Scott Foundas

Glory Road keeps its focus frustratingly narrow. There's a nugget of an interesting idea here...But first-time director James Gartner's movie is less a study of race than it is a fast break of underdog clichés and "inspirational" speeches.

It’s a familiar story of music-world success, failure and addiction, admirably but unevenly told by first-time feature director Jeff Preiss, who certainly knows the music and the milieu, but proves less adept at shaping the material into a consistently compelling narrative.

A routine memory piece about long-buried family secrets that bubble back to the surface to wreak havoc.

At its core is a most affecting portrait of two people who love each other, but may no longer be able to live as one, and it is mostly a pleasure to spend two, or three, or five hours in their company.

One of the best part 3's ever made, and Rodriguez's knack for concocting the most imaginatively deranged children's entertainments since "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" remains unassailed.

The director of 13 Going on 30, Gary Winick, was unable to infuse this material with either the sustained screwball cadences of his earlier "Tadpole" or an emotional resonance comparable to that of his superb "The Tic Code."

As both book and film, The Human Stain comes to vividest life in its extended flashbacks, which offer the most compelling exploration of Roth's perennial themes of self-loathing and reinvention.

Despite early-on guffaws, pic suffers from the same problem that has plagued nearly all of the similarly adapted “Saturday Night Live” films: It fails to sustain its initial burst of comic inspiration over the course of its feature-length running time.

An often thrilling, always compelling intro to the sport.

If the movie is finally something of a failure as a romance, it's rarely less than a triumph of soulful imagination.

It casts an increasingly hypnotic spell, thanks in no small measure to Wright -- a fearless actress (and the real-life wife of writer-director Ruscio) who brings this sometimes despicable, often heartbreaking character to life with every atom of her being.

Spottiswoode's lackluster film fails to offer any fresh perspective on these now well-known events.

Campbell is flat-out great, muting his beloved Sam Raimi shtick in favor of a genuine character turn, an act of transformation that makes you wonder why he's never been called on to interpret Elvis before.

A noteworthy piece on a difficult subject.

More often than not, Two Men Went to War resembles a feature-length episode of "Hogan's Heroes," with the brave but clumsy Brits continually managing to outfox the even more bungling Nazis.

This buoyant, optimistic fable seems to share in the late Ronald Reagan's optimism for America. It does so with the help of a gifted comic ensemble led by Tom Hanks.

The movie cries out for the bawdy, rompy air that filled Richard Lester's "Three Musketeers" movies, and what it gets instead is the same dispassionate "professionalism" that has made Hallström a steady fixture in a Hollywood that could do with an infusion of Casanova's own virile lifeblood.

Ponderously overlong and not even half as much fun as it should have been, The Equalizer still gets a lot of mileage out of Washington’s unassailable star presence.

All might have been forgiven were it not for a needlessly Shyamalanized ending that deserves to earn Wyatt at least 25 years for grand-theft cinema.

"Escobar” offers an odd mix of action movie, romantic melodrama and cautionary traveler’s tale, which works better than it should thanks to Del Toro’s fascinating performance and Di Stefano’s assured, muscular helming.

Unfunny, charmless and hopelessly ordinary.

This ridiculously entertaining sequel is that rare part deux that leaves you hankering for part trois. The action is, in a word, spectacular, but also playful, inventive and witty.

Sometimes a hard-hitting expose, sometimes a big-hearted crowdpleaser, Million Dollar Arm wants it both ways to be sure, but its instincts are mostly right on the money, as are its actors.

The result is something neither scary nor funny.

The Chorus is sham art and questionable entertainment, but at the very least it sends you whistling out of the theater.

Unfortunately, whenever Ledger isn't onscreen, Lords of Dogtown takes a spill.

Worms is one of those rare kiddie flicks that successfully adopt a child’s-eye view of the world, where nothing is more important than saving face on the playground and where parents are as distant and clueless as storybook giants.

The movie catches us up so profoundly in Frankie's self-destructive spiral (and gradual rehab), it's as though we’re seeing it all for the first time. I'd like to say that's because the story is true, only it isn't.

Even in the movie’s most ridiculous moments, Collet-Serra keeps the pacing brisk and knows how to divert our attention with a well-timed bit of comic relief.

Features a standout central performance by newcomer Boyd Holbrook (“The Host”), but suffers from predictable plotting and shallow characterizations that keep the movie from ever transcending the obvious.

The most affable and endearing of the recent wave of films about Indian immigrants assimilating in the West.

The thunderous clashes between armies of computer-generated Trojans and Mycenaeans, when they do arrive, feel decidedly un-epic, as though we were watching a child's toy-box war between plastic figurines. Which makes them perfectly in line with the rest of Petersen's artless approach.

Just around the halfway point, something unexpected happens -- the movie actually gets good. You can chalk that up to the delightful Alan Rickman.

