Kenneth Turan

While the anger of Outrage is to be expected, the surprise of the film is how much sadness you take away as well, the sadness of people who feel compelled to pretend to be what they are not.

Despite its arresting visual style, its wave after wave of creative and hypnotic images, The Pillow Book, as its name hints, slowly but inexorably leads to sleep.

A look at the annual San Diego convention that is sweetly empathetic where previous Spurlock works have been brash and confrontational. Plus, it's a lot of fun.

There is nothing noble about Eric's mission or about the considerable violence he resorts to to get the job done, but Pearce's willingness to give him an integrity of purpose mixes well with Michôd's intense, controlled direction and his ability to blend unexpected, empathetic character moments with all the killing.

A lovingly rendered visual treat struggles with indifferent direction and torpid plot.

Though ably acted and indisputably on the side of the angels, Suffragette as directed by Sarah Gavron is more dead-on earnest and schematic than it needs to be.

For though it can't maintain its momentum all the way to the end, Sunshine until it stumbles is gratifyingly far from the usual space-opera stuff.

Even in an animated feature, visuals alone, no matter how successful, are not enough. And despite having this sturdy biblical tale to work with, despite being faithful enough to the spirit of the story to please a wide swath of scholars and theologians, the creators of Prince of Egypt have been unable to relate it in a completely compelling way.

Ambitious and well-executed, The Apparition is a kind of ecclesiastical thriller. An involving and intelligent entertainment, if it ends up somewhat less than the sum of its parts, it's not for lack of attempting something different.

Well-crafted, disturbing Texas gothic thriller, a completely spooky piece of business that gets under your skin and, some plot blips aside, stays there for the duration.

A bombshell in its home country, Herod's Law is made with the kind of flair that ensures a following everywhere politicians are venal and voters hope against hope for deliverance.

With killing as an end in itself, combatants lose sight of what they were supposed to be taking up arms for in the first place. It's a terrible lesson, and one that Tae Guk Gi teaches with unexpected confidence.

Its intent is to show us how difficult it is to see clearly during times of crisis, how what seems as simple as black and white today was the source of uncertainty and soul-searching when it happened.

Watching Danvers’ story play out, complete with boggling plot twists and a scene-stealing friendly feline, is hugely entertaining, and it can’t be over-emphasized how central Larson, about to become the most recognized woman on the planet, is to the enterprise.

This is a train wreck you think you see coming, but no matter how prepared you are the nature and extent of the damage will overwhelm you.

Harron has said she was determined to be nonjudgmental about Page, to do justice to the woman's "mystery and ambiguity." In practice, however, that attitude plays as coldness, and Page, for all her remarkable zest, comes off as a not terribly interesting person we're given no incentive to become involved with.

It is the charm of Lorna Tucker's film that, her subject's reluctance notwithstanding, it provides a fascinating, involving glimpse of both who Westwood was back in the day and who she is at this particular moment in time, so much so that we genuinely miss her once the credits begin to roll.

Prometheus, unlike its predecessors, does not wear its themes lightly. It pushes too hard for significance, which is dicey in and of itself for genre material and contrasts badly with the standard nature of some of the story's plotting.

Fast Color is a nifty little film, a smart, adventurous and surprising production made with visible care and considerable love.

Renoir is a lush, involving film.

It's to be expected that the music is going to be wonderful, and it is. But there is more to this film, a surprising amount more.

This is an unusual venture, both charming and serious, that goes in more directions than anticipated, including more than a touch of magic realism.

It is as harrowing as it is triumphant in its depiction of the way it all came to pass.

Avenue Montaigne may not be a centimeter deeper than it needs to be, but you also won't be feeling that your pocket was picked when it's over.

Not only does it feel like an exclusive party at which there is definitely no room for the uninitiated, its waves of idolization barely leave room for the band itself. Good as they are, They Might Be Giants deserve a better film.

A triumph of quiet realism, a piece of sophisticated, subtle filmmaking that is both thoughtful and thought-provoking.

"Whitney's" story makes for strong and compelling viewing even though it has something of a cobbled together feel to it.

Youth is a film that goes its own way. Quixotic, idiosyncratic, effortlessly moving, it's as much a cinematic essay as anything else, a meditation on the wonders and complications of life, an examination of what lasts, of what matters to people no matter their age.

A fearless movie about a fearful subject, an unusually empathetic and quite funny film that deals with death and dying in the most offbeat and casually life-affirming way. Exceptionally smart, playful and perceptive, Look Both Ways confronts things that people would rather avoid.

There is a sophistication about affairs of the heart, about the wisdom and the risks of romantic involvement that is more than quintessentially French. It's irresistible as well.

Stillborn, pointless piece of work.

Yes, it's inventive, yes, it's out-there and audacious, but no, it's not always as funny as those good things would lead you to hope.

As sanctimonious as it is sincere, this is a well-meaning picture that is seriously stuck on itself, that can't hide its air of self-satisfaction. [25 Dec 1991]

Schizo is an ugly name for a dark and lovely piece of work, but maybe that's the point. The world this film depicts can be a casually pitiless one, half modern and half tribal, but it can also offer compassion and beauty.

Though all these technological trappings are newer than new, the human needs for happiness, applause and emotional connection are classic. The ability of People’s Republic of Desire to show these familiar desires playing out in futuristic surroundings is invariably surprising and never less than compelling.

The sophistication gap between the character Cheadle has created and the film that contains him is so great it begins to feel like you're watching two different stories that have been unaccountably spliced together.

