Phil Hall

An astonishing mess.

A documentary which wobbles and weaves as much as often as it soars.

Even if you love all things Yiddish, there is precious little to embrace here.

Yiddish Theater: A Love Story is a slight but moving documentary focusing on the final performances given by Zypora Spaisman, the Polish-born star of New York’s Yiddish theater.

Rich with compelling, often heartbreaking stories.

Kung Fu Hustle is something you rarely encounter in theaters: a genuinely original comedy.

The film is professionally made but a thorough bore at every imaginable level.

Rarely has a film been cast with so many gifted performers who are either wrong for their roles or are given nothing to do.

A powerful film worthy of a truly extraordinary American.

What’s a muscular guy like John Cena doing in a flabby movie like this? This connect-the-dots action-adventure may appeal to undemanding ten-year-old boys but will bore everyone else.

The Stranger may not be at the same level as Citizen Kane, but what is? On its own terms, it is a fine and invigorating experience that deserves to be sought out and enjoyed.

Although not a great film by any stretch, it is a fascinating slice of a fractious period in American history.

An Inconvenient Truth is something you rarely see in movies today: a blatant intellectual fraud. Shame on all of the people involved in this travesty.

About as funny as a funeral.

This is clearly not a pleasant film to watch on many levels.

Sometimes Duck Season is amusing. More often, though, it is boring and icky.

Inert, inept epic.

The only obvious question that Oswald’s Ghost raises is: how come Mort Sahl wasn’t in the movie? (If you don’t get that joke, you need to brush up on your Kennedy conspiracy lessons.)

A good film, but it should’ve been a great one.

The production values on Dirty are so painfully amateurish that it is often hard to determine what is happening. The cinematography is murky and shaky, the editing is dull and clumsy, and the sound recording isn't exactly pristine. Not that any of this matters when you have a script where every third word is scatological.

The film is a bore.

Cantet weaves a dark, disturbing story of hedonism, casual racism and the lethal consequences of self-indulgence in his superb drama Heading South.

Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou has created so many memorable films (most recently the wuxia double-play "Hero" and "House of Flying Daggers") that one can easily excuse his new clinker Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles.

Sadly, the whole affair is little more than ennui with a pedigree.

A well-intended but hopelessly ill-focused documentary which wants to be the "That's Entertainment!" for the New York theater but seems like a hodgepodge of anecdotes, factoids and moldy memories.

This extraordinary work of cinematic art is among the most sublime, compelling and beautifully crafted films to grace the big screen.

Finally receiving a theatrical release 20 years after it was made, Philip Hartman’s “No Picnic” emerges as an entertaining if flawed relic from a very different era.

So ham-handed and relentlessly overbaked that it is easy to see why audiences initially stayed away from it. Just when and how did anyone come to see this as a classic?