Mick LaSalle

The result is that this is one of those rare movies that gets better as it goes along.

Will Smith has the right quality for the role -- he's an easy man to root for -- but he augments this by channeling some inner quality of desperation and need.

Gets back the mood, the pleasure and even some of the freshness of its first installment.

As presented in "What Just Happened?" the world of Hollywood looks like a very expensive, lethal version of high school, not fun to live in, but lots of fun from a safe distance.

Stop laughing long enough, and you'll see that it's a picture about compromised lives and love for sale. But no one who watches Priceless will stop laughing for that long.

That Sunshine Cleaning was made by women is best revealed in the filmmakers' willingness to let the story breathe on its own terms, without bringing in anything extraneous, unwelcome and exciting.

This film makes you wonder why aren't there more young love movies?

Love & Friendship looks splendid. If the costumes by Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh (“Cavalry”) were any more beautiful, they’d be too beautiful.

The Net is a scary film that could have been terrifying but for something slightly earnest and plodding in director Irwin Winkler's attack.

If at any point in Sicario, you feel lost, don’t worry about it. The movie is all about being lost and, in any case, all becomes clear, eventually.

As Barkin's nemesis, Moore is evil, and that's a good thing - she doesn't back off. Kate Bosworth plays Barkin's fragile daughter and is a pleasant surprise: Who knew she was an actress?

The film is thorough and entertaining. It's enthusiastic about his contributions, but it's no hagiography, and it serves as both a celebration and a cautionary tale.

Still the spectacle of this, of beautiful, sensitive children at the mercy of damaged adults — this is what we take from The Glass Castle. It’s a universal awfulness rendered with truth and detail, and somehow that’s enough.

The mysteries of Dolores Claiborne are never gripping enough to consume an audience, and there are few, if any, surprises along the way. But the women are wonderful and reason enough to see the picture.

This film isn't boring - it's not scintillating or spellbinding, either, just pleasantly honest and moderately interesting throughout.

A funny action comedy that comes into your house in a good mood and gets the reaction it’s supposed to get: laughs.

The Trip to Greece isn’t nonstop hilarity, but if you get into the rhythm of it, it’s laidback and pleasing. It’s an enjoyable trip in good company.

Apart from a few lapses, Filomarino is straightforward and gets the job done. Along the way, he taps into everyone’s most paranoid fantasy about foreign travel — where the police and authority figures turn on you, and the Constitution or Bill of Rights are a few thousand miles away.

A moody picture that's filled from start to finish with camera tricks, unexpected angles and innovative flourishes.

This is a shrewd and effective film from a director who understands how to create and sustain a mood.

Has a slow build and a strong payoff, but George Clooney is the element that holds it together.

In its details, in its characters and their relationships, in the unfolding of its story, and even in the delicacy of its filming, Gifted rises above cynical expectation. Far from a canned piece of work, it feels sincere and inspired.

The thinking is shallow. The emotions are tepid. But the creativity is dazzling. If that sounds like a slam, consider that most Hollywood screenplays are predictable, rote and functional -- and those are the good ones, folks.

Ultimately, this is not one of the Dardennes' masterpieces. They've made a few of those, but the effect of Lorna's Silence is more modest. It leaves the audience with neither a sense of uplift nor devastation, but, rather, with something more akin to intellectual appreciation.

An entertaining film, but also an uncompromising one. It is harsh and not particularly hopeful, and it presents a situation so tangled and contorted, with so many interests in collision, that a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians seems a distant prospect.

This is a tale from the front lines, before the disease had a name, through the early days when no one knew for sure how it was transmitted.

The film follows its own winding path and covers a lot of emotional ground in 96 minutes, with Michaela Watkins lovely in a key role as Carl’s former lover and colleague. Some movies are more than just a story, they’re a world — and Paint is a world worth visiting.

Has an air of detachment and sadness, enhanced by the movie's being set a full quarter century ago.

Exciting, truly harrowing and smartly directed apocalyptic thriller from Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball"). It's the scariest zombie movie in many years.

Succeeds in making the case that the hatred that seemed dead and buried 60 years ago is alive and growing and beginning to present itself once again as a threat to humane civilization.

The Man Without a Face saves itself from sugary sweetness by presenting the friendship of McLeod and Chuck against a harsh small-town background. The screenplay takes off in some strong directions, while Gibson, in his first film as a director, keeps it honest all the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.E1]

Not about the justice or injustice of the legal system. Rather it's about the tragedy of Sam's predicament.

As the man who made the monster and now has to live with it, Pacino's a blast.

