Todd McCarthy

It's hard to find the genuine heartfelt moments in The Lucky Ones.

This material cant help but be interesting, even compelling up to a point, but its prosaic presentation suggests that the story's full potential, encompassing deep, disturbing and enduring pain on all sides of the issue, has only begun to be touched.

For those always on the lookout for the "funny" Allen, this one definitely has its moments, but too much of the picture is flat, dispiriting and frankly unbelievable in fundamental ways that defy the granting of poetic license.

Towelhead is transgressive without being effectively subversive, gutsy to no particular end. It simply lacks style, which counts for so much in this sort of thing.

Oddly misanthropic, occasionally amusing but thoroughly cheerless holiday attraction that is in no way a family film.

Can be taken to task for its overt point-making, lackluster style and some late-on dramatic contrivances seemingly dragged in to provide a little violence.

Surprisingly lacks a feeling of personal urgency and insight that would have made it a distinctive, even unique contribution to the considerable number of films that deal with the war in general and Holocaust in particular.

Engagingly intriguing throughout most of its slightly overlong running time, and perhaps the strangely mesmerizing mood Lynch has orchestrated for the entire "Twin Peaks" undertaking should not be underestimated at this juncture. But the feeling persists that, to a considerable degree, Lynch is marking time with this project, creating new riffs and variations on themes he had already largely worked out.

A witty and sometimes surreal sci-fi comedy, Men in Black is a wild knuckleball of a movie that keeps dancing in and out of the strike zone.

From a sensory point of view, the film is a pleasure, the images having been manipulated in various ways to evocative effect, Anderson’s voiceovers proving more amusing than not, and the music taking mostly lively turns.

A low-impact romantic comedy-drama from James L. Brooks in which the central characters are strangely disconnected from one another as well as from the audience.

The opposition of the two dramas winds up in gratifyingly moral and philosophical territory.

Although arresting in spots, it falls far short of bringing out the full values of the play, and doesn't approach the emotional resonance of Franco Zeffirelli's immensely popular 1968 screen version.

A strange international odyssey that becomes more complicated and loony by the moment. Some viewers will undoubtedly tune out early, others will follow as far as they can -- and a privileged few might make it all the way.

A study of the urban dope-dealing culture and its toll on everyone who comes in contact with it, the picture has an insider's feel that is constantly undercut by the filmmaker's impulse to editorialize.

More pictorially arresting than intellectually coherent.

Jewish and academically inclined audiences worldwide will respond to numerous aspects of this unusual drama, although it is paradoxically both too broad and too esoteric for the general art house public.

On its own terms, the plotting of "Devil" is absorbing, and the pieces actually fit together pretty decently. On the other hand, when scenes directly call to mind similar ones in "Chinatown," this effort's stepchild relationship to the classic is forcibly demonstrated.

Deftly playing Tina Fey's feminist-icon mother, Lily Tomlin all but steals Admission, a knowing but uneven comedy about the neuroticism of the college-admission process on both sides of the equation.

The ultimate effect of [Östlund's] studied techniques is more restricting than beneficial, which, combined with a protracted running time, faintly self-righteous air and a perplexing, misguided coda, produces a sense of letdown at the end despite the strength of much that has come before.

On their own, individual scenes are effective enough in semi-farcically portraying the ignorance, avoidance and/or downright denial by the practitioners of bad loans. Together, however, they are wearying in their repetitive nature.

Craig Zobel effectively sets all its surface parts in motion but, crucially, doesn’t sufficiently develop that turbulent undercurrents of tension and intrigue that are called for in the hothouse circumstances.

After building up some cockeyed charm through the first half, Nancy Savoca’s third feature peels off into obscure and particularized religious mysticism, leaving the viewer grasping in vain for a handle to hold onto for the second hour.

Unfortunately, Barthes brings nothing new to the familiar story.

Unfortunately, instead of embracing the weighty moral, religious and political components of the story, Malick has alternately deflected and minimized them.

Harmless, but also, unfortunately, almost entirely mirthless, this putative comedy about an unsuspecting man obliged to transport a pachyderm cross-country aspires to a winsome charm that never crystallizes, leaving what’s onscreen to wilt before it ever blossoms.

Story was originally conceived as an episode of Tales From the Crypt, and that is perhaps what it should have remained, as the thinness of the conceit shows throughout, painfully so in the first half.

While pic remains sympathetic and appealing, the endless dialogue and repetitive settings become wearing through the couple's one long night together, and the artifice of the premise may contribute to the difficulty the film has in coming to romantic life.

The central character never develops in an interesting way. Well before the wrap-up of this brief tale, her cultivated recessiveness becomes tiresome and, in these particular circumstances, a bit dull.

The pervasive chill, ugly feelings and downward spiral of the narrative make this a work that requires an equally sober, serious-minded attitude on the part of the viewer.

Revives the format but not the fun of classic Hollywood screwball comedies about rediscovering the virtues of a former mate.

Del Toro clearly knows his way around the camera, but the shadowy eeriness that saturates the early going slowly becomes monotonous and winds up being just dull, and even partially obscures the action in the long underground finale.

