The contrast between Tucker's motormouth and Chan's man of few words should be funnier, but the plot -- which is cliched without quite becoming self-reflexive -- and the uneven pace dampen most of their moments.

Thanks to a fairly good script, this thriller about a Soviet cop sent to Chicago to apprehend a Soviet drug dealer is a respectable enough star vehicle.

I can't remember another film that took so little care with the details of ambience: the cruddy sets and flat, underworked sound track drain any sense of life from the project, to the point where it looks like the cheapest kind of TV—canned theater.

How Posey's neurotic, self-destructive heroine finds her way to healing is the core of this generous film, whose moral is that happiness can't begin unless you're open to its possibility.

The behind-the-scenes revelations are thoroughly convincing.

Director Peter Kosminsky elicits such genuine performances from his talented cast that the film rarely strikes a false note.

The portraiture is so carefully done that I regret in some ways the tricky plot--which is also carefully done, but seems at times to belong to a different movie.

Kar Kar's singing is wonderfully expressive, and an improvised song to his wife at her grave site demonstrates the emotional wellspring of his music.

Sweet tempered but occasionally simplistic youth picture about three young, progressive Israelis who share a flat in a chic section of Tel Aviv.

The action is exciting, but the rapid-fire narration jumps around too quickly, making it difficult to keep straight the personalities meant to hold the film together.

Like so many post-Val Lewton horror films, this 1992 feature starts out promisingly while the plot is mainly a matter of suggestion, but gradually turns gross and obvious as the meanings become literal and unambiguous.

Writer-director James Mottern has a reasonably good feel for the textures of blue-collar life, but he pounds home the life lessons, underscoring them with poignant country-western songs.

The review format, intercut with demythicizing glimpses behind the scenes, aspires to a cynical Brechtian snappiness, but the drama is too thinly imagined, the meanings too familiar and heavily stated, for this 1976 film to gather any real interest.

Once again, Schrader tries to elevate a set of pimply sexual hang-ups to the level of Wagnerian opera; if this 1985 film were any heavier, it would probably crash right through the screen.

As in the Rocky films, Avildsen's only directorial strategy is to delay the final confrontation for so long that all the audience's pent-up frustration explodes with it. It's primitive, predatory stuff.

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.

There is no place for depth or nuance in this slickly engineered complacency machine, which roars along at a single tone and pace, neatly dispelling every troubling intimation with a Mary Tyler Moore one-liner and solving all its conflicts with tricks of rhetoric.

In spirit, if not in letter, it often resembles a gritty Warners crime movie of the 30s, and it held my interest in spite of its excesses.

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.

The film has less to do with politics, women's or otherwise, than with a very conventional notion of the redemptive power of mother love. Which would be all right if director Hal Ashby had managed to mount it effectively—he hasn't though, and the results are dramatically incoherent.

Never all it was cracked up to be.

Boring, irksome family movie.

The luminous images--as much the filmmakers' as the painter's--are occasionally transcendent.

Makes for a tiresome antidrama populated mainly by unambiguously good characters who might as well be invulnerable.

This dialectical drama has plenty of creaky moments, but Harvey Keitel compensates with a canny, surprising performance.

This is the Classics Illustrated version of Kahlo's story--fun mostly for the sets and the clothes.

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.

The formula works just fine on a more modest scale, without having to carry all the glittering casino sets and A-list movie stars.