Peter Rainer

Zhang is working in a popular sentimental mode here, but his connection to the material -- and to us -- is heartfelt and without a trace of condescension. As a filmmaker, he's the opposite of a con artist, and his new movie is a gentle marvel.

Terrifying precisely because it doesn't go in for cheesy shock tactics and special effects. (Those sharks are REAL.)

Consistently good as long as it centers on Buck and his seriocomic travails.

Watching it is a bit like checking out a grade-school talent show on parents’ night. The eagerness of the performers, their flat-out verve and innocence, wins you over. For a while at least...Finally, the film wears you down.

Director Marc Forster is very good at amping up the terror, but after a while, we reach zombie overload and we might as well be watching an infestation of Transformers.

Shyamalan is a one-trick pony who needs to find a new rodeo.

An oddly discursive documentary that is, ultimately, more about Pierre Bergé, his companion and business partner of 50 years.

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

Preteen girls – and not just those who are already American Girl fanatics – should be entranced. And why not? Not many movies for that audience are as respectful as is this one.

Laggies itself isn’t exactly slow – its pace is pleasantly meandering – and it’s far from aimless, although what it’s aiming for isn’t always clear.

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

No doubt some of it is charming enough to induce giggles in its preteen target audience.

This is the loopiest star vehicle in ages.

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.

The film is certainly worth seeing, but it should be better than it is.

In addition to being a beloved author and illustrator, Beatrix is also presented as an early feminist and environmentalist who took control of her literary empire and saved vast acres of luscious farmland from greedy developers, eventually bequeathing property to Britain's National Trust.

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]

The film is an indictment of a cultural tragedy; a testament to the steadfastness, against all odds, of the Indigenous community; and a plea for healing.

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

Soderbergh does overemphasize the "little-people" dreariness of it all. But there is much low-key humor here, too, albeit on the dark side.

Just sweet enough to avoid being negligible.

Swinton's performance, and practically everything else about Julia, seems off – tone-deaf. She plays an out-of-control wastrel who enters into a kidnapping scheme gone horribly wrong, as does the movie.

The Young Karl Marx disappointingly resembles for the most part a conventional biopic. It has little depth, either political or psychological.

First-time director James McTeigue's big, bold imagery, with slashing reds and blacks, is a close approximation of the novel's look and feel.

Director Mark Waters does a fine job meshing the fantastical with the quotidian.

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

Reygadas is both a sophisticate and a primitive: He sets up his film as a religious allegory, with the nameless painter as a kind of suffering Christ and the old woman--whose name is Ascen, as in Ascension--as his redeemer.

Of all the Star Wars-themed movies, this one is the closest to a Saturday afternoon serial/western. Don’t expect more than that. But it could have been less.

The action, directed by Shane Black, ranges from passable to interminable. The plot goes from clang to bang. Downey Jr. is still the best thing about this series.

This movie might have been better if it hadn't fashioned itself as a cross between "Citizen Kane" and "Chinatown," and instead had used Reeves's story to dramatize the transitional state of 1950s Hollywood.

The film is a stodgy snooze, and Theron, who is about as expressive here as a porcelain doll, lacks all believability--she's followed her best performance (in Monster) with her worst.

Inherently dramatic but needed a stronger director than Anthony Fabian, who overdoes understatement.

The filmmaking is TV-movie-of-the-week dull and Robinson’s ordeal is hammered home to the exclusion of virtually everything else in his life.

The bloody wrap-up isn't handled especially well, and I must confess that the most shocking thing about the movie was the casting of Carrie-Anne Moss as a suburban mom. I kept expecting her "Matrix" skills to show up in the final reel.

Sometimes, oftentimes, trailers showcase only the good stuff. The actual movie is a pale substitute. Such is the case here.

Really effective horror films make us participants in the horror. Jacob's Ladder doesn't draw us in in that way. It's a movie about interior states that's all on the outside. [30 Oct 1990, p.1]

Throughout the film there are small, rapturous moments.

