Peter Rainer

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

Based on the 1938 novel by Winifred Watson, it's a deluxe romance that most of the time plays like farce.

The bloom is decidedly off the pinkish rose. Martin has a few inspired moments but in order to get to them you have to wade through a mosh pit of unfunny gags.

The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.

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.

As it is, The Maid is a study of a character who rarely emerges from the opaque end of the spectrum.

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.

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

In some ways the movie's straightforward style is more appropriate to the horror than a more souped-up approach would have been. With material this strong, sometimes the best thing a filmmaker can do is to stay out of the way.

Goony, so-so comedy.

The movie is a decidedly mixed bag, in part, because of the equally pronounced disparities between Burton and Carroll – and between Burton and Disney, for that matter.

It’s a dirgelike odyssey sparked by Julianne Moore’s overheated turn as George’s best friend – a welcome respite from Firth’s clenched emoting.

It would have better if Brooks had invested more time trying to discover what makes AMERICANS laugh.

Doc Hollywood draws its energy almost exclusively from cliche. The cornball rowdiness is partially redeemed by the good cast.

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.

This is Eastwood's first acting job since "Million Dollar Baby," and his range, like his raspiness, is fairly one-note.

Spiritual redemption is a big theme of Narnia, but on a purely entertainment level, the movie also goes a long way in redeeming the current sad state of children's fantasy filmmaking.

Sandler being Chaplinesque isn't pretty; he's just doing his smart-aleck slacker shtick with a moister eye.

What United 93 demonstrates, as if we needed proof, is that it is too soon - it may always be too soon - to sort out the feelings from that day.

Whitaker is terrifying in a way that we recognize not from old movies but from life.

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

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

Beautifully directed by Phillip Noyce, the film -- is a full experience, a love story and a murder mystery that expands into a meditation on the deep deceptions of innocence.

Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.

Delivers more goose bumps than anything Hollywood has served up in years – which I hope does not mean that Bayona, a first-time feature director and music video whiz, will be enlisted to direct "Saw V."

A stinker.

Face/Off wouldn't work without two great actors, and it doesn't always work with them. But their gifts justify the whole loony enterprise.

The first full-scale documentary about the history of those years, and it lays out lucidly the involvement of the Communist Party in the young men's defense and the ways in which the trials, against the backdrop of the Depression, replayed the murderous quarrels of the Civil War all over again.

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

A frail little caper movie that’s overawed by its cast.

The movie's gross-out effects are impressive but wearying. How apt that the director's name is Gore.

Singles is a bright and beautiful piffle about love American-style, junior division.

The black comedy Noise may be a one-joke movie but it's a resonant one.

The Saint exists almost entirely as a vehicle for Kilmer's quick-change smarty-pants swagger, and it's inconceivable without him. He's great fun to watch--a squirish master thief with a wide streak of lewdness.

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

A solid achievement, but those in the press who have been trumpeting its greatness may be going in for a bit of self-congratulation. The movie plays very well to the choir.

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

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

For all its triteness, Sheridan's sentimentality has its poignancy: This adolescent boy is all set up to live out a halcyon life he'll never have.

Depp and Rush are still in there plugging away. They’re troupers, but the series is all used up. If there is to be another sequel it will have to be called "Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit's End."

This series ran out of steam long ago, and director Blake Edwards hasn't exactly rung in a new era by casting Italian superstar comic Roberto Benigni in the title role. He seems to have caught the director's lassitude: He's frenetic in a charmless, groggy way. His squiggly mimetic movements don't add up to a character, just a conceit.

The best thing you can say about Mad Money is that it has a good cast. The worst thing you can say about it is that the cast is extremely ill-used.

At times, Pride and Glory seems to be about a war between actors, not cops. Nobody comes off well.

Rarely has there been so obscenely precise a depiction of ravaged innocence. This young girl has nothing to live for--and an entire life ahead of her in which to live it.

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.

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.

Streep and Tomlin are so attuned to each other that it's as if they had worked together all of their lives. In fact, it's their first time. Streep has become a wonderfully soulful comedian; Tomlin always was one.

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.

This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.

