Mick LaSalle

Visceral and strong.

This sequel goes beyond disappointment into a sublime realm of embarrassment that's beyond and yet better than merely bad, because it fascinates: What on Earth were they thinking?

For all its sensitivity to the horrors of mental illness, The Soloist ends up as a fairly canned piece of work.

Aside from the defection scene, the only tension in The White Crow concerns whether Nureyev will achieve the renown he deserves or whether his career will be killed in the crib. That’s not nothing, but it’s small stuff to peg a two-hour movie on, especially one with an unsympathetic protagonist.

Dick Cheney deserves better than this — or worse. So does Lynn Cheney, played by Amy Adams, who strains in vain to give dimension to a script that paints Mrs. Cheney as little more than an amoral social climber.

Respect has everything you could hope for in a musical biopic. It has a good story and great songs and, best of all, it has someone in the lead role who can put those songs over.

Blackthorn imagines a scenario for Butch's later years and gives us a different kind of Western - somber, reflective and set in the elevated plains and salt flats of Bolivia.

By the standards of most IMAX films, this is a bizarre entry, a documentary about bugs that was produced by Terminix, the pest control company.

Ultimately lacks the narrative muscle that could have made it great. But it does have McDormand, who is great in this, her best showcase since "Fargo."

Blue Gate Crossing is 85 minutes of wistful gloom.

Just one big wipeout.

An awkward hybrid of Asian and American film techniques. It's also an uninvolving story that casts Chan in the role of a fish out of water and gives him little opportunity to show his exuberant personality.

Considering that most movies, even today, don't present a woman's romantic or sexual behavior in anything other than a spirit of judgment, She's So Lovely has to be regarded as something unique.

There are phony movies made every week, but this is in a different category - a phony movie that seems a distortion of something real, a phony movie offered in place of the real movie von Trier could have made, but it would have cost him something. Some blood, some truth, some soul. What we're left with instead is an empty gesture.

It's stupid but glorious -- Dominic (Vin Diesel) and his crew of high-spirited street racers are hired by an FBI agent to hunt down an international terrorist in London. Ridiculous and entertaining from start to finish.

Worst of all, in promoting its hero's eccentric journey as a voyage of healing, the movie replaces emotional precision and intellectual honesty with syrupy sincerity and insistence. It turns boring and cute and begs us to love it.

Onward goes on and on, but it barely moves forward. Long before its 114-minute running time has elapsed, it has overstayed its welcome.

Cast adrift in this aimless movie, Ahmed seems lost. His performance is one in an unfortunate tradition of weepy Hamlets, and his problems are compounded by the fact that his weepiness is unconvincing. Each time he teared up while delivering a soliloquy, I felt that he was trying to sell me a used car.

The terseness of Hosseini's prose has been replaced by the sentimentality of the director's approach.

Embraces its identity as a sci-fi-summer-action-blockbuster extravaganza. Along the way, it actually comes close to finding the balance that Lee was looking for.

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

Where the movie goes wrong is that it sets itself up as a study of a pathological personality but never delivers.

Not enough can be said for how strong [Crowe] is in this film, and how welcome it is every time he appears on screen. He seems able to read people. He also seems German, complete with German gestures.

A complicated and stylish Korean thriller that will make viewers' skin crawl.

With a thriller like this, details almost don't matter. It's entertaining enough to watch it get to where it's got to go. Liotta is seedy and creepy as the obsessed cop, disintegrating before our eyes. ''The only problem I have is sleazy, low-life whores like you,'' he tells a woman he picks up. Officer Pete has some hostility issues he needs to work on. [26 June 1992, p.G1]

The Persian Version tries to pivot and fashion itself as a celebration of women’s strength across the generations, but it’s transparently something else — a daughter’s attempt to come to terms with a problematic mother. And it’s an effort in which there can be no suspense because Keshavarz’s strenuous effort to whitewash mom tells us that the movie, and the relationship, can only resolve in one way.

The problematic result is not that The New Age is bleak -- bleak is fine. We all like bleak. The problem is that The New Age becomes static. [30 Sept 1994, p.C1]

Stylized and visually arresting, with intense sex scenes that earned the film an NC-17 rating, Ang Lee's Lust, Caution is an immersion into another time, place and mentality.

Tetris holds an audience’s attention until the finish, without ever quite commanding it. To some degree, Noah Pink’s screenplay deserves credit for taking an arcane business story and rendering it entertaining. But the story gets so extreme and unlikely in the movie’s last half hour that it becomes easy to separate fact from fiction.

The Comfort of Strangers might look great and might seem to be heading somewhere, but ultimately the picture is just a lot of atmosphere dolling up a lot of hot air. [15 Mar 1991, p.E8]

In a nutshell, the problem is this: If Gilroy wanted to set a horror movie in the world of art commerce, fine. No problem. It’s not a bad idea. But to do it, Gilroy needed to respect the horror genre enough to create something sophisticated. Instead he went to the horror bargain basement and pulled out the cheapest horror conventions he could find, straight out of slasher bin.

