Stephen Holden

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The New York Times
For 2,306 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 50% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 47% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 6.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Stephen Holden's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 After Life
Lowest review score: 0 Old Dogs
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,039 out of 2306
  2. Mixed: 918 out of 2306
  3. Negative: 349 out of 2306
2306 movie reviews
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    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Rumble in the Bronx
    The movie is a giddy triple somersault of a film that makes no sense whatsoever, although in its best moments it is as much fun to watch as a death-defying circus act.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Sunlight Jr.
    Despite the intensity of their performances, Ms. Watts and Mr. Dillon are only fleetingly convincing as these desperate young Americans trying to maintain a foothold.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Day Night Day Night
    Maddeningly, purposefully evasive.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    13 Tzameti
    With its icy cynicism and desolate settings, the film evokes the work of the young Roman Polanski in his sadistic trickster mode.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Role Models
    With the ferocity of a drill instructor and the boundless confidence of a self-help guru who combines psychobabble clichés with embarrassingly explicit confessions, Ms. Lynch's Gayle redeems the movie from utter banality.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Criminal
    Even with its tepid lead performance, Criminal is a clever and diverting caper film. At least, it is as long as you don't think too hard about it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Red
    Once Avery's mission assumes a Freudian dimension, the allegory loses its moral force and changes from a meditation on justice, power and inequality into a gory melodrama.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Jane Austen Book Club
    Such a well-acted, literate adaptation of Karen Joy Fowler’s 2004 best seller that your impulse is to forgive it for being the formulaic, feel-good chick flick that it is.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    17 Girls
    Wavering between light comedy and drama with wonderfully natural performances, 17 Girls doesn't judge anyone's behavior.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Evil
    The movie is as blunt as its title. It portrays such behavior as "evil" without offering any deep insights or revelations, beyond handing out the plot equivalent of a lollipop at the end of the movie as compensation for the vicarious anguish.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Welcome
    Compelling, finely balanced immigration drama.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Adult World
    Mr. Cusack’s sardonic, understated portrayal of Rat, who is not quite what he says he is, grounds the movie in a wistfully cynical realism.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Where God Left His Shoes
    Although Mr. Leguizamo wisely underplays a role that is just short of saintly, the character is still a filmmaker's bogus, bleeding-heart contrivance in a movie that is much less truthful than it pretends to be.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Dogville
    While you watch the movie, it can seem ridiculously long-winded. But once it's over, its characters' miserable faces remain etched in your memory, and its cynical message lingers.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    At Any Price
    If At Any Price overstates its points, they are still worth making. And the hot-wired performances by Mr. Quaid and Mr. Efron drive them home in a movie that sticks to your ribs and stays in your head.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Boynton Beach Club
    Smoothly balancing comedy and pathos, it infuses the fantasy with enough credibility to make you care about these people and wish them merrily on their way.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Machinist
    May be an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror, but that's all it is. Don't look for the kind of metaphoric weight you'd find in a movie by David Lynch or David Fincher.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Come Undone
    Like Mr. Soldini's last film, "Days and Clouds," a calm, very sad examination of the effects of a husband's sudden job loss on an affluent couple's relationship and social life, Come Undone is solidly grounded in mundane reality. If the movie tells an old story, its unvarnished realism lends it poignancy and depth.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Light Between Oceans
    As a drama about adult responsibility, selfishness and moral obligations, however, it never wavers in its commitment to examine what it means to raise a child.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Emperor's New Clothes
    Although there's plenty of opportunity for low comedy in the notion of an emperor and an oaf exchanging roles, The Emperor's New Clothes, much to its detriment, doesn't pursue them.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Tab Hunter Confidential
    Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary portrait Tab Hunter Confidential is as mild-mannered and blandly likable as its subject.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Stone Cold
    Once the movie gets down to business, the muscle and pyrotechnics take over. The action -- especially the motorcycle chases through the marble government halls -- pack a fairly good visceral charge.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Decay of Fiction
    If there were more experimental films as entertaining as The Decay of Fiction, Pat O’Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Iraqi Odyssey
    Watching it is like slowly leafing through a giant scrapbook whose contents include the individual stories of a large extended family.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Beyond the arty trappings and flamboyant showmanship that are typical of Mr. Greenaway, 73, Eisenstein in Guanajuato is a brazen provocation.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Where Do We Go Now?
