A highly entertaining form of ecological agitprop--radical but accessible.

Zwick, intent on correcting the perception of Jews as passive victims, lets the action set pieces overwhelm the more intimate scenes, several of which are already diminished by stilted dialogue.

Smart and consistently funny, with sharp performances.

This is a new form of obscenity that might be called suicide porn. It's not just the voyeuristic surveillance that's obscene, but the use of suicide footage as counterpoint to other stories as they're told. Steel shows no special insight into the subject, though even that couldn't justify such hideousness.

The best visual design in the world doesn't mean a thing unless there's someone around with a rudimentary sense of story. Jeff Bridges, playing the human hero sucked into the machine, has to carry the film's entire burden of charm and appeal; he seems to have freaked out under the strain, turning in some surpassingly weird, alienating work.

This terrifyingly beautiful movie blends metaphor and stark social commentary to achieve a spontaneous grace.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

Pierre Morel's diving, spiraling camera keeps pace with Yuen Wo-ping's rapid-fire fight choreography, all smartly directed by Louis Leterrier.

Cinematographer Rodrigo Pietro grounds the ghostly encounters in grainy imagery, his unobtrusive handheld camera and deeply saturated colors best appreciated in a nightclub sequence that looks like something from Hieronymous Bosch.

Cohen probably thinks he's Charlie Chaplin lampooning Hitler, but of course Hitler was still on top of the world when "The Great Dictator" came out in 1940; Cohen is actually Chaplin's antithesis, a first-world bully content to target the Other.

The purpose of the Bond girl, and of the Bond film, is still to stroke the male ego. Bond changes just enough to stay exactly the same.

Ethnographic segments about the natives' daily life are bridged by expressive folk songs, though the film digresses to consider colonialism, homosexuality, and the effects of globalization on indigenous cultures. Gosling's schoolmarmish narration betrays the filmmakers' awestruck naivete toward the culture, which they seem to consider some sort of matriarchal utopia.

Gainsbourg has some cute scenes with Johnny Depp, a debonair stranger she meets in a Virgin Megastore, but otherwise this is a fairly banal installment in the battle of the sexes.

The plot is ridiculous and the characters are cardboard, but none of that really matters once the snakes get into the cabin and start zapping people, the very definition of entertainment.

A graceful, understated sense of period allows the behavior of the characters in this love story to be unusually nuanced, making their experiences seem uncontrived as well as archetypal.

Led me to second thoughts about whether the feel-good tactics of "Schindler's List" were any worse than the feel-bad tactics on display here.

The film mechanically uses the crosscutting technique made famous by Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" without any of its wit or focused energy.

Perhaps the post-cold-war attitudes behind this film are progressive, but the same old pre-nuclear-war worship of the military goes all but unchallenged.

While largely effective, Greenwald's documentary is not a complete success.

If you're looking for a simple-minded farce with campy overtones, this 2008 feature might be your dish.

There's so little respect for the music that we never see or hear a number from beginning to end, and we rarely hear any of the musicians speak more than a few seconds at a time. Overall the glibness and self-contempt are so thick you can cut them with a knife.

If you're wondering how Steve Anderson managed to make a 93-minute documentary about the ultimate four-letter word, which uses the epithet over 800 times, you're underestimating his capacity to entertain and educate in roughly equal doses.

Rob Brown (Stop-Loss) gives a graceful, understated performance as Ernie Davis.

As werewolf Jake, Taylor Lautner does his best to salvage things by showing his bare chest through almost the entire movie, and the rest of the cast struggles gamely, but the script sucks the life out of them. This is definitely the worst installment of the franchise to date.

Elliott Gould as a conscience-stricken graduate student in a radical chic exercise that seemed hilariously dated even at the moment it came out (1970).

This dark comedy by screenwriters Jonathan Parker and Catherine DiNapoli frequently uses a .44 Magnum when a pea shooter would suffice.

Boyd brings no new insights to this drama of men in a confined space, a situation that's been the basis for many powerful war films.

Though it suggests intriguing ideas about the nature of performance, humor, ambition, and the consumption of spectacle, the movie only superficially explores them.

Flat and unconvincing.

Despite his advancing years, Chan delivers some fleet slapstick; like his hero Buster Keaton he works intuitively with levers, pulleys, ladders, and umbrellas.

Though it's aimed at preschoolers, it's tuneful and funny enough to amuse any adult.

The comedy sci-fi franchise returns after a ten-year hiatus, with the same formula of respectably funny wisecracks and obsessively detailed space monsters.