Mischievous, singular and profound.

The Bourne series ended with the last installment, and now comes a 135-minute death rattle called The Bourne Legacy. It's a peculiar movie, both over-plotted and under-plotted, encumbered by layers of detail and yet with no details invested in or developed.

The film provides an intelligently imagined future world.

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

The Wolverine shows that, while originality would be nice, a little novelty and enthusiasm in the presentation of the familiar can be quite enough.

Saltburn is a remarkable combination of smart and stupid. Its problem is that it’s superficially smart and deeply stupid. It’s clever and amusing in 20 different ways, but when it really matters, it descends into ridiculousness.

Spike Lee is too passionate and distinctive a film maker to make a lousy movie. So although Mo' Better Blues, his latest, is a misfire, there is a personality behind every camera shot. An audience is willing to go farther down the road with Lee than with another film maker, and even when, as in this case, the road leads nowhere, it's hard to resent the trip. [03 Aug 1990, p.E1]

As you enjoy the movie’s gleeful outrageousness, take a moment to appreciate the strategic sophistication of some of these bits. These scenes were well planned.

It tries to get by on charm, and like a lot of movies, and people who make that attempt, “Kingsman” does have charm — just not enough.

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn is more than horrible. It should not exist. Money should never have been raised for it. The screenplay should never have been filmed. Margot Robbie shouldn’t have produced it. She certainly shouldn’t have starred in it. It’s just a terrible thing to inflict on audiences, who, after all, didn’t hurt anyone and just hoped to have a nice time.

Funny People is a true brass ring effort, a reach for excellence that takes big risks. It's 146 minutes, with a story that's more European in feeling than American.

There's a way to love City of Ghosts, and that's to watch it not as a story that should add up to something, but as a series of little episodes with their own specialness and integrity.

Rarely has a movie ever captured the importance of a writer’s having unbroken concentration in order to work.

The result is a genre-bending yarn, an entertaining mix of period drama and flat-out farce that should please history fans.

The main thing to like about Stone Cold is that the movie is honest enough to have things go wrong -- so wrong, and in ways that are unexpected. [18 May 1991, p.C3]

Filmmakers can’t depend on funny actors to go out there cold and bring back laughs. They have to be given funny things to do.

Its one flaw occurs when the film concocts a fake conflict between the women in an attempt to add some drama. The plot device doesn't do great damage, but it is enough to keep the film from being a hands-down four-star movie.

That the movie succeeds as thoroughly as it does -- getting deeper and creepier as it goes along -- is evidence of a far-seeing creative imagination. Nolan is a compelling new talent.

The Devil's Advocate is a sharp, suspenseful and completely satisfying movie.

One of the great satisfactions of Spectre is that, in addition to all the stirring action, and all the timely references to a secret organization out to steal everyone’s personal information, we get to believe in Bond as a person.

The film never settles into an assured rhythm, and instead the actors always seem to be pushing, putting the hard sell on an audience that, however distracted by the strenuousness of the sales pitch, still isn't buying.

A 98-minute elucidation of a point that's accepted within three minutes.

A nonstop action picture with a fair amount of laughs, car chases and exploding buildings. [15 May 1992]

To put it bluntly, Wiig and McCarthy are funny, but Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones aren’t. McKinnon, in particular, is shockingly out of place, and she helps drag down the movie.

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

Easily could have been mildly funny and phony but instead is really funny and true to life.

Baker is concerned with people who are broke and on the outside (“The Florida Project,” “Red Rocket”), and while there are aspects of “Anora” that make us aware of the distance between people born with everything and those born with nothing, he doesn’t let politics or economics dwarf his characters.

In his performance, Jeremy Renner hints at something dark stirring beneath Webb’s surface, but it never quite comes out, and we’re left with something more on the order of a rough-hewn saint. Kill the Messenger tells an interesting tale, but it’s caught in an odd zone between too-Hollywood and not Hollywood enough.

The Duplass brothers keep making miniatures that contain universes. They seem to be casual, but they're dead serious. They seem to be stumbling around finding stories by accident, but their movies are thematically rigorous. They seem to be presenting matters of little consequence, but the stakes are always huge and life-changing.

There's valuable information here and some human stories that deserve to be heard.

Trumbo is breezy and pithy without ever undercutting the seriousness of the subject. A certain degree of wit is appropriate in a writer’s story, just as any Hollywood tale must at least have a whiff of absurdity, or else it can’t be true.

The result is a frustrating, boring mess.

If you know the world of “The Many Saints of Newark” — maybe you’re Italian American from the East Coast, and have at least a dim memory of the late 1960s — this prequel to “The Sopranos” TV series is both accurate and oddly hilarious.

This is a moderately but consistently entertaining film, with but one extraordinary thing about it, which is Saoirse Ronan in the title role.

