Scott Tobias

In a way, Collateral Damage is redeemed by its implausibility, because the closer it comes to reality, the more disturbing it gets. For once, viewers have reason to be grateful for having their intelligence insulted.

At its heart a simple story about friendship and loss, carried over with enough genuine feeling to excuse its uncertain footing.

Let Me In is a beautiful redundancy.

For his directorial debut, The Collector, Dunstan streamlines the "Saw" concept slightly by silencing the killer and focusing more intently on a house that’s been converted into a jury-rigged deathtrap.

A galvanizing piece of personal filmmaking.

The action sequences are choreographed with the crackerjack timing expected from Pixar, but the film's funniest and most affecting moments exploit the tension between a special family and a world that insists on dulling them down.

It's only human to feel gripped, enraged, and even moved by the events depicted in Innocent Voices, a true account of one boy's experience in the crossfire of El Salvador's long, bloody civil war.

A remarkably nuanced, ever-evolving performance (María Onetto).

In accounting for Almodóvar's identity as an artist and a man, Bad Education comes together like a bold and far-reaching summation of his career to date.

The vibrant rap drama Hustle & Flow wraps the authentic around the inauthentic, telling an underdog story that sticks to formula, yet resonates with an undeniably real energy and texture.

In keeping with Hong Kong's style-as-substance tradition, Fulltime Killers is beyond reproach.

With his flamboyant ridiculousness, Travolta does, however, give From Paris With Love a pulse, which is more than can be said for the film’s petulant hero, played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.

Poised on the edge of camp, Horror Express nimbly cycles through genres, with drawing-room mystery and procedural elements bleeding into Universal-style monster effects and science-fiction hokum.

Take a cue from Guzmán, who serves as a kind of court jester, bouncing in and out of scenes in a one-man quest to bring levity to the occasion. The movie could stand to have more of his Christmas cheer; instead, it's a recast "Family Stone."

The brain trust responsible in part for last year's "The Cat In The Hat," Eurotrip seems like the result of a particularly half-hearted brainstorming session.

There's a deceptive gravitas to the British vigilante thriller Harry Brown that some are bound to mistake for class--or even truth--in the way it grapples with one man's violent stand against societal decay. Much of that is owed to Michael Caine, an actor of such rare dignity and stature that audiences are naturally willing to follow him anywhere, including into the heart of truly risible material.

Shows an unusual degree of generosity toward all its characters, and its tenderness yields some affecting moments, even if they don't ring entirely true.

A star in every genre, Stanwyck epitomized both the steely femme fatale (Double Indemnity) and the heartbreaking melodramatic heroine (Stella Dallas), but her performance in The Lady Eve was the only one to showcase her full range of ability. Her line readings sparkle with ruthless intelligence and wit, but she's also capable of surprising openness and vulnerability.

Compared to a recent Argento dud like "The Stendhal Syndrome," Mother Of Tears at least has some of the go-for-broke gothic spirit of his earlier work. He's just lost the ability to shape it into something artful.

On the nature-documentary continuum, Earth falls closer to the cuddly anthropomorphism of "March Of The Penguins" than the cold rationality of "Grizzly Man."

In an era full of auteur-driven turbulence in Hollywood, The Sting stands out as a model of old-school craft, a richly appointed studio production with big stars and a premium on efficiency and pace.

Much of the second half is spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, though you don't have to have 20/20 vision in order to see the big twist coming from miles away. Once it arrives, the film officially disembarks from reality with an over-the-top climax and denouement that play shamelessly to the bloodthirsty masses.

Medem turns screenwriting into a feng shui exercise, shifting story elements like pieces of furniture around a room, as if the best films are the ones that end up facing southeast.

If there were a shred of sincerity to its straight-faced exposé of African strife, the film would be easier to forgive, but since it's really just a cheap horror-thriller about an ancient predator, the austere tone does it no favors.

Veering wildly from macabre Southern Gothic to quirky small-town romance, Home Fries is too busy cross-pollinating genres to bother with consistent behavior and tone.

Both too obvious and needlessly complicated, Ju-On juggles several non-chronological chapters based on different characters, ensuring that none of the corpses-to-be make much of an impression.

It's a big-hearted, well-intentioned disaster.

Spielberg balances terror on the water with a rich portrait of an island police chief (Roy Scheider) torn between public-safety concerns and a community that thrives on the tourist dollar.

Builds to a key point about the consequences of democracies fighting terrorism by erasing its central tenets, but in doing so, it doesn't underplay the horrors wrought by Guzmán's organization.

Fur is that rare movie that's TOO understated, so quiet and deliberate that it effectively buries consuming passions.

There's a reason the underdog sports formula is followed over and over: When it's executed as skillfully as it is here, the damned thing works every time.

The incongruous mix of real locations and stage sets, real voices and overdubs, is a constant distraction, while the choreography lumbers in group numbers and goes flat in more intimate ones.

Whether Edwards intended it or not—and his inclusion of hippies in the third act points to yes—The Party seems keyed into the spirit of ’68, with the house representing the upending of old money and hidebound tradition.

