This held me, but I was grateful when it released me.

Despite some fine black comedy, this hovers uncertainly between the novel's tragic precision and "Barfly's" existential burlesque.

Never lives up to the hilarity of the opening, partly because the large-scale production smothers the gags but mostly because those gags are so easy to smother.

The best Australian feature I've seen in years.

This isn't the supreme masterpiece it might have been, but Nichols's direction is very polished and some of the lines and details are awfully funny.

The movie eventually begins to wilt under the sober, plodding direction of Steve Jacobs, but the thoughtful screenplay gives Malkovich a complex, increasingly reflective character arc that he plays with great feeling, making the professor’s redemption seem honestly won.

This is good, solid work that never achieves either the art or poignance of Van Sant's earlier and more personal projects.

The injustice of the girl's thwarted career goes only so far, though Feret pushes it in some interesting directions.

The movie manages to push buttons without seeming formulaic.

This is stronger in terms of characters (male ones, that is) than in terms of story or mise en scene, but the actorskeep this pretty watchable.

Probably the most visually sophisticated of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent pictures and certainly one of the best, this 1927 release sets up an edgy romantic triangle in a traveling carnival that involves two boxers (Carl Brisson and Ian Hunter) and a snake charmer (Lillian Hall-Davies).

If you're willing to suspend disbelief, this is a pretty good ride.

Baseball fans might find this marginally absorbing; for anyone else it's as conscientious and stylistically pedestrian as director John Sayles's other films, and a mite overlong to boot.

The punky energy of the earlier films has given way to a self-conscious striving for significance, obscuring Miller's considerable kinetic talents in favor of a lumpy didacticism.

The overall mood is stately and melancholy, the selective use of color is ravishing, and some of the natural views are breathtaking.

The rough-and-tumble tone is bitterly entertaining but in the end doesn't contribute to a convincing historical portrait, and a pileup of half-baked resolutions spoils the buzz.

Critics seemed to like this less than audiences; personally I had a ball.

The tale of Rapunzel gets a cheeky make-over in this gorgeous Disney animation, which combines the studio's traditional hand-drawn look with the sculptural qualities of digital 3D.

Fair amount of grit and charm.

By the film's underwater finale, director Matteo Garrone has bestowed a tragic stature on the pint-size Othello who loves "not wisely but too well."

Evoking Curtis's mystique and eccentric personality, filmmaker Craig Highberger also delivers an invaluable chronicle of New York's barrier-smashing underground arts scene circa 1968-'74.

Leo McCarey’s 1957 remake of his 1939 masterpiece Love Affair, coscripted with Delmer Daves and shot in color and ‘Scope, is his last great film—a tearjerker with comic interludes and cosmic undertones that fully earns both its tears and its laughs, despite some kitschy notions about art and a couple of truly dreadful sequences.

This French kidnapping drama drags on for so long I'd have paid the ransom out of my own pocket just to wrap things up.

Though Hanks keeps the satirical and critical aspects of this look at show biz fairly light, there's a lot of conviction and savvy behind the steadiness of his gaze, and his economy in evoking the flavor of the period at the beginning of the picture is priceless.

The episodic structure prevents any real momentum, but Byatt and Fothergill give a visceral sense of the sea's violence and vividly capture the riot of color to be found on the ocean floor.

The movie's realism is unimpeachable, though American cops might be stunned by the idea of a half-dozen detectives being assigned to the murder of an anonymous floater.

Whether the character is supposed to be a stand-in for Cody, who grew up in the western 'burbs of Chicago and has since won an Oscar, is more than I can say, but the movie suffers from the sort of self-pitying fog that can envelop a writer when he dives into his own malaise.

Among the pleasures to be found here are some amusing sidelong glances at how movies get made and the singing talent of Streep as well as MacLaine. There's not much depth here, but Nichols does a fine job with the surface effects, and the wisecracks keep coming.