Mick LaSalle

The documentary is interesting as a human story. And anyone who loves the Kuchar brothers' films or underground cinema in general will take extra pleasure in it.

Occasionally brilliant, profiting from Fellini's distinct and unmistakable way of looking and seeing. But it goes in circles and wears out its welcome, except for the most hard-core enthusiasts.

Assessing the merits of a political film is a tricky business. Obviously, its quality is partly a function of its power to persuade, but its persuasiveness is in the eye of the beholder.

Die Hard 2 is a huge movie done right. [3 July 1990, p.E1]

A brisk, entertaining documentary that shows how the world of investment works.

Magician is worth seeing as a kind of curated tour through the movies and through Welles’ interviews. However, if you have more time and want to get into Welles on your own, an afternoon watching YouTube videos followed by a few evenings of watching his best movies might be even better.

The temptation to be emphatic about Synecdoche, New York is overwhelming but should be resisted, because the movie really is a mixed bag. A particularly odd mix.

Clever and enjoyable.

It's a film of sensitivity, observation and humor - a must-see for Fellini enthusiasts and a worthwhile investment for everyone else.

As Zimbardo, Billy Crudup adopts an implacable facade, and for a while we don’t know what we’re seeing — a humanitarian on the brink of discovery, an ambitious monster who has found the winning ticket, or a young professor in way over his head.

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.

The alien attack, taking place in several cities at once, is breathtaking...All the same, Independence Day is consistently funny.

In America, it might be called a mess, and at times this movie sags. But overall, there’s something about it that holds interest. “A Private Life” is an odd ramble that eventually arrives somewhere.

The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott, gives us the texture of life in 14th century France, so much so that we feel that we are there, in this place that’s desperate and foreign and yet human and familiar.

Perhaps the most promising thing in 2 Days in Paris is that Delpy shows that she can direct herself.

Juliet, Naked is very like a Hornby novel in that it’s irresistible and appealing and full of tenderness and idiosyncrasy, and yet when you try to tell people what was so great about it, you can’t do it justice.

In trouble from its first minutes.

It's an intelligent movie about economics. As such, it would probably make more sense to have it reviewed by economists than film critics.

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

Precious and uninsightful but ends beautifully.

Jay Kelly is Baumbach’s best film and, from an artistic standpoint, his first complete success.

Beautiful in a girl-from-the-neighborhood sort of way, Carano inhabits Soderbergh's elaborate frame with wit, physicality and just a hint of ironic distance, the suggestion of someone who's not overawed by the opportunity or taking herself too seriously.

Any Agnieszka Holland movie is worth seeing, even if Spoor isn’t up to the director’s best (“In Darkness,” “Europa, Europa”).

Long before the end, audiences will stop worrying about the characters and start worrying about themselves — about when they’ll get to leave.

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

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

After 96 minutes with these people, you’ll care even less than you do now.

A graceless, embarrassing effort.

Open Range veers wildly. It's a movie of beauty and sensitivity, and tedium and absurdity.

In addition to Bana and Hall, Jim Broadbent is outstanding in a couple of scenes, as a government official, watching from the sidelines and offering warnings and advice. Broadbent is somehow menacing, pathetic and persuasive all at the same time.

The Gift stretches things a little too much for it to be a first-rate thriller. Still, among second-rate thrillers, it’s one of the best.

Davidson’s appeal is essential to the movie’s success. If you know him only from “Saturday Night Live,” you’ll be surprised by him here. On “SNL,” he can be zany and annoying. Here he has a very particular quality that seems to be coming from a place of past pain. He has equanimity. Without making a fuss about it, he’s attentive to other people’s feelings. He just seems like a decent, thoughtful young guy, someone that you’d like to see come into his own.

“Ant-Man: Quantumania” is a glum, tiresome exercise that follows the pattern of every run-of-the-mill superhero movie ever made.

There is no point in discounting smart, engrossing entertainment like The Ides of March, though it's hard not to notice when a film that could have been great falls short.

A frustrating film that feels cobbled together.

FernGully: The Last Rainforest has a creeping sweetness that sneaks up on the viewer. This musical animation gets off to a slow start, and it's just as slow in the middle. But by the end, it acquires an emotional impact, and later you really feel as though you've been somewhere new. [10 Apr 1992, p.C1]

This adaptation does not allow for the energy and primal healing quality of sexuality. The movie’s grief of tone finds no antidote in the exuberance of this physical connection. The rhapsodic language of Lawrence’s text gives way to the spectacle of grinding between two average-looking mortals.

