Tends to let his consumers off the hook--you'd hardly guess that any of these people are responsible for their own financial woes.

There are times when this leisurely movie seems so much in love with its own virtue and nobility that there's not much room left for the spectator.

If he'd (Shepard) gone a few notches darker and deeper he might have had a formidable post-cold war thriller. Still, there's much to enjoy in Brosnan's enthusiastic scruffing up of his Bond/Steele image and in Shepard's energetic, if lightweight, direction.

Carax has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.

Some of the film's situations and motivations seem convenient or underdeveloped, but Ascaride and Darroussin are riveting, and Guediguian's frankness and empathy illuminate this kaleidoscope of lonely lives.

Silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot.

I was never bored but only occasionally interested.

Fortunately almost everyone acquits himself coolly and admirably; only costars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden ham it up.

This is Middle-aged Sherlock Holmes in schoolboy drag, and the audience is expected to chuckle appreciatively as the old material is trotted out.

Assisted by Gordon Willis's cinematography and John Houseman's performance as the demanding Professor Kingsfield, director James Bridges manages to do a fair job with the semihokey material.

An irrefutable triumph of engineering, and it entertained and intrigued me through two separate viewings...though as a view of the human condition it's astonishingly and depressingly meager.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The incandescent Doona Bae (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) gives a daring performance as the toy-turned-woman,

Writer-director Benjamin Heisenberg serves up a lean and solidly satisfying existentialist thriller.

The famously oblique French director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) won a special award at the Cannes film festival for this existential comedy (2009), whose masterful technique fails to compensate for its glassy characters and mercilessly self-amused tone.

The setup of this comedy by director-cowriter Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) and some subsequent twists may be contrived, and the laughs aren't very plentiful, but much of the behavior seems real, and the able cast makes the most of it.

As in "My Favorite Year," the laughs all come from seeing a nervous innocent pulled into the star's debauchery, the heart from our growing realization that debauchery is just emptiness with the volume cranked.

Though the action is a bit intense for very young kids, it's probably no worse than what they see on television.

It abjectly collapses into feel-good nonsense.

The electrifying music helps camouflage the screenplay's hyperbole.

What's lacking here is a sustained thematic focus -- at least five people worked on the script, including Mann, which may account for the absence of a clear through line -- though the spectacle and characters keep one absorbed.

Cuesta directs the lead actors with such feeling that their misery seems authentic.

Despite very good performances, this is anemic and uninspired filmmaking: shapeless as narrative, awkward and drifting as drama.

A serious disappointment, recommended only for inveterate Disney fans and very young people.

More enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.

In place of the sharply etched observational humor of the original, which featured a host of no-name actors in memorably quirky performances, we now get mostly raunch and some flaccid cameos from Smith cronies Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.

Coppola's fondness for the operatic gets the better of him as the action approaches a climax, but the movie is girded by a sense of knotty family history.

The extraordinary subject and the filmmaker's near total access make for a singular documentary.

The movie is most fascinating when it shows how Chanel communicated her enlightened sense of womanhood through her innovative designs, which in turn helped women feel differently about themselves.

This may be the most Brechtian thing Lumet has ever done -- a movie that repeatedly challenges us to think and then to reconsider.

Under the thoughtful direction of Guy Ferland - what emerges is solid and affecting.

As with Pakula's earlier suspenser, Klute, the eerie ambience of menace is coolly and smoothly handled, but for my taste the suspenseful set pieces go on much too long, and the message—that right-wing conspiracy is built into the American political and corporate structure—is overstated.

One can already tell that this film is on to something special during the opening credits.

Fox keeps the suspense story at a low boil throughout, allowing the politics to emerge as the characters deepen.

The leads are the whole show, and the understated visuals give them room to make the material their own. But none of the other characters is all that fleshed out (Eddie Marsan, as the woman's cruel husband, hasn't got much to do), and despite having shot the entire film on location, Considine never establishes much sense of place.

