The strain to pull all this together becomes more evident as the movie progresses, and the three-way musical finale, a rickety acoustic run-through of “The Weight,” hardly lives up to the stars’ reputations.

There's nothing but sheer manipulativeness holding this picture together.

This is every bit as silly and adolescent as you'd expect from Besson, and about as contemporary as "The Perils of Pauline." But I was delighted by the balletic and acrobatic stunts, some of which evoke Tarzan.

[It] may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admire the style, sincerity, and overall sense of craft even if you don't fancy the comic-book gore.

Whatever you think of her, Madonna’s a veteran video star with a well-developed ability to use a camera as a blunt instrument. A good or honest director would see that, and take steps to compensate for it, but Keshishian is a collaborator, not a journalist. With a child’s self-absorption, Madonna thinks everything she says or does is endlessly fascinating.

Contrary to some reports, this is not Jet Li's last action movie--he already has another in postproduction--but it represents his farewell to wushu, the martial-arts tradition that made him an international star.

They deliver a clear and compelling primer on the federal budget deficit, the trade deficit, and the personal debt crisis, all of which are driving our country toward a catastrophic financial meltdown.

It still has several moments—most notably a completely offhanded kidnapping—when Cassavetes's inimitable off rhythms do strange and wonderful things to the conventionally written comedy. Big Trouble is just a footnote in the career of one of America's most innovative, unclassifiable filmmakers, but it's something to see.

Helms's screen persona-the stiff-necked nerd who triumphs through sheer doggedness-is heavily reminiscent of Harold Lloyd's, though Lloyd was handsome and endearing enough to succeed as a romantic lead.

Fun, lively, and a tad superficial.

French director Andre Techine (Alice and Martin) powerfully re-creates the mass exodus from the city and draws a fine performance from Beart as a woman struggling to shield her children from her own fear and confusion. Unfortunately the last act goes off the rails.

Unlike high school movies made for the teen market, Chalk gets many of its laughs from the backstage wrangling among the teachers as they unload their stress on one another.

Both hilarious and poignant, with a Capraesque humanity that caught me completely off guard.

Waititi's comic vocabulary hasn't changed much-there's a lot of voice-over narration illustrated with ludicrous, cartoonish tableaux - yet the kids' genuine longing for their no-good dad elevates this above simple deadpan humor.

Its giddy stylistics include extravagant use of color and rapid montage, which are said to be a direct homage to legendary Thai independent Ratana Pestonji.

Vince Vaughn in a wonderfully low-key performance.

Kramer was never much of a director, but there's still power in some of the performances, especially Poitier's.

Tarantino has already caught some flack for daring to use the Holocaust as material for another of his bloody live-action cartoons, but of course the generation that experienced it for real has mostly faded away. In that sense Inglourious Basterds is a social marker as startling as "Easy Rider" was in its day.

You don't have to get too far into Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant 2005 novel Never Let Me Go to realize it's hopelessly unfilmable.

The main problem is that Burton operates best on a modest scale; saddled with a blockbuster, he doesn't know how to animate all the dead space.

Unlike many colleagues, I'm not a fan of "Amores Perros" or "21 Grams," scripted by Guillermo Arriaga and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu. This conclusion to their trilogy is easier to follow as a narrative, but it's even more pretentious, generalizing about the state of the modern world.

Herzog deserves the lion's share of the credit for the movie's quality, but Port of Call New Orleans is also a comeback for Cage.

Screenwriter Mark Bomback doesn't do much with the backstory scenes linking Pine and Washington to their worried families, but the main story is gripping, flawlessly paced, and nicely grounded in operational detail.

This send-up of 70s blaxploitation flicks mixes parody and social commentary to make larger points about the current state of American culture and race relations. The audience I saw the film with was almost choking with laughter.

As in the original version, the fights are outweighed by existential angst and Buddhist introspection, but the sequence in which a blind swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai) takes on an army of thieves is still gangbusters.

French director Gaspar Noe has kept a pretty low profile since his 2002 drama "Irreversible" notorious for its brutal nine-minute anal rape scene. But this epic, psychedelic mindfuck confirms him once again as the cinema's most imaginative nihilist.

Fully exploits the drama, with scenes, dialogue, and even key visuals pulled from the text.

The physical stunts by Maggie Q as a lethal martial arts expert and Cyril Raffaelli as a Eurotrash sniper who rappels buildings are more thrilling than the over-the-top chase sequences, so contrived as to verge on self-parody.