Director Bernard Rose has created a committed, intelligent and fascinating piece of work with no irony about it.

What the movie lacks -- a big lack, not a fatal lack -- is a compelling character at its center. Everyone in Garden State is fun, skewed, strange and singular.

Wonder Woman achieves touching and powerful moments that are unusual for a movie of this kind.

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

Like the best love stories, funny or otherwise, this movie also recognizes that being in love is an education, and that, if people are lucky, they choose the right teacher.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

Wondering what’s real and what’s just a carefully crafted crock doesn’t make Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood a better experience. It makes it a little pointless and frustrating.

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.

It’s a sci-fi action movie that spoofs the form to strong comic effect, and yet it profits from every good thing about the genre it’s mocking. It tries to have it both ways, and it succeeds.

Other films about Marie Antoinette have had their moments, but Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen is the first to give a real sense of what it must have felt like to live inside that palace as the walls were caving in.

Deep Cover is a sleazy crime picture and a peculiar and twisted moral journey. It's also a terrific movie, and once you trace its lineage you begin to see why.[15 Apr 1992, p.E1]

Riveting from its first moments.

Something about Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot keeps it from adding up to a satisfying movie experience. It has the feeling, rather, of a story you might hear about a friend of friend.

The material is ripe for black comedy, but Stewart’s screenplay, staying true to Bahari’s real-life experience, steers a middle course. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and sometimes absurd, but never any of those things fully, or effectively.

In a film that easily could have been cold or ironical, Ferrell provides the emotional thrust.

As the corpses pile up and the cocoons hatch, the spiders become more brazen and finally start invading houses. The last 45 minutes of Arachnophobia is a blast, with attack-of-the-killer-spider scenes coming nonstop. This is not great art, but it's a good time, and the climax is terrific. [18 July 1990, p.E1]

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

As it stands, Wakanda Forever feels as lost and forlorn as the Wakandan people.

For pure laughs, for the experience of just sitting in a chair and breaking up every minute or so, Superbad is 2007's most successful comedy.

The first great Hitler movie.

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.

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.

It's brisk and assured and never begs the audience's indulgence. No time is wasted. The movie is, at every moment, either funny or pushing the story forward, or both.

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

Ronin eventually becomes tiresome, but the pairing of De Niro and Reno never gets old.

Giamatti and Pike are backed by a strong cast, including Minnie Driver, lots of fun as Barney's Jewish princess second wife.

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

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

It is, for what it’s worth, a good documentary, though I imagine its true worth and true nature can only be revealed in time. At the starting gate of 2018, we can have no idea how this film will be perceived in 10 years, and maybe we don’t want to know. Then again, maybe we do.

Whatever the intention, Somewhere, in its odd, detached way, is compelling viewing.

A fairly wonderful movie about fathers and sons and the mystery of time.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

A big fizzle.

Underneath the seeming blandness of its presentation -- the sparse dialogue, the affectless characters -- there's a ferocious and caustic view of humanity.

July also narrates the film, in voiceover, as the cat, and every time she does, it's a white-knuckle thing. You have to hold on until she stops.

It's just horsing around that comes to nothing. No, it's worse. It's horsing around designed to disguise nothing as something.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

This is lesser Woody Allen -- nothing horrible, but nothing to recommend except to his particular fans. [25 Jan 1991, p.C1]

Smart, sedate and well acted.

A movie about the power of the imagination really becomes a movie about a certain element of surrender - about the release of power - that is practically a requirement for loving somebody.

The good news is that the pace picks up — Giant Little Ones actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about – not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.

Object to the picture on ideological grounds, if you like, but that's no way to watch movies. Better to appreciate the rare spectacle of a filmmaker leading from his gut.

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez had their fun with From Dusk Till Dawn, and now they need to stay away from each other. For their own good. Forever.

Along the way, Looking for Eric emerges as a portrait of a world and a way of life. You will probably not want to live in Manchester after seeing this film, but you'll like and respect the people.

Stone does everything he can to do justice to the real-life people he's depicting, and yet nothing he does can cover up the film's single but overarching weakness: The personal story he uses to portray the larger event is limited in scope and impact.

For the vast majority of its 113-minute running time, Wonder stays genuine and true.

In making the movie, writer-director John Ridley had to negotiate with the Hendrix legend — that is, reality had to accommodate audience expectation. In that sense, Jimi: All Is by My Side does a reasonable job.

