Joe Leydon

Overall, however, Best Summer Ever is too earnest and charming to ever feel smart-alecky or unduly spoofy, and the winning performances by DeVido and Wilson go a long way toward encouraging a serious emotional investment in the relationship between Sage and Tony.

It works surprisingly and consistently well as a storytelling flourish for a documentary that does not traffic in subtleties or moral indignation while repeatedly and boisterously posing the question: “Can you believe these people actually did this?”

An engrossing and satisfying picture, one that can be enjoyed even by people who have never before heard of its subject.

Has more than enough across-the-board appeal to attract mainstream auds unfamiliar with source material.

Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.

A wink here or a smirk there, and the whole kit-and-caboodle could have collapsed into laughable nonsense way before “Warhunt” finally does run off the rails. You still might chuckle from time to time, but not as often as any plot synopsis might lead you to expect.

Premature winds up resembling nothing so much as the coarsely smutty teen-sex comedies that abounded throughout the ’80s in the wake of “Porky’s.”

With equal measures of prickly wit, gleeful pride and bemused gratitude, Charles Nelson Reilly looks back at his life, and invites his audience to share the view, in this thoroughly engaging filmization of his one-man stage show.

Quaid's effortlessly compelling and engagingly earnest performance keeps pic grounded in down-to-earth reality.

Tonally dissonant and narratively disjointed, Wild Horses plays like a patchwork quilt of scenes excerpted from a much longer movie, or maybe even a miniseries.

What it doesn't have, to its credit, is a neat conclusion. In the end, the film appears to suggest that Aura likely will feel free to keep searching for herself, repeating mistakes and making new ones, because she has all the time in the world.

Neither funny enough nor scary enough to be satisfying as either a shocker or a spoof.

Looks, sounds and fascinates like an exceptional episode of a true-crime TV series.

If you can surrender yourself to the measured rhythms of the film and accept its mix of feeling and artifice, you may find much to admire here.

Enjoyably upbeat and intelligently inspiring.

Time and again during After Class, Schechter makes pinpoint-accurate choices that are even more impressive when, after it’s done, you replay the movie in your mind, and you realize what an exceptional piece of work it is.

It’s a competent yet uninspired overview of events.

Despite game efforts from a first-rate cast and acres of impressive production values, Event Horizon remains a muddled and curiously uninvolving sci-fi horror show.

Immensely entertaining and unabashedly inspirational.

Prosaically straightforward but consistently interesting portrait of the maverick research scientist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine.

Wildly uneven as it doggedly strives (sometimes with obvious strain) to sustain a free-wheeling, anything-goes air of exuberant junkiness.

The film benefits greatly from its ability to review events from the viewpoints of the men on the ground in Houston.

Copenhagen remains more intriguing than compelling.

The big giveaway: While some of the genuine articles sporadically earned chuckles with vulgar sight gags and gratuitous nudity, Pitching Tents is too timorous to risk being truly offensive.

An improbably effective and affecting mix of raw emotions and exciting smackdowns.

Ingeniously conceived and impressively executed, Pleasantville is a provocative, complex and surprisingly anti-nostalgic parable.

Beautifully lensed and intelligently crafted.

The wonderful thing about Wild Men, a movie that suggests a dream-team collaboration of Hal Hartley and the Coen Brothers, is that everyone involved takes themselves extremely seriously, even as they behave and speak in ways that cause viewers who get the joke to smile, chuckle and occasionally laugh out loud.