Marshall Fine Movie Review

Perhaps Fantastic Mr. Fox will be the film that convinces adults that animation isn't just for kids.

Uncertainty ultimately doesn't go where you expect it to. It's a fascinating experiment that also happens to be an interesting and highly watchable movie.

Some bad movies you slag off gleefully. Others provoke a certain disappointment at their failure, a mourning at the difference between the film's ambition and its execution. Richard Kelly's The Box is such a film.

This is, by my count, the third version of Dickens' story that Walt Disney Studios has put out. The story, however, was always Dickens', as it is now.

Michael Jackson's This Is It elicited strongly conflicting emotions as I watched a screening this week. It reveals so much about Michael Jackson as a human being.

To get a sense of just how deep the lingering effects of institutionalized racism in South Africa must run, take yourself to Skin, a powerful and compelling drama based on a true story.

A flat, self-consciously mannered film, Gentleman Broncos winds up as a waste of time for everyone involved -- including you, if you make the mistake of seeing it.

No, Ong-Bak 2 isn't a great movie and, no, Tony Jaa isn't a great actor. But so what? If you love the pure kinetics of a well-shot martial-arts film, Tony Jaa is the most exciting figure to come along in years.

Lars von Trier is a fraud, who keeps making movies because he has somehow convinced enough people that his delusions or pretensions (the latter, more likely) are art and that his movies are worthwhile.

Intelligent and provocative, (Untitled) is consistently surprising and funny without pandering for laughs. Is art the idea or the thing? Well, who cares when it's as entertaining as this film?

What to make of omnibus/anthology films such as New York, I Love You? Do you judge them by the best of the short films contained within? Or by the wo...

I don't want to know how Spike Jonze made Where the Wild Things Are. I'd rather simply simmer in the joy of having watched it unfold before my eyes.

Peter and Vandy is touching and insightful, a film that understands what that first whoosh of emotion in a relationship feels like -- and how quickly love can change and vanish.

When is a sports movie not a sports movie? When it's Tom Hooper's terrific The Damned United, yet another feather in actor Michael Sheen's cap.

Trucker is a revelation in terms of the performance Michelle Monaghan gives. Give it a chance and you won't be sorry.

There are several big laughs in Zombieland. But, ultimately, director Ruben Fleischer has to honor the horror half of the horror-comedy equation. And that slows the movie down every time.

Gervais and his co-writer/director create one premise, then seem to shift to something else - and then to something else again. But the conceptual problems are less troubling than the essential shortage of laughs.

Though it tells the story of the rise of basketball's already legendary LeBron James, it frames it as part of a larger story about friendship and teamwork.

Calling Whip It competent is meant as faint praise -- and is barely true. The script might as well have been constructed from the screenwriting equivalent of Legos.

Clive Owen has never played a character dealing with problems as normal as the ones confronting Joe Warr, the sportswriter at the center of this film, which is based on a true story.

Blind Date is strong stuff indeed -- a well-written and insightful drama built around two beautifully modulated performances by Stanley Tucci and the always-marvelous Patricia Clarkson.

Part Parisian travelogue, part Robert Altman film, Cedric Klapisch's Paris is engaging without really being memorable.

Campion's film Bright Star is about the love of beauty -- particularly the ability of poetry to move the soul -- and about longing.

Two problems: Cody's script is barely funny -- and what humor there is gets crushed by the heavy-handed direction of Karyn Kusama and the marginal acting skills of Megan Fox.

Charlize Theron, an actress who knows how to reveal herself without making a big deal of it, delivers an emotionally naked performance. It's a showcase role, but not a showy one.