Scott Tobias

Shooting in digital video, director Jeff Renfroe needlessly amps up the proceedings with jittery camerawork, jump cuts, and other technical hiccups meant to disorient the audience.

Because Quitting admits its basic falsehood up front, the film is never emotionally affecting, but Jia's participation in this confrontation of his past shows remarkable courage and honesty, especially when his behavior doesn't inspire much sympathy.

May represents something rare and unfashionable-–a smart, twisted little slasher comedy that doesn't skimp on the gore.

Bad Boys II is the rare case in which escapism involves leaving the theater.

Special recalls a minor-key "Donnie Darko," but its vision is much more limited, and it sinks into Indiewood cliché whenever it reaches for profundity.

While The Marine proves a poor showcase for the charisma-impaired Cena, it's a terrific vehicle for world-class heavy Patrick, who is clearly enjoying himself as the kind of deranged lunatic who interrupts a long string of felonies to confirm the details of his new cable package.

The film is an old-fashioned morality play writ extra-large, applying a heavy, austere tone to a sequence of events that can't bear the load. The burden falls mostly on Kevin Kline, who trades in his lithe, expressive comedic gifts for a dramatic role that fits him like a straitjacket and a pair of lead shoes.

Though frequently dazzling, Kings And Queen proves that a bunch of punchy singles don't necessarily make an album.

The Asphalt Jungle would be considered a heist picture if the mood didn't dictate otherwise. The standard "honor among thieves" theme applies, but dishonor gives the film its special noir flavor.

It's a fittingly loose, shambling little nothing of a comedy that's occasionally inspired, but at least a draft or two short of its potential. Still, it's a pleasure to watch Faris--a gifted, likeable comedian who tends to be the best element of many terrible movies.

The Ghost Writer may not go down as one of Polanski’s masterpieces, but if it does end up being his swan song, it’s the ideal denouement to a life and career of unsettling resonance.

When it steers away from campaign-ad testimonials and considers Kerry's moral awakening in Vietnam and beyond, Going Upriver features some tremendously powerful scenes.

Most of it falls on Bezucha, not just for devising these monstrously cruel characters, but for putting them in situations that are far too serious to be resolved by Christmas morning. When the melodrama gets too intense, the film collapses in slapstick.

It’s a crude, clunky piece of writing, hampered by variable performances and a leading man whose looks of silent resolve are more compelling than his line-readings. Yet the film has the elemental power of a classic immigrant story, revealing a young man’s single-minded, arduous journey to America through black-and-white images that evoke the country’s promise to the huddled masses.

Duller than a rain delay on the Golf Channel.

Quite apart from its environmental agenda, the film is a reminder that there's no space for substance in political discourse: A 30-second soundbite on global warming could easily be brushed off as tree-hugging rhetoric, but after 100 minutes of level-headed elaboration, it's chillingly undeniable.

Zodiac is the rare serial-killer movie in which the psychosis stems as much from the pursuers (and the filmmaker) as the pursued.

It's a personal story that feels like it's been constructed from other movies.

She was simultaneously a pariah and a marked woman, and Amenta respectfully honors her quixotic, deeply lonely quest for justice.

Boarding Gate's surfaces are often so staggeringly beautiful that its superficiality becomes forgivable, with the pleasant distractions of Assayas' multi-layered frames, Argento's sinewy allure, and snippets of Brian Eno ambience on the soundtrack. Why can't all movies this inane be this accomplished?

Enter The Void is a trance-like experience, feeding the shimmering neon of Tokyo at night into a spectacular hallucinogenic head-trip.

A taut, diamond-cut piece of storytelling.

It’s Complicated is the sort of “mature” character piece the French do regularly and better (and without the need for quotation marks around “mature”), but the cast at least helps relieve some of the tidiness that belies the title.

Hunter is the stuff of nightmares, but it’s the stuff of dreams, too, and it beckons you to follow it downstream.

On a deeper level, Haneke tries to reach for political allegory on the French-Algerian War, but the film functions best as a perfectly calibrated thriller, perhaps his most accessible to date.

It's kind of amazing that a joke-a-second comedy like Date Movie doesn't contain a single laugh.

Trust The Man presents itself as a funny, insightful Manhattan relationship comedy in Woody Allen mode, but morphs into the phoniest of Hollywood rom-coms.

In the absence of sincerity, Cletis Tout creates a vacuum that flushes out the entire story, leaving nothing but its own hollow cleverness.

Manages to be visually arresting, packed with geeky allusions to everything from Raymond Chandler to "Blue Velvet."

Perhaps the film will connect with those attuned to the Quays' allusive wavelength, much as a dog responds to a whistle. Others won't hear a thing.

Without Kaurismäki to introduce these lonely, forgotten souls to audiences, who's going to be his friend?

There’s a purpose to all this madness--though to talk about the primary reason the film succeeds would be giving the game away--but it should be appreciated first as a vivid, waking nightmare.