Huffman intermittently rescues Transamerica from bathos with her brusque wit, swatting away the victimization elements that figure into most films about transsexuals.

What results are surprises without sustenance.

Aided by raw, committed performances from her two leads, Goldbacher makes them tough company for themselves and anyone else around them, on or off the screen.

The idea of a toy store as a living, responsive being is a good one, but Helm doesn't take that idea to imaginative places.

Jarmusch's superb Down By Law can be described as many things–a minimalist fairytale, a modern twist on '30s prison dramas, an existential comedy–but it's memorable first and foremost as a richly textured look at old New Orleans and the enchanted bayou surrounding it.

Funny and endearing.

Though the writing gets unforgivably club-fisted and implausible toward the end, The Manhattan Project shows surprising nuance in dealing with Collet and Lithgow, who are both slow to figure out that there are limits to scientific inquiry.

Haggis, who wrote the fine adapted screenplay for "Million Dollar Baby," embeds Crash's script so deeply in allegory that every revelation feels manipulative and programmatic, in spite of some terrific individual scenes and performances.

Playing against rubber-faced type, cult icon Bruce Campbell grounds his Elvis in a wry, understated swagger that holds the film's wacky excesses in orbit and does more honor to the legend himself than a thousand Vegas lounge-show wannabes.

Argo's earthy features and self-effacing style make him a memorable foil to the flashier Walken. Without him, King Of New York might be written off as exploitative gangsta fare, all sleaze and decadence for its own sake. With him, it has the ballast of common decency.

Episodic and minimalist to a fault, Blackboards makes its ironic point about education, then makes it again a few times over for good measure, rarely expanding beyond its narrow seriocomic agenda.

The Lookout's thriller elements could stand to be more surprising, but they're ultimately in service of a better understanding of the characters. Usually, it's the other way around.

At times, Goldsworthy's philosophy edges into fuzzy New Age-isms, but with an ever-widening gulf separating humans from their environment, his work demonstrates the enlightening pleasures of reconnecting.

Director Carter Smith suffers from another, more common problem: In trying to squeeze every plot point from the book into a 90-minute movie, he failed to capture its chilling essence.

Though studio interference and his own personal demons hampered his later work, Straw Dogs shows a master in control of his effects, which made an artist of Peckinpah's sensibility an especially dangerous man.

Director Jon Favreau, who dipped profitably into family entertainment with 2003's "Elf," effectively recreates the illustrative universe of a good children's book, but he's stuck with a story that noisily grinds its gears.

While La Sentinelle doesn't end with a conventionally satisfying payoff, Desplechin's thoughtful and meticulously detailed direction offers many other rewards.

Feels more like a clever student short that got out of hand than the Kafka-esque nightmare that director Greg Harrison (Groove) likely intended.

Truth be told, Sachiko Hanai is probably an accomplished "pink film"; just don't mistake it for something classier.

Though Away We Go lacks the screwball unpredictability of something like "Flirting With Disaster," it compensates with a unexpected depth of feeling, a novelist’s (or memoirist’s) sense of detail, and a panoramic view of what home means.

Tennant and his actors have done the bare minimum to carry their lifeless movie past the finish line, and their apathy reads a lot like contempt.

Comparisons to "Taxi Driver" are unavoidable and mostly unflattering to Mueller's film, but Assassination engages more directly with the political fissures of the time, which deeply divided the nation.

Curiously lifeless, Lucky You feels like poker without stakes; it goes through the motions with nothing to play for.

Nakashima does his best to keep the flimsy enterprise afloat, mostly through whooshing camera movements and headlong dives into the grotesque extremes of Japanese kitsch. By the end, the effect is like eating a bellyache's worth of cotton candy.

Embellishments to Neil Simon's original script were inevitable, but when you're adding an "Uncle Tito," you're definitely on the wrong track.

Inept.

Through The Fire posits Telfair's good fortune as the belated fulfillment of Jamal's dreams and his family's desire to leave the projects, but it rarely gives a thought to the many thousands of gifted inner-city ballers who devote their lives to a goal that never materializes.

It's more about giving rich bullies the same comeuppance afforded to sneering wardens with bullwhips, and on those superficial grounds, it's reasonably gripping.

With Heaven, Tykwer completes his self-appointment as Kieslowski's heir apparent, but since he has always been a better filmmaker than a thinker, his ideas drift into the ether.

The film tries to squeeze Austen into one of her novels, and the peg doesn't fit.

Hitchcock would make richer films in Hollywood, but The 39 Steps came off the line as the Model T of cinematic plot machines.

An empty lake, drained of any tangible substance and refilled with wispy, pseudo-poetic metaphor.

Major characters drop in and out of sight, WWII begins and ends without much fanfare, and full decades pass in the space of a few cuts.

The first half of Cocoon is easier to stomach, as a group of septua- and octogenarians steal away to a private pool that becomes the Fountain Of Youth. The scenes of revitalized St. Petersburg retirees aerobicizing and breakdancing do have a genuine sweetness, especially with the roles filled out by a cast of beloved Hollywood old-timers.

