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Gifted director Jeff Nichols takes on another genre in his fourth film with actor Michael Shannon, after Shotgun Stories, Take Shelter and Mud. This one's an involving character-based sci-fi adventure made in the style of classic films like E.T. or Close Encounters. As the characters are thrown into an extraordinary situation, the story gradually reveals its fantastical secrets without resorting to the usual overblown blockbuster formula, which makes the movie remarkably resonant and genuinely thrilling.

Shannon plays Roy, a man who is on the run across Texas with his 8-year-old son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) and his childhood friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton), who's now a state trooper. And the FBI is on their trail, investigating the religious cult they escaped from. Led by the defiant Calvin (Sam Shepard), the cult seems to have been centred around the unusual ability Alton has to gather information from government satellites. Which is why the FBI is so intent on tracking him down. Working with the FBI, NSA Agent Sevier (Adam Driver) is fascinated by Alton's abilities, and he begins to worry what might happen if the boy is captured. Meanwhile, Roy and Lucas have reunited with Alton's mother Sarah (Kirsten Dunst) and are continuing their journey across the American South. And time is clearly of the essence, since Alton is growing seriously ill.

Writer-director Nichols skilfully keeps the audience gripped by the central mystery, dropping in hints and revelations along the way that slowly build up to the final big picture. This forces the viewer into the same perspective as the characters, who don't have a clue what's going on but are gripped by the possibilities of what they're witnessing. This also makes it impossible to predict where the story might go next as it cycles through action, humour, emotion and exhilarating drama. Through all of this, the actors all offer beautiful textures in their characters, underplaying even the most intense scenes to make them feel strikingly realistic.

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Despite the skill behind and in front of the camera, a badly constructed script flattens this film version of Jack Kerouac's iconic 1957 novel. It's beautifully shot and sharply played by the starry ensemble cast, but the repetitive structure leaves the film with no forward momentum. Instead of a voyage of discovery, it feels like a lot of random, pointless wandering.

Thinly autobiographical, the story centres on the young New York writer Sal (Riley). He's drawn to the charismatic Dean (Moriarty), a charming rogue who's married to 16-year-old Marylou (Stewart) but is having an affair with Camille (Dunst) while seducing every other woman he meets. And quite a few men as well, including Sal's friend Carlo (Sturridge). All of them are writers and artists, hanging out in clouds of hash smoke as they drive back and forth across America in search of something to write about.

Of course, Sal finds this in Dean as their friendship ebbs and flows over several years. Since this is essentially Sal's story, it's rather odd that the film abandons him from time to time to follow someone else, leaping jarringly into another situation, often marked by Dean's sudden reappearance after yet another bit of roaming. So while we understand how everyone is held in Dean's magnetic orbit, we can't quite see the point of it all. Sal may be obsessed with his thoughts of Dean, but he seems strangely willing to abandon him time and time again. There isn't nearly enough of the scene-stealing costars like Mortensen, Adams and Buscemi. And frankly, it should be a crime to waste Moss (of Mad Men fame) in such a fragmented role.

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The trio in question are Dunst, Fisher and Caplan, high school friends who reunite in New York as bridesmaids for Becky (a cleverly against-type Wilson), a girl none of them ever really liked. On the night before the marriage, they're goofing around with Becky's rather large wedding dress, and they tear it. So now they have one long night to get it repaired. Along the way, they run into the stag night for Becky's groom (MacArthur) and his chucklehead friends (Scott, Marsden and Bornheimer).

Continue reading: Bachelorette Review

Universally considered the worst superhero sequel ever, Joel Schumacher's bloated monstrosity temporarily derailed Warner's lucrative Dark Knight franchise when it tried in vain to fill gaping plot holes with a multitude of C-list villains and unnecessarily whiny sidekicks.

Continue reading: Spider-Man 3 Review

Set in the mid-seventies, the plot follows the Lisbon family, with James Woods, a physics teacher at the local high school, as the scatter brained father, and Kathleen Turner as the uncommonly strict mother. Their five daughters are beautiful, naturally blonde, and the desire of every boy in the neighborhood. When the youngest, Cecilia, mysteriously attempts suicide, psychiatrist Danny DeVito recommends that she be allowed to interact more socially, especially with boys. So the Lisbon girls are introduced to the boys of the neighborhood, who have already been watching the girls from afar through half-opened window shades, binoculars, and telescopes. At a party in Cecilia's honor, the boys witness a tragedy that shocks them out of their wits. As a result, the Lisbons fall into a deep suppression shutting out the rest of the world by retreating into their own inner sanctum. It appears they will never recover until Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett), the high school heartthrob, pursues the unattainable Lux (Kirsten Dunst). He attempts to ask her to the prom, but the only way her mother will allow him to take Lux is if all the girls go together. For the first time, the girls will venture out of the home to interact socially in an environment other than school.

Continue reading: The Virgin Suicides Review

Crowe's uncanny knack for turning up the volume has allowed countless scenes to soar to their potential. One problem nagging Elizabethtown, Crowe's most awkward project to date, is that the director is obligated to crank the knob again and again to overcome bland performances and missed emotional connections. He has assembled another astonishing collection of inspirational rock tracks, but for the first time the soundtrack outshines the accompanying movie by a long shot.

Continue reading: Elizabethtown Review

Going in to this movie, I knew full well it was, well, a movie about cheerleading, so I wasn't expecting another American Beauty (which, now that I think of it, was partly about cheerleading, but anyway...). Suffice it to say that my expectations were low. And sure enough, Bring It On is an utterly vapid film with horrendous character development, hackneyed dialogue, and a questionable theme. No surprise there. Essentially it is Fame in short skirts.

