Gary Thompson

Garland’s alien biodome is a trippy mixture of tactile old school hardware and computer-generated images. It combines to give his brightly ominous new world a sinister sheen, especially when showing how it has consumed/subsumed the old seaside community it has displaced.

Psychologists quoted in the film have a scary-sounding term for one of the ingredients found in most exceptional athletes. It's called a "rage to master."

These sequels trade directly on the emotional legacy of the originals (The Last Jedi makes some leaps into sentimental hyperspace, particularly in the way that it handles Fisher on-screen), and the more of the aged Luke and Leia we see, the more we chip away at the mythic power of characters as Lucas left them: Young, strong, immortal.

Developments give Erskine a chance to play hurt and wounded, and she handles this as beautifully as she does the light comedy. She’s the plus in Plus One.

The movie is a pitch-black comedy, told with a wink and a smirk by unreliable narrators, who include Harding, her mother, and her husband — all presenting self-serving versions of the truth, often standing in arch contrast to the images we are shown.

The movie itself is chill. The filmmakers were going for (and mostly achieve) the 1980s Amblin Entertainment feel of a movie out to have an unpretentious good time — a welcome throwback to days before comic books movies became gargantuan and grim.

Chalamet and Hammer map this progression expertly.

Jarmusch, in his droll way, both celebrates and subverts the familiar elements of the genre.

Night Comes On isn’t a docudrama, but it’s informed enough to give us a sense of the obstacles facing young women like Angel.

Potter has assembled a good cast that gives the claustrophobic material some air — the theatrical drama is set in just a few cramped rooms, including the loo. Potter also chooses black and white, suggesting stark contrasts that blend, like the viewpoints of the characters, into shades of gray.

Pike plays Colvin as selfless, but also a woman who would have pitched a drink in your face for calling her that. The movie takes Colvin's cue. At no point is her personal drama bigger than the suffering of the people on whom she is reporting, and the concluding events in Syria are particularly well-handled and tactful.

The movie is romantic and sexy, and its exploration of the masculine and feminine (fire and water, yin and yang) is inventive and playful.

Hedges is an efficient, expressive actor, and has the knack for conveying complex information with a look or a gesture, as he does here, suggesting the turmoil within his character on the night when his parents assign him to undergo therapy.

A tweak toward conventional drama might have added to the movie’s impact, but it’s scrupulous and straightforward.

What Peele conjures here in the final moments is clever enough to remind us that he was telling an intricate story all along, and not just piling up bodies.

As played by Jackman, he's imperious, self-righteous, and humorless, and it's hard to imagine such a figure capturing the imagination of the public, policy acumen notwithstanding. The movie is better at showing Rice (Sara Paxton) as a woman trampled by the press stampede — ditto Hart's wife Lee, played elegantly by Farmiga.

The chief pleasure of Isle of Dogs is admiring its lovably tactile stop-motion creatures (more than 1,000 rendered characters, a stop-motion record) and meticulous backdrops, giving the movie a deep-focus depth of field uncommon to animation.

The premise is a borderline gimmick, but director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) invests the movie with enough grit — it's set in the world of hardboiled Chicago politics — to draw us in.

A few actors with limited range are asked to do too much. Still, it doesn’t stop the momentum of this engaging, humane little movie, which builds the moment when its internal worlds finally collide — Moonee’s self-willed magic kingdom, her mother’s less hopeful reality.

The movie is a cheerful pastiche, unpretentious and efficient, and the giant shark, when it finally shows up, is a pretty good special effect, although I’m not sure I’d value it at $150 million (the amount of Chinese money it took to make the movie).

The title character in Gloria Bell is a fiftysomething divorcée, and the movie is uncommonly generous to her by the sometimes standards of contemporary Hollywood.

Jack-Jack turns out to be a jackpot. The movie is frankly slow to get cranking, and we don’t really know what we’re missing until the unsupervised infant goes to war with a mischievous raccoon.

The movies may be frivolous (and stitched together from British TV shows), but they are unique — they have an astute understanding of mature male friendship that is rare, even in a male-dominated industry.

