Gary Thompson

As the movie explores Nye’s family history, we do see just how intertwined the threads of thinking and emotion can be.

Even if you haven’t seen The Intouchables, you have a pretty good idea where the drama is headed. Still, The Upside nonetheless does an amiable job of taking you there, thanks to hard work by the two leads.

Hotel Mumbai sometimes surrenders to melodrama and action-genre imperatives, and it mixes actual people like Oberoi with fictional composites in a way that strays from the stringent just-the-facts discipline of a docudrama like United 93. But there is value, too, in its subjective approach.

There’s too much convoluted plot...and the movie at times feels big and ponderous, like Ant-Man when his malfunctioning suit does the opposite of its normal effect.... There are also too few jokes, and though Rudd and Peña work like mad to get laughs, they come up well short of optimal levels achieved in Thor: Ragnarok.

There is a lot of plot in those final minutes, and don’t bother trying to outguess the magician. He pulls a rabbit out of a hat, just to distract you from the next rabbit.

Meyers-Shyer loves movies as much as the young men in Home Again and the best scenes reflect that.

It's a bold and borderline eccentric performance by Mulligan.

Your fear that the movie will never end is the most palpable fear offered by Chapter Two, which substitutes spectacle for the creeping, escalating dread the story is meant to have, and that the first movie had in modest amounts.

Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral) has been brought in to class up the dialogue, and add some one-liners.... In addition, director Parker does some clever things visually.

First Knight manages to fill the screen with enough swashbuckling to keep things interesting for a while. [07 Jul 1995, p.29]

The movie sticks to formula, and spells everything out.

Its purpose is to make the lives of the oppressed seem real by making their suffering real.

Although the sci-fi trappings of Downsizing make it seem like a big departure from Payne’s previous work — The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt — it is the same in important ways. It’s a movie about a man suddenly separated from people he’s loved, trying to learn how to live again.

The movie mainly rides on the chemistry and charm of its two leads, and writer Kaling has given Thompson a substantial character to play.

Linklater is a naturally empathetic filmmaker, and you can feel him trying to find something he can latch onto in the Desperate Housewives cat-fighting that dominates the movie in the early going. He’s helped ultimately by the story, and by the performances of Blanchett and Wiig, who are given room to embellish their characters and relationships.

Neil Jordan gives us a fancier version of the Lifetime staple in Greta.

There is enough space for Bell and Bening to do some good work, particularly Bell, who has more to chew on here than anything he’s done since Billy Elliot.

Bening is great fun to watch here, even when she’s just watching.

This glossy, handsomely budgeted musical deploys topflight talent throughout, from casting to choreography to songwriting to animation and modern digital effects, and though it achieves a Poppins-like level of hyper-competence, it lacks the most elusive attribute we associate with Mary — magic.

Gudegast is using the Heat homage the way a magician uses a flourish — to distract you from the other story he’s telling. I confess to getting a kick out of watching it play out.

The foster-care comedy Instant Family has more heart than laughs, but enough of the former to squeak by.

Though mired in arcane subject matter, the movie is always lucid and reasonably engaging.

It comes off as fairly organic, at least until the ending, when the device is undercut by an outrageous narrative coincidence that works against both the feeling of spontaneity and the admirable nuance that defines most of the movie.

Though it’s been many years in development, it remains a timely look at the dangers of our increasingly outsourced, privatized military-intelligence network.

The goal for director Stahelski is escalating violence and bloody chaos, pushed to the point of the preposterous and beyond.

It’s a quietly inspiring portrait of selflessness, although not always a stirring one. The movie has a muted tone that tamps down emotions, and the acting is intentionally low-key throughout.

The shared energy created by audience and performer that is so restorative to Garland is where the movie finds life.

[Washington] portrays McCall as a penitent, a fellow making up for past sins by helping the powerless, the abused (the movies could stand to be less invested in the grisly spectacle of this abuse). He’s advocating in others the kind of personal reform he seeks in himself.

The movie is actually not bad, until it goes full Lifetime Channel crazy in the third act.

