Blitz shows us these kids in all their quirkiness and dorkiness, letting them do much of the talking as he records them and their families at home.

Managed to pull the rug out from under me about three-quarters of the way through, and I still hadn't found my feet when the credits rolled.

Paul Giamatti steals the picture as a sardonic grifter with a phobic terror of dirty toilet seats.

Sluggish comedy drama.

Scripted by Pitre and his wife, Michelle Benoit, this is more interesting for its historical setting than for its rather wooden drama, but Tim Curry gives a pretty good performance as the town's whiskey priest.

Brutally honest and brilliantly acted.

This is very much the work of a cinephile, calling to mind such middle-period Orson Welles jumbles as "The Lady From Shanghai" and "Mr. Arkadin" as well as dozens of other movies I only half remember, a familiarity that's essential to its charm.

This is obviously a sincere undertaking, and there's a certain homemade charm to the special effects used in the combat scenes.

Two of MTV's stupidest programs, "The Real World" and "Spring Break," have been rolled into one staggeringly dumb feature film.

As one might expect from IFC, actors and directors dominate the interview segments, which may be the reason the narrative never finds its way to Heaven's Gate.

Superior summer entertainment.

The racial satire is about as subtle as a sledgehammer, but there's something exhilarating about so blunt a weapon being swung with such wild abandon.

The result is grimly "effective," but it made me long for Hollywood junk.

For a Disney movie, Holes is mercifully low in saccharine.

The most astounding cinematic testament to flock mentality since Hitchcock's "The Birds."

A fair amount of visual panache, but the fight scenes are routine, the humor juvenile, and the Toronto locales rendered drab through muddy cinematography.

Frantic and unfunny.

Dworkin unobtrusively uses small moments to build an engrossing story of courage and hope most narrative films can't match.

Half-funny mockumentary.

This bleak little drama started as a play, and I'd bet that even onstage it felt contrived.

It has all the virtues of fine stage drama: narrative economy, honest emotion, and characters so closely defined that the most pedestrian encounters between them are revelatory.

As a comedy duo Nicholson and Sandler pose no threat to the legacy of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, in part because Sandler is so outclassed, but mostly because everyone involved is playing it safe.

I was engaged by Chick's characters...But that point passed pretty soon after the credits rolled, and nothing has come back to haunt me since.

The performances are strong without calling attention to themselves--which is more than I can say for the occasionally hackneyed use of rock on the sound track.

The experience couldn't be more realistic, though Cameron also superimposes imagery of passengers recalling the fateful night, to haunting effect.

Griffin's stand-up material is consistently upstaged by sequences of him interacting with old friends and family members.

Haven't we seen this already?

It certainly fulfills all the conventions of the genre: sci-fi premise, noir stylings, martial arts, snarky dialogue.