What makes this film distinctive is the adroit way it both subverts and enhances old-school expectations, grafting a completely modern sensibility onto thoroughly traditional material.

The Road is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.

It's a gritty story made in the director's more elegiacal mode, a confusion of style and content that is not in the film's best interests.

Carefully made, involving and old-fashioned, the superior work it's inspired gives it an impact that lingers even when the endgame is over.

Playful in unexpected ways and graced with a genuinely off-center sense of humor, Ant-Man (engagingly directed by Peyton Reed) is light on its feet the way the standard-issue Marvel behemoths never are.

Though everyone tries her or his hardest to make it otherwise, this is by definition a place-holder film that exists not so much for itself but to smooth the transition from its hugely successful predecessors to a presumably glorious finale one year hence.

Though it's more than a little awestruck and feels padded even at 82 minutes, the story it tells remains completely fascinating

Acted with gravity, emotion and a sense of the serious issues involved by stars Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha and Natalie Paul, Crown Heights deals with the intensely human factors tragic events bring into play — perseverance and despair, love and longing.

This turns out to be an informative, involving, even sobering advocacy film.

The film's greatest asset and strongest selling point is the former senator from South Dakota himself, thoughtful and articulate at age 83, who talks candidly, even eloquently, about his political career.

Its nervy decision to cut as wide a swath as possible through one of the most exciting and meaningful periods of our history have created something that's impossible not to both applaud and enjoy.

The two men collaborate so well, in fact, that the real love match of Appaloosa is between the two of them and no one else.

Fried Green Tomatoes is a folksy enigma, an ordinary film blessed with a number of out-of-the-ordinary performances. Not only does its plot deal in part with women stuck in unhappy circumstances, its very existence makes you wonder how its trapped actresses managed to make the best of a dramatically disheartening situation. [27 Dec 1991, p.F1]

Though there is heroism as well as love here, because it involves the deaths of people we have come to care about, Everest is finally a sad story, though not always a dramatically involving one.

Though Fellowes and director Michael Engler have taken pains to make the plot engaging for newcomers, this is a film, as was the case with the Harry Potter series and the Avengers saga, where the emotional connection will be strongest for those who’ve been there from the start.

Blood Diamond attempts to be an action thriller with serious political overtones, to be as much position paper as "Zulu Dawn."

Despite its weaknesses, Changing Times ("Les Temps Qui Changent" in French) is always watchable and even poignant from time to time. What it is never going to be is the grand passion of anyone's moviegoing life.

While X-Men doesn't take your breath away wire-to-wire the way "The Matrix" did, it's an accomplished piece of work with considerable pulp watchability to it.

Subtle, unsettling, slyly amusing, Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer takes some getting used to because it's the kind of film we're not used to seeing.

A perfectly adequate action thriller that neither disappoints nor exhilarates. If it doesn't exactly crackle with energy, it lets off a good buzz now and again, and, depending on your mood, it may seem churlish to ask for more than that. [5 June 1992, p.F1]

This is a satisfying indie western, a dark and brooding film made with both a modern touch and real love for the genre.

Hardwicke has connected so intensely to the Meyer novel that it's hard to imagine anyone else making a better version.

Its plot is complexity itself, but its "kids save the world" soul is simple and earnest as opposed to earth shattering. With apologies to Bill and Ted, it's an excellent adventure, and let's leave it at that.

Against considerable odds and despite a shaky start, Proof proves itself in every area.

Star Trek: Insurrection lacks the adrenalized oomph of its predecessor, but no adventure of the Starship Enterprise is without its gee-whiz affability.

What saved "Schindler's List" from this self-conscious nobility was the ambiguity of Oskar Schindler's personality and Spielberg's willingness to treat incendiary material coolly. The lesson he seemed to have learned there, that the strongest stories call for the greatest restraint, is one he has at least partially forgotten here.

Starting as a dirge and ending as an ode to joy, Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki provides a privileged glimpse into the creative processes of one of the greatest animators who ever lived.

Cafe Society is of course funny, but it also ends up, almost without our realizing it, trafficking in memory, regret and the fate of relationships in a world of romantic melancholy where, as someone says, "in matters of the heart, people do foolish things."

Late Night is that rare thing: a deft and intelligent entertainment that can touch on serious issues because being funny is something it never forgets to do.

Though being magical is very much its intention, it never manages to cross the threshold that makes that happen in our hearts.

The result is an eccentric, amusing fable that moves at an unhurried island pace, a picturesque tale that Merchant seems to have invested with an almost personal sense of spirit.

There's a certain pleasure in seeing a thriller that's almost a relic of a bygone era. There's nothing flashy about Blood Work, no in-your-face nihilism, no hot young actors you'd know from the WB network if you ever watched it.

Tasteful, subtle and sophisticated are a few of the words that aren't going to be applied to Eddie Murphy's version of The Nutty Professor. But funny, funny is something else again.

As directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Steven Okazaki, "Mifune" is thorough and insightful enough to enlighten the man's numerous fans and serve as an introduction to those unfamiliar with his gifts and his influence, which were huge.

So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.

A model of professionalism and energy, Official Secrets moves along at a brisk clip. It’s paced like a police procedural, but it focuses not on an investigator but rather a moral exemplar who takes a principled stand in defiance of the price that has to be paid.

Meanders, dawdles, doubles back on itself but finally gets us somewhere fascinating and worthwhile.

One True Thing demonstrates that the power of simple things, the transcendent nature of the ordinary, can make for riveting filmmaking.

