Beyond that surface grit, Intermission is still a fairly saccharine collage of self-redemptive gestures and happy endings that, true to its title, only fitfully compels.

Accomplished yet uneven feature.

LaGravenese (writer of "The Fisher King," adapter of "The Bridges of Madison County," making his directorial debut) eschews distractions of style and molds our attention to the performances.

While the women go through a few of the motions, shifting decorously under the sheets and sucking face, there's no lust in their coupling, just choreography and the conceit of two filmmakers with nothing more on their minds than fake dykes and bloodshed.

Schizo is an earnest also-ran, sadly muffled by the opaque performance of non-actor Oldzhas Nusupbayev.

While the entertainment value of Cloverfield is highly negotiable, it's clear that Abrams has consciously aligned himself with those filmmakers who have used the template of a grade-B monster/invasion movie -- Don Siegel, George Romero, Steven Spielberg -- as a stealth vessel for social commentary.

It's fine stuff, beautifully played, but there's no denying that viewers will have to be patient with this 80-minute chamber piece, the first third of which feels cold and false, only to suddenly shift into unexpectedly deep emotional territory.

Sean's grandfather was the colorful longshore Communist Archie Brown, and part of the film's charm lies in its evocation of a generational mural that includes old Marxists, flower children and the progeny of red-diaper babies.

A smart, romantic, heartbreaking pleasure.

A labor of love hobbled by a stubborn desire to eke its delicate love story out of a premise that all but sits up and begs to be treated as a political thriller.

Tykwer may want meaning to go with his special effects, but the problem with his filmmaking, both here and earlier, is that he's more interested in his own bag of tricks than in actually saying something.

So never mind the Xmas schlock -- go treat yourself at once to this sensationally entertaining soul food.

Seeks to establish a pioneering role for the movie in liberating America’s sex life. To me it’s far from clear that that cheerfully cheesy slice of hardcore, made for $25,000 by a middle-aged hairdresser named Gerard Damiano, has spawned much in the way of a cultural legacy.

By inviting us to take on trust the Tipton Three's accounts of what they were doing in Afghanistan, Guantánamo falls into a familiar trap of agitprop filmmaking - turning the victim into a hero. The movie gives us no particular reason to believe that they were up to anything nefarious - or that they weren't.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon offers up the singer's famous, filmed confrontation with the ludicrously snotty New York Times writer Gloria Emerson, who calls Lennon "dear boy" as he heatedly attempts to defend the role of the artist in political discourse. No devious editing required here: Although Lennon seems to lose his composure in the encounter, Emerson looks an utter clown all on her own.

It's a loving film, but Kushner's own characters are more richly textured than Mock's depiction of the playwright and the divided, divisive world he's trying to fathom.

Devotees of Motorhead frontman/certifiable rock icon Lemmy Kilmister will be in heaven watching this gushing love letter to the man who straddles rock subgenres, but anyone who's not already a fan will cry for mercy long before the nearly two-hour film ends.

Doggedly refusing artifice as if cinematic beauty were a filthy capitalist plot, Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.

Where Káel stumbles is in having his stars lip-synch, sometimes poorly, to a recording. It's a devil's bargain that allows for more natural staging, but that fails to convey that an opera's power lies less in cinematic shadings of character than in raw emotions refined by the spectacular art of a rigorously trained human voice.

While there are scenes of wrenching emotional openness and spontaneous charm -- largely due to the irresistible allure and impeccable craft of its ensemble cast -- the degree of calculation apparent in its plot and images undermines its efforts to move and seduce.

Aims for crowd-pleasing impact over subtlety. But it's still a welcome corrective to the current "zero tolerance" fad.

Blades does capture the obvious eccentricities of the skating world, and is funny up to a point, but by now Ferrell & Co. have the formula for a mild comedy down pat. What they need is a little soul.

The strength of One Bright Shining Moment lies in its reminder of McGovern's critical role in reforming the way his party chose its convention delegates, and how prescient he had always been about the looming disaster of Vietnam.

The problem, dare I say it, is that the movie just ... isn't ... that ... funny.

Robbins has made a drastically different film from the one Welles envisioned -- it's wacky where Welles is absurd, cynical where Welles is canny.

The film's strength and its entertainment lie in John Myhre's production design, its generally appealing cast...and, perhaps most importantly, a canny degree of self-parody.

There's no denying that Fry's movie is all the livelier for its gay embellishment.

The movie blows a fresh wind of disrespect, high drama and lush romanticism through that stolidly middlebrow subgenre, the period drama.