Scott Tobias

None of it sticks, but with the door left open for a third Men In Black movie, the one advantage of forgetting everything is not knowing exactly what's coming two summers from now.

Make no mistake: Poltergeist is a Spielberg film, no matter what the credits say. His stylistic fingerprints are all over the movie, never more so than in the opening third, which turns a suburban haunting into an occasion for Spielbergian movie magic before the ghosts get down to business.

Essentially the same heartwarming goo about three generations of men quarreling and bonding, with Kirk just as feisty as ever.

Again coaxing the worst imaginable performances out of his actors (see also: Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in "Saw"), Wan casts charisma-free unknown Ryan Kwanten as a young married man whose small-town past catches up to him.

Save for the diminished allure of drunk, naked hotties, there's nothing of worth in The Real Cancun.

Taken together, these stories are a symphony of inconsequentiality, drained of tension and purpose until all that remains is a vague sense of collective ennui.

Broken Wings doesn't stray far from the common melodrama in its setup and resolutions, but Bergman's uncommon sensitivity makes the film feel specific, intimate, and utterly plausible at every turn.

Hooper doesn’t entirely escape the rote business of semi-regular mutilations and impalings, but The Funhouse succeeds in updating a monster from the Universal pantheon and setting it loose in the type of traveling death trap that’s been haunting small towns forever.

Though it's tempting to praise Verete for having the courage to show the worst of both worlds, only a propagandist could get away with being so reductive; an artist should be held to a higher standard.

The big names don't do needy as well as "Big Love's" Ginnifer Goodwin.

Whenever Rappeneau stays close to Adjani, the film briefly soars on her giddy self-absorption--particularly in the first hour, when it hasn't been sullied by misfortune. But ultimately, the big stars are just window dressing for an expensive nothing.

Avatar is a weak patchwork of his other films: the leaden voiceover from "Terminator 2" here, the military/civilian conflict from "Aliens" there, even a Jack-and-Rose-style forbidden love story cued to adult-contempo soundtrack.

Hallström's approach to the material is tasteful and restrained to a fault.

The scenes between Cage and Caine are by far the film's most affecting. The two men don't seem to share the same gene pool, which only helps their dynamic.

At best, it's a light, boisterous little confection, but hasn't Hugh Grant already starred in this film a few times?

Amid all this metafictional hoopla lies the real heart of the movie, a tentative romance between Ferrell and a tax-withholding baker played with adorable prickliness by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Few of the scenes in The Perfect Game feel authentic, but the ones in Monterrey are especially lacking in flavor.

For all its pervasive irritations and lack of discipline, succeeds in using below-the-belt tactics to get its message across, especially for those unschooled in the rarified world of oenophilia.

Concerns feelings that can't be expressed, relationships that can't flower, and connections that are impossible to bridge.

Poking fun at uptight British civility has long been a monocle-shattering comedic staple, and Mrs. Henderson Presents gets by for a while on its genial naughtiness.

Rulfo's simple strategy of sticking close to his subjects and allowing them to wax philosophical about their lives and labors pays off.

After all the actorly fireworks, Street Kings concludes that the LAPD is an institution where even the well-intentioned can't work clean. Okay. What else?

Knockaround Guys proceeds with a gravity that's constantly tripped up by its characters' stupidity.

Kitano infects the lyrical, meditative beauty of classical Japanese cinema with the jarring, low-down savagery of Western genre pictures. What emerges is more than the sum of its parts, an original and profound statement on mortality, how rich human life can be, and how quickly it can be taken away.

Honest and moving.

A peculiar and destabilizing tone that's far from the standard Hollywood oater, but entirely fitting for two larger-than-life characters fulfilling their roles in history.

Miles away from "Farewell, My Concubine" in form and function, with thinly defined characters and unreflective attitudes about urban values vs. country values, the film would be impossible to identify as Chen's if his name weren't in the opening credits.

To a degree, the dynamic between Brosnan and Cooper resembles Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy's relationship from "In The Company Of Men."

As her character resorts to increasingly cruel and devious pranks, Hudson only seems funnier and more endearing.

Operation Filmmaker takes a thrilling left turn from its original conceit, and Davenport does a nice job rolling with the punches.

What's most striking about Eleven Minutes is the sheer amount of effort that goes into a show of that magnitude, quite apart from work involved in designing and executing a coherent, commercially viable line.

Mostly it's just a good yarn, with attractive picture-postcard vistas and an agreeable strain of light humor.

No doubt the list of talent involved in this remake sounded great, but the project hasn't been thought through as anything more than an arch exercise in style. And even in that trifling end, it fails utterly.

As it stands, Brook’s adaptation is an encroaching nightmare of innocence lost, following Golding’s thesis about what happens when civilization breaks down and man’s true nature is revealed.

For all its surface dazzle, The Prestige shares with this year's earlier "The Illusionist" a certain core hollowness. Maybe that's a natural consequence of even the best magic shows: You can't help but feel duped.

