Julian Jarrold's adaptation of the Evelyn Waugh novel isn't entirely faithful, but it conveys the book's universal themes.

If one discounts the facile and unconvincing ending, this first feature by Guka Omarova, offers a convincingly bleak view of how a 15-year-old boy could get ahead in rural Kazakhstan in the early 90s.

Absorbing and intelligent.

One of Claude Chabrol's most satisfyingly astringent films in years.

The narrative conceit requires a fair amount of indulgence as the story progresses, but the fleeting, incomplete glimpses of the monster early on prove the old dictum of B movie auteur Val Lewton that a momentary image can have greater impact than a prolonged one.

Thomas Hardy it's not, but as far as middlebrow British romances go, better this than "Love Actually."

The greatest disappointment is Shepard's own inability to play a Shepard character: a distant, stiff presence, he never seems to enter the emotional battles (with Kim Basinger, as the woman he can't live with and can't live without) that are the play's reason for being.

A quirky, lyrical independent feature by writer-director Michael Almereyda. It's shot in luscious, shimmering black and white.

What promises to be a standard postmortem on 60s ideology becomes a thoughtful essay on the choices we all make between work, family, and personal freedom.

Edwards directs this farcical material in an unexpectedly intimate, naturalistic style, giving the characters a conviction that makes the slapstick sequences much funnier and more suspenseful than they might have been. But the film still has a rushed, slapdash feel to it.

The movie is perfectly appropriate for girls, and its opening scenes play like a more intelligent and historically grounded version of their G-rated princess dramas.

Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.

Eastwood himself, pushing 70 but cruising women in their early 20s, counts on more goodwill than I can muster. I wasn't bored, but my suspension of disbelief collapsed well before the end.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

Might be for you. Or you might be bored anyway.

Studded with terrorist attacks... Yet Malkovich never exploits these for action-movie thrills: in each instance the loss of life is terrible and the morality of the act is left treacherously ambiguous.

Roy's story is fascinating in its own right, exploring the hero's mingled shame over his class background and homosexuality, and painting a vicious portrait of Britain's coke-snorting upper crust in the late 70s.

A film that throbs with life while keenly noting its passing, this is an ode to the village that welcomed - and let thrive - the director's refugee parents.

As the smirking title might suggest, the movie is least prepared to process the feminist backlash against porn movies that followed their early-70s crossover -- in a way the most interesting part of the story.

Packs a punch in its first act with a passionate lead performance by Cyndi Williams and a painfully concrete sense of modern life closing in. But gradually it slips into the indie paradigm of an alienated soul rushing into darkness, climaxing with a semiabstract montage sequence that's more rhetorical than dramatic.

The film is compelling to the extent that the subject is, but also unimaginative and unsurprising.

Throughout the tour O'Brien makes it a point of pride to oblige his fans, though even this comes off as self-centered.

This male weepie is ridden with cliches (Farina's character tends to a pigeon coop on his roof, for God's sake) and climaxes with a predictable act of self-abnegation.

Director Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Vargas) and cinematographer Tom Richmond transform nocturnal New York into a soft-focus wonderland for their sweet but screwball courtship.

The intense focus on this trio makes for good portraiture, but it left me hungry for more about the social context that shaped them.

Moderately pretentious, though very well filmed, this was the sort of thing teenage boys throve on in the dark ages Before Spielberg.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.

The charm, humor, and healthy eroticism of Australian writer-director John Duigan (The Year My Voice Broke, Flirting) are back in force in this pleasantly recounted tale, set in the 30s, about a newlywed Anglican clergyman and his wife, freshly played by Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald, who stop off at the remote home of a controversial (i.e., erotic) painter (Sam Neill).