The Dutch thriller Borgman gets credit for being original, but not for being original in a compelling way.

If it happens to hit you right - that is, if you happen to catch its wavelength of tear-and-a-smile whimsicality - the movie will speak to you.

It's fascinating.

Has enough wit, energy and geniality to please everyone.

Has its moments, and Schwarzenegger is as buff and tough as ever. But there's a flat feeling about this effort that's unmistakable and inescapable.

Pelosi in the House is a one-of-a-kind document of one of the most important women in American history.

Few movies are as delightful as Julie & Julia.

The subtle ironies of Austen's novel are rendered obvious, and the book's social satire gives way here to more straightforward romantic comedy.

Supercharged and lifeless, frenetic and stone-cold dead, a barrage of action scenes that look fake, yet make you wonder if fake is the new real.

Compelling parable from Canada that's open to a number of interpretations.

The moments between the characters are absolutely full. It's a pleasure to watch such consummate professionals.

The smartest thing director Steven Soderbergh did in the making of The Girlfriend Experience was to cast Sasha Grey.

As in "The House of Yes'' and "Freaky Friday,'' Waters keeps it wild but real, and the result is not only a series of lively scenes but lively close-ups: The big-eyed, expressive performances are just fun to watch.

She is a great talent, a legend, someone who has made enduring classics, and just the fact that she’s still working at 86 is a gift. But somehow none of that makes The Life Ahead, coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 13, an experience worth having.

A particular strength of Alan Partridge is that the writers (Coogan among them) don't trade entirely on the audience's familiarity with the character, but rather come up with a flashy, eventful story in which Alan can be showcased in a variety of contexts.

May hit a few wrong notes, but it strikes an emotional chord.

An elegant-looking picture, carefully made and beautifully put together, but when the gloss wears off, you're left with an experience that doesn’t quite satisfy. [5 Oct 1990, Daily Datebook, E10]

Creed II can’t be new this time out, but it does prove that the characters and relationships introduced in the first movie have staying power. People can keep making these movies and no one will mind.

What makes Ben Is Back different is that, even if this kind of pain is completely outside your own experience, you’ll feel some of it watching this movie.

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.)

Obviously, Barrymore is not ideally cast outside modern times, but her presence is so good-natured that she makes an audience want to work with her.

Keaton is fun to watch — fun and a little bit eerie. He plays Ray as all drive and no soul.

Mulan is a spirit lifter, and though it doesn’t arrive as planned, it could not arrive at a better time.

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.

It's a special movie that can make you laugh out loud numerous times at gross comedy and then make you think and feel something, too. There’s also something to be said for a movie that seems like the most fun these actors ever had.

Compared with other movies, Seven Psychopaths is clever and inventive enough to be considered a weak success or a modest failure, the kind of effort that usually gets damned with the faint praise of "not bad."

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

One-half of an unremarkable war movie, followed by a touching story about the importance of animals in people’s lives. Fortunately, the stronger part is saved for last.

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.

The experience of seeing Causeway isn’t what you’d imagine while trying to decide whether to watch a 92-minute movie about a veteran’s slow recovery. It feels more like moving in with her — invisible — for weeks, and watching as she makes a sandwich or stares into space. That isn’t drama. That’s practically audience abuse.

If you want to fall in love with Catherine Deneuve, don’t start with her youth. Start with her here, in her 70s, and then work your way back.

As a cop movie it's entertaining enough, but as a social commentary it comes up short, becoming self-conscious and preachy. [27 Apr 1990, p.E1]

A sleek, intelligent thriller.

In the end, the most valuable aspect of “Cyrano” is that it shows that Peter Dinklage can do anything.

That Hossein Amini, in his first outing as a director, kept all three of these well-known actors in perfect balance suggests a filmmaker who knows how to steer a performance.

Feels forgettable, even though, in the moment, it's often very funny.

The movie becomes inventive in new ways and even cheery. It’s a true delight.

The young actors are adequate, but they’re not intrinsically interesting, so their interior movements hold no fascination. With that in mind, The Kid Who Would Be King should have been an hour long, but an extra 20 minutes, just to stretch it to feature length, would have been forgivable. But a full 120 minutes for this was just borderline crazy.

In the end, Crash lacks a cumulative impact. It takes audiences to new places, but we've all been to similar places, and we walk out knowing no more than we did walking in.

It’s not a movie that will make you tired, but lack of ambition can sometimes be a strength. This is a comedy-thriller made simply to please in the moment, and it does, for almost every minute of its 100-minute running time.