I Stand Alone, Gaspar Noé's raw, corrosive, and relentlessly provocative response—part companion piece, part critique—to Taxi Driver unfolds with rare force and clarity of vision, rarer still for a director's first feature.

Too much of The Limits Of Control feels canned and airless, so stifled by Jarmusch's obsessions that it loses all sense of surprise.

Watching Rocky Balboa go through the usual paces does trigger a few helpless waves of nostalgia, especially once Bill Conti's famed score kicks in and Stallone sticks it to a few sides of beef. But audiences needn't be responsible for helping an over-the-hill actor through his midlife crisis.

The main problem with Breach is that the story is told through O'Neill, who's far less compelling, in part because Phillippe doesn't have the chops to draw out his own set of contradictions. By committing himself to O'Neill's perspective, Ray misses the opportunity to uncover more information about Hanssen's relationship with his wife and church, his aberrant sexuality, and his mysterious connection to the Russians.

Given an irresistible premise, Nathanson doesn't trust his material enough to follow through without excessive mugging, but his sense of the absurd leads to amusing digressions along the way.

The connection between Hu and Liu seems more scripted than real, founded on musty allegorical clichés about innocent country folk and corrupt city slickers.

The Dardennes sustain that tension through a masterful closing drive that resembles the final third of "In The Bedroom," only without the same dreadful inevitability.

This is a loud, ugly, foul comedy whose shortcomings extends far into the supporting cast.

A clever, exceedingly wonky procedural about a undercover cop (Dragos Bucur) who quietly refuses to do what he's told.

So along with being fake punk-rock, Stick It is also a fake protest movie. That leaves the only traces of genuineness to Bridges, who plays the coach with a fatherly patience that earns him a paycheck, but not the better film he deserves.

Conceptually bold and rapturously beautiful Gerry, a minimalist landscape film that's unlike anything on the American independent scene.

While the film remains intelligent and transporting, a gorgeous travelogue into another time and place, it nonetheless feels like it's going through the motions, applying period gloss to a story that needs to be more tactile.

Severance still seems a few rewrites away from living up to its potential, but it's remarkable how much just a modicum of wit can spice up the standard backwoods slice-and-dice. Scaring people with a horror film is easy; entertaining them takes a little skill.

Hideaway bottles up stormy feelings of grief, guilt, and desire so tightly that register only in a few sharp, impetuous bursts. The rest of the time, it's dull and inscrutable-a film of almost vaporous subtlety.

It might as well be retitled "Waiting For Antonio," since Sabato's appearances bookend miles of convoluted nonsense. For the prurient, that's probably too much to endure.

If the end justifies the means, it would be hard to deny that the legacy of Alberto Fujimori, the disgraced former President of Peru, is largely triumphant.

Ristovski wants the plight of a bullied moppet to serve as a sweeping metaphor for Macedonian struggle, but his miserablist excesses have the effect of converting realism into a graphic cartoon.

Starts in one direction, then performs a cruel narrative fake-out, sandwiching together two different movies that are scarcely related.

Mayron tries for a junior-league "All About Eve," but that backfires horribly, not least because her diabolical Eve (Perabo) is more charismatic and imaginative than her heroine.

The problem with Tim Robbins' dreadful turn as a South African "anti-terrorist" official in Catch A Fire--and it was also a problem with his sniveling Bill Gates impersonation in "Antitrust"--is that he can't hide his distaste for his own character.

Under Fresnadillo's assured direction, 28 Weeks Later blurs the line between genre entertainment and a photojournalist's shots of the next urban catastrophe.

Brazenly ridiculous.

While not quite a red herring, the corporate stuff serves as a prelude to a long-winded and mostly embarrassing treatise on alternative lifestyles and filial responsibility.

Though hampered at times by Rock's limitations as an actor and a director, I Think I Love My Wife stays faithful to the spirit of Rohmer's original, grappling honestly with the uncertainties of settling down and the temptations that lurk outside even the most stable marriages.

Carries a potent statement about the superficialities of appearance, and how they're more meaningful to people than anyone likes to acknowledge. But when the players themselves are conceived this superficially, LaBute winds up invalidating his own point.

Resnais and Ayckbourn care primarily about observing these characters' private and public faces, who they are and who they present themselves as. To that end, they've achieved a mood of enchanting intimacy.

With Douglas, the film's shambling charms slowly catch hold, thanks mainly to his personal magnetism.

A tasteless, witless, mindlessly perfunctory bloodbath that has the discourtesy to take itself seriously. Pitting aliens against predators may be the height of frivolity, but God forbid anyone have fun with it.

Moves forward on the conviction of its performances. Brody, in particular, shows uncommon sensitivity as a politically committed and temperamental photographer who responds to MacDowell's half-crazed resolution with heartbreaking zeal.

Zips along on smooth formula plotting and some energetic performances, but its farcical elements have the tepid rhythm of a bad situation comedy, with silly misunderstandings and embarrassing moments that could have easily been avoided.

Serves as a fascinating window into an era of radical dissent that now seems centuries past.