Has enough virtues to make it successful, including an unusual story and some fine acting, especially by the powerful Janet McTeer.

Though it is difficult to take Unfaithful as seriously as it takes itself, on its own terms it's quite well done.

Kids is more tedious than titillating, one of those cinematic irritations more interesting to read about than to see.

Irresistible family entertainment.

though it has its share of boggling action sequences and will serve as an acceptable introduction to domestic fans not familiar with Woo’s work, “Hard Target” is an awkward mixture, not on the level of the director’s best work, and leaves open the question of how well his style can adapt to Hollywood.

Though Wendigo has weak spots, including an ending that is not as satisfying as it might be, the film remains memorable despite its flaws. This is a properly spooky film about the power of spirits to influence us whether we believe in them or not.

Every holiday season needs a pleasant surprise, and this year it's Drumline. This entertaining and enthusiastically told tale shrewdly energizes its way-familiar plot line by setting it amid one of the greatest and least-known spectacles in American sports.

Does benefit from Gibson's charisma...Whether it is quite good enough is another question.

Smart and genial satire.

Anchored in an exceptionally persuasive performance by Rachel Weisz, "My Cousin Rachel" is not only a triumphant exercise in dark and delicious romantic ambiguity, the pitfalls of being taken in are what this melodramatic thriller is all about.

Scott and company have gotten so accomplished at re-creating history that the results have a welcome offhanded quality, making them spectacular without seeming to be showing off.

Denial periodically plays like a standard-issue drama. But because Hare's script grapples with serious themes and singular events whose ramifications are still being felt, it is effective when it counts.

A lot of this is quite well done, but Bromell has a tendency to have too schematic an aesthetic agenda for his story: treating film noir like kabuki is not necessarily the best way to go, no matter how beautifully you do it.

Michelle Pfeiffer is back, and her reappearance in Cheri, her best role in quite some time, underlines not only how much she's been missed but also how much the world of film has lost by her absence.

Wickedly mocking but empathetic, able to laugh at its characters while paying attention to their sorrows, this subversive comedy about self-esteem resists the notion that films have to timidly remain within tidy genre rules.

Despite its pitfalls, this movie musical is a clutch player that delivers an emotional wallop when it counts. You can walk into the theater as an agnostic, but you may just leave singing with the choir.

What Spy Game turns out to be is the old reliable family car spruced up around the edges in an attempt to convince a new generation of buyers that it's a hot number.

Only the tigers, beautiful and dangerous, maintain their integrity. By staying true to themselves, they make nothing else matter.

In other hands, these clashes of good and evil might have seemed ordinary, but Eastwood makes Changeling a hard story to shake off. To see this film is to understand both how fragile and how essential our hopes for decency and truth are in a world that must be made to care about either one.

The Summit tells a multifaceted story that deals with more than the expected peril and exhilaration of adventure tales. Here you'll find love, fear and forgiveness, personality conflicts and cultural differences, even mysteries that have stubbornly resisted solving.

Zoo is a cool sensibility married to a hot topic, a poetic film about a forbidden, unsettling subject. Elegantly made and eerily lyrical, it deals with what director Robinson Devor has accurately called "the last taboo, the boundary of something comprehensible."

Articulate, thoughtful and funny - hearing Vitali talk about getting used to 100 kinds of cheese in the West is a real pleasure - the Klitschkos are a treat to spend conversational time with. Just don't think of joining them in the ring.

Above all this is a film for gluttons for punishment, for those who never ever can get enough of Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else, please leave the building.

This noisy retread, a secondhand facsimile of a movie, is, except for the headache its boisterous sound level leaves you with, as forgettable as a bad day in the Disneyland parking lot.

Though Honeymoon in Vegas has one of his most accessible premises, Andrew Bergman has never been to everyone's taste and probably never will. He is something of a spritzer in the Mel Brooks mode, someone who spews out such a torrent of manic material that by definition not all of it is going to work. But in an age where screen comedy tends to fit snugly in a handful of pre-set synthetic molds, his all-natural craziness comes as a special treat. Especially if you like to laugh. [28 Aug 1992, p.F2]

Made with daring and passion, it attempts the impossible and comes remarkably close to pulling it off. So close, in fact, that the skill and audacity used, the shock and awe of this highly entertaining attempt, are more significant than the imperfect results.

Starts gently, with amusing drollness, then gets more serious, even provocative, without sacrificing its light touch. This is very much a film with something on its mind.

The film's scary moments are too monstrous and its happy times have too much idiotic beaming, making the film feel like the illegitimate offspring of "Alien" and "The Absent-Minded Professor."

Though American sports dramas find it hard to avoid heartwarming elements, this is a decidedly more even-keeled film, its European nature allowing it to focus on the drama of character as well as what happened on the court.

Having abandoned for a while the portrayal of real people, Streep demonstrates here that what great actresses do is show us ordinary people in an extraordinary light.

This is a film that goes its own way to the end as it asks the audience, "What you just saw, were they happy times or not?" The question is a good one, and the answer, like this film, is sure to stay with you.

Things are sporadically troublesome about the film. The story goes in and out of being self-consciously earnest and ponderous, a situation that numerous tight close-ups of people's eyes does nothing to help.

It's fun to see this kind of familiar material done with intelligence and skill.

38 years after his death, Beaton's name is not so much on everyone's lips, and one of the pleasures of this film is to revisit his gifts beyond his best known work, the Oscar-winning production design and costumes for "My Fair Lady."

