Though Adrian Lyne's clodhopper direction, underlined by a mushy Ennio Morricone score, predictably runs the gamut from soft-core porn in the manner of David Hamilton to hectoring close-ups, this is perhaps Lyne's best movie after Jacob's Ladder--a genuinely disturbing (if far from literary) adaptation of Nabokov's extraordinary novel, written by former journalist Stephen Schiff and starring, predictably, Jeremy Irons.

Writer-director Karin Albou nicely balances intellect against spirituality but is defeated by the sex scenes, which are tinged with an Orientalist exoticism; the result is a bodice-ripper for the art-house crowd.

Notorious on the festival circuit for its excruciating scenes of self-mutilation.

Without his comic underpinnings (there's only a crude pie-eating fantasy as comic security) Reiner seems lost in his own cinematic wilderness—button-down careful, almost afraid to move. His only storytelling strategy involves crosscutting from one talking head to another, and he leaves too many literary ends dangling from the Stephen King novella on which this 1989 film is based.

It doesn't come off, despite a dazzling color design and imaginative sets, perhaps because Demy's extremely rarefied talent for fantasy needs to be anchored by a touch of the real.

Graham Greene's screenplay is centered on the pivotal moment when a child first discovers sin, but the boy's perspective is neglected in favor of facile suspense structures and a thuddingly conventional whodunit finale.

Gary Nelson's direction is very bad, the writing is weak, and the acting campy at best—but Peter Ellenshaw's production design strikes the right balance of vastness and seductive detail.

After 9/11 and Katrina, this megabudget remake by Wolfgang Petersen benefits from a similar cultural oomph, though it's just as enjoyably silly as the original.

Director Tobe Hooper seriously overplays his hand, losing the shape of this 1985 film in a barrage of overblown special effects and screaming Dolby stereo.

This sitcom setup is as bad as it sounds, and Cox never really surmounts it, though the characters deepen significantly after the missionary is caught caressing the waiter and sent home to be excommunicated and shamed by his family.

Uneven and slightly muddled futuristic horror story—not really science fiction, more like an antipollution PSA gone berserk.

Despite a three-hour running time Stone is too occupied with psychodrama to explore Alexander's innovations in battle, and Farrell, clearly out of his depth, seems less a leader of men than a Hellenistic James Dean.

George Lazenby has so much reserve as James Bond that he makes Sean Connery seem almost frenetic by comparison. Director Peter Hunt manages to inject some life into this 1969 exercise with a wonderful ski chase, but otherwise the film is a bore.

Like her previous feature, "Look at Me" (2004), this relationship drama is mature and intelligent, but the character conflicts are so decorously handled that after a while the whole enterprise begins to seem more like a good waiter than a good story.

Nothing's wrong with this movie--the hockey footage is exciting, the characters quirky, the subplots idiosyncratic--but nothing's special about it either.

This is a hokey, old-fashioned melodrama in which the actors scream more often than necessary.

This new version is an almost scene-for-scene remake, which is good news in the first half and bad news in the torpid second.

The director's familiarity with silent cinema enhances the prudish pornographic footage, but when he starts cutting between separate perversions, I began to wonder if he was getting as bored with the material as I was.

Unfortunately Jia --a rather limited actor, judging from the movies excerpted here -- has trouble either articulating or projecting the existential crisis that ultimately landed him in a mental institution, which leaves the emotional center of the film inert.

I wouldn't have minded even the Hollywood schlock lurking behind the studied weirdness if I'd believed in any of the characters on any level.

Espinosa never conveys any sort of perspective on the material, as Scott does through his obsessive attention to production detail; the stylization feels empty, distracting from whatever simple pleasures the routine plot (involving double agents and stolen microchips) might have delivered.

Warmly and gently handled, though the central story, detailing the personal politics between him and the six childlike monsters, steadily loses steam.

Huston simply films the plot of Malcolm Lowry's modern-day gothic novel, turning a fevered interior vision into a cold, distant, exterior one—a documentary on the death of a drunk. As the tortured consul, Albert Finney has moments of technical brilliance, but Huston's direction gives him no inner life. The most impressive artistic contribution is that of cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose painfully sharp images suggest something of what the novel is about.

Accommodates some great water photography.

Memories of Me, directed by ex-Fonz Henry Winkler, is a "Long Day's Journey into Schmaltz," in which an already overripe father-son conflict is further sugared by large doses of show-biz sentimentality. [07 Oct 1988, p.A]

Apart from a few sleek shots involving boats or helicopters, the action eventually devolves into a standard war-movie shootout.

Scenes of harvested frogs provide an apt metaphor for Brazil's miserable have-nots, so apt that Kohn can't resist beating it to death.

A cool, at times unbearably objective look at the fragile relationship between two rather ordinary young people in Depression America (Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall), who happen to rob banks and get shot at a lot.

