Peter Rainer

It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.

The relationship between Gilbert and Arnie has "Of Mice and Men" vibes, but it strikes a responsive chord in a way that the rest of the film doesn't. Most of the credit for that goes to DiCaprio's performance.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Has an appealing rawness.

The entire remake has been dumb-dumbed by John Hughes, who wrote the script and produced.

Franklin directs smoothly, but except for Freeman, the theatrics are pretty pro forma.

What's weird about subUrbia is that Linklater's zoned-out technique is wedded to Bogosian's in-your-face power-rant oratory. The result is like local anesthesia--you can see the incisions, but you can't feel them.

Suggests a cross between "Sunset Boulevard" and "All About Eve." The suggestion, alas, doesn't go very far, but Bening's performance approaches the pantheon.

Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see.

Except for a few brilliant flashes, mostly from Peter O'Toole as Hector’s father, the Trojans' magisterially woebegone King Priam, Troy is a fairly routine action picture with an advanced case of grandeuritis.

LaBute is attacking our society’s obsession with the surface of things, whether it be a painter’s canvas or a human one, but his drama is, in itself, relentlessly superficial.

I wanted to be transported by this movie; I wasn't quite. But I respect it.

Fortunately, there are more than enough moments when the heavy-handedness gives way to the sheer bliss of ordinary magic.

Watching it is like getting a peek behind the curtain. But it's frustrating, too, because the casting of Emadeddin as a murderer-in-the-making precludes any psychological depth. And as an indictment of social inequality, which is the film's calling card, Panahi inadvertantly makes a far better case for the haves than for the have-nots.

He doesn’t entirely succeed, but the attempt has poignancy: As uneven as much of his recent work has been, Bertolucci's still in love with the movies, and his ardor--if not always the ends he puts it to--is exhilarating.

What may have begun as a descent into the personal depths of an enigmatic genius ends up as one more cog in the Bob Dylan myth machine.

The problem is that Allen is getting a bit long in the tooth to be playing a romancer-rescuer, and since he and Helen Hunt have a rather frigid actorly rapport, we have plenty of time to notice the awkward, and barely acknowledged, disparity in their ages.

At one point, Val bemoans how stupid the country is, how dumbed-down everything has become. Allen's new movie is far from dumb, but it has an air of abdication about it.

What makes Nolte so much stronger than the other performers is precisely this sense of mysteriousness and indirection, which doesn't really correspond to the Adam Verver of the novel but certainly jibes with James's overall method.

Lee has phenomenal presence, and his movements are so balletically powerful that his rampages seem like waking nightmares. Lee keeps you watching The Crow when you'd rather look away.

It works best when it’s at its loosest and most improvisatory. Whenever the seams in the script show, the film loses its grit and takes on the aspects of a made-for-TV drama about runaways.

I'm not sure I have it in me to rant yet again about what a deprivation it is for our finest actor to deny us his genius in this way.

Despite all the computer-generated effects and highflying superhero theatrics, this roughly $120 million movie is, with few exceptions, remarkable only in its small human touches.

Fitfully effective as a battle movie, and Mel Gibson does his rugged best to take center stage without seeming to. But the movie is self-righteous in a way that's frequently unseemly.

Top Gun: Maverick is a perfectly tolerable time-killer, and I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone, but I just hope these won’t be the only kinds of movies that bring audiences back to the theaters.

There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.

Were it not for these performances (Blanchett, Ribisi, Swank, Reeves), The Gift would be fairly negligible.

I don’t mind the movie’s retro-ness, but I wish Mostow didn't take pulp so seriously.

I realize that Fosse's dark sizzle might seem a bit dated today, but surely something halfway snazzy could have been devised for this movie. It's toothless.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

Demme’s Manchurian Candidate is far from a disgrace, but it's not freewheeling enough, not strange enough to make sense of our gathering dread.

A great deal of energy is expended on metaphysical ruminations that become ever fuzzier. The film is intended as an allegory, but it works best as a jailbreak romance. In this movie, lowbrow trumps highbrow every time.

Devos is especially fine as a woman whose inner solitude carries depth charges.

This sentimental stew is not without its flavors, and the cast tries hard to be winsome and adorably distraught.

Gray hasn't filled out the emotional terrain he's surveyed here. He hasn't quite grown into the emotions he wants to put on screen. When he does, he'll come up with something lasting.

Sonnenfeld does somewhat better with Addams Family Values than he did with Addams Family. But he still gooses the film with hyperactive slapstick whenever things get talky; he doesn't trust the performers enough, or the material, which seems designed for a less frenetic approach.

From a purely pictorial standpoint, this new Dune is indeed often overwhelming. The sheer monumentality of it all is impressive. Alas, the film’s emotional power underwhelms.

Talk to Her affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch.

