Peter Rainer

Ozon has a smooth gift for scenes of unease, but ultimately Swimming Pool liquifies into a dreary puzzle movie.

The rap music we hear, which is produced outside Cuba's state-run music industry, is politically audacious and charged with personal expression and uplift. The film was produced by Charlize Theron's socially conscious company, Denver and Delilah films.

With all this going for it, Vicky Cristina Barcelona should be better than it is. But there's something intriguing going on here. It's a movie about the sacrifices that people make to be happy.

Could have used a lot more grit. Without it, we're left with a crime movie fantasia that slips all too easily into the ether.

Tsotsi never comes across as anything but a brutal cipher, and serious issues such as black-on-black crime in the townships are left unexplored.

Made-up horror movies have nothing on Countdown to Zero, a documentary about nuclear security that won't make you sleep better at night.

In a supporting role as Giacometti’s beleaguered wife, who endures her husband’s penchant for prostitutes, the great, undervalued French actress Sylvie Testud strikes the film’s most resonant note.

The violence is cartoonishly garish and the yuks are few. Crowe, looking (deliberately I presume) flabby and somnolent, is more dead than deadpan, and Gosling, who appears at times to be doing a Lou Costello impression, is, to put it mildly, not in his element.

The computer-animated portions that function as a real-world framing device are more tedious than fanciful.

Based flimsily on a minor F. Scott Fitzgerald story, it's an anecdote stretched to would-be epic proportions.

Hoffman has his specialty, though, and it’s not inappropriate here: He always looks supersmart and yet his reactions to what goes on around him are superslow.

Given the pitfalls of gush and treacle in this type of material, The Friend is no small achievement. Is it impertinent to say that Watts has never had a better partner in the movies? The levels of emotion she brings to the role clearly have much to do with her co-star.

That may enough to pique your curiosity. It did mine, for a while, until it didn’t. To paraphrase what Brahms once told a young composer, what’s original in the film isn’t very good, and what’s good in it isn’t very original.

Roger & Me is a terrific movie, but if it were a great one, those images would reverberate with the shareholders' meetings and the AutoWorlds and the Gatsby parties.

It's a film enthralled by its own lower depths… Although Bad Lieutenant is structured as a redemptive thriller, it functions primarily as a freak show with religioso overtones. [30 Dec 1992, Calendar, p.F-7]

Not only Duvall shines. Murray, in case anybody still doubted it, is one of the finest character actors in America.

It’s a feminist musical crime thriller about a transgender cartel boss. Doubly surprising is that, for all its strangeness – or perhaps because of it – the mashup often works.

Things take several turns for the worse as the story plays out, and the film loses much of its charm. But it's a fascinating artifact, and never more so than when it features clips from Chinese and, of all things, Albanian propaganda films.

Tony Richardson’s 1960 The Entertainer, based on the John Osborne play, is a cultural event of the first importance.

Oswalt captures the rabidness of the die-hard fan, the kind you can hear at any moment on the sports talk shows.

Montenegro, the star of "Central Station," and her daughter make a remarkable pair. They hold your attention even when the emptily portentous story does not.

If we must endure yet another spring-summer cycle of comic book superheroes, this movie at least delivers the wham-bang goods (recycled though they may be).

Freaky Friday gives Curtis the chance to go all goofy and showcase her gift for splayed physical comedy.

Thirteen doesn't really offer much more insight into exasperated mother-daughter relationships or twisted teens than, say, "Freaky Friday," which I much prefer. At least that film was funny and didn't try to fob itself off as a bulletin from the front lines.

If audiences are hesitant to believe that the fraternization in this film really happened, it will be because of the storytelling, not the story.

The movie is moderately enjoyable, but it also makes you feel conned: It offers up a disturbing protagonist and then substitutes cuteness for character.

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.

It's an omnisexual variation on François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," although stylistically, with its emphases on hipper-than-thou attitudes and moody-blues visuals, it's much closer to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.

The documentary is an attempt, in the words of those behind the film, to “investigate the very nature of family itself.” That this attempt is overreaching and diffuse does not detract from the film’s sporadic power.

It all achieves a loony unity by the end, even though what is being unified is not altogether palatable.

Exhaustingly action-packed.

If you have a hankering for a pretty good Woody Allen movie and want to brush up on your French at the same time, Shall We Kiss? is the ticket.

Boenish’s wife, Jean, who trained to jump with him, is interviewed extensively, and, although Strauch doesn’t provide much backstory for her, she emerges as that rarity – a perfect matchup to a seemingly unmatchable man.

Melvin Van Peebles gets the idolatrous treatment in this documentary by first-time director Joe Angio that traces his subject's career as San Francisco cable-car conductor, rap pioneer, filmmaker, Broadway producer, stockbroker, and all-around womanizer.

