Stephen Holden

The movie they have concocted has the feel of a visual sampler or an elaborate color swatch submitted for a design that remains largely unexecuted.

The Hunt doesn’t know where to stop. It is undermined with a short, unsatisfying epilogue whose shocking final moment isn’t enough to justify its inclusion.

Mr. Firth gives a reserved, compelling performance.

This intriguing, sometimes frustrating, in some ways amateurish movie is a work of vaulting artistic ambition.

Watching it is like receiving a hard slap in the face from someone who expects you to laugh it off, even though the sting lingers.

Satellite is not a profound film, but it touches a chord. It captures the wistful underside of the rampant materialism embraced by the young professional class.

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.

If Mr. Hurt gives a meticulously detailed performance, he is still so innately refined that Brett never quite registers as an authentic blue-collar type, either vocally or in his body language. Ultimately, men like Brett are just not in Mr. Hurt’s DNA, and you are left with the impression of observing a silk purse artfully (but only partially) disguised as a sow’s ear.

Heartbreaking stories of families who have lost loved ones alternate with the voices of experts from academia, law enforcement and politics who give their views on the causes of the crisis.

So hopelessly cartoonish and wrongheaded in its details that there's not even a semblance of reality.

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.

It's the rare German movie calling itself a comedy that is actually funny, even if only in bits and pieces.

An unpretentious, well-acted ensemble piece that doesn't aspire to be a portentous generational time capsule like "The Big Chill," "American Graffiti" or "Diner." But it has enough markers - a grown-up, married white rapper who break dances; a karaoke bar - to suggest an approximate date.

Man in the Chair has few surprises. Once its machinery is humming, it settles into a soothing fable of a last hurrah.

Mike may be a bumbling sad sack, but Mr. Zahn gives him just enough spunky appeal to lend this unlikely fly-by-afternoon coupling and its consequences a shred of credibility.

A clever, entertaining yarn that doesn't bear close scrutiny.

If Return to Never Land -- doesn't have a story to match the original's in breadth and imagination, it does a smooth job of recycling its characters and themes.

What elevates the movie above the run-of-the-mill singles blender is its surreal sense of humor and technological finish.

A cleverly plotted movie that offers ample opportunity for spoofing anything and everything that can be found on television. Unfortunately, most of its takeoffs -- of a black-and-white gangster film, a spaghetti western and a period swashbuckler -- show no feel for genre and no genuine wit.

If the movie has loads of nerve, its ambitious fusion of cartoons and live-action comedy is only fitfully amusing.

The sustained force of Mr. Dumont's vision of existence as a swirl of brute instincts may not be easy to absorb, but it marks him as a major filmmaker.

The screenplay is vague not only about politics but also about the history of Jimmy’s unconsummated relationship with his former sweetheart, Oonagh (Simone Kirby), now married, whose wide Susan Sarandon eyes express a wistful sadness.

The impact of these stories is not in the words but in the way the mood, texture and the acting build each situation into a visually intense parable about the similarity of spiritual, erotic and aesthetic aspiration.

As the movie picks up speed and undergoes sudden, confusing plot reversals, it loses its satirical edge.

The movie's surreal style, with its film-noir camerawork and ominous lighting, turns the story into a fable about fear and nonconformism, and Mr. Macy's and Ms. Dern's carefully shaded caricatures match the mood.

A satire of contemporary sexual warfare that leaves you smiling but also stung.

Beneath the Harvest Sky reaches a dramatic climax that is so rushed and confusing, you are left scratching your head. But for all its missteps, the film feels authentic. Through thick and thin, it stubbornly maintains a thorny integrity.

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.

Bad taste is timeless. And sometimes it can be so funny that you can't help laughing.

The movie has holes galore. It has abrupt tonal shifts, an incoherent back story and abandoned subplots. It doesn’t even try for basic credibility. But buoyed by hot performances, it sustains a zapping electrical energy.

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.

The love story doesn't quite work. Mr. McGregor and Ms. Green make an attractive couple. But the movie's notion of two self-centered people ill suited to each other, shedding their defenses and clinging together, feels forced and sentimental.

