There are some creepy chuckles to be had from this allegedly true account of a hip, young New York photographer.

The best portion is an animated story-within-the-story, supervised by Ben Hibon, that recalls Lotte Reiniger's filigreed shadow puppets as it sets the stage for armageddon.

Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.

Compelling documentary.

Matt Dillon almost runs away with the movie as a preening, conniving NASCAR champ who may be dumber than a box of rocks but realizes there's something up with the VW.

Polanski honors the craft of classical storytelling and never flinches from the book's melodramatic extremes in portraying the horrors of poverty.

Unlike many other purveyors of hip comedy, they're consistently clever without being contemptuous of their audience.

Drew Barrymore's virtuoso performance smooths over the plot holes.

Even in its truncated state, this is pretty gripping stuff; just think of it as an epic commercial for the director's cut DVD.

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

Tongue-in-cheek dialogue, inventive slapstick and fight sequences, and luminous production design make this a treat.

At 165 minutes this is a pretty long haul, and the shifting alliances mapped out in the dark and claustrophobic first part can be difficult to follow; the payoff comes in the second part, which opens out into dramatic locations and bloody battle as the Mongols lay siege to Otrar.

Foley has a fine sense of shading in depicting a slightly dysfunctional family. The problem with this subgenre is the way it has to demonize and dehumanize its villains in order to produce the desired effect, which brutalizes the spectator along with the story and characters. If you can accept this limitation, this is a very efficient piece of machinery.

This sequel improves on the 2005 original about four friends.

Some have called this neo-noir, but aside from the setting there’s nothing "neo" about it; as in classic noir, the characters are slowly but surely ensnared by their own baser impulses.

Gentle, low-key first feature.

Some of the precise meanings of this Bill Forsyth comedy eluded me, but the vibes couldn't have been nicer.

The story (what there is of it) doesn't make much sense, but this is a very scary horror thriller that should keep you either on the edge of your seat or halfway under it.

Making his feature directing debut, Hoffman shows considerable generosity toward the other players, which was probably a good idea given his own listless performance as the mumbling title character.

It is only in the sequence about Berg's popular costar Philip Loeb that Aviva Kempner's documentary resonates. Loeb, an ardent union activist who was blacklisted during the McCarthy hearings, comes across as more identifiably human than the workaholic Berg, for all her fictional character's warmth and her many admirers' tributes.

Not always successful, but packed with energy and a lively Oscar-winning performance by Burstyn.

Engrossing.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

The long odds against Smith only make his unexpected surge against Carnahan more exciting, and Popper sticks close to the fierce campaigner and his young, mostly inexperienced staffers, capturing all the energy, idealism, dour humor, and unreasoning hope of a Cinderella candidacy.

The best (which also means the sexiest) Campion feature since "The Piano," featuring Meg Ryan's best performance to date and an impressive one by Mark Ruffalo.

Absorbing docudrama.

Flaky, funny, and sexy.

Movies about the trajectory from outsider to insider in LA social and professional circles--the two always seem inextricably linked--are a dime a dozen, but this one is fresh, thanks to a script by lead actor Jon Favreau that lets us know Mike knows he resembles a character in a movie even if he doesn't know he is one.

Fairly predictable, but the two leads' impressively nuanced performances make it less so, and Berri makes skillful use of both actors.

If you're willing to suspend disbelief, this is a pretty good ride.

This remake is good fun, aided in no small degree by Colin Farrell's strutting, dead-eyed performance as the bloodsucker.

The cast is certainly impressive, and probably reason enough for seeing this.

Clooney directed with an actor's appetite for vivid star turns, and he certainly gets them from Ryan Gosling, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Giamatti.

May have more heart than head, but it's also just as interesting for what it leaves out of its romantic story as for what it retains.

A fascinating allegory of modern-day Iran.

This lacks the heft of "The Insider" (1999) or the snap of "Erin Brockovich" (2000), but it's a thoughtful entry in the growing subgenre of whistle-blower dramas.

Chanodr has said that he wanted to portray the 2008 financial meltdown in all its complexity, assigning everyone a fair share of the blame. But the real strength of his debut feature is how persuasively it depicts the fishbowl world of high finance, whose executives seem incapable of seeing past their towering salaries and privileged lives.

Vincent Cassel sets a new standard for Gallic cool as the title character.

An unusually successful attempt to mate good drama with political analysis.

This loses focus and begins to get a little soggy and moralistic toward the end, but on the whole it's a sensitive and well-observed comedy that's especially adept at handling the characters' rage.

The coincidences that bring some characters together and keep others apart in this romantic comedy are plotted with musical grace.

While Walters is no Cukor, he's not without his pleasures. His simple but polished shooting style, once a routine satisfaction of the cinema, carries the aura of a long-lost classical grace.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

Despite the familiar story, both kids are three-dimensional characters, and first-time director Patel embraces their generational dilemmas with feeling and wit.

Henry Hübchen is dynamic as the title character.

Much of the film's impact comes from the nimble editing of Chris King (whose previous work includes Exit Through the Gift Shop) and Gregers Sall.

John Steinbeck's painful biblical allegory—Genesis replayed in Monterey, California, circa 1917—is more palatable on the screen, thanks to the down-to-earth performances of James Dean as Cal/Cain and Richard Davalos as Aron/Abel.

The 3-D element is unobtrusively handled, except when it perfectly re-creates the woman who's always perched on her boyfriend's shoulders in front of you at a concert.

Nicely written as well as filmed.

The ability of faith to reintegrate a damaged personality is one theme here, although the film doesn't strive for psychological realism; in its heartfelt embrace of religion as ethical path, it owes more to the bygone Yiddish drama than to psychodrama.