Singer's reverence for the 1978 version edges perilously close to mimicry, as if he has no new ideas to bring to the table, but he succeeds in drawing out the Superman myth with simple power and a refreshing absence of irony.

Part of what’s made this middling action movie so durable—besides its ready-made “Movies For Guys Who Like Movies” template—is how endearingly uncool Harley and Marlboro are, as a biker and a cowboy who don’t really belong to any particular time and place.

Babenco's hard work is undercut by his squarely theatrical notion of realism: Specifically, how did the touring company for "West Side Story" wind up in such an awful spot?

Eastwood's down-the-middle police procedural Blood Work ranks as his least ambitious work in a decade, anonymous save for his iconic screen presence and a tasteful selection of jazz on the soundtrack.

Though an assured and diverting piece of filmmaking, Man On The Train sags from complacency, rarely breaking its neat construction to animate the friendship with any real warmth and life.

May be Assayas' airiest work to date, an intriguing trifle that leaves its considerable pleasures to lounge around on the surface.

Turns into an edited-for-TV version of Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch"--flat, bloodless, and utterly bereft of period grit.

From the looks of it, a good 90 percent of The D's creative juices were expended on The Pick Of Destiny's brilliant opening sequence.

It's uplifting, but shallow.

A caustic, witty, regretful elegy for a place so transformed that it's virtually unrecognizable.

Doing his best to class up the joint, "The Wire's" Idris Elba stars as the perfect man.

There isn’t a whiff of humility or self-deprecation to Clay, Roque, Jensen, Cougar, and Pooch, a collection of black-ops douchebags and our ostensible heroes.

Smith delights in these offbeat personalities and their jerry-rigged accoutrements, but the real joy in the film comes from the happy interaction between the subjects and their creations.

It's a hilariously half-baked scheme, one that quickly turns them from hunters to hunted, but the strength of The Hunting Party is its shaggy-dog quality.

Whatever the case, We Own The Night plays like a masterpiece because it skillfully appropriates actual masterpieces, not because it earns the label on its own merits.

Powered by dim bulbs on both sides of the camera, Darkness Falls barrels ahead with unrelenting stupidity, forsaking many of its own rules in search of the next cheap shock.

Nowrasteh constantly overplays his hand, not realizing that some horrors speak for themselves.

LaGravenese lets real-life messiness keep it off a straight track, coming up with an unexpected and touching portrait of platonic friendship.

The hits outnumber the misses well enough in Airplane!, especially in the first half, when the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team (writer-directors David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) are layering jokes in the foreground and background. There are parodies of popular favorites like Jaws and Saturday Night Fever, wacky stock footage on back-screen projection, slapstick violence against various religious solicitors, and plenty of silly wordplay.

With every project, he pops open the same trunkload of shtick and leaves everyone to argue over whether it’s art. It’s a win-win situation for Korine, who’s either a genius or a provocateur who’s succeeded in gaming his stuffy critics.

As the film takes shape, the form and the subject develop a fascinating symbiosis, with Derrida cast as an active participant in the deconstruction of his own documentary.

Looks and sounds like a black comedy, but by the time DeVito reaches the cutesy, nonsensical ending, he's lost the will to follow through on it.

The film lacks the discipline to stay on point all the time, but Fey and director Mark S. Waters (Freaky Friday) have fun with offbeat throwaway touches.

Most of all, The Host functions as a popcorn movie par excellence, loaded with the most familiar conventions, but shot through with such conviction and visual panache that even its clichés seem invigorating.

It’s when the small moments become large ones that Feste overreaches and the shaky performances don’t bail her out.

Edmond would probably be completely unapproachable were it not spiked with so much dark wit, much of it coming from Macy's painful naïveté and cheapness, which comes through in negotiations with various women of the night.

Much of the film is difficult to understand—as with many poems, its meanings are so personal that they’re often cryptic—but Gorchakov’s (and Tarkovsky’s) displacement comes through powerfully in lonely rooms and in tracking shots that give the impression of a soul adrift.

The best possible feeling that 11:14 could leave behind is that Marcks has pulled off something clever, but just bringing the puzzle pieces together isn't that impressive a feat. As "Memento" proves, it's the big picture that really counts.

Though Barrie's stories are about a rite of passage into adulthood, Disney's Peter Pan treats the issue superficially, retreating from the dark places of movies like Pinocchio in favor of amped-up tomfoolery.

Abysmal.

Adhering to few solid comedic principles, The Comebacks swings wildly between lame movie references and slapstick, slightly less lame funny names (such as Aseel Tare, the running back who couldn't possibly be injured) and Airplane!-style spoof, and a few mildly amusing stabs at irony.

Amen should be a powderkeg of a movie, yet the urgency and force that defined Costa-Gavras' earlier work has been drained away, along with his invigorating newsreel craft.

Unlike, say, "Eagle Eye," Echelon Conspiracy doesn't put enough conviction behind its stupidity. It's mostly just bland.