This much can be said for Roman Polanski's carnal hoot-fest Bitter Moon -- it keeps you wondering from scene to scene if the director has gone bonkers. No doubt a lot of the lunacy is intentional, but it's still lunacy. And not terribly enjoyable lunacy either. The film plays like a dirty joke that somehow got lost in the translation.[18 Mar 1994, p.F1]

The fact that this movie, with its 65,000 painted frames, was even attempted, is daunting. It’s the kind of folly that demands a measure of respect, for the effort, if not altogether for the result.

Puenzo may have started out to make something more ambitious than an intelligent, real-world horror thriller, but what she did achieve is still commendable. The melodramatics in this movie may be cooked up, but the fears it conjures are very real.

Jenkins has an admirable feeling for, as the French would say, mise en scène, and a gift for placing actors in naturalistic settings. What he lacks at this point is a strong story sense.

Most of the music is by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, and it’s heartfelt without ever really touching the heart.

A long wallow in misery and, after a while, the pain morphs into polemic.

Whether intentionally or not, Martin has given us something truly spooky: A full-fledged portrait of a hollow man.

Philip Noyce's anti-apartheid drama is tense and thoughtful, if somewhat marred by Hollywood-style thrills.

The most enjoyable thing about the "Ocean's" movies is that nobody involved seems to take them seriously. The star wattage is immense but the stars themselves are refreshingly self-deprecating, almost satirically so.

As any kind of introduction to Ibsen, this film is more a turnoff than a turn-on.

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

We’re left with an enigma that is insufficiently probed: How does art this banal nevertheless capture us?

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

A standout is Ben Mendelsohn’s Aussie nutcase.

Because almost all animated films now are computer generated, the 2-D animated Curious George has the not-unpleasant patina of an antique.

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

The action and special effects are mostly first-rate and Vogt-Roberts maintains a vaguely satiric tone that sidesteps schlockiness.

Caine is burlesquing his own iconography and enjoying every minute of it. He hasn't lost his dignity, though; it takes a lot of self-possession to act this blissfully silly. He even looks good with bad teeth.

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

Oliver Stone's film paints a reasonably complex portrait of Morrison's life and times. [01 Mar 1991]

The actors, who portray a reunion that is more sparring match than love fest, strike occasional sparks.

Blethyn, as Frank's wife, is less high-strung than usual, which is a boon.

Seraphim Falls is essentially one long, bleak stalk-and-kill action thriller.

Still, I prefer a bit more drama in my political docudramas. The Conquest never really breaks out of its genre in the way that, say, "The Queen" or "Il Divo" or the more fictionalized "In the Loop" did.

Playing a cantankerous, beer-swigging human wreck of a man for the umpteenth time, Nolte is very good but very familiar.

At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.

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

Needless to say, everybody comes equipped with their very own overweight baggage; old grudges are revived, new ones are invented; and big personal revelations – most of which you can see coming a mile away – arrive on cue.

Director Wladyslaw Pasikowski has made the mistake of going about his business as if he were fashioning a horror film.

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.

G.I. Jane is liberated, all right--from good acting and a good story.

This monstro-budgeted sequel to The Matrix has more than twice as many special effects as the original... there is also more than twice as much philosophic bull as before--and there was plenty of that the first time around.

This slick doodle of a movie is nothing so much as an advertisement for itself.

I’ve never been able to figure out if Reggio is an artist or a con artist. Perhaps, in some ways, he’s both. He has claimed in interviews that he intended to make a movie about “the wonders of the universe.” Whatever he’s made, for better or worse, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

In Beautiful Boy, Ku manages to take a new-to-movie subject and flatten it into something that, despite its harrowing contours, is often grindingly familiar.

For a movie that is about a collection of oddballs, it can sometimes feel rather generic. But at its core, the film is not a comedy at all. The eccentricities issue from real adversity.

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

It's the barbs, and not the inspirationalism, that work best in this movie.

With a minimum of actorly fuss, Winger shows us the rage and hurt inside this overcontrolled woman. It's a great piece of acting – high drama at the service of the highest talent.