As in many a French movie, especially crime movie, the philosophe and the crook turn out to be each other’s mirror image.

As a piece of poetic compression, it ranks with the opening of Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons."

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

Thanks to Tukur, what we get here is still something: a stunning portrait of a good man caught in a widening inferno.

What makes the film intriguing, and somewhat off-putting, is that Romain is deliberately portrayed as a heel; he strains his relations with his lover and his family, except for his grandmother (Moreau), to the breaking point.

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.

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

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."

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

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

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.

The film's biggest unexplored question: Why is someone with a reputation for laying bare the truth so addicted to plastic surgery?

A hushed and powerful piece.

No better than the first – which means it will probably be creamed by critics and make a jillion dollars. But really, standards are standards.

It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.

Rapp has clearly been influenced by such lyrically disaffected '70s movies as "Five Easy Pieces." He brings out in Deschanel a sense of yearning, an avidity, that hits home.

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.

He (Gibson) ramrods his way through the bugged-out hysterics as if he were appearing in a movie that actually made sense. What a brave heart.

Waltz With Bashir is a supremely courageous act, not only as a piece of filmmaking, but much more so as a moral testament.

It melodramatizes everything and yet its overall effect is something more than melodrama.

All in all, a visual and musical feast.

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.

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

It's a powerful subject, but director McG and screenwriter Jamie Linden haul out every cliché in the playbook.

Nobody can play stupid better than Daniels – think "Dumb and Dumber" – and, as it turns out, few can play smarter. He's a sharp asset in a sharp movie.

A richly appointed period piece, it features kingly tantrums, mistresses, bodices, roaring fireplaces, incest, and mutton. It also features sharply enunciated, period-perfect dialogue in which nary a contraction can be heard.

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

A prime example of a dysfunctional-family comedy that also doubles as a road movie. Even the vehicle of transport is dysfunctional.

The result is this metabiography that says almost nothing about the great photographer's life or art.

It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.

Like many a Hollywood political drama, Lions for Lambs carries a full head of steam that is indistinguishable from a lot of hot air.

As hig concepts go, You Don't Mess With the Zohan" takes the cake.

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

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

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.

Hartnett has been stuck in the young-adult heartthrob mode for some time now, but this comic thriller may launch him into meatier fare.

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.

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

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

This is a movie about, among other things, pain, and it's made by someone who understands its expression.

There's a new sensibility at work here, wry yet lushly disaffected, and it will be worth watching what Martel does next.

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

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.

At its best, the movie makes you feel like a kindred spirit.

The most joyously cinematic movie I've seen this year. Chomet's astonishing imagination conjures images you could swear you've seen in your dreams.

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

Jackson is rare among the makers of epic movies in that he knows how to do the small stuff, too. The Return of the King has “heart”--how else could it pump out all that blood?

As Leonard, Nivola isn’t bad, which is good, since the entire movie revolves around him.

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.

Poetic conceits only work if they're poetic.

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.

Because we know almost from the get-go that things will turn out bad-to-bittersweet for them, the movie is like one long autopsy of what went wrong, starting with Day No. 488.

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

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.

The reactionary empty-headedness of this R-rated movie gets to you, spoiling whatever comic-strip enjoyment it might have had. In the “Rambo” movies, you’d have to be almost as much of a lunkhead as Rambo to take their “politics” seriously. But “Navy SEALS,” directed by Lewis Teague, isn’t scaled to be a cartoon; it’s more like a hypercharged military training film.

I have always felt that Almodóvar was at his best as an artist when he was at his most playful. Volver is about deadly serious matters of the heart, but it often has a screwball spirit. The darker things are, the funnier.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

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

An impossibly, incomprehensibly overlong and cacophonous bore.

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.

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

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

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

A cross between "Godzilla" and "Jaws," it manages to be both truly scary and truly funny – sometimes all at once.

As the cowboy-hatted wild man who cooks up speed in his motel-room lab, Rourke, who looks at home in his tattoos, is mesmerizingly grungy. He strikes a rare note of authenticity in this otherwise phony fandango.