Don Jon deserves praise for wearing its message lightly and yet for daring to present such a lecture in today's Internet-drenched environment. Gordon-Levitt may be blithe in discussing pornography, but his movie nonetheless asserts that porn is addictive and destructive, that it intrudes on intimacy, and that it short-circuits the capacities for interaction and also, ultimately, for pleasure. That's a serious subject and a committed viewpoint, handled with wit and intelligence.

The first half of White Palace is done so well that it's tempting to overlook the fact that once the picture gets its two lovers together, it has nowhere to go -- and it goes nowhere for the last 50 minutes. [19 Oct 1990, p.E1]

Routine, genial sports movie.

Thus, we find ourselves watching an ice-cold movie about competition that contains not a shred of rooting interest.

A great movie was within reach with Judy — the new Judy Garland biopic starring Renee Zellweger — but the producers and creators made an epic mistake: They didn’t use Garland’s actual vocals. Instead, they let Zellweger pinch-hit for Babe Ruth and ended up spoiling the movie.

Truth is a journalism horror story, something like “All the President’s Men” but with the wrong ending and plenty of blame on all sides. It is one of the most frustrating speak-truth-to-power tales ever put onscreen, because it dares to show how that usually works out: Power wins. Big.

It’s a mix of comedy that isn’t especially funny — offering something more like general high spirits, rather than laughs — and drama that isn’t really dramatic, except to the people on screen.

Unlike "Pirates," Stardust is anything but a wretched mess. It's a charming and smartly plotted fantasy.

This is a decidedly blue-state take on a red-state phenomenon.

For a thoroughly fascinating, true glimpse into the horrors that vanity and self-delusion can wreak, take some time to see The Baader Meinhof Complex.

The chief virtues of Parkland are journalistic in the best sense.

Nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, The Batman is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

A movie for adults, of a kind that usually isn't made in America,

What’s fascinating about Kirby here is that even when she appears to be doing nothing, she’s worth watching.

Shows how a documentary can be as moving and suspenseful as the best narrative feature.

As the photographer, Baldwin tries to keep his chin up, but he's ultimately sunk by the built-in ludicrousness of the character he plays. But Hopkins -- through wit, luck and imagination -- emerges victorious from the barren wilderness of Mamet's script. He has only himself to thank.

This is Baumbach's best yet.

The submarine drama, which opens today, has everything you could want from an action thriller and a few other things you usually can't hope to expect: an excellent script, first-rate performances and a story that has more to do with individuals than explosions.

Even when it tries to be funny, there’s never any point of connection. The emotions in White Noise are neither real nor meant to be real. The audience is always watching from a distance — until, finally, it starts wondering why it’s watching at all.

It brings together several popular strains of contemporary moviemaking and combines them into one big, shameless, audacious, compulsively watchable, irresistibly likable piece of pure entertainment.

Transamerica provides the frame and the occasion for one of the year's best performances, Felicity Huffman's as a woman trapped in a man's body who's passing for female while awaiting a sex-change operation.

A hit- and-miss affair, consistently amusing but not as outrageous or funny as Cho may have intended or as imaginative as one might have hoped.

Dumb Money is a tale of 2020, and the movie captures that 2020 feeling — gray, depressed, anxious and almost comically miserable.

It's the supporting players who stand out.

In his quiet, sad stoicism, Boyega at times seems to be channeling Denzel Washington. He embodies the dignity of suffering.

The result is that after two hours one gets the sense of having seen a panorama of human experience, of having witnessed a moment of time in all its true fullness.

With Pavarotti, director Ron Howard serves up a straightforward documentary about the great tenor’s life and career. It’s just a birth-to-death saga, featuring interviews with colleagues and loved ones and a catalogue of greatest hits, so nothing fancy here. But if you can find a better way to spend two hours, take it — I’ll stick with this.

Results are all that matter, and the result here is that The Desolation of Smaug fails in almost every way, as a story, as an adventure, as a piece of art direction and as a visual spectacle.

A tennis match can be a personal battle, a clash not only of athleticism but of mind, and Guadagnino gives every game and set the gravity of gladiatorial contest.

This is the second-best Spider-Man movie yet made. In the previous trilogy, only "Spider-Man 2" surpasses it.

There's not a single moment here in which Nixon is admirable, decisive or appealing. Nixon doesn't work as a drama, but with a little push it might have been a great comedy.