I was expecting something raunchier. Instead, what we have here is a wistful, somewhat overextended but occasionally sweet comedy about a couple that can't – in more ways than one – quite get it together.

The best part is that, amid all the hubbub, Jeunet, improbably and inevitably, draws out a love story between Bazil and Elastic Girl. Without it, Micmacs would have imploded. The romance, which is funny and sexy at the same time, anchors the shenanigans.

Fear of a Black Hat is designed to be a rap version of the classic mock rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap, and the idea is so funny that for a long time the film coasts on our good will. But it should be funnier than it is. [03 Jun 1994, p.F4]

At least the film brings up a disturbing piece of history without sensationalizing it. And it does believably portray why so many Germans, with the war at last over and the economy beginning to boom, preferred to forget what many claimed they never knew.

It's a modest film in most respects, but Albert Finney as Alfie is a man of great importance indeed, reminding us again that he's one of the most towering talents in film today.

Compared with, say, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," which featured this sort of stuff in practically every frame, Marshall's film is downright Disneyish.

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.

Too much of The Names of Love is a joke book posing as a movie.

If you have claustrophobia and/or fear insects, the last film you should see is Bug. I'm not sure it's worth a trip even if you don't suffer from those maladies.

It’s a tricky, harrowing little film. Kazan keeps things fairly schematic--every plot point is secured, every look is “knowing"--but the overall effect is ambiguously unsettling.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.

The Ice Harvest isn't a subversive piece of work; it's not making some grand statement about the dark side of the holiday spirit. But what it IS saying in its grimly funny way is that we can't always control the timing of our disasters.

It’s a universal story that is also, by virtue of its very particular time and place, a singular experience.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is an ersatz experience, a commingling of forced uplift and exotica, but it's moving anyway.

Instead of the cat-and-mouse cogitations and psych-outs one might rightly expect from this high concept, we're fobbed off with a lot of sub-Die Hard theatrics and stinko plotting.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.

I know we’re supposed to think that Besson’s daffy cinematic calisthenics are entertaining because at least they are not boring. But I was bored. It didn’t help that Morgan Freeman shows up as a brainy scientist explaining everything to us in his deepest intonations. When was the last time Freeman, a great actor, really acted?

May be accurate around the edges, but at its heart it's a fairy tale.

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.

At some point in their careers, most male actors want to play (a) Hamlet, and (b) a hit man. I hope that Clooney has gotten "b" out of his system.

When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.

What we're left with is outrage in a vacuum. It's impossible to separate out the stop-loss tactic from the misadventures of the war itself, and that's what this film, to its discredit, accomplishes.

The problem with The Good Shepherd is that it's a closed-off movie about a closed-off individual. Wilson is inscrutable from the get-go, and remains so. Damon does subtle work within the narrowest of confines.

The inevitable showdown between these two paragons is something of a fizzle; there's too much over/under-acting going on.

An ungainly, intermittently harrowing omnibus filled with moments of piercing sorrow and rage.

Night Moves may have a soft, almost dreamy feel, but at the core it’s crucially hard-headed. In its own quiet way, in how it pulls together our utopian ideals and home-grown fears, it’s the zeitgeist movie of the moment.

I wish I could say it's a resurrected classic but, alas, it's mostly a mess – a 2-1/2-hour mess no less.

Marvelously funny.

The best thing to come out of Sunshine Cleaning is the confirmation that Adams, one of Hollywood's most delightful comediennes, is also capable of piercing drama.

Lindo gives a powerhouse performance of immense feeling and subtlety.

Kingsley is amusing to watch, however, even though he overdoses on strangeness. He's like a superannuated hippie crossed with the swami he just played in "The Love Guru."

Movies about doubles are, almost by definition, creepy, but Villeneuve, not to be outdone, piles on the weirdness. He’s big on spider imagery, but the web is flimsy.