A sparing use of exterior shots during the mesmerizing buildup to the match heightens their impact, while invasively tight close-ups put the actors to the test.

Simultaneously quite watchable and passionless.

With its persuasive special effects, gentle pace, and more expressionistic than surreal production design, this serious yet far from ponderous drama is something of a marvel.

The film's theme of acceptance is undercut considerably by Hurt's overcalculated performance.

Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who studied filmmaking in Belgium, this is raw, sardonic, and formally complex.

This is basically Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily.

As in the first movie, To deftly references the "Godfather" trilogy, examining the moral equivocation and shifting alliances among various syndicate members.

Slight film of mostly comic tableaux.

The cloying score aside, this is a searing depiction of war in all its savagery, waste, and folly, with artfully choreographed sequences that surpass the conventions of the genre.

The surprising thing about George Lucas's first feature (1971), a dystopian SF parable now digitally enhanced and expanded by five minutes, is how arty it seems compared to his later movies.

The thing runs more than two hours, but this is the sort of project that's indemnified against charges of excess.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

Kolirin has a fine sense of where to place the camera and when to cut between shots for maximum comic effect, and his two lead actors--Sasson Gabai as the band's conductor and Ronit Elkabetz (Or) as one of the locals--are terrific.

So few movies these days concern themselves with ideas of any sort that a drama like this one, about a man humbled by the consequences of his own intellectual breakthrough, seems even more powerful.

This sequel to the French actioner "District B13" (2004) offers more of what made the original such a sublimely stupid pleasure.

Despite the gimmicky direction and a disappointing climax, this is a distinctive and unsettling comedy.

This is hardly Flaubert, but it is a fairly beguiling look at moral calculation.

Too many extraneous elements have been added--the victim here is an aborigine, which prompts a racial backlash against the men and their families--but at the movie's center lies the knotty story of a marriage poisoned by amorality.

Intelligent and handsomely mounted, though it doesn't use its length to build to a particularly complex emotional effect. It's a thin, snaky epic with more breadth than body, rather like watching an entire Masterpiece Theatre chapter play in a single sitting.

Wood is notorious for his 1952 transvestite saga Glen or Glenda? (aka I Changed My Sex), but for my money this 1959 effort is twice as strange and appealing in its undisguised incompetence.

The engineering of the special effects is fairly impressive, and the sight of so many objects and creatures being buffeted about carries a certain apocalyptic splendor.

Reitman deserves credit for going through with a bitterly ironic ending, but the movie is marred by its warm condescension toward flyover country.

Except for one manipulative deathbed scene, Ken Kwapis directs with sensitivity, steering the multiple story lines toward a satisfying conclusion.

The film would have been more satisfying if director Jan Kounen (Darshan: The Embrace) had shown more of the ferment of the times.

Affecting and offbeat.

It's not very special, but it's nice to see a Disney film that follows the rules of the family-film genre as Walt laid them down, rather than trying to emulate Spielberg's empty, high-tech grandiosity.

Ali Selim, a highly successful director of commercials in Minneapolis, makes his feature directing debut with this simple and beautifully paced drama, letting the characters breathe and the land speak.

Here's something you don't see every day: a genial, politically correct splatter comedy.

Sunshine does for sci-fi what "28 Days Later" . . . did for the zombie movie -- its tale about a manned space mission to the sun preys on our growing fear of obliteration as we confront global warming.

Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content.

Lots can be said for The Aviator as entertainment, though not much for it as edification.

A hallucination sequence and a scene set in a Vegas nightclub are so engrossing you forget they're animated; even the showiest techniques don't detract from the story.

At first Costner seems to distrust the hokey character he plays, but his performance and the movie's slanted humor, rash melodrama, and ludicrous action soon become riveting.

Rapaport keeps things lively with a hip-hop-tinged aesthetic, shuffling rhythmically between old and new footage. However engaging, though, the visuals have little to say about Tribe's legacy when compared with the original score, contributed by the great producer Madlib.

The Departed is completely engrossing, a master class in suspense. But in moral terms it may be the least involving story that Scorsese -- an artist much preoccupied with morality -- has ever taken on.

Though the parallels drawn between therapy and prostitution grow tiresome, the duo's interaction is peppered with inspired comedic moments.

Eleven years on, someone in Hollywood has finally worked up the nerve to address the LA riots--but only on the slickest terms imaginable.

Although the film is fast and consistently clever, it is more deeply flawed than any other Hitchcock film of the period, failing to find a thematic connection between its imaginative set pieces.

At times a bit too precious, especially inside the young navigator's spacecraft, but the warm regard for character, as well as for our often-inhospitable planetary home, makes for a reasonably good time.

Both actors are so good that one might easily overlook the Pollyannaish subplot.

There's more than a nod to Sergio Leone in Kapadia's rugged wide-screen landscapes, minimal dialogue, and extreme close-ups, but there's scant humor to relieve the harshness, and though he has presence Khan is no Eastwood--or even a Mifune.

A beguiling combination of agrarian ode and “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” deepened by Peterson's square sincerity as he struggles to find himself in relation to his family's land.

The least characteristic movie Jean-Pierre Melville ever made. It replaces his sternly fatalistic philosophizing with a benign, genuinely comic spirit, and his rigidly classical style yields to a pleasant informality.

The general tone is one of crusty, unapologetic misanthropy, driven home by the formidable Rudd (who also kicked in on the script).

The ugly emotional mess is so respectfully handled that the story resonates far beyond its comic designs.

Despite the triteness of the theme (Dern is in charge of maintaining the last remnants of the earth's vegetation), the film is enjoyable for its intimacy, seriousness, and intelligent character work, virtues not perpetuated by the subsequent new wave.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

The technically uneven performance footage is redeemed by excellent sound and charismatic interviews with popular bachateros.