Halloween 5, which was directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard and opened yesterday at area theaters, is a bit more refined in its details than the conventional horror movie.

A better and more serious film than its forerunner, "American Desi."

There are lots of oohs and ahs in this nasty shoot-'em-up story of a psychopathic terrorist who hijacks a jumbo jet. But beneath the thrill-by-numbers surface of the film, nothing makes much sense.

Though less reassuring and not as dramatically coherent as "Hotel Rwanda," it still packs a hard punch.

There is so much to admire in The Weight of Water, Kathryn Bigelow's churning screen adaptation of a novel by Anita Shreve, that when the movie finally collapses on itself late in the game, it leaves you in the frustrating position of having to pick up its scattered pieces and assemble them as best you can.

If Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is consistently watchable, it isn't especially funny, nor does it give any deeper insight into its star than you might get from seeing his late-night shows.

From its flickering, inky cinematography to its wavering late 1920's-style sound track, to Veronkha's kohl-eyed vampish look, the movie is an expert parody of a period movie style.

Does a better-than-average job of conveying the panic and helplessness of men terrorized by a sadist in a degrading environment, but it is still not especially scary.

An abrasive but innovative fusion of farce, satire and drama that blurs their boundaries in uncomfortable ways. It's a noisy movie whose characters tend to talk at medium-to-high volume.

The material isn't organized in any formal way but works as a mosaic that has the feel of a jam session.

Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical Red Hook Summer has one crucial ingredient: a raw vitality.

That the movie exists at all attests to the courage of the participants to see it through to the end. Out Loud bleeds with sincerity.

Diverting and often charming, but it never really holds together.

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.

If The Operator, which is Mr. Dichter's directorial debut, has a clever concept, it clasps it much too fiercely to its chest.

Behind the clunky machinery is a lyrical meditation on life, death, heroism, regret and forgiveness written in a florid style that might be described as Tennessee Williams on testosterone.

Choppy, high-energy documentary.

Mr. Harris's depiction of a saintly, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing middle-school teacher lends the movie a moral weight it probably couldn't have summoned had another actor played the role.

Keeping Up With the Steins would have been a much better film if it had waited twice as long before retracting its fangs.

Although crudely acted, with laughably inept action sequences and a story that makes little sense, it has the feverish pulse of a classic B movie, boldly angular cinematography and a blaringly cheesy jazz soundtrack.

Has neither the star power nor the epic sense of itself that infused “Cadillac Records,” the 2008 film on the same subject.

Not half as exotic or as compelling as Mr. Aïnouz’s 2002 film, “Madame Satã,” which examined the fantastic life of a transvestite prostitute and underground entertainer in 1930s and ’40s Rio de Janeiro. But it shares the earlier film’s deep sympathy with sexual free spirits in a rigid macho society.

From its sly, amused performances to its surreal comic book gloss to its artfully nervous camerawork, Lucky Number Slevin sustains the blasé tone and look of a smart-aleck thriller that buries its heart under layers of attitude.

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.

What lifts The Trench above the run of the mill is the intensity of its disgust.

The Toxic Avenger may be trash, but it has a maniacally farcical sense of humor, and Tromaville's evildoers are dispatched in ingenious ways. One is dry-cleaned to death, another made into pizza, a third partly french-fried.

The movie comes alive only when the camera lingers over the actual paintings and allows their power to speak for itself.

The movie is so busy constructing its labyrinthine plot that it often forgets to plumb the souls of its characters.

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.

Its most intriguing moments evoke the way that memory plays tricks and our visions of the past are actually scrambled composites of impressions and feelings.

If Divan is often fascinating, it is sometimes frustrating.

Behind the film's brass knuckles are tender fingers. Why else would Goon use music from Puccini's "Turandot" to underscore critical dramatic moments?

The Galapagos Affair would be a much stronger film were it not padded with the dull reminiscences and speculation of the settlers’ descendants.

In the same way that a crossword puzzle tickles the mind without asking to be taken as literature, November plays games for the sake of game-playing. It also has a pretentious streak.

It captures a gritty urban reality without moralizing or sentimentalizing its hapless young protagonist.