Very difficult to characterize and that's why I like it. The best I can do is to call it a sunny tragedy.

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

Manville carries it all off effortlessly.

Just when you think you’ve pinned down someone as good or bad, the tables are turned and the complexities thicken. Just like in real life.

Along with its disappointments and its narrowness of intellectual focus, Doubt offers up the crackling pleasures of performance and a narrative that snaps shut like a mousetrap. It's the movie equivalent of a rousing night at the theater.

Hallström conveys a bit of the circuslike atmosphere of the times. But he overreaches in trying to turn the film into a commentary on the politically corrupt 1970s.

Smart and charming.

A rare example of first-rate filmed opera.

It underscores, with ample footage from his rallying speeches and his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just how important it was for the antiwar movement to be represented by someone like Kerry.

The plot may be a bit too busy, but a great wash of transcendent imagery floods the screen. If I had to recommend the best children’s film out there for all ages, this one, and “The Tale of Princess Kaguya,” would easily top the charts.

It’s forceful, to be sure, but in a lurid way that suggests a telenovela that’s been baking in the sun too long.

The film targets the spinmeisters, hired by or associated with corporate interests, whose job, despite their lack of scientific training, is to discredit the science of climate change doomsayers. The fact that some of these spinmeisters proudly base their method on the machinations of tobacco-industry lobbyists is doubly damning.

The remarkable thing about Smith in The Lady in the Van is that, even though the role is no longer fresh for her, the performance certainly is. She gives it everything she’s got because, you feel, she wants to honor this character. She wants Miss Shepherd to live on.

In some ways, this glossily enjoyable movie is a lot closer to Hollywood than Beirut. At times, I thought I was watching some oddball Lebanese variant on "Barbershop."

Too often ambles into inconsequentiality. And, predictably, Ned becomes a kind of family savior – the idiot becomes the sage. It's Frank Capra for dummies.

In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.

Kaling’s naive earnestness in the role is very winning, and Thompson makes her boss lady clichés seem almost fresh. Not quite fresh enough, though, to rescue the movie.

The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]

It's a sophisticated fantasia that adults should enjoy equally. (In other words, it's the perfect family entertainment.)

The irony of this film is that it's all about how we need to come together to conquer a calamity that pushes us apart.

Rather than structure their movie as a chronological biography, the co-directors, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, wisely focus on the genesis of Cohen’s most celebrated and performed song, “Hallelujah.” This approach allows them to interweave Cohen’s entire career while also avoiding the one-thing-after-another sprawl that often bogs down these kinds of films.

Hedges keeps everything in balance: The sadness and frivolity all seem to be part of the same emotional continuum. He’s made a lingeringly poignant little movie.

My kind of Christmas movie--profane, subversive, and swarming with scuzzballs.

Each man has his own distinctive style, and yet when they jam together it sounds like the most natural thing in the world.

It may be subtitled, and the faces may be unfamiliar, but District B13 is the best buddy action movie around.

Materialists scores where it counts most. Jane Austen it’s not, but it gets at the consequences of modern romance among the moneyed classes, where self-worth is bound up in one’s market value.

It's this year's "An Inconvenient Truth."

Gunda is one of the most immersive and eye-widening documentaries I’ve ever seen.

Has an inordinate number of good laughs mixed in with the not-so-good ones.

I’ve never seen a better performance – or whatever you want to call it – from a two-year-old.

The movie is true to its own fierce vision and it's the better for it. I haven't seen a stronger or better American movie all year.

Téchiné gets deep inside the dread and exhilaration of people who have lost their bearings so suddenly they don't even have the luxury of grief.

The movie is an idyllic view of life as it ought to be, rather than the way it is.

Stunning, and it has the added bonus of being about an era that is virtually new to movies. As a dramatic achievement, however, it is not quite so amazing.

It's a lovely oddity, and one that will probably hit home for preteen audiences all over the world.

No one else in Inglourious Basterds comes close to Landa for sheer charisma.

What's exciting about Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story is that, in Jason Scott Lee, the movies have created a new star out of an old star. The film is a tribute to Bruce Lee but it's also a tribute to the transforming powers of performance. Lee does justice to Bruce Lee while, at the same time, creating a character out of his own fierce resources. He is, quite literally, smashing.

Strangely moving and mournful, but I wish more had been made of the beauty these people are relinquishing, if only as a counterweight to all that artful drear.

Messrs. Iñárritu and Arriaga have played this card one too many times. If they really want to appear radical the next time out, my advice is: Tell a single story and tell it well. What a concept.

The marvel of Cage's performance is that, somehow, it's all of a piece. That's the marvel of the movie, too. This is one fever dream you'll remember whole.

The real star here is the big, unmanned freight train sparking through Pennsylvania at 70 m.p.h. while carrying hazardous cargo. Best of all, the train doesn't have any dialogue.