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

The idealization of the native American existence in The New World, precolonization, is a pleasing fantasy but also timeworn and ahistorical. Surely someone as sophisticated as Malick - who once taught philosophy at MIT and was a Rhodes scholar - understands that he is putting forth a fabrication.

This business of the 88 minutes ticking away is a pale imitation of the old "High Noon" ploy of playing out suspense in real time. After a while, though, I began to take a perverse pleasure in wallowing in the awfulness of it all.

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.

For most of the way this is an eye-popping, not blood-curdling, experience.

Caine acts dignified throughout, but there's no way to dignify dreck.

A love affair between performer and filmmaker. The director shows off his ardor by eliciting from his actors aspects of their gifts that they themselves may not have known they had.

I suppose it's asking too much for a great actor to be matched up with a great director on a project like this. On the other hand, there's always the sequel.

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?

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

I don't mind a movie where people spend a lot of time jawboning, but what they say had better be interesting. In Spinning into Butter we are spoon-fed the deep dark revelation that racism can exist as virulently in liberal environs as in reactionary ones. Alert the media.

It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.

The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: Any movie featuring a quote in its ad from the poet laureate of Great Britain—“Deeply engaging!” -- is in trouble.

Thomas Harris adapted his own bestseller and Peter Webber, who previously directed "Girl with a Pearl Earring," had the unenviable task of trying to give this glop, which is too gruesome to be campy, a high gloss. It should be called Man With a Severed Head.

At its best it's refreshingly offhanded. It's a hit-and-miss movie that's worth seeing for the hits.

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?

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

Amid all the mayhem, there is Paris in all its faded-light glory. Is the movie worth seeing as a travelogue? Only if you are (a) a masochist, (b) a terrorist, or (c) desperate.

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

Now that it is at last on screen, my reaction is ... what's all the fuss?

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

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.

Has a terrific premise that shatters almost upon arrival; no bad-boy legend trashing a hotel room could have done a more complete job.

The treasure hunt in Fool's Gold is, of course, meant to be about more than money. But the only reason for this movie to exist is to make money.

It has the requisite amount of knockabout silliness.

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

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

The new Superman has its visionary charms, but there's only so far you can go without great characters.

The subculture of weekend warrior bikers is such rich comic material that the ineptitude of Wild Hogs is doubly offensive.

Assayas conveys with great understatement an entire constellation of emotions in Summer Hours. I wouldn't have minded a little bit of overstatement.

There’s something off-putting about this film’s optimism: After all, how many people can afford to do what Crowley did?

Maudlin.

No other concert film has ever expressed so fervently the erotic root of rock. Seeing it is the opposite of taking a trip down memory lane; it's more like a plunge into the belly of the beast.

Haneke is an exploitation filmmaker of the highest gifts. His movies are not to be entered into lightly.

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

It's movie-making as match-making.

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

This latest whiffle ball from Team Apatow is a mildly amusing comedy.

It's a bewildering mix of very smart and very dumb, but the cast, which also features a hilarious Joan Cusack, Ben Kingsley, Marisa Tomei, Dan Aykroyd as the Cheney-esque ex-vice president, and Hilary Duff as a Turaqistan airhead pop star, is tiptop.

Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.

Black, who wrote "Lethal Weapon," makes his directorial debut, and he puts a fresh spin not only on that film but also on a whole slew of films noirs.

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.

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

The film's one extraordinary aspect, which makes it well worth seeing despite its carefully coiffed shagginess, is Maya Rudolph's performance.

So deliriously chockablock with high-flying, color-coordinated fight scenes that non-aficionados may find it all a bit bewildering--a gorgeous abstraction. It sure is gorgeous, though, and it has a dream cast

Cash was a true anomaly: a poseur who was also the genuine article. A better movie would have made that contradiction its core.

The only performance worth watching is Costner's. Now that he seems resigned to being something less than an A-list luminary, he is often modest and affecting.

The movie often seems glib in the face of tragedy. And when, near the end, Shepard tries to pour on the hearts and flowers by showing us just what made Simon crack up on camera, the bathos is icky. The whole movie is icky.

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

It all works on the level of a sprightly sitcom: lesbianism for the Lucy-and-Ethel crowd.

