Once the sharp, clever satire gives way to what feels like a special must-see-TV episode, the movie’s promise slowly deflates.

Marcia Gay Harden is the picture’s treasure; watching her swell with concern at her daughter’s choices, you understand how hard it is to let go.

The Coens nod at some familiar stylistic tropes – florid swearing, sexual euphemism, crusty, aged characters – but the film’s potency is rooted in quiet precision and detailed realisation.

With the film heavily favoring extensive on-court footage at the expense of in-depth individual portraits, the “more” offered here is merely skin-deep, basketball-is-a-brotherhood uplift.

Clichéd and formulaic.

The public appetite for high-school high jinks may be limitless, but the pretentious camerawork and empty ideas of this feature-length mope yield little pleasure or insight.

Ferrara’s unconventional methods only manage to serve Chelsea on the Rocks, his loving portrait of Manhattan’s boho landmark, the Chelsea Hotel.

Far more deserving of the hoopla Mike Figgis received for his single-take, multicamera drama "Timecode" (2000), Finnish visual artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s experimental narrative truly pushes forward the possibilities of split-screen cinema.

Conventional as the film may be, the two leads are quite adept, and director Florent Emilio Siri proves to have an exquisite eye for battlefield tableaux.

Though Hilary Helstein’s film displays depth, its structure relies too heavily on Maya Angelou’s narration to flesh out deeper implications.

The Horse Boy comes off as both an edifying work of advocacy and an invasive home movie.

It helps that Fame has been cast with performers who have the glow of possibility about them.

Anne Fontaine’s biopic transforms the designer’s early life into highbrow guilty-pleasure gold.

What follows is pulp made near-profound through director Jonathan Mostow’s sure-handed guidance.

This is hackwork of the highest order, lacking in all poetry and barely comprehensible aurally or visually.

It’s the kind of two-hander that relies solely on the chemistry of the actors, both of whom banter, parry and bum rush their way through various left turns with grace. Their pas de deux almost makes up for this threadbare tragedy’s no-win endgame. Almost.

Neither blue teeth nor virgins make appearances, but Russell Brown’s torpid indie does deliver plenty of ponderous chitchat about truth, deception, criticism and artists’ motivations.

There’s little that can be done with material wrung of its complications to accommodate an ultimately life-affirming, it-all-works-out agenda.

The question is, could someone turn these full-frontal-dudity snapshots into a satisfying, cohesive movie? Answer: no, but not for lack of trying.

Painfully unfunny.

Often has the feel of a film-school exercise in which the object is to wring maximum suspense from rudimentary tools.

Swooning but shallow.

If you can roll with Almereyda’s free-form vibe, you’ll find the docu-essay’s cumulative effect goes a long way toward proving his thesis

Delivers Moore’s usual grab bag of ironic kitsch, gotcha clips and infotainment-journalism.

His closing dedication—“For my daughter”—turns this into something actively creepy, as opposed to merely brainless, boring and inept.

The results do justice to a complex genius whose impact can scarcely be overstated.

The year’s 3-D deluge continues: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an amusingly loopy kids’ meal about a small-town inventor.

Director-cinematographer Steven Soderbergh’s indifference to the material is palpable and of a piece with his deathly dull output of late.

The movie has a centerfold sheen to it--and some lesbianic soft-core flirtation to match--as its plot dives deeply into "Twilight"-esque heavy-melo meltdown in the last act. Cody throws one too many losses at Needy; the screenwriter loses her satiric way about halfway through. But for a while, this has real fangs.

This could have been a true urban mosaic. Instead, we simply get a vision of Paris as the city of lite.

This film’s greatest accomplishment is that its theatrical gestures manage to feel preposterous, pretentious and routine at the same time.

A frustrating film full of overplayed men-as-dogs metaphors, it’s only watchable for Malkovich, who could probably read a social studies exam and still be commanding.

The film fingers public ignorance and governmental inaction as causes, but its horrifying first-person testimonials of exploitative abuse are what make this call to arms resound loudly, angrily, urgently.

It’s a slickly enjoyable production (if unfocused and bloated), and his bullet-point tips are persuasive; but dude, there are better ways to humanize these issues than crying on camera.

That curatorial heft is sorely missing from Kalmbach’s final edit; it’s a portrait that neither feels forced nor fully formed.

Harmony is a finely tuned comedy, complete with precisely scripted jokes and comic set pieces that swerve toward the playfully perverse.

To fall in love with it, viewers only have to be receptive to a movie that examines the ties that bind with grace, wit and depth.

