The filmmakers aren't exactly cruel, but they focus on compulsion rather than passion, which by implication tends to tarnish the more intellectual and scholarly members of the breed.

Distinguishes itself with three-dimensional characters and an engaging storyline.

This conceit works precisely because Thatcher's popular appeal was so deeply rooted in nostalgia for the days of empire, and Streep, no fan of Thatcher, nicely undercuts the poignancy of her current condition with flashbacks that reveal her brittle arrogance in office.

Shot during the March 2003 invasion and the early stages of the American occupation, it tells us more about how the channel decides what to report than we probably know about most American newscasts.

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.

Without ever posing a serious challenge to the original, the new Nutty Professor is much more respectful of its source and funnier than I'd anticipated.

The last and best of his "Tales of the Four Seasons."

For his third feature, Richard Kelly delivers neither a triumph (like his first, Donnie Darko) nor a travesty (like his second, Southland Tales) but a sure-handed genre piece that manages to wrap up before its plot mushrooms completely out of control.

This ensemble drama by screenwriter David Hubbard isn't perfect, but its harsh honesty and sincere faith in humanity make it genuinely uplifting.

Ratliff fails to deliver on any of these ideas and the ending falters badly, but as horror flicks go this is both smart and suspenseful.

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).

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

The dialogue is superior, though, and director Roman Polanski has cast the characters well; Foster is particularly impressive in a stridently unattractive role, as the pinched, angry liberal who's orchestrated the meeting but doesn't get quite the apology she wants.

It's the first stop-motion feature filmed entirely in stereoscopic 3-D, and the technique makes Selick's artwork even more wondrously creepy. The problem is Gaiman's story, which keeps accumulating otherworldly mythology but doesn't establish a clear line of action in the home stretch.

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.

Favreau, who also plays the long-suffering Bobby, mixes elements of drama into this appropriately annoying comedy.

In the interview, a charmingly self-effacing Basquiat displays a winning smile; perhaps no one could explain what drove him, or his 1988 death from a heroin overdose at 27, but we do learn of his alienation from his family.

For the most part this is a scenic and well-scored Holocaust survival tale.

Raunchy and profane.

There is enough stylish sex and amusing character work (the supporting cast includes Ed Lauter, Mickey Rourke, Joe Pesci, and Helen Kallianiotis) to carry the day.

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

Perhaps too simple and damply nostalgic to rank with Mulligan’s best work, but still illuminated by an intense identification with adolescent confusion, beautifully communicated by Mulligan’s subjective camera technique.

Not great filmmaking, but indispensable to students of 40s pop culture.

Directed by Richard Benjamin, this is an inordinately silly comedy that manages to be pretty likable if one can get past some of its harebrained premises.

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.

Martin has become a superb physical comic, and Tomlin brings some unexpected warmth to a cruelly written part. A manic fuzziness takes over in the last reel and spoils some of the pleasure, but it's still a sympathetic effort.

Funny and forgettable.

The first screen pairing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Pretty jerky, and not enough of Fred and Ginger; still, it has the “Carioca.”

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.

Not really a Cassavetes movie, but worth seeing anyway.

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.

One of the better Halloween carbons, thanks to an unusually appealing cast and generally good pacing by director Amy Jones.

Not bad, but far from a classic.

Visconti rolls out some heavy left-wing proselytizing in the last half hour, but what really hits like a hammer is Lancaster’s realization that these awful people are the only family he’s got.

Ben Stiller directs Lou Holtz Jr.'s script with plenty of unsettling edge, and Carrey throws himself into his part as if it meant something.

Adapted by Ernest Tidyman from his novel, this suffers from some sluggish dialogue scenes, but the movie comes to vibrant life whenever director Gordon Parks hits the streets of New York.

Decently budgeted and atmospheric, it’s a sober accomplishment in a cycle that would quickly turn to self-parody.

Probably still watchable today, if only for the brittle dialogue and kitchen-sink realism, but undoubtedly dated as well.

Uneven but generally funny.

Not a great film, but a remarkable one, with Hitchcock at his most “innovative,” shooting through plate-glass floors and generally one-upping the expressionist cliches of the period.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

The animation is fairly unexciting though serviceable, and the overall mystification of class difference would probably have made Dickens shudder, but kids should find this tolerable enough.