Where Caine was like an arsonist in his relationships, Law's Alfie is more like a kid playing with matches -- innocent and genuinely surprised when things start blowing up around him. Law makes Alfie's befuddlement a surprisingly poignant thing to witness.

Later, as the picture becomes a Petrie dish in which James' theories are put to the ultimate test, Certified Copy loses some of its magic, but it retains interest as an appealing and one-of-a-kind experience.

Ridley Scott gives it the grand treatment, 157 minutes worth, but in the end, it doesn't stack up as the portrait of an era (the 1970s, in this case) or an important tale of a criminal mastermind.

It's more interesting than it sounds. Besides the sheer spectacle, which is notable.

The picture is more impressive as it goes along, revealing a symmetry of construction underneath the rudiments of a thriller.

Eubanks takes someone else’s screenplay, one that’s full of incident, and infuses it with his own sensibility. Alfred Hitchcock wasn’t a writer, either. Being a good director with a real point of view — that’s plenty.

Kaurismäki stalwart Kati Outinen, as the old man's silent and ailing wife, is the key to the movie, even though she appears only sporadically. Something in her timid, understanding and impassive gaze, which is Kaurismäki's gaze as well, lets us know that she sees things in the old man that we don't see.

One of the Coens’ most inspired, bizarre touches is to cast Tilda Swinton as rival gossip columnists, twins who hate each other. She’s quite funny — blithe and vindictive in one incarnation, insecure and vindictive in the other.

Goes to all the places a sensitive character study might have gone, but more dramatically, convincingly and vividly.

Band Aid is her (Zoe Lister-Jones) first film as a director — she also wrote and stars in it — and something about her and this film is really appealing.

Best of all is Richard Harris as Paddy O'Neil, an IRA spokesman. With his deeply lined and very Irish face, Harris has a wonderful look for the part. [5 June 1992, p.D1]

Watching the film one comes away feeling the bond that links these guys.

It's so bleak that it would play like a contrived neo-noir if it weren't so consistent, committed and obviously sincere.

At any given time, a different character will seem to be the movie’s focus. But as long as we recognize that love’s transformational power is the real subject, there can be no mystery about the movie’s intentions or how it’s unfolding.

The movie gradually works its way, with quiet intelligence and apparent conviction, until there's no turning from it. An hour in, and we're on that boat.

Takes viewers into a unique world. It's not just about air traffic controllers. It's about controllers in a specific place and from a specific social background.

Some of the segments are more successful than others, yet all of them have the haunting quality of a completely insignificant event that someone might remember years later. Night on Earth tries to stop the clock and cast a net over the whole mystery, and while the film never loses its humor, the wistfulness, yearning and deep affection at its heart is are unmistakable. [29 May 1992, p.D1]

Barbie is an impressive and original work of the imagination. Its story holds up most of the time and for most of the way, with the unifying through line being Barbie’s existential crisis.

Gladiator II coasts: never good, never terrible, always a little disappointing, with speeches that fall flat and gladiator battles that are like watching the World Series when your team isn’t in it.

Criminal depicts a compelling situation, made rich and entertaining through its extreme characters.

The Lunchbox is better as an experience than as a memory. When you're watching it, you can still believe it might actually be heading somewhere.

Best of all, there's just the pleasure of seeing something that's both fantastic to the eye and emotionally dimensional. This is how to make action movies.

Can and should be appreciated as a work of delicate and unmistakable beauty.

Toback presents specific characters dealing with specific problems and, through their stories, somehow manages to take the temperature of the times.

Like many films that attempt to be inspiring, Heavyweights uses the sound track like a rubber hose to beat the audience into submission. The movie is so honest and good-natured that it's hard to stay mad at it for long. [18 Feb 1995, p.E1]

It expertly capitalizes on the emotional associations Americans have with Pearl Harbor and renders the battle scenes with an excellence that goes beyond proficiency and into the realm of art.

Instead of settling for a tour de force from McKellen, Soderbergh goes for something better — a fascinating give and take from start to finish.

Mamet finds an angle just new enough to be fresh.

Matches a dingy urban setting with a compelling situation and throws in an ensemble of interesting characters who become even more interesting under stress. This emphasis on character -- in a sense, the movie's underlying humanity -- is what especially links it to the 1970s.

Late in the picture, Sobieski has some line-readings that are so emotionally full, strange and truthful that really nothing more need be said.

It is an exciting movie, full of crises and dramatic turns despite an aura of sadness that seems to pervade it.

