A mainstreamy, sitcommy version of Happiness, awash in splashy, trashy plot turns. Any movie whose opening line features a sulky teenage girl (in a grainy video image, but never mind that) saying directly into a camcorder, "I need a father who's a role model, not some horny geek-boy who's gonna …

A Western only by the technicality of its setting: California gold country, 1867. Michael Winterbottom, who earlier brought Jude the Obscure to the screen, takes the plot premise from Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge, but most everything else from Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller: the jerry-built town, the brothel, the …

The old imperialist warhorse, regroomed and re-shod for a new generation: the expurgation of "Fuzzy-Wuzzies" from the vocabulary; the elevation of a native African (Djimon Hounsou, of Spielberg's Amistad) above our civilized Englishmen in nobility and bravery; the post-Vietnam doubts as to the wisdom of military intervention in a distant …

Yet another Marvel Comic turned unmarvelous movie, about an Evel Knievel motorcycle daredevil (Nicolas Cage, with a black divot of a hairpiece) who has sold his soul to Mephistopheles (a bouffant Peter Fonda), though he flees his responsibilities as "the Devil's bounty hunter" and continues to pursue his chosen vocation. …

A rom-com with precious little com but plenty of unintentionally hilarious rom. Wes Bentley takes his perpetually perturbed mug south of the border to investigate the mysterious woman who stopped in at his dad's funeral and made everyone wonder if the old man had a piece of pollo on the …

Way back in 2015, Disney subsidiary Pixar released The Good Dinosaur, a boy-and-his-dog story that flipped things by making the big green lizard into the lost little boy and giving the dog’s part to a feral human child. Here, Disney flips Pixar back into conventional mode, returning the feral human …

A fine thriller, old-fashioned in the best senses. The grounded (but still otherworldly) setting: American diving experts assisting the Norwegian government in building a deep-sea oil pipeline. (The tension is there at the outset: technicians from the two sides arguing about what sort of gas mixture to give the divers …

Roland Joffé remains the thick, ponderous director who made The Mission and The Killing Fields. It takes some time to see that this lavish but feeble drama set mostly in the Spanish Civil War is a chapel candle for Josemaría Escrivá, founder of the rightist Catholic organization Opus Dei. Charlie …

Don't see We Are Your Friends for its nonsensical attempt to make Electronic Dance Music into a digital means for conveying the artist's interior anguish. Nor for its silly, Instagram-level aphorisms (no, the best part of anything is not in fact the moment before it starts). Nor for its grab-bag …

Open-faced Kristen Wiig stars as Alice, a borderline-personality woman who believes everything Oprah tells her about being a special person who deserves to win. And who, when she wins $87 million dollars in the lottery, decides to host a TV show about...herself. What starts out looking like a quirky attack …