    At heart, this jolly, galumphing crowd-pleaser, which won the audience award at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, is a raucous sitcom about scrappy little boys whose canny mamas conspire to keep them out of trouble.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Crime of Padre Amaro
    A suds-filled political melodrama that bashes the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico with a contempt that verges on hysteria, could be accused of many things, but timidity is not one of them.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Cake Eaters
    Superior acting elevates a small, overcrowded ensemble piece set in rural upstate New York into something a little deeper and truer than the mawkish disease-of-the-week movie it threatens to become.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Delta
    A film that's alternatingly intriguing and frustrating and that leaves too many loose ends dangling.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Breathe In
    What distinguishes Breathe In from countless similar movies about marital discontent and disruption is the restraint with which the story is handled, the subtlety of its performances and its almost perverse refusal to turn into a prurient, heavy-breathing examination of adultery and its consequences.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    The most gripping scene in this near-perfect little sports comedy is a fraternal arm-wrestling contest that reaches apoplectic intensity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Daybreak
    If Daybreak weren't so powerfully acted, its accumulating anguish would be too much to bear. As it is, all three couples, especially Knut and Mona, verge on caricature.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    American Casino
    The lesson of this story: if enough money is involved, greed trumps morality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Importance of Being Earnest
    For all its distractions and additions, The Importance of Being Earnest is still a reasonably entertaining costume comedy. Wilde's satirical voice may be muffled, but at least it is audible.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Together
    Together may not be overtly political, but its vision of contemporary Beijing, where brazen, fashion-crazed gold diggers like Lili bait their hooks to snare arrogant, slippery wheeler-dealers who end up playing her for a sucker, has bite.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Oranges and Sunshine
    Rona Munro's screenplay for Oranges and Sunshine is unnecessarily flighty. As the story ricochets between Britain and Australia, the film often loses track of time and becomes fragmented as it struggles to integrate too many subplots. What holds it together is Ms. Watson's calm, sturdy performance.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Last Five Years
    In Mr. Jordan’s portrayal of Jamie, this handsome talented musical theater performer (“Newsies”) goes for the jugular in taking down his character and making him insufferable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Any Day Now
    An outraged, unblinking depiction of institutionalized homophobia three decades ago, when the prevailing court opinion in adoption cases was that exposing a child to a homosexual environment was harmful. Never mind that nobody else wants Marco.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Because the film doesn’t begin to explore the wider implications of that loss of trust, its findings don’t add up to more than a sardonic gloss on a provocative subject.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The White Countess
    With its tentative pace, fussy, pieced-together structure and stuffy emotional climate, The White Countess never develops any narrative stamina.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Great Expectations
    Containing enough characters and subplots for three movies, the novel has been nearly suffocated by Mr. Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”) and his screenwriter, David Nicholls, in an effort to get everything in.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Neon Bible
    When a poetically inclined film fixates on the same image too often, it is a sign that the movie may have succumbed to its own dreamy esthetic. That is one of the problems of The Neon Bible, the English director Terence Davies's hallucinatory portrait of the American South half a century ago.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Bride Flight
    Best enjoyed as a lavish period travelogue whose story is dwarfed by its panoramic overview.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Gloomy Sunday
    The story is so schematically histrionic that the bringing in of the Holocaust late in the day feels exploitative and unearned. Gloomy Sunday is an oddity that takes itself much too seriously.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Mr. Nice
    An affable throwback to those guilt-free days when hippie drug dealers radiated the glamorous aura of avant-garde heroes risking prison to spread the doctrine of liberation through cannabis.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Concert
    The harder this desperately obsequious circus of a movie tries to entertain, the more it falls short.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Red Doors
    This agreeable, lightweight movie, written and directed by Georgia Lee, turns the malaises of a suburban family into bittersweet farce that teeters between cheeky humor and surface pathos.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Machete
    For all its political button pushing, Machete is too preposterous to qualify as satire. The only viewers it is likely to upset are the same kind of people who once claimed that the purple Tinky Winky in "Teletubbies" promoted a gay agenda.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Governess
    Because the cinematography of The Governess is so richly panoramic, the movie forces you to contemplate the emotional power exerted by film.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Love Is All You Need
    As Love Is All You Need ties up its loose ends, it settles into a rom-com formula with a predictable, upbeat ending. It feels good, sort of.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    On My Way
    Because Ms. Deneuve, 70, is in almost every scene, On My Way feels like Ms. Bercot’s loving character study of a star who has always stood above the fray, a symbol of resilient Gallic femininity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Mr. Elba’s towering performance lends “Long Walk to Freedom” a Shakespearean breadth.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Fred Won't Move Out
    Except for a subplot about a missing cat that suggests that Fred may be considerably dottier than he appears, the movie gets almost everything right about the uncomfortable moment when grown children are forced to be their parents' parents.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Rules Don't Apply
    The wonder of the movie, which Mr. Beatty wrote and directed from a story he wrote with Bo Goldman, is that it is so good-humored. Fools and idiots abound, but demonic, systemic evil does not.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Forsaken
    Had it exhibited a modicum of restraint, The Forsaken could have been twice as scary.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Palmetto
    The film, adapted from a novel by James Hadley Chase, aspires to out-noir every other film noir that has been lumped under that popular term, including "The Big Sleep" (which it resembles), in plot trickery and steaminess.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Happy Accidents
    As impressive as it is in the abstract, all the detail ultimately drags the movie down and lengthens it unnecessarily.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Never Been Kissed
    So hopelessly cartoonish and wrongheaded in its details that there's not even a semblance of reality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Brassed Off
    Brassed Off is shamelessly manipulative and sentimental, but in an agreeably familiar way.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Happy, Happy
    Sets out to puncture the clichéd image of Scandinavians as rosy-cheeked choristers bonded in communal togetherness. But its subversive intentions are ultimately undercut by its lack of nerve, along with a lurking sentimentality.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Kumaré
    A goal of this practical program of discipline and reflection is to cultivate an inner guru so that you don't need someone like Kumaré.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Benny's Video (1992)
    What gives the film a chilly authenticity is the creepy performance of Arno Frisch in the title role. Cool and unsmiling, with a dark inscrutable gaze, his Benny is the apotheosis of what the author George W. S. Trow has called the cold child, or an unfeeling young person whose detachment and short attention span have been molded by television.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    The Iceman
    If the narrow biographical focus of “The Iceman” prevents it from being a great crime movie, on its own more modest terms it is an indelible film that clinches Mr. Shannon’s status as a major screen actor.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Electrick Children
    Electrick Children is well acted and refreshingly nonjudgmental, but its narrative continuity is tenuous at best. As it jounces along toward a pat, unsatisfying ending, it leaves essential questions unanswered. But the movie’s underlying sweetness leaves a residual glow.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Go for Zucker
    It's the rare German movie calling itself a comedy that is actually funny, even if only in bits and pieces.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Lonely Hearts
    As fictional characters in a movie that is fetishistic in its attention to period detail, Mr. Leto and Ms. Hayek work well together as an unsavory couple two rungs down the social ladder from Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity."
