The black/white duality isn't terribly interesting, but as in most of Aronofsky's films, an intense horror of the body and its uncontrollability fuels the rhapsodic psychodrama.

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

Appealing restaurant comedy.

The characters are so vivid that the suspense never lags. Crowe is best in buttoned-down roles like this one, and he holds the husband's fear and resolve in balance.

Visual-effects wizards Greg and Colin Strause directed, showing more affinity for the city's steel and glass than for any of the characters.

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

Aside from an exhilarating opening and a gruesome climax, the movie isn't all that rich emotionally; all the visual razzle-dazzle winds up serving a pat lesson about people needing other people.

McAdams is typically effervescent here, but she can't rescue this weak comedy from a wooden Ford, whose stick-up-the-ass character is unimaginatively goosed by screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna.

Perry benefits from the fire, heft, velocity, and lyricism of the language, but he also updates the material and makes it work onscreen, eliciting powerhouse performances from an ensemble of actresses.

Doug Liman's Fair Game is a model exercise in dramatizing recent political scandal, and easily the best fact-based Hollywood political thriller since "All the President's Men."

The emptied-out characters strive for a transcendence they'll never quite reach, and so does the film.

In place of romance there are numerous talky espionage scenes that make the movie feel like one of those labyrinthine cold war pictures from the 60s.

Sam Rockwell plays the brother, and in his handful of scenes he skillfully tracks the character's slow decay from cocky loudmouth to thoroughly beaten man; Swank, delivering her usual spunky turn, suffers badly by comparison.

Lacks the toughness of Eastwood's best work.

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

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

This is deeply felt, poetic filmmaking, though the unrelentingly dour tone isn't for everyone. [18 Oct 2012, p.41]

The film preserves many of Ellis's amoral one liners (best delivered by Malkovich and by Richard Dreyfuss as one of the villains), though as in much of his writing, the fun is discolored by a profound cynicism.

At their best, the Jackasses combine low-brow humor with delectable absurdity (one of my favorite gags from Jackass: The Movie had a guy creeping up on a cougar while dressed as a giant mouse), but here it's almost pure punishment.

The period details are so exact they're occasionally distracting, the use of gospel music at the end is questionable, and director Randall Wallace (We Were Soldiers) shows a surer hand in the track sequences than the domestic scenes. Still, there's no denying this movie has heart.

The movie relies on the notion that postponing sex heightens arousal, but its lovers aren't any better matched post-coitus than they were before.

A fairly standard coming-of-age story, but the peripheral wackos keep it from feeling too pat. The film inhabits that elusive space between sanity and insanity, where most of life takes place.

What it doesn't have is the first movie's primal understanding of patriarchal violence and feminist rage, as both moral horror and exploitation gold. As a result, this is a much easier movie to watch.

The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.

"American Casino" and Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" offered more striking images of the human wreckage, but Ferguson is more successful at nailing the perpetrators in New York and their gullible accomplices in Washington.

The founding of Facebook becomes a tale for our times in this masterful social drama.

The language has been changed to English, of course, which is the only real reason this movie exists; the story development, desolate tone, and key set pieces are mostly copied from the original movie, which in turn was based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist.

The end result is more like a supermarket on Saturday afternoon. The content is engaging, though.