The Lives of Others wants us to see that the Stasi -- at least some of them -- were, like their Gestapo brethren, “just following orders." You can call that naive optimism on Donnersmarck's part, or historical revisionism of the sort duly lambasted by the current film version of Alan Bennett's "The History Boys." I, for one, tremble at the thought of what this young director does for an encore.

On viewing, the cuts seem negligible, but what is new and clearly improved is the sound, which now booms with each door slam and gunshot.

Promising, if uneven, first feature.

There's something overly studied, almost clinical, in how it all pulls together.

There is much clattering and clanking plus a couple of songs; some of the gothic-inspired, neo-Victorian visuals are quite arresting; and the corpse bride herself is, dare one say, surprisingly hot. But the whole thing just isn’t much fun.

As a character study Vera Drake is coarsely drawn, and as pro-choice polemic, it’s both a blunt instrument and a red herring. Which may be why, among all the moviegoers who staggered from the theater wielding soaked tissues, I was among the few who remained dry of eye, and raised of brow.

Alternately frustrating and rewarding film.

The visual effects are predictably excellent -- sometimes, in the case of a three-man free fall through space, unexpectedly lyrical -- but most of the movie's dramatic conflicts feel strictly pro forma.

Yet the movie, distilling into purest form the blend of viciousness and sentimentality that informs all Woo's work, winds up as emotionally bogus as it is viscerally overwhelming.

It is a dull and boring film, pretty as a Turner landscape and as sweetly becalmed as the glassy Sargasso Sea in which the men of the unfortunately named “Surprise” find themselves trapped for what felt, to me at least, like weeks on end.

There's nothing new about this sado-cinema, and nothing much worthy, either.

Came alive only in the presence of a supposed dead man -- specifically, the nefarious Lord Voldemort.

King Kong isn't terrible, but it's something that none of Jackson's previous movies ever was -- it's enervating.

You can only cram so much of this stuff into a movie without putting your audience to sleep -- The movie sags badly in the middle, swirling around itself without making headway.

This The Other Side of the Wind has a haphazard “well, he shot it, so we better include it” vibe. One wonders just how much of the existing editing Welles got to oversee himself; the answer is: probably not much. There’s a tight, 80-minute feature trapped in The Other Side of the Wind, one that Welles most likely would have exhumed had he not run out of money while filming.

But if City of God whirs with energy for nearly its full 130-minute running time, it is oddly lacking in emotional heft for a work that aspires to the epic -- it is essentially a tarted-up exploitation picture whose business is to make ghastly things fun.

High Fidelity wants to be hip, but it's comically square.

The best I can say about Buster Scruggs is that it seems as though the Coens picked their favorite actors and wrote them a part specifically tailored to their abilities.

Even at 43 minutes short, with earnest but marketable narration by Leonardo DiCaprio and one amusing zero-gravity taco-preparation scene, Hubble 3-D's perilous endeavors are about as thrilling to watch as plumbers snaking a drain ... in space suits! If you want an eye-popping cosmic epic, rent "Star Trek." If you want interactivity, take the kids to the planetarium.

The most pleasure to be had from this high-tech bore is to compare the Disney world-view evidenced here (the triumph of collectivism) with that of DreamWorks’ own creepy-crawler animation, “Antz” (the triumph of individualism).

Essentially a TV movie souped up by the divinely skittish cinematography of Chris Menges, the film suffers from a screenplay full of labored attempts at wit by Steven Knight, and characters who barely make it off the page alive.

Malick dangles his maddeningly innocent ideas about life and death and man's gift for self-destruction.

Evidently, this bloated piece of Oscar-nominated nonsense was a big hit in Denmark, which makes me think there's a glittering future in that otherwise discriminating country for several seasons of "Days of Our Lives."

As a political statement it is either a cry of despair or a grim acknowledgment that in the endless cycles of history, civilization will always have its saboteurs.

Sofia Coppola, who's directed the film from her own screenplay, narrowly misses making the story work on the screen.

Early on, sex addiction is called “a gaping hole in the soul” but Unlovable barely has us feel it.

If only the whole thing didn't collapse in on itself, and quickly become a parody of artistic reach and terminal folly.

As factoids do-si-do with testimonials from the likes of drinking buddy Sean Penn and fan-boy Bono, the movie all but becomes the very A&E Hagiography for which Bukowski would have had little or no patience.

A portrait of dispossession so acute that it's caused a few critics to cry, Let her eat cake!

Loses focus and sags into a how-we-got-through-it family procedural.

Shuttles between schoolboy humor, calculated savagery and, at the end, a rank sentimentalism in which love all too easily conquers all.

The result is a hazy, shoegazy visual tone that is both elegiac and eulogistic - that is, at once meditative and funereal.

