The characters have been designed to make fun of themselves, disguising the craft of writer Neil Cuthbert and director Kinka Usher in getting us to laugh at them.

What might have been a routine coming-out story is enriched by Wright's accomplished and honest performance, Markowitz's straightforward dialogue, and Joseph White's cinematography of the majestic surf and melancholy sunsets off Malibu.

Uneven and slightly muddled futuristic horror story—not really science fiction, more like an antipollution PSA gone berserk.

Documentary filmmaker Chuck Workman has a slick and entertaining way of stitching together old footage and practically no analytical or historical insight at all.

The plot turns on the complicated lives of the daughters, who are played by Sabine Azema, Emmanuelle Beart, and Charlotte Gainsbourg; they, Fabian, and Rich are the main reasons for seeing this picture.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

Alan Rudolph's 1994 feature about writer Dorothy Parker and the famous Algonquin wits she hung out with in the 20s certainly has its pleasures, but someone should tell Rudolph that, for all his skill and charm, period movies aren't really his forte.

First-time director Penny Panayotopoulou's approach to the delicate subject matter is commendably tactful and tasteful--it's also underdramatized, monotonous, and short on humor.

The boring, humorless pair do nothing to refute the image of eco-worriers as preening, puritanical douchebags addicted to symbolic gesture and allergic to cost-benefit analysis.

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

The popcorn elements are well handled, but what lingers is the sense of urban despair: watching old videotapes of the Today show, carrying on friendships with mannequins, Smith turns out to be no legend at all, just another New Yorker slowly dying of loneliness.

For the sake of more irony--the movie is lousy with it--the precocious characters have an infantile response to the discovery that their parents are missing: all want their mommies after a night of junk-food excess.

Like "Mystery Train" and "Night on Earth," this feature by Jim Jarmusch is a short story collection, but it's funnier and more formally adventurous than either--also ultimately greater than the sum of its parts.

The obviously authentic love these couples shared should settle the question for all but bigots.

It's a western, of sorts, and for the first half it's a lot of fun. But then things fall apart, and the film becomes fatally episodic.

The pacing never flags and the story—let’s face it—is well-nigh unbeatable.

I tend to approach green documentaries with all the enthusiasm of an unemployed logger, but this hard-charging digital video about genetically modified organisms kept me on the edge of my seat with its lucid exposition and frontal assault on Monsanto.

By the time Herzog tried to pass off jellyfish as Dourif's old pals, my indulgence was nearing its end--but then so was the movie.

It's also quite energetic -- there isn't a boring shot anywhere, and writer-director Schnabel is clearly enjoying himself as he plays with expressionist sound, neo-Eisensteinian edits, and all sorts of other filmic ideas.

The line between romance and sex is blurred in this enthralling feature by Guy Maddin, whose overwhelming stylization unexpectedly produces an emotional and psychological authenticity.

This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don't work in its favor.

As a cautionary tale about the perils of nation building, this is both creepy and provocative, but director Rodrigo Cortés blows it in the last few minutes with a rushed ending that feels like a cheat after all the escalating tension.

A macabre comedy of manners with the sting of dry ice, this 2007 ensemble piece captures the social climate of America in the late 40s, when a new anxiety and restlessness began to undermine the postwar optimism.

Impeccably liberal in its time, the film has not aged gracefully, although Dorothy Dandridge's performance in the lead remains a testimony to a black cinema that might have been.

His (John Cusack) quickness and intelligence make him a poor choice to play the flat-footed main character, a rigidly conservative family man who can't work up the nerve to tell his two daughters their soldier mother has been killed in action.

The integrity of his performance overcomes the formlessness of the narration, turning this loose study into something solid and affecting.

The film was praised upon release for its hard-nosed look at big money in politics, though these days it seems positively dainty.

The movie gets old fast--mostly because it’s bringing up the rear after "Undercover Brother" (2002) And "I’m Gonna Git You Sucka" (1988). But the kung-fu climax at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (“the Honky House”) is nearly worth the wait, and Adrian Younge’s score, with its moody horns, is a perfect snapshot of early 70s soul.

