John Anderson

Adult Beginners presents itself less as humor than as a study in Gen-X sociology and psychology. What happens when people raised in relative ease and who expect to live an even better life than their parents are left emotionally unequipped for reality? It might be touching. It might even be important. But it’s not exactly a lot of laughs.

Ultimately, Supercross is an example of how too much of anything will get annoying -- including VVRRRROOOOOOOMMM and flying bikes.

The problem for Mr. Krieger is that his film has been trying to dazzle us with all manner of sleight of hand and hokum and now undertakes the construction of a conventional romance. The movie starts spinning its wheels.

The plot's a lot lighter than Vera, our engaging pachyderm, and Larger Than Life is basically a buddy/road movie--complete with animal comedy and interspecies bonding. For all the traveling, the movie doesn't go many places we haven't seen before. But Murray is careful not to step on Vera's toes. And she shows him the same courtesy. [01 Nov 1996, p.F14]

There’s a weariness to West of the Jordan River, both in the storytelling and the face of Amos Gitai.

Top Gun: Maverick is not a dislikable movie, by any means: The cast is charming, the military stuff is convincing, the action sequences are, as intended, pretty astounding: In the proper theater (I saw it in IMAX) it will be a physical experience, literally, one that may lead to armrests being shredded by white-knuckling audiences in cinemas all over the world. But it’s also a little depressing, because of where it says movies are going, what it says about the lack of creativity making its way on screen, and what a precarious balance movie theaters are in.

Ms. Brown, who first came to our attention in “Stranger Things,” and for good reason, is surrounded by a cast that may have lost a bet.

Mr. Thayi doesn’t tell a straightforward version of the Hwang story, because he’s after more—the story of cloning itself, which will be enlightening for those of us on the fringes of science.

When the film leaves the realm of the impolite or even criminal for something far more extreme, it achieves a level of excess that makes the whole enterprise increasingly cartoonish, rather than just awful.

Although Born Romantic is sweetly intentioned and staunchly on the side of love, it meanders long to enough to alienate whatever affection it otherwise earns.

What keeps Ain’t in It for My Health from being a really satisfying portrait isn’t a lack of access, but a lack of intimacy.

Fully understanding the war—who does?—may not be necessary in appreciating the disturbing, moving and sometimes too-beautiful production. But that production certainly puts a Teutonic tweak on history, sometimes to outrageous effect.

The Ashman story itself is the stuff of a Broadway musical. It just needed some music—what’s here is doled out in penurious and unsatisfying morsels.

The ending, for instance, is so ridiculously tidy it squeaks. But en route to its kitchen-sink climax, "Man" manages to both amuse and provoke, to cleave to convention and promote ideas.

It is a very personal documentary, a designation that can connote the good, the not-so-bad and the distinctly uncomfortable. My Mom Jayne has it all, including a puzzle that Ms. Hargitay pursues throughout.

It may be a historical documentary, but it has blinkers on.

By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.

For all its immersion in the roar, grease and danger of Formula One, the fact-based Rush — about the sport's great rivalry of the 1970s — is also more predictable than a pit stop, something well-suited to Mr. Howard. He's made perfectly palatable pictures, but never a truly great one, partly because he has such a weakness for the commercial and a consequent gift for the obvious.

It’s an unwieldy subject Ms. Tragos has taken on, and the results are somewhat scattershot.

Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

It’s largely a two-character drama with two capable actors, though neither Mr. Teague nor Ms. Richardson (who is usually quite good) are given much with which to win our sympathy.

Moonlight Sonata is not a children’s film, of course. What it deals in, regardless of how buoyant its characters, are the most serious issues imaginable. Not that there aren’t moments of pure mirth. “Did Beethoven ever play it?” Jonas asks of the sonata, “and is it on YouTube?” Even the formidable Ms. Connolly is given pause by that.

The psychology of The Club is warped and gnarled, the thinking of its members less-than-jesuitical.

Where the Ruby-teacher relationship falters is not the fault of the actors, but the writer. Mr. V is meant to be slightly unreasonable, a hard-liner about Ruby being both serious and on time. But the script takes the very common and dubious tack of not letting the characters simply explain their situations to each other.

