The contrast between Cadigan in recovery and at his most disturbed provides an excellent antidote to romanticized and sensationalized portrayals of mental illness in Hollywood films and on TV talk shows.

Takes too long to get its themes and characters out on the field.

Juggling onstage and offstage action, Cassavetes makes this a fascinating look at some of the internal mechanisms and conflicts that create theatrical fiction, and his wonderful cast never lets him down.

This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best.

David Levien codirected; the fine supporting cast includes Richard Schiff, Jesse Eisenberg, and Danny DeVito.

This is a fairly accomplished first feature -perky, visually inventive, and unusually nast

Fascinating: supposedly the crooks kept all the cash and jewelry, but their sponsors in the MI5 were really after sexually explicit blackmail photos of Princess Margaret and other aristocrats that were being held by the revolutionary Michael X.

Many of the elements in this story about a woman who's nearly eclipsed by her overbearing mother are all too familiar, yet the combination is utterly charming.

Depardieu, a great actor who in recent years has delivered several overblown performances, is here measured and naturalistic, a sympathetic match for Ardant's icy obsessive, and Beart is suitably mysterious as a spy in the house of love.

The early scenes of Greene misbehaving on the air are pretty funny, thanks mainly to Martin Sheen as the apoplectic station manager. But I was bummed out by the movie's trite VH1 cartoon of the black power era--especially coming from Kasi Lemmons, who made her directing debut with the hauntingly ambiguous "Eve's Bayou."

So little care has gone into the characterizations, the structure, and the situations that the film merely feints at significant comedy.

For all his good intentions, screenwriter Paul Laverty (best known for his work with Ken Loach) is didactic and crudely manipulative.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

Its numerous ancillary characters are so closely observed that even those without speaking parts register as people, in a manner than blurs the line between strangeness and intimacy.

The 3-D effect is fun: during a thrilling launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, hurtling debris cracks the camera lens, and I found myself checking my goggles for damage.

Partly funded by the Humane Society, this gripping documentary by Michael Webber rips the lid off a scandal that periodically turns up on local newscasts but then disappears from public consciousness.

Roger Corman's 1970 retelling of the story of Ma Barker and her three loony sons in Depression-era America is completely out of control, but the smash-and-grab stylistics are exhilarating.

One of the earliest of the Disney true-life adventures (1953), this won an Academy Award for best documentary, in spite (or because) of its celebrated use of square-dance music with footage of scorpions.

Stanley Donen's follow-up to Charade is not quite the tour de force the earlier film was, but even with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren standing in for Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, it's a slick and satisfying entertainment.

The snickering humor that percolated through the Coens' debut, Blood Simple, is the whole show here, and it's damn near hysterical.

It's all very clever but not really provocative - though a layer of political subtext may make the scenario seem funnier and more meaningful.

The film persuades us to think long and hard about what prison means, and Lee has shaped it like a poem that builds into an epic lament, especially in a beautiful and tragic closing that risks absurdity to achieve the sublime.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs) seem to be after the gentle irreverence of David Gordon Green's buddy flick "Pineapple Express," but without his sensitivity and attention to character the movie quickly grows monotonous.

It's a classic fight movie, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as an honorable martial arts instructor...But nesting inside is a sour little 70s-style David Mamet play about the lies, calculations, and ice-cold politics of Hollywood, as the fighter is befriended and then discarded by a callow movie star.

An eminently watchable antique, this was the Marx Brothers' first film — a literal recording of their Broadway smash hit.

Walsh’s directness gives the film an understated quality that may seem anachronistic today but has real cinematic integrity.

Doug Liman's Fair Game is a model exercise in dramatizing recent political scandal, and easily the best fact-based Hollywood political thriller since "All the President's Men."

It has been called both detached and loaded, unfairly slanted as well as balanced by some of its critics--I can only testify that I found the film both troubling and absorbing over two separate viewings.