The cultural cock-strutting gets to be a bit much, but Neville handily captures the excitement of an art scene percolating, breaking wide open, and finally burning itself out.

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.

If only director Nicholas Meyer had grasped the implications of his tale more fully and enthusiastically, this might have become a classic piece of cornball SF poetry, but as it stands the tepid acting and one-set claustrophobia take a heavy toll.

Two prequels' worth of scene setting pays off in the politically resonant Revenge of the Sith.

Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch (When the Cat’s Away), set in the title city and collecting the routine travails of various urbanites.

This revisionist western by writer-director Andrew Dominik makes a wan attempt to present the Jesse James legend as the dawn of celebrity culture in America.

The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to echo the characters' moods; the score by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably majestic sweep.

A seamless mix of satire and suspense, with inspired performances by Toledo and Monica Cervera.

This sublime French farce reminded me most of Billy Wilder.

The incredible adventures pile up unrelentingly, with no inflection, no downtime, and each new space is a set decorator's hallucination, as brightly colored as a candy store on acid.

Satisfying in a purely infantile way, and the familiarity of everything is oddly comforting. In terms of action, moreover, this makes "The Matrix Reloaded" look like a clodhopper's jamboree.

Thomsen's transformation from easygoing entrepreneur to ruthless executive is so engrossing I didn't pick up on the story's chilling Freudian subtext until very near the end.

Eventually the shaky, grainy visuals grow tiresome, but director Nathaniel Hornblower (aka Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) keeps things lively with a variety of editing tricks and sly humor.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

It's his sense that he is superior to the series (which he certainly is) that introduces a fatal strain of campiness and condescension. And without absolute conviction, no action film can survive: if there's no belief, there's no danger.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Once the competition arrives, the premise begins to suggest a marketing hook--it's "Spellbound" meets "The Devil Came on Horseback"!--but by then it's already served its purpose, imposing some structure around memories that would drive anyone mad.

This is the least well-known of the madcap satirical comedies of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), and by all counts the weirdest. But the richness of its ideas makes it my favorite. The plot combines the rock musical with the spy thriller (not to mention assorted other genres), and the comic invention is fairly constant.

A surprisingly credible coming-of-age story.

Too much of the story is unfelt and mechanical—the grimly humorless Tracy (Beatty) is never very convincing as an object of desire or admiration.

Lior is an irrepressible character as he works a room, doing exactly what a bar mitzvah boy should: challenging, instructing, and, in his own way, healing the world.

The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).

A half-baked conspiracy subplot in the last third makes Carruth's knotty narrative even harder to follow, but this is still scary, puzzling, and different.

Techine glosses over the story’s most potent issue: France’s complicated relationship with its Jewish community.

The comedy divides cleanly into dark, violent slapstick (much of it hilarious) and more routine gags highlighting the fanatical characters' foolishness and incompetence.

Melville's seedy characters and engrossing friendships are well preserved, thanks largely to strategic redeployment of his crisp dialogue. As revamped caper films go, this offers considerably more texture than Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11."

The script by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson is serviceable but not exactly inspired.

This eerie drama harks back to sci-fi movies of the late 60s and early 70s that explored inner as well as outer space (2001, Solaris, and particularly Silent Running).

My Sex Life, for all its virtues, was a bit conventional and bland, but The Sentinel is genuinely crazy and a lot more interesting, mainly because it has a meatier subject: the end of the cold war and what this means to French yuppies.

In the Apatow manner, Segel mines a mother lode of painful personal memories for his breakup gags, and the vanity of entertainment people proves to be another rich vein.

Fresh, character driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat).

Walks a fine line between the quotidian and the absurd, but falls short of a satisfying payoff.

Legions of Brando impersonators have turned his performance in this seminal 1954 motorcycle movie into self-parody, but it’s still a sleazy good time.

Like most of Lee’s work, this movie bites off a lot more than it can possibly chew, and it bristles with the worst kind of New York provincialism.

A power­ful drama, but if I didn’t know Green had directed it I probably wouldn’t have guessed.