There is one aspect of Conviction that is a real cheat. No mention is made that Kenny, six months after his release from prison, accidentally fell and fatally fractured his skull. Did the filmmakers think that our knowing this would wreck a happy ending? For a film that prides itself on its realism, this omission is unspeakably wimpy.

For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.

David Mamet's Oleanna, adapted from his two-character play, is about sexual harassment, but it's the audience for this movie that gets harassed. Mamet must mean for this movie to be as enjoyable as fingernails scraping a blackboard. For both men and women, watching it is intended as an act of penance for all our sexist, elitist, feminist, patriarchal ills.

The most inventive aspect of the film, aside from a lovely, daffy romantic duet between hypernerds played by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig, are the promotional tie-ins with which we’ve been inundated -- Ron hawking Dodge Durango trucks, accepting journalism school awards, etc.

I am not a fan of food you need a microscope to see, but if your idea of fine dining is pumpkin meringue sandwiches, bone marrow tartare with oysters, tea shrimp with caviar anemones, and ice vinaigrette with tangerines and green olive, then by all means make haste to El Bulli.

The film is almost three hours long and precious little of it feels new – not from Scorsese or from anybody else.

Has some vitality, but it sinks into cliché just the same.

A pleasantly disposable romantic comedy starring the once and future indie-queen Parker Posey.

A great movie could be pulled from this horror but writer-director Geoffrey Wright gets taken in by all the mayhem and clobbering.

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

Tends to settle for easy, homiletic insights. But it also has a collection of first-rate performances by some marvellous actresses.

Without an actor of Broadbent’s poise and humor, The Sense of an Ending – which, I must add, is appropriately also the title of a famous work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode about theories of fiction – would be a bit too fusty.

Neither terrible nor excellent; Hayek, who also co-produced, may have obsessed for years about this project, but the result is a fairly standard this-happened-and-that-happened biopic.

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

What saves it all from being sordid is the open desire of the director, Gregory Jacobs, and his writer, Reid Carolin, to make sure the women in the film, not the male dancers, are ultimately the ones who are celebrated.

The film works best when it focuses on the touching, crazymaking relationship between the two men.

The White Crow fitfully does justice to Nureyev’s overwhelming desire to be an artist, and that’s not a negligible achievement.

When, at the end, we hear Cheney intone “I was the bad guy so you didn’t have to be,” the self-serving gravity of that pronouncement rings hollow because the movie is hollow, too.

Debbie’s assemblage of her crack team has its sly amusements, especially when Cate Blanchett, as Debbie’s hypercynical best friend, and Rihanna, playing a master hacker, show up. But Rihanna, along with Mindy Kaling, who plays a jewelry expert, are vastly underused, as is Awkwafina as a world-class pickpocket. On the other hand, hammy Helena Bonham Carter, as a cash-strapped fashion designer, is overused. Her hats are funnier than her dialogue.

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

Frances McDormand deserves much better than Lisa Cholodenko’s flat-footed Laurel Canyon...McDormand alone makes the picture worth seeing: Her character is a rash combo of steel and dissolution and regret.

The real love story here is between Moore and his bullhorn.

Disney studios, director Randall Wallace, and his screenwriter Mike Rich, obviously targeting a "faith-based" audience à la "The Blind Side," lard the soundtrack with "Oh Happy Day" and readings from the Book of Job.

Grant is a fine actor ("Withnail and I," "Gosford Park") and, although he doesn't appear in Wah-Wah, his spiritedness as a performer carries through to some of the others in his cast.

Sean Penn is one of those actors, like Nicolas Cage, who is best (sometimes worst) when he's over-the-top. Unlike Cage, Penn doesn't pour himself into dreadful commercial vehicles. No, his dreadful movies are usually not destined for the multiplex. Case in point: This Must Be the Place.

By holding the shot, as she so often does in this film, Takesue is encouraging audiences to take a deep, long look at things they might otherwise miss.

This is one of those stories that, on some primal level, goes straight to the heart. Be aware that the film features a child rape scene.

Taut and straightforward and a little grungy, which is how these movies ought to be.

Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?

