Nelson's amiable comedy occasionally gets fixated on things that don't serve its overall purpose and is too self-conscious to really shine. But it's a more competent, accessible film than its stealthy theatrical release suggests.

Despite the fine performances by leads Lena Headey (Game of Thrones), who has herself long been active in refugee causes, and Ivanno Jeremiah (AMC's Humans), The Flood lacks the narrative urgency needed to make watching it feel like more than a slog.

Berg's movie is no more than an action movie with an exotic backdrop. That would be fine, if only the movie were more exciting. It succeeds neither as a pointed political commentary nor as a taut thriller.

Imagine a Kiwi spaghetti western filtered through the offbeat sensibilities of early Sam Raimi or the Coen brothers and you've pretty much got the picture that is Good for Nothing.

While both plots work reasonably well separately, they're unnecessarily padded and don't tie together strongly. As a result, the film doesn't achieve its goal of its sum being bigger than its parts.

While there’s much to enjoy here – particularly in the touching performance of Hiam Abbass – there’s also plenty that is cliched and forced.

It helps immeasurably that Gainsbourg, as an actress, is as intense as her presence feels evanescent, always seemingly onto the next moment already, leaving everyone in her wake.

Art doc's stylistic quirks detract slightly from a sometimes fascinating portrait.

There are instances where you can see the director experimenting and attempting to disturb Disney’s imposing order, deploying close-ups, almost ground-level pans and strategically sweeping views to find warmth and tactility within a cold technique.

Star Daniel Radcliffe will be the biggest draw here, but the pic's focus on planning and genre mechanics over personalities may limit its appeal for his fans.

Minions: The Rise of Gru gives fans more of what they’ve come to expect, mainly Gru acting evilly, the Minions acting stupidly, and enough clever gags that will fly over its target audiences’ heads but keep their adult chaperones from dozing off.

The Night We Never Met takes a TV sitcom premise and expands on it with practically every cliche known to Hollywood. The result is a cutesy, unbelievable film loaded with charm, but void of substance, and which is barely saved by the likability of stars Matthew Broderick and Annabella Sciorra. [29 Apr 1993]

Long regarded as unfilmable, Patrick Suskind's 1985 novel "Perfume" has finally reached the screen in a blockbuster production that succeeds reasonably well in achieving what many said was beyond the scope of cinema: conveying the world of scent and smell.

It's a certified B-movie without superheroes or interplanetary travel, drawing its power from a whodunit, race-against-the-clock scenario that plays as if The Lady Vanishes and Strangers on a Train were chopped up and tossed into the blender along with a slab of CGI and a full bottle of Dexedrine.

All of this mayhem keeps us watching, but it would be hard to describe the experience as pleasurable.

A worthy title for cable nets scheduling hard-hitting documentary fare

Scott Thomas is an accomplished actress who can do passion as well as she can do light comedy. But she never quite convinces as a woman prepared to endure every humiliation to pursue her dream of a new life.

Jeon is played to perfection by the director himself. The spare script effectively funnels audience attention into him, who is never less than engaging.

Despite a premise with broad appeal and a script boasting plenty of laughs among its misfires, the high school fable falters.

The historical overview they provide is insightful and lucid, yet their polished production intermittently lapses into dry chronology while they bury the lead.

Thankfully, the screenplay doesn’t portray the story in simple terms of good or evil, but that doesn’t mean that there’s quite enough nuance or insight to constantly elevate the material above the level of a well-made-but-TV-ready biopic.

An evocative portrait of strained friendships and creative turmoil.

The well-chosen profile subjects prove both engaging and sympathetic in their fears and desires, giving the film a much-needed emotional resonance.

The doc's poignant heart is in observing how ACORN's most dedicated members have pushed to continue doing good after it was forced to close its doors.

That the documentary United States vs. Reality Winner achieves its primary goals makes it a fairly successful film. That it achieves those goals while relying tediously on almost all of the genre’s most overused formal devices, offering shockingly little variation from countless other docs you’ve seen on similar subjects, makes it a so-so film.

