This deconstructive, minimalist comedy, like his 1990 "A Little Stiff" and 1994 "I Don't Hate Las Vegas Anymore," re-creates events with the vain self-deprecation of one of his role models, Woody Allen.

A funny but genuinely dark 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.

There is some exquisite Technicolor photography by Leon Shamroy, but director Henry King never moves the action beyond respectful superficiality.

Benjamin's direction consists largely of giving Richard Benjamin inflections to most of the line readings; for the rest, he blandly shoots the screenplay, leaving large gaps in the narration unfilled and significant contradictions in the characters unexplained.

It has a kind of deranged sincerity and integrity on its own terms.

Hysterically funny CGI fight sequences, which pit the chubby superhero against a series of creatures so bizarre they'd keep Hieronymus Bosch awake at night.

Five people worked on the script; if there was ever any inspiration behind it, there isn't now.

But if you can get swept up in the story, the movie is imaginative and compelling.

This strange and beautiful Macedonian feature is a welcome reminder that national cinemas still exist.

Pretty familiar stuff, but the performances--by Adrien Brody, Elise Neal, Simon Baker-Denny, and Lauryn Hill--are relatively fresh and sincere.

The attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence.

This is fairly efficient if you can square efficiency with being twice as long as necessary and overly familiar to boot; at least Jackson and Spacey keep it afloat.

Contact is so burdened with social, political, and religious issues that they infect and ultimately overwhelm much of the philosophical content.

An agreeably shallow comedy.

If you're sick of kinky killers and English rip-offs of American genre movies, this terminally bleak and violent 1995 road movie may irritate the hell out of you--unless you're as impressed as I was by Amanda Plummer's performance.

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.

A film about marriage that works reasonably well as a star vehicle for Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand, but fails resoundingly as the caustic social comment director Sydney Pollack and writer Arthur Laurents obviously intended.

Isn't absurd enough to be funny.

Though its intentions are noble, it's hampered by a stock romantic subplot (Phillipe falls for his friend's squeeze, Abbie Cornish), a familiar structure (since The Best Years of Our Lives soldiers invariably come home in threes), and a lack of symmetry (some of Gordon-Levitt's story seems to have wound up on the cutting-room floor).

The film is shot with handheld cameras in the standard mockumentary style, but the content is often hilarious, especially when the trolls show up. There's also a marvelous deadpan comic performance by Otto Jespersen as a troll-hunter and tireless dispenser of troll lore.

Gutsy romance-drama that breaks a cardinal rule of storytelling and pop psychology: its iconic lovers aren't forced by a tragedy to learn that they shouldn't depend on each other to feel whole.

They're all instructive and interesting in one way or another, and they're indispensable viewing for residents of isolationist, or at least isolated, countries such as this one.

This bracing courtroom thriller is the most entertaining and satisfying John Grisham adaptation I've seen.

Perhaps it's fitting that a movie about the early CIA be tangled and opaque, but this drama loosely based on the life of uberspook James Angleton verges on incoherence.

It's not done in a way that suggests a fully formed talent—"promising juvenilia" is about the most one can say for it.

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.

Even in its truncated state, this is pretty gripping stuff; just think of it as an epic commercial for the director's cut DVD.