Huston does a reverse take on the material, underplaying the grotesque situation until it turns into a parody on the problems of the average working couple, but the pacing is so lugubrious that the laughs never materialize.

The music is great, and the film would be memorable for its goofy, syncopated opening sequence alone.

Fascinated by the technology of movies as much as by the technology of space—it presents film as a fabulous, exciting plaything, reviving Orson Welles's observation that a movie set is "the biggest electric train set a boy ever had."

The movie is dominated by Maddin's usual black-and-white photography, silent-movie syntax, and deadpan melodrama.

There’s no denying this is a coldly commanding tale in which Haneke’s signature obsessions--bourgeois control, sexual repression, emotional cruelty, cathartic violence--simmer quietly as subtext before bursting into the open in the final reels.

Typically overstuffed MGM prestige product (1940), but one that came out surprisingly well, with a minimum of Eng. Lit. posturing and some elegance of design.

Remains mired in a smart-alecky film-school sensibility.

Director James Cameron dumps the decorative effects of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien in favor of some daring narrative strategies and a tight thematic focus.

This quiet, elegiac road movie hinges on a few beautifully underplayed scenes between Daniel London and Will Oldham.

But the acting's so good it frequently transcends the simplicities of the script, and whenever Day-Lewis or Postlethwaite is on-screen the movie crackles.

Hammer overplays his indie hand with an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but his three leads are so credible that their aching, tongue-tied characters linger in the memory.

This gritty melodrama is tempered by surreal black humor.

This 1956 feature, a casual yet meticulously detailed reconstruction of Japan’s routinized white-collar milieu, was Yasujiro Ozu’s first film after the exquisite Tokyo Story, as well as one of his longest works.

Michael Ritchie keeps his dead-end cynicism in check and produces a genuinely funny comedy about a Little League team managed by a lovably drunken Walter Matthau. Sometimes Ritchie goes too far in avoiding the family-movie cliches the subject invites and indulges in some pointless vulgarity, but all in all, it's one of his best films.

I can't say I remembered this 1995 feature too clearly a couple of days later; but I certainly had a good time as I watched it.

Alexander Payne has won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay (Sideways), but you'd never guess that from this clumsily written drama: characters keep explaining things that their listeners would already know, and the first couple reels are so thick with expository voice-over that you may think you're listening to a museum tour on a set of headphones.

Schwarzenegger is presented as a lumbering slab of dumb, destructive strength--the image is more geological than human--and Cameron plays his crushing weightiness against the strangely light, almost graceful violence of the gunplay directed against him. The results have the air of a demented ballet.

The narrative, capped by a brief bad dream and the capture of a mouse, isn't always legible, but it feeds into a monumental, luminous visual style like no other.

The material has been bowdlerized to the point of abstraction, which makes Richard Brooks's sweaty, emphatic direction look a little silly—there just isn't that much to get worked up about. But Burl Ives and Judith Anderson are highly entertaining as the nightmare parents, Big Daddy and Big Mama, and Jack Carson has one of his last good roles as Newman's competitive older brother.

One of the most memorable of Walt Disney's live-action films, perhaps because it stays so close to the traumatic family themes of the cartoon features.

Tati hasn’t quite solved the structural problem he posed for himself, but if the film isn’t wholly satisfying, it’s still a very witty and suggestive work from the modern cinema’s only answer to Chaplin and Keaton.

Leigh pushes the story in a more interesting direction, asking whether people find happiness or simply will it on themselves.

It's a welcome throwback to the carefully crafted family films of the studio era. The scenery is lovely, and the cast is entirely worthy of the enterprise (including the regal and athletic star).

A movie whose story may be even more innovative than the superreal solidity of the animated characters.

A better-than-average Bette Davis vehicle (1940), well constructed by that shrewd old hack, William Wyler, from a Somerset Maugham play.

It's a hell of a show, though none of the artists gets more than a single number, and most of Chappelle's comic interludes are half-baked. Funnier and more engaging are his perambulations around the neighborhood.

Blake Edwards's 1982 sex comedy has the most beautiful range of tones of any American film of its period: it is a work of dry wit, high slapstick, black despair, romantic warmth, and penetrating intelligence.

Compelling collection of three loosely connected vignettes.