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    5 Days of War
    The movie is a continuous barrage of explosions, sneak attacks, chases, life-and-death face-offs, and amazing rescues that are as far-fetched as they are exhilarating. The cheap thrills are compounded by Mikko Alanne and David Battle's screenplay, a wallow in old-time Hollywood boilerplate, some of which you can't believe is being recycled yet again.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Standing Tall
    Mr. Paradot’s performance is so viscerally intense that there is no escaping its force.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    She's Lost Control
    She’s Lost Control sustains a mood of deepening alienation, but the attitude of the movie is too detached for it to be emotionally gripping, and its ending is botched.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Mortal Kombat
    The movie's extensive martial arts sequences, in which combatants bounce off each other doing triple handsprings, suggest a slightly more earthbound version of the aerial ballets in Hong Kong action-adventure films.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Fantasia 2000
    Not especially innovative in its look or subject matter.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Only the Strong Survive
    In its zeal to bring recognition to an underappreciated genre, it has an agenda similar to that of last year's revelatory documentary "Standing in the Shadows of Motown."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Perfect Storm
    The Perfect Storm is no "Titanic."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Humbling
    The movie is too shrewd to qualify as a jeremiad, but underneath the comedy are boiling undercurrents of anger and despair.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Breakfast on Pluto
    In a year overcrowded with wonderful performances by lead actors, Mr. Murphy's immensely appealing turn ranks among the strongest.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Disco and Atomic War
    Disco and Atomic War describes propaganda battles between the Soviet Union and the West, with Estonian Communist officials charged to gain the upper hand, but they were helpless amid the onslaught.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Road to Nowhere
    If Mr. Hellman's movie only partly fulfills its promise as a gripping neo-noir mystery, his stylistic hallmarks lend it a singularly haunting atmosphere.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Unconscious
    If Unconscious consistently overplays its hand, its fusion of a Sherlock Holmes-style detective story (Alma is the master sleuth, and Salvador her Dr. Watson) with a delirious bedroom farce in the spirit of early Pedro Almodóvar is frequently very funny.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    L'ennui
    Overly schematic, not always believable in its crude sexual mechanics and ultimately unsensual. But it lays out the laws of erotic attraction with a brutal directness that is downright scary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Waking the Dead
    Forever stumbling over itself and breaking its own spell.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Shakespeare High
    Performing Shakespeare can save children's lives. That is the persuasive argument of Alex Rotaru's documentary Shakespeare High, an inspiring, if too short and overcrowded, examination of the competition among high schools at the 90th annual Drama Teachers Association of Southern California Shakespeare Festival.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Outside the Law
    As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Better Than Chocolate
    For all the real problems faced by its characters, Better Than Chocolate is finally a comic rhapsody to romantic love, the possibility of happily ever after within an all-accepting subculture.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Just a Sigh
    The movie is beautifully acted, and the chemistry between Ms. Devos, who is 49 (her character is 43), and Mr. Byrne, 63, is heated in a sadder-but-wiser, grown-up way.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    That Darn Cat
    While Mr. Doug brings plenty of enthusiasm to the task, he doesn't have the moves, and the scene, which ends with his following a mouse into a Dumpster, is one dull thud. The movie also crams far too many subsidiary characters into its 89 bumpy minutes.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Go for Sisters
    As long as Go for Sisters is focused on its characters, it remains on firm ground. But the flimsy detective story draped over them is underdeveloped and too sluggishly paced to take hold.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Contender
    A cast that chews the scenery with such obvious enjoyment that you're happy to put up with its tin-eared oratory and preposterous plot turns for the sake of a good ride.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Man Who Bought Mustique
    A compulsively watchable but repugnant portrait of a selfish eccentric born to privilege.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Lost World: Jurassic Park
    Where the original film was a cut-and-dried Pop-Art-flavored allegory pitting scientific hubris against the unpredictable, ungovernable forces of nature, the sequel is an all-stops-pulled, edge-of-your-seat adventure film whose messages are not so neatly packaged.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Love! Valour! Compassion!
    One reason the film version of Terrence McNally's play Love! Valour! Compassion! is so moving is that this complicated group portrait never loses its slippery emotional footing.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Railway Man
    Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Washington Heights
    For all its untidiness, Washington Heights teems with life, and its star, Mr. Perez, has charisma to burn. The movie vividly depicts the interdependence and solidarity of people in working-class urban neighborhoods where residents really need one another.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    The Playroom
    The Playroom captures the malaise of mid-’70s suburbia with a merciless accuracy not seen since Ang Lee’s 1997 film, “The Ice Storm.”
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Heartbreaker
    Yes, Heartbreaker is diverting, intermittently charming and occasionally funny, but it is also a jumble of jammed-together notions. Unevenly paced, it goes on too many tangents to cohere as a persuasive comic fable about love and money.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Nico and Dani
    Amazingly, Cesc Gay's delicate but unblinking film Nico and Dani succeeds in capturing and sustaining the fragile emotional climate of curiosity, fear, innocence and prurience that surrounds adolescent sexual experimentation.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Front Line
    A movie that reserves its final sickening wallop for a grueling half-hour that leaves you as emotionally battered as the soldiers are forced to return to hell for one last senseless round.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Bridget Jones's Baby
    Despite an abundance of mostly tepid jokes that keeps the comedic tone at a quiet simmer, Bridget Jones’s Baby doesn’t jell. Ms. Zellweger floats through the picture, charming but strangely detached from her suitors.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    A Perfect Murder
    The story has enough nasty twists and tantalizing clues for its ingenious mechanics to remain engaging.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Mission: Impossible
    A sleek, whooshingly entertaining update of the vintage television series.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Sliding Doors
    Once the movie throws in a jolting, late-in-the-gameplot twist that could have been borrowed from "City of Angels," it never regains its balance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    American Pimp
    What we are left with is a mildly entertaining "man on the street" gloss, seasoned with fragments from blaxploitation movies and music by Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and others.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Double
    A moldy, post-cold-war spy thriller.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Naqoyqatsi
    By far the grimmest of these nonnarrative, nonverbal cinematic tone poems with epic ambitions. Although none of the three could be described as cheery, Naqoyqatsi, whose title is the Hopi Indian term for war as a way of life, reeks of doomsday.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Madame Satã
    It is a voluptuous, hot-blooded portrait of a social outcast, a black, homosexual criminal who in acting out his gaudiest Hollywood dreams, transcendently reinvented himself.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Whistleblower
    For all its high-mindedness, The Whistleblower has a choppy, fumbling screenplay (by Ms. Kondracki and Eilis Kirwan) that lurches between shrill editorializing and vagueness while sorting through more characters than it can comfortably handle or even readily identify.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Me and You
    [A] small, beautifully made film.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Learning to Drive
    As this movie, directed by Isabel Coixet, tracks the deepening friendship between people from different cultures and backgrounds, it acquires an unforced metaphorical resonance.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Magic Trip
    Magic Trip is the cinematic equivalent of a yellowed scrapbook whose pictures are accompanied by sketchy captions created after the fact.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Little Lili
    For all its spikiness, there are hurdles that La Petite Lili cannot overcome. Abridged and abbreviated, Chekhov's leisurely philosophic reflections evoke a musty aroma of pressed flowers in a scrapbook that is out of tune with the times.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Handsome Harry
    A powerfully acted but strident road movie.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 0 Stephen Holden
    Old Dogs
    This imbecilic, mean-spirited farce, which sneers at adults, leaves you wondering: where are the Three Stooges when we really need them?