Is the movie psychologically accurate? Yes. But that doesn't keep it from being a little dull.

In many ways Cracks is lurid and rickety. But its gripping ensemble performances lend it an emotional intensity that outweighs its shortcomings.

It is cleverly conceived, well acted and seasoned with blips of mildly acidic wit.

As both an actor and a playwright, Wallace Shawn, at his most audacious, goes for the jugular, but in sneaky roundabout ways.

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.

There are a lot of truthful notes in Some Girl(s), but there are also false ones that let you know that you are being played with. You’d best beware.

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.

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.

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.

The movie's biggest strength is a story that refuses to quit and almost makes sense within its own screwball logic.

As this sweet, ineffectual comedy follows two sad sacks competing for the job of manager at a new branch of a Chicago grocery chain, it pointedly avoids the raucous bad-boy clowning of the typical Everyguy farce. Think of it as a polite, tightly muzzled "Clerks."

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.

Throughout the film there is an abundance of sumptuously photographed flesh on view. But House of Pleasures is not an erotic stimulant so much as a slow-moving, increasingly tragic and claustrophobic operatic pageant set almost entirely in the brothel.

A deeply silly movie, but it is sumptuous to look at, and it never stands still. Its creators, Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, have given the story a lilting rhythm and glittering surface of the most extravagant jewel-encrusted fairy tale.

Two Lives is an absorbing, well-acted, moderately suspenseful mystery, although its time line of events is fuzzy to the point of impenetrability.

Although Wimbledon is a much more conventional film, it still has cleverer-than-average dialogue and sharply drawn subsidiary characters.

Dreams Rewired is mostly content to entertain. Its explanations of how new inventions work are simplified to the point of superficiality.

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.

This visually stylish work, with its vintage glamour photos, film and television clips, and snippets from a 1951 B-movie, "Racket Girls," is more of a scrapbook than a coherent history of the sport during its rough-and-tumble infancy.

If it's all very clever for a teen-age film, it also feels terribly forced.

The film's most upsetting scenes are its interviews with residents whose livelihood has been decimated and whose health has been compromised.

Almost in spite of itself, The House of Mirth is powerful, at times even moving.

Rie Rasmussen and Jamel Debbouze, the stars who portray Angela, the celestial therapist, and André, her star patient, display enough screwball romantic charm to keep this sugary trifle afloat longer than you'd expect.

The Emperor’s New Clothes is moderately effective agitprop.

Consistently amusing and smart in its choice of targets, but it lacks the manic edge of some of Waters' earlier movies.

As the truth tumbles out, the dialogue and the carefully timed revelations make My Old Lady seem increasingly stagy. But the performances go a long way toward camouflaging the screenplay’s clunky mechanics.

Everybody loves a David and Goliath story, and this one is told almost entirely from David's point of view.

A standard, gadget-crazed exercise in whiz-bang adventure with its tongue lodged deep inside its cheek.

With its icy cynicism and desolate settings, the film evokes the work of the young Roman Polanski in his sadistic trickster mode.

What began as a reasonably hardheaded look at profound and rapid cultural change turns into a feel-good fantasy of salvation.

An incisive but static and occasionally confusing character study of Lucy Fowler, a disheveled, hard-drinking single woman who has a day job as a contractor and a dissolute night life.

Instead of seriously investigating corruption, money laundering and the buying of politicians, Manda Bala would rather spend its time showing slimy brown frogs slithering over one another as they are dumped from one container into another.

As one comic after another recalls triumphs, misadventures and painful lessons learned, the stories become redundant.

This modest, unassuming documentary about an illegal Mexican immigrant living in San Francisco is a case study of a life defined by poverty.

Uplifting it may be, but to swallow it whole is to believe in happily ever after.

While most films in which the angry past confronts the guilty present degenerate into mawkish reconciliations, Emile errs on the side of restraint.

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.

Mr. Phillips’s self-deprecating humor is amusing but not funny enough to give him the edge he needs to rise up and conquer.

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.

Nobody eviscerates the scary depths of male narcissism with such ferocity, and it is a huge relief to find Mr. Stiller flexing his oiled, low-comedy triceps with such vengeful glee.

