Steven Rea

Damon, starring in his first full-fledged action pic, brings a determined bearing and believability to the proceedings.

Michelle Williams is a beautiful moper.

Directed with an easygoing grace by Campbell Scott, has the feel of a coming-of-age novel.

Monaghan is stronger still. This is a performance that deserves to be noticed. She is crushingly good.

Client 9 speaks plenty of truth - about politics, power, human nature - even if you don't buy into the hit-job hypothesis.

It's impossible to imagine anyone, right-leaning or left, coming away from this hugely important documentary unshaken by its representation of the United States and its military establishment.

About as not-funny as a comedy can get.

A shamelessly fun B-movie with A-movie effects.

It's a wise and endearing little film.

Holofcener writes with an ear for the rhythms and ridiculousness of real life, and her cast - to a man, and woman - embraces her words with subtlety and certitude. Friends With Money is gimmickless, and great.

As it is, most of X2's action is restricted to the Northeast Corridor, with a climactic face-off in the western Rockies, where, in typical blockbuster fashion, everything goes kablooey and ka-bam.

Kafka-esque, Terry Gilliam-esque (Brazil), Charlie Kaufman-esque (remember Floor 71/2 in Being John Malkovich?), and David Lynch-ian, too, The Double plays like a nightmare that will leave you spooked, jittery, and confused. Well, that's how it plays for Simon, anyway. For everyone else, it should leave us simply amused.

If Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter takes its time, it's time worth taking. The cinematography is lovely: great swirls of midnight snow, frosted trees in glinting sun, the bustling modernity of Tokyo, a big library, subway stations exquisite in their orderliness.

Without editorializing, Mermin raises fascinating questions about the cultural impact of globalization, the allure of the West, and the troubled history of an ancient land.

This is a story about legacy, the sins of the father, the restlessness in our souls. It's powerful, it's bold, it hits you hard.

The paper's motto is "All the News That's Fit to Print." But all that news doesn't necessarily fit neatly into a 90-minute doc.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

This mildly amusing tale of infidelity, blackmail, class differences and corporate greed not only strains credulity - it strains for laughs.

It's not exactly high art, but it's certainly high.

Zooms along with confidence, smarts, and some of the coolest car chases this side of the Indy 500.

Darren Aronofsky's Noah is the Old Testament on acid. It's the movie equivalent of Christian death metal. It's an antediluvian Lord of the Rings, fist-pumping, ferocious, apocalyptic, and wet - very wet.

An ingenious blend of sci-fi and mystery.

Presented with an economy and emotional cool that add to, rather than subtract from, its dramatic impact, The Girl on the Train reverberates with a quiet, seductive power.

When it works - and it doesn't half the time - it's as if Monty Python were back, putting its merrily imbecilic stamp on the dark world of terrorism.

Cinema as jazz. More precisely, jazz traded by the likes of Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, Chet Baker -- blurry, opiated, jagged with melancholy and stone cold beautiful.

Moon is a deceptively simple study of alienation, paranoia, and loneliness.

Hanna is a goofy and exhilarating mash-up of all sorts of things. Luc Besson's "The Professional" comes to mind, as do the propulsive synth-syncopations of "Run Lola Run" and the dark allegorical menace of Grimms fairy tales.

This is a movie about friendship, about foolhardy endeavors that get your adrenaline going and make you feel life buzzing in your toes. Written with wit and concision and remarkable confidence, Bottle Rocket is a joyride worth taking.

Disturbingly good. The writing and the performances are such that as things go from bad (sad motel-room affairs) to worse (a 4-year-old gone missing), the film's characters get inside your skin, your soul. It's enough to make you want to cry.

Director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who oversaw the elegant title sequences from the first film, likewise gives Kung Fu Panda 2's series of flashbacks a different look, harking back to Chinese shadow puppetry and delicate watercolors. With its mix of vibrant CG and classical elements, the movie dazzles.

It's an Alzheimer's allegory, full of humanity, heart, and humor.

Like "Tremors," only ickier, Slither is a tongue-in-cheek horror flick that skewers the genre while delivering seat-squirming scares.

Manny & Lo, wonderfully photographed (by Krueger's brother, Tom) and full of telling detail, is a wry, intelligent picture with a sweet, but hardly saccharine, story to tell. [06 Sep 1996, p.03]

In Bruges, at its best, works like "Pulp Fiction" with Irish (and Belgian) accents, digressing into weird discourse and giving a bunch of actors the occasion to shine in small, peculiar roles.

Russian Dolls isn't quite the gem that its precursor was. It rambles. It's less of an ensemble effort. There's more of Xavier's moping self-centeredness. But Duris is terrific as the confused cusp-of-30 protagonist, and the rest of the cast is bright and beaming.