The entire enterprise ultimately seems designed to turn Austen into a self-help guru.

Do we really need another Hulk movie? I was one of the few critics who actually liked Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," but it didn't exactly ring the cash registers or clamor for a continuation.

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.

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.

Boyle loads his movie with so many snazzy effects that we lose sight of what it all means – if anything. His showoffiness confuses.

Set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai during World War II, Ang Lee's uneven new film is a bit like a Chinese variant on Paul Verhoeven's "The Black Book." The sex scenes in this otherwise overly prim period piece are extremely graphic.

Just about everything connected to this movie is a tie-in, except for the popcorn. And even then I'm not too sure.

Oka! is a fascinating movie with many free-form charms.

The film centers almost entirely on the faces of the townspeople, which Von Trier frames vividly. There’s nothing static about his technique, but everything else about the movie is dreary and closed off.

What goes on inside the mind of a terrorist who is willing to blow himself for the cause? The War Within is one of the few films that attempts to deal with this subject in a nonexploitative way.

Good at scenes of high-level nastiness, but there's too much confusing exposition in this "Legacy" and the action scenes, some of them good, are too little and too late.

Blomkamp overdoes even his best effects. (I would have welcomed more vistas of Elysium to break up the grungefest.) If Elysium is an example of how recession-era Hollywood intends to dramatize the rift between the haves and the have-nots, let’s hope the studios don’t also bring back Smell-O-Rama.

Its wasted cast includes Dyan Cannon, Sally Kellerman, Len Cariou, and Brenda Vaccaro, who miraculously manages to give a fine performance in this malarkey.

Mangold front-loads the action, but near the end there’s a first-rate fight atop a bullet train between Wolverine/Logan and some especially pesky ninjas. It puts the train fights in the recent “The Lone Ranger” to shame.

The Karate Kid will probably work best for young audiences unaware of its predecessor – or of much of anything else for that matter.

Camping it up, Jackson is hilarious.

At its best, the film demonstrates a showbiz truism: It takes a lot of hard work to make something look easy.

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

Great on atmosphere and less good on everything else. That’s not entirely a knock.

For the most part, plays like a pretty good TV police procedural.

It's so shamelessly obliging that just about every audience of whatever stripe will find something to like in it at least some of the time. It's a confoundingly enjoyable movie because, by all rights, it should be terrible.

Dyrholm’s extraordinary performance is conspicuously better than Thomsen’s. She’s the best – the only – reason to check out The Commune.

Even a subpar James Bond movie is worth seeing because, well, it’s James Bond. But if one of the most successful and long-running franchises in movie history wants to keep pumping, it’s once again time to change the formula.

It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.

It’s both lowdown and effete, a jamboree of whoopee jokes and sick wit.

The latest, and, one fears, not the last episode in the kiss-kiss-bang-bang saga of L.A. police Detectives Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) is even more of a comic strip than its immediate predecessor. [15 May 1992]

All I can say is, I certainly hope this dreary, bleary comedy doesn’t end up serving as a referendum on anything. That would be a disservice to women, not to mention movies.

Despite his sorcerer bona fides and voluminous cape, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange isn’t strange enough, and trying to parse the convolutions of the Marvel multiverse is more exhausting than engaging.

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.

Baker is a humanist – there is nothing exploitative about what he does here. He’s after deeper emotional truths.

A hushed and powerful piece.

What hits home is Renner’s performance, which gives full weight both to Webb’s fierce, abiding love for journalism and his despair when his livelihood – his reason for being – is trashed. It’s a tragedy, doubly so since the core of Webb’s allegations remains unchallenged today.

It’s a delicate little fable that creeps up on you. It seems slight at first, but it’s held together by a performance from the veteran actress Kirin Kiki, playing an older lady who makes supernal dorayakis, that cuts very deep.

Parker "opens up" a play that was perfectly wonderful closed down. Wilde subtitled his masterpiece "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." This movie seems intent on being a trivial comedy for trivial people.

Since this is a coming-of-age movie about a poor rural kid who grapples with the big city, it would be nice if its protagonist weren’t such a lummox.