Though its heroine's mysterious seizures and blackouts are terrifying in the way they undermine her quest for self-determination, Requiem isn't a horror movie so much as a thwarted coming-of-age story, like "Carrie" without the bloody reckoning.

Much like Zwick's "Glory" and "The Last Samurai," Blood Diamond strives to be an "important" film while stopping well short of being genuinely provocative and artistically chancy.

Has a clean, antiseptic chilliness reminiscent of a Kubrick film. But too often, the director's stark visuals underline the naked simplicity of his story and make his picture of the suburbs seem hopelessly generic.

Intolerance is thrilling and vital, a collision of historical periods that feels as earth-shaking as the movement of tectonic plates.

Loosely structured around four seasons, Nobody Knows unfolds in a long series of episodes that slowly progress from lightly comic to bracingly sad as the situation deteriorates.

The result is a powerfully visceral experience that justifies itself almost entirely on surface chops, with striking color composition and a complex sound design that elevates the story to an operatic scale.

Like a lot of scenes in Funny Ha Ha, the commonplace somehow seems invigoratingly original.

Doesn't possess the discipline to peel laughs off its potentially riotous premise. Instead, Segal and company grope desperately for every low gag they can find, whether or not it has anything to do with the story.

For a film about growing up, Illegal Tender loses itself in a lot of silly juvenilia.

Anatomy Of A Murder respects the audience enough to turn us into the jury, and trusts that we, too, can consider the facts like adults.

Animal Crackers leaves the song-and-dance to Groucho in the great "Hooray For Captain Spaulding," sends Harpo running after screaming blondes in the background, and breaks down the fourth wall for a wry Eugene O'Neill parody.

For a big-budget Hollywood feature, the film places an unusually high amount of stock in the audience's imagination; not since "The Others" or "The Blair Witch Project" have so many shocks been indirect or kept teasingly out of view.

Disappointing.

At once too real for escapism and too ridiculous for a credible espionage thriller, The Sum Of All Fears unfolds like a cruel joke and treats imagined human tragedy as the punchline.

Krasinski knows how to play off Williams--his pained looks are all too appropriate in the face of Williams' desperate shtick--but it's disillusioning to see him here, because he seems too smart for this film.

The tough urban realism Lumet perfected in cop dramas like Serpico, Q&A, and Prince Of The City has been reflected in first-rate TV shows like Homicide: Life On The Street, The Wire, and The Shield. But those shows had multiple seasons to draw out the breadth of institutional corruption, while Lumet miraculously covers this territory in 167 minutes.

In casting the brothers as stowaways on an ocean liner, Monkey Business gets laughs from broad Keystone Kops chase scenes, but extends the absurdity even further with bizarre one-liners (Groucho claims he "licked his weight in wild caterpillars") and a sequence in which all four brothers try to get off the boat by impersonating Maurice Chevalier.

Once the action shifts to the dead-eyed denizens of Santa Mira, the remote town that Silver Shamrock calls home, the film becomes a sly and creepy indictment of corporate engineering. It’s not what Halloween fans wanted—and Wallace rubs it in by showing a couple of clips from the original film on TV—but take the Halloween part away and Season Of The Witch is a standalone oddity worth considering on its own terms.

Calls on De Niro to drum up the sort of emotional intensity that's been allowed to atrophy of late. City By The Sea isn't always worthy of him, but it makes enough demands to bring out his best.

It remains to be seen whether Kill Bill is merely a skilled slice of juvenilia or a pastiche with real emotional and thematic underpinnings, but based on Tarantino's storytelling command in the first half, it's worth giving him the benefit of the doubt.

Abouna starkly defines the masculine and feminine influence in raising children, and what happens when they're not so complementary.

An awkward marriage of fairy-tale and social realism.

Seems as much an imposter in the drag-queen world as its heroines; it fronts the sort of safely asexual gay characters found on network TV.

Casual moviegoers looking for a bubbly romantic comedy with Brittany Murphy will get more than they bargained for in Little Black Book, which builds to a nasty twist that's more Lars von Trier than Meg Ryan.

Far from the solemn earnestness of most Holocaust documentaries, Fighter addresses the war and its oft-toxic reverberations with refreshing impudence and candor.

The result is two bad movies in one: a gimmicky romantic comedy, and one of those seasonal headaches that submits loud family dysfunction as a vehicle for Christmas cheer.

The film doesn’t come to life until too late in the game.

Persona feels like an act of disclosure on Bergman’s part, with him pulling back the curtain to acknowledge the fantasy of filmmaking and global realities that linger in his mind.

Fosse spins his runaway narcissism into self-effacing humor and filters the darkest themes through electrifying song-and-dance numbers. The musical sequences are a lesson in choreography, not just for Fosse's renowned wit and invention in handling his dancers, but also in the editing, which fuses music and movement in perfectly timed cuts.

Shattered Glass simply sinks its teeth into a juicy story, never better than when Sarsgaard methodically paints the sniveling Christensen into a corner.