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]

When Bertolucci points his camera out a window, it's like putting on your glasses. Everything is lush, drenched in color and right there for you to touch.

He )Robert Zemeckis) creates a movie that is old-fashioned in every possible good way, but that in no way seems passe or cliched.

The main thing that keeps audiences glued throughout its running time is that it's a love story, easily one of the best American love stories of the past year.

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

Ultimately, the people who made “Lightyear” bet too much on the appeal of Buzz, when they really needed to be deepening him and transforming him. Buzz is no Woody, and to sustain an entire movie, he pretty much had to be.

The big problem of Good Boys is not that it’s harsh or nasty or outrageous or tasteless or shocking or appalling. The problem is that it’s none of those things, when it should have been all of those things. It’s safe and sentimental, with just a few mild laughs.

The acting, the setting and a feeling for the time period make “In the Land of Saints and Sinners” more than the usual action movie thrill ride, though it’s that too. That combination of elements makes this one of Neeson’s best movies of the past few years.

A tense, concise and elegantly shot film.

The main event here is Swank, who was a plaintive and sentimental figure in her earliest movies and has only fully come into her strength in youthful middle age. This strength makes Fatale an entertaining diversion and holds out the promise for something deeper and more satisfying in the future.

It’s far from the worst movie ever produced, but it’s a one-of-a-kind disaster, and therefore interesting.

As in “The Wrestler,” Aronofsky presents us with a protagonist whose physical appearance is forbidding, and then shows us their delicacy of spirit. He films Charlie’s home with just a hint of the macabre, which serves as a counterbalance to any whiff of sentimentality in the script. The Whale doesn’t make a lunge for your emotions. It earns them.

There's one really good idea at work in Warm Bodies, which is to take "Romeo and Juliet" and mash it up with a zombie movie.

The audience is made to wait a long time for an ending that's not worth waiting for.

Even good stories are never quite like a movie, and to its credit McFarland, USA doesn’t try hard to be like a movie. It tries to be something like life.

Bride Flight gives a panoramic sweep of lives as they're lived, as there is a lot of beauty in it.

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

Audiences will come away feeling like they’ve really been somewhere, that they were moved by the people they met and expanded by the experience. You can’t ask more from a movie.

Rhys Ifans is an engaging protagonist, playing Marks as a passive and seemingly unflappable character whose iron nerve and ability to keep cool in a crisis get him out of more than one desperate situation.

At times, State of Grace, which was written by the late playwright Dennis McIntyre and rewritten by David Rabe, is a little too writerly, a little too calculated to impress. Still the dialogue is good; the momentum builds, and some of the simplest scenes, such as a few between Penn and Wright, have real power. [05 Oct 1990, p.E1]

A first-rate action movie, slickly done and with so many imaginative bonuses that, for a time, it feels like a classic in the making. It's not, but it's still solid and entertaining [1 June 1990]

Amateur gives the impression of a sloppy first draft. It begins with a splash, meanders until it reaches feature length, then ends abruptly.

Though The Concert swerves and skids, it never goes off the road, and when the moment counts, when things really make a difference, the film comes through beautifully.

It’s a grand bogus mess passing itself off as a philosophical statement. It has its moments, but they’re few. Often, it’s a beautiful-looking film — but it’s beauty without substance.

Standing Ovation is an innovative film in the sense that every minute or so it comes up with a different way of being annoying. Moreover, it often goes for a layered effect, in which it's annoying in two or three ways simultaneously.

Don't believe the weak coming-attractions trailer. The inspired pairing of Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy makes for a successful action comedy.

The directorial talent is there. Now if he can just be persuaded to let someone else write the script next time, we might have something serious to talk about.

The people who made this film -- particularly the ones responsible for the story and the dialogue -- should look no further when trying to understand why In Her Shoes lands with such little impact. The characters seem authentic -- until the chick-flick template distorts them.

The movie is saying something worth hearing about the place the future holds, the concept and promise of it, in human existence. It’s an attempt to wrest that vision from the narrow fantasies of doom-peddling action filmmakers. That’s an attempt worth making.

The dialogue stretches are just pauses between the action scenes, where the director gets to show her stuff. [12 July 1991, p.F1]

Some sections are better than others, but all of them benefit from the various ways the character and the actress illuminate each other.

It's a lovely film that grows along with the characters. At first, it seems like a pleasing but inconsequential comedy. But it deepens as their connection deepens and opens up into a place of poignancy and insight.

Segerstedt's anti-Nazi stand is the only reason to be interested in him, and yet half the movie is about his domestic life.

Elba's performance is commanding and physically meticulous. As he ages through the film, he takes on the stiff gracefulness of the elderly Mandela, so familiar to us from news footage.

Rules Don’t Apply feels unbalanced in terms of story, and it has a big sag in the middle. But the good things in it are so good that they make it a fairly worthwhile experience.

The movie's storytelling is limp, and writer-director Neil Burger's ultimate unwillingness to commit to a point of view -- was this guy really the assassin? -- seems artistically chicken-hearted.

