Mick LaSalle

The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

At its best, and it’s mostly at its best, Frozen II has an air of enchantment.

Still, the goodwill lingers, even though Mother and Child falls down, dies and is beginning to look a little green and stiff about 15 minutes before the finish line.

Riveting from its first moments.

One of the rare films that directly responds to and expresses modern anxieties, this debut feature from director Henry Alex Rubin interweaves the stories of three sets of people, whose lives are upended through various bad things that happen over the Internet -- including bullying and identity theft. A fascinating and riveting thriller.

The saving grace of this French film is that it's anything but a sentimental story.

Either a go-for-broke action movie or a sick, sick movie for a sick, sick public.

In a way the faults of New Nightmare are the faults of the horror genre as it now exists. Once you get the set-up, the rest of the film is just incidents leading up to the big confrontation. The problem is not in knowing what will happen, but in waiting for it to happen. [14 Oct 1994, p.C3]

Adoration, despite a family resemblance to some of his finest work ("The Sweet Hereafter," "Ararat"), is Egoyan at his worst. The movie is slow and airless, with a script so weak one wonders why Egoyan bothered to film it.

In the end this is Hoffman's movie, and it's refreshing, finally, to see him not as an oddball or eccentric but as a decent, capable guy who is ultimately a lot more intense than most people.

A shrewd satire about stardom and the cult of celebrity.

Cop Land isn't a perfect piece, but it's sober, wise and adult.

This is the movie for anyone who has ever sat around with friends and thought, "Someone should make a movie about this," a film that captures the tenderness and quick humor of hanging out. It's not an easy task. We may find our own friends delightful, but watching other people's friends is a dreary prospect.

Let’s get the bad news over with quickly: Captain Marvel is no “Wonder Woman.”

People who go into Hot Shots! Part Deux knowing what to expect will not be disappointed, and people who stumble in unawares won't be too sorry. At its best, ''Part Deux'' is very funny, and at its worst, it's a complete waste of time -- with the balance about even between the strong and the weak sections. [21 May 1993, p.C1]

It’s as if the film itself is suffering from a pandemic hangover and can’t believe there’s a reason to feel better, even when describing one of the greatest scientific and manufacturing achievements in human history.

Floats on the charm and the labors of its lead actress, Gretchen Mol, who single-handedly makes the picture worth seeing.

On the surface, it's a mystery in which someone is going around stealing personal items, and the women are suspected -- and suspect each other. In a larger sense it's about how corporate culture is not only antithetical to individuality and human kindness but also hostile toward these things.

Numbing and inert.

The thinking part of this thriller needs work. It's not nearly as intelligent, thoughtful or penetrating as it promises to be.

Has some funny moments, and if you're a Beavis and Butt-head fan, you'll enjoy the movie.

What's interesting about revisiting the film today is that the elements that engaged people most at the time - the thriller plot and the glimpse into Soviet life - maintain hardly any fascination. But the love story - what might have been regarded at the time as the obligatory "romantic interest" - stands out as something of lasting appeal. [26 Mar 2017, p.Q41]

Quartet is buoyed by the Scottish charm of Billy Connolly, as a lovable flirt and extrovert - he is a delight and also a locus of truth in every scene he's in.

Try as it might, the movie is hardly profound, and the murky atmosphere and the leaden pace drag things down.

Fast Color is not a success, in that it’s not enjoyable as entertainment. It doesn’t hold an audience.

Won the Golden Spire Award at the San Francisco International Film Festival a few years back, and now, finally, the documentary is being released into theaters. It's a film with distinct virtues: It tells a fascinating story.

The movie is harsh, nasty and vulgar like you wouldn't believe. And often, it's hilarious.

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.

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.

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.

A superb drama about sexual harassment at Fox News.

Belle isn't a perfect movie; in some ways it's obvious. But even if it's not true to history, it's true to that painting and worthy of its inspiration.

Suspiria is not just a movie unworthy of your time. It’s an experience one should reflexively recoil from, up there with things like fire, pain, humiliation and embarrassment. Easily, it’s one of the worst movies of 2018.

This is the old stuff, the good stuff, the tried-and-true stuff of shrewdly accomplished audience manipulation.

Midway, Mondays in the Sun becomes as dull as a day with nothing to do.

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.

Only when it makes the claim for Page as a pivotal figure in American culture does it overstate the case and become tiresome.

