Carrie Rickey

With pratfalls and teardrops, the film swings from sitcom to sit-dram.

So what if the movie isn't finger-lickin' good like the original? The performances by Hanks as a crook and Irma P. Hall as his honorable landlady are mighty tasty.

Proves that the most local story is sometimes the most universal, the simplest tale sometimes the most complex.

Iridescent as each of the actors is, the result is like a handful of beads without the connecting string.

It's not fresh and irreverent, qualities we admire in Allen. It is recycled and irrelevant.

Grant's film plays like a two-hour episode of "Friends" intercut with "Seventh Heaven." Those sounds you hear are wisecrack, heartbreak, heartbreak, wisecrack, wisecrack.

One admires Wallace's intentions while despairing at his execution. Yet as clumsily directed as his film is, it inspires compassion for Moore, his men and their foes. And in that, there is merit.

Fugard’s classic minimalist drama comes eloquently to film.

It is a difficult and demanding movie, one that rewards the persevering moviegoer just as Pollock's difficult and demanding paintings ultimately reward the steadfast.

Fan's fly-on-the-wall perspective enables the viewer to empathize with all the players in the family drama, unlikely to have a happy ending.

When the film focuses on the Trojans, it's splendid. But when Troy attempts to sort out the competing agendas of the Greeks, it drags.

Like most Lee films, She Hate Me is gasp-worthy, with something to offend everyone. I will not say that I liked it. I will say that like "Bamboozled," it exasperates and resonates.

Vintage Terry Gilliam, a pour not to all tastes but one certain to please lovers of "Time Bandits" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."

Sisterhood is Stand by Me for girls, as sullen, plucky, melodramatic, exuberant, athletic, graceless, crafty, artistic, arrogant, modest, helpless and resourceful as its teenage heroines.

A far more trenchant - and funnier - satire of the fame-afflicted than Woody Allen's "Celebrity."

Paradoxically fast-talking and laid back, Long's Bartleby appears to be the illegitimate child of Groucho Marx and Ferris Bueller, one whose schemes are far more impressive than his deeds.

First-time filmmaker Kolirin paces his can-we-all-just-get-along? parable as if it were a silent comedy, which for long stretches it is. This movie about musicians has no soundtrack. Its musical moments are few, but potent.

All in all, a resonant theme, poorly played.

Binder has written himself a scene-stealing supporting role as Shep, sleazeball producer.

The performances in Girl, Interrupted resonate, but the movie does not.

Quickly devolves into a violent thriller that resolves itself in sadomasochistic romance.

Franco, the hollow-cheeked, pouty-lipped actor best known as Spider-Man's nemesis Harry Osborn, plays Tristan like a biker boy with a broadsword.

Richard Wenk's script, taut and enjoyable, pays homage to those police procedurals, with a nod to the Brazilian hostages-on-mass-transit documentary, "Bus 174."

Lives is a best-foreign-film nominee competing in a year that at least three movies in this category are stronger than Oscar's best-picture contenders.

With Insomnia, his third feature, Nolan, 32, has proven himself a precocious master of the thriller, unsettling the audience with a brief image of blood seeping through fabric.

For those who have seen Tarkovsky's moody original, let me say that Soderbergh skims the fat from the 1972 film. What's left is a rich stew of longing.

The sequences with the melancholy Faunia are monochromatic and those with Lester perfunctory. Benton too neatly -- and too hastily -- wraps up a story that would surely exert more power if it were messy and unrushed.

An appealing, low-budget musical.

However improbable this sounds, The Brady Bunch Movie is to the original television show what real grass is to Astroturf. [17 Feb 1995, p.03]

A superb film that begins with death, ends in renewal, and finds almost as much to laugh about as to cry for.

The film's atmosphere is incendiary. It has style to burn. But for the most part, the performances are all wet.

In Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Kempner gives us a balance of artist and alter ego, introducing us to a woman we'd like to know even better.

Somebody should tell Ward that winning isn't everything. Character is. And this is what his movie lacks.

