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Relentlessly quirky and strange, this pitch black comedy manages to combine its outrageous silliness with some surprising emotional resonance. Swedish filmmaker Akerlund (who directed Lady Gaga's Telephone) keeps the film's pace snappy as it lurches through a series of crazy situations that aren't remotely believable. But the starry cast manages to hold our interest.

Everything centres on a run-down apartment complex in Los Angeles, where Franklin (Lucas) lives in his dumpy flat, dreaming of someday moving to Switzerland to play his alpine horn in the mountains. Clearly unhinged, Franklin desperately misses his brother Bernard (Marsden), who went away but still sends him a daily audio-tape message. Then on the first day a tape fails to turn up, Franklin's whole life starts to unravel, starting with the fact that his landlord (Stormare) is lying dead on his kitchen floor. Franklin's attempt to get rid of the body draws the attention of two detectives (Crystal and Koechner), who start quizzing the neighbours (Knoxville and Caan). But this is only the start of Franklin's big adventure.

The story is structured as a series of wacky set-pieces set apart by luridly colourful flashbacks and fantasy sequences that fill in the back-stories for each of the characters. As a result, everyone on screen bursts with personality as well as motivations for everything they do, which makes watching them a lot more interesting than we expect. Crystal and Caan emerge as the most engaging people on screen, but even nuttier characters like Lundgren's "Brain Brawn" pop psychologist are fun to watch. By contrast, Lucas gives Franklin an eerily blank face: this is a man who still hasn't figured out who he is.

Continue reading: Small Apartments Review

Henry (Brody) takes a month-long assignment teaching at a tough school run by beleaguered principal Carol (Harden). Unflappable in the face of the unruly students, he calmly tries to get through to the teens. He clicks with fellow teacher Sarah (Hendricks). As a substitute, Henry's job is to maintain order, which seems like an impossible challenge. So he instead reaches out to a teen hooker (Gayle), thinking he might actually be able to make a difference in her life. But he can't help but wonder if he's doing more harm than good.

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Henry (Reeves) is just drifting through life with his wife Debbie (Greer) when his old school friend Eddie (Stevens) leaves him to take the fall for a bank robbery Henry knew nothing about. His life in prison isn't much worse than outside, and his new friend Max (Caan) makes up for the fact that Debbie runs off with one of the robbers (Hoch). And when he gets out a year or so later, Henry decides that since he's done the time, he might as well do the crime.

Continue reading: Henry's Crime Review

The film presents a snapshot of the hotel and its inhabitants, looking into a night filled with murder and gluttony in the doldrums of a desolate world. Tommy (Donnie Montemarano) and Mick (Vinnie Argiro) are two life-long friends from Brooklyn, in their early sixties, who have made their way as crooks. Tommy has just been released from prison, and Mick has brought him back to the hotel, where he surprises his buddy with a story of how he has gone clean. No more crime, booze, or floozies for Mick, who has saved up enough dough for the both of them to get on a bus at 7 a.m. the next morning to head for a new start in Vegas. But a mischievous Tommy, anxious after seven years in the pen, gets into some trouble after being propositioned by the seductive Amber (Natasha Lyonne). Amber is a "whooore," as Tommy refers to her with his thick Brooklyn accent, and part of a small prostitution ring run by Rodan (Vinnie Jones) from within the building. After the encounter, Tommy finds that he has compromised Mick's plans for Vegas and must somehow avoid the twisted Rodan in order to make his escape.

Continue reading: Night At The Golden Eagle Review

Normally, a movie that takes place largely in a Vegas strip joint would a shoo-in for five stars. Unfortunately, the ludicrous tale told in Luckytown doesn't merit the time spent in its nudie joints.

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Lars von Trier's peculiar compulsion to humiliate his heroines (and by extension the actresses who play them) has finally crescendoed to a deafening din of indiscriminate, exasperating martyrdom in "Dogville," a daring experiment in heightened performance and minimalist filmmaking that is fatally undermined by the Danish writer-director's conceit as a narrator.

His last four movies ("Breaking the Waves," "The Idiots," "Dancer in the Dark" and now "Dogville") have all dealt largely with the psychological (and sometimes physical) torture of vulnerable female protagonists. While his storytelling and cinematic style are almost always compelling, he's never seemed so arbitrary in his sadism than in this allegory of a beautiful, 1930s flapper fugitive hiding from the mob in a ragged, remote, austere Colorado mountain hamlet, where the tiny populace goes from distrustful to accepting to maliciously cruel on little more than von Trier's say-so.

Played with discernible dedication by Nicole Kidman, Grace is a porcelain enigma of self-flagellation so determined to escape some kind of shadowy past that, in exchange for the skeptical township's shelter, she agrees to indentured servitude -- doing handy work, favors and manual labor one hour a day in each of the seven households. She gradually comes earn the friendship of all -- even those most reluctant to accept her.

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"Mickey Blue Eyes" is one of those movies that wouldn't last 20 minutes if the main character wasn't a certifiable moron.

A comedy of the uncomfortable, it's predicated on Hugh Grant, playing an tentative, English, auction house proprietor in New York, allowing himself to become embroiled in the mob when he unknowingly proposes to a mafia princess (Jeanne Tripplehorn).

She declines, crying her eyes out and explaining her background and the family she's tried to put behind her. Romantically, he says it doesn't matter. She exacts one promise from him: That he won't agree to do any favors for her family and won't accept any, either. "That's how they get you," she says. "Then you'll be one of them."

Continue reading: Mickey Blue Eyes Review