Though conventional in many respects, it feels like no other boxing film ever made, due largely to Eastwood's unmistakable presence on both sides of the camera.

It’s just pure pleasure for 81 minutes, and that’s it.

Damon's minimalist style is key to why the Bourne movies have become an oasis from other blockbuster action fare.

A grand achievement in history and anthropology, supporting its ambition and scope with a sumptuous re-creation of the period and an immediacy that allows a forgotten past to barrel into the present.

Sleepaway Camp keeps defying every possible expectation of how a slasher movie is supposed to behave. It isn’t really scary or atmospheric, but the implements of death... are exceedingly gruesome and unprecedented.

Schrader has always been better as a writer and a critic than as a dramatist, which is why his most successful work has either been published in film journals or directed by Martin Scorsese. His flat, awkward staging diminishes some good performances -- particularly those of Nolte and a welcome Sissy Spacek.

Arriving late to the scene, Another Gay Movie coughs up the same awkward gags about coming of age via false starts and sexual humiliation, only the genuine sweetness and camaraderie that made the first "Pie" movie bearable has been replaced by glib self-awareness.

Playing By Heart covers a broad, multi-generational spectrum of romantic and familial relationships, but Carroll can't resist tying everything together in a shiny red bow. The result is daytime television at its most ambitious, an entire season's worth of flavorless melodrama and placating warmth.

Plenty of entertaining action movies have been made since John Woo's 1992 Hard Boiled, but really, what's the point?

Complain all you want about the affable slobs in Judd Apatow comedies; at least they're not tools.

When victims and their families talk about having their lives wrecked by a sexually abusive priest in the forceful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, that destruction is as much spiritual as psychological.

The fact that the story makes sense at all remains Coppola and his butchers' sole achievement.

May be a bloodless piece of thriller craftsmanship, but at a time when craft has become negligible, its efficiency and whipcrack timing are increasingly uncommon virtues.

Typical of bad improv, the inmates take over the asylum, leaving a movie that's little more than a loose, wildly uneven assemblage of individual comedic shtick.

Mordantly funny deadpan comedy.

Quintessential noir.

The remake simply replaces the laughably dated horror tropes of the 1979 version with a commercial-slick J-horror aesthetic that's sure to look just as silly to audiences in another 15 years.

Does nothing to justify its own existence other than be consistently funny from start to finish.

The film looks to do for reflective surfaces what "Amityville 4" did for killer lamps.

Its hero may be on a mission from above, but in a refreshing twist, the fate of mankind rests with the literate.

It's an exhilaratingly unpredictable experience, and not an easy one to shake.

When pinned mostly in the man's bedroom, Amenábar's flashier instincts are stifled by a bolted camera and a procession of issue-of-the-week clichés.

Screenwriter William Broyles, Jr., a former Vietnam pilot and "Newsweek" editor, connects reasonably well with the material, but "American Beauty" director Sam Mendes has a tendency to smooth out the rough edges, and the film goes flat as month-old soda.

With a cast this stacked, the performances are predictably strong (particularly from Sarsgaard, whose slow-burning role recalls his work in Shattered Glass), but the first impression they make is the same as the last.

Until filmmakers get a little distance, maybe they'd be better off ignoring such projects.

The film's modest charms are ingratiating and sweet, thanks to Colm Meaney's hilariously salty lead performance and a soundtrack that channels the warm spirit of traditional Ceili music.

Has an exhilarating edge. It's only when they open their mouths that the movie gets into trouble.

The big musical setpiece, rife with possibilities for humor and uplift, needed to be funnier and more energetic than the half-hearted lyrics and choreography bother to muster.

The Secret Of The Grain stretches out at the relaxed pace of a seven-course meal, but at the end of it, Kechiche has squeezed the most he can out of percolating dramas within the family and he lets the audience get to know its members without needing to throw them all a subplot.

Taken's subject matter is too serious for an escapist chop-socky movie, and the sleazy, exploitative tone undercuts the thrills.

The film’s biggest problem, beyond the overheated melodrama and paper-thin period trappings, is that the trio's fictionalized dalliances diminish their real art.

A chilly and extraordinarily controlled treatise on film violence, Funny Games punishes the audience for its casual bloodlust by giving it all the sickening torture and mayhem it could possibly desire. Neat trick, that.

Handsomely produced and photographed, which alone distinguishes it from the guerrilla standards of its cut-rate peers, Enron succeeds most by simply making a complex situation graspable, a tall order when the perpetrators are masters of grand-scale deception.

It would be a gigantic understatement to say that Barry Levinson's 1984 film version compromises the original ending, given that it concludes with perhaps the most spectacularly triumphant swing in movie history. And yet as much as it betrays the tragic underpinnings of Malamud's story, the phony ending remains the film's most powerful sequence, earning an ironic place in baseball's iconography.

Every element in the film, from the dense thicket of forest branches to master cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa's deceptive framing and lighting design, is precisely calibrated to make the facts more difficult to discern.

