Peter Rainer

The work of an obsessive who has developed a light touch--though some of his more outright themes and pronouncements can be heavy-going.

What Looking For Eric demonstrates is that drama, not comedy, is how Loach makes sense of things. On the other hand, I often find his dramas unremittingly bleak. I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not a big fan of Ken Loach.

At its best it shares with Stone's finest work a feeling for the imminence of death and salvation.

Resembles nothing so much as a workmanlike TV crime thriller.

The funny thing about this series is that, although we are regularly shown the most exquisite dishes, neither Coogan nor Brydon has much to say about them beyond the mandatory oohs and aahs. Winterbottom works in some midlife crises material, as he also did in “The Trip to Italy,” but to less effect here.

My only regret is that the film could not somehow take a leap forward to 1988. I would love to have seen what Lee and Will could do with "Die Hard."

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

There are many things wrong with Julie and Julia but, if you're looking to get hitched, you won't find a better booster.

The action sequences aren’t especially well designed, and the plot, such as it is, is essentially one catastrophe after another.

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

A documentary about the alternately celebrated and reviled German-born philosopher who gave us the catchphrase “the banality of evil.”

A smart little teen picture that, for a change, actually features recognizable teens.

It's an inescapable fact that Gould's singular musical insights – the way he brought out in Bach a mesmeric unity of sound – could only have arisen from a singular personality.

It’s a flurry of good gags and bad. The good ones are worth sitting around for.

The actors, all of whom seem too posed and pretty, are not particularly accomplished, and director Luis Mandoki lacks the visual imagination to bring the story to a boil.

Schrader really isn't interested in Crane except as the straw man for his moral lessons about sin and sexuality and the nature of celebrity. Auto Focus is the perfect capper to Crane's career: Even in a movie about himself, he remains minor.

Roberts, in her “serious” performances, is often a tad too stiff and monochromic, but she works well here with Hedges, who knows how to be volatile without chewing the scenery. They are quite believable as mother and son.

The mordancy of this movie will not surprise Solondz devotees, but unknowing audiences expecting a raunchy teen comedy from the film’s title should be forewarned. This is not “American Pie” in a kennel.

The Founder remains fascinating largely because Keaton is so good at guile and bile. Not once does he wink at the audience or overplay the obvious. His Kroc is magnetically repellent – more so, I venture to guess, than the filmmakers intended him to be.

With material this powerful, we shouldn’t have to continually be puzzling out what’s real and what’s staged.

The film itself vaporizes before your eyes, but it’s likable. Given its unstable mishmash of thuggery and whimsy, that’s something of an achievement.

Russell is unusual among first-time directors in his ability to mold and shape performance. [28 Jul 1994 Pg. F2]

Director Stefan Forbes interviews a slew of victims and beneficiaries of the Atwater attack machine and, in the process, gives us an even-handed portrait of a man who, as much as anybody, bears responsibility for the toxicity of high stakes political campaigning on both sides of the aisle.

This is a movie that cries out for more than the too-cool-for-school Coppola’s trademark hipster anomie. She may be too much a part of the celebrity-mongering world she portrays to do justice to its injustices.

As Jay and Silent Bob, Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith are the perfect comedy team for smart, dirty-minded 15-year-olds, which means just about all of us.

Damon is an agile comic performer, and Soderbergh knows how to serve him up without losing sight of the ultimate seriousness behind it all.

Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.

The result is that the wonderment, with nothing serious at risk, seems lackluster.

Overall, Diggers is like an Ed Burns movie -- but with fishing gear.

True love beckons in the guise of a dingbat played by Julianne Moore and all is right with the world. As Jon’s father, a man whose lifeblood is yelling, Tony Danza is very funny. He makes you understand what his son is escaping from.

Cory Yuen's So Close is a kind of Hong Kong martial-arts variation on the Charlie's Angels movies, only better.

Every generation has to discover the same clichés that were drummed into previous generations, and kids could do worse than to learn them from this film.

Has its moments.

Any highfalutin interpretations of his new film only serve to camouflage what is, in essence, a scam about a scam.

King is above all a pleasure-giver. He wants to heighten the knockabout joys of unfettered high spirits.

