You may feel fussy asking for a coherent narrative, though, because director Ridley Scott delivers so many of the shocking set pieces that are the real hallmark of the series.

The end credits are accompanied by clips of Porter from the Emmy-winning documentary Gridiron Gang (1993), which prove that key scenes from this movie were lifted straight from life and that life needs better writers.

This never rises above a date movie, but it's functionally literate.

Silberling has the nerve to play it for laughs -- This is clearly an actor's movie, but only Sarandon and Holly Hunter (as the attorney prosecuting the murderer) rise to the occasion.

However gritty this indie comedy may look (cinematographer Steve Calitri seems to be aping William Eggleston's photographs of the American south), it isn't all that different from an Adam Sandler vehicle: writer-director Robbie Pickering spends much of the movie mocking his characters' stupidity, then pulls an about-face with a sentimental conclusion that feels unearned.

The stilted performances are especially unfortunate when one considers what a fine documentary Clark might have gotten out of the same material.

Part of the minimalist humor growing out of this small-scale event is that they can barely remember anything, because the revolution scarcely made any difference.

All the characters are uniformly obnoxious, and director Peter Greenaway (The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover) lingers over suffering even more than in his other features.

Shane Acker has expanded his Oscar-nominated short 9 into a full-length feature whose splendid visuals are dragged down by a tedious story.

Cohen and a crew of script doctors have thrown in some of the oldest cliches in the book.

In this eerily tranquil psychological thriller, Nicole Kidman's placid countenance is like a Rorschach: you'll project onto it what you want to see.

Yu's portrait of Darger, which clocks in at 82 minutes, skims over the only aspect of his life that commands respect: his craft.

If you're going to make a movie in which some of your stars are animated toys and much of downtown Chicago is reduced to rubble, this is the way to do it: shamelessly, with no expense spared and no cliche avoided.

The main compensation is Harrelson's well-judged and finely shaded performance; the secondary ones are the ladies he hangs out with -- Lauren Bacall, Lily Tomlin, and Kristin Scott Thomas. But the rest of this mainly drifts.

As beautifully mounted as this production is, Scorsese has a way of letting the decor take over, so that Wharton's tale of societal constraints comes through only in fits and starts. But it's a noble failure.

Val Kilmer, clearly pleased to be entering the Oscar disability sweepstakes, does what he can as the hunk who learns how to see.

An amiable, highly ingratiating piece of lowbrow entertainment.

Well-made treacle.

Costner has the stoic routine down pat, and there are some spectacular action sequences of helicopter rescues on the high seas, but Kutcher is in way over his head.

In spite of the creative team—Hepburn, Tracy, and director George Cukor—this curiously flat 1943 melodrama redeems itself only from moment to moment.

This desperately all-ages movie just emphasizes its banality by throwing money and effort into effects and production design at the expense of pacing.

Scenes of pageantry and mass prayer show that thousands respond to her charisma, but Kounen gives little insight why; aside from Amma's belief that creator and creation are one, her religious tenets remain a mystery.

This comedy drama is capably acted and undeniably touching in spots.

It's reasonably well told and well mounted but little more.

This thin premise can't sustain a feature, and the racial and gay jokes are jarring, but the child actors are cute, especially Andrew.

Jeremy Piven and Annabella Sciorra exert some charm as bodyguards tracking the couple; Mark Harmon and Caroline Goodall are OK as the heroine's parents. Andy Cadiff directed Derek Guiley and David Schneiderman's by-the-numbers script.

Martin Campbell directed, displaying none of the flair that made his “Casino Royale” such a hoot.

Frank De Felitta wrote and directed this feeble but well-stuffed comedy; Alan Arkin and Emily Morton are wasted in cameos as Garcia's drama coach and acting buddy, respectively.

Charmingly low-tech fantasy.

Shot in beautifully textured black-and-white video and then transferred to film, the movie has an intoxicating, sexually charged rhythm and seems sharply attuned to the lives of the impoverished black musicians, singers, and dancers who perform at the club. Unfortunately, it's poorly structured, and the absence of a unifying shape significantly blunts its impact.

"B.S. I Love You" would be a more accurate title.

Lawrence Kasdan directed this fair-to-middling black comedy from a script by John Kostmayer, and although the pacing is sluggish in spots, people with a taste for acting as impersonation will enjoy some of the scenery chewing.