As played by Boseman and Gad, Marshall and Friedman are a complementary pair, like something you’d see in a buddy movie — one fit and one fat, one black and one white, one tall and one short, one calm and one stressed, but both Americans working together in a just cause.

For all its surface seriousness, Splice is a regulation monster movie. So however somber it gets, it's never truly thought-provoking, and however outrageous it gets, it's still always 20 minutes behind the audience. It's just too dumb to be serious and too slow to be entertaining. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/03/MVKJ1DOO26.DTL#ixzz0pqYvhKuF

Thirteen Lives deserves to be seen. The only question is whether audiences will be up for it. I saw it on a huge screen and had to occasionally remind myself that if it got really overwhelming, I could always close my eyes. It’s that intense.

Eye-catching and entertaining but less inspired than the original.

Even a mediocre David Mamet movie is still a David Mamet movie. That means there are lines to savor, partly because the lines are so good, partly because they are so Mamet.

Here, as in the "Friday" movies, the jokes are big and rude and vulgar and very funny.

Mothering Sunday is most likely a one-of-a-kind hybrid, a brilliant one-off.

Funny and intelligently made, a film for kids and adults that's both sweet and sardonic...Elf stays perfectly in balance, a pleasure throughout.

As Russell Boyd's remarkable cinematography emphasizes the dwarfing grandeur of the surrounding topography, Weir shows how the corresponding smallness of individuals is compensated for by the grandeur of their aspiration.

It's probably the only love story you'll see this decade that will make you half-expect the camera to swerve and pick up the sight of Rod Serling, standing there in a black suit.

At times, Harriet is a little too romantic — never quite schmaltzy — but it feels like a movie perhaps a bit more than it should. Still, it’s effective and, at times, moving, and it has a major asset in Erivo.

This is bad, borderline garbage, but disturbing, too, in that it’s just the kind of fake-clever awfulness that might be cinema’s future.

Faced with a story that doesn't make much sense, the filmmakers switch gears and try for a sociological statement - something about the marginalized and the neglected. This makes for a funny last five minutes, but sad, too, because Walker was better than this, even if his movies sometimes weren't.

The experience of watching it is rather like swooping down and catching people living their lives.

In Mission: Impossible III, we find out whether it's still possible to look at Tom Cruise and not see a weirdo. The answer is yes, but a complicated yes, because it takes time.

McNally takes a thin story and pumps it up, bringing in waitresses and busboys, all of them lonely, all of them broke. In the hands of director Garry Marshall, the material becomes deadly. He turns on the schmaltz, brings up the violins and shows them in their tiny apartments, alone and miserable but kinda cute, living their small, dull lives. This is the working class as viewed by the clueless wealthy -- condescension trying to pass as compassion. [11 Oct 1991, p.D1]

A smirky cleverness infects much of the picture, yet some scenes are so skillfully created that it's hard not to admire them, and Dominique Pinon's sensitive performance as a retired circus man gives the movie a soul. [10 Apr 1992]

Though many of Parker's well- known wisecracks make their way into the screenplay, Mrs. Parker ultimately does not give us the Dorothy Parker of legend.

After shooting lots of people and cutting lots of throats, Deadpool tries blowing himself up, something he probably should have done first. And with that, the movie shifts. Deadpool 2 becomes less violent and a lot funnier. It becomes a much better movie than the original “Deadpool,” not an action bloodbath with laughs, but a knowing spoof of the superhero genre.

American Star is a nice surprise. To hear it described, its premise sounds almost ridiculously predictable: Ian McShane as an old hit man on his last assignment. But the movie turns out to be a serious work that goes to unexpected places.

In any case, Puzzle ends strangely, in a way that’s not clear what the filmmakers intended or how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional.

I Care a Lot is notable for its colorful supporting and featured roles — Chris Messina as a mob lawyer, Peter Dinklage as a Russian mobster and Eiza Gonzalez as Marla’s girlfriend. But the main attraction is Pike, who doesn’t try to make us like her. She commits to the character’s nature and holds us with her honesty, her intensity and her unmistakable pleasure in getting to play someone appalling.

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.

The story doesn’t deliver. The songs are forgettable. And the magic never descends. Supposedly, Mary Poppins returns, but that’s not Mary. Emily Blunt stole somebody’s umbrella.

One's enjoyment of The Fairy depends a lot on knowing why it's worth seeing. It's a comedy with two or three big laughs, but it's not side-splitting. Nor does it have a particularly compelling story. Its appeal is rather in watching people who have devised their own original style of comic performance and have taken it to a rare level of refinement.