For my money, this version doesn't match the Siegel film, though it's a lot scarier and more memorable than Kaufman's low-key, New Agey version.

Documentarians Adam Del Deo and James Stern present a cogent and comprehensive postmortem of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio.

Brilliantly conceived and competently executed.

The hero (played with the right amount of adolescent insouciance by Max Riemelt) is a working-class boy admitted to one of the academies for his formidable boxing skills, and through him director Dennis Gansel captures the ordinariness of Hitler's supporters.

The ethereal private moments and inspired passages are beautifully shot by Jean-Marie Dreujou, but Dai never quite organizes the material dramatically, and the tone is too often jagged and disruptive.

Director Oliver Schmitz is particularly attentive to the superstition and ingrained sexism that make life miserable for these people, though he also seems to view women as the country's best hope.

The English cast is fun; but this is more spectacle than story, and the Steve Kloves script deserves better handling than director Chris Columbus -- plus any number of studio deliberators -- gave it.

Actor David Morse establishes himself as a truly formidable presence in this powerful first feature by Alex and Andrew Smith.

Fortunately, the script by Ronald Bass and Barry Morrow isn't half bad, and both Barry Levinson's direction and the performances are agreeably restrained.

This video profile by Deb Ellis and Denis Mueller allows his significance to register and his charisma to shine despite a pedestrian approach that's especially awkward in its use of archival footage.

The actors are brilliant, the dialogue extremely clever, and the direction assured. But by the end I couldn't have cared less about any of the characters.

Darkly poetic study of psychological brutality.

Slick and often funny, but the smugness of the satire and the stunted emotions are finally wearying.

Peter Bogdanovich used Gazzara in a similar part in Saint Jack (1979), but as good as that film is, it doesn't catch the exquisite warmth and delicacy of feeling of Cassavetes's doom-ridden comedy-drama.

The movie’s worth checking out for its collision of musical sensibilities, featuring the first screen performance by the Runaways’ Cherie Currie and an original score by disco kingpin Giorgio Moroder.

Searing drama that uses the police procedural to explore the moral and psychological devastation of the Iraq war for U.S. soldiers (and, incidentally, for Iraqi citizens).

A strong cast fails to rescue this ponderous Oscar bait.

Canadian-made unpleasantness (1975) about a psychopath stalking a college town. Bob Clark's direction is enthusiastic but sloppy-a presaging of his later Porky's. [02 Dec 2010, p.52]

This uplifting documentary breaks no new ground stylistically, but the story it tells is urgent and compelling.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

By the time director Patrice Leconte arrives at his predictable climax and conventional moral, this lethargic French comedy may not have any friends either.

They've hit a fatal snag. The feature they selected happens to be a pretty good one -- certainly much better than Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie by just about any criterion one could think of.

Howard Hawks’s only attempt at a wide-screen blockbuster (1955), much disparaged afterward by Hawks and many others, is actually fairly awesome if you can get beyond the clunky dialogue (some of it written by William Faulkner, as well as Harry Kurnitz) and the campy evilness of the Joan Collins character.

Survivors of the 70s may find their memories stirred by tales of cruising Studio 54 and the Saint, of abandoned piers and empty Allied vans; younger viewers may be fascinated by the contrast between these balding middle-aged men and their black-and-white snapshots, showing them in tight jeans, flannel shirts, long hair, and Zapata mustaches.

The story, from a book by Daniel Mannix, was Disney's best material in a decade or two, the stuff of rending family melodrama on the order of Dumbo or Lady and the Tramp. Unfortunately, the execution is only adequate: the character work relies too much on celebrity voices (as was Disney's habit in the dark 60s) and the whole film has a sketchy, underpopulated feel that hardly represents Disney at the studio's baroque best.

Conceived like a sports movie, this delivers passion, nuance, and historical insight along with unnecessary hokum.

Writer-director Marcos Bernstein is more interested in how a melodramatic imagination can distort reality, a concept he explores with charm and tact.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Witty, satisfying, and a terrific showcase for the radiant Bening.

If you're looking to be romantically captivated, this movie just might do the job.