The Alabama setting is as phony as the one in Forrest Gump, and for all of Finney's effectiveness as a yarn-spinning geezer, his whoppers seem disconnected from his character and each other--a weakness Burton fails to resolve with an awkward Felliniesque finale.

Well-acted but otherwise conventional war hokum.

I'm no boxing fan, but there's something admirable about fighter Johar Abu Lashin's love of his sport, chronicled in Duki Dror's tautly constructed 2002 documentary.

With a mug like hers Cervera must have realized this was her big chance to star in a musical, and she gives a dazzling performance.

Bier's film succeeded on the merits of its actors, and this one offers fine performances by Portman and Gyllenhaal, but Maguire doesn't cut the mustard as the anguished military man.

In a lumbering way, this depressing feel-good drama about the impact of cancer on two children, their divorced parents, and the father's girlfriend offers some useful insights into how feelings of jealousy and betrayal can limit the potential of family relationships.

Quietly unsettling in its vision of modern-day isolation.

Nobody knows how to speak, but they sure know how to apply makeup. [17 June 2010, p.63]

Though the director is Walter Hill, the dominant personality is John Milius, who wrote the story and collaborated on the script with Larry Gross, and despite some narrative stodginess in spots, Milius’s sense of warrior nobility and his talent for writing juicy parts for actors serve the picture well.

The real revelation here is Streep, who spends every moment comically negotiating her conflicted impulses.

High-octane nonsense but gives both the actors and the audience all that's needed to make this diverting--car chases, wisecracks, narrow escapes, explosions.

A painstakingly crafted nonrealist story, which doesn't seem to imply anything beyond what it depicts.

The script, which infantilizes one of the older siblings as much as the father does, undermines its own admonitions against parents and adult children meddling in one another's lives.

Comes closer to deification than dramatization--a shame, since the film offers some powerful set pieces and jaw-dropping spectacle.

Butler deftly intercuts real footage with CGI, heightening the drama, and the film becomes especially compelling once the robots are launched into space.

To Towne's credit, he's a thoughtful and conscientious romantic. He skillfully makes the two main characters a hot, volatile couple, deftly staging their courtship as if it were an erotic grudge match.

Despite some shaky narrative continuity and muddled motivations, this manages to move pretty briskly, and the action sequences are generally well handled, especially at the climax.

I was beguiled by both the eerie moods and the striking compositions, which incorporate large stretches of empty space.

The big green babysitter is back, but the charm has evaporated.

Burt Reynolds showed signs of becoming a very personal filmmaker with this police thriller, his third outing as a director. It has the wistful faith in innocence and the extreme moral outrage of Gator coupled with the subversive infantilism of The End; what Reynolds lacks in technique (which is plenty) is nearly compensated for by the almost embarrassing intensity of his feelings. The context is extremely violent, which makes the intimate moments—between Reynolds and the girl and Reynolds and his buddies—stand out in agonizingly stark relief.

As effective as MacDowell was in sex, lies, and videotape, she's clearly no match for the talented Depardieu; perhaps she'd seem less out of her depth if the script wasn't so implausible and threadbare.

But where Dante's cynicism ultimately carried the day over Spielberg's piousness in Gremlins, Explorers remains a hopelessly schizophrenic film, obscenely eager to compromise its own originality.

A murky, directionless plot sinks this big-budget fantasy despite Martin Laing's elaborate production design; the dark, industrial-looking sets often recall "Brazil" but without that film's thrilling sense of an imagination run amok.

The new sexism -- the old sexism plus the idea that everything is ironic -- is getting old.

Another giggly gross-out comedy for teenagers.

McKee's direction of actors is as clumsy as the stabs at rapid editing.

All I got was this lousy movie. OK, it's not that bad, though in contrast to "Ocean's Eleven," which gave its megastars a neat little heist story, this sequel is both contrived and convoluted.

There is hardly any point in discussing the direction of a picture like this, in which almost every shot has been predetermined by the requirements of the special effects, yet director Richard Marquand fluffs the two or three real opportunities he has, rendering the long-delayed character climaxes with a chilly indifference.

The end result is more like a supermarket on Saturday afternoon. The content is engaging, though.

The episodic structure works to the movie's benefit, highlighting the eccentric supporting characters and allowing Mendes to smoothly downshift from hilarity to sadness.

This is the art-house equivalent of a Clive Barker splatterfest, punctuated by mildly amusing stabs at Lynchian absurdity and compromised by an incoherent plot twist that would leave M. Night Shyamalan rolling his eyes.

There isn't a whole lot of Zen here, barring the opening and closing scenes with a priest, but there's plenty of lively sex, both conventional and otherwise, in this high-spirited porn romp from Hong Kong.