Hooper's abrasive satire on yuppiedom and excess, centering on a brilliantly deranged Dennis Hopper as a Texas ranger looking to avenge the death of his invalid brother, stands out for its unbridled gore and comic mayhem. It just isn't terribly fun to watch.

The big payoff, of course, is Neil Patrick Harris reprising his role as "Neil Patrick Harris."

Fantasy sequences in which Yu and his friends are thrown into the world of a '70s kung-fu film or melodrama seem like a clever way to evoke the period and bring their story to another plane, but they just end up looking cheesy, spoiled by half-executed effects. "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" this ain't.

Rather than cast actors who can't dance or dancers who can't act, Step Up splits the difference with stars Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan, who pull double duty with uninspired competence.

It's an enormous scoop for a Western filmmaker, but a potentially compromising one, too. How much can a filmmaker challenge the dubious elements of Dresnok's story? At what point can the film be considered an unwitting propaganda tool for an oppressive, totalitarian system?

Savage Grace should have the force of Greek tragedy, but Kalin's chamber drama feels curiously stifling and flat, and Moore's volatile turn isn't enough to quicken its pulse.

It’s a fascinating time capsule, catching a new, empowered Democratic machine in its infancy.

Terminally awkward in the way it meshes fake real footage with faker fake footage. It isn’t required to be convincing as fact, but it doesn’t convince as fiction, either.

Sumptuously photographed in bright primary colors, with equally immaculate period clothing and design, Untold Scandal lacks some of the emotional and thematic depth of previous adaptations, but it has the refreshing candor and explicitness that marks the current wave of Korean cinema.

An inexplicable and disastrous mismatch of sensibilities.

The characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity.

From the combustible opening-credits sequence, Caan displays a whip-crack sense of timing, pace, and energy that's so rare for a first-time filmmaker that it's tempting to call him a savant.

Much like his father Ivan (Ghostbusters), first-time director Jason Reitman has a broad, anything-goes comedic sensibility that allows silly gags and incidental humor to sneak in alongside the satirical barbs.

Morvern Callar not only attempts to reveal an interior life, usually the province of novels, but also focuses on the interior life of a woman who refuses to open up to anyone.

Ferrara blows up the everyday threat of harassment and violence against women into a magnified force.

The thinking behind Grey's casting, with its obvious sex-industry connections, lends the film a degree of verisimilitude, but it really pays off in a cameo by film critic Glenn Kenny, who brings a hilariously sleazy theatricality to the role of an "escort critic" who expects graft for his reviews.

None of it would work without Hathaway, whose self-possession and lack of irony represents a throwback to old-fashioned Hollywood wholesomeness and glamour.

Goes through its airport-thriller paces with dazzling kinetics and style.

Weintrob's background in interactive media keeps the film's technology unusually current, but his predictable tongue-clucking over Internet relationships places him squarely in the Luddite camp.

It's often stylish and exciting, but the pile-up of cool kills, hot bodies, and other unprocessed bits of juvenilia doesn't add up to a good time.

Though it's compelling enough as soap opera, American Teen digs deeply into why kids grudgingly accept the roles they've been given and the brutal consequences that come with straying outside the lines.

Born to play a Western hero, Jones sells the film's syrupy message with a soulful, wounded performance, relieved at times by his agreeably cantankerous sense of humor.

The only redeeming moments come from Walken, whose assured, effortless screen presence stands out from his faceless co-stars. Taped to a leather chair and bleeding profusely from a severed finger, he's still the most powerful person in the room.

A big, family-style Italian dinner, catered to the broadest tastes, yet satisfying all the same.

Sweet-natured and likable to a fault, the film studiously avoids confronting the darker themes of death and religion that bubble up from its story, no matter how central they are to the characters' lives.

Lawrence is fortunate to have appealing pros like Grant and Bullock around to bail him out with romantic chemistry and enough crisply delivered one-liners to survive the barren stretches of script.

Going The Distance could stand to color outside the lines a bit more, but it's perceptive about the problems of young people torn between pursuing love or their nascent career ambitions, and the witty script, by first-timer Geoff LaTulippe, is spiked with refreshing profanity.

It may be painful at times, but Rachel Getting Married sure is one heck of a party.

The film deftly sketches a sibling relationship complicated by obligation, guilt, mistrust, and, not least, an abiding love.

In its dramatic shift from the real to the allegorical, the ending of Andrey Zvyagintsev's auspicious debut feature The Return is likely to leave many viewers scratching their heads.

Opens with its snazziest effects sequences and gets cheaper from there, as if studio executives were constantly scaling back the budget as the filmmakers went along.

Remove all the crime-movie trappings—and there aren't that many, once Altman gets through with them—and the film would still endure for its surface alone, capturing the Depression-era South with brushstrokes of language, décor, and radio-plays on the soundtrack.

In the end, Harold And Maude metes out these life lessons directly and without much ambiguity, yet that does little to diminish its power.