It's a sure sign of how good Tomei is that she can even occasionally do something with Tom Sierchio's lachrymose script; the usually wonderful Rosie Perez, stuck with an uninteresting part, is less lucky.

The fallout decades later provides the drama in this documentary by Doug Pray (Hype!), who lets his eccentric octogenarian subject off a little too easy.

This made-for-cable opus, halfway between documentary and docudrama, is willing to try anything and everything except for a consistent relationship to its material.

For the most part I was able to accept this thesis and enjoy Lopez in her usual superwoman role, but the script does get awfully preachy in spots.

Techine glosses over the story’s most potent issue: France’s complicated relationship with its Jewish community.

This packaged tour through the great man's career is unenlightening and obfuscating, despite an adept lead performance by Robert Downey Jr.

The supposedly cunning protagonist registers as a cipher, and the directors' tendency to shoot dialogue scenes in close-up blunts any understanding of the social milieu he's trying to conquer.

The execution of the script is perfect, as always, but it's the laziest script Brooks has ever directed.

Perfect acting by Keaton and Streep outshines the screenplay by Scott McPherson (who wrote the original play), even as the performances are overwhelmed by cinematography so gorgeous and distracting it makes the drama seem like just so much wheel spinning.

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).

The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn't always been this high -- paradoxically, it's been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history.

For most of this romantic comedy, fatuous contrivances run neck and neck with what seem to be authentic observations about repressed sibling rivalry; some of the latter are too painful to be funny, and eventually the contrivances win out, but the cast keeps it all watchable.

Visually and dramatically it works well - it's Shakespeare by way of "Black Hawk Down" - but as an allegory of modern-day geopolitics it doesn't really go anywhere.

Emotionally charged but not entirely honest documentary.

Carmelo, the central figure, returns home when his mother's health begins to decline, and his love of family, something of an abstraction in the first part, leaves him deeply divided: he wants to care for them personally, but he can better provide for them by returning to the U.S.

It’s exactly what you’d expect: tepid, artsy, and grayish, though it has surprising bursts of sincere sentiment.

The filmmakers show habitual thriller viewers some respect by condensing the background story into iconic sound and image bites during the opening-credits sequence, suggesting they know we get the drill; this and the other stylish elements make it all the more disappointing that the movie's mediocre.

What might have been a serious drama about coming to terms with violence and loss turns into a crowd-pleasing and increasingly far-fetched remake of "Death Wish."

The story ultimately lands in incoherence; but the cameos and local details, and even some of the gags, keep it perky.

Brothers Brad and John Hennegan track six thoroughbreds in the qualifying races running up to the 2006 Kentucky Derby, yet the horseflesh isn't as interesting to them as the owners and trainers, an odd assortment of moneymen and equine gurus with a culture all their own.

Denzel Washington is admirable in the role of a dauntless detective investigating murders and metaphysics, but his sincerity can’t carry the outlandish plot—you just wonder what a guy like him is doing in a movie like this.

Jeb Stuart directed, his well-rounded portrait of the community partly undermined by the slack editing; with Rick Schroder as the minister and Michael Rooker as the defense attorney.

Keeps building to apocalyptic climaxes that never materialize. (Review of Original Release)

Insights about romance are enhanced by the novel production design, which includes puppetry, but the story's reflexivity is smug and cloying.

The stories are pretty good folk, though a little too coyly calculated. But the plantation stuff is beneath contempt. Better save this for nostalgia only—kids won't be missing anything if they never encounter this relic.

Neither the crime nor its detection is especially interesting, and screenwriter Tony Gayton doesn't appear to be aiming for psychological insights.

Moderately pretentious, though very well filmed, this was the sort of thing teenage boys throve on in the dark ages Before Spielberg.

Slick though featherweight adolescent melodrama.

Semiabsorbing.

The problem is that happy endings this strident and overextended begin to seem somewhat desperate.

While his film certainly has the nastiness of satire, it doesn't have much political focus; petty malice rather than anger is the main bill of fare, with deep-dish notations about food and sex thrown in for spice.

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.

The direction of Fran Rubel Kuzui (Tokyo Pop) suggests that she's more comfortable with character than action, and Joss Whedon's script has some fun with Valley talk (both genuine and ersatz) but strains to sell the story.

Few recent films have left me feeling more conflicted than Valeska Grisebach's second feature (2006), which is sensitive, moving, accomplished in its extraordinary direction of nonprofessional actors but also a little bogus.

