Michael O'Sullivan

Candyman can’t seem to decide whether it wants to scare you or make you think.

Too often, in a film about an ostensibly peaceful form of dissent, it feels like adversaries are being targeted, albeit subtly, when the real enemy is war itself.

Scorsese creates a film so resonant that it is both a work of great art and an anthropological document.

[A] meandering, deliberate and tearless — yet oddly moving — western vehicle.

Youth is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age.

A Compassionate Spy is less a full companion piece to “Oppenheimer” than an intriguing sidebar.

A bustling, overly busy mess.

All in all, Doctor Strange is a fun and trippy excursion to a place where Marvel rarely seems to go: that is, to the retinal roots of the comics.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

Sweet without being saccharine and funny without being forced, the closely observed romantic comedy treats the culinary arts as a metaphor for personal healing.

There is a quality of enchantment to When Marnie Was There that can’t be faked, and that the studio behind this animated feature is justifiably famous for.

Visually stylish surrealist drama.

It's the flaws that Kurtzman builds into People Like Us that make it interesting.

It’s crazy and ridiculous at times. But I can’t help agreeing with Assaf, who observes, of his companions’ rescue plans, “I like it. It has the logic of a dream.”

While the movie is best viewed as an examination of a specific place and time, it also can be seen as a celebration of a larger, more generic cultural phenomenon that one might call creative foment.

It’s kind of a downer, yes, but also stimulating as hell.

A film that is by turns darkly comic and disturbing, both sensations brought into vivid, caustic relief by the film's mesmerizing star.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

Fed Up isn’t so much a warning to the ignorant shopper or a tip for the unimaginative chef as it is a rallying cry. It succeeds in firing up the choir. Whether it will convert the complacent is an open question.

Smashed never really rises much above the level of a dramatic public service announcement. That's not so much because of its tone, but because what it's announcing isn't exactly news. Alcoholism is a disease. Alcoholics aren't bad people. Quitting is hard.

The plot is far from intricate, but Waking Ned Devine more than makes up for its narrative simplicity with a uniformly engaging cast of Hibernian oddballs.

Land of the Dead is fairly intense. Intensely gory and violent, that is, as has come to be expected from the genre. It's just not very frightening. Not half as frightening as, say, last year's "Dawn of the Dead."

And that's the moral of this story. Or one of them, anyway. Clash's success is shown as the result of a combination of talent, gumption, pluck, misadventure, supportive parents, following your dreams, luck and, yes, love.

Monument Ave. is a cinematic dead-end street that is not without its gloomy, gritty thrills -- assuming, that is, that you're not in the market for a hero or even the slightest feather of that thing called hope. [09 Oct 1998, Pg.N.49]

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

Director Rodrigo Plá, working from a spare yet jangly screenplay by Laura Santullo, steadily builds suspense, craftily calibrating subtle shifts in perspective that allow us to alternate, seamlessly, between impartial observers and, as it were, active participants.

Despite Blomkamp’s efforts to make some kind of commentary about the human soul, which the auteur bolsters with his trademark social consciousness — a tone of preachiness that, after three films, has worn out its welcome — the movie exhibits precious little humanity.

It remembers to have fun. It’s a kick to watch — often literally — and the kind of popcorn movie summer is made for.