Tom Keogh

A viewer might expect the film’s widescreen, busy images to fill with revenge-action sequences. But in its own way, Mr. Six is much more about a unique man adjusting an out-of-fashion personal code for a new type of crisis in the shadow of his mortality.

Few movies this year have been quite so rewarding with their 11th hour epiphanies.

If you're paying close attention, there is reason enough to find Up at the Villa a fascinating experience, almost an experiment in some ways, but it's not a fully realized work of cinema.

For Here or to Go? offers an insightful group portrait but lacks imagination in a romantic subplot and (except for a requisite Bollywood-style dance number) is visually dreary.

It is Foster who presents the biggest single problem, delivering a monochromatic performance that finds her character not much more than flinty and strained.

It's possible that Ritchie's most important asset is the comic constant within his characters' existential dilemmas. To a man (and, indeed, they're all men), Ritchie's anti-heroes are at odds, in either large or small ways, with their own natures.

When Phillips is out of the zone, however, Road Trip slows down, awaiting another redemption.

Ting, to her credit, is more interested in the battle between heart and head, instinct and obligation, than in what follows. “Already Tomorrow” is about ambivalence, not gratification, and is more interesting for it.

Streep delivers another of her chameleon-like transformations in appearance, accent, and manner.

About two lives in which transformation is a constant, destabilizing threat to freedom and sanity. That's a very provocative premise, though halfway through the movie Doyle and Walsh abandon its potential to go for easy laughs.

Rounders is more involved with the insulated, arcane world of a gambler than it is with the things that actually make a movie work, such as characters and relationships and a script that connects all its dots.

Brother Nature at least enjoys moments of deep-end mania from Killam and Moynihan.

A wonderfully witty homage to the very king of disco movies -- "Saturday Night Fever."

The kind of minor work that may very well speak greater volumes about (Stone's) thoughts and feelings right now than another masterpiece would.

Perhaps in an effort to tell a PG story about an all-ages storyteller, Te Ata lacks vitality, pulling its punches and sometimes resorting to a cheesy shorthand. (A scene featuring Greene’s reservation leader and a racist senator is especially cheap.) Despite that, Te Ata lingers in the memory as a tale of an artist’s promise — and fulfillment.

It's a complete drag.

If you’re partial to the Northwest outdoors, co-writer and director Alex Simmons (best known for documentaries) makes the long trip a visual treat, too. Indeed it is time for fresh air.

It is an ostensibly serious story about being young and struggling to wrest control over one's life from the hands of fools, yet it doesn't behave like a serious drama that wants to lead us anywhere.

Shaft is a decent popcorn movie and Jackson rises to the responsibility of appearing bigger than life.

Director John H. Lee keeps the action taut and often deeply felt when it comes to sacrifices and losses. But the script is often bogged down by deifying MacArthur.

Drama, swift action, and low-key, character-driven comedy.

What the film doesn't have, ironically, is a soul.

It's sporadically funny but often unfunny, the latter worse than not being funny enough.

In the tradition of "Sunrise" and "Eyes Wide Shut," crises set the characters on a kind of dreamy, nocturnal journey through chaos and fear.

It's very effective.

A huge surprise: a startlingly resonant yet unabashedly entertaining slice of American history, a popcorn movie with complex observations about, of all things, racism.

What makes Hit and Runway uniquely fun, however, is the unapologetic extent to which Livingston and Cohen turn it into an index of beloved Woody-isms.

A dark comedy that squanders its potential and never quite, as they say, suspends disbelief.