Virtually every Super Technirama frame of Luchino Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard could be described as "painterly" in its ornate details and exquisitely balanced color compositions. (Review of DVD Release)

Never does [Perkins] project the courage, frailty, or plainspoken depth suggested by Frank’s writing, and the leaden earnestness of George’s direction does Perkins and the film no favors.

Though woefully oblique and underdeveloped, writer-director Tim McCann's Revolution #9 attempts the difficult task of burrowing into the fractured mind of a modern man who loses his grip on reality.

In reviving the beloved Disney property, Robinson attempts to resuscitate the fast-motion shots and sub-Three Stooges physical comedy of classic Herbie, but the new model seems distantly related to the innocent, peppy little car of old.

Emerges as an improbably hopeful tribute to the human spirit.

Take away the death and revelations that follow, and Catch And Release has the makings of a weekly half-hour network comedy--call it "Four's Company."

Soul Kitchen plays everything big and loud-and sometimes too doggedly conventional-but it's the rare example of a crowd-pleaser made without cynicism or calculation.

When Porn Theatre stays in the darkness, its minute observations about grindhouse culture are hypnotic in their accumulating detail.

No comic trope, however musty or studded with whiskers, is off limits, including bad puns, physical shtick, pie fights, goofy names and accents, song-and-dance numbers, Jewish Indians, or just having a bunch of cowpokes farting around the campfire. Some of the jokes drop like lead, but the film's anarchic spirit carries a lot of excitement, because Brooks' anything-goes philosophy means that no comedic possibilities go unconsidered.

While Fraser’s presence doesn’t necessarily elevate Furry Vengeance into something better than the dumb, lowbrow timewaster it aspires to be, Fraser does make it a little easier to digest.

Fiennes is the perfect John Le Carré hero: reserved and sophisticated, possessing the driest of wits, yet deceptively passionate in a way that people never really anticipate from him.

If it doesn't look ridiculous now, try watching it again in a decade or three. Then it'll be funny for all the wrong reasons.

Perhaps the oddest thing about The In-Laws is that it's aimed at an audience old enough to remember not only the original, but also how much funnier it seemed at the time.

It's hard to imagine a more ill-advised choice of source material.

Save for the thrilling opening sequence, there's not much to remember about the film beyond Staunton (Vera Drake), who masks her bottomless malevolence behind a pasted-on patrician smile.

On balance, more dignity is lost than gained.

It's a righteously nasty piece of work, and a rare example of a movie that traffics in B-movie grime without a trace of "Grindhouse"-style self-consciousness.

Aas grim as The Road gets, Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness.

If the independent film world were littered with alleged disasters like The Brown Bunny, the scene would be far richer for it.

Beyond the "hell hath no fury" angle that overlays the story, When Will I Be Loved amounts to nothing more than another repository for kinky Tobackisms: Seen one (and the one to see remains 1978's Fingers), seen them all.

The film's outsized ambitions are deceptive: Everything here is less than meets the eye.

Though never unpleasant, thanks largely to Cámara and Peña's warmly convincing performances, Torremolinos 73 only really takes off when it deals with the filmmaking process.

The "What The Bleep Do We Know?" crowd may well receive the film's wisdom like communion, but the rest of us are free to gag when Salva tries to jam it down our throats.

The strange thing about Raising Helen is that nothing out of the ordinary ever really happens.

American Graffiti is an unabashed nostalgia piece, but the poignancy of Lucas holding onto this memory only becomes clear at the end. For these boys, nothing would ever be the same again.

Escapism of the worst sort, a manipulative exercise in style that preys on the passivity of its characters and its audience. In the end, Go offers little more than the sour, impermanent rush of a pixie stick.

If nothing else, the film puts the lie to the notion that an abortion could ever be frivolous or lightly considered. On that point, everyone in Lake Of Fire agrees, whether they acknowledge the other side or not.

Wild Strawberries remains a surprisingly optimistic and affirmative movie about getting old: It’s only natural for people at the end of their lives to reflect on the roads taken or not taken. And there’s peace on the other side.

Sports movies have a long, troubled history of well-meaning white paternalism, with poor black athletes finding success through white charity. But The Blind Side, based on Michael Lewis’ non-fiction book, finds a new low.

Debrauwer's characterization is as sharp and incisive as a butter knife.

It’s the perfect first-date movie: It’s flirty and romantic and a little bit saucy, but it leaves viewers with just a peck on the cheek at the end of the night.

If constructing a thriller could be likened to building a house, then Wes Craven's Red Eye is a perfect piece of architecture: It's clean-lined and soundly structured, without a foot of wasted space or any materials left unused.

The film does coast along smoothly to the inevitable, which is a credit to the always-game Reese Witherspoon, who's courteous enough to pretend she doesn't know what's coming, then make it look like a huge surprise.

The result is unfit for humankind.

Though glazed in chilly surfaces -- the Kubrickian spaces, Cliff Martinez's gorgeous ambient score, the elliptical editing rhythms of Soderbergh's recent work, particularly "The Limey" -- the film contains a surprising depth of feeling within its egg-shaped head.