The film basically upholds the verity of the news story while not condoning the sloppiness, and it’s worth seeing mostly for Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance as Mapes, a battler consumed by righteousness.

While this may seem like an apologia for randy older men, it doesn't come off that way, and Cruz gives her best performance to date.

Kazi is a bundle of energy, and the film touches on an important and often-overlooked issue: The commercial pressure that is often brought to bear on rappers to be scurrilous and offensive. This project, which was produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, shows that there is another way.

In Gyllenhaal's all-out performance, it reminded me most of Judy Davis in "High Tide," another movie directed by a woman (Gillian Armstrong) about a misfit mother and her daughter. It has the same fierce honesty.

Danes doesn't quite fit into the mindscape – she's too bland for a human star – but Cox comes of age quite convincingly, De Niro is a hoot, as is Ricky Gervais as a slimy tradesman. Pfeiffer has a field day.

When Cohen and Ferrell are eyeing each other, you never saw a loopier pair.

It leaves us with a question that may be unanswerable: How does one extinguish terrorism when its causes are myriad?

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

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?

A sense of unease, of incompleteness, is, I think, the appropriate response to this movie. Instead of trying to fill in the blanks, Curran and Gross leave things open and ambiguous. Just like life.

Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.

Obviously a movie made by smart and talented people but sometimes you can outsmart yourself.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

Abel Ferrara, director of King of New York, is a virtuoso of grunge. He may not have all the equipment necessary to make a great movie -- he's not real big on narrative, logic, believability, human empathy -- but he sure knows how to shoot the cinematic works. In technical terms, King of New York is his most stylish job yet. In emotional terms, it's as aggressively wacked out as such earlier opuses as "Ms. 45" and "Fear City."

The best, and perhaps the only, reason to see Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is for Felicity Huffman's touching, shape-shifting performance.

She sometimes falls into the same trap that Lenny Bruce fell into, playing the taboo-breaking emancipator, but for the most part she's blessedly bawdy.

The film starts out as a freewheeling farce and turns into a pitch-black burlesque with surprising depths of feeling.

It's like being trapped inside a fever dream of Oscar-night production numbers.

The script is more functional than funny, and the animation, while adept, is not altogether memorable.

Right away in Miami Vice you know you're waist-deep in movieland.

The best episodes have the emotional resonance of full-length features, and yet I didn't want them to be a moment longer than they are.

Although Howard doesn’t go in for a lot of musicological analysis of Pavarotti’s genius, which would have enriched the presentation, he compensates by giving us an ample dose of the singing.

La Vie en Rose elevates Piaf the archetype over Piaf the artist. Although I question this approach, I'm not sure it could have been done any differently, at least given the facts of Piaf's life. If there is such a way, Duhan didn't find it.

Most middle movies in a trilogy simply mark time. Not this one.

Swimming With Sharks, the latest Tinseltown dig at Tinseltown, is being advertised as a jokey spoof, but it's something quite different: a dark slice of retribution that recalls Stephen King in his Misery mode.

The whiz-bang stuff doesn't kick in until the Peter-Gwen relationship (which is the best thing in the movie) is firmly established.

A story of overwhelming humanitarian sacrifice.

Mamet is so in love with the con that he's conned himself.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

I was looking forward to something a tad more satirical than this Hallmark card of a movie, which plugs innocence and goodness like they’re going out of style.

Weir has an epic imagination but, unlike, say David Lean, he doesn't fill out the epic vision with epic characters. The result is a film that seems simultaneously grand and skimpy.

The film is fine enough to make you forgive, if not forget, the fact that it exists primarily as a corporate enterprise and not as an imaginative tour de force.

It seems less irreverent than self-congratulatory.

This documentary about the evangelical belief in biblical prophecy is both overly ambitious and skimpy.

Most of all it’s about talking. It’s practically a nonstop jabberathon. What rescues the film from tedium is that much of the talk is enticing.

It's an expertly engineered popcorn movie - hold the butter substitute - but it also tries (and fails) to be a love story for the ages.

It's the kind of movie that creeps up on you, and this is due almost entirely to its lead actress, María Onetto, who looks as though she actually could solve one of those 8,000-piece puzzles.