The most powerful sequences in the movie are the linked vignettes involving Margaret and the various grown-up children whom she attempts to help in their search for – what, exactly? Closure? Catharsis?

In real life, Mary and Elizabeth never met, but this film, directed by Josie Rourke and written by Beau Willimon, stages numerous interactions, many of them accompanied by flaring nostrils.

If the head of the bureau is God, then why is he played by Terence Stamp and not Morgan Freeman?

Fiennes's performance, tricky and impassioned, is the showpiece.

The fact that it's based on a true story doesn't alter the fact that, like most such Hollywood movies, it seems fabricated.

Switching between the 1950s, the '60s, and the present, it's compelling in a middling miniseries kind of way – expansive but not terribly deep.

It takes awhile to get going but, still, it’s rather sweet.

Hartley turns what might have been a lurid pulp thriller into a freeze-dried art thing. He squeezes all the juice out of pulp. [19 May 1995]

It’s not really such a great achievement to have women cops in the movies acting as boorish and rowdy as their male counterparts, especially since the movie seems designed for a sequel. But then again, what movie these days – or at least this summer – isn’t?

No great claims should be made for In Her Shoes. If the aim here was to show how chick lit can become just plain lit, the effort failed. But there is something to be said for froth when it's expertly whipped.

Tomorrowland is a rather sweet excursion into speculative sci-fi, and, wonder of wonders, it doesn’t even seemed primed for a sequel. But this movie about the thrill of the visionary is, alas, mostly earthbound.

Director and co-writer Emmanuelle Bercot doesn’t go in for a lot of plot, and the film’s one-thing-after-another trajectory, at least for a while, is engagingly shaggy.

It’s a big movie, but in an emotional, not a historical, sense. Oftentimes it has the hushness of a chamber drama even when the world is its stage.

RED is a poisoned valentine to the CIA, and that approach, too, is in keeping with its cold-war sentimentality.

This is a movie about how one’s passion can burn away and leave in its place a vast nostalgia.

It's been said that a thriller is only as good as its chief villain, and, in the same way, most noirs are only as good as their suckers. Palmetto has a good sucker but not much else.

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

Barrymore pulls off the neatest trick of the year: She makes all this pop schlock matter.

The best commentator is Alda, whose rueful memories of being raised as a boy in burlesque are the film's highlight. "It was a form of abuse," he says of those days, but without rancor. It was, after all, the only childhood he knew.

Kittelsen is a funny, expansive actress, and director Anne Sewitsky manages the sad-comic tonal shifts with emotional accuracy.

Carrère, wisely I think, doesn’t turn the film into a reformist anthem. Shooting in a semidocumentary style, he allows us to absorb, along with Marianne, the relentless accretion of injustices. He also gives us some of the most believable portraits of female friendship I’ve ever seen in a movie.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

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

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

Not much depth or political examination here. The film works best as a survivalist’s manual.

What we're getting in this movie isn't necessarily better; it's just more.

Is Jack, who is patterned on a real-life character, sociopathic or just plain clueless? Gallo doesn't seem to care. He cares about parading before us lowlifes living the high life.

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

Travolta gives a hangdog performance as the world-weary cop obsessed with rooting out the killers. Hayek and Leto share a few tart black comic moments as the film spirals into a bloodbath.

Exhaustingly action-packed.

Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.

It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.

The filmmakers are smart enough – or cynical enough – to realize that we don't watch movies like Under the Same Moon in order to be surprised. We go to them for a good cry.

It’s a rarity, and a real pleasure, to find a movie that presents without condescension rural working-class people, especially women.

It is one continuous fight sequence from opening scene to final credits, but lacks the blood, profanity, and gore that would have merited a more adult rating.

This is no antique show: Faced with an audience, they are still amazingly vital and sometimes amazingly lewd.

Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game. He employs the same motion-capture technology that he first used in "The Polar Express," to slightly better effect.