No envelopes are pushed in Brave, which was directed by Brenda Chapman and Mark Andrews, and no genres are subverted. It's a safe experience; but safe, in this case, is better than sorry.

A fine example of what a filmmaker can achieve when she takes on a great subject and lets it play out with all the respect and attention it deserves.

A sad experience, but the sadness has no emotional heft because its people have none. This movie hasn't earned its funk.

Easily the best in the series since the first one.

If this was a quintessential Polanski movie, something malign would reside inside its heart: The sitcom would explode its boundaries. The movie is called Carnage, but the carnivores on display are toothless.

In Aviva Kempner's affectionate documentary Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, Berg, who once polled second only to Eleanor Roosevelt as one of America's most respected females, is given her due. Or at least her showbiz due.

A great way to go on a safari without ever leaving the multiplex.

Rocketman is a campy, overblown, self-glorifying fantasia.

Sometimes, dear reader, there's no place like home, and that's just where you should be when this gorefest opens at a theater near you.

Like all too many docs these days, it chronicles a contest while caricaturing the contestants.

A true killing comedy would require a great deal more sophistication than first-time writer-director Peter Duncan brings to the party. He hasn't made a black comedy, really; it's more like a black spoof.

Well-observed and unassuming as this film is, it glides along rather too blandly.

The surprise is that, at least for its first half, this newest A Star Is Born is so powerfully fresh.

For all the glam and swank, the film is essentially a bright, shiny, empty puzzle. The puzzlemaking by writer-director Tony Gilroy is clever but most frequently an end in itself.

The movie has a lush mysteriousness that represents a bygone, almost antique style of romanticism. It bears almost no resemblance to the current crop of mostly rat-a-tat movies. To view it is to enter a time warp, and there is some pleasure in stepping back into the languor.

He's (Giamatti) terrific throughout, although the movie, which is more clever than funny, sometimes resembles second-tier Charlie Kaufman stuff.

What’s remarkable is that you come away from the movie laughing at Graham’s murderous indiscretions and yet you’re frightened by them too. Caine makes you taste the ashes in this black comedy.

It’s an important subject, lucidly presented.

A little of Solondz's deadpan creepiness goes a long way with me. Life During Wartime is about how people are not what they seem to be, but most of its characters aren't rich enough to exhibit single, let alone double, lives.

Although the movie goes way back into Rumsfeld’s career, it is the Iraq section that is the most noteworthy – and disappointing. Morris elicits virtually nothing revelatory from Rumsfeld.

An arty sleepwalk. Thornton has developed a style of acting that goes beyond minimal into the near nonexistent.

As the "Empress of Fashion" who was the fashion editor of "Harper's Bazaar" before editing "Vogue" in its 1960s heyday, Vreeland comes across in the movie as something of a cross between Auntie Mame and Godzilla. She was a true original in a world where knock-offs abounded.

Certainly few people on the planet were more interested in food than Child, and, judging from this movie, few people are as interesting.

It’s a wonderful movie, and an Oscar nominee for best international feature. It is also proof, if any were needed, that the rhythms of everyday life, no matter how seemingly mundane, can resonate when beheld by an artist’s eye.

Mortensen, who reportedly put on thirty pounds for the role, starts out playing Tony like a big lug but as the road trip ensues he brings all sorts of subtle shadings to the role. He even comes to appreciate Doc’s artistry. In Tony’s eyes, he’s right up there with Liberace.

The film is good enough to keep all the Marvel Comics crazed audiences out there deliriously happy while keeping the rest of us earthbound types in moderate thralldom.

The film has a creepy allure but, as movies featuring full-bore sexual gamesmanship often do, it wears thin.

Setsuko’s pathetic attempt to claim a new life for herself is touching. The film never makes fun of her.

First-time director and co-writer George Ratliff skirts, but never quite crosses, the line into absurdity.

Next time out, more dwarfs, more Aslan, and definitely more Reepicheep.

Canet has a good feeling for lowlife atmosphere and he works up a few fine Hitchcockian twirls. Kristin Scott Thomas and Nathalie Baye round out the sleek cast.

Although the role may not have been written with great depth, Hussain’s performance as Mirza is richly layered.

The action is swift and witty, and the 3-D effects are imaginative and not simply tacked on as with so many animated movies these days.

Although its first hour is more stunning than its second, this is a movie musical that, for a change, never degenerates into a false wholesomeness. It’s one of the rare musicals that both children and adults can enjoy, though for somewhat different reasons.

The usual Sayles mix of torpor and talent prevails here.

This time around, though, the Coens' usual arch deliberateness isn't quite as deliberate, and there's an appealing shagginess to some of the episodes and performances.... This is the Coen brothers' most emotionally felt movie, and that's not meant as faint praise.

It’s a bracing antidote to the usual “Beautiful Mind”–style Hollywoodization of mental illness.

