John Cameron Mitchell directed, making an impressive detour in style and subject matter after his flamboyant "Shortbus" (2006) and "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" (2001).

Fortunately, this time around the Ivy League characters project less of a glib sense of entitlement, making them more fun to watch, and Stillman himself gives more evidence of watching rather than simply listening.

With one of these two alpha males anchoring nearly every scene, Scott really can't go wrong, but the lead characters are pretty thin, a fact highlighted by generic subplots.

Far and away the funniest comedy in town.

This began as a one-man show, but Lepage has transferred it beautifully to the screen, where its cosmos of ideas hangs weightless.

Bernardo Bertolucci's visually ravishing spectacle about the life of Pu Yi is a genuine rarity: a blockbuster that manages to be historically instructive and intensely personal at the same time.

A stiff in spite of an interesting cast.

Ayoade owes a debt to Wes Anderson (Rushmore), but the parents here are so beautifully written, and Hawkins and Taylor particularize them so well, that the movie manages to hold its own.

Orson Welles's 1946 film reproduces his personal themes of self-scrutiny and self-destruction only in outline, though it is an inventive, highly enjoyable thriller.

There’s no denying that Cyclo is a visionary piece of work, shot through with passion and poetry.

The movie loses credibility with the arrival of Rogen and Bill Hader as two uniformed patrolmen who are drunker and crazier than any high schooler could ever get, but the variety of complications thrown at the three pubescent heroes raises this a cut above most raunchy comedies.

Powell had made The Red Shoes five years earlier; here he was clearly hoping to expand the style of the final ballet segment into feature length. But without dramatic grounding Powell’s voluptuous visuals seem empty, and his manic inventiveness operates in a void.

After she's forced to confess, director Marc Rothemund doesn't have much to do but marvel at her heroic defiance, and the film is overtaken by its talkiness, claustrophobia, and polarized morality.

This adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel is commercial to the core.

If you don't care about the first version, or what director Jonathan Demme's name once meant, the cast does an OK job with Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris's routine thriller script.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's perennial stage comedy about yellow journalism in Chicago hasn't much to offer in the way of action, but in this 1931 adaptation director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front) manages to inject a fair amount of visual energy to complement the firecracker dialogue.

Stiller plays a monster, and when Gerwig goes for him, declaring that she sees his tender side, the development seems like a fond indulgence on the part of writer-director Noah Baumbach.

The cluttered narrative leaves little room for character development, though director Niels Arden Oplev does manage to accommodate plenty of gratuitous torture and rape.

Based on a minor novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), the film betters the book in every way, from the quality of characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery. Made in black-and-white CinemaScope, the film doesn’t survive on television; it should be seen in a theater or not at all.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

The Christian themes of forgiveness and sacrifice are tastefully conveyed, and the opening sequence of Nazi bombs falling on London, an event only alluded to in the book, helps dramatize Lewis's fascination with power.

It’s a funny, rousing, brilliant piece of work. 

Straw Dogs has the heat of personal commitment and the authority of deep (if bitter) contemplation. It is also moviemaking of a very high order.

Ultimately, this is the kind of film that gets more points for what it isn't—i.e., a typical teen comedy loaded with boob and fart jokes—than for what it is.

Spencer Tracy does his cuddly curmudgeon turn as Clarence Darrow; it's a lazy, vague performance, but its wit provides the only crack of light in the film's somber, gray overcast.

Kempner's lighthearted yet not apolitical collage conveys how Greenberg's success as an athlete in the 30s and 40s contradicted an ethnic stereotype.

I laughed a lot at the anti-Hollywood humor and generally had a fine time, in spite of the holier-than-thou hypocrisy that makes this movie easily and even intentionally Mamet's most Hollywoodish picture to date.

The project reeks of commercial calculation, which is just tolerable until Walker, in search of a story arc, follows two chorus members with serious illnesses into the hospital.