It's a rich, emotional story, a wonderfully appealing film made with humor and intelligence, but there is also something almost magical about how it takes the stuff of innumerable previous films -- love, romance and adolescent coming of age -- and turns them into something that feels one of a kind.

Does have its pleasures, but the feeling is inescapable that the person most pleased is Bertolucci himself. In essence he is the dreamer of the title, as eager to retreat into this hermetic world of his own creation as his characters are into theirs. Fair enough, but why does he have to drag us along with him?

Perhaps inevitably because it is dealing with a big issue, This Changes Everything suffers a bit from being all over the map, touching so many bases that, though each is important, they don’t all cohere into a whole.

As the perfectionist creator of bravura set pieces, Cameron is still the leader of the pack. [14 Jul 1994 Pg. F1]

Because it's a Coen brothers film before it's anything else, this is about as dark and nihilistic as comedies are allowed to get before the laughter dies bitterly on your lips.

(To be) thoroughly enjoyed as a privileged look at one of the loopiest of late 20th century lives.

One of the main treats of Art & Copy is that it allows us to revisit those classic ads, all of which are just as exciting now as they were when they first ran.

A short-film director making his feature debut, Maras has settled on a strategy that combines harrowing re-creations with largely conventional character development to good effect.

Whatever else you think about Marx and his ideas, it's hard to imagine him as hot-blooded and young. Director and co-writer Raoul Peck, as it turns out, not only understands those contradictions, he is committed to embracing them, which is what makes The Young Karl Marx the audacious, engrossing film it is.

A two-hour theatrical feature that has the kind of emotional and storytelling reach regularly found these days only in cable TV miniseries. It's a warmly done family and personal drama that seems to cover familiar territory, but only up to a point and very much in its own way.

The film's pronounced split between violence and softness notwithstanding, Prince Caspian is finally a more polished effort than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and squarely in the tradition of the kind of teenage movies the Disney organization used to make before teens discovered horror and gore.

A sports film to remember.

A lively, old-fashioned adventure yarn with just a twist of modern attitude, it's the kind of pleasant entertainment that allows the paying customers to have as much fun as the people on screen.

Black and company throw all kinds of stuff at the audience, and though it doesn't all work, a lot of it does and the attempt to be different and create unguessable twists is always appreciated.

This overly derivative motion picture thinks it is doing and saying more than it is. Instead, it ends up as little more than a reasonable facsimile of the real thing, despite a subtle and effective performance by Ben Affleck, of all people.

Everything about Executive Decision is familiar except how crisply its conventional story is executed. Since most action thrillers think blowing things up is enough to attract an audience, it's a nice surprise to come across a savvy piece of work that relies on suspense and is as professional as the elite anti-terrorist unit it celebrates.

A raucous, profane but surprisingly endearing piece of work.

Like the characters it presents, this film ends up with dreams it can’t deliver on, but just having the desire to do something different makes it a project worth paying attention to.

Robinson's combination of fortitude, restraint and passion for the game was stunning. You can't help getting caught up in this story, even as you are wishing the telling was sharper than it is.

A raunchy doodle, a leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.

This is one documentary, as “La Danse” was before it, that is a thing of beauty in and of itself.

Whether you are a religious, churchgoing person or not, if you are the least bit liberal or tolerant in your world view, this has got to be one of the most unnerving films of the year.

Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.

With its perspectives on love, aging and solitude, "Prelude to a Kiss" still offers a good deal more than the usual smiles of a summer's day. [10 Jul 1992, p.F14]

Kon-Tiki features a protagonist who was determination itself, a filmmaking style that is square as opposed to cutting edge, and a story that is strong enough to involve us despite its earnest underpinnings.

Though this film analysis has its interest, the most involving parts of “American Dharma” are not Bannon expounding on his political philosophy but his postmortem on the nuts and bolts of the successful campaign he helped run against Hillary Clinton.

Even if Dan and Gretta charm each other more than they charm us, the music they make is harder to resist than they are.

The young American actor (Derek Luke) gives such an intense, passionate performance as South African Patrick Chamusso that he just about dares you not to be involved with the tale he is telling.

Better than the fiasco that was "Ocean's Twelve" (how could it not be?) but not as engaging as "Ocean's Eleven."

Made with taste, skill and discretion, The Daughter demonstrates both the staying power of classic material and the risks inherent in bringing it up to date.

Even surrounded by all this quality work, Ralph Fiennes, who plays William Cavendish, the fifth duke of Devonshire, the most powerful man in England next to the king, walks off with the picture.

More than anything, this is an intelligent audience picture, a solid and engrossing piece of old-school filmmaking, both humane and character driven, in which the various protagonists learn something - not too much and not too easily - about the nature of their lives.

Chalamet is so good it’s worth seeing Beautiful Boy for his work alone.

It's a bawdy farce done with real delicacy, a charming adult comedy that ends up with unlooked-for emotional heft. If that doesn't cover all the bases, it certainly comes close.

At once vigorous and old-fashioned, a piece of expertly crafted entertainment that gets the job done with skill and panache. [25 July 1997]

Overly familiar material, even well done, cannot be made more intrinsically interesting than it is. Not even by Cate Blanchett and Keanu Reeves.

Story and soul are never going to be kings on Skull Island, but they could have fared better than this.

City Hall is inside information in search of a movie, a forced marriage between the trappings of reality and the fantasy of a jerry-built plot. Reasonably intelligent, neither offensive nor enticing, it passes its time on the screen without providing compelling reasons for audiences to either go or stay. [16 Feb 1996, p.F1]

The only thing that won't make you laugh, unless you've got a 12-year-old's sense of humor, is the film's tireless parade of gross-out gags and scatological verbal jests. Myers gets a charge out of this material--it wouldn't be here if he didn't--but so much of it is so tedious it's difficult to believe an adult actually sat down and wrote it.