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]

On its own limited terms, The Infiltrator, like its hero, delivers the goods.

It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

If the film doesn't really explore the pain and bitterness of this marriage, it's still leagues ahead of most such attempts.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

Smith, it should be noted, has compared Neville in interviews to Job. Tone down the highfalutin references. In the end, this is a sci-fi zombie movie, folks.

What unites everything is Jarmusch’s playful, hang-dog absurdism.

A lumpy admixture of politics and carnality, but when it all comes together, it has a lingering force.

At least “Hidden Figures” was savvy enough to please its crowds. A United Kingdom, with its saintly good folk and sneering bad folk emptily exhorting, is closer to a dry historical tutorial.

A faltering attempt at black comedy mixed with romantic melodrama, Married Life is always on the verge of being interesting but never quite gets there.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

The movie confirms what most of us have known all along: Electability is all about staying on message.

Ungainly and overly ambitious, The Butler tries to encompass too much history within too narrow a framework.

I wish Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had developed more of a life of its own instead of being essentially a flat visualization of the book.

In much the same way that Godard used heroines like Anna Karina or Bardot, Toback showcases Campbell's face as a placard of unknowability--a quality he recognizes as inherently feminine. The (inadvertent) question we are left with is, How much is there to know about her anyway?

As the movie moves through its murder mystery mode and begins racking up political points, Hank becomes a stand-in for all those Americans bewildered and beleaguered by the war. He becomes a Symbol.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

Patrice Leconte has directed excellent serious films such as "Monsieur Hire" and "Man on the Train," but when it comes to humor he loses his bearings. His latest attempt at seriocomedy, My Best Friend, is a premise in search of a film.

Succeeds in bringing a lump to the throat without, as is de rigueur these days, insulting our intelligence.

The movie often seems on the verge of being interesting but repeatedly retreats into a formless vapidity.

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.

Cruise gives his energetic all to the role, but he, too, doesn’t seem to be quite aware that Seal was morally compromised far beyond the shallow confines of this film.

Gandolfini, though, is a standout as the old-school father who can't abide his new-style son (but loves him anyway).

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

The film is frustrating because so many of its best possibilities are missed. But Bening keeps you watching, and, to a lesser extent, so does Jamie Bell as Peter Turner.

Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.

The bromance often seems generic, too. Fishburne gives a highly nuanced performance, one of his best, as he allows us to see in this man of God flashes of the rogue he once was. But the movie ultimately must be defined by Doc, and we never really get inside his head.

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.

Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward.

The cast is something of an indie movie hall of fame that includes Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Steenburgen, Brittany Murphy, and Toni Collette. Marcia Gay Harden is particularly fine as the murdered girl's mother.

Despite its arty veneer and its ostensibly political edge, Circumstance seems more interested in titillation than revelation.

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 best moments in “Parnassus” are not otherwordly but worldly. It’s a movie about a dying magician and the death of magic. This is a subject that obviously means a lot to Gilliam, and he makes us feel it in our bones.

If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.

Much of The Runaways plays out in the key of dreary. But there's a flinty integrity in this movie's look at the rock grind, and Stewart and Fanning are intensely watchable.

Overall this is a film in which, as the end credit documentary footage attests, the real story overwhelms its dramatization.

Branagh is marvelous at conveying his exasperation. His conceit is that Olivier offstage acted the same as Olivier onstage – as if all of life was a vast playlet. For someone as thoroughly actorly as Olivier, this is probably no exaggeration. I would like to think that the great man himself would have smiled at Branagh's rollicking rendition of tantrums.

Director and co-writer John Krokidas doesn’t have a very fluent gift for period re-creation – everything seems stagy – and most of the actors, playing divas of various stripes, overact.

Crystal Skull is a fun ride, but if we have to wait 19 years for the next one, that's OK by me.

The only thing missing from Salt is Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb with her steel blade-tipped shoes from "From Russia With Love." Come to think of it, the Russian defector here does indeed kill with steel-blade shoes. Nice touch.

