Clayton lacks the Jamesian temper, and his film is finally more indecisive than ambiguous. Too much Freud and too little thought.

Billy Wilder's 1954 version of the Samuel Taylor staple was a perfect vehicle for Audrey Hepburn, though the cut is too tight for her costars, Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. [Review of re-release]

The characters are instantly reversible--the bratty kid turns out to be a sweetie pie, the mother just needs to be told off. Only Giamatti, as the cliched businessman husband, is irredeemable.

In minimizing the novel's morbidity, Tran also denies its obsessive pull.

This is loads of fun in the early stretch, as the characters are being introduced, but the story never really goes anywhere.

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

Forgettable nostalgia trip from 1974, shot in 16-millimeter by the enterprising Stephen Verona and Martin Davidson. Somehow, this little exploitationer ended up launching the careers of Sylvester Stallone, Henry Winkler, Perry King, and Susan Blakely.

Perkins tries to imitate Hitchcock's visual style, but most of the film is made without concern for style of any kind, unless it's the bludgeoning nonstyle of Friday the 13th.

In place of the sharply etched observational humor of the original, which featured a host of no-name actors in memorably quirky performances, we now get mostly raunch and some flaccid cameos from Smith cronies Ben Affleck and Jason Lee.

Though director Ulu Grosbard is as good as he usually is with most of the actors, the story problems tend to stump him too.

Dumont is much more confident when he sticks to the title town and the young woman the men left behind; his habit of alternating close shots with extreme long shots and his singularly unsentimental way of showing sex are as distinctive as ever.

Patricia Clarkson is wonderfully acerbic as April's cancer-afflicted mom, and the finale is surprisingly subtle and sweet, but the rest of this DV feature is as contrived as a sitcom.

With its stagy dance numbers, this reminded me more of Bob Fosse's confessional musical "All That Jazz" than "8 1/2," though it suffers from comparison to either, given that Marshall is several steps removed from Fellini's feverish self-investigation.

A slick reprise of all the elements that clicked in the original with none of the seedy originality that made it work.

An unholy mess that becomes steadily more incoherent -- morally, dramatically, and conceptually.

The sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this film--where cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier parts--ultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical.

The Griswolds, headed by Chevy Chase, are taking what could be one of their last family vacations.

This picture is packed with fun, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and elements that summon up memories of The Hustler don't work in its favor.

The script is a veritable cosmos of Spielberg in-jokes, but the writer-stars also make room for some vicious and decidedly English digs at red-state shit-kickers and Christian fundamentalists.

An alternately comic and macabre portrait of a deranged friendship.

Like its main character, the movie hits the road with no final destination in mind, and the manic inventiveness that sustains the early passages becomes strained and weird by the end.

Slightly bloated Bond, with too much technology and a climactic slaughter that's a little too mindless to be much fun. Still, Adolfo Celi—with his “heat and cold, applied scientifically”—makes a most memorable villain.

Not unlike "Eyes Wide Shut," this is an eerily earnest contemplation of fidelity, and it's pitched as farce.

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

While the filmmakers manage to keep things interesting (sexy, kinky, and ambiguous) much of the time, the self-conscious piety that Frears lavishes on this material places it in an uncertain netherworld that prevents it from ever becoming fully convincing, even as a stylistic exercise.

Commendable as pop history but fairly opaque as drama.

Though Coppola sticks to the principal narrative line and resists tangential, anecdotal episodes, he might as well have gone off in those directions for all the coherence he ultimately achieves.

Mitchell Leisen, the director, hadn't yet developed the light touch with actors he would display memorably later in the decade, though some of his trademark pictorial effects are in evidence.