Latest Film Reviews

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The Andy Griffith Show—The Complete Sixth Season [DVD Box Set] (1965)

The sixth season proved there was still life in the now-classic sitcom...[and] Knotts shows up in an Emmy-winning return appearance.
The White Countess (2005)

[The] soft-glowing facade always seems more real to Ivory than harsh reality...represent[s] our own attempts to stave off reality with the romantic projections of cinema.
Poseidon (2006)

There's camp, and there's just plain lousy writing.
The Lost City (2006)

Musical...handsome...poignantly nostalgic...The Lost City is a lot of things, but what it's not is incisive.
Goal! The Dream Begins (2006)

Obvious...All [but soccer fanatics] can pass on Goal! The Dream Begins and make plans now to avoid its two upcoming sequels.
An American Haunting (2006)

On more than one occasion...a girl scrapes her fingernails across a wood floor as an invisible poltergeist attacks her. The wood floor may not be a chalkboard, but it's close enough.
Just My Luck (2006)

Why does the new Lindsay Lohan picture have such a poo fixation?....Could it be that director Donald Petrie is Freudian slipping on his s**tty material?
Down in the Valley (2006)

Though the film around it is often ungainly, an interesting idea lives at the heart of David Jacobson's Down in the Valley. When controlling parents alienate their children, they create an environmen...
Art School Confidential (2006)

Zwigoff too often picks up his putty knife when he should be running with scissors...doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts, but some of the parts are pretty amusing all the same.
Hoot (2006)

Jimmy Buffet may be known for his Hawaiian shirts, but there's something undeniably plaid about Hoot.
Mission: Impossible III (2006)

A thrill ride, and a gripping one: plausibility-straining, predictable at times, but pulse-pounding all the same.
Water (2006)

Detailed and graced with irreverent humor and fine performances, Mehta's film deals powerful blows to economic injustice and misogyny.
Akeelah and the Bee (2006)

Dramatically jerry-rigged in every possible way.
Stick It (2006)

Too lazy to perfect its own routine...[but] a surprisingly appealing vacation, from sense to sensibility.
RV (2006)

Color me surprised when Barry Sonnenfeld's family comedy turned out to be a palatable picture that doesn't rob Robin Williams of his dignity as a comic actor.
United 93 (2006)

A unique film about a unique event...but what will we think of United 93 in five years or, for that matter, fifty?
Brick (2006)

The actors play it with poker-faces, but the further we go into the noir territory of hard-boiled, fast-paced dialogue and dames wrapped in crimson and black, the more ticklish Brick gets.
American Dreamz (2006)

Not everything works in this semi-audacious challenge to the American Dream, but Weitz consistently and amusingly hits the broad side of the barn.
The Sentinel (2006)

Strictly boilerplate...fail[s] to pursue any interesting avenues, using the cardboard characters as mere shooting-range targets.
Snoopy, Come Home (1972)

Charlie Brown: "I have a philosophy that tells me no matter how bad things get, they will always turn out good in the end." Lucy Van Pelt: "That's not a philosophy—that's stupidity." The born...
A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969)

The appeal of Schultz's pop philosophy hasn't faded in forty years: this kind of sincerity can't be faked.
Scary Movie 4 (2006)

I just don't see much entertainment value--or, certainly, a shelf life--in a contrived string of mildly amusing parodies of bad movies. Here today, yawn tomorrow.
Kinky Boots (2006)

Rigged for your pleasure...everything is played up for schmaltz value or dopey laughs.
Hard Candy (2006)

Skews just enough toward Death and the Maiden and away from Saw III.
Kekexili: Mountain Patrol (2006)

Since Lu depicts the punishing, unforgiving determination on both sides of the conflict, the film is not entirely pitiless for the pathetic criminal class.
Sir! No Sir! (2006)

Offers nothing in the way of balancing the protest viewpoint...[but] still usefully revisits--during our current unpopular war--the internal conflict of America during the Vietnam War.
The Notorious Bettie Page (2006)

More clever than insightful, [but] Harron makes the most of that humorously earnest style ripped from the pin-up pages.
Friends with Money (2006)

Gives the characters relatable failings and the story some ironic bite...[but] lacks the depth of empathy Holofcener showed in Lovely and Amazing.
Take the Lead (2006)

The dance remains the same...Take the Lead has exactly two things going for it (each worth one star): the always entertaining Antonio Banderas and a lot of ballroom dancing.
The Outsider (2006)

With The Outsider, documentarian Nicholas Jarecki paints a revealing portrait of filmmaker James Toback, the prickly screenwriter-director with a manic streak and a weakness for gambling. Jarecki dem...
ATL (2006)

It's heartening to be able to report that ATL is as much like Diner as it is like Boys in the Hood....Robinson may overdose on style, but he also respects the homegrown origins of this ATLanta-bred tale.
Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006)

The seams show...a somewhat grudging social obligation for audiences over the age of ten to tow their younger charges.
Lacombe Lucien (1974)

The collaborationist anti-hero finds Malle instantly broaching a cultural taboo, compounded when the traitorous young man forces himself into a sexual relationship with a not-entirely unyielding girl named France.
Le Souffle au coeur (Murmur of the Heart) (1971)

In all their messiness, here are love, sex, society, and family, met with cleansing laughter.
South Park—The Complete Seventh Season (TV) (2003)

As Parker and Stone see it, you can't laugh without first dropping your jaw.
De Zaak Alzheimer (a.k.a. Memory of a Killer) (2005)

The sympathy toward the obvious evil of a contract killer never flies...Still, the clever central gimmick and a streak of sly humor lift [the] film, just barely, a cut above.
South Park—The Complete Sixth Season (TV) (2002)

Thorough skewerings of celebrity foibles and fearless campaigns on taboo subjects.
She's the Man (2006)

Gets by because it knows it's dorky. It's happily dorky. It's proudly dorky.
Thank You for Smoking (2006)

A scathing satire....If there's a lesson, it's that spinning your fellow Americans is the real national pastime--the greater problem is when you spin yourself.
La Bestia nel cuore (Don't Tell) (2006)

Just because American films frequently exploit repressed memories as a plot device in nasty genre pictures doesn't make the genteel Don't Tell a sophisticated or particularly insightful film.

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