Schroeder is too fine-tuned a director for this roomie-from-hell claptrap, and his attempts to work in references to Polanski's films or to Ingmar Bergman's Persona only reinforce the pulpiness.

It's a sinuous, bittersweet odyssey, and although the filmmaking lacks finesse, the actors, especially Mandvi, with his bright, sorrowful beauty, and the great Om Puri, who plays Ganesh's father-in-law with an infernal crankiness, are always worth watching.

This superman approach to character doesn't jibe with David's crisis of conscience. His smothering of his Jewish identity may make dramatic sense, but, the way it's enacted, it doesn't make much psychological sense. As Fraser plays him, David has such a robust sense of identity that his covertness isn't really believable. We keep hoping the film will turn into a movie about a kid who declared his Jewishness and fought the consequences.

A sentimental, feel-good look at a family in mourning, but Jake Gyllenhaal rises above the clichéd script with a brilliantly creative performance.

The film, directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, doesn’t add much to the existing record. What it does do, when it’s good, is something the news headlines could not: It dramatizes the survivors’ voices on camera.

Fortunately, most of the malarkey in this movie seems intentional in the same Sunday-afternoon-serial way as the Indiana Jones movies (some of which Johnston worked on).

Sam Rockwell plays Barris with a hipster’s shimmy that’s creepily effective -- The problem with making a movie about a hollow man is that, when things start to get heavy, you’re stuck with nothingness at the core.

Though worth seeing, should be better than it is.

The reason that the film (rated PG-13 for off-color dialogue) is borderline pleasant is because, even more than in the first two films, Travolta and Alley are a marvelous team.

This time around, Harry Potter has more to worry about than the Dark Arts -- though parts of The Chamber of Secrets are spellbinding, he seems to be suffering from a bit of sequelitis.

A few stirring shoot-'em-ups help relieve the logjam of cliches. Director George P. (Rambo) Cosmatos does an OK job at the O.K. Corral. But even the good stuff goes on for too long.

Despite its exuberant perversities, Waters’s take on erotomania is almost quaint.

It's a beautifully austere piece of work -- it's rare to see a film these days that's as carefully designed as this one. But the design hasn't been given enough human contours. It's as if the film makers had forgotten the raging emotions that all that design and austerity were supposed to repress. [07 Mar 1990, p.F1]

Leconte films in an austere yet invigorated style; the action never settles into stiff tableaux.

Fry's saving grace is his love of actors. The younger and less familiar performers are more than adequate, but it's the older guard that shines. Broadbent is marvelously rummy.

Writer-director Billy Ray is so eager to be fair-minded about everything and everyone that you can't help thinking he's a patsy, too. If he directed a movie of Othello, he'd probably try to make us feel warm and fuzzy about poor, misunderstood Iago.

Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he's dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry. The best surprise ending he could give us in his next movie would be no surprise ending at all.

Some directors can profit from the strictures of a strong narrative, but, for Linklater, the conventionality of The Newton Boys works against the glide of his free-floating style.

Writer-director Andrew Niccol throws around a lot of intriguing ideas in this film, and even though his ambitions are more expansive than his talent, he's managed to come up with something that credibly resembles the shape of things to come, Hollywood-style.

Pretty much the whole movie is a series of poses, static and uninvolving, except for cinematographer Eduardo Serra’s lighting, which makes everything look convincingly Vermeer-ish. I’d like to see what he could do with Rembrandt.

You can believe this man (Jones) left his family because he felt born into the wrong tribe. Now if only he had picked the right movie . . .

The best new addition to the corp is Alan Cumming’s Nightcrawler.

It might seem as though there is nothing new to be done with the crime thriller, but The Code (La Mentale), directed by Manuel Boursinhac and written by Bibi Naceri, provides a new twist.

In U-Turn Stone is reaching for the pulp without the politics. He's trying for noir as ritual dance. But Stone is too frenzied a filmmaker to keep the dance steps simple.

You can feel your IQ plummeting while watching The Beverly Hillbillies but since you lose 10,000 brain cells a day anyway, why not have a few laughs?

Secretary is deeply conventional: Edward and Lee accept their bondage as the way to a more fulfilling life. It's the filmmakers who need to be spanked.

Killing Zoe is a raucous, arty little neo-film-noir that comes equipped with a bucket of blood to splatter the halls of convention. It’s not terribly good but you keep expecting it to take off in unexpected directions.

The role fits Fox like a glove but perhaps at this point in his career he should be scouting for something less form-fitting.

A film with an intriguing premise and likable performances but not much excitement. [13 Oct 1990, p.F13]

It’s a serviceable thrill ride.

A lovely minor achievement. It would have been major if Breillat had been more expansive with respect to Anaïs instead of contentedly letting her go on about her lumpish ways.

Taking Sides has a padded-out, stagebound quality that is anything but lyrical. And Szabó, a Hungarian best known for "Mephisto" and "Colonel Redl," is not at his best here.

