Caryn James

It is funny, irreverent and crowd-pleasing, with a kaleidoscope of likeable characters and actors. Director Craig Gillespie (Cruella and I, Tonya) has turned a saga that ended up before a Congressional finance committee into a breezy entertainment.

While it lacks the ambition to turn its obvious plot into a film that feels new, it also avoids the pitfalls of moral smugness and stereotyping. It flows along easily, bolstered by Taraji P. Henson’s and Sam Rockwell’s vibrant performances.

Its detailed fantasy world, including a dark turn-of-the-century mining town and candy-colored futuristic space bikes, is as alluring as any live-action film. Yet this two-hour story about a lost princess, a flying island and space pirates is liable to strain the patience of adults and the attention spans of children.

You might call this the scattershot school of film making... The result of being pushed and pulled through the confusing styles of Near Dark is simple exhaustion.

The deepest flaw in My Policeman is that we grasp too little of the characters' inner lives.

While Channing Tatum is charismatic, and there are a few flashes of wit in the script, the latest Magic Mike sequel is 'tepid'.

It is impossible to separate Mr. Hartman's writing and direction from Mr. Horton's smooth, sophisticated camera work, which offers a broad view of the cluttered streets and also peers up narrow stairwells to suggest Mac's claustrophobic life. However their collaboration worked, ''No Picnic'' does not look or sound quite like any other film, and that's more than you can say about most movies of any size.

My Best Friend Is a Vampire does manage to come up with a few witty scenes.

Would have been better if it had been sleeker and shorter. After all, this film isn't aiming for high-toned drama, just high-energy entertainment, which is what it delivers.

The longer it gets, the loopier it gets. [19 Jan 1992, p.13]

The film’s immersion into the anti-abortion movement — with a smattering of pro-choice voices woven in — is consistently fascinating. But Lowen’s measured approach also raises a question: How loud does a warning cry have to be to register? Eye-opening though it is, at times Battleground is muted to a fault.

The Seventh Continent is one of the most stylish films in this year's New Directors/New Films series. With its fragmented pattern of beautifully composed and repeated images from middle-class life, it rejuvenates a 1960's style that would seem to be exhausted by now. But the Austrian writer and director Michael Haneke pulls viewers through a good portion of the film on the sheer strength of his visual flair, avoiding the classic trap of how to create a film about boredom that is not boring.

The Hunt is a smart satire that uses genre tropes to explore volatile social issues.

Graceful but slight, in the end The Movie Teller tries to do too much and accomplishes too little to fulfill its big ambitions.

Craig's performance is wily and joyful, and the film's biggest flaw is that there is too little of him, as Johnson often turns the spotlight from Blanc to other characters.

But it takes on a quieter, more psychological tone and becomes infinitely better when Fiennes arrives.

This slick movie proves how much fun it can be to watch first-rate actors challenge our credulity and rise above a second-rate script.

With a little more wit and a little less blood, Renegades could have been Lethal Weapon Jr. It is a fast, violent, implausible film about mismatched partners, and though it doesn't exactly break the bounds of its trashy genre, it's not at all bad for what it is.

The fights are about as sophisticated as watching kids in a playground, and they rely heavily on slow motion, as if that will instantly create tension.

The satire of the 50's is more bland than biting, dependent on authentically garish costumes and sets. And when the horror-film scenes begin to intrude on normal life (what is hanging from the cellar ceiling, anyway?) Mr. Balaban can't make the dark elements seem comic enough to mesh with the rest of this nightmarish joke.

Enormously good-natured - exactly the wrong tone for a comedy that needs all the rambunctious lunacy it can get. Instead, this story of an American mistakenly deported to Mexico as an illegal alien is amiable and plodding, the very last things you'd expect from Cheech, with or without Chong.

Sometimes eloquent and often rocky, Magic Hour is good enough to make you wish it was much less predictable.

With its homogenized flavor, this Body Snatchers seems like a movie made BY pod people, FOR pod people.

Peter Werner, who has directed some stylish television shows (''Moonlighting'' episodes and the mini-series ''L.B.J.: The Early Years'') is competent but dull here. The endless car chases through parking garages and close-ups of the two friends talking seem conceived for a television-size scale and budget, then blown up to fill a larger screen.

Though the story evokes old movie formulas - from Strangers on a Train to the 1952 film The Narrow Margin, which inspired it - this film does not reinvent them. It dully echos their conventions.

Can't Buy Me Love has an identity crisis that's a mirror-image of Ronald's own. He thinks he wants popularity at any price, though he's really a sincere guy. The film thinks it wants to be sincere, when all it truly wants is to be popular, just like the other kids' movies, so it sells off its originality.

Selena y Los Dinos remains a slick doc most likely to appeal to her fans.

This story of corruption and conspiracy in a small Louisiana town might have passed as a taut if familiar action thriller — if it had actually been taut.