Out-of-control hilarious.

A handsome-looking movie that's full of the muted greens, browns and grays of the tony Hamptons, director Williams' tale never quite finds its footing.

An economical thriller, both narratively and budgetarily, Sound of My Voice serves up moments of extreme dread and discomfort, but works a winning undercurrent of playful absurdity into the material as well.

The effectively creepy Stir of Echoes, is enough to make your blood chill.

Like Sorkin's D.C.-set TV series, "West Wing," his script for Charlie Wilson's War is full of rapid-fire badinage, with movers and shakers moving smart and shaking snappy as a squad of aides trot along behind, briefcases and coffee cups in tow. A decade - not to mention a war - never went by so quickly.

Rosenwald tells the remarkable story of a remarkable man.

"Rebel Without a Cause" with a debate club, Better Luck Tomorrow is a sharp, smart slice of suburban angst among the high school overachiever set.

In The Business of Strangers the right words are hard to come by, but the truth of them -- and the lies -- cut to the quick.

A sappy excursion to Edwardian days.

Disarmingly laid back for this kind of fare, with a jazzy musical score (courtesy of David Holmes) and a sleek, straight-ahead style, Haywire may not make much sense plotwise, but it's a rollicking 90 minutes.

A beautifully strange movie.

An extraordinarily perfect little film: A bittersweet drama that explores sexuality and love, and their reverberations across the landscape of human emotions.

The screenplay of Open Range, credited to one Craig Storper, is an awesome compendium of cowboy-movie cliches. It borders on parody, and often crosses the border, rustling up a drove of oater aphorisms.

Terrific filmmaking, but it's hard to leave Moodysson's picture without feeling much of anything except hopelessness. Utterly.

Limitless rocks.

Director John Crowley trots his crew around London, working up a suitable amount of suspense. And paranoia.

This taut cautionary tale explores the dark side of American politics. And leaves the viewer to wonder - if anyone's still wondering - is there a bright side?

At the heart of the film, Polley - with her wary, unsure stares, her open smile and beguiling intelligence - is terrific.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

This sweet, yet unsentimental film is about growing up, losing innocence, and longing for a place, and people, to call home.

The mostly British ensemble can do this stuff in their sleep, but Macfadyen and Donovan and Graves, especially, work up the necessary antic angst and silliness.

Seydoux, no doubt best known for her kickboxing catfight with Paula Patton in "Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol," gives a quiet, watchful performance, suggesting fealty for her lady but also a strong independent streak.

Stranger Than Fiction is slicker than Kaufman's work - and Forster's direction is certainly more studio-ish than Kaufman collaborators Spike Jonze's or Michel Gondry's. But it's a clever idea, and you feel a little smarter watching the thing unfurl.

As in David Lean's "Brief Encounter," the suspense in Cairo Time comes from what doesn't happen between its pair of "lovers."

Has the arc of a Shakespearean tragedy, and all the essential components therein: loyalty and betrayal, conspiracy and delusion, self-destruction.

It's about time: Aubrey Plaza gets her own movie!

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

A chick movie? Well, yes, but it's a whole lot cooler than that one with the "Ya-Ya's" in the title.

All about the wacky borderlands where reality and invention intersect. But there are no safe demarcations -- no demilitarized zone, no Berlin Wall -- to cue us to which side we're operating in, or that Barris is operating in.

That the fantasy comes crashing back to earth seems all but inevitable. That Rudo y Cursi doesn't crash in the process - that's muy bien.

Ultimately, Somewhere may be too static, too minimalist a tale. But there's grace here.

Smart, suspenseful, satisfyingly unpredictable.

A meditation on mortality, on loneliness, on the way technology and narcissism have intersected to create a fascinating monster, The Future is all of this and more. What Frank Capra would have made of it, who knows? But he would have liked its star.

Although James and Madden are no Fred and Ginger when it comes time for the fabled ball, her breathy swoons and glitter-splashed décolletage and his personable imperviousness bode well for the couple's future.

Mr. Holmes is about how the past defines us. It is also very much about regret and trying to put things right.

It's a good thing not to know where a film is going - we need surprises, we need to be spun around a few times - and Ruby Sparks, which is about a writer and his muse, but then becomes more about the muse and her writer, is happily just such a film.

Thoroughly engaging.

Has a dreamy ominousness about it, and a sorrowfulness that speaks to the artificial intimacies of cellular communication, digital images and dial-up porn.

As for the scary business - it is, indeed, scary, delivered with an intensity that will make you think twice the next time you find yourself driving alone, or opening a closet door when no one else happens to be around.

In the engaging Looking for Eric, Loach, the master of British kitchen sink social drama - tries a bit of imaginary whimsy.