Writer-director Jane Campion approaches the tale with an artiste’s respectful solemnity, but it too often comes off like "Twilight" transplanted across oceans and centuries.

His “treason” gave credence to ending the war, helped push a corrupt administration toward its ruin and underlined the importance of the First Amendment. Rickety doc or not, Ellsberg deserves every ounce of hero worship he gets here.

The scam is so crazy, it just might work…for a throwaway episode of "Law & Order."

A film that could have been memorably haunting is, sadly, all too forgettable

In this breeding ground for date rape and HPV, there are some trashy kicks in seeing horrible people get theirs, plus housemother Fisher goes all buck wild with a shotgun.

Eventually runs out of gas--or rather, pedal-power--as the filmmakers grope for how to cap the Beavans’ story.

The laughs, meanwhile, are delivered by cross-dressing Perry’s sassy grandma Madea, whose wild threats of violence to children and adults alike are the only things that sporadically lighten up this narratively and grammatically dim redemption pap.

Granted, Boyle may be a competent director, but he’s missed the mark by not focusing on anybody with real heart: the father and his son, the cousin and her beau--basically, every person here who isn’t a cretinous, developmentally arrested creep.

Non Stop doesn’t know how to hit it and quit; it’s a rock doc that screams loud and says frustratingly little

What’s refreshing about Pascal-Alex Vincent’s dramatically thin but richly atmospheric feature debut is that it recognizes the essential truth of the conceit: all seminal voyages are journeys of heightened awareness, as visceral as they are emotional.

Perkins asks us to bask silently in the majesty of an artist in his element; in one unforgettable shot, Francis stands atop a newly finished canvas, utterly transfixed. It’s a stirring snapshot of that strange space where the act of creating can be a religious experience.

Mendheim’s stereotypical portrayal of the South boasts some real affection, but mostly it’s just whistling Dixie

Everything from the script to the film’s score seems stock, and echoes of past victories--Eyre’s dissection of infidelity in "Notes on a Scandal," Neeson and Linney’s chemistry in "Kinsey"--only remind you of what these talents are capable of when the stars actually align.

Sobering stuff for an animated movie that pitches itself somewhere between cutesy children’s entertainment and hectoring Grimm’s fairy tale. The problem with 9, though, is that it lacks a consistent tone.

Berlinger is fully invested here, but a little distance might have helped.

There’s a marked sense of retreat in this tale that’s never explored--everyone goes out of the way to remember the past through rose-colored specs.

Crank’s Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor direct with their usual flashy brio, and basso profundo Keith David has a sublime cameo as a cop indignant at the thought of a pistachio peanut butter sandwich. It’s that kind of movie, folks.

Extract, for all its surface reminders of Judge’s 1999 cult hit, "Office Space" (it’s set around a suburban bottling plant), shows its maker taking the smallest step toward lesser comic matters of infidelity and bong abuse. It feels slightly beneath him. That’s not to say you should skip it.

A talented director might have made Bullock seem like a comic genius, but Phil Traill has no control over tone, leaving the audience unsure whether to laugh or cry.

If the story were more arresting, and the filmmaking more original, then the notions of post-9/11 assimilation might be more compelling. As it stands, the movie just serves up another warmed-over Ellis Island rehash.

Less deadpan spoof than loving act of possession, Black Dynamite near-fully channels the look and feel of its blaxploitation ancestors, warts and all.

Director Sam Garbarski’s focus occasionally skews narrow, but he does evoke the anxiety of reconciling a strict faith with secular times.

Flimsy dialogue and fickle characters undercut the weighty historical demons in this fractured family portrait of three generations of men dealing with their emotional scars.

American Casino tries to connect the big picture regarding a major problem to a human pulse and comes up lacking on both sides. It’s a gamble that simply doesn’t pay off

The film and its young cast exude a charismatic irreverence, yet a hazy, perfunctory mood dulls the playful proceedings.

Too many digital effects ruin the spell of a tactile world of evil objects scheming your demise. But even a mediocre FD is better than more Jigsaw.

These ragtag rebels exude an infectious determination, and while director Dan Stone fails in the adrenaline department, he succeeds in bringing home a memorable portrait of resilience.

Unlike "The Wrestler," which Siegel scripted, Big Fan has a way of making a socially marginal figure seem oddly charismatic without stacking the sympathy deck.

This slapdash parody will simply inspire shrugs.

The doc’s breakout star is Vogue creative director Grace Coddington, a former model whose plain appearance (the end result of a horrible car accident) and frumpy clothing belie her genius for fashion. She counters her boss every chance she can get and provides the film with a much-needed emotional center.