Miami Blues is offbeat and fun. [20 Apr 1990, p.E1]

It's an amazing story, one that would seem too far-fetched if it weren't true.

There is none of the drippy cuteness of ''Star Trek V.'' This is the best sort of adventure story, with good characters and excitement and lots of humor. [6 Dec. 1991, p.C1]

In the end, Let Him Go is like a Southern Gothic, only set in the Northwest. It’s just a genre movie that delivers the goods, but the restraint and emotional insight of the direction and the quality of the performances bring it up an essential extra notch.

You can love or hate “The Chronology of Water,” but if you don’t come away from it marveling at the brilliance of Poots’s performance, you just weren’t paying attention.

The movie is directed by Anjelica Huston, and like a lot of actors who direct, Huston shows an ability to elicit strong emotions from her actors. But Huston also demonstrates a sense of where to place the camera. [13 Dec 1996, p.C1]

Still, despite Olsen and the appealing breeziness of Cumberbatch, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is what it is, a superhero extravaganza with too many fight scenes. But director Sam Raimi doesn’t overplay them, and the creative visuals keep them from becoming monotonous.

The result is not only entertaining but also refreshing, a shameless crowd-pleaser with a healthy cynicism about itself.

If it's ultimately a failure -- and I think it is -- it's still worth seeing, because it's the most ambitious and magnificent failure in recent memory. That, in a sense, qualifies it as a certain kind of "good movie."

Original enough to keep an audience guessing most of the way. It has a strong plot that takes surprising and satisfying turns, and there's never really a dull moment. This is the kind of movie that, once you start watching, you have to finish just to see how it turns out. [08 Oct 1991, p.E1]

Watts is the movie's soul, thoughtful and deep-revolving.

It's scary. It's well-acted. It's filmed with a degree of flash and elegance.

Not the kind of movie anyone will remember at Oscar time. But no one who sees it will forget it.

A good movie that has been sitting in a film can for two years waiting for a miracle. The miracle came -- Suvari's sudden popularity.

As British comedy sometimes will, A Long Way Down has an occasional attack of the cutes, but the actors' commitment keeps the movie on the plus side.

The violence and mayhem are constant, though the movie's style is refreshingly old-fashioned -- scream- and laughter-inducing, rather than coldly repulsive in the modern fashion.

A romantic drama, a rare kind of film these days, even though romantic dramas were once a dominant genre in America.

The movie's biggest weakness is in the presentation of Caine's grandparents.... The attempt, it seems, is to show a potentially positive influence in Caine's life. But the grandparents come across as canned characters, corny and concocted. [26 May 1993, Daily Notebook, p.E1]

A fascinating fact-based portrait of a gambling addict.

Hatching has the quality of a fable, and like the best fables, it has meanings that reverberate well beyond its story.

Jodie Foster stars, and it's a pleasure, for once, to see her in something entertaining and mindless.

DogMan won’t appeal to everybody, but there’s something to be said for a movie that makes you wonder if the filmmaker has gone crazy.

A well-constructed and genuinely tense thriller.

This is a heartfelt piece, and while passion alone can't carry a movie, it sure helps. Ararat is uneven because Egoyan couldn't tell it smoothly.

Hitchcock isn't ambitious or complicated. It's simple, does what it sets out to do, and gets out before anyone even thinks about checking the time. More movies should be made in its image.

A courtroom drama with a compelling story and something peculiar about it, too: For most of its running time, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a rooting interest. The audience isn't quite sure who it's for or against.

If you want to know what a culture thinks it thinks, watch drama. But if you want to know how it really thinks, watch comedy. Watch, for example, Blockers, which is exuberant in its crudeness and coarseness. It’s where comedy is now, and it’s very funny.

A new restoration takes a flawed bit of monster camp and turns it back into a strong, serious-minded and occasionally moving science-fiction film.

Summertime is the first movie ever like Summertime, and on that basis alone, we should appreciate it.

The screenplay by Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Tom Perrotta, sees the lives of these suburban students and teachers through a prism of absurdity that refracts more truth than any straightforward telling.

A thoughtful, satisfying action thriller.

Told from a different angle than any other Holocaust film I've seen.

Deerskin is funny, weird and original; it features two charismatic stars, and it does everything it needs to do in only 77 minutes.

Whores' Glory, is as sad a film as you can possibly see. To experience it is to be haunted by the bleakness and ugliness of prostitution, the hopeless trap of it, and the defeat of love that it represents.

The movie has a saving grace in that it breaks formula. Its concerns are not the usual movie concerns, and it takes what might have been a standard plot in some unexpected directions.