There's no buildup and little shape. Scenes are strong, but the movie as a whole flags.

The film remains, clearly by design, a cold piece, mechanistic and only intermittently involving.

Some so-so movies are just easy to be around, and this is one of them.

Hill and his cast, including Christopher Walken as a sadistic hood, struggle to score a victory of style over substance. But substance, or a lack thereof, wins.

More than a high concept stretched to feature length. This is a funny and extremely satisfying comedy, the best in a while.

Moving On is effortlessly intelligent in depicting the experience of being old. Even if you’re not there yet, you know intuitively that old age has very little to do with sitting in a rocking chair in perfect equanimity. It’s about living with the accumulation of things you did and things you didn’t do.

Isn’t It Romantic isn’t romantic, and it isn’t funny. It’s a bad idea stretched to feature length, a gimmick picture that never gets past its gimmick and never grows into something better. It runs 88 minutes and runs about 80 minutes too long.

Buoyed by some sensitive performances and nearly tanked by insensitive filming.

There's only so much Soderbergh can do. Gray's Anatomy is made up mainly of Gray, and there's a whole lot of Gray going on. The story is unremarkable. Gray's observations, pedestrian.

If you have any fear of heights, The Aeronauts is one of the most excruciating movie experiences since “The Walk” (2015), which replicated Philippe Petit’s high-wire stunt between the World Trade Center towers in 1974.

Even worse, Little Joe is a horror movie that, rather astonishingly, lacks a climax. The ending falls off a cliff. The result is not to make viewers ponder the unresolved and wonder what might happen next, but to question how they’ve spent the past 105 minutes.

Measured and somber, with few surprises.

This lushly photographed, brilliantly acted and wonderfully entertaining movie has its own claims to uniqueness. It's the most thoughtful of the three films, and its climax brings the entire series into sharper focus. [25 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Features some of Clive Owen's best work and a startling movie debut by the 15-year-old Liana Liberato.

Night Always Comes isn’t an especially ambitious movie, but it’s simple where it needs to be simple, and it’s complex when complexity is called for.

It's a bomb - not the usual bomb, but a time bomb, despite a 20-minute stretch at the beginning that goes along nicely. [17 May 1991]

“Hobbs & Shaw” is witty and mischievous, full of surprise and invention, and a total blast.

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

Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work.

Taken as a whole, Bandits is a success, a two-hour entertainment that floats along, stumbling into various genres, discovering its moments.

Scott is having a remarkable year. To be exact, he’s having a remarkable season. Less than two months ago, “Last Duel” was released and it was Scott’s best film in years. Now the even-better House of Gucci is his best film in years — and it’s different from his previous work.

Sober and dispiriting, tense and morose.

The bottom line on Being the Ricardos is that it’s irresistible. It’s an invitation to go behind the scenes of the “I Love Lucy” show and to see what Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were really like. It’s also an invitation to travel back to the 1950s, with writer-director Aaron Sorkin as your guide.

You can’t make a raunchy comedy and a sentimental paean to motherhood at the same time. You have to choose either one or the other. Raunchiness or sincerity. Try to do both, and you end up with a flailing, unfunny wreck, like the mix of contradictory and self-defeating impulses that we find here.

Even now, I can’t decide if it was horrible or if I liked it and must conclude that both things must be true. It really was horrible, and I liked it, anyway.

Anybody who talks about True Romance has to start with the writing. It's dazzling. In scene after scene, Tarantino surprises the audience even while coming up with dialogue that rings much more true than anything you could have anticipated. [10 Sept 1993]

It’s a preening piece of work, aiming to flatter and please, while masquerading as something hard-hitting and daring. And because of all that, it’s a bore.

With Diane, as in life, it feels like nothing’s going on, but everything’s going on.

I can’t imagine who would want to make a movie like this, much less who would want to watch this. It says nothing real about life or death, and it’s not as though it’s telling us something we don’t already know.

Sibyl is for people who like French movies even when they’re a little ridiculous.

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

As for Beowulf itself, it's all about the visuals, which means that as soon as the novelty of 3-D wears off, the experience has been had.

A so-so movie you just might want to see more than once. It belongs in a strange category: a film that can’t quite be called a success, that has too many dead spots, that doesn’t quite hang together or satisfy, and that yet is more interesting and occupies more space in the mind than other movies that are ostensibly and even unquestionably better.

"Spider-Man 2" was a textbook example of how to make a sequel: Deepen it, make it funnier, give it more heart and come up with a strong villain and a good story. Spider Man 3, by contrast, shows how not to make a sequel.

Woo's aggressive, cartoony attack in the film, which makes for its biggest delights, also wipes out whatever chance it might have had of making an emotional impact.

An empty exercise.

The movie’s one and only idea renders itself boring, with still half the movie left for the audience to endure.

One of these days, Angelina Jolie might very well direct a great movie. She has a rare talent and intense concerns and interests. But first she is going to have to suppress some self-defeating impulses that have now twice taken potentially effective films and rendered them ridiculous.

