Lawrence Toppman

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.