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    American Swing
    It leaves you feeling queasy.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Nanny McPhee
    In the endearing but somewhat scatterbrained British film Nanny McPhee, Emma Thompson creates an indelible character reminiscent of Mary Poppins as conceived by the author P. L. Travers and the illustrator Mary Shepard.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Onegin
    Feels too cramped, indoorsy and bloodless to catch romantic fire.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Wimbledon
    Although Wimbledon is a much more conventional film, it still has cleverer-than-average dialogue and sharply drawn subsidiary characters.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    Unlike those in the book, who speak through e-mails, diaries, letters and interviews, the characters here leave the impression of giving harmless nibbles instead of flesh wounds. Defanged and pushed into the background, the satire vanishes, and you are left with an agreeable romantic comedy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Look
    This is not to say that Charlotte Rampling: The Look is a complete washout. A tease is more like it, an examination of the surface. Ms. Rampling is presented as an endlessly watchable mystery, an aloof but affable sphinx. But we knew that already.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    The film may be a mess - narratively muddled and crammed with many more vampires, shape-shifters and sorcerers than one movie can handle, but it bursts with a sick, carnivorous glee in its own fiendish games.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Norwegian Wood
    The film has the loose narrative structure of a quasi-poetic personal journal that is more a series of reflections than a cohesive story.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Steep
    An undeniably impressive visual spectacle that follows the sport of extreme skiing.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Kelly & Cal
    The performances of Ms. Lewis and Mr. Weston crackle with authenticity. Like a good punk-rock song, this bracingly honest, tough-minded vignette stays true to itself.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Gently, affectionately and with wit, this lovely movie gives the 1950's its due, but not for a moment does it go overboard and make you want to go back there.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Troubadours
    The enjoyable, lightweight Troubadours is a musical scrapbook that throws together a bit of this and a bit of that.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Adam Resurrected
    The film is so flat that it leaves you wondering if Mr. Kaniuk's book is ultimately untranslatable to the screen.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Acts of Worship
    It's about individuals, not about sensations. If the characters' backgrounds are not examined in detail, the movie still conveys an intimate sense of who they are and their emotional connections.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Swimming Upstream
    The role, one of the meatiest of Mr. Rush's career, is equal in flash and complexity to his turns as the pianist David Helfgott in "Shine" and the Marquis de Sade in "Quills."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Kansas City
    If the movie, which uses blues-based Kansas City jazz as a raucous, nonverbal Greek chorus, lacks the emotional range of Mr. Altman's masterpiece, ''Nashville,'' it still has its own brawling vitality.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
    Choppy, high-energy documentary.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Tuvalu
    Helmer's wildly whimsical debut film, Tuvalu, is the kind of movie that might one day find itself in the hall of fame of surreal movie weirdness alongside cult favorites like "Eraserhead," "Delicatessen" and the avant-garde frolics of Guy Maddin.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    Occasionally, this richly lyrical movie passes over the line separating sympathetic exploration from freak-show condescension.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Love & Air Sex
    Love & Air Sex has a spontaneity and cheeky attitude... along with spirited naturalistic performances that infuse the standard rom-com formula with a zany vitality.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Bridge
    This eerie and indelible documentary about suicide juxtaposes transcendent beauty with personal tragedy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Shrek Forever After
    What fortifies Shrek Forever After are its brilliantly realized principal characters, who nearly a decade after the first “Shrek” film remain as vital and engaging fusions of image, personality and voice as any characters in the history of animation.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    Nobody does adultery in movies with more style and zest than the French, especially when the mode is frivolous. And anyone who watches Happily Ever After can identify with the grass-is-always-greener daydreams that haunt its characters.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Danny Collins
    What authenticity Mr. Cannavale and Ms. Bening bring to their roles is the sense of groundedness and integrity for one-note characters in a movie whose screenplay is little more than an efficiently executed outline.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Freaked
    Freaked, which was directed by Mr. Winter and Tom Stern from a screenplay they wrote with Tim Burns, has the candy-colored glow of a goofy psychedelic comic book and the irreverent sensibility of Mad Magazine.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Easy Virtue
    In its cold-eyed assessment of the English aristocracy Easy Virtue has none of the lurking Anglophilia found in Merchant-Ivory movies.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Grey Zone
    Certainly an honorable film. But honorable is not always watchable.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Solomon & Gaenor
    Does an almost dismayingly good job of conveying its characters' grim, bare-bones existence and the stultifying sexual and religious taboos that the lovers flout.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Frontera
    Frontera settles into a shallow, unconvincing drama with two heroes.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    (Untitled)
    If “(Untitled)” shrewdly hedges its bets about the value of it all, it is ultimately on the side of experimental music and art and their champions, no matter how eccentric. For that alone this brave little movie deserves an audience.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Trench
    What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Populaire
    The best scenes are the contests in which the competitors hammer away, executing the kind of grand flourishes with each return of the carriage that Liberace exhibited at the piano.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Hello Lonesome
    Adam Reid's smart, poignant trilogy of interwoven vignettes, manages the considerable feat of creating six fully human characters who are quirky enough to transcend the stereotypes found in a typical indie film.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    A Hologram for the King
    It takes an actor with the finesse of Tom Hanks to turn a story of confusion, perplexity, frustration and panic into an agreeably uncomfortable comedy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Abschied - Brechts letzter Sommer
    Extremely well acted. But as frequently as The Farewell touches on politics, it is essentially an excoriating (and sometimes grimly amusing) domestic drama of a latter-day king and his concubines.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    First Snow