Hotel de Love, the directing and screenwriting debut of Craig Rosenberg, is like a Valentine's Day box of heart-shaped chocolates that all have the same too-sweet cherry fillings.

Like most documentary polemics, it simplifies the issues it confronts and selects facts that bolster its black-and-white, heroes-and-villains view of raw economic power.

Throughout Grbavica the desire to forget and the need to remember are at loggerheads. At Sara’s school the psychological wounds of the war are being handed down to her generation through the separation of heroes and nonheroes. Fathers pass their weapons down to their sons. Even as you leave a war behind, you bring it with you.

Written and directed by Bernard Rose (“Immortal Beloved”), 2 Jacks has a pleasing circular structure, and it doesn’t push the parallels between old and new Hollywood to absurd limits.

The wonder is that The Great Debaters transcends its own simplifying and manipulative ploys; it radiates nobility of spirit.

Until it transforms into an improbable thriller, Turn the River is a finely observed portrait of a desperate working-class woman who refuses to play by ordinary rules.

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.

Despite its deficiencies, Naz & Maalik feels authentic, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Cook bring their characters completely alive.

Art executed under the most excruciating conditions deserves a far more searching study than this too short film, which has the structure of a hurried checklist. Even so, a lot of the art shown in the documentary, often side-by-side with photographs of the same places and events, is compelling.

As inspiring as it is, Doing Time, Doing Vipassana is too sweet for its own good; it plays like a spiritual infomercial.

Quietly inflammatory film.

Settles for being an atmospheric scenes-in-the-life biography of someone's most unforgettable character. It could have been so much more.

Grounding the zaniness is the chemistry between its two likable stars. Beneath their crusty eccentricities, Max and John are teen-agers at heart, a Wayne and Garth for the "Modern Maturity" set. As Max, his leathery face beaming with pleasure, might put it: "Holy moley, is this a dumb movie!" But it is also fun.

Even at 143 minutes, For Greater Glory cannot satisfyingly fill out the stories of a half-dozen secondary characters, and there are frustrating gaps in the biographies of Gorostieta and José. The jamming together of so much history and melodrama makes for a handsome movie that is only rarely gripping.

Mr. Newell is master of the feel-good ensemble piece whose shallowness is partly masked by the expertise of a high-toned cast.

Ms. Seydoux’s triumph is her skill at imbuing Célestine with an almost angelic radiance that clashes with her underlying coarseness.

Rachid Bouchareb's tidy little two-character film, London River, demonstrates how great acting can infuse a banal, politically correct drama with dollops of emotional truth.

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.

Part character study, part crime thriller, Bullhead is the impressive but deeply flawed first feature written and directed by Michael R. Roskam.

[An] incisive, queasy-making documentary.

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.

The movie is an amusing ball of fluff that refuses to judge its characters’ amoral high jinks. Winking at the vanity of wealthy voluptuaries and hustlers playing games of tainted love, it heaves a sigh and says welcome to the human comedy.

A pleasantly sappy fable of new beginnings that suggests a Frank Capra film sweetened with an extra layer of sugar glaze.

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.

It is wonderful at conveying a sense of suffocating ennui. Too wonderful, since the story is so sketchily told and the dialogue is so fragmentary that it doesn't quite cohere. The characters remain hazy ciphers in the torpid atmosphere of a place you'll never want to visit.

The movie’s extreme compression is its biggest failing. The business end is so minimally sketched, you are left wanting to know a lot more.

Has an episodic rhythm and little dramatic tension.

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.

As informative and packed with cultural lore as it is, The Komediant is dramatically diffuse.

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.

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.

That Mr. Grant can bring Keith back from the edge more or less persuasively is a testament to his ability to convey genuine humility without mawkishness, once he sees the light.

American Pastoral leaves a residue of dread and despair that is oddly in keeping with today’s moment of uncertainty amid an ugly presidential campaign.

Ultimately, A Silent Love transcends its problem-play situation to ponder how the best laid plans for an arranged marriage are no match against the vicissitudes of passion in a romantically besotted culture.

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.

