Damage brings to mind Last Tango in Paris, although Malle's elegant, precise direction is drastically different from Bertolucci's work, a film that celebrates the loss of inhibition and control. Although relentlessly somber, Damage offers a perverse humor in the idea of father-and-son rivalry over the same woman: it's like the Oedipus complex in reverse.

Aiming to be this year's Basic Instinct, Body of Evidence never raises a discernible pulse.

Is it a comedy? A documentary? An underground gore-fest? Man Bites Dog, the first feature film from Belgian director Rémy Belvaux, is all of these and much more, a ghastly, shocking and explosive debut with all the genuinely ruthless ability to disturb as an oily blue-barreled revolver jammed in your mouth. And it's funny, too.

Alive is no Oscar-challenger, certainly, but it does treat a very dicey incident with the even-keeled direction the story deserves.

Previously responsible for The Hitcher, a disturbingly cold-blooded exercise but still a powerful cinematic vehicle, Harmon still doesn't show enough humanity to be considered anything more than a stylish director. But he is a damned stylish one, who keeps the film interesting and the action sequences effective. If you don't expect much (and the developer vs. land owner plot is ridiculous) you may be surprised at what's here.

Bad sets, bad acting, bad direction, shadows of boom-mikes, inexplicable plot holes, generic effects, fake-looking gore, death by pogo stick (!?), off-kilter Irish brogues... I just can't say enough about this, can I? My head hurts just trying to remember this complete and utter waste of perfectly good Kodak film stock.

Director Miller, thankfully, keeps his pacing quick and his touch deft -- Lorenzo's Oil rarely becomes bogged down in interdisciplinary conundrums or the unwarranted heartstring-yanking that so often occurs in Hollywood MedFilms.

Ultimately, it's a very boring ride.

There's no denying that Pacino's performance is superb. The rest of the movie plays like a bunch of inconsequentially strung together sequences.

You've got to admire a movie that's willing to journey down paths that have no clear antecedents in the creation of a modern whimsical fable, but you don't have to admire the fractured results.

If anything, A Few Good Men errs by throwing almost too many elements, themes and moral debates into the mix thus, by default, they sometimes seem shallowly developed and overly simple. Then again, that perhaps allows them to connect with more universal experiences.

Unfortunately, the film rests heavily on the shoulders of Murphy, who seems to wander aimlessly from scene to scene, searching for a laugh. The joke's on him, though: There are none.

One of the best movies I've seen this year and, consequently, the less said about it here the better. The beauty of this movie is in the way it twists and turns, thwarting expectations, confounding stereotypes and venturing into places you least anticipate.

Perhaps one of the most unbearable viewing experiences of the year, complete with a formulaic script, lousy acting, and muddled direction.

Williams' shape-shifting, gag-spouting, celebrity-impersonating Genie is truly a hurricane in a bottle. His manic energy and hip humor are so exhilarating that the rest of the movie risks grinding to a halt whenever he's not onscreen.

What it lacks in charm, it compensates for with audacity and single-mindedness of vision.

The John Hughes script must have taken him all of thirty minutes to write – simply a matter of a few name and location changes. It wasn't a good script the first time, either.

A mortal movie about an immortal subject and the very fact that it succeeds as well as it does is a testament to Lee's skills as a filmmaker.

Interestingly, Coppola has eschewed state-of-the-art special effects in favor of a panoply of archaic film-school tricks -- reversing the film, multiple exposures, playing with the shutter speed -- that give his Dracula a stylized, almost hyper-real clarity and a wonderfully singular weirdness.

Robinson keeps Jennifer 8 moving right along, alternately dropping clues right in our laps and tossing in a red herring or two, but it's the dark town running like a black thread throughout the whole film that keeps your nerves jangling.

The Lover is one of those great films that shouldn't be missed.

While not always successful or even unusual, Night and the City is a tart Manhattan cocktail worth savoring until the cup runs dry.

Make no mistake, I'm not saying Dr. Giggles is a cinematic watershed or anything like that, but it does manage to mix humor and horror in a way that very few films ever manage successfully.

Director Rose seems not to know what to show next, and whether this is in an effort to keep his audience guessing or not, it only ends up making what could have been an exceptionally disturbing film exceptionally annoying.

Kline and Spacey are excellent here, playing off of each other like a couple of professional combatants; it's by far the most interesting thriller in the last six months.

A pure cinematic distillation of Maclean's words, it is by turns austere and vibrant, disconsolate and joyful.

Ultimately, Under Siege isn't much because, basically, with Seagal as the star there's no real human center. But Davis, playing to Seagal's strengths, has woven a carefully crafted confection around the star, who has enough moves to hold it all together.

It is violent, certainly, but it's also a genuinely excellent film, horrifying and touching and beautiful in a bloody sort of way. A bit like real life, really.