Scott Foundas

Playful and tense, loaded with wry cine-references and propelled by an ebullient energy...It seems more obvious than ever how much Rivette has influenced a subsequent generation of filmmakers—Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry—and expanded our sense of the possible.

A Red Dawn for the Tea Party era, Olympus Has Fallen is pretty ridiculously entertaining—or at least entertainingly ridiculous—for long stretches, dulled only by the realization that there are many parts of the country where this will play as less than total farce.

Even by the standards of the genre, the characters behave with astonishing stupidity, while Makinov tries repeatedly to mine suspense from slowly creeping up on his actors with the camera.

Spring Breakers seems to be holding a funhouse mirror up to the face of youth-driven pop culture, leaving us uncertain whether to laugh, recoil in horror, or marvel at its strange beauty. All I knew is I couldn't wait to see it a second time.

Oz tilts towards the mawkish, as the sham wizard learns the value of selflessness and an incessant Danny Elfman score tugs so shamelessly at your tear ducts that it would make the Tin Man surrender his heart on the spot.

It’s a classic espionage plot shot through with a typically heady mix of art and literary references: Klee and Velázquez, Bach and Haydn, Bernanos and Musil.

The haunting final image suggests how quickly such stories can be lost...which makes Beyond the Hills, above all else, a powerful and necessary act of reclamation.

Lipsky is clearly reaching for something grand and cosmic here, but the results are mostly just confounding.

Perverse, funny, and ultimately profound.

By the standards of today's bombastic "event" movies, this is a refreshingly modest endeavor—one in which the main event is the skillful holding of our attention, all the way from "Once upon a time" to "Happily ever after."

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.

The movie's sense of immutable desire resonates well after the lights have come up.

Landes's tone is never salacious or exploitative, nor for that matter pandering or sentimental. This is a sui generis work—warm, sporadically funny, deeply human, and altogether beguiling.

The rotting corpses, projectile insect vomit, and creepy geezers in black arrive pretty much on cue, as does the great Cicely Tyson as the obligatory old blind woman who "sees" more than most people with two good eyes. It's her upper bridge, though, that's truly the scariest thing in the whole movie.

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

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

The longer Swing Vote hangs around, the more engaging it becomes. It's twice as smart as you have any reason to expect but still only half as smart as you wish it were.

Here is one of the best American actors (Chris Cooper) in one of his best parts.

There's a kind of rawness on the screen that most movies never approach.

It's a feature-length teaser for a never-to-be sci-fi franchise.

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.

This represents at least as much of an artistic setback for Smith as "Chasing Amy" and "Dogma" were advances.

Never quite realizes its potential to evoke the real horror of the Internet -- Yet, Malone has given the film a distinctive atmosphere and occasional flashes of his perverse sense of humor.

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.

For most of its running time, it's an enjoyably unpretentious celebration of the guilty pleasure we can take from a stupid-as-all-get-out car chase or from watching things blow up real good. Then, in its final half hour, Wright and Pegg ratchet up the absurdity tenfold and enter the realm of the sublime.

On a storytelling level, Robots is in dire need of an upgrade.

Here is a Western without irony or innovation, without any of the overt efforts toward “revisionism” we’ve come to expect even from Eastwood -- a movie that waxes elegiac about the end of the West, but remains sure that cowboys and cattle and ramshackle frontier towns will live on in perpetuity at the cinema.

An almost ridiculously ebullient Bollywood-meets-Hollywood concoction--and one of the rare "feel-good" movies that actually makes you feel good, as opposed to merely jerked around.