Director Francis Lawrence stages the action sequences, both aboveground and underground, with a modicum of flair, and Julianne Moore as rebel leader Coin gives off some sparks – she’s a reformer with a totalitarian streak – but for the most part there is nothing divertingly new or different about this franchise fade-out.

The movie, at its best, is compellingly odd, which is also the most accurate description of Carrey's performance.

One of those documentaries that is more testimonial than investigation.

Tsunashima gives a deft performance in a role that starts out as caricature but becomes full-bodied. Collette commands the screen virtually the entire time.

If there is a single image that we take away from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," it is of Willy Loman weighted down to his very soul by his suitcases. The image that holds in this modern-day salesman's serenade is Nick the salesman reduced to selling off his own life.

[Apted] also has an unfortunate penchant for bland stateliness, and never more so than in Amazing Grace, a well-intentioned piece of historical waxworks.

It's a frisky, funny roundelay starring Stefania Sandrelli, and it features enough shouting and arm-waving to power a windmill.

Thompson is very good at playing imperious, and she even manages an unexpected trace of flirtiness in a few offhanded moments with Hanks.

I would rather have seen a documentary about the real women instead of this workmanlike dramatic rendition.

Seeing it will probably send you back to the original animated movie for refreshment.

Rossi investigates the increasing use of massive open online courses and other flexible programs and talks to such education experts as Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco.

At least Erik/Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender, is, well, magnetic.

His (Hamer) new film, 1001 Grams, is almost as good as “Kitchen Stories,” with a story equally unpromising – but only in theory.

We’re still essentially in the Land of Retread: An outer space voyage turns grisly-ghastly as gloppy, befanged creatures invade the crew’s innards and pop out – gotcha! – right on cue.

Keep your ears tuned for Helen Mirren as the imperious Dean Hardscrabble. Hogwarts would have loved her.

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.

Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.

It wants to be a movie about the intersection between criminality and the class system but, for that, it could have used a bit more class.

The film rapidly devolves into a lame buddy picture, part thriller, mostly goof.

The odd-couple pairing does yield its occasional rewards, though. The collision between Everett’s monosyllabic gruffness and Maud’s chatty ditherings is inherently funny, and so is her insistence on marriage before sex, which he finds confounding.

It's difficult to work up a strong case of the heebie-jeebies when you keep getting thrown out of the movie by all the atrocious acting.

Throughout the film Rudolph is working hard to put this thing over, mixing in slow-motion and shock cuts. But his heart is not really in it. His technique is both too good and not enough for this material, and it doesn't sit right. He's trying to glamorize dread. [19 Apr 1991, p.F1]

Brand can seem simultaneously randy and strung-out and is often very funny. Hill is surprisingly touching.

The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.

Ultimately, Ali is a far more complex creature than this movie allows for.

Cillian Murphy plays a hyper-feminine transvestite who spends much of the movie traipsing about an increasingly violent landscape in search of his long lost mother. His whirligig encounters, political and sexual, rarely soar.

Most of the time, however, we are watching pathology without benefit of insight.

Karsin doesn't adequately detail the political complexities of the struggle, but how can one not respond to someone like tribal leader Flor Ilva, who declares, "We women are warriors, not with weapons, but with our thoughts and through raising our children."

What does it all mean? I'm not convinced that Fricke's movies are much more than exalted travelogues, but you certainly feel as if you've been somewhere after you've seen one of them.

I call it art. And as long as I’m on the subject, I think the Grand Canyon is the greatest sculpture I have ever seen.

An inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy. Coppola has made some of the greatest films ever made in traditional narrative mode, but whenever he goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.

While I don't entirely rule out the possibility that Bruce is a hoaxster, it seems more likely that his story is one of those weird scientific anomalies that more frequently turn up as an Oliver Sacks case history.

I wish Fontaine would follow up with a sequel: "Coco After Chanel." Tautou's performance cries out for a second act.

Most Mafia movies are unduly sympathetic, but this one takes the cake. Peter Dinklage is excellent as the mob's chief lawyer.

Joe Eszterhas's screenplay is vastly more thoughtful than his scripts for "Basic Instinct" and its ilk, but the storytelling is too spotty for the movie to become the effective moral tale it might have been.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

The film, refreshingly, is less concerned with how Nathan performs in the competition than in how he navigates his way through the bramble of human interactions leading up to it.