The incendiary Dogville confirms the director's sadistic knack for locating his characters' (and his audience's) soft spots and prodding them for a singular emotional experience.

Shannon’s performance takes The Missing Person as far as it goes, but when a real-world tragedy commandeers the story, Buschel’s thin pastiche falls to pieces.

With ruthless efficiency and wit, Kahn ratchets up unbearable tension and releases it in startlingly visceral fashion, but his placid denouement is the most chilling scene of all.

The cheetah is the star in Duma, and no one directs animals more convincingly than Ballard, who knows better than anyone how to integrate patchwork nature shots into narrative action. Too bad the two-legged talking animals aren't as compelling this time out.

Malick's powerful intermingling of brutality and beauty, his signature cutaways to indigenous flora and fauna, and the gentle lyricism of his disjunctive narration and painterly images are too rich to fully register in a single viewing.

At bottom, Silent Light is less about faith than matters of the heart, and in Reygadas' hands, the ache is bone-deep.

The Wrong Man, an overlooked masterpiece from his greatest decade, eschews suspense for the straight-up nightmare of an innocent man dragged through the justice system.

Had Pumpkinhead been made in the silent era, it might now be treated with the reverence granted Nosferatu.

There certainly are labored stretches and groan-inducing gags, but between the suggestive names (Melvin Jerkovski, Bootsie Goodhead, Principal Stuckoff), the deliberately broad characterizations (the Richie Rich type carries his tennis racket everywhere he goes), and the air of unbridled permissiveness, the film feels about as wholesome as a T&A-fest could possibly be. It makes a strong case for being the definitive work of a disreputable subgenre.

None of their stories are particularly resonant, but the film is really about a grand social experiment gone right, and it succeeds well enough on that front, even while it isn't that convincing in the particulars.

Confidence doesn't provide anything substantial to latch on to: Its twists and turns aren't founded on the trust needed to pull them off.

The film goes off the rails in the final third, sacrificing subtle character work at the altar of blood-and-guts survival horror. As mood-killers go, it's like a jab to the back of the neck.

All of this free association falls under the wide umbrella of "experimental" cinema, meaning that the often flagging pace and incoherent stretches are balanced by sublime moments of inspiration.

Leitman gets some wonderful tall tales from her subjects, who open up like they've been waiting for years for someone to come along and ask, and she complements it with punishing footage of their exploits.

It may not have been what the producers had in mind, but they asked for a Paul Schrader movie, and that's exactly what he delivered.

It's content enough just to drink in the regional flavor, appreciate the carefree heartiness of the locals, and allows these two eccentrics to have some good times before the carriage turns into a pumpkin. The film treads lightly, but leaves little impression.

"Titanic" without the metaphors, the class-consciousness, the love story, or anything resembling a theme, Poseidon invests so little in its screenplay that it might as well be an episode of "The Love Boat" gone horribly awry.

Mann’s achievement in creating his own dreamlike alternate reality alongside a historical one isn’t necessarily diminished by his failure to bring the story across. The keep has a presence: castle walls that stretch to infinity, an ancient Evil that forbids lodgers and requires rituals to contain it, the metaphorical heft of standing over a war of unimaginable atrocity. And thanks to Mann, The Keep has a presence, too.

The few effective scenes in The Quiet suggest that the film might have worked as a kinked-up Hitchcockian thriller rather than the drab, serious drama it turns out to be.

Payne, the great satirist behind "Citizen Ruth" and "Election," loves to populate his films with throwaway details, which in About Schmidt accumulate into a portrait of Midwestern life that's almost chilling in its exactitude.

These may be the qualities of a great man, but they're not exactly the stuff of a great documentary subject, especially given how hard Carter works to defuse the emotions stirred up by his book.

Only the so-bad-it's-good crowd need apply.

There’s hardly an authentic second in the film.

Given several years’ distance from the media blitz, Téchiné brings clarity, maturity, and perspective to the case while still subtly addressing all the thorny social issues the affair touched off.

Anarchy finally reigned supreme in 1932's classic Horse Feathers, which was the first Marx brothers comedy that smoothly integrated the story into the troupe's routine.

Only half a great movie, because the other half follows a separate but related thread that isn't nearly as compelling.

A lean, well-contained slice-of-life at 83 minutes, 'R Xmas finds the director making a confident return to the hard-nosed realism on which he's staked his maverick reputation.

With no greater ambition than reworking the Police Academy movies, Broken Lizard comes up with a winning formula: one part laughs to two parts goodwill.

Awash in cheap shocks and corny sentiment, Dragonfly aspires to be an inspirational thriller about one man's spiritual journey, but it takes little time for him to reach his destination. All that's left for him and the audience to do is solve a riddle unfit for the back of a cereal box.

It’s a sick piece of work—I felt like a heel for watching it, yet I couldn’t look away, either.

The film evolves into a simple, intimate, acutely emotional portrait of a family reaching a painful crossroads.