A movie that succeeds as a tearjerker, if you can withstand those pushy moments (and there are a few) when it kind of makes you want to hate kindness.

The direction by Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer, is competent and efficient, if not especially stylish or ambitious, and the squeamish should know the movie is backloaded with stabby, graphic, slasher-movie content.

Williams and Plummer are fine, yet for all their efforts the movie endures a strangely listless first hour. The kidnapping and subsequent investigation feel under-plotted, highlighting Wahlberg’s curiously inert presence in the movie.

The new King is competent, reasonably entertaining, faithful to the original, wholesome, sometimes even enjoyable.

As we watch this safely-under-the-speed-limit parade of lumpen suburban regularness, though, we begin to wonder if director Greg Berlanti (TV’s Arrow and Riverdale) has emphasized sexuality at the expense of personality. This kid makes Ferris Bueller look like a dangerous radical.

The idea that “little” Jordan’s response to attractive older men is guided by her inner adult yields some creepy-funny laughs that many will find mostly creepy.

Ultimately, Reiner's attempt at an inspiring story of a black woman and a white man working together to further the cause of racial justice ends up being overwhelmed by the looming specter of impossibly complex racial politics. [03 Jan 1997, p.04]

The movie needs an editor, or a bartender, to remind the director when he’s hit the two-hour mark: Last orders, Mr. Vaughn.

Jenkins does something daring with the story's resolution – conceptually brilliant, but you may think that it pays a small dividend on a large emotional investment.

Courtney and James have good chemistry, and the sexual candor of their scenes together comes as a bit of a surprise, given the costume-drama, art-house tone of the production, though perhaps this is just the residue of James’ "Downton Abbey" days.

Necessary Roughness has the right kind of rambunctious spirit for this kind of picture -- even if it's not quite as inventive as similar movies like the recent baseball send-up, Major League.

Damsel is designed to be a deliberately out-of-joint comedy about a woman forced to endure an exasperating ordeal. After two hours, I could relate.

Dunst is playing it straight here, but there is enough arch in Kidman’s eyebrow to signal that Coppola is having fun around the edges of this Southern gothic, with its formal compositions and deliberate pacing (as usual, a little too deliberate for my taste).

Yes, Tolkien is a little on-the-nose. But there is also an undeniable appeal to the life-art allusions that drive this earnest movie, which is handsomely mounted, well-cast, and well-acted.

The movie is at its best when the women are focused on the common enemy: getting older.

The most engaging passages in the scattershot Fahrenheit 11/9 address the water scandal in Flint.

The movie's best window into Foley comes via his music, played expressively by Dickey, whose performance finds humor in Foley's rather sad life.

Bacon is menacing enough, but his character, as written, lacks the shading and substance that made the villains of past Hanson films so interesting. Without the complexities, The River Wild is a so-so waterborne melodrama that compares unfavorably to Deliverance and even Cape Fear. [30 Sep 1994, p.47]

What stands out, though, is the dynamic between Dana and Ali. It’s been some time since I’ve seen sisters drawn this well and this convincingly.

The doggedly serious Disobedience might have been a more engaging movie if it had allowed itself to be governed by its own melodramatic passions.

The opening sections has a feel of a competent if familiar effects movie, but the film changes mood and tone when story movies the foreboding castle — perhaps a nod to Mary Shelley, among the first to warn us of the hazards of scientists who interfere with the natural order.

What keeps the movie watchable, for the most part, are the one-off flourishes built around incidental characters.

Isaac and Kingsley are game, and their scenes have decent dramatic tension, but of course the outcome is never in doubt, and in the end, Weitz is left to rely on more contrived thriller elements to give the movie a finishing kick, which feels nonetheless like a letdown.

The movie was (apparently) shot guerrilla style by director Weinstein, though the filmmakers have been coy as to which scenes were captured stealthily and which are dramatized. This leads to questions about tact and voyeurism that go unanswered and frankly made me a little queasy.

