A brazen title card declares this " true story." (Wow, not even "based on.") However many facts may be accurate, the movie feels contrived, with climax piled upon climax.

The most violent scene is dreamlike, and more direct killings are often seen at an angle or from a distance. The camera placement is thoughtful and effective, never titillating.

Watching the film is also wearying, like assembling a puzzle from a box into which a sadist continually pours new pieces. I was still processing details when the abrupt ending snatched the puzzle away.

You'll be disappointed if you expect famed leftist Oliver Stone to apply a coup de grace to this man.

The best way to sit through Max Payne is by using minimal brain.

It warms the heart in the hands of such sensitive storytellers.

The romance seems tacked on as a way to humanize this character; there's no reason the nurse would take up with a brash, secretive American.

The film, which covers Graham's life roughly from the ages of 16 to 30, presents us with characters so uncomplicated they belong in a pop-up book.

RocknRolla is a copy of a copy of a valuable original, and you know how faint and unintelligible those can be.

Performances are rather beside the point in a movie where dogs carry the acting burden, but Perabo is especially bland.

A feel-nothing movie – a series of disconnected, implausible incidents that end as arbitrarily as they began, in an effort to inspire emotions the picture never justifies.

Alfred Hitchcock once said, "Drama is life with the dull bits left out." Well, Rachel Getting Married is drama with the dull bits left in.

Monaghan gives a solid performance, and Billy Bob Thornton has sarcastically funny bits as an FBI agent.

This is one of the increasingly rare Hollywood films that treat people in middle age as though their feelings were just as intense and their needs just as valid as those of people half their age.

It's a smooth journey across familiar territory to a safe emotional harbor, always professional and occasionally delightful.

If you're fond of wigs, you may be in heaven. If you're more interested in Whigs, you may wish the movie had dug deeper under the lovely powdered surface of Lady Georgiana Spencer.

It's as pitiless and brutal as any of their pictures and funnier than any except "Raising Arizona."

This documentary makes a terrible kind of sense. It reminds us that something we take for granted, like air, can be sold to us – if we can afford it. And if we can't, what happens then?

A thriller that's frequently implausible but almost always thoughtful. It asks us to rethink the way we see Muslims

OK, so no plot, really.

An unforced, sweet-natured story about people who find small ways to touch others and rediscover the good in themselves.

When George Lucas last pulled off an original idea for a feature film, Bill Clinton was still thought of by many voters as overweight and chaste.

Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.

If inciting boredom is the worst sin a filmmaker can commit, being timid is right behind it. Whether I agree with your point of view or not, I want to hear it.

If you wait through the credits, you get one last joke in the fine print: The actors shot the whole movie in Hawaii, on the fabulously lush island of Kauai. So while they were shooting a story about indulged prima donnas, they were working themselves in one of the most tourist-friendly spots on Earth. You've gotta smile at that.

The movie's a crazy quilt of pot jokes, sarcastic put-downs and pop culture references both obvious and obscure.

I'm afraid it just stinks.

The film seems like a loose and uncredited updating of "The Great Man Votes," a more serious 1939 entry.