Lawrence Toppman

Nothing in the longer Frankenweenie is new.

The most sophisticated and satisfying ghost story on film since "The Sixth Sense."

Nolan’s tale is not only a trip through mental labyrinths but a reminder that memories may cripple us, unless we learn to let them go.

Whedon wants to make a Serenity trilogy, and I suspect the actors will grow on me if he does. In this case, familiarity would breed not contempt but comfort.

Besides its title, the movie has retained the book's outline...But the film throws away the point of the book completely.

The middle 90 minutes, which put Hanks alone on an island without voice-over narration or even a musical background, is as risky as anything Hollywood did this year.

This is a game of numbers, not personalities, and a shrewd man wants the bigger numbers on his side when historians pick up their pens.

By the end, you'll be chilled and disturbed by what you've seen -- and, rare as this is in a horror movie, touched to the heart.

Soderbergh and writer Ted Griffin added plot twists that will catch you off-guard, dumped the clever ending and worked in a love story that's as superfluous as elevator shoes on Shaquille O'Neal.

Except for moments of labored symbolism and a too cozy ending, the movie stays sharply focused on its well-chosen targets.

Proves eye-opening in two ways: Sweeping, bloody battles will make your orbs pop, and you'll re-evaluate this supposedly “uncivilized” man who unified quarrelsome Central Asian tribes to create one of the largest empires in history.

Would you feel anxiety or remorse if you pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden, however satisfying or even necessary it might be? Munich argues that finding him in our rifle sights would leave any of us a different person.

Starts as sweetly impossible and ends as impossibly sweet.

Examines Muslim family's religious warfare.

Goes down easily enough.

By the end, Wilbur becomes an unusually complicated character: We empathize with his suffering, find his selfishness appalling, enjoy his gloomy wit and frank self-appraisal.

All his facets come through: the satirist, the prankster, the self-described political conservative with libertarian leanings, the anti-authoritarian who urged people to vote, the man tolerant of anything except intolerance.

The movie indicts exclusion and racial hierarchy without finding villains inside that system.

Historians at Ellis Island estimate nearly half of all Americans had at least one ancestor pass through there between 1892 and 1954.

If you like films short, sweet and soothing, this may be exactly your "Dish."

This is strictly a picture for the target audience, though it seems to hit that target regularly.

A picture from an old man working at the top of his game.

The rest of this well-intentioned picture never reaches (Washington's) level of subtlety and intensity.

Best of all, Billy (Jamie Bell) is that rarity in a film distributed by Hollywood: a real boy, confused at 11 about almost everything.

Has more twists than the Pacific Coast Highway and more layers than a stack of silver-dollar pancakes. If you can wrap your mind around one unlikely condition, the picture provides unalloyed pleasure for connoisseurs of cinematic con artists.

Perelman and Otto make auspicious, nearly flawless debuts.

The story’s unbelievable, end to end.

The voice cast includes Angelina Jolie as a tigress, omnipresent Seth Rogen as an acupuncturist who's a praying mantis, David Cross as a nasal crane and Lucy Liu as a cheerful viper.

Though all but two students look too old, their interpretations are unanimously fine.

The title comes from the memoir by Mariane Pearl, wife of kidnapped Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. It applies equally to Winterbottom, who has made the rarest movie among this summer's releases: a taut police procedural that examines all sides of an issue and forces us to re-think our own.

The movie feels operatic at times. Tempestuous arias play on the soundtrack, and Puccini figures directly.

Everything here has been done better in other books, other movies. The lone remarkable thing is the level of violence, which exposes the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system.

Sitting through Source Code is like watching a chef coax a beautiful soufflé into perfect shape for 80 minutes, then drop a bowling ball on it.

Like "Shattered Glass," the other picture Billy Ray directed, Breach probes a guilty mind and reveals how he baffled people. We get a Hitchcock-like pleasure from knowing the protagonist is guilty and watching other shocked characters realize his wickedness.

I think Garland and Boyle just want to make our flesh creep by showing someone else's flesh decaying. If that's their aim, they achieved it.

Penn, one of Hollywood's most famous iconoclasts, must have felt instinctive sympathy with someone who told the whole world in general to leave him alone.

It's watchable, due to the rotoscoping technique...It's also as lightweight as the smoke rings blown by one of many perverse, dull characters.

Lanthimos and Filippou have thoroughly imagined their world.

In a world full of recyclable superheroes and mindless “empowerment” comedies, we’re finally getting a movie about reality. We’re surrounded by surveillance and the threat of violence, and this film asks us to judge the proper balance between liberty and security – and the amount of collateral damage acceptable to maintain the latter.

Freeman's understated, deeply-felt acting tops a passel of good performances. [25 Dec 1998, p.7E]

When I first heard about Wordplay, I assumed I wouldn't have an ort of interest.

Flawless never begins to live up to its title.

The honesty of the performances more than makes up for slight amounts of hokiness in the telling.

A lot of chaotic fun.

The animals' personalities have been carefully calibrated: They have sufficient edge to amuse us as characters, yet they're cuddly enough to market as plush toys or action figures.

The Son's Room refers to every room this family will inhabit for a long time -- he's an unseen, ubiquitous presence -- but they may learn to lead ordinary, even joyful lives again.

The juice in "Man" comes from supporting characters.

Trumping its predecessor with a tauter plot, a lower body count and just as many edge-of-the-seat jolts.

Atmosphere is the main virtue with which this "Devil" can tempt us.

Two things keep the film off Disney's top shelf. First, Naveen is a dull hero; his good-natured vanity isn't engaging until late in the story. Second, Newman's songs are less bland than usual but no more memorable.

I'll sum up my reaction in a word: Yawn.

Yet as fine as she and Ewan McGregor are as the parents, Tom Holland stands out as eldest son Lucas, a slightly sullen teen who learns to put other people before himself.