Structurally, this becomes a little monotonous because there's just no denying that some kids are more interesting than others.

Both women are excellent, and they, as much as the movie's whodunit elements, hold the viewer until the finish.

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.

One of the most powerful romances of recent years, it is as generous as they come.

The picture is also the story of one character in particular, Bobby, and when it comes to Bobby, A Home at the End of the World is sappy and bogus.

It's not all bad. It's just part bad: It suffers from cliches and corniness, from the same kinds of scenes played over and over, and from more false endings than the last "Lord of the Rings" movie.

This film never had any business being stretched into a feature, much less one running 106 minutes. At that length, Biosphere is soporific and repetitive and puts viewers in the position of always being two steps ahead of it.

The movie’s intelligent respect for that which is unknowable allows it to cover an enormous swath of ground in just 85 minutes. Sarah Silverman is very good in I Smile Back, and the movie is even better.

If you went by the coming attractions and the advertisements, you might expect a predictable romance pitched on the level of a TV sitcom. But Untamed Heart is a movie of rare sweetness. [12 Feb 1993, p.D1]

It does provide audiences with the satisfaction of seeing and hearing an important truth expressed, and that's better than making you feel good. That's making you feel something.

As Bilbo, Freeman is a pleasure to watch to the extent we get to watch him. His timing is brilliant — he gets the movie’s only laughs. He has tremendous sensitivity and an ability to seem like he’s about to say something — and then convey it without saying it. He could have made a great Bilbo. Instead he’s the one thing that has made this trilogy bearable.

Army of Darkness has good moments and shows traces of wit right up to the end, though these moments wind up coming fewer and farther between. [19 Feb 1993, Daily Datebook, p.D1]

It's dreadful, but it's a special kind of dreadful -- the kind designed to appeal to intelligent people on principle.

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

As thrillers go, Rapt is long on intellect and short on action, a virtue to some degree, though not entirely.

The movie reveals itself as not merely dull, but pointless.

There was an interesting idea at the heart of Judy & Punch, but the execution is disappointing. This feminist visit to the world of the old “Punch and Judy” puppet shows is tonally off, shifting and swerving when it should be precise and then turning earnest and explicit when it needs to be subtle.

If you’re looking for scenes of big, awful creatures fighting each other and knocking over skyscrapers — and for the spectacle of people scurrying below, running from the huge stomping feet — you will find little to dislike in Godzilla vs. Kong. It does its job. It’s a monster movie.

A self-conscious attempt at the brass ring.

Basically, No Hard Feelings is everything you like about Jennifer Lawrence, brought together in one movie and then magnified: her down-to-earth irreverence, her comic timing, her idiosyncratic naturalness and her unexpected sensitivity.

A pleasant enough "Crimes of the Heart" rip-off about three young women bumbling, stumbling and fumbling through life, looking for answers, smiling through tears, blah, blah, blah. [21 Oct 1988]

The biggest sequel of the summer has more dinosaurs, better special effects and more action than the original... But the inspiration is gone, and with it most of the fun.

It's watchable and reasonably entertaining, to be sure. Eastwood doesn't make movies that are hard to sit through. But something in the film's point of view is off, not at cross-purposes, not contradictory, but incomplete, irrelevant and ever-so-faintly ridiculous.

Alien 3 is pretentious and gimmicky by turns, resorting at times to silly B-movie tricks that undercut its seriousness and moments that can be anticipated from a mile off. [22 May 1992, P.D1]

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]

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

Hartnett is naturally engaging, and one can see why, with the movie plummeting to earth, the filmmakers might decide to pull the humor ripcord. But here it smells of desperation.

It turns out to be just as bad as any routine French romantic comedy - illogical, inconsistent and sloppily written, a charmless, tasteless, witless waste of time.

Sure, not everything is great. Here and there, the movie goes out of its way to be sentimental. But The Lovebirds is a pleasing comedy, funny from beginning to end. That should be enough for anybody.

A serious movie that slowly earns its emotion and enlists our involvement. Even before the finish, it’s goosebumps all around.

After devising a sturdy frame for Neeson’s special brand of sorrowful mayhem, the filmmakers expertly fill in Run All Night with a series of charged action scenes, including a rare one in which Neeson chases after a cop car, instead of the other way around.

Things are a little off. The style is gritty 1970s-style crime thriller, but the morals are straight out of 2007, and the movie is set in 1988.

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

A must-see for Mamet fans.

Convoluted.

Promised to be the season's thoughtful action picture, turns out to have few thoughts and no thrills.

Shannon is worth seeing, and so is Spacey — hunched over, doing a funny impression of Nixon’s voice and body language. But this time the actors are better than the material.

Benefits enormously from smart casting across the board.

There's nothing about this thriller to prevent it from soon becoming enmeshed in the memory with others in which Michael Douglas wears a starched collar and grits his teeth.