That's something else Ridley and his actors do: make you appreciate what a life it was - impossibly short, impossibly brilliant.

There's a fine line between stupid comedy that's actually pretty smart and stupid comedy that's just dumb, and The Other Guys crosses the line - into realms of unredeeming dunderheadedness - more often than it should.

This is no-nonsense, let's-get-to-it business, and will probably be less satisfying, and less clear, to viewers unfamiliar with the source material.

Terminator 3 moves at not-quite-breakneck speed, and the shape-shifting, metal-melting special effects aren't exactly spectacular.

The thing's a behemoth. And as the franchise thunders on, it's also becoming more and more a bore.

What's not to like?

With the likes of Nicholson, Keaton, Reeves and Peet -- and a fleeting, funny few minutes with McDormand -- Something's Gotta Give is never less than entertaining. And once in a while it's sweetly, and extremely, funny.

Moderately compelling and clinical. This isn't "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; this isn't even "Klute."

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

It's a harrowing tale, but one that gets phonied up with unnecessary slo-mos, manipulative soundtrack cues, and unrestrained thespianism.

Is Auto Focus a cautionary tale or just a morbid, voyeuristic foray into kitsch and kink? Whatever it is, it's not pretty - it's the cinematic equivalent of soiled, stained sheets. You'll want to run out of the theater straight to a Laundromat.

Obama, it is implied, is deliberately making America more vulnerable to attack from Muslim extremists. No mention is made of the fact that it was under Obama's watch that Osama bin Laden was killed.

Blissfully, brainlessly satisfying.

Meta and messy, Seven Psychopaths does not hang together like "In Bruges."

One of the things that distinguishes Love & Friendship from the multitude of Austen adaptations - the worthy and the less so - is its heroine. Lady Susan Vernon, a widow of devilish charms, is as frank and fearless a character as Austen ever imagined.

The Bling Ring is Sofia Coppola's energetic, elegant, and entertaining take on this real-life story - a comedy, of sorts, if what it says about our obsession with the famous and the frivolous weren't so totally depressing.

The Trigger Effect asks some important questions about society's increasing reliance on technology (and how we take the high-tech infrastructure of daily life for granted), but the questions are wrapped in a bleak, humorless allegory about alienation and rage. [30 Aug 1996, p.03]

This is Highsmith, and so things do not go as planned for her protagonists. The Two Faces of January - drop-dead gorgeous to behold - is not a merry tale, but a murderous one. Murderously good.

Although Will Ferrell materializes for a goofball cameo, The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard lacks a key element that his "Talladega Nights" and "Anchor Man" both had - that is, somebody to like.

A jukebox musical that's astonishingly cornball one minute, winkingly sardonic the next.

And tell me if I'm nuts, but another distraction: Doesn't the BFG bear a striking resemblance to George W. Bush?

Crash fools around with chronology in a Tarantinoesque way that brings its story full circle. You could argue that as events, and people, merge, Haggis' spiky screenplay (cowritten with Bobby Moresco) gets to be, quite simply, too much.

It looks lovely in an art-directed way, and Eddie Redmayne, who won his Oscar earlier in the year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, looks lovely, too.

Don Jon is about a man's unwitting search for intimacy, for real connection in a world where everyone is connected - by social media, by the Internet, by TV and computer and smartphone screens. That's not exactly an original idea. But Gordon-Levitt goes at it with gusto, and style. Give the guy some props.

Abounds with zero-gravity action ballet, frisky interludes of sapphic foreplay, and weepy drama about doomed love. The film also has an irresistibly kitschy theme song: "Close to You," the treacly Burt Bacharach-Hal David smash by the Carpenters.

Ready-made for Valentine's Day, The Vow is, like the offerings at Cafe Mnemonic, a total sugar overload.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

Is Spurlock selling out by pulling off this stunt? Is he biting the hand that feeds him? Is he working both sides against the middle? And does he think JetBlue is the best airline in the world? You bet.

The Hip Hop Project, a documentary about Kazi and the young men and women he mentors, isn't quite as successful as Kazi himself - a Bahamian orphan and teenage street hustler who turned his life around, and got folks like Queen Latifah, Russell Simmons and Bruce Willis to help out him and his project.

Brings too much of EVERYTHING to the table: It's the cinema equivalent of a long, winding, run-on sentence.

The British star of "Ali G" fame plays Ricky Bobby's arch-nemesis. His name: Jean Girard. His provenance: France. His sponsor: Perrier. Speaking through a set of nasty-looking, tightly clenched teeth in the faux-est of faux French accents, Cohen is hilarious.

If Edel's Oscar-nominated film drags in its final 40 minutes, it's a function of the director's fidelity to the facts - and the fact that the founding trio (and the film's stars) have become prisoners of the state, confined and confused.