Fallen Angels certainly abounds in visual pizazz, clever in jokes and trendy pop references, but such things can carry a movie only so far.

Best approached as an admiring portrait of a likable, creative powerhouse at midcareer. No disapproving voices interrupt the stream of praise for his politics and his art. Mr. Kushner’s place in the history of American theater and in American culture, in general, is left unexamined. These are subjects well worth exploring in another, deeper film.

Far from a future cult classic, it turns out to be smarter and more diabolical than you could have guessed at the beginning.

Despite the movie’s gripping performances and the verisimilitude of many elements, I simply don’t believe the story.

This modest film observes evacuees from Futaba, a small town near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, making do in their temporary shelter. Partly because this version of the movie was drastically edited to 96 minutes from 145, it feels sketchy and disjointed.

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.

So sensitively acted you can almost buy its premise that love (in this case, neighborly affection and dependence) might rewire sexuality.

With its tentative pace, fussy, pieced-together structure and stuffy emotional climate, The White Countess never develops any narrative stamina.

You are left with the feeling that its excesses notwithstanding, it knows its chosen terrain.

A mildly diverting period heist movie.

As anyone who remembers "JFK," his 1991 film about the Kennedy assassination, can attest, Mr. Stone has his own paranoid tendencies, but they are muted in this provocative, if shallow, exaltation of Latin American socialism.

It's all very sweet and lightly comedic. After it's over, you half expect a statement to appear on the screen promising, "No humans were traumatized during the making of this film."

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.

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.

An agreeable show business satire with a warm heart.

Draws a curtain over her intimate personal life.

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.

Keeps its claws carefully retracted. That's probably for the best, since the documentary still leaves a bitter aftertaste.

A great big juicy gob of apocalyptic paranoia.

Avoids succumbing to the preachiness that is the bane of so many family films, and for a movie like this, that's no small feat.

An alternate title for Gut Renovation, Su Friedrich’s cranky, sarcastic documentary polemic about the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighborhood, might be “The Rape of Williamsburg.”

Occasionally, this richly lyrical movie passes over the line separating sympathetic exploration from freak-show condescension.

A gaudy thriller saturated in sex and violence, is an extravagance that leaves you with your mouth hanging open - partly in admiration of its audacity and partly in disbelief at its preposterousness.

A cinematic tasting menu consisting entirely of amuse-bouches. After two hours of such tidbits the palate is sated. But if there is no need for a main course, you still leave feeling vaguely disappointed at not being served one.

The movie jolts you with the realization that the AIDS epidemic and the public debate about such issues have retreated so far under the news radar as to be half-forgotten.

Although The Grace Lee Project is ostensibly about a name, it's really about cultural assimilation and a stereotype of virtue and subservience that has deep roots on both sides of the Pacific. As oppressive as her name may be, Ms. Lee also knows full well that there are worse fates than being a 16-year-old Harvard freshman.

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.

As Janice, Eileen Walsh, an engaging, wide-eyed actress whose teeth are a little too big for her mouth, infuses the movie with much of its slender, glinting charm.

A good deal of anger washes through this acerbic portrait of the movie business in histrionically high gear. But so does a lot of sentimentality, and as the sentimentality quotient rises, it erodes the film's credibility.

What it does offer, however, are the pleasures of watching its seasoned stars expertly go through their familiar paces.

A formulaic sports romance with the texture of a strawberry smoothie.

Rambling, occasionally very funny reflection on the meaning of family in contemporary Japan.

It's when The Deal leaves the corporate offices behind that the story turns into a bogus, convoluted mess. Once the Russian mafia, personified by Angie Harmon playing an evil seductress with a terrible Russian accent, rears its head, the ballgame is over.

As the movie jumps back and forth in time, it displays an impressive cut-and-paste agility, skillfully interweaving humor and drama without tipping over into farce or soap opera.

A crude but stirring video documentary filmed over last year and this by Amos Poe, while Mr. Earle and his band were on tour.

The cinematic equivalent of a visit from a cherished but increasingly dithery maiden aunt.

