Plotwise, the movie's groove is more like a well-worn rut. Visually, too, the movie looks half-recycled.

Liberal use is made of freeze-frame and flashbacks as a kind of emotional chronology, yet it's precisely in this regard that the characters feel tentative and half-formed. I'm still trying to figure out why this perfectly serviceable movie won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance last year.

Waters directing, from a perky script by Heather Hach and Leslie Dixon, is bouncy and assured enough to give a cheeky lilt to what otherwise might have been an earnest PSA for intergenerational peace, love and understanding.

Satoshi innovates not by pushing off into more extreme realms of adolescent fantasy, but by using all the resources of animation to tell complex dramatic stories, resources that in his hands seem almost limitless.

An extraordinary documentary about the German entertainer Kurt Gerron, has been timed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Week, but the film would also fit snugly on a double bill with "My Architect."

Joyeux Noël finishes up as no more than a garden-variety tearjerker, neatly packaged for Oscar candidacy. It's not hard to see why the French chose this inoffensive weepie as their nominee for best foreign-language film, when they might have had Jacques Audiard's far superior, if more difficult, "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or Arnaud Desplechin's "Kings & Queen."

The lack of cohesion and conviction is disconcerting, and it allows the movie to veer dangerously close to exploitation. Its subjects -- and its viewers -- deserve more.

eXistenZ gives us Cronenberg at his wittiest, and Leigh at her most vulnerable and fascinating.

Sensational viewing.

In the end, Curse also looks alarmingly like a dry run for the opening and closing ceremonies Zhang has been hired to direct for the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

Witty, insightful portraits of hyperverbal, self-conscious young people falling in and out of love.

In a film that quickly reveals itself to be a love letter to Wu, some of the best moments have nothing to do with that legendary hip-hop collective: Sage Francis taunting the unruly, increasingly tense crowd with his cerebral, political performance-art hip-hop; Redman playfully admonishing his young son to be good and then giving the boy a kiss when the paternal command wounds.

Heartwarming here relies less on forced air than on Petter Næss’ delicate, clever direction -- and a wonderful, imaginative script by Axel Hellstenius.

As lead Columbine investigator Kate Battan has herself put it, “Everybody wants a quick answer. They want an easy answer so that they can sleep at night and know this is not going to happen tomorrow.” And now they have Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

For the soul of Gondry's work, it seems to me, is neither its soaring flights of visual fancy nor its sometimes crude slapstick, but rather its pained understanding of a generation hopelessly tongue-tied when it comes to matters of the heart.

By crafting its message in mostly understated strokes, The Syrian Bride touches your heart, which you might not even fully realize until its deft, wordless final moments sweep by you.

Doesn't offer much new in the way of news or analysis. What it does offer is inspiration from an unlikely source, via an unsparing look at one such victim.

The famously lovely mug of Tilda Swinton (cast as Kurtz’s wife) merely distracts, and I couldn’t help feeling that this potent story would have been far better served by a straight-ahead documentary.

He's (Carrey) an unruly commodity and, as such, compulsively watchable.

But if you go in knowing this, the payoff is considerable - the film delivers on its feel-good promise.

It's a laudably complicated, if emotional and a little comic-book goofy, story of how a confluence of forces - industry skepticism, trained-seal lobbyists and, last but not least, consumer reluctance - undermined the future of a quiet little bean of mobile metal that the anointed few who could afford to lease it passionately adored.

The film's plainness, and the understated force of van der Groen and Petersen's performances, sharpen its complexity of feeling until all mawkishness is cut away.

How Miike gets us from amiable point A to debilitating point B is a remarkable act of manipulation and control that may leave you feeling sucker-punched, even brutalized, but you won't forget the experience anytime soon.

This filmed Tosca -- not the first, by the way -- is a pretty good job, if it's filmed Tosca that you want. I'll stay with the stage versions, however, which bite cleaner, and deeper.

The film won't likely change any minds, but there's a taut political essay beneath the blatant campaigning.

Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.

A Spanish dinner-theater comedy, this intermittently hilarious contraption by the husband-wife team of Dominic Harari and Teresa de Pelegri heaves Jewish-Palestinian conflict onto a prop-room table already groaning with loaded guns, impromptu sex toys, a wounded duck paddling in a bidet, and a brick of frozen soup that doubles as a sandbag for unlucky pedestrians below.

Where "Amores Perros" was a feast of energy, wit and imagination, 21 Grams is like a starvation diet -- a movie that wallows so profoundly in its own misery that watching it is like atoning for some sin you didn't commit.

The result is a carefully wrought, historically grounded and thoroughly absorbing look at a quintessential American experience.

What is remarkable is the absolute cool with which LaBute charts his story: The director has the soul of an assassin.

