Probably the most visually sophisticated of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent pictures and certainly one of the best, this 1927 release sets up an edgy romantic triangle in a traveling carnival that involves two boxers (Carl Brisson and Ian Hunter) and a snake charmer (Lillian Hall-Davies).

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

Baseball fans might find this marginally absorbing; for anyone else it's as conscientious and stylistically pedestrian as director John Sayles's other films, and a mite overlong to boot.

The punky energy of the earlier films has given way to a self-conscious striving for significance, obscuring Miller's considerable kinetic talents in favor of a lumpy didacticism.

The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking.

The rough-and-tumble tone is bitterly entertaining but in the end doesn't contribute to a convincing historical portrait, and a pileup of half-baked resolutions spoils the buzz.

Critics seemed to like this less than audiences; personally I had a ball.

The tale of Rapunzel gets a cheeky make-over in this gorgeous Disney animation, which combines the studio's traditional hand-drawn look with the sculptural qualities of digital 3D.

Fair amount of grit and charm.

By the film's underwater finale, director Matteo Garrone has bestowed a tragic stature on the pint-size Othello who loves "not wisely but too well."

Evoking Curtis's mystique and eccentric personality, filmmaker Craig Highberger also delivers an invaluable chronicle of New York's barrier-smashing underground arts scene circa 1968-'74.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

Though Hanks keeps the satirical and critical aspects of this look at show biz fairly light, there's a lot of conviction and savvy behind the steadiness of his gaze, and his economy in evoking the flavor of the period at the beginning of the picture is priceless.

The episodic structure prevents any real momentum, but Byatt and Fothergill give a visceral sense of the sea's violence and vividly capture the riot of color to be found on the ocean floor.

The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.

Whether the character is supposed to be a stand-in for Cody, who grew up in the western 'burbs of Chicago and has since won an Oscar, is more than I can say, but the movie suffers from the sort of self-pitying fog that can envelop a writer when he dives into his own malaise.

Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.

This engrossing documentary widens to consider the phenomenon of viral videos and the humiliation they can bring to their sometimes unsuspecting victims.

The characters have a fullness and vitality rare in American films of that period, but Towne has so much trouble establishing information visually that the film emerges as choppy, confused, ill-proportioned.

So lightweight that you're likely to start forgetting it before it's even over.

A nervy as well as somber piece of work, not only for the way it confounds and even frustrates certain genre expectations, but also -- and especially -- for the way it confronts the viewer with the moral implications of that frustration.

This one's slightly better than average these days, which means slightly diverting.

Some pieces of the plot feel dishonest, others contrived, but there are also moments of nicely observed detail and plenty of good messages.

As this wonderful adaptation reminds us, Dickens endures mostly because of his characters.

Although Broomfield's grandstanding has provoked charges of hypocrisy, this is a genuinely moral work that raises unsettling questions about the haphazard application of the death penalty, and it's certainly more complex and affecting than the fictionalized portrait of Wuornos in "Monster."

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

It's highly inventive, self-conscious camp, made in 1965, well before the genre wore itself out in superciliousness.

A fine, freewheeling musical.

With an intelligent, provocative and stylized approach, Bronson (based on a true story) follows the metamorphosis of Mickey Peterson into Britain's most dangerous prisoner, Charles Bronson.

The task of dramatizing this proved too difficult for Niels Arden Oplev when he directed a Swedish adaptation in 2009, but as Fincher demonstrated in "Social Network," he knows how to make information technology eerily seductive. Unfortunately Larsson's salacious plot elements - mass murder, Nazism, and the like - feel just as shallow as they did in the earlier version.

This is fun if you're looking mainly for light entertainment.

The film acquires a pleasant, syncopated rhythm as it bounces from one unlikely event to another, and Seidelman manages some nice detailing in the minor characters. Arquette is consistently charming and inventive in a role that barely exists as written, and Madonna is given ample opportunity to strut her stuff.

Shot in and around the town of Bradford in long, loping takes, this sprightly comedy, adapted by Andrea Dunbar from her own play, has some of the energy that one associates with the better exploitation films that used to be produced by Roger Corman.