The film is an imposing, prismatic achievement, and strongly resistant to an insta-reaction; when it’s over, Nolan still seems a few steps ahead of us.

Part of the problem is Mark Ruffalo, whose tortured sensitivity in "You Can Count On Me" and "We Don't Live Here Anymore" made him seem like Marlon Brando's heir apparent, not Will Smith's.

But coming on the heels of "Red Eye," which is nothing if not an efficient thrill machine, Flightplan can only look conspicuously flat by comparison.

Though Siegel's The Killers dispatches Hemingway after six unfaithful minutes, its roundabout treatment seems truest to his spirit.

Segel has always played more a serial monogamist than a horndog, and his earnest, self-deprecating screen persona graces the film's crudest moments with a kind of innocence.

Asks for sympathy for deplorable behavior.

It’s a busier and less coherent film, too, with a baffling master plot and a crowded pileup of special effects in search of something to do.

Dying to hear George Hamilton’s origin story? No? Well, too bad, because the mediocre, nostalgic-soaked comedy-drama My One And Only, loosely inspired by Hamilton’s childhood, has been produced with a few big stars attached.

For the fascinating character study Imelda, Ramona S. Diaz was given a month's access to the former first lady, who supplies so many bizarre equivocations that it's hard to tell whether her actions were malicious or merely delusional.

It's a tribute to the film's goofy, inconsequential charm that it's still possible to laugh as someone sneaks a bomb past airport security.

An impeccable minimalist drama that's tailored specifically to Devos' expressive capabilities, which say more than the sparse dialogue.

What it has in its favor is affability—some owed to Cusack’s gawky young charisma, some to Holland’s goofy tone and lightly surreal sense of humor, and still more to a cast where even the villains are mostly likeable...To paraphrase the opening narration in The Big Lebowski, Better Off Dead is the movie for its time and place. It fits right in there.

There's hardly a character, plot twist, or musical theme in the whole enterprise that isn't primed to go straight for the tear ducts, as if Johnson assumes that his audience is incapable of mounting a defense.

Scorsese's seductive, dreamlike imagery and Schrader's voiceover narration draw the audience into Bickle's head and reveal the world through his eyes, which see only ugliness and filth.

For a film about man who spent half his life defying staid convention, Kinsey remains as timid as a choirboy.

Few directors are as "extreme" as Miike, but ironically, his entry in Three... Extremes is the least explicit; its suggestive tale of envy and guilt resembles Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" more than Miike's usual six-per-year gorefests.

Madea's Family Reunion represents an advance on Diary, if only because it dials down Madea's shtick (she no longer waves a gun around) and irons out some of those awkward tonal transitions. The chance that Perry's followers will leave disappointed is approximately 0 percent.

Working with non-professional actors, Seidl emphasizes their ordinariness to the point of cartoonish ridicule, putting them in scenarios either banal, perverse, or both at the same time.

Too odd for a studio movie, too cornpone for the independent scene, The Astronaut Farmer finds its creators stuck awkwardly between worlds, making what amounts to a deep curiosity.

Like Antonioni, Coppola was wrestling with the properties of his chosen medium and showing how art can conceal and deceive as much as it can tell us something plain and true.

The best scenes play like "Frankenstein" revisited, with a comically bedraggled Pacino cast as the mad scientist trying to protect his runaway creation from a rabid public.

Revisits the past with an eye on the present and future, hoping as McNamara does that his "lessons" are instructive and might keep history from repeating itself.

The sort of rom-com apparatus that no relationship can overcome.

With shades of Carrie, Harry's magical powers and adolescent angst make a combustible fusion, taking on frightening, vengeful implications that Cuarón honors by refusing to airbrush the shadowy regions of fantasy.

Represents apple-pie mythmaking at its most insidiously thoughtless.

The Village may have finally emptied his usual bag of tricks, but considered on its own merits, its skillful fusion of Grimm fairy-tale horror and pointed social parable find Shyamalan in peak form.

Part courtroom drama, part otherworldly shocker, the film basically restages the Scopes Monkey Trial and comes out once more against Mr. Darrow, and it's got the spine-twisting, tongues-speaking, devil-channeling hellion to prove it.

With nothing at stake dramatically, much less cinematically, Arcand leans heavily on brow-raising repartee to carry the load, but his naked contempt throws a wet blanket over all the frank sexual anecdotes and observations.

The film is memorable mainly for attractive people sailing and smooching against an attractive backdrop. There's no urgency behind all the preening.

The film's greatest achievement is transforming his supposed acts of deviancy into disease-of-the-week uplift, not to mention a moving love story, an irreverent black comedy, and an intellectually compelling study of an artist at work.

Flowers Of Shanghai is concerned with the commodification of sex and its hurtful consequences, but Hou leaves the perversion and beatings off-screen. What remains is a succession of tableaux so vividly realized in purely cinematic terms that the emotions seem to waft from the screen like smoke.

