(4) zeitgeist, the spirt of the times, struggling to free itself of many foul diseases that have invaded its body politic. The Dark Knight Rises has a Gotham City that is a nobel force battling every bit of foulness a malevolent universe can toss at it. It is an epic tale and to witness this is enthralling. Nolan, who can indeed be pretentious and vague in his work, did good , very good this time out.

(3) and ambiivlent morality--but Nolan provides a masterful tone to all of this, a noirish brooding contained in this film's dark corners, and moves along the plot points at a relatively brisk pace, considering the length of the film. It is a murky film, but it is an epic murk, a series of catastrophes wherin in it appears that not just the characters fight for what it is good and decent in this world, but also the

(2) In othe words, this autuer of bleak proves himself capable of being hung with the many strands of his own ideas--so many loose strings left untied. "Dark Knight Rises", though, benefits greatly for having comic books as its source material, a form that demands a leaner, more straight forward narrative. Not that DKR is a simple tale--it's a murky terrain of moral ambivilance, self doubt

Chris Nolan's last film "Inception" was a superb example of what this director does with an idea when he decides to worry the notion and overwork it to the extent that it becomes a slow, waddling crawl of a film bloated with intellectual pretensions that cease to be parts of an intricate premise and more a case of a screenwriters who have fallen in love iwth the soundof their own voice.

Die Hard is man a cineaste's guilty pleasure--it was practically the only one-man-wrecking-crew movies to do anything different in terms of the hero. Willis's John McKlane isn't the rock jawed muscle monster of an Arnie but rather a reluctant everyman who is scared out of his mind as he continues to foul up the plans of the bad guys. It is, as well, a tightly directed and edited actioner that sill provides a kick in the pants. It is a masterpiece of a sort, in that it created a formula that hadn't been there before. The problem, of course, is that the practioneers of the genre haven't come up with any new twists.

That was a film that never worked for me; it tried to layer so many things over one another that you were left with the feeling that the writer and director Richard Kelly kept adding things after production started. The result is a muddle, an ambitious item without a unifying idea to offer. At bet, it lacks conviction.

The world is sterile and boredom rampant and violenceis the only cure for the tedium in this dystopian future. Pomposity and hand wringing and an arm waving visual style still amount to a struggle to remain in your seat as you try to watch it. Kubrick was an occasionally brilliant director, to be sure, but this is a comedy with no punchlines, only a a punching bag, which is the audience.

But it is C and M that is the more potent film; the characters are complex and unlikeable and their respective fates embodies as Clint Eastwood's slogan at the end of Unforgiven ; "Deserves got nothing to do with it".

Crimes and Misdemeanors is a seriously underrated Woody Allen film, and one of his most even handed. With the seamy elements of unbridled careerism, adultry, murder, and dead-end spiritualism laced through it's deftly constructed narrative, it is a precursor of Allen's 2005 critical success Matchpoint, a good variation on the film maker's themes.

An exquisitely filmed and edited movie, but one that is more mood than movement. Malick ihas too much of the photographer's eye here, concentrating on framing a good many of his exposition shots in ways that suggest the classic shots of Walker Evans and his images of depression era migrant workers; the story line, is presented as if from a requirement that the images have a narrative on which they are hung.

I had the good fortune of seeing this film for the fourth time last night, and I remain with my opinion that this is one of the finest American movies of the last fifty years. If nothing else, director and co-writer Curtis Hanson has turned an dense James Ellroy novel into a rivetting crime drama. In the midst of a city defined by corruption, three cops of varied circumstances find their duty-bound moral centers.

Francis Coppola wanted to win the Nobel Prize by making this elephantine elaboration of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness", the result of such ambitions being that the film is a structural miss. It is impressive,though, with any number of brilliant sequences and set pieces; for all the pretensions are profundity, this remains an amazing bit of film making, however erratic.

3.The dialogue here merely stalls, stops, occupies time like it were a waiting room. Seeing these characters again go on about the differences in burger joints between Amsterdam and America, the finer points of foot massage and revenge, on changing one's way of life due to a revealed miracle, makes you wish something would happen that was gratuitous and without justification. Anything to get on with it.

2. The dialogue ,as such, are extended riffs divorced from the violence and action, a sort of virtuosity that is more obstrusive than revealing; the beauty of pulp fiction was that its minimalist discussions, compact, jargon filled, quirky and redolent in references that suggested a sub culture beyond the melodrama of the basic plot, were models of sledge hammer concision.

This movie will hang around Tarantino's head for as long as he lives because it will be regarded, always, as the best thing he's ever done. It remains a powerful film for the most part, full of wicked laughs and and reconvolutions of seamy paperback action novels, but it does shows it's age. The dialogue is something else altogether, but does anyone really think he's done better than the Master, Elmore Leonard?