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.

The tolerance and loopy poetry of the beloved book by Dr. Seuss have been nicely captured.

Andrew Horn, writer of “East Side Story,” directs, stylishly.

Ruppert makes a compelling argument that the world is approaching a paradigm shift unlike anything in human history.

Lugubrious and rather contrived... Because this whole project seems detached at times to the point of indifference—no one ever seems to be having any fun, including the filmmakers—even one's clinical interest eventually begins to evaporate.

There's something more than a little perverse about taking one of the most timid, self-effacing heroines in English literature and turning her into a paragon of modern free-spirited womanhood.

This low-key romantic comedy proves that destiny-powered love stories can be formulaic without being predictable.

At 92 minutes this could hardly be considered a definitive statement, yet its combination of high drama and carefully articulated principle delivers quite a punch.

The dialogue slackens after the first half hour, but the stars have some fine comic moments together, and the intimate precode encounters are pretty sexy.

This high-powered sports melodrama benefits from its strong male leads, a sinewy narrative, and the maverick attitude of MMA. But for all the contemporary references, it's essentially a spin on the story of Cain and Abel, which may be the reason it feels timeless.

Magical, visually exciting, affecting even in its sincere hokeyness, and extremely provocative.

Whatever else you might say about this weird, creepy, and funny independent item by Guy Maddin, it's certainly different.

Like most of his British films, Blackmail is a sign of things to come rather than Hitchcock at his height, but it shouldn’t be missed.

This bleak vision directed by Darren Aronofsky ("Pi") is pointless with good reason.

At 85 minutes the movie is beautifully focused, reaching deep into its characters as they confront terrible secrets but never sacrificing momentum as the mystery unravels.

This is worth catching just for the scene in which Behdad, pulled before an Islamic judge for possession of banned DVDs, intermittently cowers and rages, and ultimately talks his way out of a flogging.

Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

Writer-director Wong Kar-wai makes these five self-consciously idiosyncratic types--often seen through distorting lenses in cinematographer Christopher Doyle's somber, garish Hong Kong--fully and instantly believable.

Slyly exploiting audience expectations and prejudices, Lelouch calls into question our very ways of seeing, even as he and his longtime writing partner, Pierre Uytterhoeven, craft an elegant meditation on loss and rebirth.

Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.

It's odd that a movie featuring a great classical director is notable for some extremely contemporary acting.

This is certainly well executed, with a sense of fate and fancy akin to Pedro Almodovar's, but its glibness began to wear on me after the agonizing death of a Great Dane was played for laughs.

While its slender plot (stripper Karina wants a baby and turns to Belmondo when her boyfriend Brialy won't oblige her) can irritate in spots, the film's high spirits may still win you over.

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.

Long, grim, but utterly engrossing.

The best thing Mann brings to his picture is a strong sense of time and place.

Responsibility for the ensuing tragedy is so finely calibrated that neither can be comprehensively blamed or exculpated.

Zbanic's story of an ordinary life stained by extraordinary cruelty cuts deep.

The end result is somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Castle, but still worth seeing.

Focusing on one family in a small northern California town that seems to have survived an initial attack, Littman quickly loses interest in the logic of the concept (the naturalistic presentation of an unnatural event) and begins pushing the sentimental pornography of death.

The performances are strong, but the spectator often feels adrift in an overly busy intrigue.

Woody Allen's welcome return to straight-ahead entertainment, after 15 years of slogging through art-house hand-me-downs, happily coincided with a return to Diane Keaton as his leading lady, and she deftly steals the show.

The most riveting interview subject is the unrepentant Killen, who granted the filmmakers surprisingly broad access to his personal life.

I suspect the unconverted will want to be beamed up pronto.

A blandly twisting plot with no meaningful revelations or substantial themes.

Critics have faulted this 2005 British feature about the Rwandan genocide for focusing on a couple of white characters instead of the 800,000 Tutsis who were slaughtered, but such easy judgments miss the point entirely: this is a spiritual drama, not a political one, drawing a thick line between our good intentions and the selfish choices we ultimately make.