Strange, moody film.

This much is certain: The cover-up was grotesque.

Perhaps the idea of watching Jeff Bridges as a drunken, broken-down, down-on-his luck country music singer in Crazy Heart doesn't automatically sound appealing. But think this: "The Wrestler." With good songs.

Stephen King's Sleepwalkers represents the first time the author has ever written a story directly for the screen. The result is a nicely paced picture that unfolds gradually, with shocks and surprises throughout. [11 Apr 1992, p. C3]

Funny and disturbing in the best way, the comedy-drama Austin Found captures something beyond its story of a woman’s obsession with making her little daughter a beauty pageant winner.

Written and directed by Riley Stearns, The Art of Self-Defense brings out a particularly skillful performance from Eisenberg, whose job is to harmonize the film’s odd shifts in tone and make something real and heartfelt of the central character’s journey.

The style is documentary-like, in that it feels like life and that anything might happen. There is also a nice sense of being in the midst of the action and right there in the room with the characters.

The tone of The Killing of a Sacred Deer is the best thing about it and the hardest to describe. You might call it skewed, except that what often is called skewed is extreme and outlandish, while this movie is quiet and precise.

Taken 2 is like a textbook on how to make beautiful, successful and highly satisfying junk-food cinema. When it's just a plot point, the information gets tossed out as fast and as forcefully as possible. Time is lavished only on the things that matter.

Against all odds, Morbius is an intelligent, human story.

An enjoyable farce, with lots of laughs and a strong cast. At 80 minutes long, it's that rare case of a short film that should have been longer.

Dunston Checks In is a fast- moving, well-done farce that both kids and adults will enjoy.

A lively experience.

The ultimate Julia Roberts movie.

A culture-clash comedy that, in addition to being very funny, captures some of the discomfort and embarrassment of being a bumbling American in Europe.

The action sequences are novel, the performances are slightly askew, and the camera work is vigorous and mostly effective.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes has an overwrought title, but it’s the best movie of the film franchise.

It's a movie for audiences who think exuberance in movies is more important than sense or logic and who can laugh at a movie and like it at the same time.

But to be fair, Stone doesn't seem even to think he's offering the last word here. Rather, he's trying to offer the first word, or at least a first opportunity to hear the other side, unfiltered by television media.

The picture is crammed with shameless satire, engaging moments of pure silliness and jokes that border on the outrageous. It combines relentless energy with an aura of good nature for a formula that works.

A dynamic story, sprinkled with some interesting ideas about the preciousness of culture and how societies might rebuild themselves.

Audiences will walk out with that good chiropractor feeling, the one that says, “Yes, I have been manipulated. I have been nothing but manipulated and pounded on for the past 90 minutes. And it was a very satisfying thing.”

Though directed by someone who has been making movies for four years, “Drive-Away Dolls” feels like a young person’s movie, which is a good thing. It also seems like a movie directed by someone who grew up watching Tarantino movies, not Coen Brothers movies, which is unexpected but welcome, too.

BPM has vitality and directness, a sense of witnessing life in the moment.

The Optimist could be described as a Holocaust drama, but it approaches that history in an unexpected way.

Jonah Hill has directed and co-written an impressive little movie with “Outcome.” It could be called a Hollywood satire, but what’s striking about it — and audacious and unexpected — is that it’s dramatic and heartfelt. Here and there, it even comes close to being sentimental.

An example of good, clean, incredibly brutal fun. [09 Oct 1990, p.E1]

Flawless is a fictional tale, but something in director Michael Radford's conscientious, methodical presentation gives it the feeling of true history.

An arresting portrait of a fascinating and somewhat mysterious personality.

There have been many movies about cops working undercover, but The Infiltrator is different. It shows the difficulty of it, the almost-second-by-second stress involved in having to be yourself without being yourself, and having to seem relaxed without ever relaxing. It’s possible to get nervous just thinking about this movie.

This Place Rules isn’t the last or best word on the events of that day in 2021, but it’s a fresh angle and one that was hard-won. Callaghan didn’t just turn over a rock to get this story, he burrowed under the rock and lived there for months.

It doesn't analyze or explain it; it just presents it. The result is funny and disturbing at the same time.

The appeal of Mr. Brooks is as obvious as it is hard to resist: Kevin Costner as a serial killer.

For the most part, The Five-Year Engagement has charm and emotion.

At its best, the effect is like seeing life panoramically, past and future, simultaneous and magnificent.

