In an effort to keep the thrills coming the screenwriters scatter about too many loose ends; they don’t provide the precise cat-and-mouse plotting that used to be the hallmark of the well-made thriller but is now virtually nonexistent.

Totally captivating, as seductive as a samba.

It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.

An across-the-board delight featuring a spot-on ensemble cast that treats the most awkward and embarrassing moments in the rites of passage with affectionate hilarity.

It would be dishonest to deny that Jade Scorpion has amusing moments, but it never gets better than that and often settles for less.

Director Peyton Reed gets the film's look and, in moments, its disingenuous innocence, but you have to wonder what he and the screenwriters, Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake, thought they were parodying. The actors clearly haven't a clue.

A persuasive if not groundbreaking drama.

It's a very mixed bag. When it's good, Hollywood Dreams is corrosively funny and unexpectedly poignant. And when it's bad, it's over-the-top bad.

The result is a kind of "Three Ages of Woman, With Plastic Surgery," that veers between insight and hand-wringing.

It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.

The alluring surfaces of other people's lives can be deceiving, though generally not in a Nancy Meyers comedy, where the thin veneer of fantasy cloaks ... more fantasy.

Tedious and contrived.

A probing though ponderously episodic drama that ultimately feels as stitched together as Sawchuk’s frequently unmasked mug.

The movie is built on the drifting life of a smart, stunningly beautiful and unfulfilled woman. But “Parthenope” shouldn’t have to strain as hard as it does — it plays like a fragrance ad. That qualifies as a disappointment for a filmmaker whose sensualist impulses are God-tier.

Though Black Snake Moan is unadulterated deep-fried silliness from "Hustle & Flow" filmmaker Craig Brewer, Jackson makes it indisputably more palatable. It's still not a very good movie, but it's intermittently entertaining (and sometimes unintentionally funny).

John Enbom's slow-burn script avoids overloading the action with backstory or psychologizing, and Bloom strikes the right balance of diffidence, panic and blank-itude to keep things creepily on edge.

The film may be fearlessly sentimental, but it is sturdy enough to provide rewarding major roles for two veterans, who are of an age when such starring parts are rare.

Some concert movies make you feel like you have the best seat in the house; this one plants you squarely in front of the Jumbotron.

Unlike the similarly multi-strand "Valentine's Day," Hot Summer Days has heart, however overstated most of its action.

Even amid the naughty flourishes, with Vulgaria, Pang again shows himself to be a wise, playful chronicler of modern life.

It feels at once overwritten and thematically thin, coasting on a cutesy concept before descending into relentless, and therefore meaningless, violence.

Paradise and its predictable waltz of suffering, choked consciousness and monstrosity adds little to the problematic subset of camp-themed World War II movies, which feel like nostalgia for hell.

Technology may have changed, cyber-crime may be all the rage, but the narrative song remains the same in films like this, and it's a tune this director knows by heart.

There is just enough in Comet to keep it from fizzling out entirely – largely in the performances of Long and Rossum – but its conceits also get in the way of its characters, making it feel fussy and convoluted when it aims for something more simple and elegant.

Elba brings care to the film’s performances, period look and musical elements. But the freeze frames, needless voice-over bits and stalled narrative momentum undercut the picture’s potential power and uniqueness.

A deeper dive into Szeles’ ostensibly complex psychological makeup might have given the movie more heft, though Szeles, magician that he is, clearly remains more about the illusion than the reveal.

With its moments of comic relief overly exaggerated and at odds with its realistic tone, Dorian Blues is at its best at its most serious.

Filled with unrealized possibilities and fraught with flaws, Final Destination seems destined to be little more than a footnote in the anthology of extraordinary films to come out of the long creative collaboration between producer Merchant, director James Ivory and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala.

While its flaws are considerable, the Holocaust-themed thriller Remember benefits mightily from a quietly commanding Christopher Plummer performance that almost makes you forget the wonky plot logic.

A sophisticated, sometimes intentionally silly spy thriller of international intrigue, Fay Grim charts the history of American foreign policy while commenting on current global complications with wink and a nudge.

There is very little about the hoary conventions of The Mothman Prophecies that couldn't be improved by a little levity, a little more sunlight and some judicious cutting.

Though it has loftier aims, it is in reality strictly a film made by believers for believers. It's like the Discovery Channel version of the Greatest Story Ever Told, an earnest, not particularly distinguished piece of work that has none of the touch of the poet that made Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" such a triumph.

By the time Greendale reaches its rousing crescendo with the anthem "Be the Rain" and Young and Crazy Horse have blown off the barn doors, the Canadian-born artist has crafted one genuinely tasty slice of Americana.

Unashamedly silly, inevitably erratic, it has so much fun sending up the world of exploitation filmmaking that even the most serious film student won't be able to suppress a laugh or two. Maybe even more.

A blithe-spirited comedy in which teenagers discover their romantic vicissitudes mirrored in their high school production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." It's being directed by their nasty drama teacher (Martin Short, hilarious), who has written 12 original songs for the production.