This psychologically dense, genuinely erotic vampire thriller lacks fangs, but it has plenty of bite.

Though bookended by extraordinarily powerful scenes that play off a potent religious metaphor, the middle section sinks into a morass of ill-defined relationships and uneven performances, which may be blamed in part on culture clash.

Despite an alluring set-up and heartfelt performances from the leads, nothing ultimately coheres, and mood trumps logic on every occasion.

There’s dignity and folly to The Tramp in City Lights, and everything in between.

Singleton abandons the underground racing subculture that gave the first film its allure, relying instead on lazy thriller plotting that's only a bag of donuts and a freeze-frame away from the average TV cop show.

The biggest problem with Crystal Skull is one that's lately plagued Spielberg in otherwise excellent films like "Munich" and "War Of The Worlds": He fails to stick the landing. And for an entertainment with nothing much on its mind, that hurts.

Late August, Early September is a resolutely minor work, a quiet departure from the brash showiness of Irma Vep, but it's crafted with the sure hand of a major director.

Only in the final minutes, when Kári overreaches for ironic effect, does the film plumb too far into the darkness.

The film sprawls across two decades and 127 minutes, but there isn't a memorable image in it.

Savagely funny...taken as a rancid, festering slice of Americana, it seems more potent than ever.

Making an assured transition to Hollywood after his Hungarian cult sensation "Kontroll," director Nimród Antal gets his business done with an efficiency that recalls "Red Eye," another thriller that clocks in under 90 minutes. But efficiency isn't everything, and Antal sacrifices too much in order to sustain tension.

Faris has mostly logged time in dire vehicles like The House Bunny, which are dumb-dumb to her smart-dumb.

It's the definition of a film meant to be admired more than loved, but Desplechin's fierce intelligence and uncompromising sense of character come through, as does some of the sharp wit and stylistic flourishes left over from his last film, 2004's "Kings And Queen."

Sure, the unlikely ascendance of 30-year-old Vince Papale from working-class suds-pumper to Philadelphia Eagles benchwarmer is a victory for the little guy, but it's still more of a personal victory, and that's what makes it touching.

The movie and the movie-within-a-movie share a chemistry even more awkward than that of their flat-footed leads.

La Soga isn't without redeeming qualities: Superfluous flashbacks aside, Crook keeps the action moving at a fast clip, cutting fluidly from the streets of Santiago to its criminal pipeline in Washington Heights, and he gets a sinister turn from Calderon, a veteran character actor who plays Rafa with a soulful swagger.

Nolan reverses the emphasis -- no surprise from the director of a plot-driven film like "Memento" -- but achieves the same end, bringing Hollywood noir under the harsh glare of permanent daylight.

Kaufman strikes just the right balance between playfulness and sincerity, leaping freely from one absurd situation to another before pulling back on the reins.

While In America doesn't convince as an immigrants-in-the-U.S. story, it resonates powerfully as a portrait of grief and reconciliation.

Provides one of the rare glimpses of the upper class to come out of recent Iranian cinema--the last one in memory was 1996's exquisite, Ibsen-esque melodrama "Leila"--and director Jafar Panahi (The Circle) captures it vividly through his hero's wounded obsession.

Chantal Akerman’s radical 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles turns the term “realism” on its face, exploring the contours of a woman’s life through the mundane routines that never make it into movies.

With their fawning documentary Year Of The Yao, directors James D. Stern and Adam Del Deo unreflectively buy into the spin on charismatic 7'6" basketball center Yao Ming, but on a certain level, who can blame them?

John Waters covered the same territory in his underrated 1998 comedy "Pecker," but without Waters' colorful mix of outrageousness and affection, Posner can't stir up the rancor to score even a few glancing blows at an easy target.

Though Eat Pray Love never loses the sour whiff of unexamined first-world privilege, its heroine does at least immerse herself in different cultures rather than expecting them to adapt to her.

A hopelessly stolid and distant evocation of Bob Rafelson's "Five Easy Pieces."

In the end, it feels like a life aestheticized, not examined.

A dense, challenging work by any measure, Japón snakes toward a justly celebrated final shot that's technically astonishing and immensely powerful, cementing the arrival of a promising new talent.

The angrier the film gets, the less funny it becomes, squelched by heavy-handed polemics, a maddeningly repetitive musical score, and a running time that drags its overriding joke into the ground.

Wong's visions of a New York café, a Memphis bar, and a Vegas casino--not to mention the swaths of beautiful country in the Southwest--have that enveloping quality that make his films so persistently seductive. The natives should feel flattered.

It's a funny, sweet-natured humanist character piece.

Appreciating what’s special about The Stepfather involves accepting—or at least tolerating—some clunky moments.

Basically a prim, desexualized "Carrie," told from the prom date's perspective and featuring Peter Coyote in the Piper Laurie role.

Margot has a kitchen-sink realism that's genuinely unsettling, like a John Cassavetes movie populated by the hyper-articulate. If nothing else, Baumbach deserves credit for refusing to cozy up to the audience.

