Schrader is no Faulkner and no Gillespie, but in his third silly attempt to appropriate Bresson's form of story telling and his second misguided effort to remake Pickpocket, he has arrived at a pretty good offscreen narration.

I wanted to like it more than I did, but it'll do.

The more interesting woman is Epper, who comes from a highly respected family of stunt doubles and at 62 shows no signs of slowing.

There's little originality in the joy rides, first kisses, and clashes with bullies, yet this 2005 debut feature by writer-director Michael Kang captures the small triumphs of a boy becoming a man.

Despite the mostly static setting, director Eytan Fox keeps this 2002 Israeli feature surprisingly lively, gracefully balancing the various story lines and making good use of an excellent ensemble cast.

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

The clunky plot is set in Santa Fe, and includes a foil character who might as well wear a sign on his forehead.

Ridiculous enough to be hilarious, but this didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying Philip Kaufman's silly romp.

The ease with which the perky, big-eyed heroine ingeniously succeeds in improving the lot of everyone around her and the painterly manner in which reality in every inch of the frame is "improved" constitute both the "quirky" charm and the pure fishiness of the film.

Almereyda's respect for his audience and his queasiness about the present register with equal weight, reinventing the poetry in the most relevant ways possible.

There are strong turns by Michael Caine as Alfred the butler and Tom Wilkinson as a ruthless crime boss.

An action director, Hathaway isn’t quite at home with this claustrophobic, motel-bound story of adultery and murder, but he gives it his all, most famously in the Freudian rampage that climaxes the film.

Morris argues that the photos also functioned as a cover-up: prosecution of the case centered on them, leaving free and clear many of those higher up the chain of command.

The script by Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore provides all the background necessary for viewers unfamiliar with the characters' previous movie and TV-series exploits, but not so much as to annoy fans.

Apatow became the hottest comedy director in the business by seamlessly combining relationship comedy that didn't bore the guys and wild comedy that didn't nauseate the girls; this is a knockoff, pure and simple, but its wit and ingenuous characters prove how far the bar's been raised.

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.

Arcand's fondness for the good old 60s can be cloying, but despite an uneven cast, he finds a tonal balance between sentimental and cynical that keeps the conversations real and heart wrenching.

[An] amiable, rambunctious New World production, aimed ostensibly at the teen trade but more obliquely and effectively at the new wave cult...It's more cleverly cut than shot—which means that it moves quickly and energetically even as the concepts and characters disintegrate.

Captures all the action of a tumultuous season while showing the emotional toll on the players.

Berri remains a boring director, dotting every i and crossing every t with nothing much on his mind but platitude.

Norbu tries too hard to please and charm, but his film at least carries the advantages of unactorly faces and a premise based on actual events that dramatizes the issue of religious vocation in a secular world.

A fascinating humanist experiment and investigation in its own right, full of warmth and humor as well as mystery.

Compensates with a sharp sense of rhythm, using hip-hop and turntablist sounds by Zoel to fuel Anthony Hardwick and Tony Wolberg's aggressive cinematography.

As a director Carnahan definitely has the goods: the opening foot chase, a sequence that's been done to death, is genuinely terrifying.

Overall it's what it aspires to be--a pleasant time-waster.

Unfortunately, after the well-honed psychological melodrama of its first half, this wanders off into the metaphysical territory of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (a much better film).

Still about as good as Allen gets, a persuasive, nuanced, and relatively graceful portrait of an egotistical yet talented jazz guitarist of the swing era, astutely played by Sean Penn.

Some scenes are banal and offensively simpleminded. But patience, ultimately, is rewarded with a welter of detail and some mighty fine camerawork.

Actor John Turturro follows his charming and colorful travel documentary "Rehearsal for a Sicilian Tragedy" (2009) with this assured and freewheeling look at the music of Naples (2010).

Ashby is excellent on atmosphere but fair to middling on character. When the film makes a sudden transition from epic to melodrama, things fall apart.

For all its implicit misogyny, the original 1966 film version of Bill Naughton’s play remains durable because of Michael Caine’s career-defining performance as the cockney ladies’ man, not to mention the memorable title tune (sung by Cher) and driving jazz score (written and performed by Sonny Rollins).

In this 2006 entry the insights are worthwhile.

A casually assembled Burt Reynolds vehicle, sloppy and loose in an amiable way.

As a director, Singleton shares with Furious a didactic streak. Singleton is no demagogue, but his fast-action style tends to erase the nuances of interracial dynamics.