Like the original, Blade II has superior production values and visual and special effects. Snipes and Kristofferson build on the resonance of their original portrayals.

In working with Lynne Adams' script, Shalhoub, the esteemed star of the current USA series "Monk," gives his cast the inspiration and confidence to express the characters' many facets and seeming contradictions.

Even when the story doesn’t pop, Ryder is terrific.

Sometimes Wolf is slight, relying on mystery and metaphor to build suspense, but Biancheri’s sense of narrative adventure imbues this survivalist picture with more than uneasiness. She gives it tenderness.

Lynskey, Ellis, and Jackson are charming enough to buoy this lightly dramatic tale, but with a laid-back energy the stakes are never quite high enough. “Little Boxes” offers tame social commentary in a pleasant package.

Try as it does to mash slasher and Christmas picture together into some kind of a yuletide “Scream,” “It’s a Wonderful Knife” so badly miscalculates both genres that you count down the minutes, wishing for a guardian angel to save its likable young stars from the movie they’re stuck in.

Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.

An endearing, affectionately humorous and even lyrical depiction of the dawning of adolescence amid the privileged, yet Jennifer Flackett's script, for all its sheen, is problematic.

For all its questionable creative choices, Moby Doc is at least more personal and daring than the typical music documentary. This is the movie equivalent of Moby’s discography, with highs and lows tied directly to its creator’s own embarrassing slip-ups and sublime moments of grace.

The film is a persistent spectacle of audio-visual mood and twee posturing: Strange musical currencies underscore almost every scene, and Logan's acts of scoping and cocooning, in and out of Joey's planetary-themed bedroom, are punctuated with fuzzy video of animals on the hunt.

It stands well on its own as a jumpy spookfest.

Nostalgia and blues buffs who missed that lively film ("Cadillac Records") could do worse than this entertaining, if sometimes slight, revisit directed by Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks.

Aniston and Bateman keep things both light and dark when they should, and Robinson's Sebastian steals everyone's heart.

Citizen Koch is pure advocacy doc: brisk and clear-eyed, to be sure, but not likely to surprise headline-savvy moviegoers or angered progressives.

Don't let the cheesy title deter you. Cuban Fury is a thoroughly engaging crowd-pleaser — sweet, quite amusing and even a tad inspiring.

Unexpectedly, the film best serves as a cautionary anecdote that epitomizes the mutual apprehension between Internet-age start-ups and establishment media.

Peddle has more in mind than creating a stylized mood. His first narrative feature makes some astute observations about adolescence and identity, including that of the culturally shifting American South, in a way that is at once immediate and timeless.

In the end, Prieto's Pusher feels like a Guy Ritchie knockoff.

Numbing but not boring, it's finally more dispiriting than exhilarating, like a wild night of debauchery that leaves only a fearsome hangover for a souvenir.

Even with a cut-and-dried approach to characterization and the issue of man-made consciousness, The Machine percolates with an elegantly palpable sense of wonder and danger.

The Lodgers isn't especially frightening, but as the story of people weighed down by their legacies, it is genuinely haunting.

It’s a pleasure to see Butler do his thing opposite a talented array of international performers — Fazal and Fimmel are standouts — and stretch his specific set of skills into more complex contemporary storytelling, making “Kandahar” worth the trip

Working from a screenplay by Douglas Soesbe that juggles contrivance and insight, Montiel labors to avoid sensationalizing Nolan's story, and in the process he overcompensates.

A chronological brain-teaser confounding enough to keep you busy trying to figure out whether those holes are in the story or in your logic. But ultimately the movie is more interested in the love part of the equation than in the whole crazy, madcap physics part.

This isn't merely a horror film about things going bump in the night, but a study of the effects of desolation on our sense of personal consciousness.

Some of the language is smart, sinister and ironic in just the right ways, particularly when Addison, Eric Bana's serial-killing mastermind, delivers it. In other cases, the dialogue is so ludicrously off - either unnecessary, or unnecessarily misogynistic if a cop is doing the talking - that it's hard to believe the same person wrote it.

Director Natalia Leite brings an emotional intelligence and sensitivity to Bare that raises it above its smutty late-night cable premise of a small-town girl falling into a lesbian affair and exploring the world of stripping.

The Dark clicks (which is often), it’s a moving and poetic tale about how neglect and abuse can turn people into freaky beasts, and how love can bring them back.

All and all, it adds up to a delightful, unpretentious movie, hands down the richest work Whoopi Goldberg has done on the screen.

Christie’s story, one of her finest, is hard to screw up, even when Branagh and his returning screenwriter, Michael Green, seem bent on proving otherwise. Their movie is an often fussy, hectic confusion of old-timey pleasures and 21st century sensibilities, a mash-up that makes for some especially incongruous visual choices.

The idea of Bean fitting into this situation, even disastrously, requires more than suspension of disbelief. It requires a full blackout of reasoning. But for the converted, and for people with a low threshold for visual comedy, Bean amounts to a hill of laughs.