    A noirish thriller that revels in ominous visual moods, deepened by Cliff Martinez's spare, shivering guitar score, this heartland "Appointment in Samarra" is a mind-teaser that speaks the flat, evasive language of its seedy characters.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Finest Hours
    The Finest Hours is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles the ’50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Tree
    The movie is truly a tree-hugger's delight (I confess to being one such hugger) that makes the most of its metaphors without straining toward supernatural schmaltz.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    City of Ember
    At only 95 minutes, the movie feels as though it had been shredded in the editing room. In Hollywood-speak, it has a weak second act.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Myth of Fingerprints
    Has some good performances (Ms. Moore's ongoing snit is a terrifically sustained bit of glowering), but it only barely begins to knit its self-pitying characters into a credible family unit. They are oddballs with attitude.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    American Pie
    Among this year's bumper crop of shallow teen-age movies, it is the shallowest and the most prurient.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    May
    Led by Ms. Bettis's discreetly campy May, the performances are a cut or two above what you would find in the average slasher film. But in the end that's all it is.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Forget Baghdad: Jews and Arabs - The Iraqi Connection
    Never finds a comfortable fit between its biographies and its theorizing.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Freakonomics
    The jocular screen adaptation of the 2005 best seller "Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" is a shallow but diverting alternative to the book.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Sex and Zen
    For those who accept the absurd simulations as realistic, Sex and Zen will have soft-core pornographic appeal. For others, its appeal should be as a cheeky if predictable sendup of erotic obsession and its unhappy consequences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Gemma Bovery
    Think of Gemma Bovery as an airy puff pastry, dripping with honey.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    A Royal Night Out
    What makes A Royal Night Out palatable are the lead performances.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Emile
    While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Felon
    Mr. Dorff’s hot-wired portrayal of a prisoner under physical and psychic siege gives Felon its emotional through line as Wade’s attitude metamorphoses from stunned disbelief, to terror, to despair, to fury and finally to hope.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Storm
    For a political thriller, Storm is remarkably restrained. There are no flashbacks to the wars in the Balkans or to the atrocities in the hotel.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Yards
    For all its incongruities, The Yards is a serious film that strives for a moral complexity and a textural density rarely found in contemporary dramas.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Holy Land
    A barbed reflection on the great divide between secular and ultra-Orthodox Judaism in Israeli culture. But its digressive screenplay lacks focus and momentum and is too oblique to connect many of the dots between its characters and their behavior.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Free Radicals
    Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Renaissance
    Over the course of 105 minutes, the brutal high contrast begins to strain the eyes. Effectively moody as it is, the style makes a convoluted story of corporate greed, high-tech espionage and science run amok even more difficult to follow.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Keeping Up with the Steins
    Keeping Up With the Steins would have been a much better film if it had waited twice as long before retracting its fangs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Chelsea on the Rocks
    An enraptured fantasia of high times at the hotel, the film is so intoxicated with the Chelsea’s bohemian mystique it virtually consumes itself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Flawless
    A mildly diverting period heist movie.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 10 Stephen Holden
    The Amati Girls
    Although the concept seems promising enough, it is undone by disastrous casting decisions and an utter lack of ensemble unity.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Severe Clear
    At its most provocative, Severe Clear pungently evokes a heroic Marine Corps mystique.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Color Me Kubrick
    Even if it doesn't add up to more than a fitfully amusing collection of comic sketches, Color Me Kubrick is a platform for John Malkovich to burst into lurid purple flame.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Going All the Way
    In "Going All the Way," a flashy movie adaptation of Dan Wakefield's popular 1970 novel about growing up in the heartland in the repressed 1950s, Mark Pellington, a director from the world of music video, has inflated a realistic memoir into a garish, hyperkinetic social satire.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Zookeeper's Wife
    Ms. Chastain’s watchful, layered performance helps keep the film on an even keel, but it is not enough to prevent The Zookeeper’s Wife, with its reassuringly cuddly critters, from feeling like a Disney version of the Holocaust.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Lisa Picard Is Famous
    This hilarious fake documentary -- deserves a place beside the comedies of Christopher Guest in the hall of fame of semi-deadpan spoofs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Towelhead
    A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Teeth
    Teenage horror-movie spoof, John Waters parody, No Nukes protest movie, twisted sex-education film, quasi-feminist fable, outrageous stunt: Mitchell Lichtenstein’s clever, crude comedy, Teeth, is all these and more.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Groomsmen
    The biggest hole in a movie that falls sadly short of being another "Diner" or "Trees Lounge" is Mr. Burns's failure to make his alter-ego character anything other than the best-looking and most affluent member of the pack, standing there and discreetly gloating.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Red Violin
    Wants to make a grand statement about the mystical power (both celestial and demonic) of great music. But give or take some scattered musical moments, the frame in which that message is couched is too kitschy to let that vision catch fire.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Agnivarsha: The Fire and the Rain
    Has a lavish ceremonial gloss. It is also a very erotic movie.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Big Fix
    The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Bright Days Ahead
    Struggling to get out from under the film’s too-cheery surface is a much more serious movie about grown-ups confronting the depredations of old age.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A streamlined, adrenalized thriller that is not as deep as it would like to appear, treads a retrospective political tightrope.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Kinky Boots
    All it wants is to divert you for about 100 minutes and leave you with the glow of vicarious comradeship, as blue-collar blokes and drag queens pull together to save the day. Foot fetishists will drool.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Natural Selection