I found myself enjoying Lionheart, mostly because Van Damme is appealing and easy to root for. I like the steady, oddly unjudgmental look that crosses his face when he's about to beat someone to a pulp. [12 Jan 1991, p.C3]

It's really, really funny.

It's striking how much emotion Satrapi is able to convey through blocky drawings.

Sometimes unapologetically stupid and joyously crass, it’s often brilliant in its absurdity, one of those rare comedies where the audience sits there dumbstruck, wondering what crazy thing will happen next. It takes really smart people to make a movie this silly.

Witty, adult treatment of an offbeat subject: a pubescent boy's infatuation with an older woman.

If Wrath of Man has a weakness, it’s that even when everything is explained, it doesn’t quite make sense. But a movie like this is about pleasure in the moment, and on that score, it delivers.

Strange, compelling and hard to classify, it's both a romance and a character study, and it's set against a historical backdrop.

At one point, this movie had me so on edge that I had a fleeting impulse to run out of the theater. It might be weird to say that and mean it as a compliment, but good thrillers work that way sometimes.

In many ways a meandering film, a collection of good scenes.

Denis' viewpoint and sympathies are sophisticated, complex and humane.

I liked every minute in it. Other films are like empty containers; this one's full. It's full of invention, full of moments, full of business, full of the nuances of human interaction, full of feeling.

Entertaining and suspenseful, the movie shows the politicking and strategies that go into this annual ritual, and Costner is at his beleaguered best.

The plot alone is a thing of beauty.

L'amour Fou engages and moves viewers in two distinct ways. It engages us by showing us something we don't know about that's interesting. It moves us by showing us something we immediately understand, that has nothing to do with being a big shot and everything to do with being just another person at the mercy of time.

Even if you’d never in a million years want to ride with these guys, “The Bikeriders” makes you understand why they wanted to ride with each other.

The film offers something unusual, a tragic spectacle of normal, recognizable and utterly sympathetic people condemning themselves.

It’s an engaging product, typical of its era and elevated by Crosby’s non-singing breeziness and Astaire’s all-around brilliance, plus the appeal of Marjorie Reynolds, who has to pretend that she’s enthralled every time Crosby warbles something in her direction. Now that’s acting.

It is all thoroughly entertaining and even, at times, gripping.

It’s a strength, not a weakness, of Jacquot’s that he makes movies about people. The ideas can take care of themselves.

For those who have seen the previous 'hood films, Don't Be a Menace isn't just funny. It's a relief. Things might be bad, the movie suggests, but they're not so bad you can't laugh.

The story told in Victoria and Abdul is so far-fetched that it really helps to know that it is, in its broad outlines, true.

Cohn was a strange mix of self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

Has a goofy enthusiasm for itself that's contagious.

BlackBerry was ultimately left behind — in the cemetery plot next to Myspace. Still, if you ever had a BlackBerry, there’s something not only entertaining but nostalgic in watching this movie.

Though the storytelling is a bit lopsided, the slapdash quality is charming overall, and the movie benefits from colorful characters and a couple of hilarious scenes.

Everything in Water Lilies is more guarded, more complex and far more interesting than it seems.

The film presents a compelling portrait of mental illness, but looking at Bale may make audiences feel as though they're watching a documentary.

An impressive effort and an impressive result that opens up a world that most of us have never thought about and renders it with sorrow and vividness.

The picture... is simple, sweet and elegantly written, and it benefits from the presence of Marlon Brando.

It’s hard to imagine anyone in this role but Redford. Without him, there would be little here worth seeing.

When one performance in a movie is exceptional, you can credit the actor. But when everyone is great, it has to have at least something to do with the director. That’s the case with “Bob Trevino Like It,” which has three standout performances.

The movie also benefits from the presence of Anne Heche as Ellis’ wife. Heche doesn’t say much, but she conveys a lot.

In The Hero, as elsewhere, Haley really is dealing with the subject of heroism, but the kind of heroism not usually found in movies, the heroism of daily life.

An intelligent film with a sophisticated understanding of art and the significance it played in Hitler's psychology.

All the movie’s finer points — of audience response, of interaction, of the dances between people — are conveyed with a specificity so expert that it seems offhand.

2 Days in the Valley is skillfully made. The beginning introduces a handful of disparate characters. It juggles their stories and then deftly starts bringing them together through some surprising and unexpected turns.

The Circle is very much a plea for the preservation and sanctification of privacy, but it’s nicely constructed in that no one character expresses the film’s distinct point of view.

McQuarrie devises a film that’s a succession of riveting sequences, filmed in a way that’s active and yet elegant. The camera keeps moving within shots, but not in a subjective, jittery way, but rather like a third person narrator calmly emphasizing the essential points.

