John Anderson

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.

Ms. Clarkson is always fascinating; only on second viewing did I notice how much Ms. Mortimer was doing while Mr. Nighy was stealing a scene. In the end, though, it’s his movie. And likely wasn’t supposed to be.

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.

In addition to the disco rhythms, glitzy fashions and alarming hairstyles, Love to Love You, Donna Summer might strike a nostalgic nerve with how natural, funny and forthcoming its subject is.

Despite its dubious inhabitants, the film consistently entertains by throwing the kinds of curves one should see coming but doesn’t.

Writer-director Alejandra Márquez Abella never makes the slightest suggestion that José isn’t going to get where he’s going, but neither does she make A Million Miles Away into any kind of ethnic agitprop.

It's a trip into a primordial world and primeval sensibilities, and if you're looking to shake off the mall-movie blahs, there are few better places to look.

[The Kings of Summer] is much more interested in the laughs that can be mined from character rather than plot. Galletta’s script, Vogt-Roberts’ direction and the distinctive play of the actors, notably Offerman and Mullally, lets the viewer know who everyone is right away, and the gag lines flow.

Ms. Newton is the kind of performer who seizes one’s attention immediately; Mr. Allen is, by nature of the story, relegated to more of a supporting role as the narrative progresses, but he’s an amiable presence.

It wants to fly away, though in one sense it does show restraint: There’s enough going on in Rogue Agent to have fueled an eight-week PBS mystery series. Economy, in the world of fictionalized espionage, is quite decidedly a virtue.

In its way, it pokes at the very delicate membrane between horror and comedy.

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

"Witty and brisk" is not the name of a French breakfast cereal, but it does describe a certain brand of French film, the type that coquettishly flirts with comedy while sprinting in the direction of dry, sophisticated charm. Such is Haute Cuisine.

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

It’s the definition of guilty pleasure.

Mr. Damon brings both a weary optimism and convincing physicality to Max, who is no revolutionary. He just wants to live, and is willing to don an exoskeletal combat suit and fight robots to do it.

It’s easy to smile at The Thursday Murder Club, with its veteran performers chewing the scenery and still having the teeth to do it. Does that sound ageist? It might, if the charms of this lighthearted, star-studded confection weren’t all about its main characters being advanced in years and still as sharp as an insulin injection.

Everything in The Light Between Oceans is deeply felt and dramatically precise, in a way that seems destined to become profoundly personal for each and every viewer.

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.

Goofily funny, and silly, and in many ways follows the currents of contemporary comedy into the gulf stream of inanity. And yet Ned turns out to be a strangely moving figure, a comic foil worthy of affection, perhaps even respect.

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.

Following Woody Allen, Ang Lee and any number of sitcoms, Georgia Lee constructs her well-shot, well-written film around three daughters.

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

Steven Soderbergh takes Gray (who appeared in his little-appreciated gem "King of the Hill") places he's never been on-screen. Motion, color and brazen stylizing enhance what is at times a genuinely hysterical work on rationalized terror.[9 May 1997, p.F12]

There are a few speedbumps of illogic along the gnarled route of Night Always Comes, but they can’t negate the pace of the storytelling, Mr. García’s gymnastic shooting, or the sense of there being no bottom to the well of darkness explored by Mr. Caron.

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.

For a movie with such a nose for nuttiness, its human element is genuine and warm.

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.

A romance, bromance and good-natured send-up of teenage obsession.

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.

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.

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.

Lemon is all about this pull and push, toward and away from the characters and the movie itself. It’s also one of the more original films in recent memory.

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.

Hardcore horror fans will get their dose of mayhem from Humane, though in its modest, tidily organized fashion the film might also get under the skin.

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.

Ms. Zenovich possesses the interviewer’s most valuable skill, knowing when to shut up.

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.

Cheerfully horrifying.

A daring little drama with a heavyweight cast, a gracefully delivered message and a hellish problem — specifically, other people.

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.

A rehashing of decades-old race relations in New York, or anywhere in America, might seem superfluous given more recent events, but Mr. Muhammad’s point isn’t to stir up anger. It’s to decry damage—the waste of a promising young life and the collateral wreckage visited upon a family and friends.

Conventional it is not. Engrossing it is.

The Strays, the feature-film debut of British writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White, is an engrossing, disturbing and even novel work, though its principal influences hang around like Hamlet’s father.

By getting out of the way as much as he does, Jarmusch makes Year of the Horse as much a statement about creative freedom as it is about music itself. [17 Oct 1997, p.F20]

Consistently daffy, consistently amusing.

It has some savvy things to say about social media, assimilation and a specifically American condition: the peculiar mix of embarrassment and pride (and guilt) one can harbor about one’s ethnic origins. With a character who brings it all back home.

Director Mark Monroe’s nearly two-hour Titan: The OceanGate Disaster is the most exhaustive exploration thus far.

It will prove a literally breathtaking adventure, depending on one’s phobias about heights, water and psychopaths. But it is an ordeal saga, a predator thriller with horror-film accents—and a considerable amount of violence and pain for the character played by the ageless Ms. Theron, who may be giving the most athletically demanding performance of her action-movie career.

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.

Uncle Frank feels like a memoir, and also feels extraordinarily true, and fresh, thanks to the untrammeled terrain it visits, at least in New York.

