Unfortunately, Volcano is also faithful to Hollywood's legendary lack of originality.

Episodic and patchy, but well acted and heartfelt.

This is brisk and fun to watch, thanks to the actors...But once you catch the main drift of the plot, it becomes awfully ho-hum.

Martial arts hero Jet Li takes on all comers--with one hand in his hip pocket most of the time--in this absurd but breathlessly paced actioner.

The film has no qualities beyond its formal polish--and its careful avoidance (or rather, displacement) of the moral and political issues involved can seem too crafty, too convenient.

Diverting, energetic, and even reasonably satisfying, so long as you aren't looking for a real musical to take its place.

The Coens do an efficient job of stamping their signature grotesquerie on sumptuous Beverly Hills and Las Vegas settings and ladling on gallows humor and malice, sometimes with the verve of early Robert Zemeckis.

The drama is hampered by a vague screenplay that takes its sweet time explaining the characters' past and never specifies the nature of the boy's palsy and apparent retardation.

The overall feel is phantasmagoric--pitched, like most of Maddin's work, in the style of a half-remembered late silent feature or early talkie.

By their own admission, screenwriters Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne spent only a day or so researching their assigned topic—New York junkies—and this early Jerry Schatzberg feature (1971) shows it, though Al Pacino plays one of the two romantic leads (along with Kitty Winn), and many of Schatzberg's fans have praised the mise en scene.

Harlin's arsenal of conceits and visual effects--pirouetting overhead angles, dancing trigonometry formulas, a pizza flavored with tiny human heads, a lot of fancy play with a water bed, and much, much more--keeps it consistently watchable and inventive.

Sincere, capable, at times moving, but overextended, this picture is seriously hampered by its tendency to linger over everything--especially landscapes with silhouetted figures, and not excluding its own good intentions.

Not at all bad for a toy commercial.

Individually these elements are powerful, but they fail to mesh or collide with one another in any satisfying way, and the movie's score only exacerbates the problem.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.

The auction makes for a pretty good hinge between the two narratives and, more importantly, allows Madonna to indulge her fetish for fine English things.

Pleasantly acted and moderately funny, but it lacks the genuine bile that made "Heathers" (1987) so bracing.

I can't yet decide whether the film works or not, but it certainly held me for its full two hours.

You may find much of this, despite the apparent sincerity, too cutesy and self-satisfied for its own good.

Like Nicole Holofcener's "Please Give" (2010), this turns on the friction between an unusually altruistic character and the self-centered people around him, though screenwriters David Schisgall and Evgenia Peretz never pursue their premise into the sort of moral comedy that so distinguished the other movie.

Its depiction of teenage behavior appears calculated to seem irreverent while satisfying expectations.

It's slight but likable, and diverting enough as light entertainment.

The film's low-tech styling is roughly the cardboard inversion of the cinematic machines it parodies, and Brooks seems less inclined than usual to push the overkill urges too far. Small compensations, I guess, but at least it's not the total washout you'd expect.

The performances are convincing, and director Gene Rhee does a good job of outlining the messiness of human affections here, showing how we don't always know what we really want or how to get it.

The action and sentiments are familiar to the point of cliche, and there isn't much life in Gillian Armstrong's academic direction—she keeps pushing ideas over events, and meanings over emotions. But Judy Davis, as a teenage girl who dreams of transcending her rural background to become a cultivated, independent woman, grants the film much charm and passion.

You'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy a show with Ruth Brown, Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke...

To call this "Farrelly brothers lite" may be a little redundant, but aside from the odd vomit gag, it goes relatively easy on their usual working-class taboo busting.

Writer-director Alan Rudolph has been remaking his own romantic comedy-dramas for so long now that even when he gives us two couples instead of one or substitutes Montreal for Seattle--both of which he does here--the film still comes out feeling the same.

Jones's script leans too heavily on the familiar device of blurring illusion and reality, but his view of the urban landscape is beautiful and distinctive.