Rarest and most impressive of all, Antwone Fisher is a serious drama set in the African American community, one that showcases powerful, confrontational scenes between black actors.

For all its surface verisimilitude and for all its focus on a problem that couldn't be more current, this film can't manage to feel more than sporadically real.

Director Taylor Hackford brings an appropriate level of pulpy energy to the telling, and star Kathy Bates... gives a better performance than the film deserves as the grumpy and possibly homicidal title character.

A smart, involving and strikingly adult drama about Sarkozy's rise to power.

Something to Talk About is like a slow-simmering stew, the kind that flavors familiar ingredients with special herbs and spices. Those spices surely accomplish wonders, but underneath it all you are left with the usual culinary suspects.

Even fairy tales could use a bit more substance than this.

Aftermath is a bombshell disguised as a thriller.

CSA is rough around the edges, especially where the acting and some of the film's invented characters are concerned. But the way CSA works out its ideas is so provoking that its drawbacks are not difficult to ignore.

A bravura act of self-revelation, its vivid portrait of one man's fears, fantasies and neuroses uses a mixture of reality, imagination and comedy to create one of the writer-director's most involving films.

If a concept is to sustain itself over a multipart story, it must make an emotional connection, and this "Reloaded," especially with stars cast for their lack of affect and affinity for blankness, cannot do that.

In practice this mélange of imagery is aimed more at the inside of Reggio's head than anywhere else. Unless you are able to get on his quasi-experimental wavelength, a dicey proposition at best, Visitors will miss your solar plexus entirely and instead put you right to sleep. With one exception.

Whether this iteration of Dumbo is a good experience for you will depend on your tolerance for the familiar and the sentimental, and the joy you take in what is visually striking and beautiful.

Gets high marks for tension and excitement.

It's hard to imagine "The Wild Bunch" having the depth and grace it did without Peckinpah having this experience to draw on, and for that masterful film alone we're grateful to have Major Dundee back among the living again.

Best and most unexpected of all, Rachel Getting Married dares to mix the bitter with the sweet. It understands that life-altering situations like weddings not only bring out the worst in human behavior but also the finest.

Juiced to the max and drenched in style, this "Romeo," mad about its image-a-minute visual agenda, is sure to infuriate as much as it delights. But the film can't be bothered to slow down for your reaction, and it never forgets its duty to be alive on the screen. [1 Nov 1996, pg.F1]

One of the unexpected pleasures of Ip Man 4 is a warm montage of highlights from the previous three films that plays at the close. Star Yen has said there are no more Ip films in his future, but no one would be upset if another one happened to come along.

All in all, the characters in Lost & Found are no smarter or luckier than they need to be, and their travails and coincidences manage to be just comic and human enough to make us happy for the time we spend together.

An amusing mock documentary that spends considerable energy artfully trying to make you believe it's real as real can be. The movie is transparently a fake, but its counterfeit nature is the heart of its charm.

Much to its credit, the documentary Deli Man wisely chooses not to bemoan the decline but to celebrate the robust survivors that remain as well as the culture they preserve.

Though Girls Rock! is nothing if not well meaning, it doesn't always feel like the best possible film on the subject.

Made under unique and wrenching circumstances, it gained poignancy and a kind of purity from its troubles, and an already affecting film ended up suffused with emotion.

What makes Lipstick & Dynamite its own animal is that, intentionally or not, the director has allowed something else into the mix, a glimpse of the unvarnished and the unsanitized.

Though it is a tale of real-life 15th-century rulers and lords, The King uses superior filmmaking and fully involving storytelling to make it seem very much a modern situation — in which wholly human individuals deal with up-to-date themes including power and its corruptions and the nature of friendship.

Destroyer is simultaneously impressive and stand-offish. Persuasively directed by Kusama and convincingly acted by Kidman and expert costars like Toby Kebbell and Sebastian Stan though it is, its determination to live exclusively at the darkest end of the street pays disagreeable dividends.

Those who enjoy the old-fashioned Hollywood pleasure of seeing divergent threads neatly pulled together will be more than satisfied.

The film's plot...is more contrived than creditable, motivations are not always clear, and some characters, for instance Kiefer Sutherland as a praise the lord and pass the ammunition Marine, are not very convincingly acted. [11 Dec 1992]

It would be foolish to deny that Unbreakable has scenes that make you jump, but without anything resonant to apply that skill to, the film has no option except squandering its technique.

On Chesil Beach is a beautifully made film that is as difficult to write about as it is to watch, and it is inescapably hard to watch. Yet the reasons it is difficult — a completely heartbreaking story brought to exquisite life via immaculate writing, directing and acting — are why it's worth putting up with the pain.

Who doesn't love a good amnesia movie, and this one, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson, pulls out more stops than one would have thought possible. [03 Apr 2020, p.E1]

Yes, this could be a better film, but the good qualities it does have are rare enough to hold our interest on screen and off.

Although he works his hardest at the part and doesn't embarrass himself, even with the help of Stan Winston's vampire makeup Tom Cruise is plainly miscast as Lestat. [11Nov1994 Pg. F1]

Intent as it is on being both artistically and politically involving, The Great Water periodically miscalculates its effects, coming on stronger than it intends.