Although Baldwin helps add substance to this frequently flippant movie with his earnest (when called for) performance, The Shadow isn't as grave or as chilling as the old radio serial. Here, the Shadow is resurrected in the service of tongue-in-cheek summer escapism. [01 Jul 1994, p.29]

At least Aquaman has a different palette, and new shapes to work with. It’s still ultimately silly and dreary, and will test the endurance of fans who then must withstand an even longer credit sequence to get a whiff of the next DC story wrinkle.

I wonder if Noe is familiar with the work of Three Dog Night, and their 1970 rumination on a party gone bad, “Mama Told Me Not to Come.” Its lyrics apply here: “I’ve seen so many things I ain’t never seen before. I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want to see no more.”

Cowriter and director Dee Rees (Pariah, Bessie) does a skillful job making us feel these inequities as they take place over time and become the fabric of lives, the basis of the assumptions people make about race and culture — the way things are.

The movie also trumpets hometown values, and makes fun of the way Liam’s wealth and fame have insulated him from simple pleasures of small-town life (underlined by director Bethany Ashton Wolf’s cozy visual presentation). The movie pokes fun at his materialism, when it’s not indulging in it.

The Glass Castle is an unfortunately flat and messy adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ best-selling memoir about growing up with extreme poverty and with parents who both inspired and damaged her.

I give Goodbye Christopher Robin credit for presenting audiences with a Pooh origins story they might not want to see, but having settled on this subject, the movie seems uncertain how to proceed.

There are also Photoshopped aggregations of Bergen, Fonda, Keaton and Steenburgen, and though they were never actually grouped together when young, they register reasonably well here as lifelong friends. The movie rides entirely on their charm, not so much on the strength of the writing or the jokes.

Bay makes a lot of familiar moves here.

When the creatively blocked Giacometti stares at his canvas, cursing. He is literally watching paint dry, and so are we.

In an effort to work all of these characters into the plot, the movie has become incomprehensible, though I doubt anyone will care, since the movie is one big blizzard of karate chops, and that seems to be the point. [23 Dec 1994, p.33]

Romeo Is Bleeding appears to be another misfired attempt to re-create the darkly comic, genre-sendup zing of "Reservoir Dogs." The extravagant violence, luridly colorful visuals and corny hard-boiled dialogue are there. Missing is a coherent story supported by internal logic. In other words, a reason to pay attention. Other than lingerie, I mean. [4 Feb 1994, p.51]

Performances are good, the period details accurate, but the script is an artificial hybrid of better-known movies in the genre, borrowing whole scenes and story lines from Stand by Me and even Home Alone. [20 Oct 1995, p.52]

Chemistry among the women is smooth, maybe excessively so. In movies about hustlers and confidence games, there is usually the scent of underlying treachery, the possibility of dishonor among thieves. In The Sting, for instance, we wonder: Is Redford conning Newman? Is the movie conning us? That kind of tension is missing here.

The movie, by German directing legend Wim Wenders, is a sequel to his imaginative, winsome "Wings of Desire," and maybe that's the problem. The second time around, Wenders' ideas just don't seem so imaginative. [04 Feb 1994, p.46]

It finds the right harmonized note of melancholy and humor in its closing moments.

It all adds up to a bicultural comedy that is good-natured if not especially or consistently well-written. The movie takes too long to get moving, stays a tad too long, and efforts to retrofit the movie as a vehicle for Derbez come at the expense of Faris, a talented comedian who has very little to do here.

This is the culmination of DeMonaco’s seething Purge scenarios, which have become increasingly focused on polarization and rage.

And yet, the focus of the movie remains fixed on the men, which makes this Ode to Strong Women seem a little patronizing. Or expedient. The director's long-time girlfriend, co-star Bahns, has the most flattering female role. Bahns had no acting experience when she was cast in the low-budget "Brothers McMullen." She still doesn't. Watching her her in "She's the One," you realize that it must be love. [23 Aug 1996, p.45]

A wishy-washy exploitation movie, which doesn’t show any real verve until the climax.