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

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

In the end, this melancholy, inspiriting movie achieves a breathtaking emotional harmoniousness.

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.

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.

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

Poor Pierce Brosnan. Sport that he is, he does his level best to be a song-and-dance man but it's just not in him. He's touchingly awful. The same could probably be said for the entire movie.

The only saving grace is that Caine and Duvall don’t overdo the southern-coot stuff.

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.

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 only note of authenticity in the movie comes from Ian Holm, playing the royal physician. What is this nuanced performance -- at least until the final fireworks -- doing in this twaddle?

Wiseman lets the material breathe in a manner unique to the subject.

Probably the most faithful to the writer's tortured spirit. It's the kind of movie that gets under your skin - and stays there.

As the murderer, Stanley Tucci is intensely creepy but, like almost everybody else in this movie, he’s more gothic figment than flesh and blood.

Doesn't evoke New York and its vignettes are trite – with one exception, a touching sequence directed by Mira Nair with Natalie Portman as a Hasidic bride and Irrfan Khan as a Jain diamond merchant.

The movie, in a very real sense, is about the privilege, the sexiness, of being a movie star. Certainly it isn't about the heist; never was.

By bringing the story into Iraq, Grant Heslov courts tastelessness. Gooniness and Gitmo don't mix.

First-time director Andrew Scheinman -- one of the partners in Castle Rock Entertainment -- may have too much of the Billy in himself to bring out the true roisterousness of baseball. He manages the movie with too soft a touch. The film's injected pathos isn't true to what most adults respond to in the sport -- let alone children. [29 Jun 1994, p.F5]

Levinson made a great political comedy once, "Wag the Dog," but that had a script by David Mamet. Here, Levinson seems to be torn between making a political jest and a suspense thriller. Neither works.

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

Soppy, schematic weepie.

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]

No doubt Be Kind Rewind will soon make its way to – um – DVD.

Blind Fury is a rehashing of movies you passed on the first time, like, uh, Over the Top.

Spirit's narration comes to us courtesy of Matt Damon, who, having played a horse's ass in some of his earlier movies, perhaps thought it wise to inhabit the entire nag this time around.

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

Intermittently gripping, but overlong.

The overfamiliarity of What Doesn't Kill You is redeemed by a full-scale performance from Mark Ruffalo.

Michel Bouquet's performance makes Anne Fontaine's How I Killed My Father required viewing.

When it comes time for some of the girls to flee, the result is one of the most emotionally satisfying of all prison breaks.

Movies about political corruption generally bog down in moralistic quicksands. Few American films have the courage to take their cynicism to the limit, and True Colors is no exception. This Capra-corny reliance on the ultimate sagacity of The People doesn’t jibe with the film’s fine edge of avarice. Tim is righteousness incarnate, and Spader can’t seem to pull a performance out of all that goodness. He is uncomfortably upstanding in the role. He looks as though he would rather swap roles with Cusack.

Wallows in its own muck.

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

Most of the time we are with Cruise and Foxx, and their interplay is never less than galvanizing.

It too has no particular reason for being (except, of course, to complete the series and cash in). It's sprightly and inoffensive, though. And, for those who care, it satisfyingly ties up the various plot strands that were flapping in the breeze from the last installment. Back to the Future futurists will feel complete. [25 May 1990, p.C1]

Bracingly perceptive about the human comedy.

Altogether fascinating.

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

Terence Davies's The House of Mirth is a rigorously elegant adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and unlike in some other Davies movies, the rigor here doesn't turn into rigor mortis.... This is dourness of a degree you won't find in Wharton, but in its own shadowed terms the film is a triumph.

Black and Kyle Gass started their acoustic/heavy metal rock music comedy act back in the late 1980s. Gold albums and HBO shorts followed, now this. Still, any movie featuring Jack Black with an appearance by Sasquatch is not a total loss, and, for those who care, we learn the origin of the group's name.

Director Barbet Schroeder is too elegant an artist for this material, which veers between routine cop-movie conventions and high-toned malarkey that seems a lot closer to Dungeons & Dragons than to "Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

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

Amy Adams is such a likable actress that she makes the romantic comedy Leap Year worth watching even though we’ve seen it all before.