A decent primer on the common and often misunderstood disease - in bold digital colors and scored to Sigur Rós and Björk, no less! - the film suffers from the attitude embodied by its self-congratulatory title.

While the movie does address white people’s thorny relationship with rap and cultural appropriation, it demonstrates how delicate satirizing that can be when it gets kind of serious near the end — a long, long end — and suggests that being the best at battle rap can also mean being the worst.

The film is exhaustive -- and ultimately exhausting.

If this is what qualifies, as some critics have suggested, as an artistic advance for Mr. Park, let us pray for a hasty retreat.

A gorgeously burnished vintage post card come to life, Motorcycle Diaries has about as much depth and emotional currency as the cardboard that post card would be stamped on.

A lot here is genially entertaining, but it doesn't make for interesting or vital filmmaking, because while Levinson might honestly prefer rye, he makes movies the way Wonder Bread bakes.

Evans is a fascinating character, and deserves a better vehicle than this facetious smirk of a movie.

Unfortunately, Hrebejk settles for unsatisfying allusions to the Czech experience that never break through the melodrama to make his case with any conviction.

There's not much more to this adaptation of the Nick Hornby novel than charm -- effortless, pleasurable, featherweight charm.

In the end, neither the appealing cast -- nor the force of Scott's stunning imagery is enough to make us understand why these men died.

Isn't much more than a proficient gothic mystery with a final twist that offers a satisfying little frisson before you start counting how many times it's been used before.

It's the zippy chatter among the Serenity's wised-up space pirates that gives the film most of its punch, but with only serviceable action sequences and largely cookie-cutter effects, you can still sense the void just outside.

Estes never really completes a thought about this sorry group's moral dilemmas.

A half-baked classic.

At once a heartfelt story about a family undone by violence and an overburdened allegory of fascism.

If anything, as it lathers up into an abortive attempt at scarlet-woman branding and a goofy siege on the nunnery where a dazed and confused Antoinette has holed up, The Duchess of Langeais works best as the comic bondage fantasy implied in its deliciously sly French title: "Don't Touch the Axe."

After half an hour spent drooling over its visual splendors, I found the movie every bit as sickening as its creators intended it to be, minus the kicks they so palpably got out of making it.

Pretty good going for a ton of moisture.

A disappointed meditation on the '60s.

In Supremacy, Damon is left to play basically one droning, humorless note, which, unfortunately, he does with his eyes closed.

What's fresh for these people is, frankly, old news for anyone who has seen even one or two documentaries on similar subject matter.

Perhaps the real question, then, isn't how you update Spider-Man but why you would even try. Introduced in 1962, the original superhero helped to initiate the age of modern comics. Raimi hasn't figured out how to reconfigure him for the blockbuster age, and there are suggestions.

Softley starts out a little awkwardly, as he tries to capture turn-of-the-century flux by opening several London scenes from disorienting, too-obvious camera positions.

Director Erik Van Looy has filmmaking chops to spare, and while he has created a sharply shot and crisply paced film, he isn't able to make it all cohere.

This overcrowded, overheated scenario, with many scenes repeated from the first two films, keeps us so busy tracking all the overlapping storylines, we have no time to imagine what they might mean.

Predictable as Satin Rouge's plot points may be, it ultimately resists characterization as an amiable and conventional tale of sexual rebirth.

As stunning to look at as "Girl on the Bridge" or indeed any of his others, but it lacks the distilled intensity — and, surprisingly for Leconte, the wit.

For too many minutes of its two and a half hours, Ray flips through its cinematic pages with a breathless and-then-this-happened urgency, offering up little in the way of personality (or truth) beyond Jamie Foxx's strong performance.

Well before The New World's two-and-one-half hours are up, Malick's tree-hugging reveries have become suffocating, no matter the unquestionable tastefulness with which they're rendered -- more painterly vistas, more Wagner (and a little Mozart, too), ravishing re-creations of 17th-century London. Surely, only a Philistine could find any fault with this, or believe, perchance, that Malick's famous poetic beauty had turned poetically fatal.

Queasily parked between halfhearted satire and overcooked melodrama, this adaptation of a well-received 2003 novel by British writer Zoë Heller offers the unhappy spectacle of a raft of acting talent trying to do right by slimy material.

Like a date who's primped too long to arrive at dinner with something to talk about, Road to Perdition is beautifully groomed and a perfect drag to be with.

It seems to have been made to delight European intellectuals and anyone else who believes that America is a land of bloodthirsty yet comical barbarians.

To explore seriously the question of Kissinger's crimes wouldn't merely take hours, it would require the patient, unblinking vision of a Frederick Wiseman or Marcel Ophuls. Gibney and Jarecki just want to string the bastard up.