If Soderbergh's ambition was to make us feel just how dull it would be to a woods-dwelling communist guerrilla, he succeeded.

It’s extraordinary how Luhrmann is able to tell this story honestly, while still making it palatable. It’s equally extraordinary that he can take this short and tragically misdirected life and make it feel like a triumph.

For the most part, it's fairly pleasant and interesting enough to be there.

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.

Surprisingly, the results are embarrassing. As puppetry, Team America is stilted. As satire, it's gutless and lazy. And as comedy, it barely delivers laughs.

Klapisch still gets these characters to sneak up and make us care about them - though it might help if you remember them from when they were young.

You Kill Me is pretty light, but it's well made, and within the built-in limitations of its story -- a hit man goes to Alcoholics Anonymous -- it's fairly pleasing.

Brad Pitt is in ecstasy here, despite the cool demeanor throughout. This is an actor who is never better and never happier than when he gets to be seedy, slick his hair back and wear a leather jacket.

By the end, Downsizing is one of those great ideas that should have just stayed an idea.

The goal here was to be absurdist, relentless and light. Well, Barb & Star is light — so light it floats off and vaporizes.

It's a complex, satisfying piece of entertainment, a succession of unexpected, outrageous scenes.

The real story of the King Richard dig is fascinating, but the movie, directed by Stephen Frears (“Cheri,” “The Queen”), is just OK.

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

More emphasis on these darker, subterranean elements might have made for a fuller experience, but Infinitely Polar Bear is really all about a father as seen from a child’s perspective. It’s better than a scrapbook item, as in a film made to be appreciated by one family. But it’s not quite a successful movie.

An Eye for an Eye may very well be the most unpersuasive documentary ever made.

At its best, Fury examines the psychological experience of warfare.

The tone is both satiric and serious, zany but heartfelt, and for a while - maybe 20 minutes - all seems well.

What could have been a brilliant short becomes deadly, stretched to feature length. The last hour of Nadja takes on the pace of a stranger's vacation video. In a sure sign of desperation, the careful tone of the opening is abandoned in scattershot attempts at cheap laughs. The film's world is undermined, and Nadja gets as precious, smirky and as boring as a Hal Hartley picture.

If you like this sort of movie - and actually, cards on the table, I like this kind of movie - you will not be sorry you saw it. But you will not come away from the experience feeling that you've seen Victoria, young or otherwise.

Miss Sloane is one of the year’s handful of great actress vehicles, and Chastain takes this role by the throat, smashes it against the wall about ten times and then devours it while it’s still quivering. You want to see star acting on a grand scale? Miss Sloane is the movie to see.

It's dreary and self-indulgent but has its crystalline moments.

An ambitious political thriller, a multilingual film of mood and texture and the occasional haunting image.

Unfortunately the movie is also a bit too long, and for long stretches it's about as entertaining as, well, a long stretch. Still, if this were one of those movie-review TV shows, I'd have to give Lion's Den a (tiny) thumb's up, for its aura of authenticity and for the ferocity of Gusman's commitment.

Does a fine job.

Seeing his life from the inside, the impulse to judge him fades. You would not want to trade places.

Within the realm of a mildly good time.

By being more than a superhero movie, it reminds us of what it’s worse than. Its greatest virtue isn’t that it’s a superior comic book movie, but rather that it comes close to not being that at all. Close, and yet not close enough.

Only in the movie business could someone sell such shoddy merchandise and expect people to buy it. If The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 1 were an appliance, it would be a broken toaster that people would toss in the garbage. Except that analogy is too kind, in that “Mockingjay” would be half a toaster.

As a piece of filmmaking, Where to Invade Next gets off to a strong start and then sags in the last half hour, but it makes a lot of interesting points and, in the way it shows other countries, conveys something about the United States.

It's a film of tension and spectacle, with a singular point of view behind it. It grabs the viewer thoroughly, even as it invites audiences to watch it with a cold, careful eye.

Within limits, this is an excellent documentary. Even fans who think they've seen everything will see things here they haven't seen.

Sirens is affectionate toward its characters without getting gushy or softheaded. [11 March 1994, p.C5]

An ideal introduction to Toback's output as well as a welcome elucidation for longtime fans. Apart from those worthy functions, The Outsider is also shrewdly made, illuminating its subject in a variety of settings and, at times, subtly assuming the style of Toback's films.