The problem with Sicko--one endemic to Moore documentaries in general--is that it never confronts any challenges to its position, which can make it seem like the crudest sort of agitprop.

Though a clearly gifted new filmmaker, Lugacy doesn't get a handle on the combustible material, and she gets scalded in the process.

Makes heavy demands of even jaded viewers, who are unlikely to stomach de Van's anatomical noodling from the same curious distance. But for the brave, the film's literal journey to find the "I" inside the body moves forward with a riveting single-mindedness.

The film has much more sophistication than the average throwback, but the search for justice across Indian Territory is uncomplicated and righteous, and the half-contentious/half-sentimental relationship between a plucky teenager and an irascible old coot grounds it in the tried-and-true.

Perhaps someday, in the greatest twist of all, Shyamalan will be remembered as the Hitchcock of the early 21st century. Until then, movies like Devil will be misunderstood as schlock.

The Descent sustains a level of intensity that most horror films can barely muster for five minutes.

Brothers isn't nearly as haunting and singular as "Last Days," because the faux-documentary format too closely mirrors the Behind The Music trajectory of a thousand other rock-band flameouts.

Witherspoon's broad, obsessive comic performance is bound to get the most attention, but Broderick does the best work of his career, finding an affecting spot between the all-purpose defiance of Ferris Bueller and the put-upon foil of his recent work.

And it's still, in the spirit of the original film, an unbelievable piece of sh--.

Through Bingenheimer, the film not only gets the last word on the peculiar allure of celebrity, but also captures a fascinating shadow history of West Coast rock, which owes no small part of its livelihood to Bingenheimer's influence as a tastemaker.

Naim directs The Final Cut as if it were the pilot to a TV series: He teases the audience with all sorts of story threads, focuses on a minor self-contained mystery, and leaves the rest for future episodes that will never come.

A movie so nice she made it twice, Susanne Bier's Dogme-certified feature "Open Hearts" gets a slight makeover in her follow-up Brothers, another raw melodrama about three lives recalibrated by sudden tragedy.

It reduces a large cast to an unwieldy collection of simpletons and caricatures.

At least White summons the camp energy that Lake Placid is fecklessly seeking.

Park’s pristine framing and yen for extreme violence give Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance the pop of a graphic novel, but there are times when his point about the poisonous nature of revenge is eclipsed by stylized torture and sadism for its own sake.

The film suffers for her (Brenda Blethyn) egocentrism.

The loaded cast does what it can with the paper-thin characterizations, but Vantage Point gets hijacked early by its high-concept premise, and it quickly devolves into a by-the-numbers thriller with the numbers out of order.

Dane Cook plays a smug jerk in the dismal comedy My Best Friend's Girl. Strike that: He's only ACTING like a smug jerk.

Easy Virtue needs a strong center to justify its celebration of American effrontery, and Biel lacks that prideful edge.

Without any glimmers of depth or subtext.

Caouette's shattering Tarnation represents a landmark in personal filmmaking: It finally realizes the digital dream of a raw, unsanctioned glimpse into the soul.

Four Brothers regresses into gallows comedy, rampant misogyny, and one preposterous Hollywood action setpiece after another.

Just because the live-action Seusses have dialed down expectations doesn't mean that Horton shouldn't aspire to more than time-wasting mediocrity. There are precious childhoods at stake here.

If The Winslow Boy has a flaw, it's that Mamet's style is impeccable to a fault, too cool and remote to have much of an emotional payoff. But since few directors can even approach his level of precision, that's a very minor complaint.

The film feels more at home with sex than war, like a romance novel where the swinging lovers find their passions stirred by bombs exploding in the distance. Their three-way dalliances are so frivolous and silly that once the action turns dark, Duigan and his cast leave audiences unprepared for the emotional fallout.

The simplified, handheld camerawork and the idea of “cutting for emotion” rather than continuity gets the most out of his actors, who are free to clash and improvise within a scene without worrying about hitting their marks.

Within its limited scope, the film celebrates Conti's peculiar dreams and earnest intensity without dipping into condescension.

Jones directs with all the grit that's associated with his onscreen persona, but Peckinpah would never allow this degree of sentimentality to slip into one of his Westerns. A better comparison might be to Clint Eastwood, another tough-guy actor whose work as a director is often a little soft at the center.

Walk Hard offers a quantity of laughs that few comedies could match, yet it's likely to leave viewers vaguely unsatisfied, particularly when the closing minutes completely run out of steam. That's the danger of spoofs: You're only as good as your last laugh.

Cultists will be happy to discover that In The Name Of The King bears all the so-bad-it's-good hallmarks of a classic Boll production.

Everly tries to patch together a profile out of borrowed news clips and shoddy videography. In the process, Frank's charisma and force never emerge.

The primary challenge for all blockbuster franchises is to be big yet fleet. Iron Man is as good as model as any, thanks largely to Robert Downey Jr.’s flamboyantly narcissistic Tony Stark and filmmakers that valued pacing and character as much as superhero hardware.

