question: The Last Castle is well acted and rousing for the most part, but the story can't stand up to close scrutiny.

numbered reviews: 1. A mundane and predictable amalgam of prison movie cliches and archetypes.
2. The story is a stirring vehicle for serious themes embodied by sharply drawn characters.
3. The Last Castle is not as simple as it looks, though its appeal is simple.
4. The Last Castle, while engrossing in parts, might have benefited from more pre-shooting talk about what makes an intriguing character -- and what makes a star performance.
5. A heavy-handed military prison melodrama.
6. Devolves into a mundane warden-versus-inmate conclusion.
7. An intermittently witty script and Rod Lurie's assured direction triumph over the cornball factor.
8. Once you strip away the red, white and blue bunting, the film we're left with is one swell action sequence -- a prison riot -- and every prison movie cliche in the (1940s vintage) book.
9. Thanks to Redford and Gandolfini, you might be able to forgive The Last Castle's prison-movie cliches, as well as the rash of improbabilities that undermine the film's extended final prison-yard battle.
10. Obvious but involving.


question: Being a remake of a Thai horror film instead of Japanese doesn't prevent Shutter from being another lame Asian horror remake.

numbered reviews: 1. Asian horror remakes are typically not screened for critics, and Shutter is no exception. The studios know what they have: watered-down, lifeless shells of motion pictures devoid of characters, drama, or anything remotely resembling horror.
2. Personally, I prefer the Thai original, which is available on DVD. It truly gave me the creeps.
3. ...like a video copy of The Ring which has so degraded that all the good bits are no longer visible.
4. Can no one think of a different reason for ghosts to haunt people?
5. Its PG-13 rating and basic lack of gore seem designed to be uncontroversial, but of course the result of all this anti-controversy is a really dull film.
6. The only thrills in 'Shutter' come from watching Joshua Jackson in a couple of appealing close-ups.
7. Add Shutter to the rapidly growing list of American remakes of Asian horror thrillers, in this case a flat, simple schlocky recycling of a crafty and scary Thai flick about the supernatural and the occult.
8. Shutter coughs up another vengeful ghost in the form of a spurned Japanese waif who appears in photographs and sets about getting her message across as many ghosts do -- in the most indirect, passive-aggressive, logic-defying way imaginable
9. Ochiai directs with calm assurance -- no eyeball-rattling quick cuts here -- and Dawson's screenplay preserves most of the original script's strengths and fixes a couple of weaknesses.
10. The choice of a Japanese director and a number of key Japanese crew seems to have helped make this American remake a notch better than the other atrocious remakes such as One Missed Call, Pulse and The Eye.


question: Featuring gut-wrenching performances from Anamaria Marinca and Laura Vasiliu, 4 Months is a gripping portrayal of life in Communist Romania.

numbered reviews: 1. Observes with ruthless, artful precision. While plunging a knife through your soul.
2. Proceeding with a blunt and sometimes brutal relentlessness, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days impresses and engrosses as a work of stark, spare naturalism.
3. A film of brutal, breathtaking intelligence, a work of pellucid, shimmering art without a scintilla of compromise, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days is surely one of the very best films of the year. And you can pick the year.
4. His film unfolds with a graceful realism, as if he just happened to catch life unfolding for these two desperate women. His film never hits a false note...
5. Virtuosic, assured, and possessed of undeniable aesthetic force, it's also hard not to turn away from.
6. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a feminist film of the toughest and most rewarding kind. Without flinching, it looks at the limits of female friendship and college romance; it depicts the horrors of illegal abortion from every angle.
7. It's a testament to the brilliance of Mungiu's writing and the actors' performances that the conversations feel more natural than anything captured on a reality show.
8. Just as Romanians got used to eating bones with little meat on them, they must also have gotten used to movies with very little dramatic meat.
9. The mesmerizing 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days represents another outstanding offering from Romania, a country in the throes of a cinematic renaissance.
10. A brilliant and discomfiting film.


question: A provocative premise and inventive set design lights the way for Hitchcock diabolically entertaining masterpiece.

numbered reviews:
1. Gripping all the way, this is a Hitchcock thriller in which, through happenstance, two men, completely different, are drawn inexorably together and toward an uncommon goal--murder.
2. Hitchcock has a deft touch with his actors producing characters in predicaments that are easy to empathize with.
3. As sleek, taut and breezy an entertainment as Hitchcock ever made, and a nice hinge moment, almost exactly in the middle of the black-and-white and color phases of his American career.
4. Hitchcock was above all the master of great visual set pieces, and there are several famous sequences in Strangers on a Train.
5. Most of the film is a journey through pure Hitchcockian irony and suspense, and well worth the trip.
6. worthy vehicle that displays Hitchcock's narrative ability and explores some of his favorite themes
7. Alfred Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train" is about weakness crisscrossing with evil, with evil pushing hard for the upper hand. Nobody comes away unscathed.
8. The prototypical Hitchcock thrill ride.
9. Two men, a problem, and a crime is an old theme, but the list of works that exploit it perfectly is a short one. Strangers on a Train belongs on it.
10. To ignore the subtext during the runaway carousel climax is to be absolutely blind.