Tully is at turns heartbreaking and heart-stirring. And it's from the heartland, so I guess that makes perfect sense.

But the ending, at once ambiguous and obvious, is a letdown -- a frustratingly literal-minded, or literary-minded, conceit.

Compelling, kinetic, fast and furious.

All four performances are strong and nuanced, which makes the film oddly compelling. At the same time, all four characters are hard to like, difficult to care about. They're like car-crash victims in a demolition derby of narcissism and lies.

The Edge isn't particularly deep stuff, but Tamahori isn't a particularly deep filmmaker - he's just really, really good, with an affinity for the natural landscape that comes across brilliantly on screen. [26 Sep 1997, p.03]

Kick-Ass has punk energy, ace action moves, and a winning sense of absurdist fun.

It's a farce with heart, a meditation on identity, family and gender politics that has real faith in its characters - even when the characters themselves lack it.

You get faux feelings -- but faux of the highest, giddiest order.

It is possible to bring substance, as well as poetry, to the vignette form, but more often Paris, Je T'Aime is merely mundane.

For Piaf fans, La Vie en Rose is a must-see. For fans yet-to-be, Dahan and Cotillard's film is an opportunity rich with discovery.

Not only eight minutes shorter than its forebear, it's at least eight minutes better - less twee, less chatty, more action, more Elvish.

Another Earth has heft - emotionally, intellectually.

Don't come to The Amazing-Spider-Man looking for originality.

Unfortunately, David Koepp - the A-list Hollywood screenwriter (Jurassic Park, War of the Worlds) and decidedly less-successful director (Ghost Town, Secret Window) - can't find the right Looney Tunes-ish tone for his immersion into bike-messenger culture.

Hackman's in it a lot, and he is, as almost always, great fun.

A stage-y but likable ensemble piece.

Pays homage to a sack of Christmas movies, from the department store Claus of "Miracle on 34th Street" to a standing-on-the-bridge-contemplating-suicide moment, a la "It's a Wonderful Life."

What are you going to do when your lead actress offers a performance that's as unlikable as the woman she's portraying? Maybe it's the script (flimsy, formulaic), or filmmaker Alejandro Gomez Monteverde's conspicuous direction, but Tammy Blanchard's Nina, a waitress with a dour disposition and an unwanted pregnancy, pretty much sucks the life out of this well-meaning melodrama.

The movie would pour nicely onto a thick stack of pancakes.

As solid as Cranston, Leguizamo, Kruger, Bratt, and all the rest are, the built-in constraints of the movie format don't do their real-life counterparts full justice.

This quiet, aching film - punctuated by dead-on music choices, a blues song, reggae, the requisite Leonard Cohen - doesn't answer those questions. It's enough to raise them.

At once noble and naive, earnest and a tad obnoxious.

Catfish, made on the cheap with digital video, cell-phone cams, and hidden mikes, raises all sorts of questions - about the imaginary realms that open when you click on your computer screen, about cyber-stalking, but also about journalistic ethics.

I Am Legend is essentially "28 Days Later" . . ., or "28 Weeks Later" . . ., only with millions more for special effects, and with nothing approaching the heart-pounding, bloodcurdling power and smarts of the two British-made yarns.

Very slight and, in the early going, slightly annoying, Coffee and Cigarettes is a long-borning Jarmusch project.

None of these elements quite come together, and while the clothes and props look authentic, the acting doesn't.

For all its faults - and there are many, from shameless compression of events to milk the drama for all it's worth, to the gimmicky miscasting of several commanders-in-chief (Robin Williams as Eisenhower is especially egregious) - The Butler is an inspiring and important summation of the black struggle.

A funny, sad and absolutely lovely film.

Almost absurdly quiet and observant, The Limits of Control is about the space between the action, the steps along the way.

An interesting choice for a Valentine's Day outing, He Loves Me is a weird, bubbly cocktail -- effervescent charm and troubling pathology, shaken together.

A thinker and an educator, Zinn has led a life of commitment and compassion, and the film offers a loving tribute.

Closer, in the end, lacks a certain heft. The language and the actions of the characters are brutal and devastating. The movie itself, a little too nice.

What the three pairs of actors lack in semblance (or resemblance), they make up for to a great extent in their performances.

My Best Friend, not surprisingly, is about what it means to have friends - and not to have them, to be alone. It's about connection, about trust and vulnerability. That Leconte's little film is a mild-mannered farce, makes the heartache funny, but really, this is serious stuff.