Pacino still gets a blast out of acting. His performance in this film about a blocked performer is gloriously unblocked – a valentine to vanity.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

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.

Far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.

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

Zamperini’s life story is genuinely inspirational, but the movie seems fashioned as a standard-issue profile in courage, with Zamperini, after a troubled youth, transformed into an almost saintlike figure. He would have been every bit as inspirational, even more so, without the halo.

Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.

Although their responses too often seem rehearsed, their innocence is touching and redemptive.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

By all rights, a movie about a girl who finds true love with an orphaned busboy (Christian Slater) who needs a heart transplant should be a hoot. It’s a unique premise--that doesn’t mean it’s a good premise. And swatches of the film are indeed as goopy as one might fear. But what keeps the film together is Tomei’s performance.

Ash's dialogue keeps the movie just goofy enough that even audiences that don't go in for schlock-horror phantasmagorias will be tickled. [19 Feb 1993, Calender, p.F-8]

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”

Glenconner is such a class-conscious caricature that he doesn't need the filmmakers to do him in; he does a sterling job all by himself.

The Lost World is a smoother, scarier ride than its predecessor, with twice as many dinosaurs twice as well designed eating twice as many people...But he's not particularly playful with his terrors here, and that's a disappointment coming from a filmmaker who can mix scares and laughs the way no one else ever has.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Although it’s refreshing to see a movie that stands up for charter schools and takes on teachers unions for their hammerlock on educational oversight, Bowdon overcorrects. His home state of New Jersey may not be an isolated case but neither, with its high level of corruption, should it be seen as altogether representative of all countrywide educational ills.

Firth is very good at playing racked men of high principle. He’s so well cast as Lomax that, at times, he’s almost too perfect in the role. He’s still the best thing about the movie.

This may be the first crime thriller to explicitly utilize superstring theory but, in its woozy romanticism, it's not that far removed from this year's other time-warp movie, "The Lake House," about two lovers living in parallel years - or "Frequency," which starred Jim Caviezel as a good guy.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."

So many movies these days are being linked, often quite tenuously, to current politics. Let this new film be no exception. I am happy to say that Ice Age: The Meltdown points up for toddlers the dangers of global warming.

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

Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.

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.

So how good/bad is Cars 3? If we’re talking Pixar threepeats here, it’s certainly no “Toy Story 3.” Instead, it’s a reasonably diverting, somewhat sluggish attempt to reinstall the “heart” of the first installment.

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

Savages isn't about anything except flashily directed mayhem. In this nest of vipers, it's the slitheriest varieties that survive – at least for a time.

As Molière, Romain Duris is frisky and, playing the wife of his benefactor, Laura Morante proves once again that she is one of the most intelligent and attractive actresses in the world.

By the end of the film, everybody has been triple- and quadruple- and even quintuple-crossed, but the characters still standing all seem to be very pleased with themselves for a job well done. If only we could figure out what the job was exactly.

Although his movie often resembles the kind of promotional video one might find as an extra on a concert DVD, N'Dour in full throttle is a sight, and sound, to behold.

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.

Trevorrow and his co-screenwriters (Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Derek Connolly) do bring some nice low-key touches to the thudfest, and action is satisfying, if not galvanizing.

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

"Money Never Sleeps" doesn't get inside the sociopathology of the money culture. In a sense, it is a product, an expression, of that culture. Maybe that's why it's so disagreeably agreeable.

The Whistleblower is frustratingly uneven, but at least it affords us the rare opportunity these days to meet up with a movie hero who isn't wearing jammies and a cape.

I wish the film, which is mostly a standard-issue talking-heads-and-clips affair, had showcased more of her performing, but what we see still justifies her fleeting fame.

Isn't terrible exactly, but it's bland, and in some ways that's worse. It's a romance posing as a detective story in which the solution is obvious and not worth the fuss.

The result may have value to '60s sociologists, ethnologists, superannuated hippies, and Kesey fanatics, but for the most part what is on view is a jumble of scenes featuring pranksters getting high on grass and LSD.