It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.

Intermittently entertaining.

A whimsical but flat-footed attempt to account for several lost months in the life of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known to the world as Molière.

It's the worst kind of convoluted thriller -- it can never unravel satisfactorily because there's nothing simple at its center, just more confusion.

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

No doubt this seeming effortlessness was hard-won. Movies this smooth don't happen by accident.

Ultimately, the con we witness in the movie is almost as beautiful as the con that is the movie -- believable in the moment, too irresistible to question upon reflection and executed with invigorating confidence.

It's silly, witty and good-natured, not scary so much as icky, and not horrifying or horrible but consistently amusing.

The name of this documentary is Surviving Progress, but that's only because "The Sky Is Falling and We're All Gonna Die" wouldn't fit on a marquee.

It's good nonetheless, an artfully arranged account of Hemingway's current life, mixed with footage shot by her late sister Margaux for a 1983 documentary about the family.

Jurassic World is an intelligent action movie that’s saying something simple but true: Yes, people are that stupid.

As a comedy, Junior has its share of laughs -- but no more than its share.

The film's appeal has a lot to do with the casting of Juliette Binoche as Sand, who brings to the role her pale, dark beauty and characteristic warmth.

The film is certainly clever enough to hold an audience's interest throughout, though in the end it's a victim of its own ambition. As a moral investigation, it's shallow and ultimately ludicrous.

Although I, Robot provokes thought, it doesn't exactly deliver thought, despite the occasional Cartesian reference to "ghosts in the machine."

Greed is boring.

At its base level, Dalíland is all about what a drag it is getting old, especially for a narcissist. But more importantly, it’s also a cautionary tale about the dead-end that is narcissism — not just in life, but in art.

Clumsy and ineffective in its first half hour. But gradually, as her investigation deepens, and we see the true hideousness of what she is uncovering, the movie achieves urgency and clarity of purpose.

Memphis Belle goes off in several different directions at once, and the result is a movie that's scattered and unfocused. [12 Oct 1990, E1]

Those Who Wish Me Dead pretty much works on the gut-level way it was intended, but it gets extra credit for being unintentionally funny.

A funny, satisfying action comedy that never disappoints.

As a cold meditation on sex and power, The Lover succeeds. The girl remains invincible behind her youth and vapidity, calmly amazed at her own strength. But as an evocation of the mysterious and universal currents of love and time and passion, ''The Lover'' is inflated but empty. [13 Nov 1992, p.C3]

It’s a sweet movie that accidentally expresses ideas that are complicated and perverse. This isn’t enough to make “Upgraded” transcend its formula, but it does make it slightly better than it had to be.

A sophisticated story of disappointment and accommodation.

It’s a very good movie, and it features a blood-curdling performance from Joaquin Phoenix, in the most frightening portrayal of a violent maniac in decades. One more thing: It’s clearly a response to the times.

The period footage shows all the principals, including Neal Cassady, who was only 38 but looked 52. Ken Kesey emerges as the film's hero - he is presented as a great American adventurer, the psychological equivalent of Lewis and Clark. Maybe that's not as ridiculous as it sounds.

You’ll see lots of movies in 2023, and you’ll forget most of them. But Carmen is so sincerely passionate and peculiar that you’re bound to remember it.

Fortunately, What If rights itself well before the finish and finds its way back to the truth and the light.

The Ref, not just about a premise but about people, is the rare good comedy that actually gets better as it goes along. [11 Mar 1994, p.C1]

Lawrence's take on pop music success is exactly right, satiric without being absurdist, and therefore a prize worth the effort.

This is the weird thing, Old Dogs is not that bad.

The real problem with This Is 40 is its lack of truth, that Apatow wanted to express something about married life, and it eluded him. After all, no less than Kierkegaard once said that the actual dynamics of marriage are beyond the scope of art, and he was the best movie critic of the 19th century.

Everything that’s good about Cruella can’t obscure the fact that it was a very bad idea. The movie makes gestures toward style. It has first-rate costume design. The soundtrack contains a series of well-loved but mostly irrelevant pop songs from the 1960s and ’70s. But we still end up with a movie that should never have been made.

Underlying the story is sadness, a sense of mystery and a quality of pain. Enjoy the movie for its surface pleasures, but when it's over, it's those subterranean qualities that will keep it lingering in the mind.

Would have been a stronger movie if it didn't require a strong cup of coffee going in.

It takes about half the movie, but gradually we realize that we’ve stumbled into something wonderful, that there’s magic happening here, both onscreen and within the lives of the characters.

A very funny French comedy of a variety that usually doesn't make its way here.

This isn't absurdity. This is nonsense - and it's as boring as nonsense.

An intriguing document, and the first significant film ever made about a former U.S. president.

The dreaded question with a film like this is, “Wouldn’t a documentary have been better?” In this case, there’s a double answer. The first half of The Glorias is better told as a drama, because it’s fascinating to see (and not just be told) the obstacles in front of Steinem and how she overcame them. But the second half would have been better as a documentary.