The talentless but irrepressibly trendy Luc Besson ("Subway," "The Big Blue") dreamed up this idiotic story that seems vaguely inspired by Kubrick's (not Anthony Burgess's) "A Clockwork Orange."

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.

Unfortunately, Frank Perry's unbelievably ham-handed direction obscures most of what is craftsmanly and pleasant in Isaacs's work, pushing the material toward a smug, sloppy, heavily early-70s satire on the horrors of suburban life. A very mixed bag, but those who've missed a storytelling sense in American movies might want to have a look.

The transition from stage to screen may be bumpy in spots, but this movie is much funnier than Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?, and the long-take shooting style is executed with fluidity and precision.

Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

Conceptual to a fault, writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Safe) realizes one of his oldest and most cherished projects -- a celebration of the glam-rock era and the bisexuality it turned into an opulent circus -- with wit, glitter, and energy, but with such a scant sense of character or period that it leaves one feeling relatively empty as soon as it's over.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

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

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

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.

A film that might make you cry watching it is just as likely to give you the creeps thinking about it afterward, which is as it should be.

The film is full of finely observed details.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

The behind-the-scenes tragedy gives Gilliam an easy excuse for the dull chaos that engulfs the story, but he might have generated it all on his own.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

The idiosyncratic instrumentation and melodies in the score by Angelo Badalamenti ("Blue Velvet") and a masterful opening scene are wasted on this pathetic thriller.

Classy and lifeless - a prettily photographed, heavily directed antiwar film.

Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) steals his every scene as the aphorism-spouting Fowley while Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning often fade into the 70s wallpaper as guitarist Joan Jett and front woman Cherie Currie.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

Dramatization is often a questionable tactic in documentaries, but by picturing Leopold (Elie Larson) on trial like Adolf Eichmann, Peter Bate adroitly compares the colonial genocide to the Holocaust.

There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen.

The character and plot contrivances are dumber than ever, but this is basically vaudeville, not narrative, and the thrills keep coming.

Broomfield, whose celebrity exposés are known for their intrusiveness and innuendo, lost me with his gentle shower scene between an Iraqi woman and her husband; even if it wasn't invented, is it really any of our business?

There's one nifty and original sequence--an assassination attempt during a state funeral where the pipe organs in the church all go haywire--but otherwise, this is crushingly generic.

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

Waters builds to a didactic message that he underlines with Disney-esque dream dust (in various colors), as if to protect his sincerity with the disclaimer of self-mockery.

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

As the phlegmatic, beer-guzzling protagonist, Will Ferrell manages to keep this rolling, though Rush's corny narrative devices (each of the minor characters receives an ironic gift at the end) couldn't be less consistent with Carver's stubborn minimalism.

Flawed but ambitious, this biopic of British parliamentarian William Wilberforce closely tracks the political maneuvering of the late 18th and early 19th century as reformers campaign to end Britain's participation in the slave trade.

A sense of authenticity overshadows any contrivance in this subtly classic drama.

Almost frantically intercutting between the characters, the movie spends so much energy trying to charm us that when the emotional stakes are raised we're too exhausted to care.

Mechanical, soulless.

The narrative emphasizes coincidences, but they're nicely understated. If it didn't seem gimmicky and self-indulgent...the movie might be more affecting.

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.

Walter Hill's existential action piece, rendered in a complete stylistic abstraction that will mean tough going for literal-minded audiences. Not quite the clean, elegant creation that his earlier films were, The Warriors admits to failures of conception (occasional) and dialogue (frequent), but there is much of value in Hill's visual elaboration of the material.

Director Nigel Cole is best known for "Calendar Girls" (2003), another condescending exercise in you-go-girl uplift.

The lesson of this barely stylish crime thriller is that a dull story is not improved by withholding information about characters' motives from the audience as long as possible.

Atypically lame, this is more for spiritual tourists than admirers of "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."

Like Bryan Singer's X2 (2003), this fifth entry in the X-Men franchise is noteworthy for its gay-rights subtext and for its noted actors delivering comic book dialogue with Shakespearean portent. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from most other recent blockbusters.

The results may seem overripe and dated in spots, but she coaxes a fine performance out of Nolte, and the other actors (herself included) acquit themselves honorably.