Lawless is one of those films that, through seeming serendipity, has a cast that defines its moment. There have been others - "The Breakfast Club," "The Godfather" and "Silverado," to name one irrelevant and two relevant examples. But Lawless really lucked out.

All in all, Mr. Papadimitropoulos maintains a delicate balance between the wryly hilarious and the heartbreaking, and sometimes the high wire trembles. But danger is intoxicating, and Chloe and Mickey—along with their audience—spend much of “Monday” delightfully drunk.

The Gateway is a bit like the movie’s drug robbery—they know how to get in, but don’t know how to get out. It’s Mr. Whigham who keeps you watching.

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

Mr. Bonneville, having a well of viewer good will on which to draw, makes a perversely convincing villain, the extent of whose offenses are progressively appalling.

The taste with which one is left is not savory, exactly, but it certainly lingers.

The main attraction, so to speak, of “Road House” is ne’er-do-wells getting their comeuppance, to put it as gently as possible. The amount and degree of fighting defy most rules of physics, respiration and orthopedics. But it is a fantasy, mostly, which is a blessing.

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.

As an experiment in Academy Award psychology, Albert Nobbs is fascinating. As drama? It is, forgive us, a drag.

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.

Barbarians is sometimes a comedy of ill manners, sometimes an exhilarating thriller, but it’s also an amusingly clever and sometimes violent parable about venality, vulgarity and territoriality. Barbarians may be an ambiguous title, but it’s apt.

Among the charms of Finch is its willingness not to overexplain, trusting our patience while involving us visually.

A modest film about a modest man and benefits enormously from Mr. Wyman’s apparent obsessive-compulsive drive to collect, record and photograph.

The film is almost distractingly beautiful to look at, something that accentuates the tension between the film's conflicting quantities, i.e., the glories of the physical world, and the corrupted humanity it hosts.

Hell of a Summer, as written and directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, manages to mine some fresh mirth out of the mayhem while lampooning a format’s classic conceits.

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]

What God’s Time affords us, as few Hollywood movies do anymore, are performances that rely on sustained craft and emotion, an ability to mesmerize the camera and justify why it isn’t cutting away.

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.

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

The big difference between Mr. Romero's film and Mr. Eisner's--which is so intelligent you fear the fanboys will scatter--is that Mr. Eisner never gives us the military's point of view. All we know is what David and Judy and Russell know, which for a long time isn't much. And The Crazies is all the scarier for it.

What’s increasingly bewildering and perversely curious is how unpleasant Spinster is, in almost every regard: The lighting is atrocious, the framing is erratic and Ms. Peretti’s comedy, which is generally about demolishing the banalities that constitute most human interaction, may well have the audience saying, “Well, of course Gaby’s alone. She’s intolerable.”

The visuals are kinetic, the pacing frenetic; the violence, or at least its aftermath, doesn’t just border on the excessive, it makes major incursions. But given the criminal milieu at hand, nothing less would have seemed plausible, or equal to the heightened, sordid sensibility Mr. Johnson creates in the film’s opening moments and maintains right up to an ending that is among the more perverse in recent memory.

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.

While Twohy has some fabulous technology at his disposal and uses it to great effect, the answer to that second question is obvious: He keeps us on the edge of our seats not by dazzling us with lights and sound (even if the sound is spectacular) but by tantalizing his audience with basic, well-wrought suspense.

War Machine, with a screenplay and direction by David Michod (of 2010’s ferocious “Animal Kingdom”), is a comedy because, as per the old Angela Carter line, it’s tragedy happening to other people. But it’s also a highly accessible examination of why the Afghanistan war couldn’t be won the way we—in the person of Gen. McChrystal—were fighting it.

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.

Pathetically unfunny most of the time.

Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini show the same appreciation for eccentrics and humanity they brought to "American Splendor" and Mr. Dano's Louis is a delicately wrought wonder.

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.

Brain Candy is not for kids. But adults, especially those cursed with a twisted, jaded or perverse sense of humor, will find plenty in it to laugh about. [12 Apr 1996, p.F12]

While Amma's teachings of love, inner peace and Karma, or action, resonate in the film -- obviously, Amma is a woman called to God -- her background remains pretty much a mystery. Less National Geographic and more personal history would have added a dimension to "Darshan."

Stephen King fans will respond immediately to the atmosphere writer-director John Lee Hancock creates at the outset of Mr. Harrigan’s Phone—a world of perpetual autumn and incipient unease, a white-clapboard Maine where the chill gets into the bones and the soul.

A virulent but thoroughly entertaining trilogy of tales about the besieged lower classes of Edinburgh, ripe with vulgarity, self-loathing, violence and economic disorder.

For all the gushing about the “transcendent” nature of “American Pie,” Mr. Brooks is the one who actually mentions, and praises, the recording itself, which becomes a fascinating aspect to a show that seems to spend an inordinate amount of time justifying its existence.

Doesn't the reigning genius of the German language deserve his own "Shakespeare in Love"? Sure. But as Goethe scampers about Leipzig, comically failing his doctoral exam, spilling his books and looking bemused, young Johann might as well be auditioning for his own Disney Channel program.

As pure comedy, The D Train is far more cringe-worthy than outright hilarious. But as a study in human nature, it’s beyond provocative — and maybe even instructive.

What’s lovely about The Adam Project is its treatment of grief, the love between mothers and sons and, to a slightly lesser extent, fathers and sons.