Richard Gere gives what many are calling the performance of his career in this thriller from Joseph Cedar.

Your basic basic-training movie, with a hard-nosed, dedicated drill sergeant (played with gusto by Lou Gossett) bulldogging would-be Naval aviators through thirteen weeks of Officer Candidate School. It's something of a puzzle why a movie in this day and age would take so long going over these fundamentals, but then, …

Sidney Lumet on the American political scene, coming at it from a slightly new angle, shifting the spotlight to illuminate a formerly shadowed nook of it: the anonymous groomer behind the public candidate. On the pretense of enlightening the benighted, Lumet can content himself with, or console himself for, any …

Cinderella story (or as one of the characters self-consciously puts it: "Cinde-fuckin'-rella") wherein Prince Charming is a corporate raider and the Pitiful Drudge is a Hollywood streetwalker: "You and I are such similar creatures, Vivian. We both screw people for money." Neither of the players (nor the screenwriter) gets inside …

Richard Gere puts his paycheck where his mouth is, and takes part in a huffy, sniffy reproof of Communist China on its human-rights record, although the whipped-up case of an American entrepreneur framed for murder while in the middle of negotiations to lift the Bamboo Curtain to the glories of …

Kurosawa's Indian summer lingers on, a little drowsier than before. In truth, the best manifestation of his famous intransigence is his lack of compulsion to be scintillating, his lack of fear of being dull. Four undifferentiated schoolchildren on summer holiday (their T-shirts — USC Trojans, New York Mets, M.I.T. — …

The reunion of the stars and director of Pretty Woman (not to forget supporting actor Hector Elizondo) is a Nineties-style screwball comedy, tolerable to the degree that you can tolerate the two stars. For many, presumably, that will be highly. Julia Roberts's constant sending-out of signals in an effort to …

Deliberately, diligently, self-contentedly conventional dead-teenager thriller: the deeds are done by a serial killer in a Grim-Reaper-by-Edvard-Munch mask. The relentless allusions to film and television ("You can only hear that Richard Gere gerbil story so many times until you have to start believing it") are supposed to lift it above …

More tales of love and impending death among English retirees in India. This time around, the story is driven by the young proprietor Sonny (Dev Patel), who is simultaneously preparing to marry his fiancee and expand his hospitality empire. His ambition for the latter tends to overshadow his devotion to …

Ill-conceived American remake, under British director Peter Chelsom, of the 1996 Japanese film (not the 1937 Astaire-Rogers film), the original of which was a success as much artistically as commercially. The social stigma, for starters, which we learned was attached to ballroom dancing in the regimented Land of the Rising …

A transplant of The Return of Martin Guerre into the post-Civil War South: an imposter, after six years away at war, i.e. two years longer than the war in its entirety, takes over the position of the local lout and landowner (a full-grown adult before his departure) and in his …

It has the plot of a bedroom farce, though the director, Yurek Bogayevicz, doesn't appear to notice the fact, or feel obliged on that account to be funny, or have any inhibition about reaching for the spiritual heights. A closet lesbian, all set to "come out" at her sister's wedding, …

Look, if you're going to cast Richard Gere as a borderline alcoholic, slightly spaced-out homeless person, it's not enough to give him a bad haircut and some stubble. Put some grit into that honeyed voice. Grind some dirt into those graying-eminence creases on the forehead and around the eyes. Otherwise, …

Adrian Lyne, agent provocateur of Lolita, Indecent Proposal, Fatal Attraction, et al., gets out the blackened oven mitts for his réchauffé of Claude Chabrol's adultery-and-murder dish, La Femme Infidèle. The suburban housewife, Constance (get the irony?), contentedly married for eleven years to the head of a New York security firm …

Deep absorption, at the start, in the enclosed world of a dour Connecticut college professor, the classroom, the private office, the school cafeteria, the empty hours at home where, to fill the void left by his late wife, a concert pianist, he tries desultorily to master the instrument himself, late …