A manufactured kid-in-jeopardy climax and Blake’s rehab stint blow the mood. Until then, this is great American acting.

It would be risible if Ozon’s hand didn’t remain so steady and confident throughout, all the way up to a complicatedly upbeat conclusion that recreates the Christian Annunciation with the straightest of faces.

It’s a movie that tips toward overkill--even Ronan’s voice is amplified into a weird whisper. More quiet would have helped.

The movie isn’t adventurous, but I’m sure glad it exists.

Christopher Isherwood’s seminal queer novel deserves a film adaptation that captures both its sense of place and its activist spirit. Cowriter-director Tom Ford settles for the glossy ephemera of a Vanity Fair cover spread.

It’s likely that only Herzog would dare to, and succeed at, resolving this singular cinematic object by contemplating the fate of an abandoned basketball.

The film is set in a celeb-owned Miami restaurant and many of the gags--exploding entrees, the swallowing of a diamond ring, on-the-job drunkenness--feel like leftovers.

Antal and his performers’ pure B-movie esprit is undeniable.

It takes a long time for Brothers to become the movie it wants to be, and even then, it stumbles.

Reitman, who also cowrote the screenplay, feels the constant need to "deepen" his characters, granting them wants and motivations--especially during the moralistic third act--that are totally alien to how they're initially portrayed.

Has neither enough bite nor enough heart to sustain it as a female-revenge-fantasy-cum-romantic-comedy; even its “shocking” switcheroo and faux-edgy moments seem remarkably frivolous and flavorless.

Plainspoken music doc relies on firsthand testimony from band members and key observers.

Even supremely talented actors like Melissa Leo (as a confidently sexy trucker) and Brendan Sexton III (as a train-station beggar) are stifled by all the pseudo-redemptive mush.

Provides more groans than laughs.

Working with uneven material, the illustrious cast is too often stranded in a realm of tony, high-art camp.

An economic slump is no reason to settle for this junked-up, unintentionally depressing "Office Space" bootleg.

Dramatically handcuffed and smothered in overbearing mood music, this lightweight New York crime thriller is desperate to look and feel gritty; the cast, meanwhile, deliver vein-popping diatribes between clenched teeth and weep openly in a desperate ploy to earn gravitas.

For better or worse, that detour into proverbial uncharted waters ends up hipchecking a by-the-book hagiography into the realm of compellingly cracked vérité.

The problem is that the film also refuses to move beyond a glacial pace, and its choice to go slow-and-low doesn’t scream art-house aesthetic so much as unintentionally sluggish. For such a small character study, that decision ends up being a doozy of a deal breaker.

It’s a gut-wrenching yet redemptive tale of fathers, sons and the horrors of war, which Marder allows to unfold with minimal intrusion or manipulation.

The problem here, though, is that the movie often feels fat instead of lean. A terribly purple folk score by Kate and Anna McGarrigle hypes the spiritual aspects of the Inuit way of life; you’ll die laughing on the tundra.

Terrific performances and superb cinematography (by Claire Denis’s right hand, Agnès Godard) lift cowriter-director Ursula Meier’s feature debut above its thuddingly metaphorical premise.

Adult children and friends watch nervously as Pippa reclaims a measure of spunk; too bad it all feels like one of those pharmaceutical ads for longer, healthier lifestyles.

And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.

Eye-candy–wise, the film plants a big wet smooch; everything else about this happily-ever-after tale, however, feels like a mere air-kiss.

Director James McTeigue (V for Vendetta) films most fights in impenetrable shadow, punctuated by death screams, blood splatters and CGI throwing stars glinting from some unseen light source.

Only the irrepressible Luis Guzmán, stuck in a walk-on bit as the stereotypical mooching Hispanic, is able to milk this cash cow and exit with his dignity intact.

Maybe this is a good time to mention that the director is Richard Linklater, usually a lot more versatile. Try to imagine a version of Linklater’s "School of Rock" that didn’t pivot on the manic music teacher played by Jack Black but instead, perhaps, on his boring roommate.

Neither the film’s main players nor its random period spoofery has any personality.

Is this sequel defending its fan base and preempting criticism about its transparent agenda? This IS a soap opera, folks--and acceptable escapism for those old enough to see it yet still young enough to shriek at undead dreamboats.

It’s just blinkered middle-class pandering at its most shameless.

Cage is not quite Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo in the Big Easy. But his performance hits all the right mythopoetic beats, rising above the thin script and late-night-cable aesthetic.