An improvement on the original, but that isn't saying much.

Two-thirds of the way through, Seabiscuit awakes to its duties as a perfectly presentable race movie, rising to a crescendo of satisfying --- if somewhat gaga -- inspiration.

The Mother winds up unpersuasive, in large part due to writer Hanif Kureishi, who visits on all his mopey characters such calculated savagery, it's hard to care much for them or to get onboard for the hope implied in the hastily stitched-on ending.

Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.

At its best, there's nothing gushy about Dennis Quaid's portrayal of Morris, and more than anything it's his beautifully modulated reserve that holds this film in emotional check.

As with all of Egoyan's films, this new one comes cloaked in an atmosphere of dread, but for the first time there's no real purpose, intellectual or emotional, to all the free-floating anxiety.

While I don't doubt that Howard's done the best he can, it's sad to see a beautiful mind whittled down by such a plain one.

(Cage's) performance feels embalmed in the accumulated shtick of an actor trapped in excess.

Ustaoglu has made Mehmet unbelievably naive -- and the hardships piled upon him unintentionally evoke "The Perils of Pauline." That dilutes what should be a powerful protest film, and robs it of the emotional impact it aims for.

Nettelbeck's storytelling grace, however, only highlights her clumsy script, which drags the viewer through an all-too-predictable menu of catharsis and romance that can overpower the film’s subtler, more complex flavors.

What the movie lacks is a point.

Match Point is a perfectly presentable, entirely unremarkable domestic melodrama parked queasily between opera and realism, two irreconcilable forms if ever there were.

Mulan, like all the characters in this movie, is a cookie-cutter American prototype, lazily ripped off from the Disney boilerplate that fashioned Pocahontas et al.

On the surface, this coming-of-age tale feels slight and unremarkable, yet the director's final close-up of Frankie packs a punch -- a testament to the power of a gifted young actress happily lost inside her first big role.

Writer-director Kirk Jones has the movie roll over, fetch and chase its own tail in order to make you love it.

The problem lies in the film's inability to decide whether such loaded images are funny in a Farrelly Brothers/Dave Chapelle kind of way or if they mean something deeper. The terrific lead performances only heighten this confusion.

Despite its Scottish scenery and period frocks, Madden's film proves a pallid creature indeed compared to the hanky-panky leaking out of Buckingham Palace of late.

Volf’s refusal to address key choices that Callas made to shape her own career and fight her insecurities suggests that he’d prefer to imagine Callas as a victim of fate — and bronchitis, fame, Onassis, etc. — instead of a strong-willed but human prima donna.

Not even Altman's loose-limbed shooting style can redeem Cookie’s Fortune, a bafflingly pointless farce that belongs more properly in the vaudeville halls than on the director's sporadically lustrous résumé.

Intolerable Cruelty seems the kind of movie that results from two essentially erudite, anarchic talents playing down to the masses.

Like this summer's other slapstick cause célèbre, "Pineapple Express," it's a comedy with as high or higher a body count as the movies it purports to be parodying, and the problem isn't the violence per se but rather the fact that neither movie ever finds a satisfactory balance between tongue-in-cheek and guts-in-hand.

Between them, first-time screenwriter Carl Ellsworth and director Wes Craven don't come up with a single clever way to generate suspense, and the movie's onboard atmosphere is so phony.

In his capable, yet only mildly exciting, adaptation of Charles Dickens’ third novel, Douglas McGrath (Emma) keeps reminding us that what we’re seeing is theater. This feels gratuitous.

Far too complex and provoking.

Everything about the movie seems excessive to the material. What should have been a small, independent feature without marquee casting -- the story's protagonists, after all, are meant to be the kind of people nobody ever notices.

One of those movie equivalents of a freeway pileup -- it's a mess, at once insistently watchable and a total dead end.

A tedious exercise in ethical hand wringing.

Compulsively watchable, with its fair share of effective sledgehammer shocks; it just isn't very good.

The kids absolutely win your heart, but there's something off-putting in the film's lazy juxtaposition of unexamined Negro dysfunction tropes (absent fathers, violent streets) against an idyllic Africa tended by white benevolence.

Stephen Frears has had more downs than ups of late, but I would never have thought the man responsible for "My Beautiful Laundrette" and "The Grifters" capable of stooping to pap as pappy as this unbearably chipper take on the real-life story of Laura Henderson.

Less outright terrifying than under-the-skin shivery, this psychological thriller from sui generis Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa breaks nearly all the rules -- including those of narrative logic.

Though The Cup is lovely to look at, it has none of the ceremonial rigor mortis of Scorsese's "Kundun."

Kusama leads with feminist empowerment, but her sucker punch is a sappy romance.