It's a measure of how pulsating and energetic a visual style director F. Gary Gray has, and how vividly actors Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey come across on screen, that this film is intensely watchable from minute to minute, even though a lot of what's happening doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny.

Israeli director Dani Menkin has been especially thorough in telling this classic against-all-odds sports story.

Contact is superior popular filmmaking, both polished and effective. But despite its success and its serious intentions, it's finally a movie where the storytelling makes more of an impact than the story.

Even though as a whole Hello I Must Be Going lets us down in the second half, the pleasure of watching Lynskey and Abbott never diminishes.

While many of its elements whet our appetite and make the film well worth seeing, The American doesn't manage to deliver a fully satisfying meal. It's against the film's religion to have us believe too deeply in its characters, and that agnosticism, combined with the plot's sense of predestination, put a noticeable crimp in its grand ambitions.

Exuberant and insidiously funny satire.

This is a chance to see Shakespeare with mud wrestling, something the Bard surely would have put in if only he'd thought of it himself… Though the actors have no major problems handling the language, the whole venture is listless when it should be sparkling. Shakespeare, even with mud wrestling, needn't be quite so much of a slog. [14 May 1999, Calendar, p.F-6]

Stop-Loss is a film that does it right.

It's taken a dozen years for Eric Roth's smart, thoughtful, psychologically complicated script to reach the screen under Robert De Niro's careful and methodical direction, and it is easy to see why.

Very much of a guilty pleasure. A nifty piece of teenage romantic piffle, it combines two strong and attractive performances.

The Chamber is like a balloon that all the air has leaked out of. Maybe it wasn't magnificent before, but in its current state it is sad indeed.

Stolen is about a puzzle that's resisted solution for more than 15 years, but that doesn't stop it from being a fascinating, adventurous documentary with a lively and eccentric cast of characters.

It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]

The problem rather is the wholesale embracing of what has become de rigueur in animation, the practice of treating major characters as if they were stand-up comics working a room in Las Vegas.

It's hard not to wish this film were more of a piece and less like loud music at the wrong party.

Energizing the entire film, in fact powering us past its more conventional aspects, is the compelling performance of veteran German actor Burghart Klaussner, who captures Bauer’s firebrand intensity exactly.

A movie that wants to be hard-hitting and gritty but lacks the stomach for the job, it meanders through what should be a lean and focused narrative and ends up more of a letdown than anything else.

It is a measure of the singularity of the Band’s story, and the way their music remains such a tonic to experience, that “Brothers” still demands to be seen.

Revenge may be sweet, but this is one "Monte Cristo" that leaves a sour taste.

Woo has turned out a slick piece of business, filled with explosions and assorted acts of violence brought off with considerable movie-making skill.

Triple Frontier is a solid, engrossing genre item with designs on being something more. It doesn’t quite get there but it does well enough along the way to make the journey worth taking.

Has to fight to hold our attention and it doesn't always succeed.

An accurate sense of how today's Hollywood works.

This is a film without a center, a film whose young protagonist should have more texture, more of a compelling voice than she does. Through no real fault of the acting, young Astrid does not compel our attention the way she must if White Oleander is to succeed completely on the screen.

It's an undeniably small yet almost indefinable film, warmhearted and bittersweet, laced with both humor and tough emotions. Plus it has a kind of bicoastal appeal.

Haphazard and erratic, involving only in fits and starts, Hero’s core is nevertheless so shrewdly and gleefully cynical about public heroism and the cult of celebrity it is impossible not to be at least sporadically amused and entertained.

"Molière" is a polished, character-driven entertainment enlivened by flashes of droll humor.

The other, unintentional lesson taught here is that it's easier to make a mouse talk than to come up with something interesting for him to say.

If you care about the best kind of independent filmmaking, if you want the option of experiencing artistic films when you go to the movies, missing out on One is not an option. When a film like this appears, attention should be paid.

Though originality is not one of its accomplishments, Anastasia is generally pleasant, serviceable and eager to please.

By consistently and relentlessly overplaying everything, by settling for standard easy emotions when singular and heartfelt was called for, by pushing forward when they should have pulled back, director Joe Wright and screenwriter Susannah Grant have made the story mean less, not more. Instead of enhancing The Soloist's appeal, they have come close to eliminating it.

Subject and style could not be more different than in The White Crow, but that fusion of opposites has resulted in an involving biographical drama that rarely puts a foot wrong.

Brainy, audacious, opinionated and fun, Vice is a tonic for troubled times. As smart as it is partisan, and it is plenty partisan, this savage satire is scared of only one thing, and that is being dull.

Funny as it is for a great deal of its length, Hot Shots! does, however, have its share of dull spots, and watching it inevitably makes one yearn for the good old days of "Airplane!"

Overcomplicates its plot and spends a lot of time floundering around in the shallow end.

For serenely rising above all the foolishness is Chan himself, a performer whose belief in broad and harmless fun gives his films a clear and present connection to the classic silent comedies to go along with its action fixation. For once a film's ad line has a whiff of truth about it: "No Fear. No Stuntman. No Equal." [23 Feb 1996, p.1]

Moore's scattershot is a lot more interesting than some filmmakers' focus, and many of those individual parts are classic.

Secretariat shows no fear of the sentimental, and that's putting it mildly. This is an old-fashioned, super-genteel family movie that opens with an equine quote from the Book of Job and makes ample use of the Edwin Hawkins Singers' gospel song "Oh Happy Day."

A deeply personal and unexpectedly poetic film.