If there were truth-in-titling, Burton's movie rightly would be called "Alice in Narnia: With Stops at Disneyland, the Shire, Rohan, Naboo, and Oz."

Roos introduces the possibility that perhaps two partials add up to the whole truth, and in so doing creates a provocative love story that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

What gives North Country urgency is that it's about how a man comes to understand that it's bad for him and for his community to deny his daughter privileges and prerogatives he'd grant his son.

The exhilarating film pays tribute to Buster Keaton's "The Balloonatic" by way of its slapstick, and to Hayao Miyazaki's "Howl's Moving Castle" by way of its watercolor palette and traveling domicile.

As an account of how for-profit big business literally rips a consumer's heart out, Repo Men is too graphic for me.

A lyrical and delightfully goofy study in romantic longing.

It is not unforgettable, like the original Love Affair. It is not An Affair to Remember, like the remake. It is not laden with ironic humor, like Sleepless in Seattle. This Love Affair is . . . fair. [21 Oct 1994, p.03]

Ford plays Linus as a consummate actor so good at feigning emotions that he fools even himself. It is a nuanced performance, astonishing in an otherwise innocuous film. Though Ormond's Sabrina doesn't exactly generate the heat to melt Ford's glacial CEO, his transformation from polar ice cap to volcano is heartstopping. Who'da thunk we were watching Cinderfella? [15 Dec 1995, p.03]

What this unclassifiable story may lack in decibels, it has in emotional depth. At once a mystery, a family drama, a snapshot of children at risk, Ballast is an unusually perceptive character study more eloquent in action than in dialogue.

Taylor-Wood stresses the universals rather than the specifics of John's youth. So don't go expecting a Fab Four origin story. The word Beatles is never uttered. But do go.

If there were a truth-in-titling law, the movie would be called "3000 Bullets to Brain Death."

Goblet of Fire, fourth in the fantasy franchise, is the most fun and the most fraught with conflict.

Macdonald's film brilliantly telescopes the '70s, an era when every physical action had its equal and opposite political reaction.

This bracing adaptation of the Nurse Matilda books by Christianna Brand is the acidic antidote to Mary Poppins sweetness.

Core, a cinematographer who helms both camera and directorial duties here, creates a vivid sense of time and place without letting the period music, clothes or art direction intrude. The performances are likewise understated and unpretentious, especially those of Wahlberg and Kinnear.

Old School has all the ingredients of an uproarious campus comedy, but it lacks a boisterous short-order cook who could whip up a food fight or three.

Breslin, so memorable in "Little Miss Sunshine," suffers the most. Skilled and reactive with humans, she doesn't quite muster the same engagement with her finned and flippered costars here.

Overstocked farce.

Both consoling and confounding.

Their exhaustive tribute to hungry zombies, fast girls and faster cars is . . . exhausting, if intermittently entertaining.

Raunchy, raucous and riotously funny.

Most of all, it is the improbably entertaining story of how new media are altering the very nature of courtship and friendship.

Jon Amiel's moody, and strangely moving, vignette of the naturalist is something else entirely. It is more about Darwin, father and husband, than Darwin the scientist.

Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.

Werner Herzog's magnificent tragedy, Grizzly Man, a Shakespearean character study that packs the sheer terror of "The Blair Witch Project."

Tennessee is drenched in melancholy, a trip through a tunnel of pain illuminated by a lone ray of light at the end.

Plays like "Sixteen Candles" meets "Beetlejuice." Yet for all the film's frantic pace, this plot plods, even for 'tweens at whom this suburban-girls-take-Manhattan fantasy is obviously targeted.

The characters are (hand-painted) so flat that the film looks like a paper-doll convention at Epcot.

Involving study of sibling and interpersonal relationships.

Driven is in both its script and its execution a paint-by-numbers affair.

A raunchy romp through the peeping-Tomism, potty humor, raging hormones and social humiliation that are standard issue in the Hollywood high-school sex comedy.

Less like "The Waterboy" and more like "I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry," only funny.

Perfect Stranger is the Egg MacGuffin of whodunits, a cheesy affair that casts so many baited lures that they tangle each other and don't hook you.