Being a person who grew up with him as a live cultural presence, I’m a highly biased fan of the man. Still, like its subject, “Belushi” is sometimes simply too much.

What it does have is wonderfully natural dialogue that allows two talented actresses to spin a convincing friendship out of a gossamer narrative, and an engaging relationship out of pure charm. Is it enough? Probably not. They say you can’t have everything, which is especially true here.

A dispiritingly vitriolic, only sporadically funny satire of ’50s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! verifies a suspicion long held here, that the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, really hate the movies.

The go-for-broke plot twists are daring, but because there's no sense of background to the characters, one gets the sense it's all being made up as Baigelman goes along.

[Barry's] search for an identity is the ignition and combustion of the film. The exhaust, however, comes courtesy of Philip Morris. And the odor, like that surrounding the film itself, is of provocation in service of no cogent point.

Veber, also responsible for "The Dinner Game," apparently has a finger on the pulse of French audiences and Gallic-minded Americans, but there's just not a lot of freshness in this Closet.

One of the reasons documentaries often take so long to make is the filmmakers' need to keep their subject from giving a performance. They want something genuine, something that materializes only when the camera disappears. Nothing Mr. Courtney is says is inaccurate or, God knows, dishonest. But it isn't quite true either.

The divide between Mr. Sutherland and the rest of the cast is striking: The way Friedkin shoots him, and the nature of his portrayal, are in sharp contrast to the more stage-bound performances of his co-stars; it may have been intentional, though it doesn’t really work.

There’s no glory in the pugilism of The Survivor, save for the last, exquisite shot of Haft in his Marciano fight, which is alarmingly beautiful, a catharsis for Haft and a moment of aesthetic delirium for the viewer.

Ms. Richen has a problematic subject for a documentary, and the problems extend beyond the limitations of footage. She needs to sell the event, thus her lineup of marginally relevant characters gushing about it.

Entertaining but highly conventional documentary.

Go see it. But you'll feel cheap in the morning.

A kind of blues song in its own right, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory is an affectionate attempt to showcase three major figures in the development of Chicago blues, musicians who spent their entire lives eclipsed by the oversized stars they played with.

What Mr. Parker has committed to the screen is a righteously indignant, kinetic and well-acted film — Mr. Parker, as Turner, delivers a fierce, complex performance. At the same time, his film is remarkably conventional. The framing and the camera movements are all very routine, even dated; one would have said it looks like television, before television gained its current lustre.

Far From Home rather quickly segues from a soapy tale of life and love among the denizens of Midtown High School into a narrative where characters invoke George Orwell, question objective reality, claim truth as their own, and are enveloped in the kind of catastrophic inter-dimensional destruction that just seems like a way of not telling a coherent story.

While the title Marianne & Leonard sounds as if it’s out to give the female half of a famous partnership equal time, it does something quite close to the opposite.

Narrated quite drolly by comedian John Hodgman, Class Action Park is very funny in its dark way, the interviewees are all charmingly surprised that they lived through their teenage years and there’s a remarkable amount of action footage from the park, considering that it predates cellphones. (The animation by Richard Langberg is amusing, too.) Where the film has a problem is Mulvihill.

The robbery isn’t sophisticated enough on its own to hold one’s interest.

The tone is funereal; the tears are abundant. But the evidence that the organization knew that criminals were infiltrating its leadership—the documents referred to in the title were commonly known as the “perversion files”—is substantial and goes largely unchallenged.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

There are a few characters and storylines that aren’t quite resolved, but the essentials—notably, what launched Mickey into a life of crime—are wrapped up in a way that should mollify a viewership left hanging when the show was so abruptly assassinated.

Directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), the HBO documentary is almost too balanced.

For those more concerned with what “The Avengers” movies do best — outsize spectacle and wry comedy — Age of Ultron has to be declared a victory.

Mr. LaBute is not a moralizer as much as a lamenter — his people usually bring unhappiness upon themselves. In the gently joyous Dirty Weekend, though, they are capable of finding a flight path to contentment.