It's a tortuous, unsatisfying movie, but it's not like any other film I've ever seen about an artist, and it has sequences of blinding intensity.

Altogether remarkable, a near-masterpiece.

The actors, who also include Rosamund Pike as a woman whose family was massacred by the Comanche, and Ben Foster, as a member of the military who killed an American Indian family, are all strikingly good.

Most movies about black inner-city life have been so male-oriented that Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. seems like a bulletin from the other side of the tracks. It’s more of a harbinger of better things to come than a solid achievement in its own right, but it’s moving in a fresh, invigorating direction.

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.

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

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.

Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.

This movie is a one-of-a-kind experience – blarney carried to rhapsodic heights.

Writer-director David Jacobson has a good eye for widescreen compositions and sustains a low-key note of dread but is less successful in his attempt to graft a neo-Western to a neo-noir.

It is not the redemptive uplift that I am objecting to here. It's the way that Bier manipulates us in order to send us aloft. She wants the world to be a better place. Fine. But what she has concocted here is an arty version of the same old Hollywood dumb-down dramaturgy. It just has a higher gloss.

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

What Batra is reaching for here is the fairy tale beguilements of Bollywood romance but without all the hoopla. He wants to tenderize the Bollywood clichés and bring the essence of their ardor into the real, teeming world of Mumbai.

Estevez directs with ease and assurance but, both internally and externally, not enough happens to these people.

Destined to become this year's love-it-or-hate-it movie. Is it OK to say I merely liked it a lot?

Almost a textbook example of how to do more with less. It's about aimless people who suddenly find their aim.

Gavron’s conventional approach to the material compares unfavorably to the newsreels and stills of the actual suffragettes that close out the film. The harsh reality comes through in that footage in a way that the film as a whole only approaches in bits and pieces.

Winkler is so interested in making Merrill admirable that he neglects to make him interesting. That's true of the movie too. In the ethics department, it's commendable. In the drama department, it's bland. [15 Mar 1991, p.F1]

The back-and-forth between the performers is tensely choreographed, and Buscemi does a good job opening up the action, which mostly takes place in a Manhattan loft.

It's all something of a stunt - "Speed" on a shoestring - but very well done.

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.

Too much of Sunshine is like a cross between a middling "Alien" movie and "Solaris" (the woozy Steven Soderbergh version).

A better movie would not have hinged its thesis so closely on Anna’s innocence. The film doesn’t fully allow for the fact that the issue of Anna’s veracity, or lack of it, is essentially a sideshow.

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

The film becomes cumulatively stranger as it goes along, and it has a lulu of a kicker.

Violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilized, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?

Freddy Krueger fans will exult and horror movie mavens will not be surprised: Wes Craven's New Nightmare is much better than the usual run of scare pictures. [14 Oct 1994, p.F4]

It's a B-movie with A-accouterments.

Mangold never ventures beyond the obvious. We're set up with righteous anger against the liberal establishment and then fobbed off with goombah melodramatics. The film should be called Cop Out.

Eric Eason's script is sometimes unduly contrived and derivative, but we are always aware that something larger is being played out.

The Imposter has too many reenactments for my taste, and Bourdin is glorified by Layton more often than he is condemned. Still, this is one creepy mystery.

Gretchen Mol is unrelentingly charming in the role and she almost - almost - makes you believe that someone as unclouded as this could actually exist. This film would go well on a double bill with "The Stepford Wives."

Williams once knew how to be very still and yet allow us to see the plangent human being underneath. In One Hour Photo, Sy's scary ordinariness is a species of acting stunt. There's no there there.

What gives the movie its poignancy – what turns it into something more than a polite entertainment – is Smith's role. Or, to be more exact, her performance, in tandem with Courtenay's.

Ridley Scott has made two iconic sci-fi films, "Alien" (1979) and "Blade Runner" (1982). Trying for a hat trick with Prometheus, he comes up short. I'll say this much for it – it's not boring.

The film’s title is derived from a magical black stone of Persian lore that reputedly absorbs the burdens of those who speak to it until it crumbles – freeing the speaker of her troubles.

