There's inherent drama in watching a person amble up a mountain, but it's an act of bad faith to oversell a stunt.

All that's left is to enjoy the ravishing visuals, which range from gorgeously dusky scenes of semidarkness to the sort of smeary neon palettes that Wong Kar-wai has virtually patented.

Adding hot naked men to a predictable narrative doesn't equal titillating or taboo; it just means you've dressed up a messy melodrama

How Göran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama.

Inspiring if straightforward, the film boasts music that makes for a pleasantly innocuous soundtrack to buying Frappuccinos.

Though the dialogue rings too chirpy ("Gee whiz!") and faintly anachronistic ("Get over it, man!"), the acting is wonderfully subtle, especially John Mahoney's turn as Bryce's grimly clear-eyed grandfather.

You get the "girl," but little else; even as a tribute to one woman's determination, this semibiopic screams botched opportunity

Galella's real crime goes conspicuously unmentioned: feeding the cult of celebrity while stoking a public appetite for empty gossip as news.

This is the kind of autumnal sentimentality that the Academy goes wild for-a (rightly) venerated performer acknowledging his own mortality by pandering to cheap-seat emotions.

The Americanized version reconfigures the plot as both a hazing ritual for corporate-ladder-climbers and a lazy hook to hang cheap jokes on.

Cue those weepy violins. Indeed, you get everything you'd expect from this mostly saccharine melodrama.

The movie you were hoping to avoid.

So it's the story of a down-and-out bigwig vindicating himself by revising his crowning cultural moment. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Only jackanapes and jackasses would deny that the experience of war can cause psychic damage, but does that mean we have to sit through such a schematic, dogmatic melodrama about the subject?

Simply casting doubts isn't the same as making a compelling counterargument-or crafting a coherent film.

A proper profile of Hefner would start and end with sex, and not merely glance on casualties like Dorothy Stratten (and even the loveless Hef himself). The movie can't seem to get it up.

A tepid rom-com, replete with a nostalgic Bangles tune.

Jolie must eventually become a comic-book supergirl impervious to explosions and bullets, all the better to set up a "Bourne"-like franchise by the final fade-out.

Walker integrates stranger-on-the-street testimony to further her general vibe of ignorance, thus pinpointing the true target of an agitated doc--our own blithe apathy.

Director Christian Carion (Merry Christmas) establishes a low-key yet threatening atmosphere right from the start, and gets terrific performances from Kusturica and Canet.

Life During Wartime slices deeply into its characters' weaknesses.

The film clandestinely captures marauders in action while embedding itself in the imperiled home of aging farmer Michael Campbell. He's not the movie's ad hoc martyr, but something more compelling: a simple man whose fight for personal justice has matured into patriotism.

Filmmaker Victor Nunez pairs evocative locales--beatnik Bay Area, bucolic rural New Mexico--with fleeting asides of poetry (penned by the Santa Fe–based writer Joe Ray Sandoval); these meditative detours both elevate a routine story arc and tap into tangled, twisted familial roots.

One can maintain the energy and patience for donnybrooks and general insanity only so long.

The man himself stares into Davis's lens, both confident and scared; for these moments alone, the movie is key.

Inception, though, is no "Avatar"--instead, it’s the movie that many wanted "Avatar" to be. In a roaringly fast first hour, we’re introduced to a new technology that allows for the bodily invasion of another person’s dreamworld.

No one would claim that director Lance Daly delivers an Emerald Isle version of "The Spirit of the Beehive," though this scrappy film does have a knack for capturing the elation and confusion of late childhood in their ragged glory.

Director Nicolas Winding Refn, the prankster of last year's "Bronson," has never reduced his craft to such a sledgehammer of minimalism. Electric guitars drone on the soundtrack, bones crunch, and a mystical religiosity gathers around One-Eye; there's a midnight cult here for those who yearn for one.