A tale that's sweet-natured, funny and surprisingly touching.

Not only is it Merchant's best directorial effort to date but also is among the finest films the Merchant Ivory company has ever made.

Despite its good intentions, Spirit is more self-conscious and uninspiring from a dramatic point of view than one might have wished. Still, whenever it threatens to get bogged down in earnest dramaturgy, a stirring visual sequence -- rouses us.

An illuminating and engrossing look at the life and times of pioneer Los Angeles physique photographer Bob Mizer

You walk out in the depressing realization that you’ve just seen one of the more interesting movies Marvel will ever make, and hopefully the least interesting one Chloé Zhao will ever make.

47 Meters Down doesn't have the campy sparkle that made “The Shallows” a cult hit, but it's the kind of cheesy thriller that's good for a few jumps and a few chuckles at its own silliness.

Within the confines of a straight-ahead, handsomely designed and photographed biopic beats the heart of a more adventurous presentation of Holiday’s tragic life. It’s hinted at in Day’s performance, the dreamlike memory sequences and a cheeky, meta-coda that plays out during the end credits but never quite pierces the film’s more varnished surfaces.

About 33 minutes in, I couldn't help but think, if they do another close-up of your watch as it tick, tick, ticks toward another three, I will scream. But honestly, any screaming should be directed at Paul Haggis, who both wrote and directed this mess.

Despite a high-powered cast and a zany/trendy concept, hardly anyone’s home in Housesitter. The result is much ado about too little, an occasionally amusing screwball farce made by people whose screws are barely loose at all.

Irresistibly funny… Just about the best holiday gift imaginable. [23 Dec 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]

The plot is lean, the dialogue is spare and there are some intriguing stabs at intellectual and emotional terrain. But the pacing is deadly, so slow there might be time for a catnap or two without missing anything important.

The French have a knack for it. They've been making funny and agreeable movie farces for forever, and seeing The Women on the 6th Floor makes you hope they'll never stop.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.

That the plot is the problem comes as something of a surprise given Monahan's pedigree. The well-regarded screenwriter ("Body of Lies," "Kingdom of Heaven") won an Oscar for the deliciously conflicted cops and crime twister of 2006's "The Departed."

There may be an intriguing, perhaps even profound story behind Smith’s growth as a singular artist and woman, but director Elvira Lind keeps too much on the surface, making it hard to invest in Smith’s often esoteric, self-centered journey

As cinema or literature, Murder on the Orient Express may be little more than a clever parlor trick. But in its final moments, even this overstuffed, underachieved movie offers a morally unsettling reminder that — with apologies to Chandler — the art of murder isn’t always as simple as it appears.

The loneliness of the long-distance chess grandmaster is affectingly conveyed in Magnus.

The animals are impossibly adorable, but never threaten to upset the film's delicate balance between magic and a more sobering reality. It's a fairy tale in the best tradition.

DamNation is certainly a picturesque splash of doc advocacy, as long as you don't dwell on the cracks.

In all his athletic scenes, leaping through doors, leaping between uptown and downtown trains, leaping on an assortment of villains, Swayze is just fine. It's the movie's big cosmic questions that throw him; for these he's reduced to a look of total stupefaction--not the movie's finest moments. [13 July 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]

Sarah Snook gives a riveting performance as a mother going mad in Run Rabbit Run, a psychological thriller that’s mostly effective, even though its story is familiar and somewhat threadbare.

That rare zombie movie with actual scares.

Unfortunately, Electric Dreams has another thing in common with most rock videos: It’s strong on music and visual effects, while somewhat lacking in story development.

There's hardly a moment in Three Amigos that isn't silly--make that incredibly, outrageously and breathtakingly silly. Maybe that's why this tale of a trio of inept silent-movie stars turned real-life heroes is such a goofy delight. It's like a cross between a big-budget Three Stooges movie and a Hope-Crosby road picture, with dozens of old cowpoke gags thrown in to spice up the brew.

While this return to indie roots frees up Lee's often gifted image making, his usual pace issues and penchant for jagged flourish over sustained feeling keep it from achieving a rich, strange, sexy and sad whole.

A superbly shot film of emotional extravagance, sentimentality and even humor, House of Fools is a film that is ultimately quite moving but which probably could only have been pulled off by a director steeped in that famous Russian soul.

Directed by Olivier Dahan, Isabelle Huppert takes the most familiar type of material and attains impeccable results.

LaBute can't avoid a fatal mistake in the modern era: He's changed the male academic from a lower-class Brit to an American, a choice that upsets the novel's exquisite balance and shreds the fabric of the film, corrupting all of LaBute's good work and robbing it of the impact it would otherwise have.

Only really kicks in when it is dancing, which is about half the time.

Halloween: H20 is as stylish and scary as it is ultra-violent. It's a work of superior craftsmanship in all aspects.

A blithe and unapologetic fairy tale about affairs of the heart, it's a spun-sugar confection that's so light and airy it threatens to simply float away.

Smart and sassy high school movie that's fun for all ages.