It's now a straight-up crime and retribution flick, capped off by the dumbest wolf-feeding coda a 13-year-old ever dreamed up.

With its fluidly changeable surfaces, animation may be the ideal medium for confronting the public's growing uncertainty with reality, but Perfect Blue is a missed opportunity, too shallow and exploitative to be taken seriously.

Confusing gender issues like the ones dredged up in Ex-Girlfriend call to mind another Reitman dud, the pregnant-Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy "Junior," and the sophistication level has only slightly improved since then.

It thoroughly eviscerates the MPAA and makes a solid case that the culture has paid the price for its censorious practices. His (Dick's) attacks are the equivalent of shooting ducks in a barrel, but these ducks had it coming.

To its enormous credit, doesn't cast the conflict as cut-and-dried exploitation. It presents something altogether more complex--too complex, unfortunately, for an 85-minute documentary to elucidate perfectly.

If anything, The Transporter isn't ludicrous enough; only one scene (a hand-to-hand showdown in the middle of an oil slick) reaches the inspired, delirious comic heights of the best Hong Kong movies.

All the bright colors Cassavetes splashes on the canvas don't make Alpha Dog art.

At once bitterly funny and devastating, Lost In La Mancha sides with Gilliam in form and spirit, piecing together the train wreck with snaky humor and interludes that cleverly mimic his Monty Python collage animations.

While there's an element of left-wing fantasy in Lemmon's conversion from unquestioning patriot to newly awakened skeptic of U.S. covert activities, Lemmon's emotional directness, driven by a need simply to find answers, makes that transition entirely plausible. Within this decent citizen lies the conscience of a nation.

The Fly movies could be a metaphor for sequels: Always go for the real article, not the freakishly mutated copy one telepod over.

Much of the fun of Baghead is that it's unclassifiable, by turns a movie-movie lark, an Eric Rohmer-like relationship comedy, and a surprisingly effective "Friday The 13th" kids-in-the-woods slasher film.

Though Law and Kidman spend much of the movie apart, Minghella and ace editor Walter Murch arrange their interweaving subplots like a running dialogue between two lovers, each compelled to survive on the thin hope that they'll be reunited.

Offers a taming-of-the-shrew scenario so relentlessly bland and old-fashioned it makes "Dear John," the Sparks adaptation from two months ago, look like "Last Tango In Paris."

Class Of 1984 anticipated Lean On Me, The Substitute, and a spate of other high-school thrillers and docudramas that advocated a fight-fire-with-fire approach to teen violence, but it’s vastly more entertaining.

The film has one thing going for it--it's certainly never boring.

More of the same, only more. Yet here, “more” means a more needlessly convoluted plot, a more cartoonish parade of ethnic stereotypes, and more leaden political metaphor than viewers can digest.

The film satisfies in much the same way Allen's movie-a-year comedies used to satisfy.

Emerges as something rare, an issue movie that's so honest and keenly observed that it doesn't feel like one. It earns its thesis statement through minute details and a unique grasp of a commonplace problem.

The emotions at play in Bella are no doubt heartfelt--and must have resonated with a few hundred people, anyway--but they're so cut-and-dried that the mawkish script virtually writes itself.

Millennium Mambo is a resolutely minor work, so enveloped in ennui that it never gets past the surface of things. But those surfaces are remarkable.

Better equipped to deal with the workings of nitro-injection systems than human emotions, director Rob Cohen's film grows less assured the more time it spends with its characters, particularly through its dull middle section. It does earn points for trying, however, and while Walker is a cipher, Diesel has enough personality for both of them.

When the material gets really bad, as it does in the dismal Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Grant's pinched facial expressions become an inadvertent commentary on the movie he's making, as if he plainly realizes that his one-liners are tanking.

Some of the strongest scenes are candid front-stoop sessions in which the kids swap gossip and float some hilariously pre-sexual theories on romance.

Ultimately, the film could stand to be more inconsequential, because whenever anything happens to move the story along, it immediately loses its laid-back Southern charm.

Some of the jokes are about skating, others are about whatever random thing happened to pop into Ferrell's head with the cameras rolling, and just about all of it is funny.

There's no subtext to The Jane Austen Book Club, just a skim across the books' surface that winds up re-shelving a great author into the self-help section.

The always-interesting Jane, a volatile and unpredictable character actor, fits the bill.

The beauty of The Class is that it puts the lie to the one-teacher-can-make-a-difference myth propagated by so many other films.

In the spirit of the original, Linklater closes with one of the best endings of its kind since George Romero's "Martin."

Perhaps due to the talent of everyone involved, Dreamcatcher moves with an oddly exhilarating awfulness that sets it apart from more run-of-the-mill horror films, which lack the imagination and budget to be so thoroughly misconceived.

In trying to recapture the spirit of classic '30s screwball comedies, the film too often mistakes manic energy for wit, and it ends on a note of gloppy sentimentality that wouldn't have held water in Old Hollywood.

