finds it difficult to infuse humanity into a character who essentially functions as a dramatic device

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 20, 2006

The film plays for keeps: It hurts and it doesn't back away from messy questions about art, commerce and conscience.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 6, 2005

By the end of the film, relationships have turned so corrosive that the characters leave an ugly aftertaste in the mind of the viewer.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 6, 2005

The Dying Gaul begins with a Herman Melville quote: 'Woe to him who seeks to please rather than appall.' Let them serve not as words of wisdom, but of warning.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 2, 2005

[E]xcept for some problems in the middle act, the movie is easy to swallow.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 23, 2005

Like minimalist composer Steve Reich's prickly, tense music on the soundtrack, the movie itself is too often too intellectual, experimental and abstract.

Full Review | Original Score: C+ | Nov 23, 2005

Lucas' insight into the subtleties of interaction -- and the churning depths that those subtleties suggest -- is of a whole other order than that of most film directors.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 18, 2005

The movie doesn't completely please, but more disappointing is that it no longer aims to appall, either.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 18, 2005

I'm not going to spell out the collateral damage, but I found the ending cheap, contrived, and genuinely disgusting.

| Nov 18, 2005

The Dying Gaul is often wicked fun.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 11, 2005

It proves Lucas, the noted playwright, to be a born filmmaker.

| Original Score: B+ | Nov 9, 2005

We have good performances but a very faulty script.

Full Review | Nov 7, 2005

Begins promisingly only to lapse into an increasingly improbable and overly familiar tale about how rotten Hollywood industryites can be.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Nov 4, 2005

Lucas' evolved sense of character refuses to apply definitive shades of good and evil to anyone in this distressing triangle.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2005

Audacious and extremely well-acted -- if flawed.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Nov 4, 2005

With humor and rage fighting for dominance, debuting director Craig Lucas drives a stake into the dark heart of Hollywood.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 4, 2005

This smart, good-looking movie deserves an audience.

| Nov 4, 2005

The heady cast of Campbell Scott, Patricia Clarkson and Peter Sarsgaard labors mightily -- and unsuccessfully -- to create empathetic characters out of a trio of self-absorbed neurotics in contemporary Hollywood.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Nov 4, 2005

seems relevant only insofar as its cast effectively pinpoints the vengeful malice born from spurned love and squandered trust.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 3, 2005

Craig Lucas's sublimely acted film stars Campbell Scott as a closeted bisexual predator who has an affair with an emotionally unstrung writer (Peter Sarsgaard).

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2005