[An] informative documentary.

The cast is uniformly fine, although Rooney Mara is stuck playing a composite of various women that feels, well, like a composite of various women.

There is a lot to like here, a few things to love. Like the fact that someone in Hollywood can still assemble a cast this large and impressive — someone who does not work for Marvel.

The contributions of the actors now blend more seamlessly with the animation to create digital characters, and the characters are being integrated more successfully and believably into the landscape — director Matt Reeves works on a big widescreen canvas of sweeping, picturesque exteriors.

One of the best of the 16 Bond films, thanks to Dalton's athletic, tough and deadly new 007.

Journey’s End makes no attempt to disguise the stage origins of the script. Instead, director Saul Dibb shows the physical dimension of the situation in a new way — much of the action occurs in the tunnels — it’s shot imaginatively in extreme low light,.

The War Room is far more interesting, however, as an unintentional commentary on the evolving (or de-evolving) nature of documentary itself, and on Pennebaker's famous style - the shaky hand-held shots, the grainy film stock, the abrupt zooms and changes in focus. The style is known as cinema verite, the very name suggesting that what you see is spontaneous and "true." [12 Jan 1994, p.36]

It's a nice gesture that he's chosen The Old Man and the Gun as his exit vehicle, gifting fans with heaping helpings of his relaxed charm, making a nod to the Sundance Kid, and even the flimflam fun of The Sting.

He's not an easy man to read, and he's not meant to be (Foy carries most of the emotional load). First Man relies on Gosling's own low-rev screen presence to hold the viewer's interest. Not until we reach the surface of the moon does the movie really venture into his head (almost literally in terms of camera point of view).

The Jumanji reboot Welcome to the Jungle is a happy surprise — a movie that turns out to be good (almost clean) fun, and is much more interested in character and comedy than special effects.

Aaron Sorkin’s entertaining new film is a tough, smart look at the way some Hollywood heavyweights treat women. Spoiler: not well. But it’s also more than that – it touches on broader legal and labor issues and systems that disadvantage women everywhere, in different ways.

The movie is as bubbly and eager as Peter himself, but a little more efficient. It designs its actions sequences around character and story and — a rare thing in comic-book blockbusters — lets the actors act during the climactic action piece.

It’s possible, even given Lee’s jaunty structure, that he could have given Girls Trip a more disciplined edit — the movie runs more than two hours, devotes generous time to less interesting characters, and makes room for the movie’s long roster of performance cameos — in addition to Hart, there’s P. Diddy, Common, Ne-Yo, Mariah Carey, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, and many others.

Aiello, Headly and Mazursky create memorable, unexpectedly sympathetic characters. Sometime director Mazursky ("Enemies, a Love Story") is especially poignant and brave here, playing a has-been director in a role that calls inevitable attention to his own stalled career. [27 Sept 1996, p.50]

The movie is often whimsical, a tone augmented by clever use of special effects and sudden flourishes of animation. Offbeat soundtrack selections and effective music by composer Andrew Harris help set the mood — ultimately genial and hopeful, and the movie is short and sweet.

Patti Cake$, in the end, is a little pat, but it doesn’t take its underdog, band-of-misfits formula too far, and Macdonald’s infectious grit carries the day.

It’s an obvious formula, but when the movie sticks to it, it works well enough; Reynolds and Jackson have pretty decent chemistry.

Mira Nair is a director who, for a change, is not obsessed by the way bigotry pulls people of different cultures apart. Instead, she is amazed by the way love keeps bringing them together. [12 Feb 1992, p.41]

The movie will play in IMAX theaters and 3-D, which is the best way of seeing it. Director Albert Hughes (yep, the same guy who along with brother Allen did Menace II Society and Dead Presidents) and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (the recent creep-out Goodnight Mommy) capture and construct some compelling images.

The movie also runs 2 hours, 20 minutes, which is a lot of dead samurai. The violence is often numbing, and the translations — the movie is subtitled — are sometimes as deadly as the swordsmanship. On the other hand, Blade of the Immortal is flat-out gorgeous. Widescreen, lush, beautiful.