There's no depth, surprises, or wit to the screenplay, which seems motivated by the sole desire to generate the vilest, most disgusting people and images imaginable.

For the first hour or more, The Hurt Locker boldly forsakes any conventional narrative hook beyond the ongoing tensions between these men and the terrifying grind of defusing bombs day after day.

Though dumber than a box of rocks, Saw forges ahead with the kind of conviction and energy that will keep bad-cinema junkies sitting bolt upright.

There's ample opportunity here for a sharp consumerist satire, like a dryer cousin to the candy-colored pop-culture send-up “Josie And The Pussycats,” but Hartley misses his own joke.

When a director of Scorsese's caliber is working at the top of his game, it's a reminder of why we go to the movies in the first place.

Gives the impression of spontaneity while being meticulously planned. Most importantly, Steers and Culkin know that the best way to evoke sympathy is never to beg for it; by the end, their achievement seems hard-won.

Carlos is mostly tense and thrilling, revealing the poisonous side of global citizenship.

It takes guts to remake what many believe to be Hitchcock's first masterpiece, but what Ondaatje's done with The Lodger could not be mistaken for ambition.

For most of the way, the film is perceptive about the hot-and-cold volatility of wounded relationships, when couples are struggling to communicate yet familiar enough to exploit each other's weaknesses.

The film resembles one of those Saturday Night Live sketches that has one joke and keeps going, and going, and going.

Just as Hearts Of Darkness is as compelling an adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel as Apocalypse Now, Blank's Burden Of Dreams follows a maniacal Werner Herzog as he one-ups his blinkered hero in Fitzcarraldo, the tall-tale biography of a rubber magnate who builds an opera house in the middle of the Amazon jungle.

Though some of the heated exchanges in Forgiving Dr. Mengele seem awkward and staged, they put Kor at the center of a riveting debate over how best to come to terms with past horrors, and the potential (and limits) of putting them to rest.

Zahedi isn't afraid to put himself out there, even when his thoughts and actions are profoundly unflattering; his self-effacement makes the film a reflection on narcissism and misogyny rather than an exercise in both.

The film's moralistic streak leaves a sour taste, especially because its battle of the sexes is so wildly off-balance.

McQueen speeding across the German countryside and leaping over the first of two barbed-wire fences leading into Switzerland may be the film's most iconic and enduring image. Dubious or not, it's a triumph of sorts that a tale that ends in war crimes could have such a rousing conclusion.

There are strong ideas at play in Noé's undeniably audacious and technically stunning second feature, which goes as far as any film can in revealing the breakdown of order and the deterioration of the rational mind.

As loose and playful as major studio movies get.

Finds connections deeply embedded in a soccer culture fueled by the country's thieving cocaine trade.

There's potential for a lot more excitement in Splinter, but Wilkins seems content just to bring it across the finish line.

Sags into a dreary, humorless family melodrama.

Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke got his start in short films and documentaries, and his first feature reveals a gift for concision: It doesn't overexert itself trying to come to big conclusions about these characters, and even the comedic scenes settle for gentle quirks over broad guffaws.

Few filmmakers could produce so grand a spectacle, but Zhang used to be good for more than just eye candy.

Contains all the elements of a satisfying teen genre picture, but they've been compromised out of existence.

Leaves all the real risks to the young warriors at Ia Drang and collects easy dividends on their bravery. In the end, it honors them by paying tribute to itself.

Thornton is one of America's finest actors, but after this, "Bad News Bears," and "School For Scoundrels," his run of loveably irascible authority-figure roles should probably come to a close. He's kicked around one child too many.

The first of two sequels shot in immediate succession, Dead Man's Chest bears the unenviable burden of racking the pins for both movies, which leaves it with precious few opportunities to have a little fun of its own.

Schumacher choose to start the movie in outer space? The opening shot epitomizes everything wrong with Phone Booth: Given the chance to stage human drama on an intimate, suffocating scale, Schumacher begins in the endless expanse of the void, tricked out with gratuitous CGI effects.

Had it been easier to comprehend at the beginning, there's no telling how bad Premonition might have been.

Belman doesn’t look into the bigger problems of James’ team jet-setting across the country during the school year, or the spectacle allowed to build up around him. He cares most about what happens on the court, which is diverting and fun as far as it goes, but not close to the whole story.

Brilliant in flashes, thinned out as a whole, the film seems ideal for the DVD revolution, where the greatest hits can be compiled at the touch of a remote.

Towne never strains for effect, justifiably confident that his polished staging and wry, sneaky wit will be enough to give resonance to Pre's life.

Kedma makes for a clumsy, lugubrious history lesson.

Impossible to swallow as truth, this Rambo treatment is equally hard to enjoy as escapism.

Save for two spectacularly impressionistic sequences, Taymor brings little of that imagination to Frida, a turgid and conventional biopic that skips through the major incidents in Kahlo's life without giving them any special resonance, or even much visual panache.

Provides enough happy endings to make the audience forget that romance and Christmas miracles don't always work out.