Watching Allen fart out a story when he has no characters is always painful, as people are defined through clumsy expository dialogue and ranked according to their cultural accomplishments. But the script here is lazy even by his standards.

Mann excels at staging the chaotic bank jobs and bloody shootouts that were just a day at the office for Dillinger, but even at 140 minutes the movie is so dense with incident that there isn't much room for cultural comment or character development.

This powerful South African drama turns on the debut performance of young Presley Chweneyagae as the hood, and it's magnificent: a stone-faced killer in the opening scenes, he becomes an open book as the story progresses, as frightened, confused, and needy as the baby he drags around town in a shopping bag.

Argentinean writer-director Daniel Burman uses a shaky handheld camera and voice-over narration to take us inside Ariel's head, which gets a bit exhausting, even in the more emotionally satisfying second half.

The movie takes as its mantra and organizing principle President Kennedy's observation, during his 1961 speech to the United Nations, that "every man, woman, and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness."

Intelligence applied exactly where it is most rare: in the lavish, star-studded epic. Otto Preminger’s 1960 film, based on the Leon Uris novel, makes fine use of dovetailed points of view in describing the birth pains of Israel.

Robbins is attempting too much here, but the 70 percent or so that he brings off borders on delightful.

This isn't quite up to the original, but it has its moments, as Inspector Clouseau (Peter Sellers) sets out to solve a murder in an English country house.

Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire costar in this 1942 musical—which is closer to a revue, without much plot but with loads of Irving Berlin tunes.

The two different ends require shifts in point of view that are beyond Sayles's talent as a visual storyteller, and the film does not cohere. Yet many of the individual scenes are charming, funny, and pointed, and the movie gives off Sayles's usual glow of goodwill.

MGM’s opulent version of ancient Rome circa 1951, with Peter Ustinov at his most whimsical doing honors as the mad Nero...Directed with some pizzazz by Mervyn LeRoy.

A gravely beautiful drama about the mysteries of aging and death.

A persuasively feminine coming-of-age story.

Kwietniowski follows up his impressive debut feature, "Love and Death on Long Island," with this equally absorbing study of a compulsive personality.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

A handsome, ambitious film that fails to satisfy—perhaps because the director, Ivan Passer, insists on an ambiguity on the plot level that muddies and dilutes the thematic thrust.

Thanks to the performers (including Andie MacDowell and John Turturro), this has a certain amount of charm and warmth, but the period ambience feels both remote and uncertain.

There's an undeniable formal elegance in the way Ferrara, who coauthored the script with Zoe Lund, frames and holds certain shots, and Keitel certainly gives his all in this 1992 entry in the Raging Bull redemptive sweepstakes.

What we don’t know about these characters–and what we don’t see in certain scenes–is often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas’s sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density.

As the envious, destructive best friends of the central couple, Jim Belushi and (especially) Elizabeth Perkins have the actor's know-how to fill in the gaps, but as the lovers, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore are hopelessly pallid.

John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, Robert Morley, and Muppet creator Jim Henson make cameo appearances, but they're all upstaged by an uncredited Peter Falk, whose monologue on a park bench opposite Kermit the Frog is an exercise in virtuoso daffiness.

Excellent support from Alan Bates, Albert Finney, and Joan Plowright, but Richardson's direction drags more than a bit.

Douglas Sirk is best known for his highly stylized Technicolor melodramas, but he also did superlative work in restrained black and white. There’s Always Tomorrow (1955) is a virtuoso study in tones, ranging from the blinding sunlight of a desert resort to the expressionist shadows of the suburban home where Fred MacMurray lives in unhappy union with Joan Bennett.

Though the movie isn’t much to look at, he (Siegel) gets a credibly dark and pathetic performance from the typically comic Oswalt.

This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing.

Jayasundara dispenses with conventional story pacing to alternate long, static scenes with moments of revelatory lust or violence; as a press release states, the movie is "composed of uncanny set pieces portraying sex, death, and waiting," though its aesthetic achievement may lie in making all three feel like the same thing.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

Ousmane Sembene’s 1977 Senegalese film was attacked for daring to depict life in precolonial Africa as something less than paradisiacal.

Jannicke Systad Jacobsen, a documentary maker directing her first fiction film, demonstrates a sure sense of tone, and Bergsholm is memorable as the misfit teen.

The first four letters say it all.

What's confusing yet ultimately illuminating is the way his gremlins function as a free-floating metaphor, suggesting at separate junctures everything from teenagers to blacks to various Freudian suppressions.