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After a dozen or so years of fantastically bitter legal wrangling, Spider-Man has finally crawled to the big screen. For the uninitiated (and even for those of us who grew up with the comics but can't remember all the details), Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is the whipping boy of his New York high school. He's got a crush on the girl next door, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst), and his best friend Harry (James Franco) is the son of the local millionaire/scientist Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe).

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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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The movie makes the same mistakes over and over and eventually drains one's patience, but yet I stuck around because the leads played kids I would have liked to know.

Continue reading: Get Over It Review

The two are spotted in the White House by a gaurd who originally saw the girls at Watergate the night of the burglary. The two are taken to the infamous "West Wing" where they meet and fall in love with President Richard "Dick" Nixon, played by Dan Hedaya, and very well I might add. Unfortunetly Hedaya's very entertaining performance of Dick couldn't save this already ill-fated non-comedy.

Continue reading: Dick Review

Leaning hard into ham-fisted mockery of beauty pageants and Midwesterners, "Drop Dead Gorgeous" is an exercise in frustration.

It's frustrating because this mocumentary condemnation of the objectification of teenage girls is ripe with thick, delicious layers of irony, but director Michael Patrick Jann -- whose background is in sketch comedy -- allows that irony to be beaten to death by cheap, madcap overacting.

Following two frontrunners in the fictional American Teen Princess Pageant, "Gorgeous" applies its comedy with all the precision of a paint roller. Wide swaths of disposable laughs come from parading the absurdly varied and one-dimensional contestants before the camera. There's a showtune freak with a drag queen brother, a fat chick, an American girl adopted by Japanese immigrants, a brainiac who wants to do a Shakespeare soliloquy in the talent competition, an interpretive dancer and a soccer dyke -- whose death in a farming accident sets up the plot, revolving around how far one girl might go to win.

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Most film directors dream about making their "Citizen Kane," and while few would have the audacity to try to equal Orson Welles' cinematic masterpiece, Peter Bogdanovich has found a way to do the next best thing.

Where Welles borrowed famously from the life of William Randolph Hearst -- his ego, his powerful publishing empire and his scandals -- in creating the fictional Charles Foster Kane, Bogdanovich has commandeered an incessant rumor about an infamous and mysterious death aboard Hearst's yacht in 1924 and turned it into a foxy and spirited historical showbiz anecdote that lingers in your mind for weeks after seeing it.

"The Cat's Meow" is an ensemble piece packed with the best work of some under-appreciated actors including Edward Herrmann ("The Lost Boys," "Gilmore Girls") as an amusingly gruff Hearst whose paranoia has gotten the better of his nerves; Joanna Lumley ("Absolutely Fabulous") as sardonic novelist and socialite Elinor Glyn; Jennifer Tilly ("Bound") as sycophantic but opportunistic gossip columnist Louella Parsons; Cary Elwes ("The Princess Bride") as once legendary, now down on his luck movie producer Thomas Ince; and a delightfully devilish yet wisely understated Eddie Izzard ("Shadow of the Vampire") as Charlie Chaplin. All these famous names were among the billionaire's onboard guests that fateful weekend.

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Whether it's a skill learned hanging around the sets ofher father's movies or something in the family blood, SofiaCoppola has definitely inherited a distinguishable talent as a filmmaker.

"The Virgin Suicides" -- her moody, dark andwhimsical first feature from behind the camera -- is a mesmerizing andaccomplished directorial debut about an enigmatic quintet of innocentlyseductive teenage sisters who all kill themselves in the course of onemonth in the mid-1970s.

The story was adapted by Coppola herself from a best-sellerby Jeffrey Eugenides, and is curiously told from the perspective of a handfulof neighborhood boys, smitten and spellbound by the girls as teenagersand still haunted by their inexplicable deaths 25 years later.

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"Bring It On" is better than any movie about cheerleading really ought to be.

Taking cues from "Clueless" -- the best teen bubble gum flick of Generation Y -- it's a self-mocking popularity satire that takes frequent pot shots at "sweater monkeys" and their endlessly percolating pep, while also allowing its bright cast of pretty young things to color outside the lines of their stock characters.

The talented Kirsten Dunst embraces her inner ditz as Torrence Shipman, the new cheer captain of the Rancho Carne High School Toros, a boys-and-girls pep squad with a repertoire of flashy choreographed routines and a major reputation to maintain. For five years running they've won the ruthlessly competitive national cheerleading championships. (You know you've watched them on ESPN2, admit it.)

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Having dabbled in John Malkovich's mind in "Being John Malkovich," then delved into his own neurotic noggin in "Adaptation," ingeniously idiosyncratic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wraps his head around themes of lucid-dreaming and lost love in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and once again hits the Freudian jackpot.

A melancholy metaphysical romance about how human beings are the sum of their experiences, this distinctively surreal, meditative fable takes place largely inside the rapidly dissolving memories of a dejected sad sack named Joel Barish (Jim Carrey), who hopes to end a crippling case of heartbreak by having his ex-girlfriend (Kate Winslet) electronically expunged from his cerebellum in a makeshift CAT-scan procedure performed by a dubious back-alley doctor (Tom Wilkinson) and his nerdy house-call technicians.

To augment the film's sublimely disorienting narrative -- parts of which run backwards as Joel's discordant recent memories are boiled away before his more melodious earlier ones -- director Michel Gondry opens with an unsteady shot of Joel wobbling out of his unfolded sofa-bed on Valentine's Day 2004, the morning after his selective lobotomy.

Continue reading: Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Review