A fitful, contrived, 131-minute guilt trip which fails to convince an audience fully to invest in any of its characters.

You know what they call a Royale with Cheese in Austin, Texas? The Big One...ambitious and a typically satisfying outing for one of America's most consistent directors.

'When You Care Enough to Send the Very Best'...the film has all the substance, visual appeal, and excitement of a Hallmark card.

A ridiculous but cheerful toss-off...amusing and charming.

Adrian Belic's straightforward film shows the men in action and allows them to tell -- in their salty, no-B.S. way -- their own stories of how and why they do what they do.

Tarantinoid...the machinations are all familiar enough that your unoccupied brain may drift off to wonder how Hartnett's made a career out of bad haircuts.

Every isolated moment or trapping that might be excused in a better film leaps up like a cowlick that just won't behave: Demi Moore drawling through 'Louie Louie' comes to mind.

Hugely ambitious and visually commanding...the kind of artful, textured, defiantly non-mainstream gamble more filmmakers should be taking.

Are Guest and Levy scared of biting the hand that feeds or simply out of touch? In either case, the answer can't be good.

A creepy look at the borderline personalities on both sides of the line between celebrity and citizen.

Will the audience be 'rocked' by the band's wily charms or let down by a slack story that repeats too many decade-old jokes? Stoked or bummed? Everyone knows rock is about rebellion, so f*@# it: call me stoked.

If you can surrender to the film's crazy convictions, it's a popcorn-munching wild ride worth taking.

The greatest adventure and saddest irony--taught alike by teachers to students and students to teachers--is that the big picture of history is writ small and ruthlessly unforgiving in each life--indeed, in every moment.

Nick Cassavetes: 'I was diligent in trying not to glamorize these kids. I think that they are portrayed as pretenders...But, you know, with money comes beautiful girls and ennui.'

Aghdashloo: 'The minute I realized that the two women are so similar to one another, I just simply asked Grandma to take me to Elizabeth. And I said it out loud. I said, "Grandma, please take me to Elizabeth." And she did.'

It takes only a small leap of imagination to get from Jim Davis to GI Steven Green, the 21-year-old alleged rapist-murderer...men like Jim are trying to unwind from something worse than a bad day at the office.

Yes, I think there is--we took that idea quite serious: that there is an artist in a very difficult, let's say, in kind of an exaggerated obsessive mode.

[Guest:] 'I could tell, her head was exploding. And I said, "What's going on?" She said, "Everyone wants a wig."'

Children are amazingly adaptable. I remember the barbed-wire fence. That was a part of the landscape I grew up in. I remember the sentry towers and machine guns pointed at us...as I said, 'With liberty and justice for all...' I didn't relate the two.

We'd all be better off if we could find our grace without a camera's obstruction, but ironically, Block's film provides a useful direction to see our way.

Though its humble pleasures give cause to pause and reflect on the Spanish filmmaker's occasionally overpraised output, Volver is a diverting melodrama...

It's like a Family Channel movie escaped and hid out in a movie theater.

More concerned with character, well-timed sight and sound gags, and witty banter than it is with smooth plotting....[but] well-worth the plunge.

No film in the history of cinema has succeeded in being more 'outrageously funny'...

My grandma was ninety-three, and she had a heart attack and they tried to resuscitate her three times. They broke her ribs; they shoved pipes down her throat...It's just--it's butchery. So I think you can go too far.

That the narration and Field's God's-eye camera draw attention to the film's form doesn't detract from its function: to give us that 'second' in the mirror...

Conversations with God. Nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you try.

Steel assembles a scrapbook of suicide: reminiscences of surviving family and friends and magnetically morbid caught-on-tape records of people's last living moments on Earth.

Plays like a political Heat, but for the sake of the scrupulously researched social history, a bit of artificially induced pulse-pounding can be forgiven.

When Jeliza-Rose announces in the first scene, 'Today, we're all going on a great trip!', know that it's to the center of an emotional black hole.

The wit of the show is in the clever transplanting of human situations to animal ones, which in turn reflect on the foibles of our daily lives.

Once she makes the sound feminist point that it wasn't easy being a girl in 1768, Coppola proves intellectually taxed.

Broyles and Haggis redundantly hammer home the same point in scene after scene...while fail[ing] in 132 minutes fully to breathe life into their triad of reluctant heroes.

With its compulsive theatricality, Running With Scissors enacts what may be the most unpleasant brand of insanity in a film full of them.

Eric Schlosser: 'Rick and I both really structure our works before we sit down to write them. So it was actually a really easy and natural collaboration.'

Rupert Grint: 'Suddenly the car starts to roll. Roll towards the crew. And I had to dive in there and pull the handbrake. It was quite close, actually.'

Todd Field on Eyes Wide Shut: 'Probably the polite thing I would say is "no comment," but the truth is...you've never seen two actors more completely subservient, and prostate themselves at the feet of a director.'

[Rider's] squirrelly film debut amps up Horowitz's wry humor, putting silliness in unintentional competition with the film's action and dramatic elements.

With a bit more discipline, McGrath's wide-ranging film would be the equal of its more straightforward, older brother, but Infamous' many charms deserve their own moment in the sun.

If Shimizu's aging idea of rage-made wraiths were true, caterwauling critics would be crawling all over the multiplex right about now.

A sincere examination of the moment, on the cusp of adulthood, when children must decide whether to get out of the only life they've known or honor it by staying home.

Though American Hardcore doesn't achieve a cogent and authoritative history, it succeeds in giving the general impression of the early-'80s hardcore punk scene.

Delicately balances the inherent drama of the tragic circumstances with the comedy of manners that is the Royal Family's dysfunction, and Britain's ambivalent attitudes to the same.

Augusten Burroughs: 'We didn't have sex because we had to find a way to show each other how much we loved each other. We had sex as a way to operate with each other, and that just warped me, you know, for years.'