The major miscalculation in Wonderful World is the presence of a dream figure, known as the Man (Philip Baker Hall)...he throws this delicate, intelligent film, which at its best suggests a muted hybrid of “The Visitor” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” off balance.

With a cackling nihilistic glee, the movie rubs our faces in the stinking, screaming muck of raw human appetite and insists that that's all there is.

The low-key realism is so meticulously maintained that Summer in Berlin feels somewhat trivial. There is nothing larger here than meets the eye. It is "Sex and the City" on a stringent budget with fewer characters.

Probably the first romantic drama ever narrated by a smelly dead fish.

This movie is a more conventional, but also more believable, exploration of the potential cost of thumbing your nose at society.

The movie has only the most tenuous connection with reality. But the same could be said of classic 30's screwball comedies in which the treacherous feints and ploys of the mating game are transmuted into witty, romantically charged repartee.

Its most consistent pleasures derive more from its performances than from storytelling.

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.

A 1950's movie magazine fantasy dressed up just enough to pass for contemporary.

The movie is so busy applying cute touches to everything and everybody that it forgets to devote enough attention to the souls Michael has come down to save.

For all its energy and fine acting, Tycoon has a frustrating lack of narrative coherence.

If the actors playing the brothers show little fraternal similarity, their performances are convincingly natural.

An uproariously dizzy satire...Hedaya has created the year's funniest film caricature.

The movie never transcends a screenwriting formula that makes you uncomfortably aware of the machinery driving it all.

Mendelsohn's fusion of science fiction and Chekhovian melancholy finds a fresh perspective on a familiar theme.

Piles too many small disasters on top of the initial tragedy, including a drunken car accident, a drug bust and a cancer scare. It also swerves unsteadily into farce.

An amiably klutzy affair whose warm, fuzzy heart emits intermittent bleats from the sleeve of its gleaming spacesuit.

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.

There is some fun to be found in this goofy riff on Shakespeare.

Acute emotional honesty and a frustrating narrative coyness coincide in Morning.

A peppy romantic trifle from France that rises above the mundane on the strength of its beautifully detailed lead performances.

Whether or not you wince, this meticulously acted movie, which won Ms. Soloway a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, paints an accurate picture of how a segment of youngish, educated, affluent, white Americans converse. It is anything but inspiring.

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.

What the movie lacks is contrast. The sped-up ribbons of traffic in a city look as pretty as the interior of a redwood grove. As for the perils of logging, one brief shot of a clear-cut forest flashes by so quickly it is almost subliminal.

Super rides on the carefully bent performances of its stars.

[A] shallow but enjoyable all-American morality play.

The optimism and good humor of John Lavin's crude, endearing documentary Hollywood to Dollywood are so unquenchable that its disturbing underlying theme - growing up gay in the South is no picnic - is partly obscured by its openheartedness.

There is enough discomfort on display to reinforce the cynical adage that sex is God's joke.

If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn’t wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne’s “Election.” But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought.

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.

Has the rambling pace of an episodic 1950s costume drama.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the rich “are different from you and me,” he might have been thinking of someone like the moody billionaire from Fierce People.

A crude but scathing portrait of suburban life.

Quitters is repellent but believable, which makes it a little scary.

Life of Riley is neither especially profound nor riotously funny. An element of caricature is palpable in the performances but restrained.

Instead of feeling universal, the movie feels claustrophobic.

Crackles dangerously to life whenever Constance (who narrates the film) is on the screen with her father Hank (Terry Kinney).

Everything that happens in the last half-hour betrays the canny, hardheaded perspective of what came before.

Once Price Check darkens, it loses its comic footing, along with its nerve, and becomes a wishy-washy potpourri of elements that fail to mesh: backing away from its satirical potential, it sputters toward an evasive and unsatisfying ending. Ms. Posey, however, blithely sails above the fray.

It is a strange piece of work.

Much of the film is a nearly wordless tone poem that sustains an intense emotional gravity and sexual tension through its mixture of music, beautiful outdoor cinematography and somber, silent acting.

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.

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.

It mocks the absurdity of war, but between the chuckles, and especially near the end, it plucks the heartstrings.

A powerfully acted but strident road movie.