Summer Phoenix has a screen presence that's simultaneously distancing and transfixing, an inscrutability that makes her seem either mysterious or a complete blank.

A little less earnestness could have done this movie some good.

Breaking from the Spielberg oeuvre, Munich isn't a particularly hopeful movie, but it's a fair and morally dignified one.

Few directors are capable of marrying ideas and entertainment—one is often sacrificed for the other—but Spielberg peppers one gripping action setpiece after another with trenchant details about a near-future robbed of the most basic freedoms and privacy.

Working from a novel by Cecelia Ahern, LaGravenese brings some intelligence and maturity to a genre that sorely needs it, but it isn't enough to prop up this long-winded and thoroughly bland romantic comedy.

There's a good movie here, but we get it in pieces that are sometimes hard to decipher.

Deeply personal and deeply silly.

The tiger footage in Two Brothers would make for a solid nature documentary, but because the animals are shoehorned into a narrative, they've been anthropomorphized to death.

Even with a wild card like Black desperately retooling his lines, there's nothing authentic or personal about The Holiday--it's as chilling as heart-warmers get.

With startling clarity and dreadful logic, Loach and Laverty make sense of every bad choice Compston makes until he runs out of options, locked into a destiny that he can't escape, mainly because his good intentions are clouded by tragic naivete.

De Niro and Murphy are visibly uncomfortable with each other. Their improvisation seems chaotic and mismanaged, and the movie follows in kind.

It isn't pretty to witness, but the pain of it smarts.

There are many layers to the man and the movie, and it’s hard not to leave the theater shaken.

Lourdes starts from the unexpected position of believing miracles are possible, but it doesn’t paper over the religious and practical problems they raise--for the blessed and bereft alike.

The 33-year-old Koreeda, who began his career in documentary, has a gift for observing life as it's lived, accumulating simple, seemingly banal scenes into an unforgettable reflection on the frustration and helplessness of trying to explain the ineffable.

The Mystic Masseur shows more signs of life than "Cotton Mary," but it's still a producer's movie: attractively mounted, dramatically inert.

The film ends so beautifully that it's easy to forgive the dead passages that preceded it and hope it carries over into his next movie.

In spite of strong performances and a characteristically vivid sense of place, the film feels disjointed and heavy.

In trying to find the decency in a killer, the film anxiously accounts for his every misdeed. It's a little like watching "City Of God" morph into "Three Men And A Baby."

Miraculously, High And Low turns the mundane follow-through of police work into the stuff of white-knuckle suspense.

The film gets its distinction from the performances by Cheung and Nolte, whose scenes together are suffused with loss and unexpected mutual compassion.

Though it occasionally dips too deep into a well of redneck humor, Slither cleverly exploits the nervous laughter that fills a theater whenever a horror movie gets too frightening to bear.

Though he labors endlessly to account for her behavior, which is explained away by flashbacks to her decadent parents and a glamorous mother-figure played under Vaseline lens by an uncredited Sandra Bullock, Bacon fails to make her seem human.

While it never approaches the richness and gravity of a great Mann film like "Heat," Miami Vice blurs the thin blue line to similar effect, and he features a couple of bravura setpieces, including a tense raid on an enemy hideout and a shootout with chaotic, you-are-there immediacy. If only all summer movies were this majestically slight.

Looks like a cheap polyester suit, an entirely synthetic composite of scenes from other movies.

After being strapped down by a run of elegant, high-class literary adaptations--"The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley," and "Cold Mountain"--writer-director Anthony Minghella liberates himself in Breaking And Entering, his first wholly original screenplay since his piercing, minor-key debut feature "Truly, Madly, Deeply."

No one writes for ensembles better than Apatow, and his players are all skilled at giving his work a loose, improvisational feel.

Here’s a film that opens with a man being smeared in excrement and closes with an even more horrifying act of revenge, yet it’s fevered, passionate, and occasionally erotic, at least by Greenaway standards. It’s a film awash in the color red, full of blood, sex, and rage, the rare Greenaway that feels alive as more than a formal or semiotic exercise. You may even catch him storytelling here and there.

Long on inspiration, short on specifics.

Through Sorrentino's lens, Andreotti's chief lieutenants are made to look like Reservoir Dogs, with Andreotti as a calm, tight-lipped, upper-crust analog to Lawrence Tierney.

Based on true events, À Tout De Suite reveals the seductions of criminal life to be something like Stockholm Syndrome for Le Besco.

Though its procedural goes a little soft in the middle, Gone Baby Gone quietly accumulates in power, leading to one of the more subtly devastating final shots in recent memory.

Though Anderson's storytelling gets murky at times, it's still a fine showcase for his versatility, adding to an impressive, under-the-radar résumé that includes the underrated science-fiction comedy "Happy Accidents" and the first-rate horror film "Session 9."

It's a con job that feels like a precisely attenuated work of art, elegantly weaving flashbacks and ellipses into the story in an effort to conceal how shamelessly manipulative it is in the end. And as always, Smith comes out a winner.