Maslany is first-rate in this role.

Foy is quite good in this role.

Crazy Rich Asians is a romantic comedy and a fairy tale, and it helps to keep the latter in mind as you ramp up suspension of disbelief to necessary levels.

Sheridan leans toward the lurid, but with the blood is a marrow you don’t get from other movies, where action is increasingly tied to fantasy. Soldado bludgeons its way into touchy border politics, and maybe lucks its way into a story focused on the moral imperative of protecting a single child.

Hawkins — small and mighty as usual — draws her energy from the quiet courage in Maud’s drive to create, to modify and adorn her bleak world with the images that express the contentment she knew as a child.

The movie has metaphors to burn, and those looking for provocative commentary will surely find it. Foxtrot, though, is a slippery thing that resists easy categorization, and will reward viewers who wait until all of its secrets have been revealed.

Part of its appeal lies in the truth and specificity behind the clunky presentation.

Based on a novel by Ian McEwan, The Children Act wanders into the tricky space created when what is moral and what is legal diverge, and law is made to suffice.

Stunning. [25 Nov 1994, p.87]

Brisk and informative.

Only the Brave has a respectful and heartfelt regard for its characters, and something more — an unusual sense of their spiritual lives, abetted by the movie’s impressive visual presentation.

The Endless works on its own modest spooky-kooky terms, and also as a rumination on life’s ruts and patterns, best considered over a couple of beers.

City Hall also gives us a political drama with engaging moral and ethical dimensions. The movie is a welcome change from the fluff of "The American President" and the self-indulgent freak show that was "Nixon." [16 Feb 1996, p.44]

This is an intriguingly weird, gender inversion of the Cinderella fantasy at the root of Pretty Woman.

It all adds up to a handsome, engrossing slice-of-life movie with the feel of a Western, inventive and unique. The Rider desegregates a genre that typically presents cowboys and Indians as separate and opposing forces – archetypes unified here in one remarkable individual.

The movie is mostly gore free and tame by the standards of modern horror movies, and some of the familiar visual touches borrow greedily from the James Wan school. But it’s smartly written and well-acted.

Game Night is not the greatest comedy in the world, but it has a great grasp of the ingredient that makes comedy work, identified centuries ago as brevity.

Ronan is good (as usual) as the spirited and rather haughty Mary, making the most of what, to be fair, is the plum role.

While the movie is often dazzling, it’s also frequently dull.

The movie works best when it falls back on plain old acting. Merritt Wever is sweet presence as the hobby shop worker and gentle soul who understands Mark’s obsessions, and appreciates his art. Her scenes with Carell are the movie’s least technological, and its best.

It’s a story with too many influences, no cohesion, no apparent narrative purpose.

Wonderstruck, for all of it’s child-in-danger plotting, has a warmth that points (along with the title) to a safe and sentimental conclusion.... When it arrives, though, it lands with a curious lack of emotional impact — perhaps inevitable, given the nature of a story that seeks to connect characters who are rarely and sometimes never on screen together.

Last Flag Flying lacks the casual, lived-in realism you usually find in a Linklater film. You don’t buy the men as long-separated pals, and so you don’t really buy the premise — the connection that caused Doc to seek out these men is not visible on screen.

Despite the movie’s emphasis on physical action, it’s this chemistry that keeps the movie going.

It’s here that Sheridan’s genre instincts get the best of him, and Wind River gives way to lurid exploitation.

It’s a funny concept, helped by Marshall-Green’s blended look of pleasure and consternation at being the vessel for an invincibility that he enjoys but cannot control.

While Keaton is many things, he is not Jim Carrey. Which, from Keaton's standpoint, is probably a relief. [17 July 1996, p.25]

High Life has the trippy profundity of 2001, the human treachery of Aliens, and it also includes an Orgasmatron.

Result[s] in pleasant but forgettable results.

Krasinski makes suspension of disbelief easy, and the movie mostly works — I can’t remember the last time I was in a movie theater so quiet.