Dramatically leaps through time, covering months or sometimes years in the span of a single cut. The effect is jarring and exhilarating, but it also bucks the common idea that relationships deepen over time.

The clipped tough-guy language, Juan Ruiz Anchía's rich chiaroscuro lighting, the layers of "short cons" and larger deceptions—they're all elements of a genre whose time had passed, but that Mamet was able to revive with effortless aplomb.

Less a movie than a political act, Fast Food Nation aims to disseminate its counter-propaganda to the widest possible audience, which is the only plausible reason why the book has been shoehorned into a narrative instead of a documentary.

For a comedian who thrives on spontaneity, the heart of Reno's act seems conspicuously canned.

Perhaps because the present-day characters are such insufferable twits -- especially the brooding Penn, who's given to tossing around stanzas by Yeats and Dylan Thomas -- the modern story feels like a device, a flimsy entrée into events that would be better accessed directly.

Short of counting the cards out loud, these geniuses seem to do everything they can to get caught.

A deadly earnest, relentlessly solemn affair.

Cobbled together from borrowed parts, Jean-Claude Brisseau's Secret Things makes a fearsome Frankenstein monster out of other movies, yet the influences are so thoroughly digested that they come out seeming wholly original.

There are indications scattered throughout Coco Before Chanel of a major designer quietly and persistently honing her craft, but most of the film could exist without the Chanel name and still smell like the same perfume.

Valhalla Rising has the misfortune of starting with its best chapter and steadily growing more ponderous from there, dragged down by a religious theme that's as thin as the filmmaking is relentlessly spare. Yet it's a beautiful head trip, too.

There are times when Nanny McPhee seems designed to drive all but the most sugar-crazed spazzes out of the theater: Colors that should never go together clash like a tempest, the camera whisks around in manic curlicues, and a musical score makes certain that nothing magical goes underemphasized.

Saw III may be the best of the trilogy; hopefully, it'll encourage its makers to wrap the franchise on a relatively high note.

Caetano's blunt, deterministic ending underlines the point too neatly, but in dignifying an outcast whose life is treated as anonymous and disposable, he puts a human face on a national tragedy.

In a genre where killers love to play head games, it's a clever idea (Cohen's?) to have this one remain mute, but that leaves Cuthbert to carry much of the psychological load, and there's no substance to her character, apart from the suggestion that she's being punished for her vanity.

Even as The Quiet American loses focus and urgency, Caine's performance keeps the doomed spirit of Greene's hero intact.

Though it isn't explained until the closing minutes, the title Acts Of Worship says a lot about Rodriguez's terminal weakness for the overwrought and faux-poetic.

It’s not always easy to sort out the legitimately inspired touches from the merely campy ones, but the film has a deranged, go-for-broke spirit that makes such distinctions irrelevant.

The Rwandan genocide was one of the most shameful marks on Bill Clinton's presidency, but for all the film's powerful images, George stops short of the forceful political statement that Rusesabagina's story demands.

Rain lays so much portent on every scene that it becomes ungenerous and morally forbidding, as if each bummed cigarette or leisurely cocktail will lead the family that much closer to oblivion. In this case, the punishment is far greater than the crime.

There’s so much distance between where Blacula started and where Scream Blacula Scream ends up that the sequel quickly exhausts its thin purpose.

Doesn't have the content to match the form, never cohering into anything more substantial than a glum navel-gazer about a little girl lost, unable to find a permanent home (literally or figuratively) on either side of the Atlantic.

Rarely have Bruckheimer and Scott been so upfront about insulting people's intelligence.

Once the torture finally commences, the film attempts to float a political point about the Third World taking back First World health-care privileges, but the chief torturers' sadistic humanitarianism is never seriously considered.

Though shorn of 20 minutes for its U.S. debut, the film's wry comic portrait of the Japanese Occupation during WWII hasn't lost any of its incendiary brilliance, both as a political provocation and as a brusquely humane take on the horrors and absurdity of war.

With juicy supporting roles for Chiwetel Ejiofor and Willem Dafoe as Washington's fellow officers, the film works best when the characters are just sitting back and shooting the breeze, which is what they're doing much of the time. Here, puzzling out a robbery is more fun than stopping it.

Cacoyannis errs on the side of genteel respectability, sacrificing emotion and verve at the altar of good taste.

Which is more interesting: Vampires fighting over the potential long-term blowback of their Alaskan buffet, or a couple of exes bonding under duress? Seems like an easy decision, but 30 Days Of Night makes the wrong choice.

The frequent outbursts of comedy help alleviate a tone that's appropriately muted and sad, and Jenkins should be credited for refusing to tack smiley-faces onto a tough, possibly lose-lose situation.

Afterschool wears its many influences on its sleeve, but it’s very much a movie of the moment. The passing of time and the evolution of technology may give it an expiration date, but more likely, Campos’ film stands to be an essential document of what it was like to be a young person in the late ’00s.

There's hardly a shot in the film where Chase doesn't try to swallow the camera with one broad expression or another, and Vacation follows in turn, laboring too hard to drive every punchline home.