The beauty of Soul is that, just as animation is finding more being demanded of it, Pixar is answering that demand. It is making the case for animation as an ideal vehicle for exploring the grand, the general, the universal.

Glorious moments aplenty despite director who's just in the way.

It's not a film for children, and it's not even something children would like. It's challenging and disturbing and uncanny in the ways it captures the nature of dreams -- their odd logic, mutability and capacity to hint at deepest terrors.

The plane crash in Flight must go down as one of the strongest single scenes of 2012: It's extended, detailed, technically and emotionally realistic, and beyond that, it reveals character.

A delicate film - not flimsy, but fragile - that holds together on the strength of Efron's physical presence and performance.

To watch Nowhere Boy is to appreciate anew both the anger that drove Lennon and the strength of character it took for him to overcome it.

I won't tell you Taken is great, but it's great fun.

I hope casting agents and other industry types see Fourteen, because I want them to see Norma Kuhling (of the NBC series “Chicago Med”), who plays Jo. She takes this strong role, by writer-director Dan Sallitt, and hits it exactly right.

It's amazing how far a movie can go on nothing but speed and directness.

Though “It Ends With Us” ultimately lands in the zone of social commentary, the experience is mainly one of witnessing life as experienced by one woman over the course of years. And it’s worth the journey because of Lively and her simultaneous and contradictory mix of pleasantness and cold discernment.

Casadesus infuses Margueritte with a lilting quality, underscored by the sadness of someone who knows she is the last person standing and inhabits an alien world.

Joel Edgerton, who wrote and directed, co-stars in Boy Erased. Edgerton casts himself as Sykes, who runs the conversion program, and he couldn’t have found a better actor for the role.

The Miracle Club won’t rock your world, but it’s a nice movie. There’s always a place for nice movies.

Dinner for Schmucks is lumbering, inconsistent and about 20 minutes too long, but it's funny. It's funny from the beginning, and it stays funny, even as it beats scenes to death and overstays its welcome.

Unlike many documentaries about movies, it's neither underfunded nor perfunctory, but thoughtful and bracing.

Until this film, these Shin Bet directors had never consented to an interview. Now that they've spoken - and have said the unexpected - we can only wonder if their words will have an influence.

Though it is funny - at times, laugh-out-loud funny - this comedy is by and for adults.

Masterminds delivers for the most part. Kate McKinnon, as David’s wife, does her usual frozen-face, crazy-eyed weird thing, but this time she’s funny.

McCormack at first seems too light of spirit for the role, but she grows into it, and it turns out she's exactly what the movie calls for: Someone too wholesome-looking to be anything but a fine young lady.

If Public Enemies lacks anything, it's something audiences can't legitimately expect to find: a certain EXTRA something.

Ricky Gervais, instead of resting on formula and on a familiar persona, uses his first opportunity as a big-screen actor-director to make an original comedy that expresses some real thinking and feeling.

By turns frightening, exciting and ridiculous, San Andreas is, in the end, more impressive than anything else.

It’s less about music and more about how hard it is — and how bad it feels — to be absolutely and completely on the outside. And though the movie is uncompromising on that score — and shows its heroine going through a series of humiliations that are almost as painful to watch as they would be to experience — it’s not self-pitying. It’s dead-eyed accurate, and that’s its ultimate redemption.

The strength of the Coens is that they are so witty, skilled and smart, so in command of their medium, so fluid and agile, so capable of surprising and delighting from every angle, that they can make the grimmest story bearable, even palatable.

The surprise is that Kindergarten Cop is delightful and entertaining, a cop movie with suspense, no blood and a lot of genuine warmth. The script is intelligent and plays to the unique strengths of Schwarzenegger as a star. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

A notable, worthwhile picture.

The story is the story, and you’ll either connect with it or you won’t. But no matter how you react, Titane has the integrity of sincerity and the authority of a filmmaker’s real skill and vision.

Mafia Mamma is a one-joke movie, but it finds ways to keep that one joke funny for 100 minutes.

Obviously, no one should wish all films were shot like this. But the approach suits this story and these characters, and that’s all it had to do.

Fire in the Sky doesn't look like it had an expensive budget, but it uses what special effects it has to good effect, and the scenes of Travis on the space ship are genuinely scary. You stop asking, ''But did this really happen?'' -- not a bad question, actually -- and start imagining what it might have been like. [13 Mar 1993, p.C3]

A maddening film, maddening in a good way, but maddening nonetheless.

