A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

But like much of Herzog's work, it's essentially apolitical, focusing on a man at war with his environment -- and no one plunges into the foliage like he does.

This taut thriller adds so many twists of its own it might be more appropriately cross-referenced with The Manchurian Candidate, even though it isn't nearly as daffy or as mercurial.

This curious ecological parable was directed by George Miller (Babe: Pig in the City), who still has an eye and a sense of humor but on this particular outing can't get the script he wrote with three others to make much sense.

Fascinating documentary.

An ungainly collection of one-liners and misdirected sight gags that hardly qualifies as a movie. But as a stand-up routine it's a scream.

The most interesting moments, however, belong not to the chef but to those who labor in his shadow. "Jiro's ghost will always be watching," observes one interview subject as he imagines Jiro's eventual passing and its probable effect on his 50-ish son, who follows in his father's footsteps but will never be considered his equal.

The film is at once funny and, in its depiction of the scant differences between art and megalomania, somewhat frightening.

Ryan O'Neal is a con man and Tatum O'Neal is the foundling who may or may not be his daughter. Though their relationship is conventionally drawn, it has a heart that Bogdanovich hasn't been able to recapture.

Depp conveys his character's ambivalence and ambiguity with utter conviction, and though the annoying score tries to throw Pacino's monologues over the top, his persuasive, low-key performance puts the violins in their place.

Anne Dorval gives an extraordinary performance as the mother, who lashes out at the boy but can't disguise her own suffering when he lands an emotional punch; their scenes together reminded me of Paul Schrader's Affliction for their sense of familial love gone hopelessly sour.

This is a good, solid, intelligent drama about the ambiguities of what does and doesn't constitute courage under fire

The notion that only whites can be racist barely survives this riveting 2009 documentary.

As in The Human Factor, Preminger approaches the mystery of human irrationality and emotion through logic and detachment; the effect is stingingly poignant.

A very curious and eclectic piece of work--fresh even when it's awkward.

One girl's melancholy (beautifully expressed by actress Kerry Washington) is a response to a fractured romance.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

It still holds up as splashy fun of a sort, if you can handle its sexual politics and its depictions of Native Americans.

This isn't always adept as storytelling, and Block's coming to terms with his own denseness occasionally tries one's patience, but he manages to make the overall process of his reeducation fascinating and compelling.

Director Bob Clark teamed with nostalgic humorist Jean Shepherd for this squeaky clean and often quite funny 1983 yuletide comedy, adapted from Shepherd's novel In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

This absorbing PBS-style documentary by Joseph Dorman follows Aleichem from his early years in the Russian shtetl of Voronko through the pogroms that would drive the Jewish diaspora of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

This is both beautiful and horrifying, with a fine sense of ambiguity and a wealth of subtleties.

The film (and Garson’s stiff-backed, Academy Award-winning performance in particular) has dated very badly; it’s difficult now to see the qualities that wartime audiences found so assuring.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

John Badham, a last-minute replacement on the project, impresses with his Spielberg-inflected direction of the young actors and his efficient management of competing plot levels. But much of the credit should go to Lawrence Lasker, Walter F. Parkes, and Walon Green, whose screenplay deftly links the boy's sexual and moral maturation with a similar development on the part of the computer, thus accomplishing the thematic goal of “humanizing” technology that all the video-game movies—and video games themselves—have been striving for.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

Not only Waters's best movie, but a crossover gesture that expands his appeal without compromising his vision one iota; Ricki Lake as the hefty young heroine is especially delightful.

Grimly mesmerizing saga.