In its perfect fusion of popular entertainment and high art, Rear Window ranks among Hitchcock's best.

The weaknesses in Sayles' story and his occasional bouts with didacticism are far outweighed by the film's exceptional intimacy and humanity.

The Predator series needed a shot of vitality, not another workmanlike go-around. SSDP: Same shit, different planet.

The results are reasonably clever and impeccably executed, but one of these days, Burger is going to have to pull more from his hat than just the rabbit.

These images and reports have stirred consciences without quite stirring decisive action, and an earnest indie doc like this one seems like another cry in the wilderness.

Includes a few half-hearted ironies about how people are really serving dogs, not the other way around, but even those gags are cribbed from a retired Seinfeld routine.

In spite of a subtle performance by Ulrich Tukur in the eponymous role, Gallenberger’s film feels labored and emotionally disengaged, an autumn-hued history lesson that’s as studiously reserved as its steel-spined subject.

Posed somewhere between a fairy tale and harsh reality, the film pulls off a daring feat by turning Blancan into an almost abstract monster as a way of getting into the deeply unhealthy situation that created him.

The sturdy premise delivers little in the way of actual laughs.

Epstein and Friedman's doc-like approach also results in a certain dramatic stasis; Howl is a film aimed more for the head than the gut.

Divided into a triptych of images sprawled across a Cinemascope frame, AKA rarely uses the extra screens for information that couldn't be conveyed well enough in one.

The film is both traditional and modern: austere in its engagement with history, and insistent in its showy action beats.

George Washington is a mood piece first, and its triumph is in bottling up the intense feeling of early adolescence, and watching how tragedy transforms it.

Sputtering along on Mac's sleepy improvisations, Mr. 3000 volleys between the dumb, frat-house wackiness of "Major League" and the "Wonder Bat" schmaltz of "The Natural" and "Field Of Dreams," chasing the gags with a lame baseball-as-life message about playing for the right reasons.

3-Iron gains its hypnotic power by observing these characters through a slight remove. With total command of his effects, Kim transforms an already peculiar romance into something as otherworldly as a ghost story.

Not since Lecter has a role been this well suited to Hopkins, whose intelligence and pristine formality as an actor often make him seem alien--or worse, an incorrigible ham.

Though it scores a reasonable share of laughs, Delirious might have been better off if it weren't a comedy at all.

It's the product of a great dreamer and aesthete, rather than an authentic emotional experience--a gorgeous, crystalline bauble that really catches the light.

The problems of coming out, intolerance, safe sex, and censorship are ticked off like a checklist in Better Than Chocolate, a well-meaning Canadian slice-of-life comedy that remains firmly planted in the creative rut currently plaguing gay cinema.

For the soldiers, it's about living to see the next day and living with the things they see, and Gunner Palace honors their perspective like no other Iraq documentary has to date.

From the opening-credits sequence (by Saul Bass), Seconds mangles and distends the windows of perception until viewers get immersed in his sweat-soaked nightmare.

What started out as a fleet one-off swashbuckler with novel supernatural elements has become loaded and graceless, with each new entry barreling across the goal line like William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Flaws and all, Dark Blue has a combustible energy that's usually anathema to Hollywood, reopening an old wound that has festered too quietly for more than a decade.

It goes down smoothly, thanks in large part to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's grounded lead performance and Marc Webb's slick direction, but it seems like every other scene coughs up a dispiriting cliché.

Kutcher and Peet are a low-wattage pair, with little of the verbal riffing that counts as seduction in most romantic comedies, but they have real chemistry together, and A Lot Like Love happily indulges their silly, juvenile one-upmanship.

Cul-de-sac functions better as an affectionate goof on Waiting For Godot, enhanced by an unforgettable setting that naturally severs the trio from contact with the outside world.

Seasoned with amusing bits of fantasy, like a pizza topping that briefly curls into a smile, Friday Night captures the city at its most inviting, alive with the feeling that wonderful things can happen to ordinary people.

The Man Who Knew Too Much finds the director firmly back in his wheelhouse, extracting all the wit and suspense he can from a pulpy exercise in abduction and conspiracy.

Fighting doesn’t break new ground so much as animate B-movie types, but New York movies this gritty and flavorful don't come along very often.

The few isolated funny moments, particularly a witty visual gag involving a pop-up tent with legs, provide only a short break from the screen-flooding onslaught of CGI creatures and screaming extras.

It's all superficially enjoyable, right up to the point where the big picture starts coming into focus and it's not worth looking anymore.

A banal message movie.

Ozon's disappointing new film Time To Leave is his "The Flower Of My Secret," a Douglas Sirk-inspired weepie about a terminal cancer victim making amends, but it's a little too sentimental and square even by his recent standards.

Because Saw does nothing to alter the look, tone, and engineered gimmickry from one movie to the next, it keeps going deeper into backstory and character arcs than horror series past, as if this ugly, cheap-looking schlock were somehow "The Lord Of The Rings."