Chadwick Boseman commands every moment of this film, radiating probity and purpose, and it’s only later on that you realize that, with another actor, this wouldn’t have been a sure thing. The Black Panther is a superhero with lots of uncertainty.

Clearly, Peirce's motives are pure. She's not using the "stop-loss" issue as a wedge to make the government or the administration look bad. She's using it to dramatize an injustice and to advocate on behalf of the soldiers.

Germain and Brown open up the stage play with flashbacks, which are not nearly as effective as the two guys talking. But as long as they’re talking, and they talk enough, “Freud’s Last Session” is very much worth seeing.

Much of the film is so wrenching there's no time for idle thoughts.

This is Merchant-Ivory's kind of showmanship, the unflashy adult variety of movie magic that they made their hallmark.

Bana is rock-solid throughout, able to convey sensitivity and moral probity through a not quite impassive facade — never overdoing it, never underdoing it — and yet fulfilling his duties as the movie’s locus of feeling and meaning.

Ultimately, Stone is a haunting film about what it feels like to be really and truly lost.

As for the story, it's in some ways inevitable, but it has enough barbs and curves to keep it new. The smartest touch is that the young lawyer is, as a moral entity, a work in progress.

When the film is funny, it's terrific. When it shows what it really wants the audience to take seriously, it threatens to come apart. But mainly, it's a comedy, and mainly it's a lot of fun. [21 Aug 1992, p.C1]

At 80 minutes, this might have been a delight. At more than two hours, it's so much of a good thing that it starts to become a bad thing.

Cinema is not about special effects, but about human emotion and a face in close-up. For those in doubt, Locke is the proof.

Eschews cliches and cuts to the truth.

Wry and sometime bitter movie about love.

If you watch “Pamela, A Love Story,” you will probably discover a few things: that you like Pamela Anderson more than you realized, that she’s probably nicer than you think, that she’s an open book, that her sons are eminently normal and proud of her, and that she has some of the worst taste in men of any woman in public life. (She makes even Liza Minnelli seem lucky in love.)

The desire to go back in time to change things -- or just to visit -- is so central to the experience of being alive and stuck in time that Timecop has a built-in power. It's a power the film, a satisfying science-fiction thriller, takes full advantage of.

What results isn’t a straight autobiography, obviously, but rather the autobiography of a career and, most importantly, the autobiography of a spirit.

Kazan's writing in Dream Lover is spare and evocative, but here in his first film he also makes a case for himself as a talented director. It's hard ever to feel safe during Dream Love'; even during stretches when nothing bad happens you just know something will. Individual moments may be clear, yet everything in the film has an uneasy ambiguity hanging over it. Characters seem to connect, but they don't quite. [5 May 1994, p.E4]

Directed by the Polish filmmaker Malgorzata Szumowska, The Other Lamb is slow-moving but never dull, because the world of it is so distinct and odd.

Here is a culture in which female strength, having no outlet, must become distorted or lethal. In Therese and her aunt, we find two manifestations of the same disease.

A privileged glimpse into people's private pain, a drama shot with the simplicity and immediacy of a documentary.

So The Fabelmans is entertaining enough, but perhaps what’s best about it is that Spielberg got it out of his system. After this, he won’t ever need to make a film about himself or his parents again.

Based on the novel by Robinne Lee and adapted by Jennifer Westfeldt and director Michael Showalter (“The Big Sick”), the film is smart, realistic and emotionally honest.

Anyone who prefers Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock to Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Lopez is bound to regard Two Weeks Notice and not "Maid in Manhattan" as the better candidate for romantic comedy of the season.

More than most espionage movies, the film is about relationships, the men with each other, the men with their own disapproving wives, and governments with each other. Everyone courts someone.

Deserves to ride the wave of the latest, hottest micro-trend in pictures: the romantic comedy for guys.

There’s a French saying, “In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” and usually, the more interesting story belongs to the one doing the kissing. In A Secret Love, that’s Pat.

Huppert shows everything to us, and it's fascinating.

Truth or Dare is like a detective story. You try to infer the truth by looking between the frames. The picture we get of Madonna is a contrived one, but it's revealing anyway, because it's the one she wants to present. [17 May 1991, p.E1]

The murder plot is a cheap turn that says nothing about the nature of Suzanne's ambition. Without Suzanne's media-obsession as its focus, To Die For becomes just another fairly good black comedy.

A suspense thriller of rare intelligence.

A glib satire with a slick surface, lots of snappy patter and nothing to sell but its own cleverness.

