Russ Meyer's most deliriously mannerist and frenetically edited feature (1978); it's helped along by an extremely arch script written by Meyer and, pseudonymously, Roger Ebert.

This pleasant romantic comedy is essentially "Far From Heaven" with the races reversed.

The film reveals its true colors at the end, with a plug for the New Age dude ranch the entrepreneurial couple has since established in Texas.

An alternately comic and macabre portrait of a deranged friendship.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

The extravagant makeup and special effects are actually unobtrusive because they're demanded by the pleasantly formulaic story, whose conflicts -- and broad, innocuous political allegory -- justify the heartwarming resolution.

The source material has undergone some sentimental softening, though Hope Davis, as the heroine's sister, does a swell job of making sanity seem obnoxious.

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.

I came to this expecting a standard rock doc, but its cobwebbed tale of an aged parent and grown child's debilitating relationship seems closer to "Grey Gardens."

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.

Making his feature directing debut, Hoffman shows considerable generosity toward the other players, which was probably a good idea given his own listless performance as the mumbling title character.

Christopher Guest's hilariously canny 1989 satire about contemporary filmmaking in Hollywood

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

Rosen goes out of his way to avoid Disney's stylized movements and character touches, but ends by making his characters all look, sound, and act alike—conditions hardly hospitable to dramatic involvement. The animation may be naturalistic, but the fallacy is as pathetic as ever.

It's a bad sign when you can't name or differentiate any of the Lost Boys.

The moody images and Michael Nyman's score aren't enough to salvage this banal 1997 science fiction story.

It’s a gothic horror film that significantly benefits from its B-movie makings, going hard with the blood and gore, which only seems possible because of its lack of color. And while it’s by no means perfect, it does hint at Coppola’s capabilities, which would later captivate many.

The net effect of which is like a prolonged visit to an amusement park--kids will love it.

Writer-director Deepa Mehta fuses the soap-opera elements of her plot -- which reveals one sexual secret after another of the variously betrayed, selfish, and self-actualizing members of the two couples' New Delhi household--into profound drama.

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.

A wry, nonjudgmental look at the blind faith and materialistic ambitions permeating the superstitious Indian subculture, though the tone becomes more caustic as the hypocrisy and corruption of colonial politics strip Ganesh of his moral authority. The cast is uniformly excellent.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

Elegant flamenco tragedy.

Spirited, quintessential, and often hilarious.

Ultimately just another Dirty Harry opus.

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.

This 1985 western does a decent job of developing some dry 80s humor without completely undermining the genre, yet Kasdan's considerable skills as a plot carpenter seem to desert him as soon as the story moves to the town of the title--the action turns choppy, confused, and arbitrary.

Ultimately unsuccessful, the film is nevertheless a fascinating first draft for Vertigo.