This film by Julio Medem has dreamlike visuals, lush sensuality, a gorgeous cast, and a plot built on elaborate, self-conscious coincidences.

Tim Burton's new movie is gorgeous -- shot by shot it may be the most impressive thing he's done.

I found it warm, humane, pretty, and dull enough to anesthetize patients awaiting massively invasive surgery.

At times Shahriar succumbs to self-conscious poeticism, and her male characters are invariably thieves and oppressors, but the film draws a good deal of power from the passive anguish of the girl.

Director Karel Reisz (The French Lieutenant's Woman) clearly doesn't trust the American audience's ability to handle mixed, emotionally complex tones (and by all the available evidence he's right not to), yet by segregating the feelings he wants to express he makes them seem artificial and programmatic. But the performances do have a redeeming vividness.

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.

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

Harris’s refusal to treat her heroine strictly as role model or bad example makes her portrait a lot livelier and less predictable—as well as more confusing—than the standard genre exercises most reviewers seem to prefer. What’s exciting about this movie is a lot of loose details: frank girl talk about AIDS and birth control, glancing observations about welfare lines and the advantages of a boy with a car over one with subway tokens.

As "Kick-Ass" proved, there's a ready audience for the spectacle of a school-age girl who's a relentless killing (as opposed to texting) machine.

Though the questionable motives and bad planning of offscreen characters who far outrank Gibson make it difficult to take at face value one soldier's last words -- "I'm glad I could die for my country" -- some viewers will, which may be as the filmmakers intended.

The film is a pleasant ramble through an eventful year. Klapisch's special effects--cameras speeding down hallways, superimposed images--are both amusing and annoying.

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.

Director Ron Howard brings a quality of gentleness and whimsy to the performances, but basically this is a highly calculated project brought in by those two old pros, producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown (Jaws, The Verdict).

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.

There's something a mite pathetic about our culture still clinging to 007, but it's hard to deny that this is one of the most entertaining entries in the Bond cycle, which started with "Dr. No" (1962).

Both actors work hard to give this disturbing crime story some flavor and substance, but the narrative is overextended and poorly organized.

Peter Weir's attempt to make a "Casablanca" for the 80s - a romance set against a background of exoticism and intrigue - suffers from hazy plotting and a constant, pretentious mystification.

The glorification of the FBI, the obfuscation about Jim Crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin.

I hate to rap this serious-minded filmmaker, but I'm beginning to wonder whether her scripts aren't better realized when they're held in check.

Little remains in this true-life story of a nuclear worker's mysterious death other than some prefab antinuke, profeminist rhetoric - soft-pedaled, thankfully, but still strong enough to testify to the basic smugness of the project.

Wonderful first feature.

What makes Outrage a bankable indie film is the promise of personal embarrassment--everyone loves a good outing. Except for the person at the center of it.

Estevez strains to prove his earnestness at every turn, undermining the film's good intentions with a surfeit of explanatory dialogue and a sappy adult-contemporary soundtrack. But for all his awkwardness Estevez is undeniably sincere, regarding both people and nature with disarming good will and maintaining a steady, soothing pace that allows the life lessons to resonate.

For all of its simplemindedness and deck stacking, the film is distressingly well made—Pollack is no artist, but he has a glistening technique (there aren't many American directors left who know how to plan their shots for such smooth cutting) and a strong sense of how to hold, cajole, and gratify an audience.

Prior to its hyperbolic final act, this is one of Robert Altman's most skillful and least bombastic features in some time.

Toward the end the freak-show humor begins to yield diminishing returns, but for most of its length this delivers a steady stream of uncomfortable gut laughs.

A triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.

Coppola based her script on a revisionist biography by Antonia Fraser, though the film reads most poignantly as a personal statement; like Marie, the director was born to a life of privilege and carries the burden of a proud family legacy.

The result is pretty entertaining, though most of that entertainment derives from Katz's skillful exploitation of gumshoe formula.

Yes, the picture is flawed, but it is still something unusual in contemporary movies, a work that deserves to be called honorable, and not only in its intentions.