There are many stretches when it's easy to forget that Get Smart is a spoof; it's more like a third-rate James Bond with pratfalls.

Fantastic Mr. Fox may be his most purely pleasurable film to date, evoking the Dahl books and Rankin-Bass productions that so transported him as a kid.

Too often, Saints And Soldiers confuses bravery for faith.

In the wild and consistently surprising Y Tu Mamá También, anything isn't the half of it.

A Molière this good deserves a more substantive portrait, but this one will do for now.

Comes from a pure place. Or rather, it comes from a DESIRE for a pure place in a game poisoned by mercenary compromise.

Fukunaga paints better outside the lines, working with cinematographer Adriano Goldman to offer vivid shots of the poverty and despair cutting through Latin America, of gang rituals and territorial skirmishes, and of ordinary people taking dangerous routes to a better life that may be a mirage. Next time, a few rewrites please.

Perhaps because the trial hits so many delays and roadblocks, Twist Of Faith doesn't gather much dramatic momentum, though there's something to be said for the emotional grind of running in place.

Adjusting to Martel's style requires patience, but her indirection pays dividends, culminating in an unforgettable final shot that flies in the face of narrative expectations.

Currently serving out a sentence that will likely consume the remainder of his life, Spector turns the interview into a trial on his own terms--one that's gripping, revelatory, and a little self-incriminating.

Only Edie Falco, appearing as a bereft mother leading a citizen's group that searches for missing children, suggests the great film that Freedomland might have been.

With the exception of Hilary Swank, whose earnestness spoils the fun, a stellar cast seems in on the joke.

The film has a warmth and raucousness that's surprisingly disarming.

Taken on a camp level, there's a lot of fun to be had here, even if the movie may actually take itself seriously.

It's a little disappointing to see Van Sant dial back into mainstream respectability. Had he evoked Harvey Milk's life with the poetry that he did Kurt Cobain's, Milk might have been something special.

Killers isn’t an entertainment, it’s a high-speed spat.

In any form, Apocalypse Now remains an audacious, powerful, and haunting vision of war as a waking nightmare, and the new print looks and sounds better than ever. But as much as Redux was born of Coppola's intellectual restlessness, it also speaks to his unwillingness to make tough choices and live with them.

Random silliness rules the day, but the gags are frequently surprising.

Everything abhorrent about Death Wish—its inner-city stereotyping and casual racism; its embrace of lawlessness and righteous bloodletting; Paul’s rancid transformation from naïve, bleeding-heart liberal into gun-toting angel of vengeance—gets blown up to such a grotesque degree that no sane person could mistake its world for the real one. It’s like a paranoid right-wing small-towner’s vision of what the big city is like: a gang-infested war zone, lorded over by the cast of Breakin’.

He's (Corbijn) a patient, fastidious filmmaker with a great eye-ideal for his subject here-but his austerity doesn't entirely erase the suspicion that he doesn't have much on his mind. His film is a triumph, but it may be a triumph of style over substance.

Cruise is thrown into many sticky situations, with legions of trained assassins surrounding him on all sides, but he never once suggests that things aren’t entirely under control. It’s profoundly boring to watch a hero without weaknesses; after all, even Superman has Kryptonite.

It would be tempting to call Storytelling a narrow and simplistic examination of the creative process, if only Solondz weren't so quick to agree.

There's an audience out there for this kind of thing--Cook is obviously a populist, and Norbit made bushels of money--but if this is what passes for funny, what in the world of comedy DOESN'T qualify?

Can't help but be deeply engrossing, as it taps into a highly charged atmosphere that one parent dubs "a different form of child abuse."

Though Pieces Of April comes together with improbable grace, Hedges evokes unearned tears from a premise that's already loaded from the start. Like Holmes, he serves up boxed stuffing and canned cranberries, then fishes for compliments to the chef.

It's rare for a comedy to be as fully worked-out and exquisitely timed as An Amazing Couple; just don't expect to warm to it.

The shooting of the movie-within-a-movie offers the brightest moments in Son Of Rambow, a testament to the innocence of the boys' creative impulse and the sheer unlikely pleasure of their friendship.

As much as the jurors at this year's Cannes Film Festival insisted that the Palme D'Or was awarded to the best film in competition, it was a sign of the times that they chose to honor Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, marking a clear and decisive victory for ideology over aesthetics.

The entertaining new documentary The Heart Of The Game at least acknowledges many of the same conflicts that arose in Hoop Dreams, even though it's really more about two outsized personalities and their infectious passion for the sport.

Once In A Lifetime is less a proper documentary than an extended VH1 Behind The Music episode, but there's only a little bit wrong with that.

In its strongest moments, Tully has the quality of a good short story, in the way it details the underlying affection and resentment that creeps into the lives of its four main characters, played with great sensitivity by a cast of mostly unknowns.