The whole movie is curiously distant and flat, like a museum object encased in extra-thick glass.

An enjoyable if never electrifying record of his Unity Through Laughter stand-up tour.

If "Crash" grew a pair of cojones, it might look something like Larry Clark’s cheerfully defiant Wassup Rockers.

As in many of his films, Jaglom establishes a striking intimate rapport with his female subjects, and as the funny and bitter revelations pour forth, an activity that many men may view as something done strictly out of necessity takes on unforeseen narcotic, romantic and therapeutic dimensions.

The movie is monotonous, and by the time it gets to its climactic re-enactment of the Tate-LaBianca killings, it seems little more than the heir to "Survive!, The Zodiac Killer" and other unsavory 1970s horror cheapies that tried to turn a quick buck on real-life tragedy.

The humorless tone and relentlessly noisy (visually and sonically) aesthetics leave much to be desired.

Ultimately has nothing of any real depth or profundity to say, but a thousand self-consciously complex ways of saying it.

Playing something of a cipher who reinvents himself as the occasion demands, Wood is unusually well cast, but it's Hunnam, with a psychotic twinkle in his eye, who turns the movie on whenever he's onscreen.

The movie is so rigged to elicit the audience's empathy that it becomes difficult to watch; it's stifling.

The strengths of Dominion, however, have been little diminished by its long shelf life and, in fact, may have grown stronger with age.

Kormakur shows he knows his way around an action movie better than most, keeping the pace quick, the banter lively and the old-school, mostly CGI-free thrills delivering right on schedule.

Jolie has a gangly inelegance that suggests a giraffe trying to hang wallpaper -- but the entire movie is predicated on a spark between its prettier-than-thou stars that seems to have bypassed the screen and ignited in the tabloids instead.

"The Blues Brothers" it is not, but in its best moments, the movie feels like a comic exaggeration of the real hardships that a couple of average, decidedly unhip guys went through on their unlikely way to the top.

This depressingly uninspired action-comedy (based on the 1975–79 TV series) is Hollywood’s latest McMovie -- name-brand recognition as raison d’être or, if you will, creative bankruptcy on a very large scale.

The movie is basically on one level and Faris on another -- in that exclusive aerie occupied by Judy Holliday, Carole Lombard, Lucille Ball and a few other blissfully original comedy goddesses.

Has a relaxed poeticism to it; it's a sweetly naive, adolescent Hemingway fantasy with a star-making performance by Shawn Hatosy and good ones from everyone else (including Caan).

Emerges as an overproduced novelty pic that looks and feels more like a company promo reel than an engaging piece of storytelling.

This is gloriously self-aware hokum, a fantasy movie that is, above all, about our need for fantasy and escapism -- and even our need for movies like The Astronaut Farmer -- to help us combat the depression and disappointments of the everyday.

An utterly bizarre, weirdly compelling story of manimal love that stakes out its own brazen path somewhere between “The Fly” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

Structurally, it's ambitious, but emotionally the movie never quite connects, spending so much time laboring over its parallel storytelling and its cosmic connections that the characters remain at arm's length, as intangible as reflections in glass.

Though his work has been little seen outside of France, writer-director Jean-Claude Brisseau's reputation as one of the most terribles of his country's filmmaking enfants precedes him. This 2002 film offers ample evidence as to why.

What neither Howard nor his screenwriter, Ken Kaufman, seem to realize is that The Missing is that much bleaker and more unsettling when its horrors spring forth from the land itself and from the souls of wayward men.

More often, Gatsby feels like a well-rehearsed classic in which the actors say their lines ably, but with no discernible feeling behind them.

In the post-Columbine era, Koury's film has its finger on something particularly potent.

Whenever Firth and Stone are onscreen together, the movie sings; the rest of the time it’s never less than a breezy divertissement.

For those of us who find Lelouch an unbreakable habit -- the guiltiest of guilty pleasures -- watching And Now Ladies & Gentlemen comes close to sheer moviegoing bliss.

It's not a great movie, or even a particularly good one, but it's spectacular. No expense has been spared. The technical crew reads like a roll call of Oscar-night regulars.

Hidalgo can still be a wonder to behold, especially in its dynamic racing sequences, but the movie bogs down in its midsection with a needless kidnapping subplot that ultimately becomes quite tedious.

Art School Confidential reaches its dementedly brilliant peak in the company of Jim Broadbent.

Even at its low ebb, the movie effuses an infectious, mischief-making joy.

Can a movie about global warming genuinely be called lighthearted? If so, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand's Everything's Cool comes as close as one imagines possible, essaying yet more inconvenient truths about the potential future of our planet in the same buoyant, irreverent style the filmmakers brought to their last activist docu, "Blue Vinyl."