For the literal-minded, there’s an added bonus: Johnny Cash singing Solitary Man over the opening credits.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge (who is a physician!) keep the action spurting forward, but their approach is oblique. We seem to be catching the odds and ends of scenes; it's as if the filmmakers wanted to make a movie in which all the expected high points were skimped.

Nothing more than an efficient time-killer with the added bonus of being based on a real misadventure. But, unlike its benighted cast of characters, it gets the job done without a hitch.

Even as an Eastwood vehicle -- an appropriate term for a movie about a cutthroat car-theft ring -- the film is a warmed-over compost. [07 Dec 1990, p.F10]

Whatever brought Greene down was far more complex than this film allows for.

An actor making his directorial debut, Parker, who plays Turner and also co-wrote the script with Jean McGianni Celestin, has taken hold of an incendiary subject and coarsened its complexities into agitprop.

Essentially three movies in one: The staged reenactment of Columbus's expedition, the filming of that staged expedition, and the contemporary local uprising. It's a lot to bite off, especially since Bollaín's budget doesn't seem to be much larger than Sebastián's.

In Collateral Damages, we are witness to heroism, all right, but it's a heroism unsullied by sentimentality.

In top form, Joel and Ethan Coen offer up feel-bad experiences that, like fine blues medleys, make you feel good (although with an acidulous aftertaste). Inside Llewyn Davis is one of their best. So many movies are emblazoned with happy faces; this one wears its sadness, and its snarl, proudly.

One of those stranger-than-fiction documentaries that just gets weirder and weirder as you’re watching it.

The film, which swivels frantically between first responders, survivors, and investigators, has a percussive force, but its best scene, unbearably tense, is a quiet one, when a Chinese app designer (an excellent Jimmy O. Yang) is carjacked by the Tsarnaev brothers.

If you care anything about the music of groups like The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas and the Papas, The Beach Boys, or Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the ramshackle, engagingly anecdotal Echo in the Canyon is required viewing.

The film is a dual portrait in courage.

This is romanticism of a rather low order.

The ultimate feel-good movie about feeling bad. And within those limits, it succeeds all too well.

Von Trier is undeniably talented, but Zentropa, which won the 1991 Jury Prize at Cannes, comes across mostly as an exercise in pseudo-profundity. It’s got more metaphors than it knows what to do with.

Look for a cameo by a movie star whose initials are J.D.

David Mamet and jujitsu come together in Redbelt, and the result is a draw.

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

Directed by Mellencamp from a script by Larry McMurtry, the result is a curious, wayward blend of small-town anomie and intrigue and hero-worshipping narcissism. [21 Feb 1992, p.F10]

At around the halfway point the film takes an intriguing swerve, as Kyle is canonized and Lance is unexpectedly launched into celebrityhood. Flashes of deadpan outrageousness occasionally redeem the dourness.

It's sweet and winsome and a little pat, done with just enough feeling to lift it out of its class. [15 Mar 1995, Pg.F5]

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

Worth seeing for the expert archival selections, but a decidedly mixed bag for anyone familiar, or unfamiliar, with the times.

Divided We Fall is intended to be restorative, but its wish fulfillments, while charming, are also a bit too gaga for that.

When French New Wave directors like Truffaut and Godard paid tribute to Hollywood pulp, they poeticized it and gave it an infusion of feeling. Tarantino’s tributes are, for the most part, far less complicated: He’s a fan, and Kill Bill is his mash note.

The film's parallels between Mohmed's travails and the Iraq war are forced, but overall this is a fascinating odyssey that never plays out in ways you would expect.

Dan Klores's astonishing film is about a subject so bizarre it could only work as a documentary – as a drama, it would be dismissed as being too far-fetched.

For me, there is too much rue that goes unacknowledged by the filmmakers. When great musicians must adulterate their art in order to find an audience, I see no pressing reason to cheer.

McAvoy succeeds in making the boy's mania for trivia endearing rather than annoying. As his (delayed) love interest, Rebecca Hall, playing a campus radical and the first Jewish person he has ever encountered, is stunning.

More entertaining than it has a right to be. It's pulpy and preposterous, and yet it gets at a real truth.

Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.

I do hope there will be many more future installments. I’d like to spend more time with these folks.

One aspect of this story that could have been more deeply underscored: The steroid use that ultimately banned so many Russian Olympians was not just about winning. It was about winning under threat of disgrace or death.

Harrelson does his considerable best to redeem the hackneyed role of the dreamboat do-gooder. No matter how conventional his roles may be, he always gives them a feral quality, an eccentricity, that lifts them out of the ordinary.

Schoenaerts has the gift of being able to make inarticulateness expressive. Perhaps this is why, in moments, he seems to recall Brando and Dean.

A semi-improvised, microbudget marvel with a range of feeling that shames most big-budget star-driven movies.