Cruddy, primal, extremely violent, and fairly entertaining, this 1984 feature from the New York-based exploitation outfit Troma, Inc. (Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz) captures some of the snot-flicking spirit of the old EC comics. How much you'll enjoy its deliberate crudity probably depends on how far you can let yourself regress to surly adolescence.

Ruthless, poundingly violent horror film, directed by Wes Craven. It isn't artistically adroit, but if success in this genre is counted by squirms, it's a success.

An inept cheapo by any standard, only marginally more sophisticated than an Edward Wood Jr. production—yet it carries a certain demented charm, and there’s reason to suspect that Tobe Hooper checked it out before making The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The humor is often predictable--minor characters are stereotyped only to be demeaned for easy laughs--but the movie impressively fulfills its larger purpose of making you look at your culture's conventions as such.

Though the special effects are resourceful and the action scenes shot with surprising vigor, Albert Pyun's 1982 film is a little too self-important to provide a true B-movie pleasure.

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 bad, all right, but also weirdly compelling, thanks to some mind-boggling special effects work (check out the celestial chorus in the first reel) and some extremely speedy direction by Raoul Walsh, who seems to have decided that if the jokes weren't good, the least he could do was get through them fast.

John Frankenheimer directed, too much in love with technique, though he ably taps the neuroticism of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, and Fredric March.

It looks like a potboiler: only a few of Peckinpah's themes are present, and they're mostly left undeveloped. But Peckinpah can still stage a fight scene better than anyone, and the film establishes its own crazy rhythm as it runs off wildly through most of the southwest.

Slightly above average 50s science fiction (1958), enlivened by a nearly literate script by James Clavell (Shogun).

Half self-parody, half deadly serious, The Killer Elite is an intriguingly enigmatic movie from one of our most committed and most maligned film artists.

Malle is certainly sincere in his efforts to describe the overall milieu accurately, and the film is less obnoxious than his pious Lacombe, Lucien (1973), which dealt with a related theme.

Clearly, it’s an affront to Holiday’s art, but just as clearly, it’s a good piece of low entertainment.

Certainly it's the weakest of Ford's major westerns, burdened with a schematic and pretentious Dudley Nichols script (the "cross section of society" on board the stagecoach), but its virtues remain intact.

A rowdy, cheerful film on the surface, it has a disturbingly sour undertone supplied by Ford's realization that this paradise cannot be, and never was.

An odd, atmospheric 1947 thriller with a San Francisco setting, adapted by writer-director Delmer Daves from a David Goodis novel and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.

Daniel Taradash’s script is contrived in spots, and the main virtue of Roy Ward Baker’s direction is its low-key plainness, yet Monroe—appearing here just before she became typecast as a gold-plated sex object—is frighteningly real as the confused babysitter, and the deglamorized setting is no less persuasive.

The script, by Budd Schulberg, is pat and badly proportioned, but the picture has a sharp, dirty appeal.

The film amiably runs through all the standbys associated with vampire movies, putting a personal and goofy spin on most of them. Sharon Tate also appears, at her most ravishing.

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

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.

Although the film is built around the town's big centennial celebration, there are no big dramatic events in the usual sense; the film's focus is the complications, readjustments, and discoveries of middle age, and it's entirely to the credit of old movie buff Bogdanovich, who wrote the script, that there isn't a single film reference in sight.

The film is more strange than good, yet its self-conscious treatment of the politics of beauty seems eerily prescient.

One of the earliest of the Disney true-life adventures (1953), this won an Academy Award for best documentary, in spite (or because) of its celebrated use of square-dance music with footage of scorpions.

As usual, blood flows freely and gratuitously, but you could do worse.

The film never moves far from the conventions of Italian sex farces—that is, it’s a comedy of embarrassment and frustration—but the flip Marxism adds a little flavor.

This 1970 feature was the directorial debut of Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, Shampoo, Coming Home, Being There), and for a first effort it isn't that bad.

Kramer was never much of a director, but there's still power in some of the performances, especially Poitier's.

