It’s a 60-minute documentary that feels like days of watching paint dry.

In the director’s hands, these societal passion plays and “documentaries” offer a terrifying, top-down perversion of art itself--another insidious extension of politics by other means.

One wrongheaded jaw-dropper follows another.

Third times are rarely charms in the movies, much less fourth go-rounds, and it takes more than ho-hum 3-D and video-game-ready action sequences to liven up diminishing returns

The meal here is mainly nostalgia, larded with a thick sauce of irony.

The longer this profile of the mixed Muslim-Jewish crew follows players over the course of a difficult season, the more it establishes the difficulty of burdening one team to serve as a national symbol of reconciliation—and how hard it is to break free from triumph-of-the-underdog clichés with even the best of intentions

It’s gratifying to see Eisenberg move past nerdy-cutie parts; his slim shoulders, it seems, are capable of handling more than Michael Cera’s leftovers.

Packs a forceful punch.

Cribbing from countless Tinseltown efforts, this music-video-cum-perfume-ad is awash in excessively melodramatic flashbacks, car chases and references to the domestic illegal-immigration debate.

It takes more than a few good actors playing bad apples to sustain such familiar romps through regurgitated material. There’s no bounty to be plucked from Perrier’s Bounty. The treasure chest has long since been emptied.

A truly impressive portrait of self-destructive, smooth-talking alpha males, and a testament to an actor who waltzes across that Peter Pan–syndrome tightrope with the greatest of sleaze.

The film blows up a minor aspect of the New Wave to foolishly apocalyptic proportions, substituting gossip for gospel.

Poised between childhood and adolescence, arrogance and insecurity, the kids still make for compelling subjects.

The real treasure, however, is Bronstein, whose charismatically loopy, caffeinated performance carries an air of suspense: Can he keep his kids out of harm’s way? Will his clownish antics suddenly turn toxic? Is it simply a matter of when?

Can they really be setting up a sequel at the end, with Robin as an outlaw? Let’s hope so--that’s the movie you actually wanted.

From its opening montage of Hallmark-worthy kisses to a climactic clinch under the Tuscan sun, Letters to Juliet celebrates synthetic sentiment.

Too much of this love triangle rings false.

Kilcher makes the slog worthwhile--her face gleams with possibility, even in the character’s darkest moments--though one prays she escapes the typecasting trap ASAP.

The esteemed director, Ken Loach, isn’t really a fantasist--and it shows.

Sol Tryon’s dark, irrepressibly hilarious fable offers highbrow absurdism and low-budget filmmaking at their most clever and outlandish.

By movie’s end, you see flocks of umbrella-adorned commuters in a different light; and what’s often viewed as Japanese humility becomes a doorway to something huge and eternal. Bring the kids.

But while you can’t fault this labor of love’s conception, you can take issue with its leaden execution.

Although convincing as athletes, neither Miller belongs on a movie screen; personal parable or not, this feels like a too-familiar trip around the bases.

The big question isn’t whether middle-aged romance will bloom, but rather, how much sub-Jarmusch deadpan humor and pathos can you take?

An overall lack of drive drops the pacing from languorous to a slow, stalled crawl, but the journey itself isn’t the point here. For once, it’s the destination--forgiveness--that really counts.

With this depressingly bland sequel (scripted by snark specialist Justin Theroux), he’s (Robert Downey Jr.) stranded in lightweight arrogance.

Babies is barely more insightful than your average Flickr photo gallery or home movie clip: it’s just infant porn for prospective parents.

The big absence here is the man himself; Gibney couldn’t get the jailed Abramoff on camera, either due to unwillingness or a Justice Department intervention. Whatever the reason, it’s crippling.