Proyas is trying simultaneously to create a pure thriller and sci-fi nightmare along with his tongue-in-cheek critique of artifice. And this doesn't work out quite so well.

Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.

Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

Any self-respecting period piece, historical drama or even caper movie - and The Debt is all three - balances issues of global significance with interpersonal drama. The problem here is that the personal eclipses the global. The stakes are too low.

American Made is one of the many children of “Goodfellas,” a true-crime story turned first-person narrative told by a charismatic ne’er-do-well surrounded by dubious characters and tantalizing subplots. None of these offspring, including American Made, have matched the chilling grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, with its multifaceted characters and visual fluidity.

It's a purely sensory journey until the pictures start making editorial comments, in slaughterhouses and garbage dumps.

Still — and with the full knowledge of committing an atrocious pun — the whole thing left me cold, partly because there’s no actual villain and thus very little concrete drama.

To its credit, Unstoppable features a first-rate performance by Jharrel Jerome (“Moonlight”), who is never less than convincing as Anthony and sometimes seems to be in a different movie from his co-stars.

There is often a pulsating musical score buoying the action, such as it is; family snapshots appear, the histories of the individual kids are told, their approaches to competitive spelling are explained, and there are interviews with mothers and fathers who, someone warns, should not be stereotyped as “tiger parents.”

Mr. Chase still tries to be funny here, sometimes desperately, and isn’t. Which along with a career’s worth of ill will puts the sting in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not.

Screenwriter Steven Knight has much to answer for in Callas being quite so shrill, but Ms. Jolie is unable to turn her storied character—one of opera’s most important and influential performers, a woman of polarizing voice, scandalous history and tempestuous personality—into something recognizably human.

18 1/2 — with a title aimed at fans of both Rose Mary Woods and Federico Fellini— then proceeds to go off the comedic rails.

It is an inspiring story, no surprise, told with a great deal of warmth.

The compositions and palette are occasionally stunning (the cinematographer is Scott Siracusano), and while the story lacks a certain momentum, the intention, quite successful, is to keep a viewer curious.

In several marvelously postmodern moments it recognizes its own glucose level. And the results are genuinely hilarious.

Despite Mr. Molloy’s tapping into his inner Michael Mann and turning Wilshire Boulevard into a scene from “Heat,” there are scattered human moments in “Alex F,” thanks largely to Mr. Murphy, who has always been a provocateur capable of tenderness.

The landscape is dire, the architecture is haunted, children disappear by the dozens and antique toys inexplicably spark to life. That Mr. Radcliffe doesn't is part of the problem.

Mr. Reynolds can do goofily perplexed as well as anyone and is quite charming as Guy, who doesn’t know what’s going on, except that as “Blue Shirt Guy” he’s rocked the worldview of online gamers everywhere.

The most profound thing the remarkably dread-filled drama Day Night Day Night tells us is what it doesn't tell us.

Beast of War is a rare animal—a hybrid shark movie and a war film—and it takes care to deliver some tweaks.

A two-hour documentary that feels like three, it certainly has a worthy subject, and a charismatic one; it commits a trove of valuable cultural lore to posterity. But it also commits a sin in never finding its rhythm, or a through-line on which to hang one of the great stories of American popular music.

If the screenplay to Kill the Messenger were a news story, any capable copydesk would have kicked it back to the reporter — not for a shortage of facts, but a lack of dramatic soul.

The difficulty is that Brassed Off operates at an emotional pitch that starts at a crescendo and never relents--rendering almost everything equally inconsequential.

One of the brighter aspects of Life of Crime, which otherwise ambles along good naturedly, is the casting.

It is Mr. Kinnear's slippery charm that keeps Thin Ice from sinking into the frosty Wisconsin slush toward which it seems to be heading from the start.

Ms. Jacknow, finally, finds herself with little room to move except into a full-blown nightmare hellscape and turns Clock, for all its thoughtful moments, into one movie for two very distinct audiences.

