A rollicking tale of rehabilitation and redemption, rife with cool special effects, Hancock is smart and surprisingly raunchy.

I'm ripping up my Lars Von Trier fan club card.

Easily the best 1975 B-movie made in 2005, Four Brothers is a raucously entertaining vigilante film.

Art-directed within an inch of its life, Sleuth has the smirky gloss of a project that everyone involved with thinks is terribly good, and terribly clever. These people - Branagh, Pinter, Law and the usually great Caine (even in bad stuff) - are laboring under an epic misconception. Sleuth is just terrible.

A temptation that can be easily and safely resisted.

MacDowell brings an absolutely riveting conviction to her role. She's strong stuff in a movie that is likewise gripping and powerful.

A kind of Tracy/Hepburn rom-com with a "Dead Poets Society" backdrop and dollops of human failing for added drama, Words and Pictures stars Clive Owen and Juliette Binoche - a matchup that makes you want to like Fred Schepisi's film, even when it becomes impossible to do so.

Franco, the hollow-cheeked, pouty-lipped actor best known as Spider-Man's nemesis Harry Osborn, plays Tristan like a biker boy with a broadsword.

A movie that provokes as many rueful sighs as it does bruising laughs.

Her (Angela Ismailos) generic questions about the politics, economics, and aesthetics of film yield predictably generic responses from her subjects.

Purely as an action film, Riddick is passable, if grueling. The problem is tonal.

What could have been an amusing and entertaining zombie flick is, instead, a slog.

It's a stylish package with not much inside.

Not even Chan's imaginative fight choreography redeems this folly.

Boasts exciting competitive track cycling footage.

An atmospheric Argentine thriller starring Viggo Mortensen in twin roles (literally), Everybody Has a Plan is in the vein of, if not on the same plane as, Michelangelo Antonioni's "The Passenger."

The film's atmosphere is incendiary. It has style to burn. But for the most part, the performances are all wet.

Among contemporary films, fans will recognize extensive borrowings from Terminator and Alien. But Donaldson makes sure we wind up with something more than Alienator: Species shrewdly manipulates some very modern fears of deadly sexual infection and touches a paranoia unimaginable back in the '50s. [07 July 1995, p.03]

Everything about An Unfinished Life's screenplay is cliched and predictable, but the actors manage to elevate the proceedings above and beyond shameless soap.

May not be great cinema, but it nonetheless deserves attention.

Was it just three years ago that Perry made his feature debut with "Diary of a Mad Black Woman?" Then his filmmaking was strictly amateur; now his sweeping pans and portentous closeups approach those of Pedro Almódovar.

At 24 minutes, Lola Versus might be a middling episode of a sitcom like "New Girl." At 87 minutes, it is a gracefully aimed arrow shot in the air. Where it lands, Wein and Lister Jones know not where.

Utterly charmless - there's not even a glimmer.

Sadly, the combination of gauzy photography and cheesy music gives the film the aura of a fragrance commercial.

A spectacle where A-list talent strives mightily to elevate a C-plus effort.

Eisenberg (who starred in director Fleischer's far better Zombieland) does his usual Eisenbergian thing, more slacker and less hacker, but still hitting the same notes. And Ansari squawks and yelps, like a parrot with a grudge.

Jackson gets by mostly on bluster, but that doesn't matter because he serves mostly as a foil to Mac's popeyed shake-and-bake antics.

The plot is canny, but it would be little more than an ingenious springloaded device were it not for the performances by Howard and Iures.