Some call Margot a comedy. For me, it is a tragedy impaled by comic moments.

Perfectly cast, if insufficiently dramatized.

For those who gripe that America doesn't make cars or movies like it used to, Clint Eastwood has two words for you: Gran Torino.

This so-called comedy is a frayed string of anxious jokes about whether male bonding is manly or sissy.

Next to the cheerleader grunts and aerobic struts that pass for dance numbers on most music videos, the sequences in the compilation film That's Entertainment! III are like treasures from a highly evolved ancient civilization. [06 Jul 1994, p.E01]

Follows its heroines' rise and wising-up with a giddy, "Hard Day's Night" enthusiasm.

A dynamic portrait of an artist by an artist, one as wry, audacious and erotically charged as its flamboyant subject.

Working from a story by Antwone Fisher, screenwriter Tina Gordon Chism is tender toward characters balancing where they come from with where they'd like to go. Fisher was the subject of an inspirational biography by Denzel Washington.

Whatever you say about Sex and Lucía, you have to admit that it takes place at a hormonal high tide that never ebbs.

The second-best film parody (after The Brady Bunch Movie) of a '70s TV phenom that unaccountably looks better the further you get from it.

What is lacking in this version, with its hasty third act and abrupt denouement, is the surprise that their union may be the deepest love either will ever know.

Ryan may not be admirable, but Clooney makes him relatable. It's his deepest and nakedest performance.

For those dazed and dazzled by surf anarchists Noll and Clark, Hamilton comes off as the sport's technocrat, but he boldly goes where no surfer has gone before.

What begins as Lafcadia's journey into the heart of darkness ends as his pilgrimage into the light. Stunning.

Feels somehow incomplete. It may be that its visual metaphor is more effective in literature than in film.

Not to say that it isn't fun, only to say that it is more about sensation than sense.

While 13 Going on 30 is too formulaic to sustain the delicacy of emotion that gave "Big" its appeal, it has tour-de-farce moments that made screenwriters Josh Goldsmith and Cathy Yuspa's "What Women Want" such a monster hit.

Shannon is flawless.

At first glance Walter isn't a guy you want to spend two hours with. But by the end of the film, you don't want to see him go. Jenkins is like that: He sneaks up on you and steals your heart with light-fingered skill.

French movies are not so neatly resolved. In fact, the point of many French movies, such as this provocative one from director Laurent Cantet, is that some problems don't have satisfying solutions - or resolutions.

My guess is that The Dreamers will have a certain resonance for those of us who discovered movies and sex at the same time during the '60s. For the rest of you, the film is a curiosity about cinegenic youths baring their bodies while thinking they are baring their souls.

Hugely entertaining catalog of MPAA follies.

The result is a movie that is both laugh-out-loud funny and cringe-worthily silent.

Ultimately the voyage is so choppy and long (2 hours, 48 minutes) that into the third hour I found myself yawning, "Yo-ho-hum and a very sore bum."

A high-concept hostage drama of absolutely no value to anyone -- except maybe Bell Atlantic, whose titular street-corner pay phone is on screen for almost every agonizing frame.

This invitation to look down upon the stupidity of numskulls is one that should be declined as swiftly as a call to poke fun at Special Olympians.

A challenging film populated with characters who are depressed, on antidepressants, or strung out on mood-altering drugs, The Dead Girl is a downer with resonance.

Those who know Austen novels will recognize how much each character resembles a figure in one of them. Those who do not will enjoy the amusing types. Men, this means you.

Roughly an hour in, Transformers 2 morphs from teen adventure into lumbering war movie. Bay and his screenwriters squander their human capital in order to show us scenes of 20-ton toys crushing 10-ton toys.

Buoyed by the appealing Hart and Grenier.

A likable and completely dispensable heist film starring two of the deftest comedians working (Keaton and Latifah), the film from Callie Khouri is itself an American retread of the British caper telefilm "Hot Money."

Until a final conflict that more resembles a monster-truck jam than a superhero showdown, Iron Man is solid gold.