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]

It's not much of a comedy - even Steve Carell, as the therapist, plays it straight here. But it's very effective as a cautionary tale.

Inventive and intermittently amusing.

Flat and uninspired.

This latest, from director Bille August, is merely respectful and respectable. It never sinks, but it never really soars either, though here and there it hits a powerful moment.

It’s a downer. It’s morally tangled. The characters are as depressed as the scenario, and Michael Giacchino’s music can’t make it better.

There was enough story here for an epic, but Napper chose to make a poem-like movie, one that sustains a tone of mystery and wonder from start to finish.

It’s not a bad film, just, strangely, not a good one.

Tremors gets its characters into a series of hopeless situations and then resolves these situations in unexpected ways. I tried to out-guess the movie and couldn't. The movie might be nothing more than light entertainment, but care and thinking clearly went into it. [19 Jan 1990, p.E1]

Last Night in Soho is full of color and darkness, and its melange of past and present evokes one of the world’s great cities. It never lets up.

Starts off as a comedy about an unlikely friendship between a white man and a black man who meet over a pick-up basketball game on a Los Angeles playground. Then it switches gears and for a time seems as though it's going to be a more serious look at these men and their world. Finally, it just falls apart completely, and the last hour is a chaotic, meandering mess. [27 Mar 1992, p.D1]

It's a drama with elements of black comedy and suspense, European in feeling but American in attitude. Just for fun, it's set in 1949, an era of glamour, of Hitchcock and of husbands even more clueless than they are today.

With Body Snatchers you get a middling, respectable horror movie, one without any frightening unconscious echoes and with too much of a pedigree to try to scare you with something cheap, like gore. [18 Feb 1994, p.C3]

A particularly strong element is the story of Carlotta’s father, played with arresting intensity by Laszlo Szabo.

A nice idea for a movie, but has a mostly silly script and some of the craziest and most laughable casting imaginable. But the movie's main challenge is a simple one: It is very difficult, next to impossible, to build a movie around an inert, inactive character.

Whatever it is, it’s the rare case of an intelligent disaster movie.

The result is that rare movie specimen, a completely intentional, expertly guided work of art that fails almost completely.

An inventive, black comedy.

An overwrought drama.

This is an acerbic examination of erotic obsession, told from different perspectives, with wit, suspense and cold-blooded detachment.

Whenever Roberts is onscreen, Closer freezes and starts to atrophy. And when she's off, tender shoots of life begin to sprout.

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

Along the way, My Best Friend offers insights into the emotional and psychological components of both friendliness and friendship. They're not synonymous, though both have value.

For a little while The Client seems as though it's going to be a battle of wits between the two lawyers played by Sarandon and Jones. The interplay between the two is the best thing about the movie. [20 July 1994, p.E1]

Even while we’re watching it, a funny feeling sets in. Lots of things happen in American Made, but it’s as if the frenetic pace is to keep us from thinking about what we’re watching.

Not Fade Away is a movie by a filmmaker who treasures his memories, cares about social history and relishes getting it right.

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.

Here and there, particularly in flashback, Bening gets a scene or a moment to invest in and shine, but for truly a surprising length of time, Bening plays a woman who is asleep, literally.

Its impression lingers in the mind, giving the film a longer half-life than it would otherwise deserve.

The picture, for all its slickness and style, is empty, empty-headed and emotionally false… [It] has no more depth than "Pretty Woman" and occupies the same moral landscape. [5 Apr 1991, Daily Datebook, p.E11]

Jindabyne suffers from too many extraneous elements and from a story that doesn't land with enough force or purpose.

Linklater never finds a way to sustain a drama from these characters and their situation.

Bogdanovich films Noises Off in long, unbroken takes. Though for the most part he doesn't give us the whole stage but moves in to follow the action more closely, the camera moves as one's eyes might, while following the play. Bogdanovich does what he has to -- he gets out of the way of Frayn's original farce. And the result of his thankless toil is a movie that doesn't quite feel like a movie, and that's not quite as good as the play, but that's pretty good anyway. [20 March 1992, p.D5]

Though the film seems less like a theatrical release and more like something that might play on an obscure PBS station at 2 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, it's reasonably interesting as a personality study.

A near-miss, but a miss all the same.

Vengeance is unexpected and, in the best way, weird. In his first film as a writer-director, B.J. Novak takes familiar elements, but puts them together in ways that are original and unexpected. Even when the plot turns go off the deep end, it’s impossible not to appreciate Novak’s audacity.