The movie's sympathy is often disarming. Unfortunately the director can be generous to a fault, repeating certain moments and letting others run on after he's made his point.

The science is compelling, though Cameron and codirector Steven Quale undermine the movie's scholarship with a silly sci-fi ending.

This absorbing documentary by George Hickenlooper (Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse) spends too much time on the celebrities in Bingenheimer's life for its analysis of fame and fandom to rise above the banal.

Ken Hanes's witty script shows its origins in his stage play, with the repartee often a bit too thick and fast for the screen.

Critics, clients, and colleagues all weigh in on the architect, but Pollack is more interested in the mysteries of the creative process, and his studies of Gehry's buildings, deftly edited by Karen Schmeer, capture their dramatic sense of movement and resolution.

Based on two of his previous shorts, this lurid vision is good for a few laughs-some intended, some not.

None of the characters emerges as very sympathetic.

This is jammed with cliches but completely engrossing, in the manner of a movie ardently in love with its own bullshit.

Like much of Verhoeven's best work, it's shamelessly melodramatic, but in its dark moral complexities it puts "Schindler's List" to shame. Van Houten and Sebastian Koch (The Lives of Others) are only two of the standouts in an exceptional cast.

If, like the filmmakers, you're willing to settle for a myth that flatters your sensibilities and shortchanges the past, you're likely to find some agreeable kicks here.

The movie, which leans too heavily on the metaphorical value of the two historic events, dives from heady romance into heavy moralizing.

This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn't at all hard to take (John Candy, in a supporting role, is hilarious and original, and Hannah has a pleasant naive charm), but its appeal is based almost entirely on regression—a thematic regression to infancy (now endemic to the American cinema) and a stylistic regression to the most lulling kind of TV blandness. No wonder it's relaxing: it's a lullaby.

Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

This intermittently effective UK horror thriller carefully establishes the psychological relationships among the women, then squanders this calibrated and generally plausible setup with a series of crude, implausible, and scattershot horror effects.

Given the tension dogging her every step, I wondered if this would end in bloodshed, but Abu-Assad opts for a more hopeful conclusion, making his film -- strange as it may seem -- a comedy.

If you can tolerate 79 minutes of joggling images you’ll probably find this entertaining, though writer-directors Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza overplay their hand with a late-breaking back story that rips off one movie too many.

Compared to their first movie, "The Yes Men" (2003), this one focuses on many fewer hoaxes, but they're more elaborate and potent.

A grisly extravaganza with an acute moral intelligence. The graphic special effects (which sometimes suggest a shotgun Jackson Pollock) are less upsetting than Romero's way of drawing the audience into the violence.

Many of the plot points seem belabored because they're introduced in the voice-over, then ploddingly dramatized, then analyzed by the family over meals.

Comparisons with Michael Mann's recent Dillinger biopic "Public Enemies" are inevitable, and mostly flattering to this project: director Jean-Francois Richet and screenwriter Abdel Raouf Dafri take advantage of the additional screen time (about 100 minutes more than Mann had) to flesh out their protagonist, who fancies himself an honorable thief and even a left-wing revolutionary but ultimately turns out to be something much simpler: a man who loves his work.

This quirky 2004 documentary ends with the Shopsins' forced relocation after 32 years, an uprooting made all the more poignant by Eve's death during filming.

Kelly is a supple and courageous storyteller, boldly free-associating as he mixes parody and satire with earnest psychodrama and coming up with plot points no one could anticipate.

Sensitive, intelligent, enlightening, and sometimes surprising.

The film is ferociously kinetic and full of visual surprises, though its gut-churning reputation doesn't seem fully deserved: if anything the gore is too picturesque and studied, an abstract decorator's mix of oozing, slimy color, like some exotic species of new-wave interior design.

An evil twin to "The War Room" (1993).

Universal's classic from 1931, directed by Tod Browning. The opening scenes, set in Dracula's castle, are magnificent—grave, stately, and severe. But the film becomes unbearably static once the action moves to England, and much of the morbid sexual tension is dissipated.

Andre de Toth’s 1954 noir is gritty, powerful, and economically told.