The cultural cock-strutting gets to be a bit much, but Neville handily captures the excitement of an art scene percolating, breaking wide open, and finally burning itself out.

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.

If only director Nicholas Meyer had grasped the implications of his tale more fully and enthusiastically, this might have become a classic piece of cornball SF poetry, but as it stands the tepid acting and one-set claustrophobia take a heavy toll.

Two prequels' worth of scene setting pays off in the politically resonant Revenge of the Sith.

Soggy stuff from French director Cedric Klapisch (When the Cat’s Away), set in the title city and collecting the routine travails of various urbanites.

This revisionist western by writer-director Andrew Dominik makes a wan attempt to present the Jesse James legend as the dawn of celebrity culture in America.

The main interest here is the juxtaposing of Gosling's Method acting with Hopkins's more classical style, a spectacle even more mesmerizing than the settings.

Director Yojiro Takita uses the changing seasons to echo the characters' moods; the score by Joe Hisaishi (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle) has a suitably majestic sweep.

A seamless mix of satire and suspense, with inspired performances by Toledo and Monica Cervera.

This sublime French farce reminded me most of Billy Wilder.

The incredible adventures pile up unrelentingly, with no inflection, no downtime, and each new space is a set decorator's hallucination, as brightly colored as a candy store on acid.

Satisfying in a purely infantile way, and the familiarity of everything is oddly comforting. In terms of action, moreover, this makes "The Matrix Reloaded" look like a clodhopper's jamboree.

Thomsen's transformation from easygoing entrepreneur to ruthless executive is so engrossing I didn't pick up on the story's chilling Freudian subtext until very near the end.

Eventually the shaky, grainy visuals grow tiresome, but director Nathaniel Hornblower (aka Beastie Boy Adam Yauch) keeps things lively with a variety of editing tricks and sly humor.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

It's his sense that he is superior to the series (which he certainly is) that introduces a fatal strain of campiness and condescension. And without absolute conviction, no action film can survive: if there's no belief, there's no danger.

There's more soul to be found in any Kong close-up than in this film's overplayed reactions, which are used to instruct us what we should be feeling at any given moment. This is never boring, but I can't recall another Spielberg film that left me with a more hollow feeling.

Once the competition arrives, the premise begins to suggest a marketing hook--it's "Spellbound" meets "The Devil Came on Horseback"!--but by then it's already served its purpose, imposing some structure around memories that would drive anyone mad.

This is the least well-known of the madcap satirical comedies of Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker (Airplane!, The Naked Gun), and by all counts the weirdest. But the richness of its ideas makes it my favorite. The plot combines the rock musical with the spy thriller (not to mention assorted other genres), and the comic invention is fairly constant.

A surprisingly credible coming-of-age story.

Too much of the story is unfelt and mechanical—the grimly humorless Tracy (Beatty) is never very convincing as an object of desire or admiration.

Lior is an irrepressible character as he works a room, doing exactly what a bar mitzvah boy should: challenging, instructing, and, in his own way, healing the world.

The film excels as a visual exercise, as a study in adolescent psychology, and even as astute political analysis (it's the dragon who holds the fiefdom together).

A half-baked conspiracy subplot in the last third makes Carruth's knotty narrative even harder to follow, but this is still scary, puzzling, and different.

Techine glosses over the story’s most potent issue: France’s complicated relationship with its Jewish community.

The comedy divides cleanly into dark, violent slapstick (much of it hilarious) and more routine gags highlighting the fanatical characters' foolishness and incompetence.

Melville's seedy characters and engrossing friendships are well preserved, thanks largely to strategic redeployment of his crisp dialogue. As revamped caper films go, this offers considerably more texture than Steven Soderbergh's "Ocean's 11."

The script by producer David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson is serviceable but not exactly inspired.