The MST3K folks have gone all-out and found a movie in actual color to lampoon: This Island Earth, a 1954 Universal sci-fier with a no-star cast, low-tech special effects and a logic-defying plot. It's a perfect vehicle for Mike, Servo and Crow to go after - and following a brief prologue that brings MST3K novices up to date, that's exactly what they do. [19 Apr 1996, p.03]

Montenegro's character has a spark in her eye, and a determination, that makes this quiet, intelligent film anything but boring.

Terribly slight and a little off.

Mostly, Not Fade Away is a hit.

Deliberately paced, with an eerie, country-ish score from the Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly, Jindabyne is definitely a mystery. But it's not about who killed the woman - audiences know that practically from the outset.

The "black Godfather" comes off as a cold-blooded narcissist whose vision of the American Dream is as twisted as it seems to have been rewarding.

In a way, The TV Set suffers from the same syndrome as the industry it's parodying: bland and compromised, it feels as if it's been fine-tuned and focus-grouped within an inch of its life.

Circumstance is more interesting for its cultural views than for its insights into love, sex, family angst, and rebellious youth.

The whole affair has a painfully self-conscious, self-referential air. Jokes land with a thud, and so, alas, does Rocky, who seems to have forgotten how to fly.

Kill Your Darlings is a tale of inspiration, then, but also a tale of jealousy, obsession, homophobia, and homicide. It's a whirlwind. Even if it doesn't all hang together, it's worth the ride.

While the production values are top-notch, and the action artfully choreographed, in the end - and quite well before the end - a sense of tedium sets in.

Lacking in subtlety and nuance, Broomfield's nerve-jangling movie nonetheless succeeds in showing the war from various vantage points. And from wherever one's standing, the view is profoundly disturbing.

Salt offers a sloppy concoction of story elements from '70s espionage classics - the sinister black ops of "Three Days of the Condor," the nuclear dread of "Fail-Safe," the political-assassination scenarios of "The Day of the Jackal."

If Mockingjay - Part 1 was walkier and talkier than its forerunners, Part 2 is pretty much all action - and lesser for it.

McGregor, playing his lover, is a perfect foil: gentle, funny, magnetic.

Plays with cultural stereotypes, and upends them as well. The picture starts as one thing and turns, dramatically, movingly, into something else.

This is an indie film with big stars - but also an indie films with big ideas about bringing real people to life.

Apted opts not to show the horrendous cruelty inflicted on thousands upon thousands of captive Africans, shackled and chained, making their way to the Americas in ships. Instead, he has Wilberforce and his fellow abolitionists describe the inhumane conditions - in the precise, passionate language of legislators who believe that human decency is more important than money and power.

In the end, The Last Kiss holds less a cynical view of the matrimonial state than one of considered irony.

Saving Mr. Banks, set in 1961, is smart, delightful.

An elaborate origins story with more datelines than an issue of Condé Nast Traveler (Oxford! Miami! Argentina! Poland!), X-Men: First Class has some fun trying to explain how Professor X, Magneto, and all those mopey mutants came to be.

Has its effectively nasty, chilling moments -- and it also brings body piercing to new heights of ickiness.

Long and lugubrious.

Works the basics with style and intelligence.

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Gimmicky artifice.

Exhilarating and, ultimately, filled with a sense of existential dread.

A first film with a deft comedic touch and a trio of charming stars, Saving Face isn't deep - but it doesn't profess to be.

Illuminating and unsettling.

Taken for what it is - 'tweenage escapism - Stormbreaker is moderately fun.

An old-style mob movie based on a real court case and a real character - a colorful character - Find Me Guilty is about loyalty, family, and a bunch of good fellas.

Made in a forthright, unfancy style and utilizing a cast of born naturals, Washington Heights deftly draws parallels between father and son's complicated relationship and the tensions that pulse through this predominantly Dominican American community.

No walk in the park, Tyrannosaur is a character study steeped in the British (and Irish) tradition of social realism, and the experience of watching this skillfully made film is, well, exhausting.

Your body's sitting there in the theater, but it feels as if your head is someplace else.

Pacific Rim shares much with the Mexican filmmaker's "Hellboy" franchise - jokey and comic book-y, full of muscular tableaus with huge squads of people coming and going (and running for their lives).

A love song to the new Europe (Klapisch's original title: Euro Pudding) and a snapshot of a polyglot gang on the cusp of kind-of-reckless youth and responsibility-burdened adulthood.

Pretty magical.

Has a certain captivating quality about it.

Footage from VanDyke's travels provides the first-person narrative thrust to Point and Shoot, but Curry's interviews with VanDyke, back in his Baltimore home, are what give the film its larger, more challenging context.

The film turns into a story of corruption on many levels, and it moves fast, without a scrap of fat in the telling.

A heartfelt project, scrappy and engaging, The Way has its way with audiences despite, not because of, its sentimental excess.

