Donzelli, a busy actress in France, directed this drama from a script she wrote with Elkaim, which may explain why the parents become the center of the movie while the ostensibly suffering boy never takes shape as a character.

All the macho men who let down their guard for Blaustein can be proud of the loving deconstruction of violence-as-entertainment that resulted.

The wavering style and tone fragment the movie, undermining both characters' development, though each retains her power as a symbol.

Has its faults, but it's Barbet Schroeder's most relevant and interesting film in over a decade.

Its resolution reeks of phoniness and self-congratulation, even if some of the narrative strands leading up to it are fairly absorbing.

The special effects are beautifully handled and the reflections on death attractively peaceful.

Realist fairy tale.

Riveting cinematic essay.

This film doesn't really clear the bar, but it's handsomely mounted and proves that heartless manipulation of the weak and gullible never goes out of style.

Johnny To is considered one of the best action filmmakers in Hong Kong, and in this smart, stylized gangland thriller (2005) he looks at the messy inner workings of a triad.

Eastwood is still a primal force on-screen, but his unusual practice of shooting scripts as written, which served him well on "Unforgiven" and "Million Dollar Baby," here leaves him exposed to Nick Schenk's familiar situations and awkward dialogue.

The Wilder ironies and favorite themes—sexual deception, innuendo, the power of words to slice up and serve a character—are all present in abundance.

At 116 minutes, it's a test not of speed but endurance.

Standard-issue liberal feel-good fodder.

Writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wring a surprising amount of juice from the familiar premise, and director Ruben Fleischer heaps on the gore without burying their character-based comedy and surprisingly heartfelt moments. This is worth seeing just for the title sequence.

As long as Miller simply crosscuts between the machinations of the three mothers, the sociological and psychological parallels are intriguing, but when they're forced to share the same story line, the contrivances and coincidences begin to seem fussily elaborate.

In short, I never quite believed the story, but this movie is more about feeling than thinking.

I suspect an account of all the complex business transactions would be more fun than anything in the movie, where you can't see a blue sky that isn't made up to resemble the Dreamworks logo.

Sleekly tooled but eminently forgettable thriller.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Todd Phillips is no artist, but his lowbrow comedies (Road Trip, Old School) always hit the mark because they're so psychologically true: the superego tries to control the id, but the id gets drunk and barfs all over it. Hilarious.

Walsh may not have been directly responsible for the structure (the second half is a remake of an earlier Warners melodrama, Bordertown), but his personal response to the material puts it across.

Claude Chabrol's capacity to make shopworn material seem almost new is especially evident in this 2007 drama, which he cowrote with his stepdaughter, Cecile Maistre.

Robert Aldrich dissects the underlying ideas with just enough craft and thoughtfulness to make the implications of this gritty 1966 war drama unsettling in not entirely constructive ways.

Not without its cruelties, but not without its beauties as well.

Hitchcock liked to pretend that the film was an empty technical exercise, but it introduces the principal themes and motifs of the major period that would begin with Rear Window.

It's not easy keeping track of all the contradictory tensions, and the film seems forever on the verge of spinning totally out of control, though whose control—Hunter's? Elmes's? anyone's?—it's hard to say. Still, it's more a success than a failure, if only because the confusions are so protean.

As usual with the series, the movie combines a plot line a toddler could understand with gadgets that would baffle an engineering Ph.D.