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Cybill Shepard is miscast in Bogdanovich's otherwise handsome adaptation of Henry James' famous novel.

For knucklehead machismo...and cheesy imitations...

While Steele Justice is highly entertaining, and very clearly following in the footsteps of a formula, its action execution is often sloppy and ham-handed.

Who needs a Rambo spoof when Rambo so successfully spoofed itself?

A highly accomplished tearjerker from Britain, and worth seeing for its warmth of feeling - even though you are aware all along that you are being "worked on" by a team of professional sentimentalists.

It's the sort of film where in a crisis nuns roll their eyes skywards and slowly murmur, with clasped hands, things like : 'Sweet Jesus, have mercy.'

If you want to know what the ultimately synthetic box-office film would look like, then try this weepie.

A sincere and involving celebration of the human heart that manages to sell its moving story without relying on mere sentimentality.

Thoughtful casting lends the film resonance, and it's far better than its potentially mawkish plot combination of children and nuns would suggest.

The pathos of little children caught in the agony of war is always a solid staple of sentiment on the screen. It has been well and touchingly presented in any number of films. And it is offered again with deep compassion in "Conspiracy of Hearts" ...

Papagajka starts with the mystery of an intriguing and beautiful world but, unfortunately, doesn't go beyond a surface level exploration of its world and characters.

A small yet satisfying psychological drama, dripping with atmosphere and surreal beauty.

Addicted doesn't know how to competently address its issues of shame and guilt without simply reifying that sexual fulfillment is something that ravages unless tightly contained.

Addicted is the kind of film for which the Alan Smithee pseudonym was invented.

Woodruff's direction is smooth enough on a technical level, but the film's storytelling has little dimension, even for a melodrama.

The actors are uniformly handsome and mostly serviceable, though the same can't be said about the filmmaking or the writing.

Part soapy melodrama, part steamy thriller of infidelity gone sideways, this film is wholly unconvincing as a study of sexual compulsion.

Watching "Addicted" is like eating Cheese Whiz straight from the jar. There's no nutritional value. It's kind of embarrassing. But it does satisfy a base craving for cheap, immediate sensation.

The film unfortunately depicts black female sexuality, a topic rarely portrayed onscreen, with all the depth and subtlety of a late night Cinemax offering.

"Addicted" doesn't know whether it wants to be a modern-day bodice-ripper, a morality-tinged cautionary tale or a serious snapshot of sexual compulsion. Whatever the case, it fails on all fronts.

Billed as an erotic thriller but playing more like an R-rated daytime soap, "Addicted" marks a rare but dramatically neutered opportunity to explore a black woman's sexuality onscreen.

"Addicted" doesn't fail because it wants to provide steamy, soapy melodrama to a mainstream audience; its faults are a function of its judgment, not of its genre ... more Cinemax than cinematic.

The film lingers so lovingly over Zoe's many sexual exploits that one almost feels disappointed when it becomes clear that the film is about to turn into a lecture. Erotica is best when it doesn't take itself too seriously.

While the leads are certainly attractive enough to bring the book to life, the film fails to live up to the melodrama and seductiveness that made the book popular.

Far be it from me to totally trash a seemingly-silly soap opera males might find laughable to the same extent it moves females to tears. Go figure!

If one squints hard enough, all the nudity and grinding might retain appeal, but for those who can't switch their brain off, the picture is maddeningly inconsistent and comically performed.

The film is fun, bright, mindless, yet bubbly and to be appreciated in that vain, if at all. Recommendation: Watch anything else.

Watchable as an outrageous film.

That it succeeds is mostly due to Fonda. Calling her performance powerhouse would be a grand understatement.

The film is meticulously made, offering a swirl of tension -- aided in this by Michael Small's haunting score -- and Fonda is indeed fantastic, even if the role she's playing happens to be a Hollywood staple of outdated moors.

Like other of Pakula's greatest films featuring phenomenal female leads, this is really a Jane Fonda picture you're watching, and it's impossible to forget it

Style, grit, and a narrative that pits focus on the unforgiving landscape of New York City.

There is a timelessness to the freaky-ness and sadness of the human condition in this film, and Fonda is nothing short of sensational in her tense portrayal of a transitioning soul. An essential watch.

As close to a classic as anything New Hollywood produced.

Persuasive script by Andy and Dave Lewis; elegantly muted Technicolor; high in its class.

What lifts it above its B-picture origins (and the pastiche is certainly conscious) is the style -- crisp, elliptical, only moderately arty -- of Alan J. Pakula's direction.

This is done with remarkably little dialogue but with a tremendous sense of tension and atmosphere.

But Klute feels vibrantly alive in a way that betrays its subdued chilliness.

While the plot mechanics work along the well-worn gears of any number of mystery-thrillers, the film catches and holds us because Bree is such a fascinating, enigmatic character.

Klute is a cool film about a cool customer, but it's all a façade... [I]t's more of a character study in thriller garb, and Bree's cool affect is mostly a well-honed act.

There was no shortage of superb performances by lead actresses in the 1970s -- Diane Keaton in Annie Hall and Sally Field in Norma Rae are two that immediately come to mind -- but Jane Fonda's turn in Klute was not only great but also groundbreaking.

A movie resolutely of its moment that still surges with third-rail electricity ...

Playing a complex, sharpy written part, Jane Fonda won the Best Actress Oscar for her strongest dramatic performance in Alan Pakula's well mounted drmataic thriller

Produced handsomely in New York, but directed tediously by Alan J. Pakula, the film is a suspenser without much suspense.

One of the most important and influential movies of the early 1970s.

[Fonda] makes all the right choices, from the mechanics of her walk and her voice inflection to the penetration of the girl's raging psyche. It is a rare performance.

