Walter Addiego

It’s a complicated tale, and at 92 minutes, the film is a very brief summary.

Gattaca is a welcome throwback to the days of good, low-tech sci-fi, stressing character and atmosphere over computer-generated effects and juvenile thrills.

There’s already a small library of films about the Who and its music, but this is the first I know of that examines the men who almost accidentally wound up managing one of the most incendiary of ’60s rock groups.

We're compelled to admire these athletes because, despite their obvious skill, they are in constant danger.

An affable comedy (with some serious notes).

It’s an intricate thriller about a con game, but so loaded with wicked humor and sensual appeal — ravishing cinematography, high-temperature eroticism — that for long stretches viewers might forget there’s any plot at all.

The film is cleanly made and moves quickly, which enhances its effectiveness. It raises moral issues that simply can’t be addressed too often.

A potent and disturbing experience. Fortunately it’s much more, offering sharp performances and genuine drama.

My Old Lady is affecting, even if many of the revelations and high-voltage speeches occur at predictable moments. But if you can look past this formulaic side, it's a movie worth seeing.

The film is far from perfect but has enough going on to compensate for its excessive length and some sentimentality.

Presenting Princess Shaw looks and feels like a DIY project, which is fine because the documentary is really a hymn to self-reliance — although bolstered with a modest amount of plain old luck.

Rao avoids high drama, and while there is humor, the film's tone is one of melancholy.

See Love Is Strange for its sensitivity and understated jokes, but mainly for Lithgow and Molina's expertly modulated work, which pulls the movie back when it threatens to stray into melodrama or heavy-handedness.

It's fascinating stuff, but secondary to Ebert's genuine passion for the movies, which, if anything, grew toward the end of his life. He saw film as a great civilizing force, "a machine that generates empathy," as he says in the film. If that idea appeals to you, see Life Itself.

The movie has lots of ironic humor, especially in the earlier segments, and laughter doesn't disappear entirely when the thriller element kicks in.

The result is a thrill ride with enough plunges and turns and loop-the-loops to make it worth a spin. What the picture lacks is the magic and resonance you feel in the best of popular entertainments.

The actor suffered deeply, and however much he’s responsible for that, it’s hard not to feel some compassion for a bright and sensitive artist who, at least early on, seemed full of life.

Director Patrick Creadon, who in 2006 made the entertaining "Wordplay," about crossword fanatics, probably errs on the side of advocacy here. But give him credit for acknowledging that idealistic endeavors don't always pay off.

Who can resist a good horse story? Simply and directly made, Dark Horse is a rousing documentary.

It may not sound funny, but there's a bleakly comic air about the story, and a bit of surrealism, suggesting the most caustic side of the Coen brothers.

Does about as good a job as any film could be expected to.

It's impossible to listen to Francesca's parents, deadly serious about art as a higher calling, without feeling both saddened and disturbed.

A gripping documentary about the most exacting and expensive scientific experiment ever conducted, and one that may be among the most significant.

Entertaining but predictable, and too long.

It may surprise you to hear that in the end there is a sliver of hope offered in Under the Tree, so thin that it’s almost not there. A less interesting movie might simply have served up a headlong plunge into the abyss — but Sigurdsson gives us a tiny flicker of light.

Works a familiar mine and produces more than a few nuggets. It's a good tonic, if one's still needed, for '80s-style cynicism: Greed is not good.

The hits just keep on coming in Muscle Shoals, a hugely entertaining, perhaps overlong, documentary about the renowned recording studios in the small Alabama town of the film's title. It's mandatory viewing for fans of the classic rock, soul and rhythm and blues of the 1960s and '70s.

The Great Escape is great entertainment. [06 Jun 2004]

The film doesn't see any contradictions between the man and his work, which is folkloric, mostly upbeat, often humorous. Both art and artist are outsized and entertaining, and that's about all that Bel Borba Aqui has to say.

If you stare at it too hard, In Another Country, an exercise in drollery from South Korea's Hong Sang-soo, simply evaporates. But if you take the film as the bauble it is, you'll be entertained by its lighthearted wit, social observations and resolute sidestepping of profundity.

The film's sense of intimacy, its closeness to real people and painful events, allows it to reach a deeper place than more conventional pieces of political rhetoric.

The scale is small, but Jellyfish has deep currents.

It’s a lot of ground to cover, but if the movie fails to plumb the depth of Lear’s mystery, it succeeds in being an entertaining look at an influential figure.

A powerful polemic leavened with moments of beauty and humor.

Gets blue-ribbon results from its thoroughbred cast of improvisational comics.

Creating this kind of otherworldly mood takes exceptional talent, and this is a film worth experiencing.

A potent and troubling meditation on the state of Western society.

What's on the screen may not be a letter-perfect Mansfield Park, but something true to its spirit.

A sobering documentary.

Outstanding in support roles are Alison Lohman, playing a friend of Jerry's, and John Carroll Lynch, playing a neighbor who befriends Jerry.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

An intense and affecting report on the experiences of U.S. troops in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

The real joy here is the gorgeous nature cinematography.

A charming and moving film about a slightly racy subculture in a highly rule-bound society.

There’s much of value to be had along the way to a nicely handled ending. It would be a mistake to call it a surprise, but it’s something that few viewers are likely to expect.

In the title role, Kikuchi is impressive, easily handling Kumiko’s comic and more somber sides and never allowing us to settle into a single or simple interpretation of the character.

History rendered with enough brains and imagination to more than make up for its few stumbles.

This new picture is mainly in the spirit of fun, a loose, generally good-natured comedy with screwball overtones.

It's dark fun, in the spirit of "Gremlins."