William Golding's 1954 allegory on man's innate inhumanity is too facile by half, which makes it ideal for high school English classes but rather too gaseous and predictable for the movies.

This David Cronenberg masterpiece (1991) breaks every rule in adapting a literary classic - maybe On Naked Lunch would be a more accurate title - but justifies every transgression with its artistry and audacity.

Roundly condemned as a glorification of drug dealing, it's actually an acrid film noir on a classic theme—the hood who must make one last score before he quits the business.

Professionally made, quite entertaining, and disappointingly hollow.

This thriller is a lot better than you might expect--especially for a Kevin Costner vehicle.

The experience couldn't be more realistic, though Cameron also superimposes imagery of passengers recalling the fateful night, to haunting effect.

In its embrace of human imperfection the movie recalls with elegant formal simplicity the populist threads of 30s French cinema.

The documentary begins to lose its shape as Siegel ponders the spiritual and cultural impact of the honeybee, but it does succeed in flagging a potentially critical problem.

Gross-out horror comedy is my least favorite genre, but this movie's so skillful I have to take my hat off to it.

A rather tedious kidnapping movie by writer-director Lisa Krueger, despite the novelty of the kidnappers (Scarlett Johansson and Aleksa Palladino) being sisters, one of whom is pregnant, and the kidnapped person being a nurse (Mary Kay Place) needed to assist with the childbirth.

The movie gradually deepens from odd-couple comedy into Catholic-themed drama, but it remains marvelously funny throughout. Instead of hitting the easy notes of black humor, McDonagh skillfully modulates between broad character laughs and the men's piercing anguish as the story nears its bloody conclusion.

Assembled by Gene Kelly, it jerks and sputters along through an overedited collection of songs, dances, comedy routines, and dramatic excerpts, with a strong tendency toward camp. Gene should know better.

The weaknesses of the film are twofold: an inability to convey any convincing grasp of the present beyond the family's present (and ongoing) situation, and a belt-and-suspenders heavyhandedness that has always been Lumet's biggest stumbling block in driving home a dramatic climax.

This was one of De Palma's early efforts, and its excesses can be chalked up to youthful enthusiasm—the ideas seem appealingly audacious even when they misfire, which is more often than not.

Part wish fulfillment and part social moralizing, the film never resolves its point of view, but a few of the apocalyptic images stay in the mind.

The documentary becomes more poignant and substantial when old age begins to seriously disable some of the dancers.

Klapisch self-consciously throws fistfuls of quirky film style at us, as if he were Francois Truffaut, but his characters are still interesting and his party sequences are especially good.

Adults won't find much to enjoy here, though the dog's high-octane action series serves as a perverse parody of Jerry Bruckheimer-style summer blockbusters.

Milos Forman's "Amadeus" (1984) is so ingrained in the popular imagination that its portrait of Mozart may never be dispelled, but this thorough and insightful 2006 documentary presents a more rounded and compelling view of the high-spirited genius.

It is a funny picture—not too consistently, and certainly not too coherently, but when it hits, it hits.

By the end the story is more satisfying than you might expect.

Despite its flaws, the film remains a fascinating souvenir of a vanished avant-garde.

While billed as a romance and a thriller, the film strictly qualifies as neither, appealing to our prurience, guilt, hatred, and dread.

Jun, a downstate native, has an ear for plainspoken dialogue and neither glamorizes nor patronizes his characters.

Unfortunately the film never establishes either a perspective of its own or a coherent geography of the city, so the politicians pontificating at ceremonies and architects commiserating at building sites become deadly dull long before the the film exhausts its 88 minutes.

If you treasure Gilliam at his best and take his ideas seriously, you'll probably be infuriated as well as delighted.

The film asks us to embrace not only the death of beauty but the beauty of death.

Offers a fascinating inquiry into memory and art, mixing clips from Fellini's films with contemporary shots of the same locales in and around Rome.

The conventional ghost-appeasement scenario isn't very suspenseful, which may be part of the reason it's so gripping.

There are plenty of laughs whenever Moore wants to twist the knife, but the bottom line is that he respects and trusts his fellow Americans a lot more than Bush does.