Some of it looks like a TV commercial, and the characters' motivations could have been generated by a computer, but the cast--Ray Barrett, Julia Blake, Simon Bossell, Saffron Burrows, Pippa Grandison, and Aden Young--is attractive and energetic.

Naturally, age and infirmity are a major subtext of Shine a Light (and, really, any movie featuring Keith Richards). No matter how cadaverous the Stones appear, they keep climbing onstage, and I’ll miss them when they’re finally gone.

The science is compelling, though Cameron and codirector Steven Quale undermine the movie's scholarship with a silly sci-fi ending.

Smith is resourceful in the role, though the story stretches one's credulity about his character's resourcefulness.

A pretty good caper comedy for 11-year-old boys -- "heist thriller" would make it sound too ambitious.

Lightweight slasher.

Berri remains a boring director, dotting every i and crossing every t with nothing much on his mind but platitude.

If there were any more cops on the edge in this arrhythmic, ham-fisted crime drama, Brooklyn would need a bigger edge.

Cheung can't make the woman very interesting in her own right--the most compelling performance here is Nolte's.

Though My Girl seeks to stir large, devastating emotions, Zieff seems afraid to touch on anything too difficult or unpleasant, lest it alienate his audience. The results are curiously gutless and unmoving, as Zieff finds himself stuck with a sentimentality without substance, a poetry without pain.

The production values are above par, but as in Carpenter's original, seeing ghosts is less scary than imagining them.

On the other hand, the brutality and sadism it delivers at every opportunity, which we're supposed to take for granted as part of the "fun," left me feeling that any civilization that can create such an entertainment may not deserve to survive.

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

The idiosyncratic instrumentation and melodies in the score by Angelo Badalamenti ("Blue Velvet") and a masterful opening scene are wasted on this pathetic thriller.

I'm too big a fan of director James Whale (1896-1957) to take a film about him lightly, and I'm afraid this speculative 1998 movie about his last days won't do.

The shtick based on whether other people understand him is subtle enough for 79 minutes.

Despite a monotonously fashionable mise-en-scene, Lyne generates some genuine erotic tension between his two stars; you believe in their obsessive relationship, even as most of the action and staging registers as ridiculous.

It's silly adolescent stuff, but director Brett Ratner and screenwriters Paul Zbyszewski and Craig Rosenberg serve it up gracefully.

The movie's strength is in its comedy; a tragic subplot feels merely manipulative.

The film clearly means to celebrate the power of imagination, but while younger kids may find it charming, some parents may begin to wonder if the girl's obsessive fantasies don't warrant a trip to the local shrink.

This 1941 film, which Warren Beatty remade as Heaven Can Wait, is nothing special in itself—a fairly routine romantic comedy from the 40s, with Robert Montgomery having a hard time acting like a lowlife.

Steve Buscemi supplies the only spark of intelligent life in this numbingly flat universe, despite the fancy gadgets, the high-speed chases, and a skyscraper collision reminiscent of the World Trade Center attacks.

Story is fairly conventional and not especially well told, though as usual Tran's images are so sensual and beautiful that I was rarely bored or frustrated.

The young heroine is rather humorless, but Gavras's intelligence and skillful touch are evident throughout.

An overloaded script by Heidi Thomas... defeats a fine cast

Nothing quite works as it should: the rhythms are subtly off, the pace is forced, the comedy overextended . . . and the surfeit of hommages—to the Keystone Kops and Laurel and Hardy and Jerry Lewis and all and sundry—threatens to sink it before it gets out of the starting gate. But there's something to be said for Edwards's insatiable overreaching, and at times the orchestration of pratfalls and comic pairings could hardly be more deft.

This originated as a late-night play, and the humor is correspondingly sophomoric, but I loved Dennis McCarthy's melodramatic score.

The Israeli academy showered awards--best picture, director, screenplay, editing, cinematography, sound, costumes, actress, supporting actress, supporting actor--on this coming-of-age story, which makes its modest whimsy even harder to get excited about.

As in "Breaking Upwards," the best joke here is that the wives (Jenna Fischer, Christina Applegate) wind up getting more action during the marital recess than their hapless hubbies.

The humor's vulgar and the plot feeble, but this is a cut above the gross-out comedies aimed at male teens, and its heroine and her gal pals keep the high jinks amiable.

Feels particularly mechanical. The movie isn't a complete waste: it adequately re-creates the comics' Dickensian characterization, and every frame brims with clever details. But once the action begins, Spielberg's incessant, force-fed "fun" quickly gets exhausting.

This has some currency as ethnography, showing how tribal and interpersonal matters mesh with sports mania, but it remains a formidably dull account of an inherently exciting pastime.

The movie's script and production values represent a big step up from the nearly unwatchable predecessor and make it suitable viewing even for people who aren't Twilight nerds.

Vanessa Redgrave bails out this mushy Italian-postcard romance.

