Walter Addiego

A well-made culture-shock documentary.

Ineptly written and shot like a fashion mag, rings hollow throughout. It's a long, long way from "Jules and Jim."

An edifying and forthright drama that aims to create a lump in the throat, and succeeds.

Funny enough that it could make buddy pictures respectable again.

The jokes run hot, cold and tepid.

Never gets the mixture right, lurching between bullet-happy shootouts and overwrought domestic content.

A potent drama from Yang Li, one of China's Sixth Generation filmmakers noted for the stark realism and documentary feeling of their work.

Will probably pass muster with very young viewers, but their parents may grit their teeth at its saccharine quality.

There's no objectivity in this film -- Greenwald's goal is not to offer balanced coverage but to roil the waters.

De Felitta has taken potentially overripe material and given it real heart.

This is a timeless, and nearly plotless, look at the day-to-day life of a nomadic Mongolian shepherding family. Yes, it moves deliberately, and impatient viewers will find it intolerably slow. But those who can get in track with its serene rhythm will be rewarded.

Linklater has less success telling a story; time passes amiably, but the film has no center.

Well made, but it's a talkfest that wears its stage origins on its sleeve.

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

Has an impressive cast and captures some of that era's fuzzy rebelliousness and humanism, but taken on its own the picture is finally thin stuff.

The standard noir trappings are here: the femme fatale, double-crossing, fatalism, broken dreams, innocence betrayed and the rest of it. But Stone pushes it all so far and so relentlessly that it becomes absurdist comedy.

This is a nearly miraculous conjunction of director, material and actor.

Though not flawless, this is a compelling study, in Dogme style, of a wounded young woman who spends her working life spying on others.

With the exception of a couple of inspired moments, Mary Reilly is merely a curious variation of an often-told story.

The most compelling footage was taken during the uprising of August and September 2007, which put a bad scare into the government because a large number of Buddhist monks played a prominent role.

Not sure we need to know this much about his family life.

It's a bleak, fatalistic tale about rootlessness and the changing moral order in the machine age, but the wondrous details of the film trump any grand thematic concerns.

Standard-issue slasher pic.

From Juan Ruiz-Anchia's florid, eruptive photography to the pinpoint editing by Howard E. Smith that enhances it, everyone involved with The Corruptor understands that action is the bottom line - except Chow.

Director Paul Morrison ("Wondrous Oblivion") nicely re-creates the period, but puts too much weight on the sexual relationship as determining the men's artistic courses.

The picture seems to have been intended as a political satire, but only a Hollywood executive could mistake it for the real thing.

What's unforeseen in Unforeseen, a superior documentary by Laura Dunn, are the consequences of a certain mind-set about mankind's relationship to the world and, finally, to itself.

A potboiler but entertaining enough to rise above its flaws.

This nightmarish revenge drama from Korea is grueling, intense, cruel -- the very definition of extreme cinema.

A gentle comedy.

The performers don't really seem at the top of their game here.

This Belgian crime thriller makes compelling viewing out of a "you can't be serious" plotline.

Doesn't allow the story's considerable nostalgia and sentimentality to overwhelm it.

It is stark, realistic and resolutely downbeat. Yates' work is lean, and he has a nice way with action sequences. [17 May 2009, p.R28]

The acting is good, particularly by Faour, who plays the naive, zaftig heroine as warm and appealing despite her troubles. It's also nice to see veteran Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass ("Lemon Tree"), who plays Muna's sister.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

Intriguing and educational. For partisans of Bertolt Brecht, it's mandatory.

Earnest and kid-friendly -- also simplistic and dramatically creaky.

Too much of nothing and far from the potentially star-making material that Foxx deserves.

The talented Murphy is appealing here, performing with sincerity and restraint - a wise choice, since his co-stars are a menagerie of wisecracking animals.

A romantic sitcom that never transcends its gimmicky plot, but offers enough screen time to Gwyneth Paltrow to satisfy even her most rabid fans.

Nothing groundbreaking, but there's an easy charm in the movie.

Otherwise, the movie, which borrows from a dozen pop sources and improves on none of them, is pretty much a washout.

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.

Writer-director Mark Herman seems genuinely moved by the plight of the mining communities, but his attempt to translate those feelings into a story shows the effects of hard labor.

Well-made and modestly enjoyable.

Stupid.

If you want lots of Will Smith and industrial-strength special effects, the movie delivers.

A lightweight and sentimental exercise that succeeds at little except maybe inspiring the viewer to go out and find a decent curry.

I'll stick out my neck and say that Park Chan Wook's wildly gruesome Thirst is the most whacked-out version of an Emile Zola novel ever to reach the screen.

This is grim material, but director Hilary Brougher -- working from her own script that won a Sundance award -- examines the lives of these two suffering women without sensationalism or preaching.

That's not to say the entertaining Antz" was made by Woody, just that it's full of his personality.

I could have done without the clips from the old "Superman" TV show - strictly sugar to make the medicine go down, and a sign that the director doesn't fully trust his audience.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

Freed from the demands of adapting an established and complex literary piece, the filmmakers seem to have relaxed - and so can their audience.

A frantic, epic-sized blowout of campy, "Indiana Jones" -style derring-do mixed with lots of computer-generated gee-whizzes.

It's a handsome and entertaining small-scale picture with nice acting, some crisp (and some crude) dialogue and effective direction.

You can see this Danish offering as a sardonic update of familiar noir material, or simply as the story of the midlife crisis of a guy who wishes - or dreams, or dreads - that he's living out a grand drama. There are pleasures to be had either way.

The effort is undermined with crass humor, mugging and slapstick.

It's back in a handsome new black-and-white print, and it's still powerful stuff -- you can see why Pauline Kael wrote that it was "probably the only film that has ever made middle-class audiences believe in the necessity of bombing innocent people."

The bloodshed is somewhat less gory than in many slasher films -- with stress on the "somewhat." [26 Sep 2004]

With his caustic humor, director de la Iglesia is being billed as "the next Almodovar."

Good-looking and empty.

At first, the technique seems gimmicky, but finally it's as compelling a perspective as any to understand how these men passed through agony to some sort of peace.

An old-fashioned and family-friendly comedy.

Perhaps Patten is trying to do to us what Rinpoche does to his followers, but the film's meandering structure and intrusive narration detract from the focus on the master.