Here Balasko, best known as a comedian, is particularly satisfying. But the reward is too small on the investment, and the film's resolution is downright irritating - not just a waste of time, but a waste of time with attitude.

For about 115 minutes, State of Play tells an alarming, tightly constructed story, with serious things to say about journalism and the state of the country. The movie appears to be all but over - and likely to stand as one of the best films of 2009. And then the filmmakers add one last embellishment, and they blow it.

Meandering and inert. Yet as an etching of an emotion and a vehicle for Costner, the movie makes a case for itself.

Since the hit-man career is probably one of the most familiar non-law enforcement careers in films, it should come as no surprise that Little Odessa has nothing new to say about it.

The problem on which the movie turns is this: Bill Murray’s natural quality as an actor exudes self-knowledge and knowledge of the world. If he looks depressed, the aura suggests, it’s not because he knows less than we do. He knows more. Murray brings that quality to bear in St. Vincent, but it doesn’t fit.

The Hand That Rocks the Cradle is a perfect thriller. It may not be as good a movie as ''Cape Fear,'' which is a sort of cinematic extravaganza, but in many ways I liked it more. It's stripped- down and lean, without a moment wasted, and the plot works like a delicate machine. [10 Jan 1992, p.C1]

Director Edward Zwick tried to make a great movie, but somewhere in the process he forgot to make a good one.

Techine doesn't have much of a story to tell, so instead of moving the narrative forward, he expands it laterally.

If the first "Hangover" movie were this awful, there never would have been a Part Two. This is a joyless, unfunny mix of comedy and drama, a complete waste of time, with exactly one good joke in the entire movie. It comes in the first minute. After that, you can leave.

Ashkenazi is a terrific actor, commanding and grand-scale in his aura, but with an unmistakable warmth. And Gere, cast against type, couldn’t be better. In a career of only good performances, this is one of his best.

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.

In the Taken movies, the hilarity of mild-mannered Neeson going on a family vacation with hand grenades in his suitcase was never acknowledged, but it was there and part of the fun. Here, the comedy is closer to the surface, thanks to the wit of Kolstad’s screenplay and of Ilya Naishuller’s direction.

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]

These scenes of raving nonsense might have seemed radical in, say, the 1970s. Now they’re just tiresome.

The best thing that can be said for “Kinds of Kindness” is that it’s never quite boring, despite being 164-minutes long and lacking much of a story.

It’s good to see Spielberg, at 71, still finding new forms of cinematic language with which to express his humanism. It also should be said that though Ready Player One wears a cheerful face, there are none of the usual heartwarming, classic Spielberg moments. That’s because, second to “Munich,” this is his most pessimistic film.

Ideally It Could Happen to You should be fun all the way, with the audience confident things will turn out right. Instead it's mostly annoying, with an ending that feels tagged on.

A goopy Gwyneth Paltrow movie.

A successful work of art. To see this movie is to feel that you've lived it.

Late Night is a fairly agreeable experience, and every time Thompson is on screen, there’s a reason to keep watching.

Consists of long stretches of boredom, banal dialogue and contorted metaphors, interrupted by flashes of ugliness. See it if you want to be put off of sex for a month - longer if you're older, and perhaps for years if you're very young.

Clearly, an effort was made to create a serious, thoughtful movie.

The Apprentice is an anti-Trump movie, depicting his early career as a real estate developer in New York City, but it treats Donald Trump with a modicum of sympathy.

All of which is to say that, when it’s Hanks steering the ship and fighting the Nazis, it means something extra. It’s not just happening to him, or them, but to us. And so, we can better imagine what it cost those guys, who had to make that back-and-forth ocean voyage in the awful months before their leaders figured out how to sink the U-boats.

The pace is slow and the story neither takes off nor arrives anywhere.

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

Has the three elements we've come to expect from Eastwood: the steady pace, the shadowy cinematography and, of course, the presence of the Big Guy.

It's a very funny movie, perfectly paced. [15 Apr 1994, p.C1]

It's 90 minutes of flying, dismembered limbs and explosions of blood, but give the man credit. Stallone can do action. If you want action and nothing but, here it is.

Another urban action thriller that's better than some, worse than most and so forgettable that it's possible to forget it while watching it?

A charming and wise film.

Though Mom is ditzy and, at times, irritating, we come to recognize her as the family's most original creative spirit.

It's that rare kind of movie that comes along only a handful of times each year -- gut-level entertainment that's oddly profound.