It could have been something special, but two things drag it down to mediocrity -- director Clare Peploe's misunderstanding of Marivaux's rhythms, and Mira Sorvino's limitations as a classical actress.

Something special about it. It's a formula movie, to be sure, but it's Formula One.

Despite some real virtues, Brian Banks as a whole, is only a break-even experience.

It has an affectionate aura, a warmth to it. But at the same time, the audience is left standing on the outside, almost as though watching a home movie: Clearly, this meant something to the people who made it, but it's hard to say what or why.

A paranoid, prurient sexual nightmare.

This is what Hopkins has been showing us for decade after decade: the deepest, rawest and most tortured feelings of private, dignified men. His is nothing less than a glorious cinematic legacy, and the miracle is that he keeps building on it.

August: Osage County was a three-hour play that felt like two hours. It has been made into a two-hour movie that feels like a month.

A movie can’t just be crazy, lest it go off a cliff and never land. It also needs a human core, and Diesel and Rodriguez are it.

Almost as mindless as "Fantastic Four," but more annoying in that this one has philosophical pretensions.

A harsh and thoroughly unromantic examination of the scarring effects of war.

There's not really a movie there, nothing that sustains itself from scene to scene and nothing that's worth watching from beginning to end.

The new Footloose does everything it needs to do. It's a vibrant youth musical that will appeal to audiences who haven't seen the 1984 original. And it has enough charm and life to it to compete with the memory of the earlier version.

The character motivations are weak, and the story is poorly structured. But its camera work, possibly intended to distract audiences from the movie’s flaws, only compounds its problems. It distances the audience and makes Jason Bourne a chore to sit through.

Disclosure is a frankly adult picture. The seduction scene is protracted and genuinely sexy -- though what this woman sees in Douglas is a mystery. The talk in Disclosure is also frank -- and unusually explicit. People talk about sex in this picture as they would in life.

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

All [Tarantino] has to do is trim a full hour out of "Vol. 1" and a half hour out of Vol. 2, combine what's left and he'll have something not just amusing and idiosyncratic, but outstanding.

A disappointment, a precious and grotesque exercise reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen," only less amusing.

If you want to know years in advance what old-age nostalgia is going to look like for Baby Boomers, look no further than Pirate Radio, in which the sun always shines, the music is great and the sex is available, guilt-free and glorious.

A film made with high aspirations and more than the usual commitment but one that, after an arresting beginning, changes into a passive rumination.

Benigni sets out to do the impossible.

With Hard Candy, the innocent are tortured along with the guilty -- the innocent, in this case, being the audience.

It's surprising to see John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell together in such a meandering mess as The Object of Beauty. It's also surprising that their being in it doesn't help. [19 Apr 1991, p.E1]

As a drama - an epic drama, no less, clocking in at 137 minutes - its fascination is diffused, and the movie becomes something of a long slog.

With a movie like this, we know what has to happen. The fun is in seeing how it happens. Ryback is an explosives expert, so there are some delightful bomb interludes. He makes a bomb for the microwave, takes a missile apart and puts it back together and comes up with original ideas, such as rigging a hand grenade to a door so it will explode when the door is opened. Under Siege is a lot like Die Hard moved to a battleship. [09 Oct 1992, p.C3]

The complicated truth is that the Internet’s dangers are entwined with its pleasures, the allure of instant fame, the illusion of contact with masses of people. Nerve is the first movie to capture all that, and the result is a successful and memorable thriller.

It all becomes silly, monotonous and boring. Maybe not as monotonous as being cast out into void, but boring enough to put you to sleep.

That none of this seems snarky, but sweetly human, is largely thanks to Rogen, who never makes Herschel ridiculous, but aspirational, as if he has a vision he’s working toward.

That’s all it is, a little bit funny.

The real item under consideration here is the movie itself, and the bottom line is that it lands in a humane place. True, any viewer will go in with a certain curiosity, ghoulish or otherwise, about what it's like to jump off a bridge, and yet the overall effect of the film is broadening. To see it is to dread the bridge jumps and to come away with a feeling of compassion and empathy.

The Oath is harsh. It’s extreme. It goes to places you don’t expect, and then past those places. It’s the most unpleasant comedy in a long time, and lots of people will absolutely hate it. It’s also one of the best movies of the year.

Going into Sisters, the thought is, “It’s Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. How bad can it be?” Going out, the thought is, “Now we know.” It can be downright awful.

Biutiful exists, at its best and beautifully, in that space that's hard to define, between the outside and the interior, action and thought, body and soul.

After the heights of "Casino Royale," the series falls back into routine with this above-average thriller, filled with over-the-top action, familiar Bond atmosphere and a story that's impossible to follow - and why bother anyway? Daniel Craig is still the coolest man in the universe. That definitely helps.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

Alas, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life loses steam and grows more perfunctory as it wears on.