Love stories don’t come much squirmier than this one, and Alvarez plays it with honesty, insight, and the awkwardness inherent in this blindest of blind dates.

Affleck's psychotic enthusiasm aside, no one seems to be having a good time, and the ill will becomes infectious.

Davis and Heilbroner lean a bit too hard on the most outrageous forms of abuse in the pre-Stonewall era, as opposed to the everyday traumas of living in the closet, but Stonewall Uprising picks up momentum once it starts detailing the event itself, drawing on the vivid memories of the people who lived it.

While it's not always necessary for filmmakers to relate that closely to their material, Feig's marked distance from the story of a sullen boy who parts the Iron Curtain may account for its generic artlessness.

With his bleached-blond hair, implacable European accent, and nerdy devotion to cool rationality, Ribisi acts like a cross between a young Reich officer and the Comic Book Guy from "The Simpsons," and his unashamed hamminess steals the movie.

Nobody is better at capturing the crushing banality of everyday life than Judge.

Dreadful.

Stone has made an excruciating disaster for the ages.

Barrymore has rarely been so bright and effortlessly charming, but it's all lost on Fallon, who often resembles one of those unfortunate SNL guests who freeze up on live TV, completely out of their element. If Fallon wants a life after SNL, he might want to try another medium.

The Sure Thing is queasily old-fashioned, a raunchy road trip without the raunch that nonetheless trades on sex-comedy stereotypes: party animals in Hawaiian shirts, tea-sipping no-fun-niks in neutral-colored sweaters, and a compliant blonde sex doll that is, in fact, a sure thing. The film takes baby steps to something better.

Ends with horrific revelations that are made all the more powerful by the lightness that precedes them. Simultaneously sad and hopeful, Ghobadi suggests the resiliency of a culture in which war is part of the fabric of everyday life.

In Chéreau's hands, Gabrielle has an operatic quality that throws the repressive environment into sharp relief; the film works like a pressure cooker, seething with bottled passions that intermittently burst through with startling cruelty and violence.

The film might have been more powerful, not to mention fair, if the nuns believed they were doing right; only on movie night, when McEwan sees herself in Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells Of St. Mary's," does Mullan grant her so much as the delusion of rectitude.

A viscerally punishing study of repression and masochism, carried out with the utmost discretion and chilling reserve.

It's telling that this slice of milquetoast is the first to get picked up by a major studio boutique. Put in the most euphemistic terms possible, the film's banal premise contains "universal themes," meaning that its sentimental clichés translate readily to all continents and cultures.

The music isn't much of a relief either, mostly because Young keeps cutting away from the performances.

Immensely likable.

Perhaps the worst thing that could be said about Better Luck Tomorrow is that, on a slow night, it's easy to imagine these delinquents wanting to rent a film just like it.

Chabrol develops the inevitable confrontation between the two men like a car wreck in slow motion, and getting there takes a little more work than it should; the film takes the form of a thriller, but it doesn't have the pace of one.

When it comes time for the actual robbery, so little has been explained that the plan seems ridiculously easy in some respects and totally improbable in others.

Storytelling clarity has never been a Kurosawa strong suit, yet Pulse baffles even under those standards, so it's best to just get on his abstract wavelength and ride the thing out.

They never come up with a sufficient reason for crossing into Afghanistan. Their motives for heading straight into a war zone sound like something out of a stoner comedy: They went in search of "really big naan."

Seems to go out of its way to obliterate all the elements that made the original so special.

Meet The Robinsons takes a large step toward making 3D a sustainable format, the CinemaScope of tomorrow.

A canny piece of autobiography that looks at the man behind the legend and the legend behind the man.

Cantet's masterful study of a white-collar businessman in decline.

Though comparisons to "The Blair Witch Project" are inevitable, the impeccable first-person camera technique not only makes sense dramatically, but also facilitates a complex and queasily ambiguous relationship between the conspirators and the audience.

At once predatory and vulnerable, Jung has a primitive intensity that speaks louder than words, carrying an enigmatic and often maddeningly elusive film that's short on dialogue, rational behavior, and narrative logic.

On record and in her movies, Moore is sold as wholesome and real, which sometimes translates as generic and blah, in spite of her genuine appeal and accessibility.

The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his character in such a bind.

Though it doesn't rise above the cut-and-paste aesthetic of other making-of documentaries, The Siberian Mammoth assembles many members of the disparate Cuban cast and crew, and unearths some rare production photos and footage.

It’s haunting and beautiful at times, surprisingly playful at others, and like all great movies about magic, it has more than a few tricks up its sleeve.

Even the flaws mesh with the overall fabric of the film in a way that impeccably choreographed musical numbers and fight scenes might not have. Altman reverses the emphasis of most mainstream family entertainments, which are about pace and snap, and instead favors a gentle, more inviting evocation of Sweethaven and its oddball inhabitants. Robert Evans wanted an answer to the Broadway hit Annie. Instead, he got a Robert Altman film.