Watching the new film is like getting upsettingly full on insubstantial tapas: You would never say no to just one more, but there’s better.

Moodysson hasn’t exactly descended to "Babel"-level pabulum with Mammoth, his first foray into English; these characters are too fascinatingly thorny, and he still has a supple way with a pulse-throbbing dance tune.

Like Moore’s modus, Shamir’s stroll is sloppy, but his willingness to tip sacred cows is truly courageous.

Never mind the unreliable Angeleno characters; it’s the director-actor who’s the flakiest, as he’s unable to decide if Fix is a real-time saga of a rebel, a loser or a victim. How many face-lifts can you give a single film?

It’s Shannon’s slow, steady world of hurt that makes the film watchable.

Sokurov, who also acted as director of photography, films the character and his surroundings with the eye of a newly arrived visitor to another world.

It’s a hysterical doc that’s a war on rational, levelheaded analysis.

For all his brilliance with choreography, Woo is flummoxed by the thousands of actual human extras, though there’s no denying his commitment to the finer points of battle tactics (yawn).

The set pieces are grand—gloriously dumb and never realistic enough to make you wince at the fact that billions of microscopic souls are dying before your eyes. Rather, you wince at everything else.

It’s unfortunate that the result is so unaffecting, especially in light of all the things the director does right.

There’s one bright spot amid all the awkward groping and abundant onscreen texting, and his name is Zach Gilford.

The movie does an uncommonly sensitive job probing the psychologies of blocked men, less so the urges of a widow who needs more than comforting words.

The results are often tasteless moments, like Hugh Jackman cackling over footage of an Australian aboriginal ritual scored to techno.

Giggles, not belly laughs, come frequently, and it’ll help if viewers love U.K. comics.

One of the main explanations for our country’s inner-city high-school dropout rate is that public education doesn’t teach skills applicable to life outside the classroom. Director Mary Mazzio’s film, part documentary and part public-service announcement, offers a plausible alternative, which may prompt a discussion of totally revamping standard curriculum.

It’s a dud.

The film slowly loses the sobering toughness of its initial inquiry, and finally comes off as bloodline-biased hagiography.

Even if Women in Trouble didn’t keep bringing to mind a superior artist, the film would still be badly written (DOA tangents about cunnilingus and kink don’t make dialogue edgy, only vulgar), not to mention unevenly paced and an embarrassment to all involved.

"Southland Tales" was a soporific mess, and while The Box (based on material by novelist Richard Matheson) is superior by a certain margin, Kelly derails his newfound discipline with the usual shimmering portals and hazy notions of apocalyptic sacrifice.

Given the months-long hype, what’s most bewildering about Sundance sensation Precious is its overall shrug-worthiness.

Unfortunately, none of the subsequent noise is all that scary, and the striving for "Paranormal Activity’s" buzz is shameless.

The unspoken theme underlying Dickens’s prose--that the money-grubbing Ebenezer is conversing with semblances of his own self--finds near-perfect cinematic expression through Carrey’s efforts.

An unfocused comedy about weird Army pseudoscience, ends up blinking before we laugh.

While this totally impartial approach is admirable, it also robs Collapse of any invested sensibility. Smith has given this bull a stage on which to rage, but why the filmmaker has bothered to mount the platform in the first place is, frustratingly, anybody’s guess.

Fans of "The Wire," take note: Clarke “Lester Freamon” Peters does an impressive turn as Nelson Mandela.

Equal parts Hollywood meet-cute and quirky coming-of-age tale.

The grizzled veteran actor, naturally, elevates the material like a pro, yet the entire exercise feels thin and reedy, trading in geriatric sentiment instead of hard-forged emotion.

Both Project Greenlight runners-up, directors Michael Aimette and John G. Hofmann get the teen angst and Gaelic aesthetic right; too bad their third-act thuggery isn’t just routine, but ridiculous.

Storm’s remarkable poignancy is made all the more palpable by its restraint.

It’s unfair to blame Hess solely for condescension comedy’s bad aftertaste--he’s not the only perpetrator--but his particular brand is the most graceless.

The story is too rich in incident for Fabian, whose episodic TV-movie approach speeds through Laing’s lifetime of abuse.

Only Billy Connolly, as the boys’ way-of-the-gun pa, brings a smidgen of sobering gravitas to the proceedings, though he can hardly counter the pounding hangover brought on by all the mock-virtuous butchery.

West is far more adept at and interested in sustaining an unrelentingly ominous mood than in executing the genre-required spook shocks.