By the way, Danny Collins is inspired by the true story of Steve Tilston, a British musician who received a 1971 letter from John Lennon some 30 years after it was written. The gist of the letter was about the same, but all the characters and circumstances are creations of the filmmaker.

The last five minutes of Midnight Sky are touching and beautifully acted — if you’re willing to wait for it.

If you can find a better time at the movies this year than this wild comic thriller, let me in on it.

L’Attesa — also known as “The Wait” — is atmospheric and moody, serious and full of portent; and if it weren’t so good, it would probably be unbearable.

Gets better as it goes along.

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

Even when it's hard to follow, it looks good. The undersea action is visually convincing, and Ramius' submarine, with all its rooms and compartments, is always believable. The moonlit photography in the picture's final scene is stunning. [2 Mar 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Capable of astonishing even the already cynical.

So this is fairly interesting history, not as interesting as we’d like it to be, but interesting all the same.

Often the movie seems like a lot of empty-headed blather, with one side hating the First Amendment and the other side unable to find a better use for it but to say the f-word.

Waititi adopts a tone that’s wild enough to accommodate all possibilities, so that even while we’re laughing, we’re in a state of anxiety.

It should come as no surprise that Jonathan Hensleigh's script was not originally written as a "Die Hard" film. The blend of "Die Hard" and "With a Vengeance" is sometimes smooth but never complete. It's as if "Die Hard" were wearing a rented tux.

Lights Out presents actual characters that are interesting, that have rough edges, that act like real people, not victims in waiting.

The year's best romantic drama.

What truly propels the film is the growing realization, through both the script and Sweeney’s performance, that Christy isn’t an ordinary person blessed with an extraordinary gift. Rather, she’s an extraordinary person whose very life force is awe-inspiring.

Wicked Little Letters is for people who like British comedy, but also for people who think British comedies are too refined for their taste. This one isn’t. It’s crude and outrageous enough to appeal to modern American audiences.

Those willing to meet (Untitled) even part way will discover a comedy of intelligence and wit, with some strong performances.

A noble attempt that doesn't hang together.

Desperately unfunny action comedy.

Though Man on the Moon is lost when it comes to Kaufman's inner life and motivations, it offers a detailed account of his career.

A long-winded indulgence in tear-and-a-smile whimsy, elevated above the merely irritating and saccharine by compelling art direction.

Hillcoat and Cave give us more than an action story. They create a world.

Brothers has the careful observation, measured pace and lived-in feeling of a good European film.

A Hologram for the King has great energy, and also a languorous, lived-in quality.

The High Note begins well, ends well and even has a good middle, but there’s one extra plot turn, about 15 minutes before the finish, that’s one too many. It doesn’t spoil the movie, but it adds an unwelcome touch of sentimentality into a story that is otherwise fairly tough throughout.

Yet with all its virtues, Thunderheart unravels after the first hour and continues unraveling until it chokes itself. The movie's complicated story, involving the FBI, the government, and the feuding tribal factions, is impossible to sort through. [3 Apr 1992, p.D1]

The only weakness of the movie is that, because it’s a true story, it can’t rearrange the order of events for maximum drama. Thus, what is essentially the climax of the film comes about three quarters in, and the rest of it, while never less than interesting, feels like falling action. The good news is that Sweeney and Kirby get their best scenes, respectively, in this last section of the movie.

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

If you loved the earlier films, these are moments you will hold on to, but they're very few, and they're not enough.

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

What happens is important, but more important is how it happens and whom it happens to.

I lost patience with a widow who is grieving one month and then making out with a guy in a bar the next. This is an emotional recovery even Hamlet's mother might have found unseemly.

The Seagull has all the big things going for it and yet so many little things going against it that it’s just not the movie it might have been.

An impressive and imaginative fantasy.

As a first-time director, Pearce manages something difficult. He creates a tone that acknowledges absurdity, but also consequences. He finds an edge that’s extreme, that’s weird, that’s satirical and that goes right to the edge of farce, and yet the movie is at all points as involving as an intense drama.

Has a certain B-movie integrity -- a muscular commitment to grabbing the viewer's eye and keeping things moving. It won't win any awards, but it holds interest.

In addition to being extremely funny, the film has a warm spirit and respect for the characters.

The fact that the movie has to entertain with digressions is an indication of more than looseness, but rather a shoddiness...Nothing connected with the job is of any interest at all.

One can almost feel the movie Away We Go might have been, if only we could believe that Verona loves Burt - or understand why Burt loves Verona.

The movie is a fantasy, and the choice is either share the fantasy or don't participate.

As a movie, Escape From Tomorrow is at best pretty good, but the way it was made makes it something unique, possibly memorable.

Again like Chabrol, Fontaine has a way of making you laugh, on and off, for 90 minutes, before leaving you feeling a little queasy from too much truth.

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

So, Dial of Destiny isn’t great, but it’s still a lot of fun — even compared to some previous “Indiana Jones” movies.