Renoir at least looks like a great movie. If you want a full-scale immersion in this material, I recommend “Renoir, My Father,” Jean Renoir’s wonderful 1958 biography. This book is the touchstone for all matters Renoir, both père and fils.

It's almost impossible to watch this movie and not, on some level beyond reason, succumb. The Pursuit of Happyness is an expert piece of calculation: a male weepie engineered for the whole family.

I found myself staring at his new one, In Praise of Love (Éloge de l'Amour), in a state of rapt annoyance and befuddlement. It's constructed in two sections, which are far more fractured and opaque than the simple description I will here try to set out.

An actress named Moon Bloodgood, who started out as a hip-hop dancer and Laker Girl before getting into movie and TV work, plays a bush pilot and sometime girlfriend of Jerry's. The role is bland but that name is great.

The implicit question overhanging the film: Is the political impetus to present only “positive” imagery of black people an injustice to the fullest range of their experience?

Stoppard and his director, Michael Apted, must be aware of how dry their film is, because periodically they work in little thriller divertimenti -- car chases and such -- that only serve to point up how un-thrilling everything is.

I kept expecting Sacha Baron Cohen to traipse onto the scene. Alas, he doesn’t.

Although Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che may have an epic running time of almost 4-1/2 hours, its scope is surprisingly narrow.

Cloud 9 may not be my idea of a great movie, but it doesn't pretend that old folks are, by definition, sexless. In the movie business, this qualifies as a revolution.

Sorrentino’s magic is all smoke and mirrors. People calling this movie a visual feast must be awfully famished.

The best parts of the movie are its occasional animated sequences.

It’s a strange, unsatisfying, fragmented movie, but at its best it belongs in the same unconventional continuum as Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (about Bob Dylan) and “Love and Mercy” (about Brian Wilson).

Adams has a good camera eye and a fine feeling for the regional mores of the South, where she's from. Judd, who for a change isn't being terrorized in a thriller, is more nuanced and intense than she's ever been.

The best part of the movie is when the few who make it through are introduced to their new owners. It’s love at first touch.

The acting is fine -- and so is the moody-blues direction -- but, given the subject matter, the movie should be blacker and more disturbing.

The dialogue is sharp and so are the performances. Andrew Dominik directed this neo-noir in a low-key comic style that's alternately gritty and fancy. The gritty stuff is best.

Downsizing never quite goes where you think it’s going, and normally, I’d say that’s a plus. But confounding expectations only goes so far. You still have to get to a place worth getting to.

It has one big thing in its favor: Sally Hawkins’ performance as Langley. She’s perfectly cast, which, as a general rule, does not always translate into a perfect performance. Not so here.

It's a great piece of work in a movie that, whatever its failings, deserves to be seen even if you swear undying allegiance to the BBC mini-series.

Despite some occasional moments of real sadness and terror, the turmoil in this movie is decidedly on the upbeat.

It's been a while since we've had a good monster movie, and while Cloverfield probably won't give you sleepless nights, it will certainly keep you awake in the theater.

Miles Ahead is obviously a labor of love, but it falls into the trap of so many biopics about anguished artists – it confuses the anguish with the artistry.

Brad Pitt gives one of his best performances as Sgt. Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a tank commander with a passion for killing Nazis.

Erotic comedies are often attempted but rarely realized. Tamara Drewe is proof that sexy and funny need not be mutually exclusive.

Blunt and Friend strike a few flinty sparks, and Julian Fellowes’s script has its share of dry-as-dust witticisms. Most of the time, though, it’s a stiff pageant.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

In political terms, True Crime is a far cry from "Dirty Harry" -- it actually stands up for due process of law. In Hollywood, I believe this is known as mellowing.

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

At its best in the interludes between explosions.

I will never be comfortable with the concept of Bosch as charming prankster. Just one look at the paintings will cure you of that notion.

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?

I wish the film had gone even further into loopiness. Like Ant-Man, the film, directed by Peyton Reed, comes in two sizes – it’s sometimes big on laughs but often small on risk-taking.

As it is, “Mockingjay,” a big bore, suffers from being the transitional event before the big showdown.