Real kudos goes to Molly Parker, searing as a heroin-addicted mother immobilized by the death of her husband, and to a poised little boy named Harry Eden, who's astonishingly good as the 10-year-old son desperately trying to hold her to the straight and narrow.

With Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Loveridge celebrates the mashup aesthetic that enabled the artist to find a voice, and reveals that reconciling contradictions — like an outrageous sense of humor and earnest political activism — is key to both Arulpragasam’s music and the life she’s constructed with audacity and wit.

Now there is inconclusive but reasonable doubt, based on a letter that turned up in 2005 from Upton Sinclair, who had heard their disgruntled first lawyer say they were guilty. You'd think this nugget might show up in a new documentary about the case, but Peter Miller, known for his 2001 film about that other beloved song of the left, "The Internationale," has recast the story into a tale of prejudice against Italian immigrants and the violation of civil rights.

These people accept the consequences of living like there's no tomorrow. They stand awaiting their fate in a rain of fire. And now we can feel a little bit of that, too.

Winstead is wildly funny (and spot-on) doing the impressions in Nina’s act (especially of Björk ordering a smoothie) but also proves uninhibited and candid when Nina doesn’t have jokes to hide behind.

(Herzog's) tribute to Kinski doubles as a life-affirming monument to creation in all its variety.

A tougher, more experienced director may someday force Holmes to surprise first herself, then us.

A career best for the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.

We may not fully grasp what Nora saw in Joyce, but what he saw in her is made unmistakable, and worth seeing.

Gets stuck in a rut. Hearing Santa say “f---” isn't nearly as funny the 50th time as it is the first 49.

Go for the dazzling, if repetitive, human stunt work. Endure the appallingly simplistic politics.

One graphic that I.O.U.S.A. doesn't include is a national balance sheet of our assets and liabilities, which would illustrate that the former is more than double the latter. We're in the black, and a film this deep in the red isn't something to be scared of at all -- or taken seriously.

There's no emotional weight to either character, or to this far-from-dangerous liaison. All you can do is watch the slight story sputter, and try to figure out whether Bèart's formidable lips were made by God or man.

Though Akel and Mass share writing credit, Chalk was actually shot in a loose, improvisational manner in the mode of Christopher Guest's films, and its best set pieces are like devastatingly effective pinpricks puncturing the Hollywood hot-air balloon of inspirational teacher/coach melodramas.

Imamura has said that Warm Water Under a Red Bridge is a poem to the enduring strengths of women. It may also be the best sex comedy about environmental pollution ever made.

American independent movies about awkward adolescence are never in short supply, but this highly assured first feature by commercials and music video director Mike Mills is the first since "Donnie Darko" to view the latter stages of teenagerdom as fodder for a phantasmagorical odyssey of Lewis Carroll–like distortions.

Repeatedly, Iñárritu and Arriaga stop themselves just short of suggesting that we're all going to hell in a hand basket. Had they not -- well, then Babel might really have been onto something.

Eklavya contains only one song sequence, a lovely set piece for leading lady Vidya Balan (Salaam-e-Ishq), but it embraces the imperatives of dynastic family melodrama as fervently as any classic of Bollywood’s golden age. This is robust storytelling, with blood and thunder pumping through its veins, and real whiskers on its face.

The film works no matter which side of the racial divide you're on, because nothing unites an audience quite like making fun of everyone.

Provided you don't think too long or hard about it (and why ever would you?), Live Free or Die Hard is infectious good fun, and a tremendous encouragement to the middle aged.

But by film's end, no one is looking good. If Wranovics is somewhat too noncommittal in his presentation, he still shows a great eye for detail.

Sex holds in perfect tonal balance, and without cynicism, a brew of maliciously transgressive comedy and tender sympathy for its tortured characters, all gripped by terror of love, or sex, or both.

The movie is calamitously miscast.

The romance that ensues between Macy and Bello (both of whom are terrific) is exactly the kind of mature, sexy adult relationship that people complain doesn’t exist in movies anymore.

As naked and bitter and mesmerizing a display of self-pity as you've seen outside as Edward Albee play. By the end of this willfully grimy yet oddly beautiful movie, Billy and Layla have earned grudging sympathy.

The archetypal Townes Van Zandt song is a low-key ballad filled with sadness and failed humanity. Director Margaret Brown's documentary about the revered songwriter's songwriter (who died at the age of 52 on New Year's Day, 1997) keenly achieves the same tone.

It plays out more like a 12-step program than a human drama.

The family flags palpable agony... provides the movie's only earned emotional tension.

In its exploitation of human misery, Monster's Ball doesn't just invite cynicism; it provokes hostility.

The film is beautifully shot and filled with fine performances.

Moving and vibrant Italian-language film.

Small Time Crooks is definitely minor Allen that, nevertheless, offers a welcome riposte to the current national obsession with getting rich.