The good direction and performances seem wasted on limited material; despite a few interesting twists and ambiguities, the main revelation--that the reporter is an insufferable snob--doesn't seem worth the 84 minutes devoted to spelling it out.

Aside from one slow-motion sequence, the film treats its subject with few commercial concessions, so one hopes that the horrible and decidedly unmemorable title won’t keep people away; this may be the best movie about disaffected youth since River’s Edge and Pump Up the Volume.

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.

The blend of animation techniques somehow demonstrates mastery modestly, while the special effects are nothing short of magnificent.

As usual, Lee tries many kinds of stylistic effects and uses wall-to-wall music (by Aaron Copland and Public Enemy); what’s different this time is how personally driven the story feels.

Despite the predictable mix of humor, musical numbers, and celebrity cameos (Art Carney, Liza Minnelli, Gregory Hines, Joan Rivers, etc), the movie is breezily fun and every bit as entertaining as its predecessors.

A pleasant surprise, Michael Dinner's film manages a mild redemption of the conventions of the horny teenager movie by taking its characters with a grain of seriousness and injecting some light romance and melodrama.

This is well worth seeing for Bening's arresting, unpleasant performance.

The script, by newcomer Sabina Murray, is occasionally cloying as the naive hero falls for a bitter prostitute (Bai Ling), but its epic tale of two cultures tragically entwined is anchored by deep and elemental emotions.

I value the flawed Tic Code over a good many relatively flawless features because it has more heart, more life, and more spunk.

Deftly realist character study.

It's good old-fashioned rural gothic that would make Flannery O'Connor proud, with tricky switcheroos that keep shaking up our assumptions about what's going on.

Estrada references Welles throughout with his low-angle deep-focus shots, grotesque close-ups, and brassy sound track. The actors are uniformly excellent, embracing their arch roles without succumbing to caricature.

The dazzling star power of the French screen royalty Ozon has assembled and the film's sheer exuberance in its own artifice make this a delight from beginning to end.

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.

This 1981 film drips with a sense of anger and betrayal that seems wildly out of scale to its cause—the discovery (less than original) that musicals don't reproduce social reality. The point is made endlessly, though it's in the film's favor that it's made with seriousness, consideration, and a certain amount of imagination.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

Unfortunately, without even the most cursory effort to establish some notion of normality, the movie progressively gets duller and duller as its mechanical horror fancies spin themselves out.

Saved from bathos by Taraneh Alidosti's performance as the virtuous, wide-eyed girl.

Standard Neil Simon stuff, full of cute grotesques, snappy one-liners, and cheap plays at pathos.

Scott Speedman gives a piercing, intelligent performance.

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

I loved this at the age of nine and suspect that some of it’s still pretty funny when it isn’t being self-congratulatory; the Technicolor and guest-star appearances undoubtedly help.

It’s pretty much all genre and no nuance, though Michael Curtiz’s direction is surprisingly soft and light.

This functions perfectly well as a Van Damme vehicle, but it's also a funny and poignant look at a man trapped by his own ridiculous reputation.

The movie's no roller-coaster ride, but there isn't a boring moment either.

Not to be confused with the 1959 Mamie Van Doren-Mel Torme exploitation item, this is an uneven first feature (1996) by independent filmmaker Jim McKay about the friendship of three rebellious high school seniors.

The parallel between the dolphin and the disabled tourists who flock to see it borders on treacle, but Gamble's rapport with his finned costar is so touching that the movie works anyway.

A major star in Mexico, Bichir is quietly affecting as the father, a humble striver who faces loss at every turn.

This is a long way from the inspirations of Airplane!

The notion that Page, like Marilyn Monroe, was too ditzy to know what she was doing is more a mythological construct than an observation.

As in most of Wang's films, a memorable cast of characters compensates for a serviceable plot.

This impressive first feature by Jill Sprecher, coscripting with her sister Karen, shows that she has an eye and ear all her own.