Unfortunately the allegory tends to overpower the characterizations even as it deepens them.

Watchable but not very illuminating.

Unfortunately, the relationship between Cobb and Stump as depicted here isn't very substantial or interesting, and the fictionalized Stump's offscreen narration feels rather concocted; what the movie has to say about Cobb mainly leaks through around the edges of this cumbersome apparatus.

Live-action stars take a backseat to CGI chipmunks in this uneven family comedy.

Pairing Jackie Chan and Jet Li would seem like a slam dunk, but this big-budget martial arts drama, which borrows liberally from "The Wizard of Oz," is something of a disappointment.

The three actors manage to get a lot of mileage out of the material: although one never quite believes that Tandy's character is Jewish, she is remarkable in every other respect, and Freeman and Aykroyd are wonderful throughout.

The connection between the two narratives is supposed to be a big, heartbreaking surprise, though I figured it out well in advance and spent the interim unfavorably comparing this greatest-generation hanky wringer to the British drama "Iris."

It’s one thing to make a movie filled with mayhem and then implicate the audience for watching it; it’s another thing entirely to come back ten years later with the same movie, hype it with a marketing campaign, and try to implicate the viewer again. One nice thing about America is that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime.

Tyler Perry grounds this sequel to "Why Did I Get Married?" (2007) in his trademark blend of comedy, soap opera, and down-home southern sentiment, though he lets up a little on the moral proselytizing, which aids the digestion considerably.

Joffe, a British screenwriter (The American, 28 Weeks Later) debuting as director, hits some of these notes in his adaptation of Brighton Rock, but the movie's religious flourishes seem more rhetorical than heartfelt.

The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising.

In some ways, for better and for worse, this is even more about Graysmith (Jake Gyllehaal)--who became obsessed with solving the Zodiac killings that terrorized northern California in the late 60s--than about the murderer.

Watchable if relatively threadbare movie.

Unfortunately I can't give this a thumbs-up or thumbs-down; I haven't yet developed an aesthetic that will accommodate a guy firing a bottle rocket from his ass.

As the aching spouse, Moore delivers what is for her an unusually sympathetic performance.

All three lead actors are adroit; but the story, adapted from a short story by H.E. Bates, is both contrived and not very well told.

In 20 Dates Myles Berkowitz strings together one embarrassing moment after another and triumphs in a culture characterized by actorly artifice.

The film wobbles between impulses to be a simple feel-good story and a trickier, ultimately sadder tale about a man facing a moral and spiritual crisis.

The main characters are a couple of revered high school table-tennis champs (one short and aggressive, the other tall and moody), and their efforts to win a big national tournament accommodate plenty of Zen aphorisms, glaring showdowns, and slow-motion paddle swinging.

It's a subject that guarantees a certain amount of liberal tongue clucking, though director Jeff Renfroe wisely concentrates on suspense instead of sermons.

While the results are far from unprofessional--the cast is uniformly good, including a characteristically slapped-around Meryl Streep...The male self-pity is so overwhelming that you'll probably stagger out of this mumbling something about Tolstoy (as many critics did when the film first came out in 1978) if you aren't as nauseated as I was.

Film noir has seldom been so blanc.

Big laughs are few and far between in this 1998 movie, which is more successful as motivational anecdote than as comedy.

A more honest film would have been a greater tribute to this brave and tenacious fighter.

The husband learns nothing, and his monstrous behavior makes the movie relentlessly downbeat. No one, including the viewer, achieves catharsis.

As in Korine's other movies, characterization is often just amplified weirdness.

This begins to get interesting in the home stretch, as the woman's chronic deception begins to catch up with her, but for the most part it's an extended Geritol commercial.

A curiosity of the first order.

The only one who seems to be having much fun is Parker Posey, camping it up as one of the vampires.

Goldfinger touch on many grand issues (theater rivalry, anti-Semitism, child labor, the generation gap, Israelis' hostility toward the Yiddish tongue) but stop short of exploring them, focusing instead on a family that personifies a dying tradition.

How ironic that one form of beauty would be returned to battle-scarred Afghanistan by ugly Americans, but that's just what director Liz Mermin caught in her slim 2004 documentary for the BBC.

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

Alison Eastwood, whose good looks and last name have served her well as a Hollywood actress, makes her directing debut with this mediocre cancer drama.

Ingmar Bergman's best film, I suppose, though it's still fairly tedious and overloaded with avant-garde cliches.

Producers Michael Bay and Steven Spielberg deploy an arsenal of noisy special effects to demonstrate the invaders' high-tech superiority, which makes Olyphant's inability to breach an Internet firewall look pretty silly.

The cast packs enough sexual ambiguity to satisfy the most rabid Williams fan (not to mention a screenplay by Gore Vidal), but Mankiewicz leaves much of the innuendo unexplored—thankfully, perhaps.