A not-bad futuristic actioner with three or four astounding sequences, an unusual hero, a nifty villain and less mythic and romantic resonance than might be desired.

Francis Ford Coppola's take on the Dracula legend is a bloody visual feast. Both the most extravagant screen telling of the oft-filmed story and the one most faithful to its literary source, this rendition sets grand romantic goals for itself that aren't fulfilled emotionally, and it is gory without being at all scary.

Blue Ruin is a talented but sophomoric low-budgeter that straddles the divide between genre thriller and art piece with mixed results.

A great title in search of a movie to live up to it, this startlingly uneventful compendium of thick-headed boy-talk and female tolerance squanders a fine cast on incredibly ordinary characters and situations.

A nice looking but heavily formulaic DreamWorks animation entry.

A disappointingly routine thriller that prefers to lean on tired Hollywood conventions rather than to explore fresh dramatic and stylistic territory.

While rambunctious and passably humorous, this offspring isn't nearly as imaginative and nimble-minded as the forerunner that spawned it.

A pictorially unusual but dramatically listless tale.

This aggravatingly empty would-be suspense piece puts all its trust in its star to save the day, but even this compulsively watchable performer can’t elevate such a vapid, undeveloped screenplay.

A self-indulgent drama about a Harlem drug kingpin trying to go straight, Sugar Hill plays like a dreary variation on New Jack City.

It’s an eyebrow-raising true tale, one aided and abetted onscreen by the solid cast and strong sense of commitment. But Heckler is caught somewhere between being a journalistic historian and a dramatist without seeming expert at either. His screenplay connects all the dots of the story with no sense of shaping or modulation.

[A] mostly engaging but only fitfully inspired serio-comedy.

The Hudsucker Proxy is no doubt one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of old Hollywood pictures ever to come out of the New Hollywood. But a pastiche it remains, as nearly everything in the Coen brothers' latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be.

It’s hard to detect a strong raison d’etre behind Sofia Coppola’s slow-to-develop melodrama.

A deeply metaphysical film by contempo Hollywood standards, this middlebrow trifle may engage the emotions of a certain tier of young professional women.

This middle portion of an intended trilogy will only play to the converted who have already seen Part I, and then only to the most gullible among them who will swallow mediocre filmmaking for the sake of ideology.

The film's slender conceit is given some weight by its 11-year-old leading lady Sydney Aguirre, whose portrait of a flinty, instinctively mischievous tomboy growing up without benefit of parental guidance provides gratification even when there's not much going on.

One imagines Godard spending whole days playing with dials, switches and buttons to discover the very moments he wishes to emphasize in his clips, and a good many of them are passingly arresting.

The audaciousness that marked Todd Haynes’ earlier work has been supplanted by self-important preachiness in Safe.

Created as a comic vehicle for the lead actor, pic depends entirely too much on Wayans to carry the day, but at this point he is far more eager and willing than he is funny.

Whit Stillman's stiff directorial approach ill suits the sensual ambiance of the club scene so intently depicted, and the mostly self-conscious, uptight characters seem to have made a left turn out of "Metropolitan" and walked through the wrong door to turn up in this flamboyant druggie scene.

A desperately slight romantic comedy marked by contrived romance and little comedy.

Disappointingly, Death of a President shrinks from its promise as a piece of genuinely radical or adventurous speculative fiction.

The mash-up of elements combine with a singularly unpleasant roster of characters to create a work of genuinely off-putting quirkiness.

Spielberg is such a talented director it’s a shame to see him lose all sense of subtlety and nuance.

Neither the establishing dramatic linchpin nor the final conversion of conscience is terribly convincing, leaving this pared-down rendition of the original work diminished in power and meaning as well.

As usual, there are only fragments of thoughts, nothing is developed, and it will be left only to the tiny band of die-hard Godardians to try to make any meaningful sense of the disparate fragments stitched together here.

More than the film that surrounds him, Jack Black is worth the price of admission in Bernie, an oddball May-December true life crime story that would have profited from being a whole lot darker and full-bodied than it is.

With Gere’s character so lacking in memory and mental clarity, the film provides very little for an audience to latch on to. Tedium quickly sets in and is only sporadically relieved in this labor of love that simply doesn’t reward even the patient attention of sympathetic viewers.

In trying to merge this alarmist theme with an old-fashioned murder mystery, the filmmakers throw at least one plot-twist sucker-punch too many, leaving the viewer with an “Oh, come on” reaction to the entire film.

Carlos Lopez Estrada’s debut feature brandishes brash exuberance and stilted storytelling tropes in roughly equal measure, yielding a result that stimulates just as it cheapens itself dramatically.

An excellent novel about the Iraq War and its homefront fallout has been turned into a rather flat and disappointing film in The Yellow Birds.

A resourceful, if rather hyperbolic documentary that devotes 90 minutes to analyzing one of the most famous scenes in film history.

It is nonetheless imaginative in a highly familiar and ultimately tedious way.