This action comedy transforms LAPD detective Chris Tucker from an intolerably annoying egotist into a practically lovable intolerably annoying egotist.

Jewison's lack of interest in developing anything other than his rather debatable ideological point relegates the film to the realm of moderately competent TV drama.

There's no formal stylization to speak of, but this is, after all, a film about performances, and Medak simply points his camera at the actors and lets them chew away. Some of the chewers are better than others, and Harvey Keitel and Frank Langella especially, coming from opposite poles of intensity and languor, deliver the honest emotional goods.

The psychological and psychoanalytical probes into sexual and emotional problems keep this reasonably lively.

The film contains a remarkable level of violence, yet never establishes a tone that would make it seem funny or truly shocking; the jokes flounder in an air of half-hearted spite.

More or less restages Tobe Hooper's 1974 original, including its much-loved family dinner scene.

This may seem slick and sentimental, but beneath the surface is a film every bit as morbid as "A.I. Artificial Intelligence," which also used a nonhuman protagonist to contemplate human death on a mass scale.

George Clooney produced and stars in this international spy thriller, which he probably thought of as existential but which registers onscreen as a giant bore.

This is an ideal straight-ahead version of Jesus's story, built around Christopher Plummer's offscreen narration, for people who don't already know all the details and can't follow all of "The Passion of the Christ" without a synopsis.

Limiting the potential overripeness of the material with tact and sincerity, he (Wang) generally makes the most of his resourceful cast; only the dog overacts.

Munich may have value as an act of expiation but not as entertainment or art.

As in many reductive period pieces, there are no real characters here, just archetypes, namely reactionary cretins and sensitive souls who anticipate modern attitudes.

The limiting factor, despite serious performances by the two leads, is that neither character is entirely believable.

Director Q. Allan Brocka (Eating Out) keeps the tone downbeat for too long, but one can't fault his ambition in tackling the elusive connections between love, sex, and money.

Luhrmann's squirrelly, five-exclamation-point stylings mercifully subside after the first 20 minutes or so, leaving behind a palatable big-screen confection.

Based on a story by Steve Martin of all people, the script seldom rises above formula (Guy Pearce and Neal McDonough are especially ill served as a pair of starchy FBI agents), but its respectful treatment of Islam is both unusual and welcome.

Attractively animated.

The film suffers from clunky smart-aleck dialogue and an overabundance of jump cuts and crane shots, and despite its libertine air, Toback repeatedly cautions that acid is a fast track to insanity, especially in combination with Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

It's the angriest comedy I've encountered all year, though it's pretty well spoiled by Carrey, who insists on turning it into a star vehicle with his slapstick and spazz attacks.

Nicely toned.

A painfully misconceived reduction and simplification by writer Waldo Salt and director John Schlesinger of the great Nathanael West novel about Hollywood in the late 30s.

A lot to look at, little to contemplate, and nothing to hum.

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

It shows rare courage in protesting the widespread abuse of innocent Iraqis, but its pseudodocumentary form is full of awkward misfires (such as a protracted use of theme music from Barry Lyndon) and its acting is often terrible.

The main pleasure of this high-stakes-poker drama is watching a septuagenarian Burt Reynolds effortlessly revive his 70s screen persona as a strutting paragon of male shrewdness and sexuality.

The film is fairly tolerable as these things go: Wilder takes time off from the steamrolling plot for improvised bits with some actor buddies (including Charles Grodin and Joseph Bologna), and the project as a whole is a lot less mawkish than we've come to expect from Wilder's directorial efforts. Still, it ain't exactly state of the art.

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

Watching Best Worst Movie, you can't help but notice that the Troll 2 crowd consists almost exclusively of people in their 20s, which makes perfect sense: manufacturing an obsession with a terrible movie probably seems more worthwhile if you think you've got all the time in the world.

I could have done without all the pushy tactics of this romantic comedy.

The rough-and-tumble tone is bitterly entertaining but in the end doesn't contribute to a convincing historical portrait, and a pileup of half-baked resolutions spoils the buzz.

It's more sophisticated than the usual run of Disney product, but it lacks the inventiveness that could endow it with genuine charm.

The screenplay is sharp and insightful, the period details ring true, and Martin is appealing as a dreamer conflicted about his homosexuality. But once the action shifts from the town to the festival, any momentum gets lost in a psychedelic haze.