Fortunately, the last 30 to 40 minutes of “The Housemaid” are so propulsive and unexpected that it makes up for what the middle lacks.

The film is mired in gloom, not just sadness, but heaviness.

The film is kindly and well-intended, but it’s also sentimental and lifeless. Swan Song is a rare movie without a single good scene.

What this film desperately needed was another element in the script, something besides love and sex. Maybe something about art, something that put the lovers on the same team and back into those appealing bohemian clubs. As it stands, love jones is a smart setting in search of a story.

By the end A.I. exhibits all its creators' bad traits and none of the good. So we end up with the structureless, meandering, slow-motion endlessness of Kubrick combined with the fuzzy, cuddly mindlessness of Spielberg.

The film ends up landing in a confused middle category. It's neither a coherent, discrete work nor a zany tribute to the late actor.

If anything is better about the sequel than the original, it's Leslie Nielsen, as deadpan as ever, but looking more relaxed than before, mugging and playing up his jokes with the subtlety and timing of an accomplished comedian -- which, at this point, I suppose he is. [28 June 1991, p.F1]

The strength and beauty of The Runaways are that it tells the truth.

Patrik Age 1.5 has a single drawback that can't be overlooked, at least from the standpoint of an American viewer. It's predictable.

Michelle Williams doesn't just survive. Called upon to glow, she glows. Her performance doesn't solve all the riddles of that personality; none could, and it's for the best that Williams doesn't try.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

The movie moves. It has action sequences that are so enormous that they won't just wow audiences, but rock them back in their seats and make them laugh at the audacity of it all.

The action scenes are imaginative and elaborate without seeming fake. Nothing is belabored, and the stakes never stop escalating.

The result is a reminder that, with weak material, it’s often worse to have a really good actor. The weaknesses just stands out in sharper relief.

To mildly respect Japanese Story is easy. To enjoy it would require an act of will.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

Anyone who has ever felt morally right and completely in the minority will have a point of entry into this movie.

The script is full of off-the-wall lines that take you by surprise but are perfect. [21 Aug 1987]

It's a beautiful machine, thought out and revved up to the last detail, with no other purpose but to delight - and it delights. [24 May 1989, Daily Notebook, p.E1]

The film is too intelligent and well-crafted to dismiss and too good to hate. Some people will love it, and at worst, most people will like it a little.

There's great pleasure in watching a movie in which the director has thought out everything beforehand.

Beauty and the Beast creates an air of enchantment from its first moments, one that lingers and builds and takes on qualities of warmth and generosity as it goes along.

Its cinematic stylishness and its attention to modern-day anxiety raise it to something out of the ordinary.

It's a good movie not because it says the right things but because it says those things well. [18 Sept 1992, p.C3]

In slightly less than 1,000 years, the competition for worst film of the third millennium will be fierce. Yet the smart money may well be on the Korean art film Lies.

As the documentary shows, while it lasted, it was really something.

Tom O’Connor’s script hits all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction brings out unspoken subtleties of the characters and their interactions.

Strives for an airy, merry amorality, but it never quite achieves liftoff, though at times it comes close.

Frankly, we are left with nothing, except with a movie that insists that we love it — or worse, assumes we will — because its subject is so worthy. Even on that score, that of convincing us of the worthiness of its subject, Maudie falls down.

As suspense thrillers go, “Dangerous Animals” is as uncompromising as it gets. It doesn’t aspire to much, but it’s well-acted and well-written, looks great and full of surprises.

An audacious film, set in contemporary Marseille.

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

In a blind taste test, I couldn't possibly have identified this as a Linklater movie, and he's a filmmaker I generally like. If anything, Bad News Bears shows that Linklater can get in and out of a movie like a cat burglar, without leaving his fingerprints anywhere. OK, he's proven it. He need never do that again.

This is the best disappointing movie you will see all year.

This film, directed by William Friedkin and based on Mart Crowley's breakthrough play, is often dismissed (sometimes by people who haven't seen it) as sappy and dated. But on second look, it's one of the important films of the 1970s.

Alan Rudolph's direction is active but unintrusive, highlighting some of the more chilling moments with slow-motion sequences and odd cross-cutting. [19 Apr 1991, p.E1]

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

The last 15 minutes of “Twisters” are so much fun that they might easily convince viewers that they’ve seen a good movie. So this leaves you with a choice: Is it worth suffering through a boring hour and a so-so half hour, just to see an entertaining opening and a genuinely exciting finish? I know what I’d say (nope), but this is one you’ll have to decide for yourself.