Blithely entertaining but almost completely devoid of rigor.

Throughout it all, however, I couldn't escape the feeling that this movie belonged on television instead. It has the immediacy, but also the shallowness, of an extended TV episode. Talking heads proliferate and pontificate.

Given the flimsiness of the material, why settle for D. H. Lawrence when you can have the Playboy Channel instead?

Kushner's proactive stance on gay rights is prominently aired and, to a lesser extent, so are his musings on the Arab-Israeli situation. His participation in the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's controversial "Munich" did not make it into the film.

It would have been wonderful if Lee had consented to an interview for this documentary, but at least we have, among many others, her 99-year-old sister Alice, until recently a practicing lawyer in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala.

The timing is slack and the jokes repetitive. But, like most Will Ferrell movies, it has enough riotous moments to carry you through the dull stretches.

This is a film that starts out cynically and gradually morphs into sentimentality of a particularly high gloss.

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

State of Play is far from a great movie, but it's sentimental in all the right ways.

The wonderful Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr plays the harried papal spokesman. It's a marvelous movie until the halfway point, when it unaccountably devolves into silliness.

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.

Goony, so-so comedy.

Schmaltz this thick requires a director who can at least make us feel that our tears are not being shamelessly jerked. But St. Vincent is too clunky to hide its tear-slicked tracks. Maybe that’s a good thing. At least that’s more endearing than being worked over by a smooth operator who knows exactly which buttons to press.

But the film isn’t just a well-made TV-style thriller either. It’s on to something--the way upwardly mobile parents, hoping to make their lives more professionally fulfilling, unwittingly bring the danger of the unknown into their lives.

The best reason to see this documentary is for the stunning shots of polar bears and walruses in the Arctic Circle. If the filmmakers had just left it at that, they would have accomplished a lot.

As strong as Blood Diamond is in its best moments, I wish it had been even harder-edged. DiCaprio is remarkable - his work is almost on par with his performance this year in "The Departed."

If you've seen "To Sir, With Love," "Dead Poet's Society," "The Corn is Green," or "Stand and Deliver" - to take a random sample - you've already seen much of this movie. Swank is good, though, and so is Patrick Dempsey as her suffering husband.

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.

Crudup, whose features have the appropriate delicacy, plays Ned with complete conviction; it’s difficult to imagine anyone else succeeding as well.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

Even with Gere’s standout work, a little of Norman goes a long way, and this film offers up a lot of Norman.

This is not intended as a movie about what a genius must endure on the path to success. Sharad’s story is much more relatable than that.

Spielberg wants us to drop the techno-gadgets and join hands, but it’s the VR world that really juices him. He’s the ultimate fanboy making a movie about the need to move beyond being a fan.

Even though It Could Happen to You has its tenderized, good citizenship side, it's been written (by Jane Anderson) and directed (by Andrew Bergman) with an embracing cheer. It's blissfully uncynical.

But at its highest level of ambition, Proof fails to deliver. The film becomes a psychological whodunit where Catherine is shown to be either a martyr to her father or else his intellectual equal. None of it is terribly convincing.

Complexly intriguing documentary about psychedelic rock icon Roky Erickson.

Somewhere along the way -- 'round about the Ghost of Christmas Past stuff -- the magic has fallen out of the story. The treacly score by Miles Goodman, with songs by Paul Williams, doesn't help. The Muppets are at their best when they're anarchic, without all this soggy whimsy. [11 Dec 1992, p.F12]

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.

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.

Eastwood's earnestness has its own stoic charm. There's something nutty but also heroic in how he plays this macho-man-with-the-heart-of-a-woman premise with a straight face.

Viewers expecting a blistering attack on the fast-food business, or an Altmanesque panorama, will be disappointed, but it's a sensitive and humane piece of work.

It’s easy to call this film a video action game starring real people, but that “real” part means a lot.

For western fans, watching this movie is like encountering an old friend after a long absence.

It's not that Waters set out to make a social statement here. It's just that the landscape and his mindscape turn out to be a perfect fit.

