Lawrence Toppman

Because the tale is straightforward and conventional, it needed and got terrific acting.

Multiple lobotomies. That's the only way to explain what happens in the middle of Hitch, whose first hour sets up one of the brightest romantic comedies in months and whose second hour tears it down.

Finding Dory can be described in exactly the same way as its title character: good-natured, funny, optimistic, darting from place to place, ranging from anxious to frenzied in tone, and unable to sustain an idea for more than a few moments.

Christian Bale loves to suffer on-screen. Werner Herzog loves to make people suffer on-screen. Rescue Dawn is proof they were made for each other.

An animated film that challenges preconceptions about the genre and foregoes the usual romance/adventure structure.

The film is visually sumptuous, morally ambiguous, dramatic and dreamlike, with a narrative as engrossing as any live-action movie of 2013. It’s easy to follow yet hard to shake.

The film works best as an extended "Twilight Zone" episode.

The movie takes countless liberties, including the addition of the 13-year-old girl. But authenticity doesn't matter much; we're watching a fairy tale about trust, maturity and beating the odds, and those plot threads are woven tightly together. [13 Sep 1996, p.6E]

The loosely autobiographical 8 Mile, an uneven but watchable drama about life in Detroit's slums, begins the shrewd transformation of vitriolic rapper Eminem into a mainstream figure.

The well-composed movie directed by Jon Favreau and written by Justin Marks takes us beyond the 1967 cartoon and, in some ways, beyond Kipling.

Most importantly, Shut Up & Sing is about what happens in the music industry to people who won't.

If we admire anything about him, it’s entrepreneurship; there’s something uniquely American about a guy outrunning his own death by turning suffering into profit. And as a judge asks, why shouldn’t a dying man be allowed to try any remedy for his disease?

The best war movies don't preach against war: They remind us of the costs for soldiers and families and ask us to consider whether those costs are worth paying. The Messenger does that without firing a bullet or putting us on a battlefield.

Slater narrates as if reading a restaurant menu. Reid seems to have learned each long sentence in segments, so she wouldn't be overtaxed.

Feuerzeig leaves a lot of territory unexplored. Why did people overlook his suffering and bizarre behavior for so long? Were they cold-hearted profiteers, onlookers enjoying a freak show or honestly ignorant of his troubles? Are there links between Johnston's creativity and madness?

The temptation to soften Grandma, to sentimentalize her character or sweeten her encounters with people she has cast aside over a long life, must have been almost irresistible. Luckily, writer-director Paul Weitz resisted it.

Characters in Breillat's movies often make sex their god, lose faith in it, then find their lives hollow and grim. Bergman wouldn't have been so concerned with bodily woes, but he'd have understood.

Cool. Stupid. Juiced-up. Feeble. Stripped-down. Self-indulgent. Clever. Sophomoric.

Sandler proves even a hardened Israeli secret service agent can be an imbecilic juvenile.

Chi-Raq is indeed interesting, challenging, provocative and consistently entertaining in its outrageous depiction of life in modern Chicago. And nobody in mainstream filmmaking today except Spike Lee could or would have done it.

I've heard that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. By that standard, the U.S. "War on Drugs" seems crazy indeed in The House I Live In.

This is one of the few recent westerns that requires you to keep your eyes open and memory engaged.

Its main pleasure lies in watching Bush thaw under gentle emotional heat applied by the few people who haven't given up on him.

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.

I can’t think of a single situation where Kelly Fremon Craig, who makes her feature debut as a writer-director, takes us to a place we haven’t often been. Yet she lays out her heroine’s dilemmas with good humor and understanding.

In an elemental way, though, the film always works. The acting can be basic, a cross between Bollywood directness and Western nuance, but it has weight.

It's cheerful nonsense from blithe beginning to obvious end.

This pretentious mediocrity from writer-director Gaspar Noe is "Taxi Driver" without depth or any humanizing of the main character. [25 Oct 1998, p.4F]