A bathetic TV-movie-type "learning experience" that provides about as much insight into teenagers as 40s westerns did into Indians--it's all in the costumes and customs.

Broadly speaking, the popular literary biopic is a hopeless subgenre, but this account of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes manages to test the rule thanks to its unusual seriousness and first-rate performances.

The lesson of this barely stylish crime thriller is that a dull story is not improved by withholding information about characters' motives from the audience as long as possible.

I suppose the constant repetition is necessary (Matlin's character only communicates through sign language), but it points up the film/play's willingness to sacrifice situational truth for didactic accessibility.

Still reeling from the success of Carrie, De Palma turns this 1978 film into an endless series of shock effects, some of which work but most of which don't.

James Cagney gives it all his drive and speediness, but this plodding, straight-line 1957 biography of Lon Chaney Sr. never comes close to capturing the actor's obsessiveness or offering any insights as to how he made his personal pain and humiliation accessible and meaningful to a mass audience.

Old-time music aficionado John Hartford is on hand to hold it all together, and in fact his presence is the most gripping element of this disappointingly flat production.

Two interesting asides: the director and most of the cast aren't gay, and the film is based on a true story from 1996 -- the real Iron Ladies are shown, too briefly, during the closing credits.

Ernest Schoedsack's sequel to his monster hit of 1933, rushed out the same year. The slapdash production shows in a wavering tone and a paucity of special effects. With Robert Armstrong and Helen Mack; the animation, what there is of it, is by the legendary Willis O'Brien.

The famously passive-aggressive musicians manage to keep any real drama offscreen; the overriding impression is of four people enduring each other long enough to get their retirement portfolios in order.

Another miscalculation by sophomore director Michael Mayer.

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.

I'm a sucker for fantasies, but this one is so undistinguished and arbitrary that it left few traces in my consciousness, apart from the impression that the filmmakers resort to cruelty whenever they run out of ideas, which is often.

Light-bodied comedy.

It's most entertaining for its stunt casting of movie stars as the president's family and advisers.

Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds offer a damning chronicle of failure and chaos.

The movie hits a surprising range of emotional grace notes, including several moments of genuine regret, and concludes with an understated moral lesson about the value of self-respect over social status, something that would never happen in an Allen film.

The theatrical monologues come close to defeating him (Wenders), and only Jessica Lange, as one of Shepard's abandoned girlfriends, manages to avoid cliche.

Well-intentioned but obvious drama.

As a movie, this sort-of sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show ain't much—but then neither was the original, and we all know how much difference that made.

It's tempting to accuse director and star Kevin Costner of taking the idea of vanity production to a new level in this frontier adventure based on a book by David Brin.

The characters quickly succumb to stereotype.

Brian Cox does sturdy work as the minister who helps Obree combat depression, and first-time director Douglas Mackinnon gets a big assist from Obree himself, who doubled for Miller in some shots and filmed others with a camera strapped to his handlebars.

Jeff Wadlow directed this exploitation flick, which seems designed for students on spring break.

Promises more than it delivers.

This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn't at all hard to take (John Candy, in a supporting role, is hilarious and original, and Hannah has a pleasant naive charm), but its appeal is based almost entirely on regression—a thematic regression to infancy (now endemic to the American cinema) and a stylistic regression to the most lulling kind of TV blandness. No wonder it's relaxing: it's a lullaby.

This pretentious 2005 art movie is somewhat interesting for its wide-screen photography of the striking locale, but the storytelling is awkward and confusing.

Despite some amateurish moments, Pulido displays genuine visual intelligence, using repeated static angles to emphasize the blandness of the family's anonymous tract house and moving with the characters as they try to individualize themselves.