A gorgeous confection, packed with gargantuan gowns and pornographic displays of pastrystuffs, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette is also a sharp, smart look at the isolation, ennui and supercilious affairs of the rich, famous and famously pampered.

The film's save-the-world scenario may be the stuff of crusty cliff-hangers, its imagery may be borrowed, and its jaunty dialogue anything but deep, but there's something exhilarating going on here. It's darn sublime.

If we now take a woman's right to vote and to hold public office for granted, Suffragette reminds us that it wasn't that long ago when things were different.

Sunshine can be seen as a story about science and religion, about the rational mind and the mad. But at a certain point, like a dying star about to pop into eternal nothingness, the movie can't be seen as anything - it just implodes.

Baker gets great, sly, unforced performances from his two leads, but it's not all a rollicking good time: There are moments of quietude, inquietude, moments when a sense of wariness and loneliness settles over the women.

Loses itself in melodrama, caricature and narrative missteps.

Disconnect is an Eleanor Rigby movie. Look at all the lonely people. A "Crash" for the Internet age, Alex Henry Rubin's topical opus swoops down like an alien spaceship to investigate a disparate group of Earthlings living in close proximity in the suburbs of New York City.

Blood-curdling stuff.

May not plumb the depths of the female psyche, but it's stylish and frivolous in the most profound ways.

Wanted is head-spinning stuff, and it's easy to get caught up in its masterfully manipulated mayhem. Visually, and viscerally, it's pretty awesome.

Often ingenious, funny and unnerving. [14 Oct 1994, p.14]

No amount of accomplished acting and directorial skill can conceal the fundamental silliness of Outbreak's storyline, its inconsistencies, and the miraculous coincidences necessitated by its plot. [10 Mar 1995, p.3]

JCVD juggles humor with whomping martial-arts moves and a kind of melancholy star turn from the melancholy, muscular star.

The humor and chops are there, but the story isn't quite.

The movie isn't as deep as it pretends to be, but it does have several nicely unexpected twists going for it. And it has Williams - memorably creepy, chillingly sad.

And that, in the end, is what Quartet is about: determined engagement, embracing music and theater and the arts, and embracing the friends and loved ones you have around you.

It is Rapace, the Swedish actress who gained worldwide recognition as Lisbeth Salander in the original adaptation of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo," who ends up the true heroine of Prometheus.

The relationship between Chris and his diminutive namesake is at the core of the film - the determination to be there for his son, no matter what; the mentoring, the pair's goofy, lovely banter. And Smith and his bright-eyed boy pull it off brilliantly.

"March of the Penguins" - phooey! Those smelly little birds are built to survive in the frozen tundra, and nobody's asking them to pull a sled.

Belle, with its country manors and its city slums, its snooty nobles and its fiery idealists, its ballroom dances and barroom conspiracies, brings these themes to a dramatic head: romance and race, privilege and justice.

Has a breezy, Altmanesque air, as it tracks the mini-dramas of its crisscrossing characters.

An entertainingly hairy paranormal affair.

Swiss Army Man is a quest movie of sorts, and also a sort of modern-day piece of absurdist theater. Samuel Beckett by way of Monty Python, it is a story that is at once rooted in the fixations of adolescence (sex, the idea of sex, bodily functions, more sex) and in the loftier firmaments of the mind.

With the exception of a few stakes and crosses jumping from the screen, some bloody sprays here and there, and one creepy, claustrophobic car ride, the 3-D glasses are a hindrance, not an enhancement.

What this slow-moving but fascinating two-part portrait does do is hunker down in the jungles and mountains of Cuba and (in the second part) Bolivia, capturing in keen, almost Zen-like detail the trudging and trekking, the recruiting and strategizing, the fighting and the philosophizing.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

There's something optimistic in the filmmaker's clear-eyed, straightforward storytelling style.

The meaning - and irony - of Kaboom's title doesn't become clear until a beat or two before the end credits roll, and even then it's hard to say what exactly Araki is getting at.

Cusack is especially good in a role that's got more (and less) going on under the surface, while Peet offers up another coltish, trash-mouthed vamp.

They're not exactly Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy, but French filmmaker Cédric Klapisch's "Spanish Apartment" movies - 2002's "L'Auberge Espagnole," 2005's "Russian Dolls," and now, Chinese Puzzle - have their devotees, too.

Jolting, suspenseful, full of twisted sympathy for its goons' row of characters, and wickedly amusing to boot, Killing Them Softly summons up the ghosts of "Goodfellas" and a whole nasty tradition of crime pics. And then it lets its ghosts go, whacking and thwacking away.

Deeply personal and filled with love, Maya Forbes' Infinitely Polar Bear is nonetheless a hard movie to watch - hard to watch comfortably.

