Dennis Lim

John Madden's competent, monotonous film version, not exactly stagebound but hardly freewheeling, only underscores its mechanical nature.

Airy, pseudo-folkloric gibberish at best.

As botched-drug-deal tales go, Pusher digs surprisingly deep— its surface clichés give way to an existential despair that finally swallows the movie whole.

Too breezily, You’ll Get Over It gets over it--the dewy, abrupt optimism of its ending seems wholly unearned.

With a few exceptions, most of the laughs in Stardom are cheap...and worse, the ideas beyond platitudinous.

The lead performances could hardly be better: Gosling, having stolen and propped up entire movies last year ("Murder by Numbers" and "The Believer"), crackles with the economical intensity of a young Tim Roth. Morse, who has racked up decades worth of idiosyncratic character parts, is monumental in this career-peak turn.

This dreamy, languorous farce offers a manageable strawberry-flavored alternative, a mildly kinky Hello Kitty sadomasochism.

The movie avoids grand conclusions, and its restraint heightens the clarity of the perspective shifts that constitute a rite of passage; Nico and Dani is a modest chronicle of a summer during which everything had to change so that everything could stay the same.

You have to, if not love, at least not mind a movie in which the very act of Ashton Kutcher reading is enough of a cosmic trauma to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time.

At best, plays like an attenuated "Seinfeld" episode.

Gray's brand of film-buffery manifests itself, simply and irresistibly, as ardent, uncynical movie love.

It's doubly frustrating that after flirting with (and even upending) biopic conventions for much of its length, A Beautiful Mind finally gives in to them so readily.

A bottomless trough of mystic swill, is too confused to even fulfill the paradigm's most basic requirements.

The wall-to-wall rap score is as kinetic as the acrobatic fight choreography, and nothing else matters.

Open Water is simply a stunt--hopelessly literal-minded and cheap in every sense.

Constipated English whimsy for the easily tickled.

It's the sort of movie that could haunt your dreams for weeks. In the end, it is, as promised, all about love—this brave, foolish, improbably moving film's great achievement may be the utter sincerity with which it lives up to its title.

If it's remembered at all, it will be as a time capsule of early-21st-century blockbuster cowardice and redundancy.

After simmering for an eternity, it derails, with spectacular, psychotic force, bulldozing its way toward an almost unwatchable theater of cruelty.

Stevenson's performance is at once clueless and fiercely committed, a volatile combination that pays off in the best scene: the mother of all PFLAG meetings.

Chéreau's film is an unsentimental, almost uninflected, account of a preparation for death, told with a painful clarity that eventually bleeds into compassion.

Superhumanly awful BBC bottom-feeder Love, Honour and Obey, which, paramount among its many faults, is not recognizably a film.

Mawkishly clichéd as it is, Together is an odder hybrid than it first appears -- at once populist and deeply cynical about the price of popularity.

There are worse crimes being perpetrated in Hollywood than The Real Cancún--an exploitation fantasy no more booby-besotted than a "Porky's" or "American Pie" installment, and certainly no more unreal.

Relying on rote culture-clash pratfalls, Gilfillan belabors the symmetries.

The year's most repugnant movie.

A disingenuous and colossally daft whiplash twist (presumably Patterson's) that only further perforates an already ragged plot.

An out-of-body experience for its viewers as well as its heroine.