What it's really about, of course, is the very delicate marketing problem of turning a super-bland pop star into an acceptable human being onscreen. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]

Carrey, unable to pretzel himself in this role, has to do a normal job of characterization, but he never fills in the blank spaces in Peter Appleton. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power.

The whole enterprise heaves and strains with a sadistic overkill that even Dario might find too rich.

The funniest thing about The Women is that Mick Jagger is one of the producers.

This shameless piece of sentimentality is indignantly on the side of feelings and spontaneity and against coldhearted technique, as if those were the only two choices in training doctors.

Madonna's mess of a movie grabs at the rub and rancor of multiculturalism, which it proceeds to squash into a litter of clichés, or, more simply, insults.

I saw Brooks’s Fever Pitch when it came out, and was instantly smitten...Fever Pitch still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it.

Parts of Bangkok Dangerous, far from seeming unfamiliar or freshly stylized, offer nothing that you couldn't catch in an episode of "CSI."

The director, Frank Marshall, who has produced films for Steven Spielberg, gets his own Michael Crichton book to play with—and the results are disastrous.

The only thing that Butler and Aniston have in common, however, is identical Aruba-bronze skin tones: they seem to have been sprayed with the same can.

This is a certifiably loony picture; it's so bad it puts you in a state of shock.

Travel-folder footage of Rio mixed with father-daughter incest (in a disguised form)...Most of the movie is an attempt to squirm out from under its messy erotic-parental subject.

This picture seems ingenious at the start, but Crichton can't write people, and he directs like a technocrat. This is the emptiest of his pictures to date.

Compare 88 Minutes with "Sea of Love," another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation.

The sheer ineptitude of the movie is supposed to be funny, but there's no lunacy behind it: Shore and his writers are like comedians on Prozac, smiling through the fart jokes without a hint of desperation.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.

The film is at the same time intensely personal and riddled with occasionally cringe-inducing clichés. No matter: Rockaway is an agonized and sharply moving film.

By means of suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Patrick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is provided.

Despite the merely functional reticence of Glowicki’s direction, along with the narrow scope of the drama, Tito is an instant classic of acting.

Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.

For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.

Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

In Rewind & Play, Gomis does more than reveal the discussion that didn’t see the light of day in 1970; he reveals the cinematic methods by which the fabricated and tailored view of Monk’s life and work were crafted.

Lodkina borrows one of the most familiar of young filmmakers’ tropes—the drama of a film student struggling to complete a thesis film—and transforms it into something as original as it is personal.

In short, this film is what would remain if you deleted all the spaceships from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the tale of a once ordinary man beset by an unworldly thirst that he can neither explain nor quench.

The film’s own style may feel more prosaic than the poetic, but it’s awfully irresistible prose; its most conventional element, a plaintively beautiful musical theme composed by Tommy Wai, is also its most emotionally effective. Yet Hui does infuse a wistful poetry into her filmmaking