Sure, it’s kind of entertaining to see the studly, studious Mortensen slap on a few pounds and go way out with the fuggeddaboutit talk as he tries to shoot the shit with Ali’s pedantic, closeted virtuoso. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him ham it up. But the leads mostly are saddled with literal, middle-of-the-road material.

When Jared finally erupts, Hedges nimbly navigates the character’s hurt, fear and burgeoning pride — his relief at having at last found his voice.

This delightful and compassionate romp achieves precisely that rare quality -- grace -- that sets Betty apart from the pack.

Diaz leaves us unsure about whether we should pity or revile Imelda, a woman alternately charmingly childlike, shockingly remote and, ultimately, as she stands over the waxed corpse of her husband, pathetic.

Their taste is as bad as their timing is exquisite.

Part of the fun of Joshua is the skill with which Ratliff juggles horror and realism, feeding one into the other until we become part of the unraveling of the Cairns' perfect life.

It's hard to know whether to be impressed or appalled by Eva Mozes Kor, the Holocaust survivor in Bob Hercules and Cheri Pugh's fascinating documentary who has made forgiving the Nazis her life's work.

This is one of those rare times when a credit-heavy gathering of top film talents actually manages to produce a work of art.

Even more than the invasive procedures of her day job, or the casual humiliation by the raging misogynists drawn to this business, there's a virulent self-hatred on display that is palpably painful to watch.

The British music-video director Peter Care (making his feature debut) and screenwriters Jeff Stockwell and Michael Petroni have retained much of the wry, teen-wise dialogue from the late Chris Fuhrman's cult-hit novel, while giving his story arc a fuller, more rounded shape.

Unexpectedly moving documentary.

The family squabbles jangle the nerves while not hitting on insights or memorable emotion.

There's nothing profound going on here, and this pristine example of cinéma de qualité must later have driven ardent French New Wavers round the bend. But as a breezy populist comedy, more farce than satire, it remains infectious, and the case made for love and sex over tyranny and death takes us back to an age when romantic leads were less self-serious and more willing to double up as buffoons.

It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.

Wilson is articulate and ironic, and Otto-Bernstein mostly shields us from his tantrums and critics.

The Last Winter won’t win many fans among those who place the saving of union jobs above the repairing of the ozone layer. But this is a horror movie with many inconvenient truths to tell about the ways in which we are willingly destroying our planet.

The film is never less than lovely to gaze upon, shot in saturated colors, richly appointed in period trappings and peopled only by the very beautiful. But it is also, by its end, too silly to take seriously.

If Sayles had maneuvered these stories and performances into even a shade more sentimentality or gravitas, the weight would have collapsed them like a house of cards. As it is, they breathe easily, delicately into each other.

It's a testimony to the integrity and poignancy of Tammy Faye herself that she comes off as a cool, even complex, woman.

His is a valiant story, though it doesn't quite work as a nearly 90-minute documentary -- the Cadigans simply don’t have enough material.

Among the film's other drawbacks are how conventional it feels in its structure and strategy, often misguidedly going for the epic high-key feel of classic NFL Films on a low-key, DV budget.

As mean-spirited toward its working-class characters, especially its women, as it is profoundly unfunny.

The movie always teeters on the verge of something deeper, and Cheadle’s rendering of Greene’s stubborn refusal to be domesticated is funny, exhilarating and then quietly tragic. But Lemmons keeps pulling back into jive-talking shtick, and for much of the time -- I felt as though someone had trapped me in a time-warped episode of "The Jeffersons."

Almereyda has crafted an uncannily revealing portrait of a major American artist at work, all the more remarkable for the deceptive casualness with which it unfolds, as if Almereyda had just shown up.

Beguiling and intoxicating.

You may as well watch the movie too, if only so that another of life's astonishing possibilities won't have entirely passed you by.

Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.

Just about the only good thing you can say about Spike Lee's pointless, didactic The 25th Hour is that it's filled with strong performances, albeit of stock characters.

Exceedingly dry and precise and slow-paced comedy.

Jodhaa Akbar is clear and solid and absorbing, but not quite exhilarating.

Captivating coming-of-age story.

Divided We Fall briskly, often hilariously, forbids us to wallow in the specious comfort of untainted local heroes or irredeemable villains.

Surprisingly engaging, as is the Paul Simon theme song, and the film is enlivened by flashes of humor just rude enough to delight older children.

At once an astonishing piece of filmmaking and, quite possibly, an Olympian folly.

If we never do find out exactly why Wilbur is so intent on offing himself, it almost doesn't matter, given Sives' magnetic, star-making performance and the careful, elating mixture of comedy and pathos.

The problem with Fahrenheit 11/9 is that it’s Trump’s Fahrenheit 9/11 rather than Trump’s Roger & Me.