Though hardly a failure, the serious-minded work is less affecting than it might've been, relying sometimes on hints that are needlessly ambiguous and on symbols that don't quite click.

While we can readily identify these characters, we can't identify with them simply because Hill never bothers to tell us what makes them tick.

The film is a textured portrait of human beings and the jobs they do, offering scant commentary but much to chew on, not to mention plenty of laughs -- no small feat in a movie dedicated to something as dry sounding as “public radio.”

Byington's two-chuckle-a-minute script is mostly interested in Larry's constant, evasive patter, which continues whether the target of his words appears to care what he's saying or not.

If Chambermaid lacks the dramatic push to carry it through to the end, Seydoux’s performance remains robust and engaging throughout.

The film bears an undeniable stamp of authenticity in its depiction of the romantic crisis suffered by two twentysomethings in New York's ever picturesque Greenwich Village.

There's a good deal of pleasure to draw from some of these bonding moments, especially among vets who haven't seen each other for years, but not enough to justify overshadowing the movie's other elements.

Poehler's adept at showcasing not just the comic gifts of her cast, whose decades-long friendships began in improv theaters and at SNL, but also the joyful vamping that connects their characters.

Despite the sometimes clumsy exposition, Lyrebird turns out to be an enjoyable melodrama.

All the nervy cutting, the pirouetting pans and off-kilter angles, the dexterous split-screen and the bombardment of eclectic music cues — many of them dropped in with archly emphatic force — can only distract from the lack of depth for so long.

It can impress with its utter originality and technical know-how, but there’s so much going on for so long that many viewers will be exhausted by the midway point, if not earlier.

Although Weigert is convincing as Abby, Passon's attitude toward the character is hazy.

It’s an impressive debut, an ambitious project pulled off with confidence.

It attempts to walk the fine line between despair and comedy, reality and imagination, and often succeeds. For audiences prepared to take the leap of faith and accept the unusual tone of the film, Game 6 should be a winner. Others may wonder what the fuss is about.

If the part of the film devoted to endurance lacks the harrowing power of, say, 2013's All Is Lost, it at least gives Woodley the opportunity to convincingly sink her teeth into a plum dramatic lead role as a young woman fighting fiercely against the forces of nature (instead of a dystopian civilization).

That the film proves engrossing throughout is due largely to Michael Dorman (For All Mankind), in the central role of Jesse.

Ultimately goes the distance, it gets the job done with a halfhearted bunt rather than a solid line drive.

Jolie deserves significant credit for creating such a powerfully oppressive atmosphere and staging the ghastly events so credibly, even if it is these very strengths that will make people not want to watch what's onscreen.

Taken together, the shorts offer some scraps on Berger the man and the artist and thinker without really supplying a full overview, while also exploring some of his main preoccupations in ways that would benefit from at least some prior knowledge of his work.

Its elegant subtlety feels refreshing in this era of over-the-top horror films.

Buried somewhere deep inside this phony, flashy movie there are thoughtful questions of racial identity, ingrained social perceptions, environmental conditioning and codes of masculinity. . . . But any thematic coherence is sacrificed to stylistic showboating that keeps taking us out of the story.

With the exception of a few unpredictable moments from Zooey Deschanel and Will Ferrell, Winter Passing finds only cliche as it reaches for profundity.

Tag is neither bad nor good, but rather, despite its out-there story, almost numbingly ordinary: an easy, breezy action-com that’s sometimes amusing but rarely funny, competent rather than inspired.

The loggerhead turtle's journey is indeed incredible. But you would rather the narration, delivered intelligently by Miranda Richardson, didn't feel a need to remind you of this fact so frequently.

None of the other economic gurus of the era is interviewed, so the film comes across as a 90-minute monologue, which is intriguing to a point but also wearying.