The only problem I was faced with was trying to understand what exactly it was that I enjoyed, and how this movie differed from the play I'd read.

This cagey and compelling 2004 documentary looks at the world of wine, but it's actually a nuanced, provocative piece of journalism about globalization and its discontents.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

It seems more like an illustration of his (Kaufman) script than a full-fledged movie, proving how much he needs a Spike Jonze or a Michel Gondry to realize his surrealistic conceits.

Apart from McVay and Lea DeLaria (as a lesbian who befriends and advises the hero), the actors mainly come across as movie types rather than characters, and despite the obvious sincerity of the project, deja vu seems written into the conception.

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

Carl Reiner comedy whose technical execution (Michael Chapman's cinematography is masterful) is better than its script.

Woody Allen's first film as a director, in which he plays Virgil Starkwell, Public Schmuck Number One. This ragged collection of gags and sketch fragments was reportedly pieced together from an incoherent mass of footage by ace film doctor Ralph Rosenblum.

Honkasalo's bleak, meditative 2004 documentary, about children who have been orphaned or dispossessed as a result of the Russian-Chechen conflict, eschews any attempts to make sense out of this long-running war.

Recklessly biting off more than they can possibly chew, the filmmakers still give us a memorable apocalyptic view of 1987 England.

A film of ingredients, rather than ideas realized and integrated: it panders on different, disjunctive levels.

The crazy color schemes and visual effects once made this a popular head picture, though you'd have to be stoned to tolerate the score, which includes The Candy Man.

Either you like this movie a lot or you run screaming for the exit; I find it rough going.

Among the many offhand virtues of Julie Delpy's first feature as solo writer-director is the fact that she's as attentive to French foibles as American ones.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

Powerfully illustrates what globalization has been doing to underdeveloped countries around the world.

The performances are strong without calling attention to themselves--which is more than I can say for the occasionally hackneyed use of rock on the sound track.

As one might expect from IFC, actors and directors dominate the interview segments, which may be the reason the narrative never finds its way to Heaven's Gate.

Despite the flashback structure, this is a film in which mood matters more than plot, while the hero's heroic stature steadily shrinks.

The plays and amusements the boys put on--by far the most successfully magical scenes in the movie--inspire Barrie to create his great work, "Peter Pan."

The film raises many interesting questions about our own responses, but it may finally be too open-ended for its own good.

A fine example of the genre, but not for jaded tastes.

There's a good deal of pleasure to be had in the clockwork precision of her hand-to-hand combat, which Soderbergh often shoots in profile to showcase her wall-climbing backflips. The story surrounding it is comparably smooth, skilled, and mechanical, though a lot less memorable.

Some of Roth's cars become characters, their voices furnished by Ann-Margret, Jay Leno, Brian Wilson, Matt Groening, Tom Wolfe, and others. The pace never flags, and the enthusiasm is infectious.

Moody and thoughtful.

This engrossing animated thriller (2000) somehow displays realist gore, nudity, and sexual violence in a tone not too far from that of a children’s adventure; its innocence stems in part from the convincing naivete of the heroine.

Perfect acting by Keaton and Streep outshines the screenplay by Scott McPherson (who wrote the original play), even as the performances are overwhelmed by cinematography so gorgeous and distracting it makes the drama seem like just so much wheel spinning.

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.

The overlapping stories pulse with a tidal rhythm, the film's sensibility flowing between serious and wry, and there are memorable turns from Assi Dayan as the waitress's henpecked dad and Tzahi Grad as a cop with a nonchalant attitude toward babysitting.

Occasionally cloying, but the distinguished British cast (Anna Massey, Robert Lang, Georgina Hale, Millicent Martin) generates considerable gravitas.

Washes onto the big screen with a tide of weak one-liners, exaggerated reactions, and vaguely nauseating gags.

This movie really belongs to Baye and Lopez, both so skillful that they almost make you forget that what you're watching is close to a stunt--one oddly evocative of Graham Greene in its doomed romanticism but at times also minimalist to a fault.