It’s best to accept Don’t Breathe as simply a piece of lowdown fun — connoisseurs of creepy and sometimes brutal chills will have a good time.

It's compassionate but unblinking.

Bujalski has a serious talent for finding resonance in the mundane.

While Pick of the Litter can’t be described as innovative, it still creates a solid emotional punch when we see several of the five now-grown dogs finally matched with grateful humans. It’s quite moving to hear the recipients detail how liberating it is to have the assistance of one of these amazing animals.

The strangeness, humor and melancholy of aging are deftly explored in this film.

Exhilarating for Lynch diehards.

That the movie works so well is also due to the exceptional talents of leads Simonischek and Hüller, who hold nothing back — especially the former, whose Winfried is one of the oddest ducks in recent movies.

Overall it's a remarkably eccentric work coming from a cagey old Hollywood hand who directed Bogart and Hepburn in their primes. [28 Jun 2009, p.Q30]

The most amazing act in the Gran Circo Mexico doesn't take place in the ring - it's the grind between performances.

Eventually comes into its own as a wacky commentary on the state of America in the fifth year of the Iraq war.

It's a testament to what happens when all the right ingredients come together. Wag the Dog is the best political satire in years.

An exceptionally fine movie that plays out on a large and leisurely scale.

The director takes an unpromising premise - the switched-at-birth plot - and gives us something that's touching and unexpected.

The glory of the picture is the eye-popping, surreal backgrounds that blast the conventional characters off the screen.

It's full of visual flash, and can be enjoyed as a giddy ride, but you would waste your time trying to puzzle out the nuances of the story.

Metroland is a provocative rumination on how relationships are warped by two people's inability to be truthful with each other.

I can't help thinking, though, that maybe Thornton was too ambitious in trying to wear three hats.

You may find yourself weeping toward the end, and, later, you may also find yourself wondering why. The revelations are staggeringly obvious.

It's not as good as the original - which was fresher, funnier and scarier - but if it were, then by the criteria of the film's resident movie scholar, it wouldn't be a genuine sequel.

Lacks the spark of the best recent Disney spectaculars, like "Beauty and the Beast."

Speaking of bangs, the special effects include one of the better mega-blasts in recent memory: vast fireballs tear through the busy tunnel at dizzying speed and with devastating results. This is the money shot, what the Stallone audience is paying for. It remains to be seen if they'll buy a Stallone who's been downsized and reformulated - about a teaspoon's worth of added complexity.

It's soft-edged fun that loses direction (or, given the scattershot plot, directions).

His good-natured slob routine compensates for a lot of the film's dead spots, and the picture winds up a modest cut above the usual vehicle tailored for a would-be film star.

Some delightful surprises, but the sort of heavy-metal, high-definition sci-fi look that dominates the proceedings, plus the relentless pace and endless morphing, are somewhat tiring.

Cher is an inspired bit of casting, while the talented Dench is underused. Smith seems to be going through the motions as the fatuous and deluded aristocrat, while Tomlin has a ball as Georgie. But what really stays with you is the work by Plowright - she is a beacon of good sense (both as actor and character) and plucky as you please.

Director Troy Miller, making his feature debut, does a decent job with schmaltzy material.

There seems to be a pretty good film lurking around inside Bullhead, which makes what we actually see on the screen all the more frustrating.

A bonbon, not of a full-course meal. Foodies will smack their lips over many delectable shots of victuals prepared by the film's engaging protagonist, a provincial woman chosen to cook for the president of France. As a story, though, it's insubstantial - there's conflict here, but it feels perfunctory.

The film raises significant questions about manhood and offers a few gripping sequences, but isn’t fully satisfying.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

The title comes from Indian legend in which Lord Rama tests the purity of his wife by a flaming ordeal (which we see enacted in an open-air pageant with comic overtones of Bunuel). This bit of mythology too handily prefigures a major element in the film's conclusion.

The film was clearly a labor of love, for good or ill. At one point, Galinsky jokingly refers to the production as “semi-unprofessional.” This is unusual and welcome frankness from a moviemaker.

A modestly entertaining martial arts melodrama with impressively staged fight sequences that help compensate for a stale plot and some less-than-stellar acting.

A doleful melodrama. There are some intense, moving sequences, but too much emotional badgering and a general shortage of finesse.

Although this leisurely tale of an aged French sculptor offers a few other small pleasures, in the end it lacks heft.

In short, a nice, predictable film unlikely to linger in the memory.

Trying to be provocative with a capital "P," Anne Fontaine's Adore undermines itself by provoking unintended laughs.

Turns into a pedestrian slice 'n' dice feature.

The New Zealand feature Boy almost pulls off the trick of merging cartoonish humor and '80s pop culture with a story glancing at deeper family issues. The film has an appealing 11-year-old hero, but in the end feels half baked.

A mediocre college comedy that blends bits of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Mean Girls" and "Legally Blonde" and doesn't have much to show for it.

Requires us to repress any thoughts about stale material and keep Caine's heartfelt performance front and center.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

The film never quite overcomes a slightly stodgy quality.

Affecting at times, but finally feels overblown and heavy-handed.

This tale of a young rape victim further brutalized by officialdom never lives up to its potential.

Oristrell's comedic sense only seems to succeed in spurts, and he often burdens the proceedings with a theatrical and contrived air that undermines the humor.

This Paramount-DreamWorks collaboration, with Stephen Spielberg credited as executive producer, is competently made, strongly focused on its characters' relationships and surprisingly light on special effects.

Amenta was deeply moved by Rita's story, but his prosaic direction can't do it justice.

The Dance of Reality may not succeed, but it may hold some interest to cinephiles as a relic of a kind of extravagant, overheated personal cinema that doesn't exist anymore.