Director Underwood's ethereal and spirited touch lifts this frothy blend to its fullest, most pleasing dimension. [2 Aug 1993]

Neither Baranov nor Putin — nor the many oligarchs, whether dead or alive — are the protagonists of The Wizard of the Kremlin, whose main character is ultimately Russia itself. In that sense, Assayas has crafted an ambitious chronicle that serves up plenty of compelling facts, but never turns them into the stuff of legend.

What’s nice about Migration is how, between the comedic bits and tangential adventures, it never loses sight of the lessons embedded in the Mallards’ story.

Julie Taymor's visual gifts are very much in evidence in Across the Universe, an ambitious, only partly successful attempt to reinvigorate the musical genre.

The film's unrelenting bleakness and misanthropic tone is likely to be a turnoff to mainstream performances, but it provides its lead actor with another opportunity to display his riveting intensity.

A film with some real stunning visual highlights but a narrative throughline that feels patchy and unbalanced.

While Jackass 3D can never be accused of stinting on its spring-loaded arsenal of projectile bodily fluids, neither does it approach that sublime, laugh-until-it-hurts level of gross-out nirvana that made the first two installments so darned irresistible.

John Waters has returned to trashy form with what is unquestionably his most outrageous film since those heady "Pink Flamingos" days.

No subtext goes unexplained, and at times the score underlines what we already know. But the actors always find the grace notes, and there are sparks in the way everyday exchanges turn sharp with compassion. There are welcome laughs too, particularly in Bracco’s grump-meister line readings.

Although the film’s dark humor and colorful, thriller aesthetics provide some juicy material at the beginning, its overindulgence in chatter, fornication and occasional gore feels too blatant to make Sono’s social commentary run anywhere but skin-deep.

A film that lingers in the memory in spite of being rather irritating to watch.

Transporter 2 really does deliver the goods.

Credit a rock solid turn by lead Jon Hamm that doesn’t shy away from revealing a darker underbelly to his underdog character, as well as a keenly-observed script by Tom McCarthy and deft direction by Craig Gillespie for the rewarding changeup.

It’s a decent concept for any sort of movie – a thriller, a horror flick, a comedy – but the problem here is that writer-director Joe Martin never quite decides which one he wants to make.

Wears its righteous indignation and good intentions on its sleeve but its simplistic, heavy handed treatment of a complex issue gives it the weight of a contrived movie of the week melodrama.

A niche theatrical run might draw fans of Goldthwait's previous work, this effort isn't likely to get as much help from critics as those sometimes did.

The doc has little to say about the Michelin ranking system that hasn't been said, but offers enough behind-the-scenes interest to entertain foodies and inspire a few additions to their dining-experience bucket lists.

Davey’s tortuous emotional distress, while generically relatable, seems more appropriate to a younger teen rather than a young woman who’s practically a college freshman. This curious disjunction impacts the performances as well, which are adequate but rarely persuasive.

By focusing so narrowly on religious fundamentalists and bigots while ignoring any spiritual dimension to religion, the film is not only being disingenuous but limits its audience to non-believers.

A wedding comedy that grows increasingly unfunny with each passing minute.

Unfortunately, the talented actor, while delivering a fiercely compelling performance, is let down by the formulaic screenplay by David McKenna, who explored similarly abrasive territory with such previous efforts as "American History X" and "Blow."

Spends too much time on unconvincing romantic-comedy contrivances to be consistently engaging. Throughout the uneven film and its mixed bag of performances, the compelling point of focus is Diane Keaton's smart, funny, spot-on natural portrait of the formidable Stone matriarch.

Even while gesturing toward a redemptive sacred altar, a default mode for parenthood in many mainstream movies, the director lets the messy realities stand. And his fine cast makes them ring true — the selfishness and neglect, the confrontations brutal and tender, the pained silences and, not least, the gusts of pure, jagged joy.

Bad Match clearly only aspires to be a thriller with a surprise or two up its sleeve. On that front, it's adequate.