Americans desensitized to senseless violence may find the subject matter almost banal, and the interspersed news footage of armed conflict from around the world feels like a rhetorical device. But the coldly telegraphic structure--a series of 71 blackouts following the four strangers to their deaths--yields some striking moments.

The film has a flat quality that cannot entirely be overcome by the sensational animation and the obvious good intentions of its creators.

Even as you're wincing at what you thought was misguided earnestness, it's being subverted by filmmakers who've turned many of the genre's weaknesses into tiny triumphs.

If one discounts the facile and unconvincing ending, this first feature by Guka Omarova, offers a convincingly bleak view of how a 15-year-old boy could get ahead in rural Kazakhstan in the early 90s.

Somewhat preposterous but fairly watchable mystery thriller. The plot gets so convoluted and farfetched that you still may be scratching your head after the denouement, but you probably won't be bored.

This is stronger in terms of characters (male ones, that is) than in terms of story or mise en scene, but the actorskeep this pretty watchable.

Writer-director Chris Ver Wiel stocks this diverting crime comedy with familar characters and formulas.

Visually imaginative and even persuasively spiritual.

Enjoyably campy hokum.

This scary black-and-white SF effort from 1953 was shot in 3-D, and on occasion it’s shown that way.

Rowlands and Unger deliver sensitive performances, Shields is surprisingly good.

Clooney badly botches the spy plot by casting himself as Barris's agency contact... and a truly awful Julia Roberts as Barris's Mata Hari lover (she's soundly upstaged by Drew Barrymore as his devoted girlfriend). Yet the mounting delirium drives home Kaufman's basic point: that a shadow government rules by bread and circuses.

It's a story worth telling, though once the participants and the filmmakers start basking in their virtue, the material begins to feel overextended.

Seriously uneven but often charming.

Sex and JFK's assassination are intertwined in this puerile, pseudodark story about a wacky family--an adaptation of Wendy MacLeod's play that uses the medium of cinema mainly to exploit archival footage.

Danny Glover and Mel Gibson make a gently contrasted (and nicely self-reflexive) odd couple in this action-comedy sequel.

For what it is, it's fine.

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.

Not terribly funny, but the intimations of an older, saltier America in the picaresque plot make this watchable.

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.

Pegg has some good obnoxious moments, but he's only a few movies away from becoming Dudley Moore.

Horror fans may be disappointed by this handsome exorcism drama, which aspires to the serious religious feeling of William Friedkin's "The Exorcist" but delivers little of its shock or gore.

Instructive comedy, which is marvelously neutral toward a type of sexual and domestic relationship that's often exploited or overblown.

The running joke about coffee enemas will date this innocuous, crowd-pleasing adventure comedy.

The cast is OK, and LaBute still has an eye, but the uses they're put to seem contrived and arty.

Too bad the overreaching script has to go after effects recalling "Alien," but as a stylistic exercise this still has its chills.

It's bleak, creepy, and occasionally terrifying. Studio pressure apparently forced Murch to back off from the full fury of his conception, but this is still strong stuff.

It preserves some of the form and language of White's original but fattens and sweetens his lean and pungent prose with songs by Richard and Robert Sherman (Mary Poppins).

According to common usage, the French word stupide comes closer to silly than to dumb, which is how I might rationalize my affection for this harebrained, obvious, but euphoric tale.

Broder's script makes the weird transition from satire to camp as if there were no distinction between the two. It's a bracing if at times bewildering experience.

Good, amusing, disreputable fun—until it starts getting solemn and preachy.

There's tenderness, humor, a gratuitous body double, and splashy lighting in this ho-hum action drama, which takes itself at times too seriously and at other times not seriously enough.

Writer-director Rob Hardy opts for family-friendly drama but tones down the conflicts so much that none of the story lines can rival the music.

As contrived as this premise may sound (and it isn't much better on-screen), writer-director Mora Stephens manages to push the odd-couple story in some interesting directions.

A bit disorganized, it carries hints of surrealism (especially in Harpo's extraordinary performance) that later flowered in Duck Soup.