Straightforward storytelling was never the strong suit of the show, which relied very much on Mr. Murphy’s charisma and that of his co-stars, notably Sophie Rundle, who plays sister Ada Shelby. The future always looked grim in Peaky Blinders, but the fate of the show, which apparently has two Murphy-less years to go in a planned sequel, is beyond uncertain.

Making his film debut, Richie Merritt plays Rick as a sullen, evidently stupid and certainly uncharismatic schemer in possession of a modicum of animal cunning and perhaps a hint of personal insight. But there’s no life in his eyes. And little life in his acting. Which is too bad for Matthew McConaughey, who gives yet another terrific performance.

The type of film with which Mr. Ratner has claimed to be infatuated is itself like a caper - it requires precise execution. Tower Heist is more like that 10-story Snoopy, as he drunkenly bobs along Central Park West.

That this is the first film for director Joe Mantello, who was nominated for a Tony for directing the stage version, may be compounding the problem. But frankly, if someone wanted to do a parody of a gay film like this, it's hard to imagine the sloganeering being much different.

Writer-director Andrew Okpeaha MacLean, who in his feature debut has lashed together a sturdy vehicle for unadorned morality and pragmatic justice.

A documentary as messy as the movement it tries to portray, 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film possesses energy, passion and about a dozen documentaries inside it yearning to breathe free.

A lot of culture, East and West, receives glancing blows from The Monkey King, which was directed by Anthony Stacchi, whose 2014 stop-motion animated feature “The Boxtrolls” is a classic. And an entirely different animal from The Monkey King.

An overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem’s life.

Given how early the illicit-insemination angle of Fortier’s history is revealed, viewers will suspect that even worse is to come, and they will be right. But that doesn’t mean those same viewers might not have other questions.

A serviceable thriller, kind of an “Argo” in Argentina, replete with ornate preparations, plans gone awry and narrow escapes.

What may feel like Mr. Sfar's indulgences are sometimes just that, but one could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.

Pellington bestows on the film a distracting, if occasionally effective, amount of video technique, and Wakefield’s story is rich and often truthful.

Exposes director Khan's stage roots -- he has no feel for the close-up, although his use of the frame itself, and negative space, is occasionally thrilling.

The cast is really fine, but the script requires a lot of hard swallowing. The story moves along briskly and colorfully but gets further and further from the intimate atmosphere that initially makes it so appealing. [25 Apr 1997]

It’s a clever gesture, but also points out what’s ultimately wrong with director Dan Friedkin’s postwar thriller: It knows a lot about art history and presumes we know nothing.

You can consume only so much gooey romanticism before someone gets seasick, and it’s precisely the soggy love story at the center of Adrift — a survival-at-sea adventure directed by the estimable Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur — that prevents this storm-tossed vehicle from achieving maximum upthrust.

A goofball movie, in the way "Malkovich" was, but it tries too hard.

Nonnas is directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen”) with undistilled sincerity and dollops of goo. But Mr. Vaughn’s Joe Scaravella, who seems to hew quite closely to the story’s real-life restaurateur, is free of Vaughn-ish smirk. He approaches pathos.

Percy Vs Goliath has a solid sense of place—the Canadian prairie—and Mr. Walken gives us a solid sense of Percy, a man whose instincts are so contrarian he sometimes seems unsure whom to disagree with, or what to refuse to do.

Mr. Nixey is doing an Alfred Hitchcock homage within a movie lacking anything as subversive, or skilled, as Hitchcock.

The gothic sense of unease that informs the early stages of The Pale Blue Eye gives way to hysteria—not the kind that Poe used to underlie his various narrators’ incipient madness, but just a horse-drawn trip to Crazy Town.

Hyams the director ("Sudden Death," "Timecop," "The Star Chamber") operates at too much of a fevered pitch for things not to eventually get out of hand -- accelerating violence and horror eventually hit maximum velocity and warp into nonsense, no matter how erudite the script.

It’s not as if the people never existed, only the band, and the logical conclusion of all this speculation is exactly where the movie takes itself. I don’t want to spoil the party, but it feels like exploitation.