The narrative emphasizes coincidences, but they're nicely understated. If it didn't seem gimmicky and self-indulgent...the movie might be more affecting.

Before the movie collapses into the utopian nonsense that seems obligatory to this subgenre, a surprising amount of sensitivity and satirical insight emerges from Eleanor Bergstein's script and Emile Ardolino's direction.

Walter Hill's existential action piece, rendered in a complete stylistic abstraction that will mean tough going for literal-minded audiences. Not quite the clean, elegant creation that his earlier films were, The Warriors admits to failures of conception (occasional) and dialogue (frequent), but there is much of value in Hill's visual elaboration of the material.

Director Nigel Cole is best known for "Calendar Girls" (2003), another condescending exercise in you-go-girl uplift.

The lesson of this barely stylish crime thriller is that a dull story is not improved by withholding information about characters' motives from the audience as long as possible.

Atypically lame, this is more for spiritual tourists than admirers of "Aguirre: The Wrath of God."

Like Bryan Singer's X2 (2003), this fifth entry in the X-Men franchise is noteworthy for its gay-rights subtext and for its noted actors delivering comic book dialogue with Shakespearean portent. Otherwise it's indistinguishable from most other recent blockbusters.

The results may seem overripe and dated in spots, but she coaxes a fine performance out of Nolte, and the other actors (herself included) acquit themselves honorably.

One reason why it disappoints is that it comes across as more the work of screenwriter Laura Jones ("An Angel at My Table," "The Portrait of a Lady," "A Thousand Acres"), who's lately been specializing in high-minded literary adaptations, than of Armstrong, who tends to do better and more nuanced work with more intimate and domestic material (e.g., "The Last Days of Chez Nous," "Little Women").

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

Tends to let his consumers off the hook--you'd hardly guess that any of these people are responsible for their own financial woes.

There are times when this leisurely movie seems so much in love with its own virtue and nobility that there's not much room left for the spectator.

If he'd (Shepard) gone a few notches darker and deeper he might have had a formidable post-cold war thriller. Still, there's much to enjoy in Brosnan's enthusiastic scruffing up of his Bond/Steele image and in Shepard's energetic, if lightweight, direction.

Carax has a wonderful cinematic eye and a personal feeling for editing rhythms, and his sense of overripeness and excess virtually defines him.

Some of the film's situations and motivations seem convenient or underdeveloped, but Ascaride and Darroussin are riveting, and Guediguian's frankness and empathy illuminate this kaleidoscope of lonely lives.

Silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot.

I was never bored but only occasionally interested.

Fortunately almost everyone acquits himself coolly and admirably; only costars Greg Kinnear and Marcia Gay Harden ham it up.

This is Middle-aged Sherlock Holmes in schoolboy drag, and the audience is expected to chuckle appreciatively as the old material is trotted out.

Assisted by Gordon Willis's cinematography and John Houseman's performance as the demanding Professor Kingsfield, director James Bridges manages to do a fair job with the semihokey material.

An irrefutable triumph of engineering, and it entertained and intrigued me through two separate viewings...though as a view of the human condition it's astonishingly and depressingly meager.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The incandescent Doona Bae (The Host, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance) gives a daring performance as the toy-turned-woman,

Writer-director Benjamin Heisenberg serves up a lean and solidly satisfying existentialist thriller.

The famously oblique French director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) won a special award at the Cannes film festival for this existential comedy (2009), whose masterful technique fails to compensate for its glassy characters and mercilessly self-amused tone.

The setup of this comedy by director-cowriter Peter Hedges (Pieces of April) and some subsequent twists may be contrived, and the laughs aren't very plentiful, but much of the behavior seems real, and the able cast makes the most of it.

As in "My Favorite Year," the laughs all come from seeing a nervous innocent pulled into the star's debauchery, the heart from our growing realization that debauchery is just emptiness with the volume cranked.

Though the action is a bit intense for very young kids, it's probably no worse than what they see on television.