All that matters is that emotions be real, and so they are: wracking grief, harrowing madness, unquenchable hate. Composers have tried and failed to turn "Lear" into a workable opera, but Kurosawa has found the visual equivalent. Yet the last image of a man, solitary and silent, is more haunting than all the destruction. [10 Aug 2001, p.7E]

Leaving the book aside, how well does the picture fare? Middingly, and in fits and starts.

Bizarrely entertaining and brilliantly designed.

For all its flashes of emotional honesty and mordant humor, is nonsense at its core.

Eastwood has directed five war movies and acted in others, and he knows there’s no single truth to convey about combat.

If the spate of action movies must continue, especially at Christmas, let more be like "Daylight." [6 Dec 1996, p.13E]

The part that caters to older fans is funny and satisfying, if unbelievable. The part that plays to action-movie devotees is muddled, unsatisfying and unbelievable. Luckily, the first part is about two-thirds of the movie.

Nick Schenk's well-intentioned script employs the creaky old Hollywood device of reversing everything set up in its first half.

On the most basic level, Cars is an old-fashioned fable about an egotistical, talented loner who learns humility and redeems himself by helping unfortunates.

Exactly the right length. That sounds like faint praise, but isn't it rare? Many movies drag past the points where they should stop; others end abruptly, leaving you to wonder at things unexplained or unconcluded.

Doesn't reveal all its layers until you've taken the last bite.

Any critic likes to predict the rise of a star, so let me introduce you to Gina Prince-Bythewood.

Brilliantly embodied by Jamie Foxx in this unflinching, entertaining biography.

So I was curious to see why we needed a two-hour documentary about the three-hit wonder who cast away his career halfway through life and coasted on celebrity status for 30 years. After seeing Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, I'm still not convinced we do.

The plot is thin: You'll guess the villain early, then pick holes in story construction. But Black's ear for mock-noir speeches doesn't fail him, and he gleefully parodies the chase scenes that dominated his action movies.

Amiable bundle of broad, easy laughs rather than bitingly fierce satire.

Perhaps the director should make only silent movies. Scenes where characters communicate via eyes and body language usually work here, even if we don't know exactly what's going on.

Writers Rasmus Heisterberg and Nicolaj Arcel are known in America for the original version of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." This film is the exact opposite: stately instead of propulsive, emotionally warm instead of chilly, lit by candles and sun instead of flashlights and neon.

This picture won't attract white audiences. I doubt that blacks would flock to a Jerry Seinfeld concert film. But we'd all get along better if we realized we had the right to laugh at each other's foibles

Like an impressionist painting. Scrutinize it closely, and the details don't make sense individually. Step back from it to study the big picture, and it will make a sweeping effect.

The best vampire movie I've seen in years.

It's the poster child for bad taste, not to mention bad construction.

Try as he might, (Hanks) is miscast in Road to Perdition, a partly satisfying gangster drama that amounts to less than the sum of its handsome parts.

Gone Baby Gone would be an accomplishment with anyone at the helm; from a first-timer, it's a revelation.

Mortensen has been ideally cast. He’s at his best playing fanatics, obsessives, people beyond the norm who can’t find their place in a quiet world.

There’s not a great theme, a great performance or even a great scene in Boyhood. But I think it might be a great picture.

Someone Like You is from Hollywood's bottomless box of cliches.

The film's main virtue, a large virtue indeed, is that it does not give anything away before its shockingly apt time.

So what's the motivation for the earnest, handsome, well-acted, unenlightening, workaday J. Edgar in 2011?

Hollywood hardly ever pays attention to such people, and the average moviegoer won't either. But Leigh makes an irrefutable claim that their lives matter, and that attention must be paid.

At its best, the movie powerfully indicts our violent history. A montage of bloody U.S. interventions in foreign affairs over the last half-century, most overthrowing elected governments we didn't like, left me shaken.

If movies were still silent, Girl With a Pearl Earring would be a near-masterpiece.

These veterans realize they’re all playing cogs in the director’s plot-twisting machine.

On first acquaintance, Seabiscuit seems to be about anything but horse racing: the disappearance of the American frontier after 1910, our love affair with automotive speed, the passing of a rural way of life, homelessness during the Depression.

As Disney-fied as "Pinocchio," barely challenging the images Americans have treasured for 150 years.

One Fine Day is a fluffernutter. Half of it is as down-to-earth, satisfying, even nourishing as peanut butter. The rest of it is gooey, dense and indigestible. [20 Dec 1996, p.4E]

The film has such an expansive, likeable spirit.

He (Chomet) keeps us waiting for a narrative payoff that will equal that visual splendor, and he makes us think that many small inspired touches will add up to something memorable. But when he opens his hand at last, there's nothing in it.

It's freakishly funny, suddenly tender, gleefully macabre, genuinely scary, and full of a moral – fear turns weak people into bullies – which is dosed out so gently that it never tastes like medicine.

A typical shallow caper film. Just assume the truth is the exact opposite of what's happening.

Will dazzle you while establishing the world in which it takes place. After that, you may wonder whether Guillermo del Toro got amnesia halfway through.

The Coen brothers’ new movie, set in Hollywood in 1951, brings easy laughs but dissipates from memory moments later, like the cheesy films to which it pays homage – or, perhaps, mocks.

Is it too much to ask that he take a risk next time and kill somebody off, however much we’re used to having them in the “Trek” universe?

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

This seemingly simple thriller has two subtexts, one more overt than the other, that should give pause to people who claim Hollywood is always too left-wing.

The filmmakers do everything they can to balance levity and leavening. The subject says "drama," and the three supporting women deliver well-shaded, understated performances. (Howard shows us how weakness can be just as destructive as malice.)