Engaging and well acted, the film is admirably low-key, yet Burman's relaxed approach becomes a liability--everything goes down smoothly but leaves one hungry for something more substantial.

Much of the three-hour movie takes place in the prison, but the resonant characterization, expansive plotting, and judicious use of exterior locations and flashbacks remove any sense of claustrophobia or sluggishness.

Scripted by Pitre and his wife, Michelle Benoit, this is more interesting for its historical setting than for its rather wooden drama, but Tim Curry gives a pretty good performance as the town's whiskey priest.

This movie swims freely in the moral ambiguities Lumet seems to thrive on.

Bunuel remained true to his surrealist origins throughout his Mexican period, but the full command of his earliest and latest films, as well as such intermediate masterpieces as Los olvidados and The Exterminating Angel, resulted in stronger fare than this.

While not particularly cohesive, this 2002 film has some nice moments of comedy and father-son poignancy.

This bright noir, with gleaming cinematography by Jeffrey Jur, is as single-minded as a short story, but the premise is almost too clever.

The altitude, extreme cold, quicksand, and crushing poverty are potent dramatic elements, but of course there's no mention of China's complicity in the area's economic ills; instead writer-director Lu Chuan frames the story as a showdown between the head ranger and the leader of the poachers.

Comic book stuff, helped out by the presence of Rae Dawn Chong as an airline stewardess whose sarcastic commentary adds some comic counterpoint to the deliberately overscaled action.

Not very memorable, but fun and exciting while you’re watching it. It’s worth the price of admission to hear the wooden-throated Peck speak Greek and German (“Like a native!” one of his superior officers comments).

So visually striking, so compulsively watchable as storytelling, and so personal even in its enigmas that I found it much more pleasurable than any of the Hollywood genre films I've seen lately.

The Holocaust subplot is contrived and schematic. Yet the central love triangle is fairly compelling, aided by Krol's fine performance.

This is second-level Marx Brothers, which means it's funny but not hysterical.

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.

Thornton seems born to play the sort of slow-witted poet of the mundane that the Coens find worthy of their condescending affection.

This obsessive movie, awarded the grand jury prize at the Sundance festival, may not quite live up to its advance billing; the subject is powerful, but the filmmaking often seems slapdash, and the final half hour dithers.

The talented cast--manages to rescue the movie as well as the earth.

Toledo is very funny, and there are some hilarious comic bits, but writer-directors Dominic Harari and Teresa Pelegri drag in several distracting subplots, turning this 2004 Spanish comedy into a scattershot affair.

The film's opening and closing moments are weirdly reminiscent of "Black Hawk Down," another tale of Western soldiers in over their heads on the dark continent -- clearly no one these days understands manifest destiny.

Well-meaning but simpleminded biopic.

A reasonably updated facsimile of a 50s service romp called Operation Mad Ball, a similar celebration of high jinks.

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.

In the end, this admirably broadens our knowledge of the era but doesn't much deepen it.

It's all very impressive without being particularly enthralling.

Long, heavy, and not particularly edifying Holocaust drama.

Registers as frighteningly typical and indicates how successful the Bush administration has been at convincing Americans that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and armed with weapons of mass destruction.

This is the apotheosis of Classics Illustrated filmmaking, aiming at nothing more than tasteful reduction, and the fact that it's done so well here doesn't mean that it's necessarily worth doing.

Apart from some unexaggerated notations about American puritanism in the 1940s and '50s, this is more a work of exploration than a thesis, and Condon mainly avoids sensationalism.

This uninspired comedy drama seems to have been bankrolled by the state tourism board, yet the Celtic music sequences provide welcome relief from the reheated plot.

The film is an impressive technical achievement: the full-figure animation is dimensional and elegant, the perspectives imaginative, and the color design superb. But without the (old) Disney genius for emotional structure and character design, the results are rather flat—the film concentrates on Disney horror and trauma without the relief of Disney charm.

Though this drifts at times as storytelling, it's mainly lightweight but personable fun.

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

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.

If you don't care about such motivations, this is a pretty good thriller, though not one you're likely to remember for very long.