wreck as horrifying as the film itself.

A better title for this flick might have been Astigmatism: Nothing ever comes into focus long enough ... to deliver even the faintest sense of fright.

Shrek's first 20 minutes are so devilishly funny that letting go of pure belief doesn't seem like such a bad thing.

For all its simplicity, however, the film is entertaining, even uplifting, with Lopez giving a stellar, confectionary performance.

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.

Comes off as a desperate attempt to breathe life into dull proceedings.

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.

So many romantic cliches it's laughable.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Struggles to achieve a giddy eccentricity that never fully emerges.

A tight blend of self-awareness, humor and fear.

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

Screams straight-to-video.

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.

The freak show of druggy squalor and the wired sexuality of hardcore kink and flaccid cocks float by solely for our carnivalesque amusement.

Director Jay Chandrasekhar (Super Troopers, Club Dread) does a fine job with the car jumps. Just try to wake up whenever you hear "Yee-haw."

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

Callahan's feature debut is a one-way ticket to Palookaville.

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.

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

The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.

Even when the film does strike some genuinely heart-tugging notes, they’re invariably shattered by such ham-fisted lines as “You really are blind.” At times, it’s enough to make you wish you were deaf.

It's amazing that anyone still thinks this kind of shit can fly.

The film's failings are only highlighted by the fact that while, occasionally, we're granted real glimpses of interior lives, largely emanating from de Leon, Davao and Picache, those lives are never given the chance to take shape.

Baumbach weds his verbal gifts to a fresh visual acuity that brings layers of rich detail to a portrait of a family coping, poorly, with self-inflicted change.

So what in this high-concept lame-a-thon makes screenwriter Bradley Allenstein think he can diss the Clippers?

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.

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.

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

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.

For the most part it delivers the goods.

Despite the film's aspirations to soul healing, its uplift remains mechanical, like an escalator's.

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

Highly reductive and deathly dull slasher flick.

Nothing comes together after the first ten minutes.

The film seems to argue that Rock's real-life manipulation of the race card is little more than exploitation, rather than the essence of his incendiary comic critique.

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.

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.

The Jackass boys achieve true genius, however, when they take their penance public. Before stunned, inert onlookers, these skate-punk Situationists transform official zones of work and leisure -- office parks, golf courses, bowling alleys -- into arenas of dangerous stupidity to remind us that, in the end, we’re all just meat.

It's all part of a larger calculus that the filmmakers hope will translate into a thinking person's thriller. If only they themselves knew how to figure it.

The first REALLY great mythic film of the summer has arrived.

The film's larger, surprisingly mature emotional rhythms are strong enough to pull it through.

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.

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

It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.

Ironically, for all the paranoia, York's Defiler and his henchman, an always game Udo Kier, are an oasis of wit in an otherwise parched, self-serious script.

Shadow Magic is rich with detail.

A hodgepodge of psychosexual horror gimmicks, from the virginal psychic artist to the impotent psychotic actor.

A pretty miserable time at the movies.

He (Berlanti) shoots for bland entertainment and scores.

These live performances and classic music videos drive home the point that part of the Giants' longevity flows from the fact that they can't be explained, only experienced.

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

A brutish affair replete with sliced bodies, a diced storyline and enough clanky dialogue to wake the dead.

Thai director Kaos (a.k.a. Wych Kaosayananda), making his inauspicious Hollywood debut, still can't breathe any life into it. You'll just want to get back to your Game Boy.

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

It almost appears like a little thought went into this otherwise grim exercise in soullessness.

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

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

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).

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

A cheap "Star Wars" rip-off with swords instead of light sabers.

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

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.

Why Crop Circles now, if not to ride the hype of M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" to some quick cash? The movie’s rambling, slapdash, repetitious nature suggests as much.

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.

Within a few minutes of the film's frenetic opening set piece, however, it's obvious that director David Kellogg and screenwriters Kerry Ehrin and Zak Penn have no idea how to capture the spirit of the source material.

Railsback and Snodgrass struggle against caricature in their own fine performances.

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

A mind-numbing exercise in high body counts and big tits.

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.

Baldwin's perfectly impacted performance as a tough-love provider (the actor gets some of the best lines in the movie).

"It's no longer funny, but he refuses to give up the joke." That just about sums it up except for the film's shopworn plot -- and its wretchedly cheap production design.

If, as it appears, Rosenthal is competing with the knife-wielding Myers for the title of biggest hack, he wins by unanimous decision.

(Lawrence)'s not just unfunny, he's coarsely anti-funny. The film just lurches from one dull skit to the next without bite or much of a point.

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

It does, however, fairly bubble with speed-freak energy and a dry, laddish wit that keeps the jokes coming.

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.

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

It's an amusing scenario, until even Miike seems to lose his taste for the oddly sweet concoction and allows the film to drift aimlessly to a rainbow-hued finale.

What at first seems emotionally charged, ultimately comes off as contrived.

Remarkable exploration of sexuality and the Jewish faith.

Murphy slogs his way through this dismally dull sci-fi comedy.

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.

An ostensible action-comedy that can't seem to get either side of its genre equation right.

While there are scenes of wrenching emotional openness and spontaneous charm -- largely due to the irresistible allure and impeccable craft of its ensemble cast -- the degree of calculation apparent in its plot and images undermines its efforts to move and seduce.

It boasts none of the studio's high-gloss animation. That said, Recess is not without its charms.

Working from a script by David S. Goyer ("Dark City") that lacks any sense of humor or character, Snipes seems unsure if he should vamp it up or play it straight, while Dorff just plain sucks.

Seems stuck in reverse.