Berri is very good at bringing out his characters' emotional contradictions so that we seem to be discovering them right along with Jacques and Laura.

This love letter to Valentino from director Matt Tyrnauer seems intended for the already smitten.

At worst is inoffensive. But that's the point. When you're making a movie about people whose lives are torn up in this way, inoffensiveness is, well, offensive.

Ultimately, the blight is so overwhelming that the film collapses from corruption overload.

The Bhutto family is often referred to as the "Pakistani Kennedys." After seeing this film, that designation doesn't sound so glib anymore.

August Evening is rambling, diffuse, and at times so "sensitive" it makes your teeth hurt. And yet it's also intermittently quite affecting.

Their chief adversary is the greedy, heedless BP executive played by John Malkovich in his finest slinky-slimy mode. At its best, the movie is like “The Towering Inferno” but without all the sudsy subplots that doused that film’s fires.

I wish that the Mexican drug cartel subplot was not so overwrought and Oliver Stone-ish, and the decision to shoot much of the film "Cops"-style is also problematic. But the film puts you right inside an everyday inferno and, to its credit, doesn't turn down the heat.

It's difficult to imagine the target audience for this film. Gangbangers, perhaps?

If, like me, you find the movie technique known as motion capture creepy, you might be put off going to see Steven Spielberg's 3-D The Adventures of Tintin.

Burton is extraordinary in one of his rare good movie roles and O'Toole is regally madcap and larger than life. No doubt his Oscar-nominated appearance in "Venus" has prompted this rerelease of Becket. They make a fascinating then-and-now combination.

This film would be better if it wasn't so slick. Still, parts of it are enjoyably shaggy, and Hopkins is very endearing.

One thing is clear from A Place at the Table: You cannot answer the question “Why are people hungry?,” without also asking “Why are people poor?”

Despite everything, many of us still think of animation as a kid's genre. $9.99, based on stories by Etgar Keret who also co-wrote the script with the director, is an attempt to use the animation medium to express an entirely adult sensibility.

Henry Fool finds Hartley assimilating Godard's ideas with far more assurance than in previous pictures like "Amateur" and "Flirt."

It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

Kenan never loses sight of the wonderment that children (and adults) experience when the inanimate becomes animate. Anthropomorphism is basic to the art of animation. So is a good story, and Kenan has that, too.

Black Mass is like a playlist of greatest hits from other, better movies.

The Wave, directed by Roar Uthaug, is pretty good. It’s also pretty strange. At least for American viewers – and Norwegians, too? – experiencing all these familiar disaster movie tropes in a Scandinavian setting, even on a relatively low budget, can be weirdly disorienting.

The stage is set for a wonderful movie, and yet The Luzhin Defence, based on the Vladimir Nabokov novel The Defense, never courts greatness.

A Separation is not the work of a constrained artist. It's a great movie in which the full range of human interaction seems to play itself out before our eyes.

It’s fun for a while to see Kurt Russell hamming it up behind his voluminous mustache or Samuel L. Jackson once again raising rafters by laying down the law. But the film is pointless, even as entertainment, because it builds to nothing more than a comic book blood bath.

I found it immensely touching that these women found it in themselves to keep plugging away. Despite everything, they ended their days with a measure of peace and happiness.

It’s a strange movie – simultaneously rawly realistic and airbrushed.

An overly stately affair that often substitutes production values for imagination.

Office Space is so enjoyable that you wish it were even better...Once the scheme to bilk Initech is set in motion, the off-kilter humor flattens into a take-this-job-and-shove-it thing, and the ending seems pooped-out.

The saving grace of Queen and Country is that its nostalgia is not laced with sentimentality. Even working in this conventional mode, Boorman doesn’t try to strong-arm us into blubberiness.

For Your Consideration is, except for "Borat," the funniest film of the year. Or, it's the funniest film that you don't have to watch through parted fingers.

I'm all for films that don't flow from the usual Hollywood test tubes, but A Civil Action is basically the standard formula with a dash of downbeat.

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.

All this is diverting but also borderline dull.

Polley has a sometimes graceful understanding of emotional temperate zones and Williams, when she isn't being zombielike, is touching. But Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.

As a piece of storytelling, Everybody Knows covers a vast expanse of human experience, but it doesn’t dive very deep.

Has a poignant undertone: We may feel we already know in our bones just how suffocating this culture is; but the people who made this movie seem to be discovering each fresh horror for the first time. It's like watching a virgin sacrifice.

The most interesting character in Imperium is not even Nate. It’s Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell), a seemingly normal family man who reads the great philosophers and loves the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, even making an exception for the recordings of Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein. Terrorists come in all flavors.

Myers, whose background is in documentaries involving Afghanistan and Iraq War vets, is good at capturing the revealing, offhand moments in this story, but Maggie’s conflicts about motherhood and the military needed a greater psychological scope than this film provides.