Whatever else it may or may not be, Primary Colors is first and last a mainstream Hollywood entertainment. And that means that viewers looking for engagement with political issues are bound to be disappointed.

It's as slick as anything you might find on the Discovery Channel, and the snippets of 3-D computer animation are too cool for words.

It's hard to tell whether these characters are meant to seem as staunchly symbolic as they do when they deliver some of the back-story-heavy dialogue.

Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith's script has its witty moments, and some of the secondary characters--such as Larry Miller as the father and Daryl "Chill" Mitchell as an irritable teacher--are every bit as quirky as the leads.

They often seem more bent on titillating or harrowing us than on helping us understand the characters.

Exciting, clever sequences driven by surprisingly little plot and culminating in a climax full of the transmogrification animation was invented for.

Rebecca Miller's second feature shows her to be a careful but somewhat schematic scenarist; her shaky directorial skills are partly offset by her skill at eliciting convincing portrayals from actors.

The premise provides a fine showcase for the two appealing actresses, who appropriate each other's vocal and physical mannerisms with dead-on accuracy.

Based on a true story, the movie was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film; some might castigate its unabashed sentimentality, but I found myself moved, especially when I recalled that this was supposedly the war to end all wars.

Director Jerry Schatzberg has made a penetrating study of human relations--racial and sexual--within a sharply observed social framework.

Audaciously combining conviction and childish humor, this SF thriller reminds us that the distinction between the tangible and the intangible may be frighteningly arbitrary--an idea that's made too scary ever to seem trivial, no matter how silly things get.

At the very least, it's more honest and involved in its portraiture of American soldiers in Iraq than anything TV news of any political persuasion has given us.

The real problem, however, is the male protagonist and his foul inner life: Almodovar's impressive recent work has focused on the rich emotionality of women, and though the film provides an interesting take on gender and submission, this sort of nastiness just isn't his thing.

Mann understands that mood is more important than plausibility in a thriller, and you could cut the mood here with a knife.

The movie has plenty to engage one's interest but little to sustain it.

The problem is that once they do connect, their passion isn't believable.

This isn't about the verities of hip-hop so much as the chaos and confusion of mounting a big production with a slew of stoned MCs.

It’s overlong, talky, and sometimes stolid, but these are all familiar Mankiewicz failings. He shines in his deft verbal wit and novelistic propensity for detail, backlit by a highly personal blend of romance and cynicism. An imperfect film, but its excesses are as suggestive as its subtleties.

The effect is riveting and telling--not always realistic (none of the characters carry cell phones) but often enlightening.

Gondry is a soft surrealist without much of a sociopolitical agenda, closer to Dr. Seuss than Luis Buñuel,

Director Eran Riklis entertains without sermonizing, though the story clearly identifies women as the region's best chance for peace.

With a score by the Residents, cartoon art by Warren Heise and Timothy Stock, and scenes of the actors commenting on and interacting with the real-life Kurtz, this 2006 advocacy video brings a jumpy energy to its Orwellian tale.

Streep and Hoffman are pitch-perfect, and Amy Adams is also superb as a young nun caught up in the conflict.

Carrey's attempted self-immolation in a men's room, which weirdly recalls certain Fred Astaire routines, may be a small classic.

Structurally and dramatically this is all over the place, but stylistically it's gripping, and thematically it suggests an oblique response to the end of Hong Kong's colonial rule.

This nicely made 1994 comedy-drama could be described as an Australian "Easy Rider," with Sydney drag queens instead of bikers and no apocalyptic ending.

Director George Tillman Jr.'s screenplay covers an array of events in the characters' lives so replete with drama it could easily be too much, but the movie's humor is vibrant, the sorrow unexploitive, the sexuality character enhancing, and the love heartfelt--and Tillman is tremendously skilled at bridging the vast shifts in tone.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

Nihilistic greed was the major factor when GM terminated the car in 2001, though Paine is also careful to note the passivity of the general public.

Might easily have been mawkish; instead it has a light comic edge and a dignity built on the fine characterization of Pauline.

This is quick and unpredictable storytelling, its dialogue simple but tough. Alberto Jimenez is excellent as the conscience-stricken father, whose duty to respect the law tests his relationship with his own son, and both kids, Juan Jose Ballesta and Pablo Galan, give passionate, committed performances.

Though I hate to ruin the complex experience of following a rather calm story about a lonely widower as it becomes something else, I feel obliged to point out that the hard-core gore and soft-core surrealism of this baroque morality play may not support any theme.