    Aside from Ms. Harris's performance, the main reason to recommend Natural Selection - very conditionally - is that its creator clearly has talent. He simply lacked the resources to make the movie he envisioned.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Look of Love
    Had The Look of Love focused more acutely on the father-daughter relationship or explored Mr. Raymond’s relationships with his two sons, only one of whom appears briefly, it might have amounted to something more substantial than a keenly observed period piece that keeps a celebrity journalist’s distance from its subject.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    All Together
    If the characters are likable enough, they are underdeveloped and have little of the quirky individuality or dimension of the adventurous seniors portrayed in the superior (but sugarcoated) movie "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." For a truthful film about those final years, you'll have to wait for Michael Haneke's heartbreaking masterpiece "Amour," which is to open in December.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Lights in the Dusk
    This spare, minimalist film is not realistic. It has the simplicity of a silent movie, and the blocking of the actors, especially in the scenes with Koistinen and Mirja, emphasizes the distances between them.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Miss Potter
    This much sweetness and light in a movie is all very well. But there's a reason that recipes for cake and cookies call for a pinch of salt. In Miss Potter, there is only a grain or two -- not enough to dilute the sugary overload. The film is the cinematic equivalent of a delicate English tea cake whose substance is buried under too many layers of icing.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    For the second film, Babak Najafi has succeeded Daniel Espinosa as director. The structure here is more mechanical, and the ambience scruffier, as the complicated story shifts from one disreputable lowlife to another.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Shipping News
    The final product is soft at the center, a rustic cinematic greeting card.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Titus
    Makes the best possible argument for a cautionary drama that contemplates the absolute worst in us.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Catching Out
    The scruffy, outspoken train-hoppers in Sarah George's exhilarating documentary, Catching Out, are a sure sign that the pioneer spirit still flickers in pockets of TV-wired America.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Derailroaded
    Larry (Wild Man) Fischer, the psychotic songwriter and performer (found to be both paranoid-schizophrenic and bipolar) is sympathetically profiled in Josh Rubin's documentary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Stone Angel
    This multigenerational family history has enough gripping moments to hold your attention, but ultimately it leaves you frustrated by its failure to braid subplots and characters into a gripping narrative.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Holden
    Shake Hands with the Devil
    Filmed in Rwanda, Shake Hands With the Devil is certainly panoramic. But the best that can be said of the film is that it is an honorable dud.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Daydream Nation
    Daydream Nation hopscotches forward and backward and in and out of the surreal; its abrupt tangents are announced by chapter headings. In the most complicated sequence the film tracks three characters simultaneously. The cinematography is darkly lush in an ominous "Twin Peaks" mode.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Holden
    G.B.F.
    Unlike such forerunners as “Clueless” and “Mean Girls,” however, this movie, doesn’t have a believable moment in it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Band of Robbers
    This comic take on “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is infused with a gleefully absurdist sense of humor while retaining a childlike sense of wonder.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    John Rabe
    John Rabe, has its visceral moments. But it is also burdened by manipulative clichés of a screenplay in which exposition outweighs character development. Inspired by Rabe’s diaries, from which short excerpts are read, it tells the story almost exclusively from a Western point of view.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Toast
    Ms. Bonham Carter's hearty performance makes Mrs. Potter almost lovable. You may laugh at her garishness, but you applaud her pluck and stamina.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Cirkus Columbia
    Half of the time, the movie - based on a novel by Ivica Dikic, who collaborated with Mr. Tanovic on the screenplay - has the tone and pace of a farce. The other half, it plays like an unconvincing melodrama. The film assumes knowledge about the history and politics of the former Yugoslavia and the wars involved in its breakup that most Americans don't possess.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Little Big League
    The scenes on the ballfield have a credibility that is unusual in a baseball film. Adding to the realism are the appearances of a number of major league players as the Twins' opponents. The glow and cleancut innocence of these scenes evokes the magic of the game as seen through the eyes of a youthful fan.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Holden
    Saudate for the Future
    Despite its sociological tidbits and flashes of musical vitality, Saudade do Futuro never goes anywhere.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Assisted Living
    May be a comedy, but its images of physical frailty are inescapably unsettling. As the camera fixates on frail, spotted trembling hands unsteadily reaching out, it is impossible not to imagine a future in which those hands could be yours.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    1,000 Times Good Night
    What makes 1,000 Times Good Night more than a dramatic essay on wartime journalism is Ms. Binoche’s wrenchingly honest portrayal of a woman of conscience driven by a mixture of guilt, nobility and self-importance, reckoning belatedly with her destructive impulses.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Brighton Rock
    By discarding most of the theological debate, the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That's good enough for me.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    A candy-colored never-never land that Peter Pan might envy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Confetti
    Content to go only a third of the way to the bottom of its characters, the movie gives each a few comic tics and leaves it at that.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Backstage
    As long as it focuses on its feverishly needy central characters, neither of whom you would ever want to have as a friend, it remains true to itself.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Alila
    The movie...tries to juggle too many characters at once (its title means "story plot" in Hebrew), and in several cases their connections aren't adequately explained.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Mascots
    Although Mascots is neither as funny nor as satirically acute as its forerunner, it would be churlish to complain too loudly. And the sharpest verbal jokes in the screenplay by Mr. Guest and the actor and writer Jim Piddock are as inspired as ever. Mr. Guest’s gift for the archly comedic mot juste is undiminished.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    True Adolescents
    True Adolescents, like most indie movies related to the mumblecore school, is a delicate piece of machinery. Its truth lies in the tiniest details: the pauses, the stricken looks, the false bravado, the pathetically redundant slang (so many "dudes").