If The Creator were any more slanted, any more in the tank for the coming AI onslaught, you would think it was produced, written and directed by AI.

Considering all the possible ways BackBeat could have been really ridiculous, it's all the more impressive that it should turn out to be an intelligent, sincere and entertaining piece of work. [22 Apr 1994, p.C3]

Nobody Else But You takes a novel concept and a willing leading lady and squanders both through drab, lifeless storytelling.

The movie benefits from the frankness that filmmakers were allowed in these pre-censorship days. Dvorak, in her best showcase, is sympathetic as a woman bent on self-destruction, because we appreciate that she has desires she can’t contain.

With Woo, violence is not just a means to an end. It's something pretty; it's fascinating. His talent is an original and peculiar one. Woo brings an esthetic sensibility to bear on the phenomenon of a good guy beating people up -- and to the spectacle of a violent shoot-out. Explosions aren't just impressive but beautiful. [20 Aug 1993, p.C1]

A shrewd thriller that takes the time-honored plot about an innocent man wrongfully accused and gives it a film-noir twist.

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

It provokes nothing but yawns, and the sex it explores is stuff everybody knows about and says, "So what?"

The film is long, empty and bogus.

The goal of this review - why not just say it? - is to disclose as little about the story as possible while instilling a ravenous and even rabid desire to see Love Crime immediately.

For pure, uncomplicated enjoyment, it's the movie to see right now.

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

The magnificence of Weisz’s performance — yes, it’s another magnificent performance from Rachel Weisz — is that she is never hiding anything, beyond what a 19th century woman might conceal out of polite reserve. In her every moment on screen, she is an open book. We’re just not seeing all her pages.

Taken as a whole, the movie is far-fetched and even faintly ridiculous; and yet, in the moment to moment, it's compelling and truthful.

An exceptional example of Shakespeare on film.

The movie explores the real essence of determination, and it’s not what people imagine as they recite affirmations to themselves. Nyad shows us determination almost at a level of pathology, as a single-mindedness that could be considered sick, except that Nyad wasn’t delusional about her capacities.

Screenwriter William Monahan has fashioned an intelligent and highly topical epic. Director Ridley Scott has brought it home with banners flying.

Wildly imaginative, humane, playful and deflating of all pretense.

Weisz’s conviction, passion and galvanizing outrage drive Denial. For a Jewish academic, this was no intellectual exercise, and Weisz lets us see it. Between the frames, Weisz likewise assures us that Denial is no routine movie for a Jewish actress.

It shambles and ambles, seemingly without focus or pattern, from one thing to the next. Yet at the same time, it's predictable, not from moment to moment, but in its outlines.

What Ritchie is able to convey is the terrifying nature of this kind of small-scale combat, with the enemy coming out from nowhere and from every direction. Even if you’ve never experienced anything like this, there’s something about what Ritchie does here that feels authentic.

As of today, this is the most delightful movie out there.

The acting is splendid. Fellowes’ dialogue may not be subtle, but the actors are so familiar and at home in these roles that they make up for whatever is lacking.

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 times The Game is frustrating to watch, but that's just a measure of how well Fincher succeeds in putting us in his hero's shoes.

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

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.

Director Curtis Hanson gives the film a slow, European pace and a cold, slick look. The sound-track is made up almost entirely of internal noises -- a buzzing fluorescent bulb, music from a record player. Everything contributes to an ominous atmosphere. [09 Mar 1990, p.E1]

Now that she's past 50, can we all stop holding Michelle Pfeiffer's looks against her and just admit that she's a great actress?

The takeaway on Friends With Benefits is that mores change, styles change, the rules change, and even humor changes. (There are two jokes involving apps, of all things, that are pretty funny.) But people's emotional needs remain the same from era to era.

Along the way, this funny picture does exactly what a satire should: It irritates everybody. At least it runs that risk.

Ambles along and has a feeling of randomness about it, but, in fact, it's tightly plotted. Every moment, however seemingly haphazard and casually presented, is keyed to the progress of a young man from lost to not so lost.

The result is a film of passion and ambition, but one whose success is intermittent at best.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

Feels like an extended skit stretched and stretched, maybe not to the breaking point, but to the sagging point.

The result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that's truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.

Internal Affairs gets inside of you so fast that it's hard to look for or notice its imperfections. There's no point in quibbling about a movie that's this good, this absorbing and merciless, this original and twisted. [12 Jan 1990, p.E1]

A disturbing film about grim subject matter, but the overall experience is more exhilarating than saddening. There's just something satisfying about seeing a movie so well made.

