Unfortunately, Frank Perry's unbelievably ham-handed direction obscures most of what is craftsmanly and pleasant in Isaacs's work, pushing the material toward a smug, sloppy, heavily early-70s satire on the horrors of suburban life. A very mixed bag, but those who've missed a storytelling sense in American movies might want to have a look.

The transition from stage to screen may be bumpy in spots, but this movie is much funnier than Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?, and the long-take shooting style is executed with fluidity and precision.

Machiavelli epigrams and 70s soul classics embellish this slice of thug life, which succumbs to the usual hypocrisy of condemning Barnes while grooving on his cars, clothes, and jewels.

Conceptual to a fault, writer-director Todd Haynes (Poison, Safe) realizes one of his oldest and most cherished projects -- a celebration of the glam-rock era and the bisexuality it turned into an opulent circus -- with wit, glitter, and energy, but with such a scant sense of character or period that it leaves one feeling relatively empty as soon as it's over.

The argument is so tilted against windmills (sorry) that this comes perilously close to an advocacy video. But Israel deserves credit for delivering the bad news that wind power, like natural gas and nuclear, comes with its own array of social and environmental headaches.

Directed by Djo Tunda Wa Munga, who studied filmmaking in Belgium, this is raw, sardonic, and formally complex.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

Confounds expectations -- about slasher stories and about film narrative in general, in part by being closer to a collection of interconnected short stories than to a novel.

A film that might make you cry watching it is just as likely to give you the creeps thinking about it afterward, which is as it should be.

The film is full of finely observed details.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

The behind-the-scenes tragedy gives Gilliam an easy excuse for the dull chaos that engulfs the story, but he might have generated it all on his own.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

The idiosyncratic instrumentation and melodies in the score by Angelo Badalamenti ("Blue Velvet") and a masterful opening scene are wasted on this pathetic thriller.

Classy and lifeless - a prettily photographed, heavily directed antiwar film.

Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) steals his every scene as the aphorism-spouting Fowley while Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning often fade into the 70s wallpaper as guitarist Joan Jett and front woman Cherie Currie.

With Hurd Hatfield memorably playing the title part, the 1945 film also includes juicy performances by George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, and Donna Reed. Deeper and creepier (that is to say, better) than anything turned out by Merchant-Ivory, this is both very Hollywood and very serious in a manner calculated to confound the “Hey, it’s only a movie!” crowd.

Dramatization is often a questionable tactic in documentaries, but by picturing Leopold (Elie Larson) on trial like Adolf Eichmann, Peter Bate adroitly compares the colonial genocide to the Holocaust.

There's nothing here about Monroe that we haven't been told a thousand times already: she was sexy, she was troubled; she was warm, she was selfish; she took pills, she lit up the screen.

The character and plot contrivances are dumber than ever, but this is basically vaudeville, not narrative, and the thrills keep coming.

Broomfield, whose celebrity exposés are known for their intrusiveness and innuendo, lost me with his gentle shower scene between an Iraqi woman and her husband; even if it wasn't invented, is it really any of our business?

There's one nifty and original sequence--an assassination attempt during a state funeral where the pipe organs in the church all go haywire--but otherwise, this is crushingly generic.

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

Waters builds to a didactic message that he underlines with Disney-esque dream dust (in various colors), as if to protect his sincerity with the disclaimer of self-mockery.

Here's something you don't see every day: a genial, politically correct splatter comedy.

As the phlegmatic, beer-guzzling protagonist, Will Ferrell manages to keep this rolling, though Rush's corny narrative devices (each of the minor characters receives an ironic gift at the end) couldn't be less consistent with Carver's stubborn minimalism.

Flawed but ambitious, this biopic of British parliamentarian William Wilberforce closely tracks the political maneuvering of the late 18th and early 19th century as reformers campaign to end Britain's participation in the slave trade.

A sense of authenticity overshadows any contrivance in this subtly classic drama.