Some of the gags are side-splitters, some just sit on the screen. But the film would have to be a great deal worse to prevent Naked Gun die-hards from lining up. [18 Mar 1994, p.F6]

Mos Def makes it work. It's a truly daring piece of acting because it skirts racial stereotyping and is so out of key with everything else in the movie. But that's just why it is so good.

In a confused world, this is a movie with answers.

This is not just a musicologist's dream; it's our dream, too.

A glossy, depthless melodrama.

Most movies about rock are such dithery jobs that "BackBeat" may seem more impressive than it really is. It's lively and full of good music and it plays around with a fascinating subject -- the Fifth Beatle and his one true love. But it doesn't really illuminate that subject or those years or that music. It's a Pop treatment of Pop. [15 Apr 1994, p.F1]

A celebration of the gloriously mundane.

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.

A crime thriller that is strong on sultry atmosphere--you practically break into a sweat watching it--but weak on believability.

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.

It's all tease in the first half, and all implausibilities in the second. Still, Thomas is always worth watching, in French or in English, whether her mood be chilly or tropical.

The filmmakers are clearly on Wise’s side, but they are also eminently fair.

Depp is rather sweet in portraying Don Juan's self-delusions, but his performance is hampered by the role.

She (Weisz) accomplishes the near-impossible here: She humanizes a Gothic conceit and, in so doing, turns stage blood into real blood.

He uses Vacth, a beauty who somewhat resembles the young Nastassja Kinski or Dominique Sanda, for her eerie, implacable hauteur. There is a mask behind her mask.

It's a sweet and disquieting excursion made by filmmakers whose eyes and ears and imaginations are in marvelous sync.

Wilkinson’s acting is likely to be undervalued simply because it seems effortless.

This is fire-breathing melodrama masquerading as social commentary.

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]

In The Game, Fincher pulls back from the total gross-out but sustains a tone of aggravated anxiety. Hitchcock could have done this material and still made its perversities pleasurable.

One of the many, many things wrong with Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightley as literature's most famous adulteress – take that, Emma Bovary! – is that one never feels the love. It's a conceit in search of a movie. It could just as easily have been titled "Décor."

The only genuine moments of emotion come not from the lead actresses but from that great trouper Blythe Danner.

Plenty of terrible movies know how to work your tear ducts. Here's a weepie that, in Pfeiffer's performance, touches you on the highest levels.

Crammed with such big-name crowd-pleasers as Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner, Maverick reaches for that Feel Good feeling. It settles for Feel OK.

Whether you deem this project an extravagant boondoggle or a masterpiece, you have to admire Christo’s tenacity in finally making it happen, as chronicled in the documentary Walking on Water.

The rural atmosphere is well wrought and so is the depiction of phony evangelism – but it all devolves into the usual heebie-jeebies by the end.

Even though the various patients too often come across as cutesy case studies, Fleck and Boden for the most part avoid working their lives up into some grand-scale "Cuckoo's Nest"-style microcosm of humanity.

He was the Beatles of the hair business.

The language of that poem, which periodically pours out from the screen, is the best thing in the movie. The worst thing: the interpolated animated sequences that are meant to "illustrate" the poem but which can't begin to compete with the imagery evoked by Ginsberg's words.

Tom Hooper, who directed "The King's Speech," is not great with action and big set pieces, but he gets the job done. What makes Les Misérables work are the up-close moments when he can focus on performance and song.

Eastwood gets all noirish for us but, like Jolie's performance, there's a rote quality to it all. Even the mournful little ditties that Eastwood composed for the soundtrack seem canned.

I wish the film had probed more deeply into why anybody would face those odds. George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” has never quite cut it for me.

The strongest exchange in the film comes when he is confronted by several angry black activists who believe what he is doing is self-abasing and hurtful to the cause of civil rights. It is left for you to be the judge. I think he’s a hero. Every little bit helps.

The law of commerce worked this time around: One terrific thrill ride has begotten another.

The film has a transcendent spookiness.

It should all resemble a vanity project except for one thing: The film lays out the case for reform with steadfast rigor.

Green Zone wraps up with a wish-fulfillment fantasy that is about as believable as watching reinforcements riding in to save Custer.

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.

Considerably less slick than "An Inconvenient Truth," and no less urgent.