A sampler of novella-length films set in three different time periods and starring the same two actors, Hou Hsiao-hsien's Three Times resembles one of those delicate trios served at fine restaurants, each a fresh interpretation of a common ingredient.

From his wonderfully idiosyncratic bits of silent comedy at a storefront window to a brilliant one-take of Malkovich watching a calamitous scene unfold, de Oliveira seems determined to exit on his own terms.

What makes Raising Victor Vargas so special, beyond its irresistible charisma, is how Sollett and his cast capture the thrill of first love.

Ritchie's frivolous comedy tries to have it both ways, thinning out the material for mass consumption while still sticking to the script -- an unstable alchemy that backfires horribly.

Shine A Light pays tribute to the band's essential agelessness.

Though tagged as the director's bid for commercial success, School Of Rock is as philosophical in its own way as "Slacker" or "Waking Life." It was made by people who not only know the music well enough to create magnificent flowcharts around it, but also understand how a simple, soul-stirring rock song can seem revolutionary.

Stranding an able supporting cast in mostly disposable roles--including Jacqueline Bisset, Mary Kay Place, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Amber Benson--Cox writes himself into several corners, then plots honking contrivances to get out of them.

A large part of what makes Some Like It Hot a perennial favorite is that it has the go-for-broke commitment of an early Marx brothers farce, but it's harnessed by a well-structured script that keeps building on itself. It's no fluke that the capper is the most famous closing line in movie history.

Though thirteen too often mistakes hard realism for overheated spectacle, the heightened drama brings out the best in Wood and Hunter, who turn their climactic scene into an actors' workshop, charged with raw emotion. As the film barrels toward the outrageously histrionic, they nearly pull it back from the brink.

A sort of distracted, freewheeling form of inquiry and observation drives Encounters At The End Of The World, a loosely constructed documentary that seems to have been made on a whim.

Much like "School Of Rock," Bad Santa salvages a tired, paint-by-numbers formula by resisting it every step of the way, stubbornly refusing to stop its juvenile fun until the last possible moment.

The issue may be polarizing, but Vera Drake resonates with such seriousness and truth that it transcends the narrow limitations of polemic.

It's not often that good movies have a hole in the center, but Nina's Tragedies labors admirably to develop the strong feelings of longing and heartbreak that unite its damaged souls, however briefly.

Herzog also finds extraordinary beauty in what Dorrington is trying to accomplish: Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his boat, Dorrington wants to float around the natural world in a reverie, and when he finally does, he experiences a connection with Plage that's genuinely transcendent.

Smartly conceived and meticulously executed, if too slight and gimmicky to have much resonance.

The Paranoids summons a scuzzy, winning nocturnal ambience, particularly when Hendler breaks out of his funk, hits the dance floor, and does his best impression of Michael Stipe in the “Losing My Religion” video. For a few brief moments, he and the movie transcend their four-walled ennui.

Though Climates lacks "Distant's" haunted, poetic melancholy, it has a vivid, sensual texture that's unmistakably Ceylan's. He's one of those rare directors who doesn't need a credit for identification.

Judging by the far more interesting adults in the film--Braga, a terrific Laura Linney as Webber's mother, and Hawke as his father--the solution for Webber and Moreno is to grow up and not be so full of themselves. In their current state, they make for unpleasant company, and so does the film.

What's good about Next Stop Wonderland -- and nearly good enough to warrant recommendation -- has nothing to do with Anderson's sloppy, disjointed filmmaking, and everything to do with Hope Davis' far more disciplined and appealing lead performance.

The Pursuit Of Happyness represents a belated and calculated attempt to scrape off the glossy movie-star veneer and connect with the everyday struggles of living hand-to-mouth in the big city, but it's too late. Watching his (Smith's) performance here is a little like imagining an American version of "Rosetta" starring Julia Roberts.

To think that a semi-major studio financed a production this low-rent and listless is amazing: Since when did MGM start making student films?

Though the results are a matter of record, the uplift is nevertheless intoxicating, even enough to compensate for a film that routinely substitutes corny iconography for real imagination and vision.

Not enough can be said about how good Jennifer Jason Leigh is in this movie.

Something of a cross between the formalist whimsy of Wes Anderson and the God's-lonely-man psychosis of "Taxi Driver," the film breaks all the rules, but the tonal schizophrenia that results isn't an accident.

Until its pat, implausible conclusion, the film has the edgy nerve of a classic amour fou, charting a complex relationship with the sort of bumpy, unpredictable spirit that would do Cassavetes proud.

It's convincing as everything but a piece of good filmmaking.

There's enough material here to add another hour to Spike Lee's "reel of shame" in "Bamboozled," but hideously offensive black stereotypes are merely the tip of the iceberg.

Dim, compromised, and dead on arrival.

At a minimum, his new film, Adoration, marks a welcome return to the Egoyan of old, the one who could spin seductive mysteries out of disassembled parts and show how images can be manipulated into comforting lies.

Abortion, incest, infidelity, revenge, and hockey collide at a fever pitch, juxtaposed with such frantic energy that they're pushed to the level of high comedy, funniest at its most dramatic.

