Winner of this year's Oscar as best foreign-language film, In a Better World is an intriguing examination of the ideas of revenge and forgiveness, but it wraps things up too neatly to be truly compelling.

Let's start with a fact. The 1981 film Arthur is a middling piece of studio comedy, buoyed (in the first half) by an unexpectedly effervescent perform...

By the logic of the script for Your Highness, if I want to write an amusing review of the film, all I need to do is type the word "f**k" 500 times. O...

Hanna and her father live in a cabin near the Arctic Circle -- but their time there is about to come to an end. He's training her for a mission: to find her way to a certain address in Munich.

An oddball blend of crime tale and backstage comedy, Henry's Crime is a deadpan delight, an unexpected treat that offers the fire-and-ice teaming of Keanu Reeves and Vera Farmiga.

Director Sean McNamara's roots in TV -- shows such as That's So Raven -- are apparent. Even with Dennis Quaid, Helen Hunt and young AnnaSophia Robb as Bethany, Soul Surfer feels like a TV movie.

Cross Napoleon Dynamite with The Red Shoe Diaries and you might get something like Meet Monica Velour, a comedy that's neither as edgy nor as funny as it seems to think it is.

There have been any number of comics who have aspired to the mantle held by comic Lenny Bruce and his obvious heir, Richard Pryor. Their successors ra...

Rio is a fish-out-of-water animated comedy about birds -- and, as those things go, it's cute and entertaining -- but not in an aggressive or annoying way.

Henry Winkler's film Ceremony is as good an example of faux Wes Anderson as you'll find. Not that it's a good film; or an original one.

As he did with Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford uses The Conspirator to construct a conscience-pricking drama that tells one story while commenting (no...

What's that you say? A documentary about ventriloquists? Could anyone resist? Resist at your own risk, however, with Mark Goffman's Dumbstruck, openi...

I understand why Susanne Bier's In a Better World won the foreign-language Oscar -- but I believe this was the better film.

When first seen in Jim Mickle's rough-edged vampire movie, Stake Land, opening in limited release Friday (4/22/11), Kelly McGillis is in a badly torn ...

I get the joke about Pom Wonderful Presents The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. I wish it was a little funnier -- or more pointed. It's provocative; it could be more so.

Watching a movie like Water for Elephants, knowing that it's not only based on a novel but on a best-selling novel that was all the rage for book clubs, makes me wonder about the book -- specifically, how bad is it?

The characters in Jim Stake Land are tough and to the point: It's gruesome and bloody, as you would expect in a modern vampire-plague movie. None of that romantic Twilight business here.

The suit is by Ted Baker of London and Morgan Spurlock owns three copies: charcoal gray, nicely fitted, festooned with lavishly embroidered logos of h...

Yes, that's right: Werner Herzog has made a 3D documentary about cave paintings. While the film is a fascinating look at a misplaced piece of human history, it goes on too long for what Herzog has here.

Someone had the unfortunate idea to hire a camera crew to document American TV producer Phil Rosenthal's adventures as a consultant to Russian television. The result is Exporting Raymond, a curious vanity production.

I'm obviously not the target demographic for Disney's Prom. Still, I'd like to think that, even if I were a teenage girl, I'd be smart enough to see this for the formulaic b.s. that it is.

At the end of Gaukar Ulfarsson's documentary, Gnarr, the title character, comedian Jon Gnarr, along with his friends/campaign managers, have a stunned...

Earthwork has something important to say about the way we value true artists in our society. However, it is slight and, I'm afraid, slightly forgettable.