A persuasive thriller for most of its length, it stumbles in its attempt to become an upscale version of "Death Wish" and other vigilante dramas and ends up derailing with a soft thud.

With the former mayor currently enjoying one of the rare second acts in American political life, Giuliani Time does a strong job of reminding us what the first one was like.

The Kite Runner is a house divided against itself. The Marc Forster-directed version of the Khaled Hosseini novel does one part of the story so well that its success underlines what's lacking in what remains.

Moves with the suffocating deliberateness of a river of molasses.

The result is solid and efficient, if unadventurous, illustrating both the lure and the limitations of comic book extravaganzas.

Despite the potential for rancorous finger-pointing, one of the remarkable things about “The Front Runner” is its determination to be even-handed, to encourage viewers to make up their own minds (at least up to a point) about what happened 30 years ago and what it means for today.

A small but exquisite film, beautifully observed and impeccably executed. Written and directed by So Yong Kim, it shows a different side of an actor we thought we knew and reveals unexpected aspects of a character who turns out to be not as familiar as he seems.

Its easygoing and engaging quality masks how rare an accomplishment it is to create something achingly true as well as amusing, as wise about people as it is about the craft of film.

A cut above the average thriller. For one thing, it's put together with enough professionalism to make you almost (but not quite) forget the implausibilities that films like this are inevitably prone to. And for another, its concern with cops getting out of line seems hardly far-fetched after what the world saw happening to Rodney G. King.

Not only is Polanski very much in his comfort zone with this material, he also has cast it impressively, staying away from any of the actors who played the parts in either its London or New York productions and finding players who match up well with Carnage's juicy dialogue.

It starts out like a house afire, but by the time it's over we're the ones feeling burned. A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.

A brooding meditation on the unnerving power and terrible cost of emotional and political masquerades, the Chinese-language Lust, Caution gets under your skin with its examination of what qualifies as love and what does not.

Transformers' multiple earthling story lines are tedious and oddly lifeless, doing little besides marking time until those big toys fill the screen.

Complex, unexpected and dazzling, alternating relentless tension with resonant emotional moments, this is an exemplary espionage thriller that has a strong sense of what it wants to accomplish and how best to get there.

Although the pulp energy that Blomkamp brings to this material makes it consistently watchable, the film doesn't feel as singular as we would have hoped.

The bane of documentaries on creative people is that they're often little more than a fan's note, of interest only to those who already know and love the work in question. The Universe of Keith Haring starts out that way but the force of the late artist's energy and personality is strong enough to win over the skeptics.

One of Difret's strengths is the care it takes to present many of Ethiopia's traditions in a respectful way.

The Wolverine is an erratic affair, more lumbering than compelling, an ambitious film with its share of effective moments that stubbornly refuses to catch fire.

Uneven but ultimately effective, convincing in mood and emotion despite its melodramatic plotting, Avi Nesher's Past Life is straight-ahead filmmaking heightened by a connection to a pervasive Israeli reality not often found on film.

He [Caton-Jones] has made the film all of a piece, making sure that the three lead performances complement rather than overwhelm each other. [9 Apr 1993, p.F1]

The Portrait of a Lady may not be up to this high standard, but it is never less than absorbing either.

Even after you've seen Forbidden Lie$, the dizzying, drop-dead fascinating documentary on Norma Khouri, you won't be absolutely sure if she's on the level or a con artist ranked as "one of the best ever." That's how good she is.

With its shrewd mixture of paranoia and the paranormal, the way its elaborate mythology combines enigmatic phenomena with potent cabals intent on running the world, The X-Files experience resembles "Twin Peaks" crossed with "The Twilight Zone."

Directed in bold, energetic strokes by Taylor Hackford, "Devil" is fine disreputable fun at first, a stylish and watchable hoot. But then its tone changes, the plot goes gimmicky and bombastic speeches about the nature of good and evil clutter the airwaves and confuse the issue.

Yes, some of the individual stunts and action set pieces temporarily hold our interest...but the story itself is not convincing on its own terms, playing like a series of boxes (Bond asking for a martini shaken not stirred) that need to be checked off and forgotten.

There are hopeful notes here. If you are looking for examples for America's finest hour, it's not our rush to start an optional war but rather that an anti-administration film like this can still be made and still be seen.

Squanders an appealing performance from Costner.

The remarkable things about the new film, adapted by Vicente Leñero and directed by Carlos Carrera, are how smoothly it has been transposed to today's Mexico and how far good acting and skillful directing have gone toward tempering those melodramatic roots.

Though Overnight seems to be cautioning us about the excesses of filmmaker ego, it isn't always consistent.

This pulpy, energetic film is a fast-moving and entertaining tale.

The exquisitely calibrated Breathe In explores such a fraught mutual passion with honesty, intimacy and complete emotional involvement.

Strongly acted by a highly competent ensemble.

Though it is a vivid, promising piece of work from first-time director Ernest R. Dickerson, it also shows how difficult it's becoming to deal with this material in any kind of fresh manner.

"Exception" breaks no new ground but it is a solidly done and always engrossing piece of alternate history, mixing real people and events with fictional ones.

Bright and charismatic though Mary was, she was, in effect, born under a bad sign, fated, despite all her advantages, not to have anything like the happily ever after that royals have in fairy tales and Disney movies. In a similar way, despite numerous advantages (including splendid cinematography by John Mathieson), the film with her name on it has promise it does not fully deliver on. But when those queens are on the screen, all bets are off.

This lively and engaged documentary lives up to its name.