Clearly weighted towards Gitai's own liberal political stance, but incorporating a range of other views too, West of the Jordan River is a dry and sometimes depressing film, but informative and humane too.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 gets the job done, and should provide entertaining diversion for families during the holiday season.

Part zombie movie, part apocalyptic bioterror, part military conspiracy thriller, the refit hybrid doesn't stint on the visceral kicks demanded by contemporary audiences while remaining reasonably true to those Romero roots.

Too often coming across as an elaborate home movie, the doc would have benefited from its story being told by a more experienced filmmaker who was less emotionally involved in the proceedings.

It's mildly enjoyable while you're watching it, but as with all such outings, you'll have a hard time remembering it the next day.

A sensitive but not sentimental story about a romance involving a mentally challenged young man never makes a misstep.

Maybe Roth was too busy paying tribute to all his childhood influences to take the necessary steps, but even in this uneasy era of SARS and other airborne horrors, his flesh-eating virus movie never convincingly gets under the skin.

The finish, too, is enigmatic, but in the hands of Hodges, with his masterful touch in conveying how deep run the rivers of regret, I'll Sleep When I'm Dead may take its place with "Get Carter" as a classic British gangster film.

Filled with devastating statistics documenting the devastating effects of climate change on the planet, the film takes particular aim at CEOs, or “greedy lying bastards,” of the oil and gas corporations which are contributing to the crisis.

Rahim has a great face but isn’t given enough opportunity to make it clear to audiences what his character is going through beyond the most basic emotions.

Pike creates an admirable if flawed Marie whose graceful womanhood battles with her fears of being exploited or bypassed for her gender.

A perfectly agreeable, if limited, piece of work.

Owens’ triumph is long overdue for big-screen treatment, and director Stephen Hopkins delivers stirring moments amid the tension-free stretches, particularly once the action moves to Berlin.

This navel-gazing epic is maddeningly distancing at almost every turn, lacking the spiritual and existential breadth of even Reygadas’ most impenetrable work. Running a prolix three hours, it feels like being trapped in somebody else’s crisis unfolding in real time.

Webber’s key influence appears to be ultra-naturalistic contemporary European cinema, most specifically French, and The End of Love hits that mark often enough to make it affecting.

Despite the solid work of cast and crew, the film dawdles and fails to justify its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Midnight reaches its tender conclusion without ever achieving the emotional or dramatic heft that such an epic tale requires.

Alice Englert expertly finds the line between satire and sincerity, mocking the slipperiness of the spiritual-enlightenment industry while acknowledging the serious intentions of the people — in this case very well-heeled customers — who think it’s at least worth a try.

Stewart, selected for Marylou five years ago on the basis of her striking debut in "Into the Wild," is perfect in the role, takes off her clothes more than once and nearly always seems to be breaking a sweat, which kicks the sexiness quotient up high.

You're Not You isn't entirely successful in avoiding a television movie-style predictability in its depiction of its central character's incapacitating illness. But its superb performances and emotional complexity ultimately elevate its familiar themes.

The only factor that keeps the outcome from being a grand success is the film's script. It's hampered by its focus on a pivotal character with so few redeeming graces that the movie never grabs interest, or emotions, as effectively as it should. [20 Sep 1991]

Overlong, willfully obscure and scatologically extreme, the film will elicit a variety of negative responses despite offering some individual elements that, on their own, would surely impress any of Barney's admirers. The work simultaneously is more fully realized and less creatively inspired than the Cremaster cycle.

[Beller's] deep-rooted empathy and compassion is plainly evident in her latest effort, but it's not enough to compensate for the tedium engendered by the meandering debates whose impact ultimately adds up to very little.

Adams is reason enough to see it anyway in a performance that gives us intimate access to her character’s fears and anxieties.

Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse never find a reason for those unfamiliar with the graphic novel to care about any of this nonsense. And it is nonsense.