As gamely as the movie tries to make sense of its title character, there remains a huge gap between the film's creepy, clean-cut Dahmer (Jeremy Renner) and fiendish acts that no amount of earnest textbook psychologizing can bridge.

Mildly engaging, formulaic.

The Finest Hours is a moderately gripping whoosh of nostalgia that shamelessly recycles the ’50s cliché of the squeaky-clean all-American hero.

For all its visual zaniness and its aura of psychic imbalance, the movie, which won the Discovery Award at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, stays on the surface and never locates its own heart of darkness.

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."

Each thread of the plot is followed to its dangling, ragged conclusion in a movie that may be painful to watch but that maintains a chilly integrity.

What saves Train of Life from sinking into sudsy Holocaust kitsch is its sustained comic buoyancy.

If the central performances in Careful approached the earnest intensity of some of its early-1930's inspirations, the movie would probably be twice as funny.

As Shadows vacillates between the historical and the occult, you may snicker at the way hackneyed horror movie conventions are redeployed for more serious ends. But you won't be bored. The movie is well acted (especially by Ms. Stanojevska) and very sexy.

If The Imperialists Are Still Alive! doesn't go much of anywhere despite its peripatetic characters, that stasis seems intentional.

A fascinating double-edged portrait of 1950s Los Angeles.

Even more than Jerry Lewis, Robin Williams or Pee-wee Herman, Mr. Carrey, now 41 (pretty old for an overgrown kid), sustains a maniacal energy that explodes off the screen in blinding electrical zaps. Those jolts don't always feel pleasant.

A small, mildly entertaining documentary.

It is an emotional journey for these grown children, now in their 40s and 50s, who engage in sometimes heated conversations, several taking place on the actual sites where Joseph and other prisoners endured unimaginable suffering.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An ensemble piece developed from an improvisational workshop, the movie exudes a haunted melancholy that recalls such early Alan Rudolph films as "Choose Me" and "Welcome to L.A," and it includes several flashy performances.

The chemistry between the two is as old as Abbott and Costello. Harold is the sensible worried one, and Kumar zany and reckless. The movie's funniest moments, set at Princeton University, caricature and then demolish the image of Asian-Americans as nerdy, sexless bookworms incapable of fun.

Despite its surreal touches and an improbable story that piles on the metaphors, the movie, which has a rich, honey-dripping score by Andrea Guerra, maintains a tone of refined heart-tugging realism.

A sly retrospective exercise in corporate self-congratulation masquerading as an insider’s tell-all.

Above all, it loves its characters and the actors who play them. A fearless, talented filmmaking auteur working on a limited budget, Mr. Lipsky insists on doing it his way and letting the chips fall where they may. More power to him.

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.

Softening that apocalyptic undercurrent is a counter-strain of quiet nobility.

The connections made in Photographic Memory are more tentative than those found in Mr. McElwee's earlier films, which also seek answers in roundabout ways while maintaining an acute eye for light, color, space and atmosphere.

As the movie glides along, it may not elicit explosive laughter, but it plants a steady smile on your face and doesn't leave you feeling molested. If that's another way of saying Johnny English Reborn is old-fashioned, so be it.

The closest sensory approximation of an acid trip ever achieved by a mainstream movie and the latest example of Mr. Gilliam's visual bravura.

A much more high-pitched movie than its forerunner. [10 July 1993, p.15]

City of Men has a more humane, you might say bleeding-heart, perspective on this anarchic culture than “City of God.”

Most of the modest pleasures are in the ways the men expertly play off one another and invest their shallow characters with more depth than any filmmaker could reasonably expect.

5 Flights Up would be nothing without its stars, whose humanity warms up a movie that otherwise portrays New Yorkers as coldblooded, slightly crazy, hypercompetitive sharks.

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.

Until it goes haywire with the cabbage scene, Stray Dogs sustains a hypnotic intensity anchored in exquisite cinematography that portrays the modern industrial cityscape as a chilly wasteland.

In trying to keep track of everybody while providing enough melodrama to sustain an atmosphere of controlled terror, Paradise Road stumbles all over itself and never really finds its center.