A couple of heavyweight actors — Tim Roth and Cillian Murphy — get top billing, but this British drama belongs to young Eloise Laurence, memorable as Skunk, the diabetic daughter of Roth’s kindly solicitor.

It's moody and atmospheric. But with the exception of a few cool moments that remind you of Ferrara at his best, it's dull and written with little attention paid to basic storytelling.

Unfortunately, the film turns out to be not quite as twisty as promised: it’s less a pretzel than it is a Cheez Curl. And I do mean cheez: The resolution, when it comes, is wholly lacking in nutritional value.

Thereare moving moments in this over-hyped satire by the Israeli-Arab writer-director-actor Elia Suleiman, and it's fascinating to get a picture of daily life in prosperous Palestinian neighborhoods.

Much of the action is strident and cartoonish -- but the romance at the core remains tender and true.

Worthwhile mainly because of "Inside Out," a 28-minute autobiographical film written, directed and starring Jason Gould, who not-so-incidentally is Barbra Streisand's son.

Claiming that from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, the US government has misled the public - and the media - on the reasons for going to war.

Mongol really isn't worth leaving your yurt for.

Agonizingly slow-moving and talky, it consists primarily of conversations between two men in a truck.

The quality of the acting, Cave's hellfire score and the heavy atmospherics of the directing merely dress up a cliché: Violence leads to more violence.

Nowhere near as funny as you’d expect with its stellar cast.

The cast, so packed with talent that Jean Reno and Cherry Jones barely register, is stuck with stagey dialogue. Juliet Rylance, in the Nina part, has a particularly hard time. But there are good points, including Janney’s obvious pleasure in her part.

A genially scattershot mockumentary.

The movie begins to wear out its welcome even before a conclusion of breathtaking corniness.

Chism’s characters are pleasingly odd, and though she can’t string much of a narrative together — there is a stop-and-start quality to the picture that grows tiresome — a few of the set pieces are funny.

The movie was largely improvised, which lends itself more to scenes than a feature-length film.

A Walk in the Woods is broad as a barn door, with two stars who have minimal chemistry — and there’s not much in the way of reflection about mortality.

Stevens has a keen sense of the absurd, but the whole thing is too forced - and his use of "rotomation" (last used in Richard Linklater's "Waking Life") to give a Timothy Leary-swirl to key dramatic moments winds up looking incongruous.

Farahani determinedly underplays her character, and is often very touching. But while there is a satisfying final scene, The Patience Stone is essentially a monologue, and Atiq Rahimi (directing the adaptation of his own novel) doesn’t have what it takes to make the story more dynamic.

The photographs on view are dazzling; the way they are shown here is somewhat less so.

Tried to turn this into a replay of its 2000 military-rescue hitBlack Hawk Down -- though, in the end, it's almost totally lacking in the serious hardware and viscerally paced action that propelled Ridley Scott's movie to the top of the box office.

Like the artificially sweetened junk food it is, this all goes down pretty easily.

A good edit would have allowed the film's worthy, obviously heartfelt, message to shine.

Late August, Early September is less a living, breathing movie than a dry exercise in theory. [07 Jul 1999, p.048]

Rebecca Hall is wasted as Sandvig's sister and the film's voice of reason.

The Rock is funny and charismatic in “Hobbs & Shaw,” and his bro chemistry with co-star Jason Statham is a joy. The pair slinging vicious insults at each other is almost vaudevillian — it would make a decent live tour. And then there’s the rest of the movie.

The actors can't escape the confines of the warmed-over, coming-of-age-in-suburbia script by Mills, from a novel by Walter Kirn.

Suffers from a lack of focus and a sitcom script.