Much scampering, yelling, quaking and crying is required of the actors, and they acquit themselves well enough, even with oozing fake wounds and prop rebars piercing their shoulder blades.

Miles Ahead is more a provocative character sketch than a meaty portrait, but it's a film that should be applauded for its daring, and for Cheadle's shape-shifting, soul-baring work.

Although it's pretty much impossible to avoid the cliches and constructs of a war movie, Ayer pushes his actors to find the adrenalized fear, and fire, in their guts. Pitt brings "Wardaddy" alive in ways that put his cartoonish "Inglourious Basterds" Army lieutenant to shame. Lerman's rabbity dread is palpable.

If the film itself isn't brilliant, its star most definitely is.

The Road isn't a masterpiece...But I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear - and yes, perhaps hope - kicking around like such a terrible dream.

Lacks the gimmicky hook that made "Run Lola Run" an arthouse hit, but it doesn't lack for ideas, nor for images that will sweep you up in their boldness and have the resonance of dreams.

A story of obsession and honor, deception and self-deception set against a sharply etched landscape of political upheaval and intrigue. Malkovich orchestrates all this with assuredness, and Bardem, looking weary and worn, inhabits his character with a realness, a truth, that's downright spooky. And beautiful.

Offers a diverting tale of erstwhile indie filmmaking and the power of porn to generate change - both at the box office and in the bedroom.

Although its origin-story machinations get the better of it, Ant-Man isn't a bust.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 is quieter and less flashy than its predecessors, that doesn't make it less satisfying.

A spirited, smart-alecky look at the ongoing conflict between a government that wants to eliminate pot and a public that wants to smoke it.

Too bad Chocolat isn't as seductive as its leading lady.

Dumb with a capital D, Blades of Glory takes its (almost) fleshed-out sketch-comedy idea as far as an ice-skating buddy movie with we're-not-gay jokes and a psycho stalker can go.

Dazzling and delirious, The Fall is a celebration of cinema, of old-fashioned storytelling and globe-hopping spectacle.

It's more of a character study, insightful and nuanced, about a man grappling with a profound sense of inadequacy, questioning himself. In many ways, We Have a Pope recalls last year's Oscar winner, "The King's Speech": Someone who doesn't feel up to the job fate has handed him, and then struggling to come to terms with it.

A syrup-thick New Age ghost story of the same sappy stripe and mawkishness as another Costner foray, "Message in a Bottle."

The movie's too long - and the violence and mayhem are unexpectedly harsh and heavy - but Franco's inspired, looped performance is right up there in the annals of reefer filmdom with Jeff Bridges' the Dude in "The Big Lebowski."

Lieberher, a Philly native transplanted to L.A., is a reed-thin, wide-eyed wonder. There's none of that precocious Hollywood child-actor stuff going on; he's seriously thinking about what he has to say, assessing his words and their implications. It's rare to see any actor - let alone a novice, barely out of the single digits - so readily and naturally displaying inner thought in front of the camera.

It's earnest, but it feels beside the point. Blood Diamond's real point: box office.

The Spanish actress Marina Gatell is exotic and engaging as a young writer drawn to Lorca and puzzled why he is not drawn to her in return.

Doesn't match up against the new millennium martial artistry of "The Matrix," nor do the special effects - but he knows how to establish characters and relationships.

Most of it plays like Jackass.

Supermensch is one of those truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tales.

Twilight - directed with savvy humor by Catherine Hardwicke - turns vampirism into a metaphor for teen lust.

Moves along the way its leading man walks along - steady and sure.

With a moody overlay of songs supplied by Okkervil River and Shearwater, In Search of a Midnight Kiss also serves as a millennial's answer to Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

The Grey, whose clipped title, grim swagger, and lost-in-the-outback themes conjure up visions of that Alec Baldwin/Anthony Hopkins classic, "The Edge," devolves into a predictable man-against-nature, and man-against-fellow man, affair.

Fast Food Nation picks up, and drops off, various members of its cast, sometimes without a satisfying resolution. But its final scenes, inside a real working meatpacking plant, on the killing floor, are brutally to the point.

With a thumping score and whirling cinematography, District 13: Ultimatum delivers two or three awesomely choreographed chase-and-fight-and-chase-and-fight-again sequences. The dialogue (in French, with subtitles) is not this movie's strength, nor should it be.

The Salvation is severe and bloody stuff.

Tokyo! is a must-see for the Gondry segment, and a strange, diverting pleasure for the rest.

Despite some fine, nuanced acting (it's Lane's movie, to be sure), Unfaithful doesn't get much deeper than a romance novel.

Monsters, like a serpent eating its own tail, comes back on itself in ways that haunt, and hurt.

The contrast in lifestyles is striking, and I suppose one of the themes that Babies is trying to get at is that despite chasm-wide economic and societal differences, infants are really all the same.