This is interesting, at least reasonably. But to a large extent, how you perceive the film will have much to do with how you see the story as relating to today’s headlines.

It is old-fashioned in a good way, classical and well-acted, and that it has no surprises keeps it from being disappointing, even as it keeps it from being great.

For those willing to enter this world and pay attention, A Late Quartet provides distinct and uncommon satisfactions.

Last time, Peele made a movie about the country. This time he made a movie about himself, and it’s even better.

Everyone comes out of Little Woods looking good, and DaCosta comes out with a directing career.

In the end, probably the best way to watch Emperor is to pretend that the Supreme Command of Allied Forces in Japan after World War II was Tommy Lee Jones. If you do that, the movie works surprisingly well.

One of the nicest things about Hearts Beat Loud, and there are several nice things, is the way that Offerman and Clemons seem like father and daughter. This is the work of the actors, but also of the director.

It's a straight-ahead adventure with the usual number of thrills, but with the added virtue of being smarter and more sober than one might expect.

Looking back over All the Old Knives, it might be more accurate to call it a spy romance, except that makes it sound titillating. Better to say it’s a movie about the consequences of trying to stay human while working in the spy business.

A pleasant surprise. What looked to be yet another science fiction movie turns out to be one of the year’s few romantic dramas, one which just happens to be set aboard a space ship.

That's why the more you like the Judy Garland film, the more you might appreciate Oz the Great and Powerful. Appreciate. Enjoy. Admire. Be glad to see. Have fun with ... But as for love - well, love will be harder to come by.

Yet something's missing in director Mira Nair's treatment -- specifically, a point of view about the material, a compelling reason for this historical excavation beyond the fact that Reese Witherspoon makes a convincing Becky Sharp.

The party scenes are entertaining fantasy, but the insider-business end of the picture is occasionally interesting in its own right.

Does not end well. But there's a lot of pleasure in getting there.

Everything Melville shows us, he shows us for a reason, and these reasons are never obscure but are rather pertinent to the action and to the moral movement of the world and the characters.

Taken as a whole, these films constitute one of the greatest uses of cinema a documentary filmmaker has ever devised. Like the other films in the series, 49 Up is alternately touching and mundane, part soap opera, part reality show and part anthropological study.

One doesn’t expect that kind of intensity in a sedate British murder mystery, but Pfeiffer brings it. On her own, she helps Branagh make the case for his remake over the original.

It exemplifies the same appealing style, which strives to show life as it's lived and people as they really talk and act.

One of the most enjoyable pictures of the season.

So chalk Escape Plan up as a pretty good action movie given an extra edge by the intelligent use of its two main actors.

Blue Chips is in many ways like a modern Frank Capra movie, about a battle between corruption and idealism, money vs. love, the pack vs. the individual. It's an Americana story about white farm boys and black ghetto kids bringing their talents together in a pure endeavor and about the cynical forces that would pollute that. [18 Feb 1994, p.C3]

This is pure entertainment but smart entertainment, plotted and executed with invention and humor and acted by a winning cast radiating good-movie energy.

Dream Horse is full of heart and interest. Throughout, Collette makes us believe in the human-animal connection between Jan and Dream Alliance, which is touching, mysterious and deep.

There are some brief minutes when the tension drops and the story starts to sag, but Fukunaga almost always fills the frame with something worth seeing, and the story has a built-in suspense.

Suncoast is a personal and mostly quiet movie, but it has the force of a real expression, of something that somebody just needed to say.

Even if a certain glibness in the plotting deflates its impact somewhat at the finish, it remains an eerie, playful thriller and an all-around entertaining time at the movies.

A thoroughly satisfying, completely entertaining film that's also, rather surprisingly, an emotionally full experience.

By the end, “Coming 2 America” has us. It’s strange, these movies that create a warm feeling. It’s hard to say why or how. But when Murphy sits on the throne watching a bad lounge singer (also played by Murphy) perform “We Are Family,” it feels like the summation of the three decades of virtuosic silliness that Murphy has brought to the screen, and of all that has meant to us.

If one person survives and 6 million are killed, or one person gets out and 3,000 are crushed, it's not really a happy ending - or even an adequate representation of the larger event. This is precisely the challenge that The Impossible faces and never quite overcomes.

A legit action movie.

Although the picture's title and promotion might lead you to expect another "Wayne's World," Airheads is something more substantial. It's a spoof of heavy-metal culture that at the same time respects the vitality and pent-up passion behind it.

Gets better as it goes along.

So fascinating and has so many implications that it balances out some real flaws in the story.