Would be fascinating by virtue of its subject alone. But the filmmaker wisely emphasizes how Harris also represents something bigger; this isn’t just the story of one man but also the dawning of the virtual über alles age and the death of privacy.

Despite a plucky soundtrack and frantic editing, the movie shows otherwise wan interest in the gaggle of faux-transgressive bad girls who bare their dulled claws at England’s establishment ethos, as though that notion alone were somehow fresh and cheeky.

Cloud 9's plot is thin, the conflict lazy, and the resolution sudden and unsurprising. That's a shame, because stronger development in the story department might have made this film a minor sensation.

Zombie is still committed to showing how violence perverts all touched by it, yet his carnivalesque approach undercuts his empathy. He panders to the cheap seats whenever he’s not being scary.

Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications.

Props should be given to Rodriguez’s breathless “let’s put on a show” inventiveness. Plus, Macy and the booger--kick ass!

Timing’s everything in comedy, so perhaps Post Grad would have seemed peppier prior to the Great Recession; circa now, this comedy feels like a cynical stroll through the unemployment lines awaiting today’s class of seniors.

Spelling may not be Quentin Tarantino’s forte, but his grasp of language (both verbal and visual) is peerless.

By the end of Pray’s skin-deep love letter, only one sweeping reaction seems appropriate: “A pox on all your houses.”

This isn’t revisionist history; it’s a key moment in political radicalism reduced to an empty pop-cultural posture.

Kari Skogland’s flashy yet dead-on-arrival drama turns Belfast’s backstreet battlefields into music-video backgrounds.

When violence eventually rears its ugly head again, the effect is as anticlimactic as the movie’s title is misleading. Brief bliss is a red herring; there’s only a lifetime of pain left in such acts’ wakes.

If any star’s life should lend itself to a grade-A guilty-pleasure biopic, its Hamilton’s, but My One and Only dodges the dirty details.

Rousing, devastating, invigorating, painful, joyful, soulful--all those adjectives don’t even begin to describe Passing Strange, but it’s a start.

Though wildly uneven, the film sometimes comes within screaming distance of the sick ironies of "Heathers." That's how loudly Goldthwait still knows how to yell.

There’s something admirable about the anything-goes energy that Van Peebles brings to this tall tale, but the amateurishness and Video Toaster–era technical tricks start to grate after a bit. It’s a funky, free-form fairy tale, but one that only a mutha could truly love.

Dime-store philosophy, coupled with the running commentary from the Games’ heinously Spicoli-esque announcers (“Dude, that was the hardest slam we’ve ever seen!”), ruins an otherwise gripping, in-your-face experience.

In using the urban poor and the queer community as punch lines, Casi Divas ultimately succumbs to its own criticism.

We are in the presence of a new classic.

No simplistic status parable. It’s more a psychological snapshot of a person forever doomed to remain a voyeur to her own life

The escapades are tossed off and fall flat, all products of the business-as-usual template created by the film’s producers, Adam McKay and Will Ferrell.

Lamely tries to update "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" for the Twitter set. Too bad Truman Capote’s not around for rewrites.

Though Aron Gaudet’s documentary never quite captures the relieved atmosphere of these homecomings, it does acknowledge the dark side of a cheery platitude: those on both sides of the divide are in need of healing.

The ideologies underlying Andersson’s oft-astonishing succession of extreme wide-angle, vanishing-point tableaux are a decidedly acquired taste.

Herb and Dorothy are adorable enough, but Sasaki’s documentary really shines when she gives center stage to the grateful artists whom they helped nurture.

Missing is Cameron’s signature action modification, best exploited in Aliens: the strapping female heroine. McG’s testosterone-juiced world feels a little doomed without her.

As brightly alive a movie as the season will offer.

Set against this is the blithe humour of the proceedings, a welcome shortage of love interest, Dolph's minimalist wit, and two arch-villainesses attired in black plastic and other form-fitting fabrics. Destructive, reprehensible, and marvellous fun.

This is meat-and-potatoes genre work, certainly superior to a Hollywood product like "Edge of Darkness," but not by much.

It’s a familiar tale, but one told with gusto, wit and visual flare; of particular note is the dilapidated Germanic fortress where Capricorn and his cronies reside, which looks like it was plucked straight from the warped minds of a Gilliam or a del Toro.

To be fair, Craig is still the best Bond since Connery, and a Man Who Knew Too Much–style set piece at a Vienna opera house momentarily offers the fleetness and wit the rest of the film lacks.