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

What finally holds all the hokum together is Pitt. Even though the movie keeps ramming home the idea that Formula One racing is a team sport, Sonny’s outlaw vibe is clearly its focus.

The documentary is like the cinematic equivalent of humblebragging. But it does provide one great “told you so” moment.

There’s a pretty good movie buried somewhere deep inside the ungainly pastry that is Chef.

Tries mightily to make the case that Spitzer was brought down by his political enemies.

In addition to the usual pontificators like Gore Vidal, whose world weariness has assumed Olympian proportions, the director provides interviews with such right-wing counterparts as Richard Perle and William Kristol. Nobody is allowed much time to develop an argument.

If Avalon doesn't succeed in its family-of-man approach, it triumphs on a more theatrical level, as a family-of-actors movie. What Avalon is really about is the magic of performing. [18 Oct 1990, p.F1]

Since the only really good "Planet of the Apes" movie was the 1968 original with Charlton Heston, I've always wondered why filmmakers can't just leave well enough alone.

The cast is terrific, the movie isn't... It all plays like the pilot for a series that wasn't picked up.

The movie doesn’t delve especially deeply into the psychology of double-agentry, and the shifting viewpoints between Israelis and Palestinians flattens the drama instead of broadening it.

Given the temptations to goof it up, Pesci's performance in My Cousin Vinny is something of a triumph. As Vincent Gambini, a swaggering pint-sized New York lawyer who only recently passed the bar on his sixth try, Pesci modulates his usual psycho-nuttiness and gives it some recognizably human, even melancholy, undertones. The movie is a very mixed bag, but it's not quite the dumb fest that the TV spots make it out to be. Pesci gives Vinny's ultimate vindication a note of bittersweet triumph.

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

Too many different stories are vying for attention here, and none of them are very good.

It offers up the requisite thrills, stunts, and bad guys. Beautiful people abound, and 007 still knows how to fill out a tux. I had a reasonably good time at it.

O'Neill and Curry, both heretofore nonactors, can't put across much more than a single emotion at a time, but their amateurishness isn't as annoying as it might have been in a movie with higher aspirations and artistry.

There is a great movie to be made about the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll. Honeydripper is not that film, but it certainly whets your appetite for it.

Jim Jarmusch gives us five different, self-contained episodes in five taxis in five cities on one night. The episodic structure breaks up Jarmusch's usual funky minimalism: It makes it less of a drag. Episodic movies usually don't work; we seem to settle into a story just when it ends and we're thrust into the next one. But Jarmusch's film may be a special case. Unbroken, his vague, meandering scenarios have sometimes dawdled into oblivion. But here, as in his last film, Mystery Train, the anomie is at least given some variation.

With all the talk in Page One about the demise of print journalism and the rise of new media, this shiny spacious emporium seems like both a beacon and a staggering folly.

Hayek gives one of her better performances, though – she makes it clear that Beatriz may be righteous, but she’s also more than a bit unhinged – and Lithgow is so good at playing CEO oiliness that you have to smile. He’s the man you love to hate.

The new film Paris by writer-director Cédric Klapisch was originally supposed to carry the subtitle "An Ephemeral Portrait of an Eternal City." That kind of sums it up.

I wish this movie wasn't so purposefully elegiac and attenuated – at times it's like a middling Terrence Malick fantasia – but it's well worth sitting through.

The plot's many complications pretty much all add up, which is a rarity these days for a murder mystery. It's possible that audiences don't even care anymore if a film makes sense as long it's entertaining.

Departures is sappy and wacky – not the best combination.

It’s unseemly, I know, to praise a movie like this for the stand-up-comic affability of its host. But Reich’s engagingness also gives credence to the seriousness of his message. He’s all about fairness, and, in his demeanor, as well as in his presentation, he embodies that ideal.

It’s to Nathan’s credit that he doesn’t negate the allure of dirt-bike riding as an escape hatch from inner-city woes.

It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.

An elaborate techno-heist thriller, The Italian Job features some spectacular chase scenes, but for a change, the people doing the chasing are also worth watching.

It’s gross, all right, but rarely funny – unless jokes about alcohol-laced breast milk is your thing.

The filmmaking style is annoyingly slick, but the testimonies of these children are excruciatingly moving.

The derby sequences are just OK, and the conflict between Bliss and her uncomprehending parents, played by Marcia Gay Harden and (a fine) Daniel Stern, is so predictable that you wish someone had rolled onto the set to whip it into shape.

What’s clear is that many of Weiner’s supporters within the mayoral campaign stuck with him only because of Abedin’s connection to the Clintons. Hey, it’s politics.

The role of Deb is not written with any great depth, but Miller gets into the character’s psychological complications in a way that almost compensates for the lack.