Dan in Real Life fires on so many circuits that at times it's actually shocking how good it is.

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

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.

A satisfying combination of great songs and strong dramatic performances.

It's a movie about an idiot in the grip of something common place. He starts off as a garden-variety idiot and progresses to a big idiot.

If this isn't the single best performance ever by a preadolescent male (Osment) in a motion picture, then it's tied for whatever is first.

The drama builds and builds until the last seconds and never really lets up. It’s a striking debut from Meneghetti, in his first feature film.

We still have Kendrick’s performance. We still have the compelling situation. We still have the unusual subject matter. But it’s enmeshed with unreal nonsense.

Drop is the kind of film that separates the real movie lover from the conditional movie lover. It is manipulative, fundamentally ridiculous, obvious, far-fetched, gut-level in its appeal and irresistible. As such, it embodies the true soul of movies.

Together, the two actors build a rapport that goes beyond the dialogue and justifies where the story ultimately goes. Anyway, that’s the paradox in “The Good Nurse,” which potential viewers must sort out for themselves: The performances are worth seeing, but the movie isn’t.

The movie is alive from beginning to end, and it's a pleasure to see at least one big-name director get out of the prison of his own reputation.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

Coco Chanel is not the most lovable of heroines, but it's a strength of the film that director Anne Fontaine allows Tautou to make Coco as cold and ungiving as she does.

On its own terms, the movie succeeds. Like a fable, its meanings are unspecific but haunting.

Goes nowhere.

A film with no theatrical core and no integrity in the writing, acting or storytelling.

Darkman is big, stupid and wonderful -- an absurd, grand-scale adventure and a vicious comedy rolled into one nasty, unpleasant, hard-to-resist mess. [24 Aug. 1990, p.E1]

A grounded and unusually matter-of-fact adaptation.

This makes Hostiles something of a slog, but a movie-literate slog containing some impressive scenes.

Sharper works like a machine, and so it seems unfair to complain that, by the end, it feels too mechanical. It’s fun. It should have been more fun, but take the fun where you can get it.

This laugh-out-loud comedy is set in the world of daytime television and is reminiscent of the sex farces that were popular in the early and mid-'60s -- except that Soapdish, unhampered by a desire to be perceived as sophisticated, is actually more sophisticated and much funnier than the movies that were around then. [31 May 1991, p.E1]

Still, those who meet the movie on its own terms and don't expect a masterpiece may appreciate the commitment of Wright and the actors. Blanchett goes out of her way, for example, to be repellent here.

If this is the best we can do in terms of movies - if something like this can speak to the soul of audiences - maybe we should just turn over the cameras and the equipment to the alien dinosaurs and see what they come up with.

Suffers from some of the deficiencies common to first features. It is sincere and earnest but the product of an assumption that the milieu itself is compelling enough to command an audience's attention.

It's a compelling minimalist drama about spiritual evolution, with strong performances and exotic locations.

Does a beautiful job of capturing that mood -- the exuberance and wistfulness of one man's last year of youthful irresponsibility before joining the rat race.

One of the best war movies of the past 20 years.

If this movie were a human being, it would be intelligent and sincere but so depressed as to be unable to get out of bed without a forklift.

In the end, it's really just a thriller, slower than most, with pockets of dead time but with a few extra flourishes, too, thanks to Norton.

An ugly, misguided exercise.

To my eyes, the whole thing looks sad, like something people might cling to in the absence of religion - or a kind of religion in itself, minus dogma or salvation, but with lots of people standing around dressed like total goofballs.

With The Way, writer-director Emilio Estevez has made a respectable failure. What's respectable - and undeniable - is that this is a sincere effort to make a film of sensitivity and spiritual richness.

Best of all is the work of Gillian Jones, who shows up in one scene as "Grandma."

Coppola has no trouble convincing viewers that Marie Antoinette is an interesting historical subject, but there's a big distance between that and creating a fascinating personality or fashioning a compelling narrative.

By avoiding the usual cliches of the freedom saga, Suffragette finds its way to its own, specific integrity. It’s a movie that’s easier to respect than love, but it is something to respect.

Despite the fact that both protagonists are equally appalling, the screenplay seems to have a soft spot for the woman. However, this doesn't take away from the fun of watching the two characters tear each other to pieces.