Pulls off a neat trick: It's a poignant, sweet-natured love story in which what most of us would call kinky sex - domination, submission, some enthusiastic spanking - is featured prominently, but not pruriently.

Like some murderous version of "Working Girl," the ruthless exec and the seemingly naive underling go at one another - turning the film, at a pivotal moment, into a satisfying whodunit.

Silverman is wickedly fast. Her timing kills.

A taut, tricky thriller.

Lost in a time warp of its own doing (or non-doing), Hitchhiker's Guide just doesn't seem terribly original.

A Cat in Paris is thrilling, and a thrilling example of traditional ink and paint cartooning.

A parablelike melodrama with obvious symbolic meaning.

Charming is such an overused, film critic-y designation, but The Way Home is that, and more.

Cooper, who steered Jeff Bridges through his Oscar-winning turn in Crazy Heart, gets fiercely committed performances from just about everyone in Out of the Furnace.

The film, with its painterly juxtapositions of dockside industry, green hills, and cloud-scudded sky, is full of misguided motives and fairy-tale fraud. But it rings true at heart.

Instead of gleaning something from real life, the great minds behind Friends With Benefits slapped their ideas together based on screwball classics, "Sleepless in Seattle" bits, and a keen analysis of Hollywood hackery.

If there's a psych ward for motion pictures, It's Kind of a Funny Story should check itself in. Boden and Fleck's film suffers from bipolar disorder: manic and silly one minute, moody and muted the next.

An enjoyably trippy Japanese animated feature.

If you love Les Mis the stage musical, my guess is you will love what Hooper and his bustling company have done. But when you hear "Master of the House" and you think of the Seinfeld episode with Elaine's gruff dad belting the tune before you think of those shifty innkeepers the Thénardiers, then you may want to steer clear of this grand endeavor.

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

An engagingly knuckleheaded comic vehicle for former Saturday Night Live trouper Will Ferrell.

There is a lot of finger-pointing. Assertions are made, theories offered, but not much in the way of certainty.

There's humanity here, on all sides, and a gentle wisdom beneath the raging rhetoric.

Nunez's dialogue, and the paces he puts this threesome through, just don't ring true. Coastlines is the stuff of pulp, seriously at odds with what the writer-director has always done best. That is, show the inner workings of people, their needs, their fears, their small dreams.

In the wake of the Oscar-winning "The Hurt Locker" - a far better film, and one with a less strident, less obvious agenda - Green Zone arrives looking strangely anachronistic.

A downer of a drama.

The Chamber of Secrets -- darker, scarier and somewhat better than "Sorcerer's Stone."

Undertow has the plain, stark, disturbing quality that marked the original "Cape Fear" and "In Cold Blood."

Simplistic and corny, this adaptation by director (and co-writer) Stephen Sommers nonetheless delivers the goods: exciting animal stunts, breathtaking subtropical scenery (India and a jungle-ized Tennessee and South Carolina) and a likable if not exactly three-dimensional cast of characters. [23 Dec 1994, p.03]

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

Without doubt one of the scariest, creepiest, gut-churningly unsettling pictures to come along in ages.

Like Mickey Rourke in "The Wrestler," Malkovich plays a star long past his glory days in The Great Buck Howard, but continuing to do the only thing he knows. The tone of the two films couldn't be less alike, but the story arc of the central characters graphs the same.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

In many ways, City of Men is like a Portuguese-language version of David Simon's "The Wire."

Forster and his team have also mastered the discreet edit, leaving a lot of the blood, gore, and zombie slime to the imagination. (It's still a pretty convincingly creepy affair.)

A deadpan, dead-on comedy.

Poignant, funny and clear-eyed about some tough topics: homophobia, racism, AIDS.

Megamind has momentum and dazzle.

A goofy screwball romp that affords a gaggle of A-listers the chance to hambone around in antic style.

The Weather Man belongs to a school of earnest, artsy Hollywood flicks that includes the Michael Douglas-goes-bonkers "Falling Down," and a lineage that goes back to revered 1970s pics like "Five Easy Pieces."

It's a tale of survival and kitsch that will win you over.

A dark, shaky, standard-issue superhero picture.

Some tacky animated sequences notwithstanding, Youth in Revolt is smart, cool and frequently hysterical.

Suffice to say it's got plenty to do with corporate karma. And the word severance is more than just a double play on words - it's a triple whammy.

A lot of dark, Orwellian fun.

A big, kabooming sequel that plays sleight-of-hand with its audience.

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

Catastrophically overdone.

42 doesn't shirk from showing how daunting it was for Robinson to turn the other cheek, as Ford's Rickey tells him he must do, in the face of the insults and hostility.