Guy Ritchie's mainstream rehash of his Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, the same collection of "colorful" characters (Bullet-Tooth Tony, Franky Four Fingers, Boris the Blade, et al.), the same hectic crisscross of underworld factions, the same violent collision of these, and the same stylistic superficiality, flashiness, trendiness, and conformism …

The loss of a spouse (post-fire), measured in a nonlinear narrative that eclipses our feelings of sorrow with feelings of mere irritation. Once the widow reaches out to her husband's heroin-addicted best friend, the narrative straightens out, but the striven-for naturalness never rings true. With Halle Berry, Benicio Del Toro, …

Steven Soderbergh holds forth for two and a half hours on the illicit drug trade. One hears that the narrative is "complex," but only in the strictly numerical sense of "consisting of two or more related parts" (courtesy of Webster's New World Dictionary). Three parts, to be absolutely exact. The …

Is this a ripple in the inevitable Tarantino backwash? The caper plotline is snipped into nonsequential segments, and the dialogue runs harum-scarum for the four-letter words and their compounds. (Unusually amusing example: five participants in a police lineup performing their different interpretations of "Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker.") …

Spawn of Tarantino. A gory, amoral, all-attitude caper thriller, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie (writer only on The Usual Suspects), who arranges such a crowded schedule of "startling" revelations that they soon become ho-hum revelations. Juliette Lewis, the kidnapped surrogate mother (ready to pop), is in rough proximity to …

Under the drillmasterly direction of Joe Johnston, the remake emerges as your basic tale of Oedipal lycanthropy, an Oedipus simplex if you will (the ungovernable son, for good measure, has been playing Hamlet on the London stage), so basic that it takes place in the 19th Century, unearths an archetypal …