Gary Thompson

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]