Goes down like stiff medicine, leaving one feeling exhausted relief when it's finally over.

Staccato, Mamet-style dialogue exchanges, breathless pacing and remarkably healthy, well-fed-looking actors create a cumulative sense of artificiality that seriously undercuts the devastating effect clearly being sought.

Beautifully made pic will spur newsy media coverage and possible consternation on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, but members of the general public will be glancing at their watches rather than having epiphanies about world peace.

The lead performances have power, whereas pictorially the film is pretty rough and ordinary.

With "Shampoo" and "American Gigolo" now distant memories, the time evidently seemed ripe for another Hollywood stud movie. Despite Ashton Kutcher’s believability as an older woman’s kept boy, Spread isn’t a patch on those previous films.

Represents a passable follow-up to the venerable Peter Pan story and mercifully, at 72 minutes, is exactly half the length of the last attempt at same, Steven Spielberg's lamentable "Hook."

The picture comes up short in several departments, notably in pacing and in giving a strong sense of why this man became such a legend.

Stylistically audacious in the way it employs six different actors and assorted visual styles to depict various aspects of the troubadour's life and career, the film nevertheless lacks a narrative and a center, much like the "ghost" at its core.

Lovingly and knowledgeably made by director Tony Bill, who got his pilot's license as a teenager, pic nonetheless has a lightweight, airbrushed feel; despite the brutal dogfights and inevitable deaths, there's little gravity or resonance.

Daylight is a lower-echelon disaster thriller, in which the best character is knocked off early on and the leading man runs out of ideas with a third of the picture still to go. Noisy, technically proficient actioner about a group of people trapped in the Holland Tunnel after an explosion gets off a few decent blasts, but is just too limited in scope, imagination and excitement to burst out as a major B.O. winner domestically.

A protracted parade of woefully familiar motifs from the Amerindie playbook, Happy Endings comes off like an undernourished Paul Thomas Anderson wannabe.

Although well made and acted, the real question surrounding this microscopic look at men enduring the severe pressure of trench warfare is what relevance it may have for a modern audience. The answer is, probably not much.

Lacks narrative push...atmospheric drama that casts a minor but distinctive spell.

Malick's exalted visuals and isolated metaphysical epiphanies are ill-supported by a muddled, lurching narrative, resulting in a sprawling, unfocused account of an epochal historical moment.

A thriller more contrived than it is exciting.

There's something about novelist Stephenie Meyer that induces formerly interesting directors to suddenly make films that are slow, silly and soporific.

Colaizzo’s dialogue often crackles with modern idioms and good pithy comments, flowing from the distinct characters in easy fashion. As a director, he’s paced the action well. He knows what he’s doing, even when he’s doing the wrong thing.

Anthony and Joe Russo place too much faith in the ability of their talented thesps to carry the day over precariously thin material.

Refreshingly revisionist in the sense that it takes a relatively clear-eyed view of the messy lives and equivocal circumstances of many of the key participants.

There is amusement to be had, engaging actors to admire and beautiful craftsmanship to behold, but the entertainment quotient is below their usual standard when it comes to the films they target for a mass audience, of which this is one.

After impressing well enough in his previous big screen directorial outings, Abrams works in a narrower, less imaginative mode here; there's little sense of style, no grace notes or flights of imagination. One feels the dedication of a young musician at a recital determined not to make any mistakes, but there's no hint of creative interpretation, personal feelings or the spreading of artistic wings.

A minor affair, a confection based on dalliances and the way a set of sophisticated theater people handle them, that lacks true distinction.

The only problem is that the great majority of screen time is devoted to the kind of loutish, drunken, small-minded, confrontational macho posturing that, in assorted ethnic stripes, has been paraded across the screen innumerable times in recent years.

Director David Gordon Green has created some fresh, penetrating, beautifully drawn scenes of one-on-one intimacy…But some of what surrounds these interludes is variously misguided, fuzzy and borderline pretentious.

Holes will no doubt speak clearly and appealingly to its intended early teen audience.

Apart from startling, out-there comic turns by Robert Downey Jr. and Tom Cruise, however, the antics here are pretty thin, redundant and one-note.

Although the humor helps, the Groundhog Day-like repetition gets tedious; it makes you feel more like a hamster than a groundhog — or rather a hamster's wheel, going round and round, over and over again.

River of Grass works much better as a jokey , theoretical piece of genre revisionism than as a real movie.

Reasonably engaging as far as it goes, Searching for Ingmar Bergman evinces great appreciation for the writer-director's legacy and offers the testimonies of numerous eminent enthusiasts, but it leaves a good deal to be desired.

Director Spike Jonze's sharp instincts and vibrant visual style can't quite compensate for the lack of narrative eventfulness that increasingly bogs down this bright-minded picture.

The homily-laden wrap-up, stressing the upside of bad days, is enough to make you hold your nose, but it only lasts a moment, which is suggestive of the way Arteta and the cast provide the energy and momentum to get the job done but not overstay their welcome.

A game and winning performance by Melinda Page Hamilton is the only saving grace.