Sutherland is either an excellent sounding board for this nuanced portrait or he's a big zero, probably both. Fonda, however, transcends her limitations, making the most of her often forced quality as an actress.

Fonda is simply a revelation, beautiful, sassy and streetwise, and yet hauntingly vulnerable. She deserved her Oscar in a role she has never bettered.

For once, a genuinely psychological thriller.

Fonda won an Oscar. Roy Scheider is her nasty pimp!

With Fonda and Sutherland, you have actors who understand and sympathize with their characters, and you have a vehicle worthy of that sort of intelligence. So the fact that the thriller stuff doesn't always work isn't so important.

Fonda and Sutherland sizzle. A great story too.

A knock-out

The whole movie is self-consciously artsy with long periods of silence, carefully composed camera setups that I guess are supposed to suggest remoteness and alienation.

Pakula, when he is not indulging in subjective camera, strives to give his film the look of structural geometry, but despite the sharp edges and dramatic spaces and cinema presence out of Citizen Kane, it all suggests a tepid, rather tasteless mush.

Fonda and Sutherland are at the top of their game in this mystery/thriller that also provides a fasinating look into the mind and soul of a top NYC callgirl.

A gripping suspense thriller; Fonda tough and vulnerable deserved her Oscar here.

Fonda's riveting performance is impossible to shake

Thanks to its complexities of character and morality, Klute creates a proposition for the audience in which there's no such thing as simple pleasure, even if we're paying.

Worth a look for Fonda, who finally became an actress with this role.

An exciting murder-mystery story that serves as a fascinating study of the complex inner life of an attractive call girl, played by Jane Fonda.

Even today it remains difficult to over-praise the depth and reality Fonda brought to her character, or to overstate how completely she set the pace for actresses in the '70s.

Informed in part by the conventions of film noir...Klute manages to distil them all into something highly original and distinctly unsettling.

Klute was fresh when it came out in the 1970s, but time has taken away much of its boldness.

Mann stages some thrilling sequences, notably a pounding storm, and while Thunder Bay is no masterpiece, it's still worth a look.

Thunder Bay combines all the elements for an engrossing movie.

Sets up fascinating tensions between people and ways of looking at the world, but ultimately backs away from any kind of meaningful examination of them.

There's not many directors other than Anthony Mann who could have made the rival wildcatters and shrimpers become so lovey-dovey.

Stinks up the joint.

The whole film has an air of smugness about it, as if Burns has created this 92-minute joke which either you get or you don't.

Uncertain as to whether it's a horror story, a cautionary tale or simply another absurdist look at life and love in the big city, A Problem With Fear gets its own case of the cold sweats.

A Problem With Fear is aggressively busy, jumping between sterile office buildings, airless shopping malls and hurtling subways, cut with television and computer game images. None of it though, amounts to much beyond a sense of visual irritation.

A puerile TV-style pigskin parody.

Silver has done something really special with all of this, bringing the stories of these four people together in a sort of relationship mélange that speaks to the ways people can't help but miss the forest for the trees.

The offhanded, piercing quality of the comedy within the viper's nest of romantic roundelays suggests a cruel Alan Rudolph, and that's more than enough for me.

Self-delusion is the principal subject of this short, acerbic comedy by Nathan Silver.

Flashbacks and fantasies, plus wry inserts of film clips and complex overlaps of art and life, adorn-for that matter, overwhelm-the story, which is built on flimsy psychological clichés amid the implacable imperatives of desire and disease.

The energetically crafted, well-acted movie about characters one would go to considerable extremes to avoid in real life is turning into a veritable indie micro-genre.

The Great Pretenders fails at every genre it pretends to be.

The Great Pretender manages to illustrate the irrefutable truth that life and romance is messy, but also quite entertaining.

The punchlines are dark and the tone is caustic, but its central concern is a classic one: what we see in other people and how we would like to see ourselves.

This film is a beautiful and beguiling art object.

Unfortunately, as with so many of Silver's films, the endless self-absorption of the characters on display quickly wears thin.

While by no means a masterpiece or rewriting of all that has come before, iOnce Upon a Time in Calcuttai exhibits the dramatic potential of a director who refuses to ignore what is oft left forgotten in what is considered "the stages of development."

Peripheral details like an old abandoned theater and a pregnant dog were more interesting than the main characters.

A crisp little picture framed in a hazy bigger one, defined by a nervy national mood that is implicitly felt rather than explicitly illustrated.

It feels like a young filmmaker has watched a lot of porn, ultra-violence and Gus Van Sant and tried to combine them in one movie. And it just doesn't work. At all.

The underlying pathos in the premise gives the film a jolt of emotion that's difficult to define.

A school comedy so predictable the screenwriters should be sent to the principal's office but with a central performance worth skipping last period for.

It was good acting and good writing.

Oh dear, am I the Duff?

While director Ari Sandel's adaptation is devoid of any surprises and spells out every thought and action, it does finally deliver a worthy message.

Not clever enough to be genre-defining in its own right, The DUFF nevertheless follows successfully in the footsteps of its teen romcom predecessors, delivering both laughs and a genuinely touching romance.

It's not a terrible movie, just kind of forgettable and average.

This is Whitman's show, and she's so strong she makes a good film out of what should have been a middling one.

There's a part of me that thinks I should dislike this film on principle alone, but I'd be lying if I said I did dislike the finished project.

A fairly predictable entry into the teen genre that is elevated thanks to an incredibly charming lead performance from Mae Whitman.

THE DUFF has a visual style that places you in the lexicon of the teen psyche, with self-referential hashtags and slang.

Both the cruelty of the students and the happiness of the ending felt beyond the realm of possibility to me. If you're going to make a satire, you have to go all the way.

What keeps this movie from simply being a tired rip-off is the incredible performance of Mae Whitman.