At its best, though, Blue Chips is really about the wiggy, muscle-twitch world of high-pressure college athletics. The movie is best around the edges, when it's jamming and anecdotal and not taking itself so heroically seriously.

Wuhl is occasionally touching, and his blank-faced disbelief can be very funny; he has the addled look of a shell-shocked aesthete. But for the most part Marvin's funk doesn't bring out Wuhl's sharpest talents; he needs a role with more spring and less vacant staring-off-into-the-distance. And Primus needs a project that will sustain his gift for transforming a group of disparate actors into a spirited jamboree. [21 Aug 1992, p.F11]

If you're young enough to have missed some of the better Lemmon-Matthau pairings, like "The Fortune Cookie" or "The Odd Couple," then Grumpy Old Men won't seem so grumpy. [25 Dec 1993, p.2]

This John Hughes production (citywide) based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip is pretty tepid tomfoolery but at least it’s not assaultive in the way that most kids’ films are nowadays. It’s trying for giggles instead of guffaws.

If Medak had been able to delineate the twinship of crime and show biz, he might have moved the film's frights into a higher realm. Instead, he's come up with a classy freak show.

The effect is a bit like watching "Gone With the Wind" with a dumpling substituting for Scarlett O’Hara.

What saves it is Dennis Quaid.

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

Should be remembered for a pair of performers -- Derek Luke and Viola Davis, whose cameo as the mother who abandoned him cuts through the sap like an acetylene torch.

Species is a pretty good Boo! movie. It's not the kind of sci-fi film that's going to give Stanley Kubrick any sleepless nights, and it may not give the rest of us much sleeplessness either. Its primary purpose in life is to unleash a lot of gloppy morphing and mutating and make us go -- all together now -- eeeuuuh. [07 July 1995, p.F8]

Directed by Alan Rudolph and co-scripted by him with Randy Sue Coburn, Mrs. Parker is a real odd duck of a movie. It seems to have been made both as tribute and put-down. The sporty conviviality of the Algonquin Round Table is celebrated, and yet there's a hollowness to the confabs.[21 Dec 1994, p.4]

A bit too satisfied with its own sweet sensitivities.

What we do care about, and what “Final Reckoning” finally delivers on after an overly expository first hour, is watching Tom do stuff. Set pieces involving a sunken submarine and buzzing biplanes amply fulfill the franchise’s main selling point.

It's one of the weirdest achievements in film history: Temperamentally, Spielberg and Kubrick are such polar opposites that A.I. has the moment-to-moment effect of being completely at odds with itself.

The audience for Hannibal is far more primed for a good time; if the film is a hit, it will be because Lecter has been cartoonized; his ghoulish panache, his double entendres about cannibalism, and his pet phrases like "goody-goody" and "okeydokey" all serve to make him a figure of fun.

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage.

It's a movie about the warm feeling you get when you belong to a family, and, throughout, the thermostat is turned up high.

Spartan is a character study embedded in an action-hero scenario. Neither aspect ever really breaks loose.

Neil Young’s concept album turned concert tour turned movie, which is like nothing I’ve ever seen--at least not in an unaltered state.

The best addition is Austin Butler as the baron’s bald-pated, hypervicious nephew. It’s official: Butler no longer looks or sounds like Elvis Presley. Villeneuve is adept at staging grand-scale battles, but the movie’s best set piece is the climactic tooth-and-nail face-off between Paul and this grinning gargoyle.

The Program tries to travel light and heavy, and the combination of noggin-banging action and deep-think doesn’t gel. Latham, who has previously bestowed upon us the ersatz pop reportage of “Urban Cowboy” and “Perfect,” doesn’t tunnel very deep into the world of college athletics. What he and Ward come up with is fairly standard stuff that seems derived mostly from old movies.

Even in a piffle like Something’s Gotta Give, Keaton reminds us of her uncanny ability to inhabit her characters' knockabout emotions.

This may sound like an Oprah episode, but the outcome is far from predictable and carries the force of a tragedy in which everyone, and no one, is to blame.

The Last Samurai is an idyll in which the savageries of existence are transcended by spiritual devotion. That’s a beautiful dream, and it gives the film a deep pleasingness, but the fullness of life and its blackest ambiguities are sacrificed.

Henry and June is so gentle it almost floats away--but it’s a movie that can’t just be dismissed. It may be a failure but it’s a one-of-a-kind-failure.

It’s powerful, all right, and Downey’s performance is lacerating, but missing is any sense of lyricism in Dark’s hallucinatory yearnings. Without that leap of transcendence, this new Singing Detective doesn’t sing.

It's plotless. It fits no category -- "docudrama tone poem" probably comes closest.

Directed by Kevin Lima and produced by Dan Rounds, it moves briskly, and, if it doesn’t make a star out of Goofy, it doesn’t trash him either. It lets Goofy be Goofy.