The only character who emerges as more than an ideological mouthpiece, and nearly saves the movie, is the Ambassador's resident hairstylist, who masks her faded beauty with a thick coat of eye shadow and an overteased hairdo. I kept wondering who this deeply sad, earthy actress was, making so much out of so little, until I realized it was Sharon Stone in the most naked performance she's ever given without taking her clothes off.

An act of cinephilic homage that transcends pastiche to become its own uniquely sensuous cinematic object, Strickland’s densely layered, slyly funny portrayal of the sadomasochistic affair between two lesbian entomologists tips its hats to such masters of costumed erotica as Jess Franco, Tinto Brass and Jean Rollin, without ever cheapening its strange but affecting love story.

The Berlin File keeps narrative coherence far down on a priority list that privileges expertly choreographed hand-to-hand combat, hair-raising stunt work...and such familiar genre accoutrements as secret rooms hidden behind bookshelves, shiny metallic attaché cases, and pens concealing fast-acting vials of poison.

For all its infectious, go-for-broke wackiness ATHFCMFFT never quite surpasses its opening sequence.

Draft Day affords the simple but uncommon pleasure of watching intelligent characters who are passionate about what they do trying to do the best that they can.

In his best film to date, Nick Cassavetes directs with ferocious energy, taking scenes past their logical stopping points and pushing his actors (particularly Foster, who can be as terrifying as Edward Norton in "American History X") to, but never over, the precipice of absurdity.

Less outre than "Gummo" and "Julien Donkey-Boy," Korine's most lavishly produced pic to date begins as a sweet-tempered tale of social misfits-turned-celebrity impersonators, but falls short of its ambition to say something meaningful about the obsessive nature of celebrity culture.

Allen’s visual direction and editing rhythms are particularly sharp and precise this time around, as is his work with the actors.

An exceedingly good-natured Z-grade creature feature.

He Was a Quiet Man casts its own perversely funny spell thanks in large part to Slater, whose wonderfully shifty, beaten-down performance is easily his best in the 17 years.

McG's Marshall lies at the nexus of Thornton Wilder and Norman Rockwell -- it's David Lynch without the irony -- and if he overdoes things a touch, there’s nothing disingenuous about it.

An unusually bright, inspired look at the perils of breaking into the acting business.

If the great movie musicals are the ones that transport us to some heady superreality, the only place Rent takes us to is the Nederlander Theatre.

An intoxicating blend of exotic travelogue, death-defying derring-do, and affecting profiles in courage and perseverance.

Infernally boring for much of its running time, and then, just as the pulse starts to quicken: To be continued.

An odd concoction: an English-language movie made by Dutch filmmakers working with an American cast on location in Russia and Mexico. That strangeness, combined with sharp casting and affectionate performances, is a big part of "Affair's" charm.

Big Trouble in Little China is a far more enjoyable mash-up of classic Westerns, Saturday-morning serials, and Chinese wu xia than any of the Indiana Jones movies, with Kurt Russell in full bloom as Carpenter’s de rigueur hard-drinkin’, hard-gamblin’, wise-crackin’ loner hero—a bowling-alley John Wayne.

Itself owing much to such lone-man-of-action hallmarks as “Die Hard” and “Speed,” this welcome throwback to an earlier, more generously entertaining era of summer blockbusters delivers a wide array of close-quarters combat and large-scale destruction, all grounded in an immensely appealing star turn by Channing Tatum and ace support from imperiled POTUS Jamie Foxx.

Though Lifshitz's attitude toward sex and sexuality ranks among the most progressive in contemporary movies, he doesn't belabor it; seen through his eyes, Wild Side is a love story in which love is unrestrained by matters of gender or sexual orientation or even the number of lovers.

Black Snake Moan is, at its core, a fairly straightforward variation on George Bernard Shaw -- "Pigsfeetmalion," if you will. One day, when he outgrows his terminal adolescence, Brewer might be the perfect filmmaker to tackle Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

It aims simply to relate a great and enveloping story -- one that may lead us to ponder the things that unite (rather than distance) peoples of differing belief systems, and may compel us to marvel at the many wonderful and horrible endeavors undertaken in the name of religion.

Whereas Wan (who retains a producer credit here, and makes a cameo appearance) is the sort of director who can effortlessly turn a billowing curtain or creaking floorboard into an unbearable portent of dread, Whannell rarely makes the neck hairs quiver, let alone stand at attention.

In a true-life sports tale like the recent "Invincible," you buy into all the inspirational clichés because the characters have inner lives and the movie is about something bigger; here, you keep hoping for something bad to happen to somebody just for the sake of balance.

Jacobs and his writers are notably more interested in creepy atmosphere -- and in contemplating the order of the universe -- than in jump-in-your-seat jolts. But well before day breaks, it's the movie’s plot (which would have made for an outstanding Outer Limits episode) that has come to seem stuck in an endless loop.