The film is partly a comedy, because no movie with protagonists this stupid could be a straight drama. And yet the film contains a lot of truth about its place and time.

Anyone who appreciates Sylvester Stallone or enjoys the "Rocky" movies will find moments to enjoy in Rocky Balboa and will leave the theater reasonably satisfied. It's just good to see the guy, and it's good to revisit the character. And that's everything good to be said for the experience.

Eventually the concept buckles under the heavy blockbuster treatment, becoming a monotonous, repetitive spectacle of endless shipboard sword fights and pirate ghosts in the moonlight.

Watchable in spite of Greengrass as much as because of him. The story is good enough to make viewers want to ignore the photography.

A faithful portrait of a period in American social history.

Damsel is a misguided exercise, a 113-minute mistake and a waste of time, but it does have a good opening.

Philippe Blasband's screenplay is witty and economical, and the film's editing is crisp.

Scenes that should have been cut are included, so as not to disappoint anyone. What could have been a small, sweet and genuinely scary film is instead a full hour too long and many millions too fat.

The pace of Master Gardener is measured, but there’s nothing relaxing about it.

As Baby Boomers continue to dominate the culture through sheer numbers, you can expect more movies about demented parents. But a good rule of thumb for those who’d attempt such a story in the future should be this: If you want us to care about crazy old Dad, show us that he was once something more than an abusive sperm donor. Show us that he was once a decent father.

Unsane is Soderbergh in his best mode. As in “Haywire” and “Side Effects,” he takes what easily might have been a lowbrow genre entry and realizes it so completely that he turns it into something extraordinary.

Even at its silliest, it's a better picture than most, with surprises and inventive turns and performances that remain strong throughout. [14 Aug 1992, p.C1]

Bogdanovich takes a tale of old Hollywood and infuses it with velocity and enthusiasm.

It’s still an unusually good picture and worth the time (though you could skip the last 30 minutes and still get all you’re going to get from it). But if only writer-director Ruben Ostlund (“The Square”) had figured out a graceful way to end his movie at, say, the 100-minute point. He’d have had something extraordinary.

A curious thing about "Revenge" is that auto executives who might have been portrayed as villains in Paine's earlier documentary are likable characters here.

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.

The film is a fascinating look at how a true event can become a media event — and how courting the media can have good and bad results so mixed up that it’s hard to know where the good influence stops and the corrupting influence starts.

The new John Waters movie, Cry-Baby, which opens today at the Kabuki, isn't daring or even daringly undaring. It's a spoof of those dull, corny musicals from the '50s and early '60s and is just as dull and safe as the kind of movie it mocks. I fell asleep, and I haven't dozed off in a theater since ''Dream Lover,'' a Kristy McNichol effort from 1986. [6 Apr 1990, p.E1]

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

Maria, despite being occasionally slow, is a weird, good movie.

An exceptionally perceptive film about what it's like to be 19 years old.

It provides unvarnished behind-the-scenes access to a presidential campaign, showing aspects of the process that we would never see otherwise.

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.

Between the lines, Scoop conveys, not only what Andrew most likely did, but what led him to assume that he’d get away with it.

An ambitious and exciting piece of work, a movie about sex and movies made by a filmmaker who understands the power of each to set off fantasy, create addiction, incite danger and transform the spirit.

So here’s the case of a movie that is, in every way, nothing special — except for the way it’s made and how it’s done.

A structure might have inhibited Aster’s impulse for meaningless excess. Instead, we get a movie that’s all talent and no discipline, which, in practice, is even worse than a movie that’s all discipline and no talent. At least the latter tries to please the audience; the former just pleases the filmmaker.

In the end, it’s the ideas at work in The Matrix Resurrections, much more than the action, that keep us contentedly in our seats for well over two hours.

Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.

In every way, Miss Potter is a very beautiful thing.

Young Benny has a nice smile, and she and Jack seem like pleasant people, but in the end (and in the beginning and in the middle) it's hard to get worked up about them.

Still, as Dylan biopics go, this is probably the best imaginable.

The Lost Boys is a horror movie that's funny without making fun of itself and scary without trying to make you sick. [31 Jul 1987, p.86]

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

Oh, Hi! is that rare case, a movie that’s engaging and interesting moment by moment, but everything else is wrong with it.