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Company You Keep
    This earnest, well-intentioned movie elicits frustration that its story had to be packaged as a conventional, not very suspenseful fugitive thriller with a bogus Hollywood ending.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Two Men Went to War
    It mocks the absurdity of war, but between the chuckles, and especially near the end, it plucks the heartstrings.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    AmnesiA
    The first feature written and directed by Martin Koolhoven. It reveals him as a skillful manipulator of disturbing visual images (much of the film is washed in inky blue) and a screenwriter adept at sustaining a mood of impending doom.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Disappearances
    The movie, though lovingly handmade by Mr. Craven, has a frustratingly disjunctive rhythm.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Flash of Genius
    It has the tone and texture of a well-made but forgettable television movie.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    You've Been Trumped
    Mr. Trump comes across as an insensitive, lying bully who will do whatever it takes to realize his dream of creating what he promises will be the world's greatest golf resort.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Unfinished Song
    The movie, originally titled “Song for Marion,” has more emotional clout than you might reasonably expect from a piece of inspirational hokum.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Art of Amália
    Only twice does the film give a tantalizing glimpse at the personality behind the voice.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Cecil B. DeMented
    Consistently amusing and smart in its choice of targets, but it lacks the manic edge of some of Waters' earlier movies.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Ezra
    The movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making Ezra even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English. Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Collaborator
    Collaborator has the tone and structure of an extended one-act play. Its uniformly wooden dialogue lends it the stage-bound feel of a tortured writing exercise.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    3 Hearts
    The screenplay relies on so many mechanical contrivances to make the story gripping that you can hear the rusty machinery clanking.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Corruptor
    The movie may be a conventional story of police corruption, temptation and conflicting loyalties, but it never loses its smarts.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Diary of a Chambermaid
    Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Winter Passing
    Its familiar story of an embittered child's homecoming and confrontation with a parent throws off dramatic sparks, but they never flare into a blaze.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Across the Universe
    Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Harsh Times
    Mr. Bales's spectacular technical performance of a toxic bad boy on the fast track to hell somehow lacks an inner core.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    How Stella Got Her Groove Back
    The movie, adapted by Terry McMillan from her semi-autobiographical novel, is pointedly boundary-breaking in its positive portrayal of a May-September relationship between a younger man and an older woman.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Unscrewed
    If Ms. Smith's and Mr. Hoffman's mopey, sheepish performances are quite convincing and ultimately sad, the movie constructed around them doesn't really know what it wants to say or how to say it.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Holden
    Capital
    Its indictment of capitalism is so shrill and one-note that it may just as easily set off fits of giggling, because its characters are so ridiculously evil.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Million Dollar Arm
    Every conflict is softened by inspirational clichés.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    American Violet
    The movie's staunchly liberal point of view extends to the 2000 presidential election, which is shown unfolding in the background. Al Gore's concession speech is used to suggest that the systemic racism in Melody is a symptom of a broader climate of injustice.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    God Bless America
    Mr. Goldthwait's screenplay is essentially a comedy act fleshed out with a story he doesn't try to make convincing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Religulous
    Much of Mr. Maher's film is extremely funny in a similarly irreverent, offhanded way. Some true believers -- at least those who have a sense of humor about their faith -- may even be amused. But most will not.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    The Unknown Woman
    Ms. Rappoport’s sturdy performance helps keep this outlandish melodrama from collapsing into unintended comedy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Eleven Minutes
    Might be described as a low-rent answer to Douglas Keeve's documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, "Unzipped," a movie that also revealed the fundamental silliness of fashion, though it had some glamour attached.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Claire Dolan
    Cartlidge's beautifully still performance, mournful one moment, defiant the next, lets you see into Claire's soul without editorializing or begging for our empathy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Cabin Fever
    Sustains such a palpable mood of foreboding until the end.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Race
    If Race is a standard inspirational biopic that exalts the legend of an athletic hero, at least it doesn’t soft-pedal the racism that Owens encountered at every turn.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    On the Road
    It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    You're Not You
    Despite holes in the storytelling, Ms. Swank and Ms. Rossum keep it real.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Details
    Instead of turning soft and squishy, this examination of karma gets tougher as it goes along. Its refusal to settle into a cozy niche may be commercially disastrous, but I take it as a sign of integrity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    Lovesong
    [An] exquisite, beautifully shot meditation on love clouded by fear and doubt.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    Never regains that initial blast of energy and the final scenes wobble toward a wishy-washy ending.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Cherry Orchard
    What makes this Cherry Orchard different from almost every other interpretation (and makes it essential viewing for lovers of Chekhov) is Ms. Rampling's extraordinarily rich portrait of Ranevskaya.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Cruel Intentions
    You have the queasy sense that the whole thing is just an elaborate stunt, and in this case an exploitative one.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Speaking in Strings
    Draws a curtain over her intimate personal life.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Hyena
    The strongest elements of this film, which adds nothing new to the subgenre, are its atmospheric, smeared-lipstick cinematography and Mr. Ferdinando’s portrayal of an arrogant, double-dealing crook.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Coastlines
    A larger problem is the film's attempt to piece together a hard-boiled crime drama with a soft-boiled soap opera, ultimately giving precedence to the suds and adding a sickly lemon scent.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Decoding Annie Parker
    Decoding Annie Parker is considerably better than the kind of disease-of-the-week fare that used to be a television cliché.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Driving Lessons
    The screwball aging diva genre isn't the only formula guiding this stubbornly old-fashioned movie. Driving Lessons belongs to the silly feel-good mode of "The Full Monty," "Calendar Girls," "Billy Elliot," "Kinky Boots" and dozens of other celebrations of Britons defying convention to become "free," whatever that means.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Anna and the King
    Has the rambling pace of an episodic 1950s costume drama.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Danny Deckchair
    A pleasantly sappy fable of new beginnings that suggests a Frank Capra film sweetened with an extra layer of sugar glaze.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 90 Stephen Holden
    All Access: Front Row. Backstage. Live!