It's a deliciously perverse melodrama.

Téchiné's movies are always worth seeing, and The Girl on the Train, for all its faults, has moments that resonate

Bob is a marvelous creation--a faker who is also the genuine article. He’s the perfect hero for a movie about the world as one big scam.

The documentary includes peerless clips of Billie Holiday and Lester Young from a TV show Hentoff coproduced as well as snatches of an interview with a young Bob Dylan, a clip of Hentoff on William Buckley’s “Firing Line” TV show, and lots more worth your time.

It comes on strong, but in its bloody heart of hearts it’s no more resonant than one of those old Vincent Price-Edgar Allan Poe contraptions – and less entertaining, too.

It just may be the most boring movie ever made – period.

The film drags a bit and Irglova's inexperience as an actor sometimes leaves her costars in the lurch. But it's a sweet little film just the same.

Is there a moral objection to be raised about a movie that features a teenage girl as an assassin? I suppose there is, but I couldn't find it in me to object.

Ultimately, forgettable, but for most of the way it's a pleasant little vacation of a movie.

Despite the film’s intentions, Idris and Seun can’t really stand in for anybody but themselves. What they go through, as middle-class kids in a privileged school system, seems far less race-based than the filmmakers would have us believe.

[Cameron] may not be a great artist, or a visionary, but in its look, and its feeling for family, this behemoth enterprise still has an ardent, cornball grandeur to it. I look forward to “Avatar 3.”

It's all been done before, and better.

It's a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg's mulchy fixations-and probably for no one else. [27 Dec 1991]

I much prefer the whacked-out, Dr. Strangelove-ish brand of political-apocalypse film to all this straitlaced you-are-there dramaturgy, which seems a throwback to the early sixties not only in time but in spirit. But what Thirteen Days sets out to do it does admirably.

The film was adapted from a 1993 novel by Robert Bober, who drew on his own childhood experiences, and as it unwinds, one begins to appreciate Deville's desire to see things work out well for these people.

For a movie touting "inner peace," this 3-D sequel sure goes in for its share of battle scenes, but for the most part they are excitingly conceived.

Langella's performance turns what might have been a "Twilight Zone"-style trifle into something more: a movie about a proud, ornery man combating his fearfulness.

It's a showpiece for that Belgian city's medieval splendor. You may want to book vacation reservations upon leaving the theater, although the memory of this underwhelming movie may tarnish the sightseeing.

The film could be more adept and probing, but the ladies - Cleo Hayes, Marion Coles, Elaine Ellis, Fay Ray, and Geri Kennedy - are delightful.

The only performances worth discussing are delivered by the always excellent Michael Shannon, the Texas detective who tries to set things right, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the scurviest of the marauders.

It's a movie that could easily have been made 50 years ago, and I don't mean that as a knock. There is much to be said for a film that values unflashy craft and simple, unhurried storytelling.

Bridges redeems the clichéd role of spoiled artist-sot. He's flamboyantly entertaining, which is more than this otherwise dreary movie deserves.

Our familiarity with the actors, and their comfort in this period setting, lend the piece an unexpected air of naturalism.

More often than not, Moore goes for the guffaw, and as enjoyable as that can be, it falls short of producing the kind of devastating, in-depth analysis that might really challenge the hearts and minds of ALL audiences, left and right. At the very least, this approach undercuts the effectiveness of Moore’s own case.

Above all, literally, are the kites. When a character says, "You fly these kites and feel the joy," we know just what he means.

It's nice to watch a political movie that, for a change, isn't trying to save our souls. It's possible to have a good time with this movie while, at the same time, regretting all that it isn't.

There's ample reason to stay with this series. When Harry says "I love magic," you believe it.

The movie captures so well the push-pull of family dysfunction that, after a while, even the Fangs’ extreme eccentricities seem routine. And that’s the point: The filmmakers are trying to demonstrate that, no matter what we think our family dynamic may be, we’re all on the same strange spectrum.

More than awe, the film provokes gratitude for what this man did.

Much of the nattery byplay seems improvised, and the results are very hit and miss – inspired contretemps alternate with gabfests that seem to go on forever.

One of the bright sidelights to Juliet, Naked is the bemused way it deals with the crazy-making ramifications of hero worship.

Channing's formidably good -- a career woman in extremis -- but the movie, which was written and directed by Patrick Stettner, otherwise unfortunately resembles a product of the Neil LaBute Finishing School.

With all this working against it, Les Cowboys strikes a fresh chord. The rise of jihadism has infused this revenge scenario with (all too literally) new blood.

Taut almost to the point of abstraction.

Inspirationalism wafts off the screen in little perfumed puffs.

Zilberman's conceit is that these players, who mesh so beautifully in their music-making, are discordant in their personal lives. Those lives are constructed for maximum messiness, turning what might have been resonant drama into high-class soap opera.