This 1968 Beatles musical gets somewhat plot heavy near the end, but it's a marvel of innocence and free association, blending several animation techniques in a loose narrative full of gentle bad puns and flowing visual segues.

A stodgy Universal thriller from 1941, redeemed by a name-heavy cast.

Zappa's most ambitious compositions (performed by the London Philharmonic) share screen time with nostalgic freak humor. [26 Dec 2013, p.30]

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

Archetypal 50s science fiction—light on brains and heavy on sexual innuendo (1954). But director Jack Arnold has a flair for this sort of thing, and if there really is anything frightening about a man dressed up in a rubber suit with zippers where the gills ought to be, Arnold comes close to finding it.

Richard Fleischer’s professional efficiency tarts up a bit with dated 60s flashiness (multiple images, etc) and semidocumentary pretense in this 1968 feature about Boston sex murderer Albert De Salvo (Tony Curtis), brought to justice at last by police inspector Henry Fonda.

Redeemed a bit by Adrien Joyce’s Preston Sturges-inspired screenplay, Nichols’s film is nonetheless as unfunny as Carnal Knowledge, and just as vicious.

Elvis made a few better films (including Peter Tewksbury’s The Trouble With Girls and Don Siegel’s Flaming Star), but none that drew so well on the bad-boy side of his personality.

Gregory La Cava's improvisational style received its highest critical acclaim for this 1936 film, a marginally Marxist exercise in class confusion during the Depression.

A failure of resolution mars it, but it is diverting enough for the first couple of reels to make it worth seeing.

Uys's juggling of the separate yet interlocking plotlines is fairly adroit, and his whimsy continues to be good humored, although once again it's purchased with a sentimental and complacent view of African life designed to flatter the viewer.

Charming, if a bit claustrophobic.

This curious ecological parable was directed by George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City), who still has an eye and a sense of humor but on this particular outing can't get the script he wrote with three others to make much sense.

Director Jonathan Demme's farcical and broad 1988 comedy, written by Barry Strugatz and Mark R. Burns, doesn't really work, but there are plenty of enjoyable compensations.

Though frustratingly superficial and shot through a nostalgic, rose-colored lens, this enthralling 2010 doc opens a wider window on forgotten world of burlesque shows than anything I've previously seen.

There's some excellent comedy early on involving the mutual incomprehension of Africans and Americans, though this eventually gives way to solemn, ethnocentric mush about one African's reading of the story of Jesus, demonstrating as usual that sustained subtlety is hardly Spielberg's forte.

On the whole, the adaptation is faithful but some of the qualities of Dinesen's language are lost in translation or through abridgment, and the politics have been needlessly simplified.

Lacks the scariness, the mystery, and even much of the curiosity of Rivette's better work.

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

Streisand is stunning, but the film is a trial, particularly when the music disappears somewhere around the 90-minute mark and all that's left is leaden melodrama.

Special-effects buffs generally cite this 1963 effort by Ray Harryhausen as the master’s masterpiece, and his work does a great deal to enliven the tired plot and vacuous stars (Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack).

There are some striking visuals and Hartnett is a magnetic presence.

Helms's screen persona-the stiff-necked nerd who triumphs through sheer doggedness-is heavily reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's, though Lloyd was handsome and endearing enough to succeed as a romantic lead.

Nichols is so astute at directing the actors (who also include Bill Nunn, Donald Moffat, and Nancy Marchand) that it's relatively easy to overlook the yuppie complacency, shameless devices (starting with an adorable puppy), and product plugs (especially Ritz crackers) that undermine the seriousness of the whole project.

Wears its art, as well as its heart, on its sleeve -- so much so that I feel guilty for not liking it more.

Storper is pretty good at playing with and against certain western cliches in his treatment of the good guys (including Annette Bening's character), but resorts to pure cliche when it comes to the villians (e.g., Gambon and James Russo).

A mainly routine Hong Kong action film from fleet and floppy-haired action hero Jackie Chan. It's light on plot and character, but the stunts are well staged.

If you can tolerate the overbearing music (think John Williams at his most manipulative), this is relatively painless, thanks to a lighthearted tone and some energetic lead performances.