This shapeless series of unfunny vignettes (interspersed with pointless street interviews) deserves to be slapped hard.

Even when it’s shooting in the swing states, the film never finds drama, focus or any greater purpose other than some dubious horn-blowing about the SEIU being singularly responsible for electing President Obama.

Krakowski’s modestly charming culture-shock comedy has an unusual midpoint game changer, as it suddenly mutates into an intimate familial-generational drama.

Michael Jackson was obviously shooting for the moon right before his death, as you can tell from these stunning bits of concert spectacle.

What’s ultimately more impressive than the vigorous madcap action and innocuous humor, however, is Bowers’s willingness to address adult themes--alienation, regret, class tensions--with a directness that shows a surprising respect for his target young-adult audience

There’s nothing more boring than a life embalmed with halfhearted Hollywood bombast, which only makes the film’s fleeting pleasures stand out all the more.

There’s still too much flashback material here about apprentices and evil cops. But if you’ve ever raged at nameless, insensitive service people, you won’t mind seeing them strapped into a rotating turret, the shotgun cocking.

Vampirism is the new monstrosity du jour, and with Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, tweener boys get their own testosterone-infused variant of Twilight.

(Untitled)’s onslaught of self-indulgent bohos and art-vs.-commerce clichés are as ersatz as their objects of scorn.

The new movie is a joke, a toxic cocktail of banal psychobabble, laughably arty slo-mo flourishes and unmotivated sexual violence that only brain-in-jar types could take as a serious statement.

It’s a judgmental tale whose only payoff is carpe diem drivel.

The new film sometimes feels too snazzy in its jittery cinematography, but the stunts make it through the budget upgrade intact.

Albou’s film conjures an irresistibly evocative atmosphere of stifling limitations, as well as a frank view of the female body that vacillates between carnal, sacrificial and beatific. Its caustic beauty is hard to shake.

Filmmakers from Jacques Rivette to Hou Hsiao-hsien have treated the City of Light like Alice’s rabbit hole; writer-director Hong Sang-soo similarly embraces the fantasy, but goes one step further in this extraordinary character study by fully erasing the line that separates the actual from the fictional.

Part alt–art-history lesson and part pilot for CSI: The Louvre, Peter Greenaway’s deconstruction of Rembrandt’s 1642 painting The Night Watch contends that the work is--after the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci’s The Last Supper and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel--the fourth best-known artwork in the world.

The true soulfulness of Sendak’s parable never emerges.

Frightening statistics punctuate the film like death knells.

Numbingly simplistic in concept and execution.

Saavedra, in an incredibly vanity-free performance, never shies away from Raquel’s darkest edges and still forces us to empathize with the frustrations and stunted loneliness of a life lived in servants’ quarters.

Cutesy and generic, New York, I Love You is almost colossally inept at capturing five-boroughs flavor.

Adela’s troubles feel slight and underdeveloped in the face of the world around her; it’s all too appropriate, in the end, that nature swallows her whole.

It’s too easy to say that Peter Billingsley shot his eye out with this inept comic trifle, but…well, he shot his eye out.

Lone Scherfig directs it all as if it were a breezy lark, so a third-act tonal shift makes for an incongruous, excessively moralistic fit with everything that’s preceded. Most insulting, though, is the way in which the climactic passages miraculously tidy up every frayed edge of Jenny’s life.

Forgive the film its "Napoleon Dynamite" overquirk; a loving god is watching all, genuflected to on bedroom-wall posters and seen in the film's final five minutes--and if you're not a Rush fan, this is not your movie

Refn has somehow found his way to an authentic English hard-man drama, anchored in a dynamite performance, even as it celebrates thug life.

Hardly the heady stuff of "Frost/Nixon"--or then again, maybe exactly the same thing. This one’s more rude and fun.

A slipshod documentary about a fascinating subject: the loaded history and current complications of African-American hairstyling.

Peter and Vandy is crippled by DiPietro’s interest in repetition. Activities that were cute and fun at the beginning, we see, ultimately become tedious. The novelty of the film’s gimmick follows suit.

You sense the Demme-esque working-class comedy that might have been.

It’s an unnecessarily quirky affair, with collages, archival footage and interviews in extreme close-up, which--perhaps intentionally--make it seem like an experimental ’70s throwback.

Visual Acoustics goes out of its way to remain as kindly and pleasing as Shulman himself.

The movie’s b&w images of craggy landscapes and shirtless young men have never looked more vibrant.

God bless their antics, but the Yes Men’s jestful jousting feels more like tilting at windmills