Exactly one minute longer than its predecessor, but it's a dragged-out exercise, with no epic scale and no spirit worth talking about.

The last half hour and the lively opening make us almost forget the movie’s so-so middle. It brings all the elements together, points to the future and keeps the action to a human-scale minimum. If you want to see Solo: A Star Wars Story, I wouldn’t talk you out of it.

Entertaining, but it's about one notch below being something anybody really needs to see.

Violent and nonsensical, with story elements in contradiction, it is lifted up by the efforts of the actors, who try to put a human face on the blockbuster machinery and almost succeed.

The film, actually, is a little like Reeves himself: It starts promisingly and trails off into indistinctness and mystery.

Unfortunately, Stuart Baird's direction is so sluggish and Jim and John Thomas' script so padded that Executive Decision has no build. Instead of focusing on the mechanics of suspense, the film concentrates to a boyish extent on mechanics, period.

Call Jane doesn’t depict a radical transformation, just a deepening. And Banks makes it worth watching.

Mature, thoughtful and occasionally dazzling.

A superior sports movie, dealing honestly with a great American story.

The slow pace kills the sense of urgency, and the length and breadth of the film makes the story seem insignificant. Tarantino is still someone to watch, but Jackie Brown, before it's over, becomes a who-cares proposition.

A sympathetic look at what it's like to be a Brazilian transsexual prostitute working in Milan.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

The hardest thing to describe is tone, but it's the thing that most sets Killer Joe apart and makes it one of the most interesting and satisfying movies of the year so far.

The film is always at least mildly interesting, because international arms dealing is a fairly compelling issue, but it's never as informative as a good documentary nor as engrossing as a good narrative. It's a hybrid that's frustrating in two distinct ways.

A wistful romance with metaphysical overtones, the movie is warm and charming. [10 Jul 1992, p.D1]

The film does have enough visual interest and occasional revelation to allow it to limp with dignity to its conclusion.

A smart and unsettling atmospheric thriller.

With “Young Woman and the Sea,” Gertrude “Trudy” Ederle finally gets the movie she deserves.

Under the subdued, dignified surface, this movie - about the 24 hours after a one-night stand - churns with a filmmaker's fascination and wonder, sadness and longing.

The music is hit-and-miss, and the movie sinks into as many cliches as it avoids. But the characters are appealing, and the storytelling is just unconventional enough to keep an audience guessing.

The Dying Gaul has the best kind of story in that it unfolds as a series of surprises, and yet every step, twist and turn seems inevitable in retrospect.

The effect is like watching an opera without music. Or a musical drama in which no one sings. These departures from a realistic convention never feel like static set pieces - that's the great success of the film and of the poems themselves.

A film of wisdom, emotional subtlety and power.

It tries to get by on charm. It doesn't.

A satisfying story of a grand-scale swindle, but it also retains the impishness and charm of "Ocean's Twelve." Even better, it solves the Roberts problem in the most thorough and economical way possible: She's not in the movie.

Some of the dialogue in Made was improvised, and the comic invention at work here -- Vaughn's and Favreau's -- make Made into a rough gem.

It has nothing going for it but a terrific story and an amazing performance by Judith Ivey, who plays an enigmatic Good Samaritan.

Shot for shot, Big Eyes is one of the most beautiful-looking movies of 2014, but to say that isn’t enough, because it’s not just pretty, not just pleasing to the eye. It’s visually astute. It is made by people aware of what these screen images mean, what they refer to, and the psychological effect that they will have on an audience.

Dares to present a flat-out heroic president, without the safety net of irony. It succeeds.

Law often looks angry and frazzled onscreen. This time he looks angry and sure of himself.

Kong: Skull Island is a smart SciFi action movie that doesn’t rely on a handful of monsters and random scenes of computerized destruction to run out the clock. It has a smart script, imaginative filmmaking and a cast of fine actors that actually get to act.

For most of its 110 minutes, City Hal is a strong, hard-boiled drama that gives an insider's look at the wheelings and dealings in and around the mayor's office.

This summer's comic gem.

Has warmth and integrity, but it lacks the urgency of a story that had to be told.

As a visit to a world and a way of life most of us will never experience, American History X is vivid, and it feels honest. At the very least, it's not typical.

A smart, sexy romantic drama, directed within an inch of its life by Hans Canosa.

The action is difficult to follow.

