Hurt's character is so inert and unemotional that some spectators may find it difficult to stay interested in him.

After a while I wasn't sure whether I was learning about cocaine or ingesting it.

A busy, Crash-like complex of LA stories, each hammering home the injustice of our immigration law.

The emptied-out characters strive for a transcendence they'll never quite reach, and so does the film.

The result is notably dim and flat on a big screen, and the giant-monster scenes, often cloaked in darkness, are few and disappointing. Edwards tries to take the high road with a politically intriguing premise (a la District 9) and a tight focus on the evolving relationship between his two traveling companions, but his shapeless script doesn't do much with either element.

Slight but savory.

The screenplay (by Lewis John Carlino, of The Great Santini) collapses into musty moralizing in the second half, and director John Frankenheimer throws in the towel.

It's uneven, but still pretty charming, and director Jorge Furtado's whimsical visual touches keep things lively.

Originality and even a certain amount of obscurity are more appealing than formula. This doesn't work, but I was never bored.

Reminded me most of Jean Genet's "Un chant d'amour," with bondage and latex replacing incarceration and cigarettes. This is not to say that it's equally good or poetic, but the eroticizing of a whole universe is no less apparent.

A collection of shots and characters designed to circle the globe rather than to say anything much about either the filmmakers or the audience, a triumph of multinational capital at work rather than of people or ideas.

The video has a funky, loose-limbed feel, but Van Peebles has been celebrated so much already you have to wonder how many victory laps a man needs.

This doesn't exactly set the world on fire, but I was charmed by its old-fashioned storytelling, which is refreshingly free of archness, self-consciousness, or "Kill Bill"-style wisecracks.

Some may condemn this gruesome, heartless exercise, but I prefer to savor the irony: three years after the Francophobia that accompanied Operation Iraqi Freedom, every bonehead in America will be lining up to see a Frenchman's movie about subhuman hillbillies.

Too full of its own heavy breathing to work as the primordial storytelling it's aiming for--a so-so adventure story is closer to the mark.

It's hard to think of a deadlier shotgun marriage than Jacques Tourneur's poetry of absence and Spielbergian uplift, but Shyamalan has patented the combo, adding pretentious camera movements that are peculiarly his own--even the jokes are pretty solemn.

For this remake writer-director Neil LaBute has moved the action from Scotland to Washington State, added enough scares for Warner Brothers to market the movie as horror, and turned the story into an almost comically Wagnerian expression of the castration anxiety that snakes through his original screenplays.

Earns points for its set and sound design, eerily desaturated color palette, able cast, and one really good special effect. Sadly, the movie just doesn't deliver chills.

An episodic thriller that certainly has its moments, but eventually peters out into dull formula standbys; Eastwood's Harry seems weary of his own sarcastic witticisms, and the ones here won't make anybody's day.

Enjoyable and even exciting at the start, Dog Day Afternoon degenerates into frustration and tedium toward nightfall—an experience no less painful for the audience than for the actors.

This unambitious caper flick takes a while to get moving but gradually develops a modest meat-and-potatoes appeal, compromised in the third act by a whopping and perfectly avoidable plot hole.

Writer-director Derrick Borte brings a heavy hand to the comedy and an even heavier one to the drama.

Nobody seems to know quite what he's doing in this opulent but fairly empty period fashion show, apart from campy overactors like Christopher Walken and Jonathan Pryce who appear eager to fill the voids left by their colleagues.

Burt Reynolds showed signs of becoming a very personal filmmaker with this police thriller, his third outing as a director. It has the wistful faith in innocence and the extreme moral outrage of Gator coupled with the subversive infantilism of The End; what Reynolds lacks in technique (which is plenty) is nearly compensated for by the almost embarrassing intensity of his feelings. The context is extremely violent, which makes the intimate moments—between Reynolds and the girl and Reynolds and his buddies—stand out in agonizingly stark relief.

It opens promisingly, with a fine sense of the disorientation of a monolingual tourist abroad and in trouble. But instead of things building from there, the energy gradually dissipates, and by the time the mystery is solved, it's difficult to care very much.

A decent piece of do-good cinema...Director Norman Jewison stages their confrontations for effectively flashy, immediate effects, though he unnecessarily neglects the action-movie underpinning.

When a respected actor moves into the director's chair, he can usually draw a pretty good cast, which is certainly the case here... But Sherwood Kiraly's slight script only makes this embarrassment of riches seem more embarrassing.

Reducing one of the most compelling cultural icons of the century to a comic book character, this $22 million project makes a passable kiddie show, and not much else.