Radcliffe and Kazan have a nice nerds-in-clover rapport. If only the movie wasn’t so satisfied with how cute it is.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

The performers are so likable that you stay with them even when, as is often the case, the material is hit-or-miss.

What actors! The great Miriam Margolyes has a wonderful cameo as a scullery maid, and Colin Firth manfully endures a face full of frosting. And then there's Angela Lansbury, playing her first movie role in 20 years as the villainous Aunt Adelaide.

It's a soggy farce that not even its top-notch cast can rescue – though not for want of trying.

Cameron, tall and lanky, fitted himself into the podlike chamber and dropped seven miles to the ocean floor. Although he didn’t encounter anything other than barrenness, he did bring back to the surface 100 new species of microorganisms. I hope National Geographic appreciates the effort.

The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

All this is mighty silly, but there's something to be said for watching a French movie that, for a change, isn't about l'amour, existential angst, or madness. It's oddly reassuring to know that Hollywood isn't the only place where dithery, disposable spy spoofs are manufactured.

Even the "surprise" appearance of Keith Richards, as the scurvy father of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, has already been hyped to death in the advance press.

A lovely confection.

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

Streep’s performance has been criticized for being too theatrical, but that’s off the mark: The character she’s playing is supposed to be theatrical. She’s a woman playing a part – the ravaged matriarch.

I suppose it's asking too much of Ratner to impart some kind of visionary flourish to the proceedings. But without it, these comic-book movies all tend to look the same.

The pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film's frayed sleeve… Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it's a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows [12 Oct 1990]

Despite all the heavy artistic artillery Mendes has brought to bear, his movie isn't all that far removed conceptually from "Top Gun" - which was also about military men itching for a chance to rock 'n' roll. The only difference is, "Top Gun" was unabashedly a popcorn movie while Jarhead is a box of unpopped kernels passing itself off as a full meal.

Gene Hackman is excellent when he isn't overdoing his patented nice-guy routine.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

Other welcome faces include Alicia Vikander as a CIA analyst who has a better bead on Bourne than her superiors; Julia Stiles, in a repeat appearance as the spy’s former contact; and Riz Ahmed as a Silicon Valley billionaire.

I don't mean to unduly target Kill Bill Vol. 2 --it's certainly no worse than most of the blam-blam fare out there. But what I crave now are movies that speak to me in a different way about violence, that acknowledge the fact that real people are harmed.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Fiennes brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.

The first-time director, James Marsh, and his co-writer Milo Addica (who wrote "Monster's Ball"), sustain a black-comic tone, and the performances, as far they go, are quietly chilling.

What you get in Trouble with the Curve is standard-issue late-career Eastwoodiana. The growl, the snarl, the crotchetiness are already familiar to us from "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) and "Gran Torino" (2009), his last appearance as an actor.

It's a heroic story, and Zwick frames it rather too strenuously as an antidote to the generic Holocaust stories of Jewish passivity and martyrdom. And yet, as a piece of historical redress, a great service has been done in bringing this narrative to the screen.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.

It has a sweetness all its own.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

If Baron Cohen is going to continue making scripted comedies, he needs to work with directors far less slapdash than Larry Charles. He can be one of the funniest people on the planet, but he needs a real dictator – I mean, director – calling the shots.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

Blossoms of Fire fulfills the first criterion of any good ethnographic study: It's about an inherently interesting subject.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

The movie becomes, perhaps inadvertently, a celebration of selling out.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

As a technical achievement, K-19 is right up there with Das Boot. Don't expect much dramatic depth, though. The fathoms descended in this movie are strictly nautical.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

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

“Twilight” is essentially an adolescent female fantasia about coming to terms with one’s sexuality. There I’ve said it. And I’m sure no one else has ever said it.

The "Die Hard" series was never exactly big on nuance, but this new installment relentlessly zeros in on sensation. It's almost sadistically single-minded. [19May1995 Pg.F.01]

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.

The aliens are as gloppy and gross as ever. I especially liked the joke about Andy Warhol being an alien – except didn't we know that already?