John Patterson

Koppelman and Lieven's toneless, generic direction style is slack, not slick, and they handle actors like livestock. Only John Malkovich, as Matty's psychotic uncle, retains his dignity.

Even the relatively successful pairing of neckless maestro of anxiety Stiller with the indomitably effervescent Black gets bogged down by Steve Adams' aimless screenplay. Would the Barry Levinson who once made "Diner" please wake up and pull himself together?

Yet another unfunny buppie sex comedy in the manner of "The Brothers," "Two Can Play That Game" and "Deliver Us From Eva."

Indulging his taste for Grand Guignol and the stylistically baroque, Schwentke never quite overplays his hand, though his occasional lapses into visual extravagance can be irritating, and the result is a nasty, intelligent and complex thriller.

It's outclassed by the memory of just about every prizefighting flick you've ever seen.

The narrative chronology is so heavily hacked about, its tenses so addled and the material so thinly spread across so many characters, one can scarcely keep it straight in one's head without going cross-eyed.

Aranoa's bleak yet warmly humanistic Princesas deftly and sympathetically ponders the interlocked destinies of two Madrid prostitutes.

Extraordinary is the very last adjective that comes to mind.

If as much thought had been expended on character and consequences as was lavished on bell-bottom diameters, collar widths and soundtrack selection, Blow might have been a richer, more intelligent experience, and much more Demme's movie than a carbon copy of other people's.

Ramsay has made a movie in which a universe of hopelessness and decay is penetrated by shafts of light that remake these bleak surroundings in strange and beautiful ways.

No matter how “real” things appear, scenarios and story arcs are relentlessly imposed upon the partay-cipants so as to finesse a narrative as crudely overdetermined and howlingly predictable as any studio-manufactured fiction.

By the time it hits you, you're worn out by all the dead ends and false trails the movie has put you through.

Writer-director David DeFalco's ugly, pointless and dishonest remake of Craven's remake.

One of the sweetest comedies in a long time, which doesn't mean it's sugary or fey.

A cut above the usual teenage-wasteland movie.

Fleming's more than passable, often extremely funny remake.

Remarkable energy and wit, and is probably the most purely enjoyable entry in Kaufman's suboeuvre of literary excursions.

The movie lover in you will recoil; your inner sophomore will rejoice.

Culkin, a revelation here, mines every last nuance of the confusion and anger that results. Bursting with grenadelike one-liners and full-bodied performances, particularly from Sarandon (batty) and Goldblum (creepy) -- Igby Goes Down inaugurates a career that should be well worth following closely.

If the contrast between Marine life and blue-blood luxury sometimes pulls the film in awkward directions, Anselmo's perceptive fondness for all his characters -- parents, children, grunts, even drill sergeants -- more than compensates.

Even more problematic is the script's clumsy, sprawling architecture, Sheridan's clubfooted sense of pacing and his grubby, indistinct visuals. The only upside? The Chieftains aren't on the soundtrack.

A bracingly sarcastic political comedy -- it opens on a bound copy of Mexico's Constitution, stuffed with cash -- possessed of a baleful satiric eye for hypocrisy and greed, a delicious anti-clerical bent, and pitch-perfect comic timing.

A refreshing antidote to those E! True Hollywood Story documentaries on adult-film figures like John Holmes, Savannah and Traci Lords.

Nauseating, tasteless and offensive -- but in all the best ways.

The result is the niftiest Bond movie in years -- fresh, funny, and jammed to the rafters with demented stunts, Boys'-Own gadgetry and brazen promiscuity.

Lurches from one set-piece stomach-lurcher to the next with nary a nod to narrative coherence.

Miraculously seems a great deal longer (this is not a good thing) as it careens from shit joke to corpse joke to ass joke to dog-turd joke and back.

Proves that it's possible for a movie to be reckless and adventurous merely by being sedate, unhurried and contemplative.