Solo eventually finds its feet, and the movie gets better as it goes, but we feel throughout the tension between conflicting visions of Howard and original directors Lord and Miller.

Cathleen’s arc, initially front and center, starts to feel outweighed by the all-in performance of Oscar-winner Leo.

Characters overflow on the screen, crowding out emotional investment, and there is a severely misplaced emphasis on the power of special effects — many characters appear to be entirely digitized, and none has much screen impact.

The movie really soars when the dragons do the same — as in previous installments, the best shots are of dragons maneuvering through the clouds.

Tearful audiences will know they are in safe hands with Shyamalan, and that no matter what happens, at the bottom of each box of tissues is a happy ending with moving narration. [27 Mar 1998, p.F7]

The movie is often clumsily scripted, and given to caricature, which Carell and Stone manage to transcend. The best, most telling dialogue seems to be archival — snippets of Gollum-like broadcaster Howard Cosell, his arm around his female co-commentator, oafishly telling her how pretty she is.

One part beautiful fable, one part cheesy "Rocky" clone, "Fly Away Home" is nonetheless a notch above most flimsy Hollywood movies made primarily for children. [13 Sep 1996, p.44]

A more nuanced Bale portrait of a man enamored of secrecy, strong-arming, militarism, and vigilante impulses can be found in The Dark Knight.

The Ghost and the Darkness doesn't seem to know what to do with this unsettling bit of history. There is a little bit of Hemingway bullshit about manhood and courage and grace under pressure, but the movie always seems to be reaching for a philosophical/mystical edge that would have been better off in the hands of a director like Peter Weir. Instead, the job went to Stephen Hopkins, whose credits include "Nightmare on Elm Street 5" and "Predator 2," and whose taste for straightforward commercial thrills gets in the way of the stories more interesting possibilities. [11 Oct 1996, p.56]

In some ways the movie’s crazy fictions suit today’s modern mash-up sensibilities, and its cast reflects the patterns of modern migration that are creating a whole new world.

The movie is antic, bouncing frantically from one story element to another, and poor Stevens, looking electrocuted and sleep-deprived, plays Dickens like the Man Who Invented Meth.

Although a fact-based period drama set in 16th-century Venice, "Dangerous Beauty" is really an allegory about modern society's puritanical attitudes about sex. [27 Feb 1998, p.F7]

What does work is Washington’s subtle, authentic, meticulous work as a walled-off, neurodiverse man.

Atomic Blonde is what fans of the Clash used to call a poser.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is competent, occasionally rousing entertainment that nonetheless left me a little bummed.

It’s not very deeply felt. Phoenix gives his all, but Ramsay plops us down in the middle of Joe’s breakdown, before we can get our emotional bearings. We figure out who he was — abused child, traumatized soldier – before we get a sense of who he is.

His script is good-natured, more genial than funny, though director (and Philadelphian) Charles Stone III does get some good work from star Irving, who proves surprisingly adept at playing low-key comedy.

You almost wish the movie had jettisoned the horror elements entirely, and converted It into what it feels like it wants to be — something more like King’s Stand By Me, with a teen girl in the mix.

Stuber and Shaft are the kind of movies Hollywood made every month back in the ’80s and ’90s, until audiences — after a half dozen or so Lethal Weapons — grew tired of them. Stuber serves to remind us of why we liked them, and also that they wore out their welcome.

We're meant to thrill at Colette's emancipation, but when she breaks it off with wild Willy and finds true love (with Denise Gough) for the first time – built on respect and honest affection — it looks dreadfully dull.

Well, the movie is trippy and almost willfully opaque — all I can say for sure is I left A Ghost Story feeling full.

But as the increasingly far-fetched plot kicks in, the movie loses its personality, and plods toward a ludicrous conclusion that looks like the end result of a dozen desperate rewrites. [27 Sept 1996, p.04]

It will entertain youngsters, the only people in America who have yet to see more "Rocky" movies than sunsets. [14 Jan 1994, p.50]

Khan and Macdonald make it watchable.

While the movie initially adheres to the Chan brand — emphasizing athleticism over violence — it turns grisly and vicious in the closing scenes.