Plowright's performance as a genteel widow in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont is a small-scale gem, deeply felt without being in the least bit showy.

The staging of the physical comedy in The Pink Panther is not always adept - director Shawn Levy is no Blake Edwards - but Martin, who co-wrote the screenplay, keeps spinning in his own orbit anyway. And what an orbit it is.

Costner is always at his best when he’s a little ornery, and Duvall is the same way. His grizzled performance is so thoroughly in character that he even chews as if it were 1882.

What would you do if you could take a pill and suddenly access 100 percent of your brain power? This is the premise behind Limitless, a sci-fi thriller that looks as if its makers utilized around 30 percent of theirs.

Freilich includes interviews with three generations of kibbutzniks and some fascinating historical footage going back to the 1920s.

The film is actually fairly entertaining once you get past its overweening desire to be the bearer of bad tidings. A more adventuresome movie would have treated the down-and-dirty world of politics as its starting, not its ending, point.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is in the scabrous mode, and I like it better than "Trainspotting" -- it doesn't pretend its shenanigans are revolutionary.

As Sam, the wayward stepsister of Charlie's sardonic friend Patrick (Ezra Miller), Watson doesn't lose her cool, or her warmth, in a role that might easily have devolved into terminal sappiness.

There are fine, wry moments tucked inside the curdled whimsy.

Whatever the case, the film resounds with hyperbolic passion. Hot bubbling currents flow through this film’s constricted veins.

What we have here is a perhaps unanswerable enigma of the sort all too common in the annals of spying.

More of a testimonial than a documentary, but it weaves together a portrait of a remarkable Irish-American friar, who was gay and a recovering alcoholic, and the many lives he inspired.

Writer-director Cao Hamburger works well with child actors and has a spare, unforced style. But too much of this film is desultory and thin.

The best parts of Wonder Woman are frivolous in the best way.

Among other things, Unforgivable is a free-floating meditation on the distresses and exhilarations of being a parent.

Just in case we don’t register the mismatch, Rogen is outfitted to look especially shlubby, and he sports an unbecoming beard that never comes off. With his crack timing, he still manages to get a few laughs, but he would have gotten a whole lot more if the jokes were any good. Theron, meantime, is photographed in full glamour mode throughout. This is probably just as well, since, as an actress, she doesn’t appear to have a comic bone in her body. Therein lies the true mismatch in this coupling.

Shulman was around so long that he even got to weigh in on Frank Gehry's Disney Hall. He was skeptical once but came to love it.

The only grace note in this otherwise determinedly graceless movie is the classy way Walker’s exit is handled.

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

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

The script by Bean and Tolkin is potentially more interesting than what’s been made of it.

From scene to scene The Connection is never less than watchable, although it is also never less than predictable.

Pianomania is the thoroughly apt title for a thoroughly enjoyable documentary.

I must say I felt relieved that the film wasn’t a masterpiece. If it was, we’d have more reason to fear Stewart will leave "The Daily Show.”

Like Jim Carrey, Ferrell seems to think that the way to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor is to drain himself of everything that audiences love about him.

You may find, as I did, that the lovely twilit moments in this movie stay with one, and that summoning them up in your mind is like slowing down time.

Abbott has a compelling unpredictability, though, and in a couple of his scenes with Lynskey, you can spot the stirrings of a more complex film than the one we finally ended up with.

In its own superannuated preppy way, Stillman's comic universe is as singular as Woody Allen's.

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 effective but schematic storytelling.

Anderson can't quite rise above his own quirkiness. It's not that he can't respond to the beauty he places before us – he can – but his jokiness keeps undercutting his own best efforts. The Darjeeling Limited is a transitional film for him: He's outgrown a comic style that can no longer accommodate his deeper feelings.

An overstuffed odyssey that, while disappointing on many levels, has standout performances by Paul Giamatti.

This enjoyable Dreamworks animated comedy is well timed.

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.

Schepisi may have made the first truly and intelligently uplifting spy movie. His style here is magisterial yet playful: The melancholy grandeur of Russia, on view at last for the whole world to see, has turned him into an eye-popping enthusiast.

The rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory is shopworn, but the sibling rivalries are cantankerous and goofy and Bernal's Tato, who fancies himself a pop singing star, wouldn't make the first cut on "American Idol."

Hartley has such a spare, controlled touch in this film that this landscape seems both realistic and fantastic. [16 Aug 1991]

Heartbreaking, exhilarating, baffling. In other words, it expresses the performer's persona in its purest form.

Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."

July, like Hal Hartley, another overrated art-house luminary, is an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

The result is more of an illustrated storybook of a cherished classic than a living thing in its own right.

Allen may consider Alice to be a minor jest before his next Big One, but there are pleasures in its small-time ambitions that sometime elude him on his more ambitious projects.