What results, against some odds, is an intriguing entertainment. Adjustment Bureau's central concept is certainly ingenious, but the details are a little wonky and don't stand up to too much scrutiny.

A canny combination of elements unites with an unlikely true story to make this more effective than you might be expecting.

Unconvincing and annoying, a miscalculation on numerous fronts, it is finally sugary enough to make the sentimental Priscilla play like a model of icy restraint.

Tentpoles are rarely guilty of overreaching, but Tomorrowland has a tendency to feel out of control, a film that is finally more ambitious than accomplished.

Measured and beautifully modulated, the 82-year-old director has the kind of sureness and fluidity that is easy to underestimate. But it's difficult not to be impressed by the results.

It is the incendiary work of British actors Idris Elba and Naomie Harris as the couple in question that elevates our involvement in this authorized film version of Nelson Mandela's autobiography.

Red can't stop itself from trying too hard to be hip. It's not that it doesn't have effective moments, it's that it doesn't have as many as it thinks it does. The film's inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it's downright irritating.

Rules Don't Apply, as its name implies, is a movie intent on going its own way. It's not without its charms, but there aren't enough of them and they don't readily cohere.

(Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

An easygoing and amusing romantic confection.

Both too unfocused and overly familiar. It has enough comic energy to generate some chuckles, but even when we laugh we're always wondering why the jokes aren't funnier. [5 Mar 1999]

There's no freshness here, no sense of newness or discovery. In its place, there's an earnest desire not to drop the ball, a determination to risk as little as possible in keeping this golden egg from cracking wide open.

A sketchy trifle that is sporadically amusing but also off-putting around the edges.

The virtues of The Aeronauts are real but they are almost exclusively visual. Despite the hard work of acclaimed actors in what sounds on paper like a strong story, the drama presented is determinedly earth-bound.

An amusing tale of larceny triumphant, Bandits is an entertainment with a rogue's imagination.

The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.

Life of Crime has the authentic Leonard snap, crackle and pop.

The strength of Foster’s spooky performance makes Nell more effective and worthwhile than it otherwise deserves to be. And it is just because we come to care about that unusual young woman that we wish she were in a better movie, but that was not to be.

It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]

This largely Spanish-language film brings on the waterworks because its core story is undeniably affecting. The whole movie, however, would be more convincing if the elements around that vital core were more multidimensional and less contrived.

Grainy as it looks in its massive Imax blowup, Mickey's misadventures with water and a broom still have the kind of magic even modern technology can't always manage.

For much of the film, Berg is content to act like a Michael Bay wannabe, orchestrating large action set pieces that get increasingly tiresome and WWE-like as individuals get mindlessly slammed into the dust.

Has noticeable problems with characterization and dialogue. But once that awesome storm, one of the most terrifying ever put on film, gets cranked up, it's hard to remember what those difficulties were, let alone care too much about them.

Beowulf appears so cartoony, in fact, that the academy just put it on the short list of films to be considered for the Oscar in feature animation.

Though aspects of it are entertaining, the presence of all these mismatched pieces give Spider-Man 3 an ungainly, cumbersome feeling, as if its plot elements were the product of competing contractors who never saw the need to cooperate on a coherent final product.

The power of film to irrationally transform and exalt is almost a religion to Woo, and another reason why he was the natural go-to guy for this lucrative movie franchise.

With what we see on screen weighted too much toward pain and too little toward redemption, this is a film we respect more than love, and that is something of a wasted opportunity.

Inspired by actual events, Saints and Soldiers benefits by being a small-scale war movie.

The kind of shrewd, genial comedy it provides doesn't intend to break new ground, but its traditional satisfactions are so effectively done and so long in coming our way that to see it is to realize just how hungry we've been for this kind of old-fashioned treat.

Inevitably violent (though a disemboweling still seems excessive), as edited by Jake Roberts Outlaw King now moves along at a satisfyingly brisk pace. While we likely have not seen the end of Robert the Bruce on film, this for sure is a worthy addition to the canon.

Sarah's Key is more powerful than you expect, maybe even more powerful than it should be.

Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer is a welcome surprise. It combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve.

While adapting accomplished fiction such as this is a lure Hollywood can never resist, some characters breathe better on the page, and that is the case here.

Yet with so much going for it, the film's creators have made the classic Hollywood choice and treated its actresses like flesh-and-blood special effects. If you've got talent like this, or so the theory goes, a coherent story is a luxury that can be dispensed with.

Powered by an exceptional performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, this artfully disturbing film is a compelling, imaginative look at the potent emotional bond that forms not between romantic lovers but between fathers and daughters.

It does move right along and it's enlivened by stronger, more enjoyable acting than this kind of picture usually provides.

Chomsky deserves a more thoughtful documentary than Power and Terror, and in fact he got it in 1993's "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" --The film's main flaw is the absence of other voices -- From a cinematic point of view, two sides of an issue are always better than one.

J. Edgar is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?

Directed by Mike Gabriel and Eric Goldberg, Pocahontas is on the formulaic side, a copy that duplicates what its predecessors have done, only a little less adroitly and with a little less style. [16Jun1995 Pg. F.01]

What is interesting is not how little sense Déjà Vu makes but how little that matters. If you want your films to add up logically, you're welcome to take your calculator somewhere else. But if you do, you will be missing out on some first-class genre fun.

By the time this lightly entertaining look at life's emotional crises ends, even the characters you didn't think were sympathetic will have won you over.

In a sense it's a shame that Cocaine Cowboys is so obsessed by violence, because the film has interesting points to make.