    So good it leaves you starved for more.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    The Arrival
    The Arrival, like so many science-fiction films, begins as a promisingly eerie mixture of pseudo-scientific exposition and chilly paranoia. But once its plot has been bared, it turns into a muddled chase movie filled with glaring inconsistencies.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Miss Julie
    Aside from the change of setting, Ms. Ullmann’s version is quite orthodox. Much more convincing than Mike Figgis’s 1999 screen adaptation, starring Saffron Burrows, it is a grueling slog through a hell of torment, cruelty and suffering.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Real Steel
    An underdog drama with clanging metal-on-metal action, Real Steel feels scientifically programmed to claw at your heart while its battling robots, which have a semblance of human personality, drum up your adrenaline. That said, I'm not sure that the movie itself has more than a semblance of a heart.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Filth
    After a certain point, watching it is like listening to the ravings of an increasingly incoherent and abusive drunk.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Bamboozled
    Spike Lee has grabbed a tiger by the tail in his scabrously risky new comedy, Bamboozled. The wonder is how long he succeeds in hanging on.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Minus Man
    Takes such pains to avoid narrative and verbal cliches and anything that could remotely be construed as sentimental or romantic that it feels curiously flat.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 20 Stephen Holden
    Phone Booth
    Bogus on every level, right down to its half-hearted trick ending.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Anniversary Party
    Despite its shortcomings, this smart, caustic movie is easily the most incisive and realistic comedy of manners to emerge from Hollywood in quite a while, and that's saying a lot.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    After Midnight
    Diverting and often charming, but it never really holds together.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Stephen Holden
    Phoebe in Wonderland
    Soon after that the movie simply stops dead in its tracks, as though the money had run out and the project had been called off in the middle of a scene that makes no psychological or dramatic sense. It leaves you frustrated and annoyed.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Shag
    Long before the film is over, one is left frustratedly grasping after characters and an ambiance that have evaporated into formulaic freneticism.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    A Goofy Movie
    A Goofy Movie is engaging in its mild-mannered way, but the story is too rambling and emotionally diffuse for the title character to come fully alive.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Then She Found Me
    Then She Found Me, a serious comedy, is more impressive for what it refuses to do than for its modest accomplishment.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Sangre De Mi Sangre
    Although it exhibits a heartfelt connection with the city's half-invisible population of illegal immigrants, its myriad inconsistencies and strained plotting are increasingly frustrating.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Saint Misbehavin': The Wavy Gravy Movie
    Make of it what you will: like its subject, Saint Misbehavin' is an unabashed love letter to the world that defies the cynicism of our age.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    Despite the movie's considerable visual splendor, the pacing of Warriors of the Rainbow is clumsy, its battle scenes chaotic and its computer effects (especially of a fire that ravages the Seediq hunting forest) cheesy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    2 Days in the Valley
    Two Days in the Valley lacks the humanity of ''Short Cuts'' or the edgy hipness of ''Pulp Fiction,'' but it is still a sleek, amusingly nasty screen debut by a film maker whose television credits include an Amy Fisher docudrama.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Wassup Rockers
    However you respond to Wassup Rockers, it is completely alive, unlike any number of teenage Hollywood movies with their stale formulas and second-hand puerility. And that's mostly to the good.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Extra Man
    For all its flighty charms, The Extra Man never really lands. It hovers like a hummingbird madly beating its wings to stay aloft.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Going Shopping
    Going Shopping, like Mr. Jaglom's other movies, has enough smart, knowing touches and enough easy spontaneity among its well-chosen actors to make you wish it added up to more than what it turns out to be: a flighty, motor-mouthed cinematic divertissement.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Max
    A historical fantasy connecting fact and wild supposition into a provocative work of fiction that poses ticklish questions about art and society.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    Finding Eleazar
    If Mr. Shicoff ultimately comes across as a short-tempered, egotistical prima donna, the upshot of all the fuss is worth it: his Viennese performance is transcendent.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Touchy Feely
    Its humor is softer and more ambiguous than that of Ms. Shelton’s earlier films, and its characters are harder to pin down.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 40 Stephen Holden
    Antiviral
    At a certain point, Antiviral doesn’t know where to go or how to break out of its vacuum-sealed sepulcher, and Syd, even when vomiting blood, remains as incorporeal and creepy as a ghost. This is a movie that drinks its own tainted blood.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Odessa... Odessa!
    As it observes these people, most of them well over 60, it conjures a melancholy definition of exile as a haunted state of mind.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Quid Pro Quo
    After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters' feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    For a Good Time, Call...
    Doesn't aspire to be more than a broad, sloppy, old-fashioned sitcom with a sexy gimmick. But it is quite funny.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    En soap
    So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    Becoming Jane
    The screenplay’s pseudo-Austen tone is so consistent that its lapses into modern romance-novel fantasy threaten to derail the film.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    Taking Woodstock
    This likable, humane movie is not an attempt to recreate the epochal Woodstock Music and Art Fair captured in Michael Wadleigh’s documentary “Woodstock.” It is essentially a small, intimate film into which is fitted a peripheral view of the landmark event.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    The Third Miracle
    This intelligent, well-acted movie is not helped by the fact that its story in some ways parallels that of "Stigmata," the trashy supernatural spookfest that flared briefly at the box office earlier this year.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Snake Eyes
    A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 80 Stephen Holden
    The Relic
    Yes, we've seen it all before. But The Relic proves that the hoariest cliches, when stirred together with enough money, shaken vigorously and artfully lighted, can still make the adrenaline surge.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Stephen Holden
    The Brothers Bloom
    As much as you admire the stagecraft and the technical skills on display, when all is said and done, that's all it is: a fancy, not-quite-two-hour stunt.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Stephen Holden
    Resurrecting the Champ
    For Mr. Lurie, who specializes in political subjects, Resurrecting the Champ is an encouraging return to film following the rise and fall of his television series "Commander in Chief."
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Stephen Holden
    It's About You
    Because Kurt Markus's Super 8 camera is the cinematic equivalent of a single microphone, the film's look matches the scratchy quality of its ancient (by rock 'n' roll standards) sound. The crudeness brings out the elemental quality of music that digs deeply into the soil of working-class American life in songs that express the defiance, despair and nobility of people who refuse to go down without a fight.
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