First-time director James Gartner observes all the rituals--the coach busting chops, the team sneaking out to party--but the players are indifferently characterized and the civil rights story has a fake Black History Month feel.

Better than it might have been, given the limitations of this kind of brand-name filmmaking. Hodges doesn't shirk his duties, and though the film lapses too often into easy facetiousness, much of it feels surprisingly substantial. The action moves smoothly and logically, finding a rhythm that engages your attention despite the patent lack of inspiration and genuine commitment.

The movie is quite enjoyable, though, redeemed by Crowe's trademark sincerity and assured handling of oddball character actors.

No sense of complicity between filmmaker and spectator, no depth, no ambiguity, no production value spared, plenty of running time and pomposity, and a desperate sense of trying to do everything and please everybody.

Though we are largely spared Leonard Nimoy's stentorian presence as a performer, we must endure his miscalculations as a director: the dialogue scenes are often hilariously turgid; the action scenes—when Nimoy can be bothered to descend from his podium and film them—are zanily maladroit.

Alternately mawkish and strident, with lots of fades to white and dog reaction shots, this can be recommended only for its good intentions.

The romantic plot, involving his unrequited loved for Garner, is soured by her character's unconcealed shallowness: she won't have him because his genes aren't up to snuff.

One more sluggish, artfully framed thriller with Rembrandt lighting set in a New York borough--a kind of picture that's awfully hard to do in a fresh manner.

The story's resolution isn't very satisfying, but I considered most of this movie time well spent.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.

Fine work carved from minimal materials.

"Bill & Ted's Aurora Adventures" might almost serve as the subtitle for this very silly but enjoyable 1992 comedy, developed from characters introduced on Saturday Night Live--heavy-metal fans (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) with a cable access show in Aurora, Illinois.

The movie implies that Durst murdered his wife, but the unsolved crime turns out to be less mysterious than the mind of the killer, nervily portrayed by Gosling as not evil but unaccountably empty.

This is one of those movies whose empty-headed premise is so pure it's witty: with his insatiable need for excitement, the hero is a perfect stand-in for the fanboys in the audience.

Newman does a remarkable John Huston impression, and screenwriter John Milius demonstrates once again that he went to film school.

Maybe because director Scott Marshall is Garry's son, he allows his affable father to steal the movie from everyone else, and his performance proves to be a small gift worth having.

Just when it seemed as if the vampire narrative had degenerated into terminal suckitude, along comes this gleefully gory little gem.

Winterbottom, a Brit who's shot several films in India, carefully notes the local customs and mores that contribute to the young woman's tragic fall.

Both lead actors are wonderful, and director Ziad Doueiri (West Beirut) artfully addresses the cultural and even spiritual dimensions of the story without losing sight of the lovers' tenderness and confusion.

The script is a veritable cosmos of Spielberg in-jokes, but the writer-stars also make room for some vicious and decidedly English digs at red-state shit-kickers and Christian fundamentalists.

This 2005 British feature by writer Anthony Frewin and director Brian Cook, both former Kubrick assistants, uses Conway's unlikely saga to mount an appreciative send-up of a certain style of gay extravagance.

This is mainly smoke, not fire.

Cathartically disgusting adventure movie.

It's an utter waste of Watts; there's not a trace here of the talent on display in Mulholland Drive, perhaps because the script doesn't bother to give her a character.

The banal score seems more appropriate for a western, and there's a certain self-conscious theatricality in the mise en scene, yet this is both handsome and affecting.

The film tends to groan under the weight of his obsessions -- and his sister's fixation on circumcising her son -- yet for much of the 95-minute running time the chemistry between Attal's vulnerable husband and Gainsbourg's sweet, beguiling wife is irresistible. The terrific score is by jazz pianist Brad Mehldau.

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

Carpenter's direction is slow, dark, and stately; he seems to be aiming for an enveloping, novelistic kind of effect, but all he gets is heaviness.

Terminally boring.

Unlike most literary adaptations this one actually conveys the pleasure of fiction, lingering suggestively on small details of character and place. The movie casts such a seductive air of mystery that the resolution feels anticlimactic, yet there's plenty to enjoy along the way.

This keeps one reasonably amused, titillated, and brain-dead for a little over two hours.

Well-made treacle.

What's left is a curiously disconnected illustration of American racism, which nevertheless fails to realize the power and irony inherent in its pop-Marxist analysis.

The result is an uneasy mix of Coen-style laughs (particularly evident in the big comic close-ups) and Zhang's majestic imagery (in one shot the couple's divorce papers shatter into a burst of confetti).