John Anderson

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

Luckily, there are jokes, like little lifeboats, floating all around, rescuing “Like Father” from anything resembling gravity.

There are reasons to watch, principally Dianne Wiest’s outrageous Ruth Gordon impersonation and the presence of the gifted Julia Garner.

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.

Jakubowicz has made a muscular, messy and vulgar film based on a life that has been all those things.

Where one suspects Mr. Sires wants to go in his ultimately righteous film is into the squalid margins of America whence a Babudar might spring. That he hits a stone wall, in the form of the subject’s mother, is too bad, but no surprise.

While it isn’t the intention of the film to generate sympathy for Mr. Út, one can’t quite help it.

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.

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.

The Found Footage Phenomenon, while long-winded, offers a knowledgeable take on what makes the difference.

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.

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

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.

An uneven but likable horror film with one of the better plot twists in recent memory.

A nutty Norwegian mashup of drollery, myth and jolts to the nervous system, Thale does a deft dance between grossout comedy and horror fantasy. Still, it’s too wordy by half, saying what it should be showing

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.

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.”

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.

A trashy little movie about drinking, football and drinking, is also one of those films that pretends to moralize about the very behavior it milks for every giggle it can get.

It’s a daring movie in its way—suicide is often inexplicable, and Phil treats it exactly that way. But Mr. Kinnear might have had more confidence in his audience, and maybe in himself.

Less magical is the blind adherence to formula evident in most of Taken 2. As they might say in the advertising department, it's an adrenaline-fueled thrill ride. But it could have been much more.

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.

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.

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

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]

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.

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.