Not a sterling example of how to make a high-toned weepie, let alone a serious examination of trauma.

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.

As a piece of filmmaking, Munich is rarely less than gripping. As a political essay, as a brief against despair, it is far less convincing.

Much more silly than romantic.

If you were expecting Ritchie to discover something in Madonna that no one else has, something like, say, acting talent, forget it.

It’s all strenuously camp.

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.

Poehler is the life of the party and steals just about every scene, although there's not much to steal.

Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.

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

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.

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

It has a trashy, low-road, rabble-rousing spirit but it also has high-road pretensions. It’s a violent movie that wants to make an anti-violence “statement,” the oldest ploy in the boxing film genre.

He's (Gandolfini) the true star of the film, and his stardom is achieved in the most honest of ways, through the sheer brute force of his talent.

He intercuts documentary sequences from a French news crew and also includes Arab website footage of insurgents and YouTube confessions from soldiers who witnessed a barbarous act, which we also see, involving the platoon and a young Iraqi girl. The concept is audacious but the actors are too theatrical.

A disconcerting melange, Tokyo Sonata begins rather conventionally before spinning into black comic, almost fantastical, terrain.

The hardy fools - I mean, visionary pioneers - in this movie are so gravity-defying that I had to look at the press notes afterward just to make sure no computerized special effects were used.

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.

Weitz doesn't have the chops for satire, let alone black comedy.

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

Both frenetic and witless--a bad combination. It's the sort of action-comedy vehicle that stands a chance of succeeding only if the star chemistry is strong enough to compensate for all the uninspired calisthenic derring-do.

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

At just over two hours, Stranded is nonstop harrowing. It has cumulative power.

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.

As feminist polemic, She-Devil is dubious indeed.

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

There's a hushed, rapturous quality to its best parts, though, and the emotional interplay between Ricky and Marina has a scary immediacy that the movies rarely achieve. Almodovar dares a lot in this film. [4 May 1990]

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

This half-baked fairy tale always seems to be on the verge of becoming charming but despite a good cast it never quite succeeds.

Watching this movie, you get the feeling that the Depression existed so that Seabiscuit could be memorialized.

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

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.

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.

What is the great Gene Hackman doing in the dingbat con-artist comedy Heartbreakers.

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

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

An OK action film, but only the humorless will find it heretical – or educational.

Ballard filmed across hundreds of miles of South African desert, and there are times when the whole throbbing universe seems to resound for him.

Bacon lavishes his camera on her (Sedgwick) in various states of dress and undress, but the script, by Hannah Shakespeare - talk about having to live up to a name! - is a cheat. It rarely expands on the boy's crises in having to deal with such a mother.

Based on an interminable 1994 international bestseller by Louis de Bernières that I found impossible to make my way through. The movie duplicates exactly my experience with the book, although I must say I was thankful to be spared serial outbreaks of hearty Greek dancing.

Director Alexandra Lipsitz doesn't do much more than chronicle the noise, but it's intermittently fun stuff.

Breezily enjoyable but thin.

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

Even by Farrelly standards, the film is a washout.

It may sound like faint praise to say that Enchanted is the movie of the year for smart and spirited 11-year-old girls. But a movie that genuinely respects that audience is not to be belittled.

Theron breaks through with a ferocious performance--a real career-changer.

Red Lights is the most ambiguously compelling romance around.

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.

Baumbach captures the ways in which children takes sides in a war they can't even begin to comprehend.

The only surprise to me about this movie is that there no jokes about kilts – a serious omission in an otherwise entirely predictable farce.

It has what the most heartfelt Disney animated features used to have: rapturous imagery matched with real wit.

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.

The documentary is, in essence, not much more than a record of what happened in Zaire, but it has been assembled with a real feeling for the historical moment. It's literally a blast from the past.

Inspirationalism wafts off the screen in little perfumed puffs.

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.

Sweep aside the gross-outs and you've got the family values comedy of the year.

At times this indie is as repetitive and self-indulgent as its protagonist, but it captures a bit of the madness of being unrequitedly in love.

The end result, at best, is high-toned pulp.

Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out. But he has a tin ear for acting.