Swimming in computer-enhanced mayhem and a non-stop hip-hop-and-techno soundtrack, Blade: Trinity might as well come equipped with joysticks attached to the seats, so everyone can play along.

One of the film's oddest missteps is in making the boy-band gig just another occupation, instead of using it as a central way to illuminate the brothers' unusual bond.

In its amalgam of classic Hollywood war movies and courtroom dramas, Hart's War takes the audience to a place that never existed in order to teach it a lesson it already knows.

In light of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's young career, it's fitting that his beguiling, transfixing romantic fable Tropical Malady splits down the middle into two radically different halves.

A surprisingly bittersweet love story at heart, Eternal Sunshine values the sum of experience, which in this case means a thorns-and-all openness to romantic possibilities.

The story they get may be heartfelt and inspiring, but all that powerful sentiment doesn't make it any more complete.

Unsurprising tribute to the sweetness of rural dwellers.

The kids are great, but when they graduate from Rock School, will the valedictorian be the next Jimmy Page, or the technically proficient lead guitarist of a Led Zeppelin cover band?

In spite of the uniformly strong performances, 13 Conversations largely factors out human nature, leaving a giant puzzle where each piece is pre-determined to fall into place. In the end, the Sprechers have a movie for people who brag about finishing the New York Times Sunday crossword in pen.

It's also, in its sick, sick way, a real crowd-pleaser.

Though he commits to a lot of embarrassing silliness, Murphy projects so little genuine warmth that his transformation barely registers.

Through a miracle of timing, Davis landed the lead role in Gillian Armstrong's assured debut feature My Brilliant Career fresh out of performance school, and it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing the part.

Opening shots tend to say a lot about a movie, but they say everything about The Notebook, a glossy adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' four-hanky sudser.

It's an extremely cynical perspective, enforced by some disappointingly turgid melodrama, but keep in mind, this movie was made before an almost uniformly poor and black population was left to rot in New Orleans floodwaters. Even at his worst, von Trier can still strike a nerve.

The dynamic between Jackman and McGregor bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Aaron Eckhart and Matt Malloy from "In The Company Of Men": the cool, suave, experienced philosopher of excess and his weaker, more earnest pupil.

Cameron acts like a childish jerk, even in the reconciliation phase, and the underlying reason is that he--and the movie--hates women.

What saves I Love You, Man, at least partially, is the relaxed chemistry between Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, both very funny men who are genuine enough to push back against a premise that's often maddeningly artificial.

While The Woodsman gets the psychological profile right, it fails to make Bacon a man.

Documentaries like Stolen Childhoods present an uncomfortable dilemma for anyone who cares how movies are made: They have virtually no aesthetic value, but compensate with unimpeachable social worth.

The natural chemistry between Ellefsen and Nordin keeps the film pleasant and inoffensive, but is there any question about where or when or how it will go?

While it's a pleasure to watch the likeable Johnson open up and come out of her shell, Phat Girlz belongs to Mo'Nique, a grating, belligerent woman who alternates self-deprecating fat jokes with drama-queen meltdowns and simpering pleas for acceptance. Save it for the talk-show circuit, please.

Great casting takes The Other Guys most of the way: Ferrell draws a wealth of good material from his character's oddball ineffectuality, and he partners perfectly with Wahlberg, who's always best at his most incredulous.

The film doesn't seem to know how it feels, much less how others are supposed to feel about it.

Centurion offers little beyond viscera for its own sake, without anything like the bold abstraction of "Valhalla Rising."

At best, The Forbidden Kingdom counts as an amiable time-waster for kids, but much more should be expected from the momentous union of two kung-fu titans.

Only about half of 1929's The Cocoanuts, an early sound-era comedy, was entrusted to the Marx brothers' vaudevillian antics; the rest was left to drippy Irving Berlin songs, kick-lines of bathing beauties, and a half-baked subplot about a stolen necklace. Yet the good scenes establish the Marx dynamic to hilarious effect.

As a domestic melodrama, the film sometimes plays like The Honeymooners without the laughs, but the push and pull between the flashbacks and the interrogation scenes gain steadily in strength as the case gets harder to pin down. There’s more to these characters—and this movie—than initially meets the eye.

The film's visceral assault extends to the sledgehammer script, an amassment of unsubtle ironies and war-is-hell clichés that often reduce it to an amateurish theatrical stunt.

Like the worst of late-period Allen, the film recycles character types from his previous work without inventing new reasons to summon them into existence. They're left stranded, seven characters in search of an author.

The result is a middling Frankenstein-like hybrid of spectral mayhem and murder mystery, constructed entirely out of borrowed parts.

The scattered insights in This So-Called Disaster aren't worth the sifting it takes to find them.

Plays like a 90-minute wake, albeit a warm and humorous one.

Far from muting the satire, Renoir's hearty characterization complicates it and gives it life, which is rare among broadsides at the bourgeoisie.

Channels Toback in his purest form, which will probably be a treat for auteurists and a headache for just about everyone else.