Intoxicates and overwhelms at the same time, giving off so much pleasure in a small space that the effect can be suffocating.

With her (Latifah), Just Wright feels hampered by arbitrary contrivances; without her, it wouldn't be enough movie to exist at all.

The Decalogue finds Kieslowski and co-scenarist Krzysztof Piesiewicz turning a delicate cycle of intimate, funny, heartbreaking, and compassionate works into a symphony of human fallibility.

A pleasantly inconsequential small-town quirkfest that's presumably more meaningful to native audiences.

It sends a bad message to the film's young audience that the daughter of a world leader needn't be more than a vapid bikini-stuffer.

In keeping with his concept that the mind and the body are inseparable, Sade builds to an extraordinarily powerful centerpiece when the two come together, fusing fear and desire, pleasure and pain, innocence and enlightenment.

Madonna presents the three leads as flawed but essentially decent and redeemable, but they're bound up in a story that's meant to affirm a vague set of values. If she needs to justify the "Sex" book by charting her own contrived path from filth to heavenly wisdom, that's fine. But she should do it on her own time.

By the end, even Goodman seems to have lost interest.

Though it gets far too cute, The Cuckoo settles into the snappy rhythms of a promising sitcom pilot, at least until Rogozhkin decides to get serious.

In the scope of things, Ohwon's story is a route into the larger story of an uncertain and tumultuous period in Korea, and it's here that Chi-hwa-seon loses its grip.

Once again, Dumont cycles through the pet themes of films like "L'Humanité" and "Twentynine Palms," but their repetition is beginning to seem like shtick.

Craven’s best work resolves the contradictions of his bloodlust and intellect—in that, Deadly Blessing isn’t one of his best.

In Jewison's hands, this cat-and-mouse game plays like third-rate John Le Carré, treading lethargically over high-minded intrigue that mixes fact, fiction, and unlikely speculation in dubious relation to the historical record.

John Woo's smart thriller Paycheck may not intend to be political, but it's marked as much by its era as post-Watergate thrillers like "The Parallax View" or "Three Days Of The Condor."

Martha Coolidge's bright, whimsical Real Genius can credit part of its substantial and richly deserved cult following to the fact that nothing has changed: Raunchy, lowbrow teen comedies are forever in vogue, and SDI is still an impossible, money-sucking political mirage.

The main problem with “Hong Kong Trilogy” is that it over-promises and under-delivers.

Rocket Science doesn't go too far into Todd Solondz-style mockery, either; though painful to witness at times, Thompson's determination to face his fears--not just of speaking, but of girls, too--is heartbreakingly noble and courageous.

A little focus might have helped. Or not: The Dry Land seems intent to tick off a checklist of PTSD symptoms without animating them with fresh details or creative life. It's cloaked in an earnestness that suffocates.

After Hours is a caffeinated black comedy with an emphasis on speed. With a small crew and a tight shooting schedule, Scorsese transformed limited means into a staccato burst of creative energy, playing up the extreme paranoia and frustration of a data processor stranded in Soho.

Edited with an impeccable sense of timing and rhythm, with each new revelation and insight planted at just the right moment, Bus 174 examines an already gripping story from a moving and untold perspective.

In a sense, Oasis is an unabashed tearjerker, but Lee keeps knocking the melodrama off-balance, making all the big emotional payoffs a little discomforting, because they're not that far removed from something really disturbing.

The film too closely resembles what it's attempting to spoof--minus the obvious payoffs, of course.

Roth gets the notes right while missing the music: He studiously replicates Miike's unblinking depiction of torture, but without much reflection or wit. It's merely unpleasant and more than a little dumb.

Recommended to those who feel "The Crucible" doesn't feature enough bodies ripped in half vertically. Others are duly warned.

Drifting through time and space without firmly situating the viewer, Iwai's elliptical style requires patience, but also a willingness to be carried along by its gorgeous, dreamy lyricism.

Without the mythical power or giddy adventurousness of the first two Star Wars movies, the impact is strangely numbing, like watching a two-and-a-half-hour ILM show reel in search of moneyed investors.

Fast, exhilarating new comedy.

Broderick’s tendency to hang all his problems on corporate greed and heartless bureaucracy leads to some strange missteps.

For all of Audrey Tautou's considerable charm in the title role, Jeunet's need for a well-ordered universe proved as suffocating and exhausting as being trapped on an amusement-park ride.

There's little wrong with Charlie, but it needs the Burton of old to animate its candy-colored universe with mischief and awe. Instead, he remains trapped like Wonka in a hermetic house of wonders, and the movie suffocates along with him.

As it progresses from black comedy to something approaching surreal horror, El Crimen Perfecto swells into a nightmare reminiscent of Griffin Dunne's journey through Soho hell in "After Hours."

Its dense mysteries remain more tantalizing than distancing: No other director integrates the creepy with the cerebral quite like Cronenberg. (Review of DVD 9/13/04)

Runs more smoothly and stylishly than the average teen comedy.