Jones has many good moments, and “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is a decent remake of a decent movie.

A completely appealing, beautifully preserved memory piece - a grand, colorful coming-of-age story with a candy box color palette and a standout performance by Renée Zellweger. It's a great story and a great crowd-pleaser.

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.

Something to Talk About never goes bad, though it does get corny in places, and it hits a couple of dull patches near the finish. The last half-hour contains two completely different scenes involving two completely different horseback riding contests. Yet despite the braying insistence of the sound track, the audience doesn't care about either one.

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 brilliant and irresistible counterfactual overview of American history.

The characters are engaging, and writer-director Stella Meghie is able to keep us interested in them for about an hour — and then the drama leaks out of the movie completely.

It tells a simple story - an almost archetypal story - but it does so with a lot of passion and technical sophistication.

Overlong, overplotted and underdrawn.

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

Murphy is the key here. It would be a pleasant surprise to our time-traveling moviegoer from 1984 to find Murphy looking so much like his old self and in possession of his old gifts. His comic timing remains impeccable, and laughing with him here is both fresh and familiar, an ideal combination.

It’s a lovely children’s movie, which isn’t to say that every moment of it is splendid and enchanted, because that’s not the case. The experience of watching Dumbo is more like, “This is OK, this is all very pleasant” — and then suddenly, there are tears in your eyes, and not from allergy season.

Though One Fine Morning is low-key and flows easily from one scene to the next, it’s truly innovative and original. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve has cracked a code. She figured out how to make a kind of movie that other filmmakers would love to make but don’t know how.

An amusing bauble.

Two hours of nonstop, nail-biting tension and anxiety.

It’s original and idiosyncratic, but Swicord lets herself get away with things another director might not have allowed.

A fine ensemble piece, but a maddening and unjustified length.

The film is bleak, not particularly compelling, and the characters are frustrating, the enemies of their own happiness.

The result is embarrassing: quick cuts and shaky, hand- held camera work, bad acting and lots of attitude.

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

Daring and gutless at the same time. It's daring in that it's a romantic movie that's willing to be coarse. It's gutless in that it refuses to paint any of its characters in a negative light, even temporarily.

Highly visual but cold. It's undeniably inventive, but also relentlessly fey and self-consciously zany and, in terms of story, it moves with audacious slowness.

Stallone, often tortured in his movies, is cinema’s most tortured optimist.

We’ve gotten too used to action as mere spectacle, explosions on a video screen. Plane takes time — not a lot of time, but just enough — to make this a story about people.

Unwittingly, Lynch/Oz ends up demonstrating the flimsiness of comparison as a tool of film criticism.

Frehling is excellent as a rigid do-gooder who thinks he understands everything and then comes up against crimes that shake his sense of the universe. His fresh fierceness is nicely balanced by Voss, who says little but radiates wisdom.

If you ever liked Madonna, this concert film will remind why you weren’t wrong. Madame X is somewhere between a success and a triumph.

People take comedy for granted, but to step back and think about Stuck on You is to be impressed by the invention and sheer exuberance of the picture, which isn't great but sure is enjoyable.

The human connection the two characters make in this film would be understandable to anyone in any century, past or future. For that reason, there’s a very good chance here that Hall, Penn and Johnson have made more than a good movie with “Daddio.” They may have made a classic.

Gooding can't will this well-meaning film into life.

Forestier's performance is a tour de force of comic acting, maintaining astonishing alertness and energy from shot to shot and scene to scene.

A triumph for Judd and the director.

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]

Destroyer makes “Manchester By the Sea” seem like an afternoon party with clowns and balloon animals. But if there’s a reason to see Destroyer, it’s for Kidman’s performance. It’s to take that journey with her.

It's a buoyant comedy with more warmth and generosity of spirit than anything else in theaters right now.

A merry, wistful, tear-and-a-smile romp about the Holocaust, of all things.

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.

It's almost a great movie. For half of its running time, Anderson maintains a distinct and arresting tone of vague absurdity, and then he loses control and the film begins to dip into silliness. Individual scenes become labored. Yet even at its worst, The Life Aquatic is always interesting -- there's really nothing else like it.

There's no other film like it. It's embarrassingly frank and self-revealing, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes both.

Though Craven satirizes horror cliches, he also knows how to cut through them and do new things. Throughout, the action comes unexpectedly and quickly.

As entertainment, On Chesil Beach isn’t remotely satisfying, but it does deserve credit for being weird.

Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.

A suspense thriller of rare intelligence.

It’s a line that all horror movies must walk. The characters must be stupid enough to get themselves into trouble, but not so stupid that we don’t start thinking of them in Darwinian terms. Somehow, “Cuckoo” stays on the right side of that line, but barely.

A rare reminder from movies that the grand emotions are not only for the young and the middle-aged. They're the sweetness and torment of life until the last light goes out.

Both Mastrantonio and Harris are terrific, never missing a beat, always convincing, even when playing the most extreme emotions. [9 Aug 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

The movie has finesse, and the actors have charm, but there are no surprises.

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]

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film.

A full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence. It is both things, effectively and sincerely.

Prada just feels authentic, from its glossy look to the specific and sometimes curious behavior of the secondary and tertiary characters. To watch it is like being entertained while getting an anthropological crash course.

Here's the thing: This movie would be easy to mock as maudlin and self-important, but there's something about it that can't be dismissed. The monologues may be theatrical and presentational - director Anne Emond made this film when she was 29 and too young to be subtle.

It's extremely funny, one of the funniest films of 2012, with a particularly winning style - far-fetched, extreme and nonstop.

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

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.

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.

The results are mixed. Many of the films are too long, and even worse, the collection as a whole doesn't come to grips with the human scale of the tragedy.

The Chamber has nowhere to go and it goes there slowly, flirting in all directions.

Big Miracle is not the most sophisticated adventure film, but compared with most family movies, it's practically something out of Noel Coward.

Night Moves, which shows her at her best and worst, also shows two roads, right and wrong, that Reichardt can choose to pursue. As someone who likes this filmmaker even when I don't like her movies, I hope she takes the harder road.

A half hour before the finish, Margaret loses altitude and starts looking for a place, any place, to land. Instead it crashes, in slow motion. But up until then, Margaret is committed and unusual.

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]

Comes closer than any other recent animated film to the Looney Tunes ideal. Just as Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny entertained without either condescending to kids or lobbing adult jokes over their heads.

In many ways a beautiful movie, and yet in other ways it’s not very good at all. As an achievement in stop-motion animation, it’s stunning — seamless and detailed, so perfectly done that it’s easy to forget that you’re witnessing skill and not magic.

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.

An enchanting, beautiful and brilliantly imagined film.

The picture looks like it cost about 3 cents to make, but it packs a nice punch, with tense moments, unexpected turns and a hot performance by Joanne Whalley-Kilmer. [30 Oct 1989, p.F3]

When it's good, it's good, and when it fails, it's still clear what Levine was trying to do.

Though Hauser and Sweeney can’t exactly save the movie, they keep it from derailing.

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.

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

It’s a sneaky little movie about what people are really like, and it’s impressive.

There are lapses in character motivation, and at times the film takes on a cartoony feeling. But if you worry about those things, you shouldn't be watching action movies. For its genre, Broken Arrow is a class act.

As good as The Motel Life is for the actors, that's how bad it is for the viewer.

It is the best and most enjoyable American film to be released this year.

Don’t mistake his movie’s lack of sentimentality for callousness. Babylon is coarse, hard and wild, but its emotion is undeniable. Babylon is what movie love really looks like.

This is a solid, three-star movie, but its premise is brilliant and unforgettable. [21 May 2017, p.Q45]

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.

Red Heat, the new Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie, avoids most of the usual action-movie gimmicks and is better for it. It co-stars Jim Belushi and opens around town today. [17 Jun 1988, p.E1]

The To Do List is a romantic comedy with no romance and little comedy, but with an ugliness of spirit that's surprising and unrelenting.

Hero was directed by Stephen Frears, who has made some of the better movies of the last few years (Dangerous Liaisons, The Grifters), but here his direction isn't nearly as sure-handed. Watching it I got the distinct sense he wasn't liking the movie he was making, or that, at the very least, he was struggling to keep up. [02 Oct 1992, p.C1]

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

There should be a special category for movies, like “Dog,” that are hard to enjoy but easy to take. They’re not entertainment. They’re more like a vague form of companionship. They aspire to little but demand nothing, and, if you like, they can keep you company. You can’t call that a good movie, but you’d have to be a creep to call it a bad movie.

Freeway is rude in the way the truth is rude -- only funnier. The movie seduces with its humor, all the while presenting a realized vision of a harsh, absurd world.