Richard Corliss

Spinning in that wedding dress, or glaring in wary repose, Lawrence catches fire on screen.

Pacino seems to recall, from his early Michael Corleone days, the power of whispered menace.

Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.

It has many of A Separation’s strengths — the acute observation of complex characters in a story that keeps unpacking surprises — but they have become familiar. They lack the revelatory wallop of the first film.

Here is a picture that has wit, a hairpin-turn narrative, high pizazz and ensemble star quality. Ready, set, Go.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

It's got power and depth, and two kings whose greatness is diluted by hubris, and a thrilling dragon fight, and the demon Grendel as a tortured outcast, and a naked monster who looks a lot like Angelina Jolie.

Despite some rough edges and language, this is at heart a beguiling fantasy of comradeship.

If the Unbroken needle stops at Impressive and doesn’t quite rise to Enthralling, it’s because Jolie stints on exploring the doubts that tortured Louis nearly as much as Watanabe’s punishments did, and whose details so enriched Hillenbrand’s biography.

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention is a cure for nagging ethnic generalities. This Palestinian sort-of-comedy has a sly wit that amuses and disturbs in equal, salubrious measure.

Fast, witty, glamorous, with thrill piling on giggle atop gasp. [11 June 1990, p.85]

The impact of this sisterhood fable on viewers should be as warm and rapturous as Olaf the snowman’s dream of summer. Child, teen or septuagenarian, you’ll warm to Frozen.

The film doesn't scale Shakespearean heights, but it does give its star a nicely gnarled ogre to play.

John Wells's The Company Men is a juicy, judicious drama, and one of the few current movies to address an issue that affects many of the people who will see it - or, because reality is too depressing, avoid it.

McConaughey's fans might be shocked to see him in this role - more likely, they'd skip the opportunity - but they ought to give his performance a shot. The dimpled demon lover proves he can be just as seductive playing Texas's creepiest, craziest cop.

Spielberg has energized each frame with allusive legerdemain and an intelligent density of images and emotions.

By the end, the canniest viewers may not be fooled, but--and you can believe this--they may be mesmerized.

Everything that happens in Happy Feet Two is good-to-great.

Bad 25 is an intimate view of a performer at his peak in the intense splendor of creativity.

Visually the most ravishing and complex Pixar movie, Brave evokes memories of Walt Disney's early experiments with the multiplane camera, but with the more persuasive intricacies available to CGI artists.

This is no breathless film fantasy; its pulse is stately, contemplative. But anyone who has keen eyes and an open heart will surely go soaring and crashing with the lovers lost in Malick's exotic, erotic new world.

A ghost story, a bustling action-adventure and an example of the comedy tour-de-farce, in which the star validates his virtuosity by appearing in a plethora of funny disguises.

This is your basic, and very enjoyable, Disney princess musical, an empowerment tale to teach bright, dreamy girls how to grow to maturity - and outgrow the adults in charge.

Stand By Me is a shuck. It trumpets its sensitivity while reveling in coarseness. And at its climax it suggests that manhood can be found through the barrel of a gun. Maybe this is how Rambo discovered puberty. Maybe real kids should be discouraged from following his example.

This high-IQ sermon is long but never lazy. Renouncing his tendency to make every movie take emotional flight, Spielberg sticks to the story as Kushner has artfully compressed it. Lincoln is brain food and, at another pivotal moment in American political history, an instructive feast.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide.

The cast is uniformly superb, and Marc Forster's attentive direction gives proper weight to each perplexing emotion. Strip away the strident melodrama, and you have this season's moodiest, most adult love story.

Samantha Morton, as Emmet's "mute orphan half-wit" of a girlfriend, is the sweet revelation. Rarely has a performer mined such complex and potent emotion from such simple materials: a smile, a shrug, an attentive winsomeness.

Everything finally came together under the sensitive directorial hand of, yes, Francis Coppola. The supporting cast is splendid. The film's occasional lapses never puncture the airy tone; they are easily forgiven, like Peggy Sue and her friends, whose only sin was to grow up. This prom-night balloon of a movie floats easily above the year's other exercises in '50s nostalgia. If you dare reach for it, it will land smartly in your heart.

The tense verbal comedy of Mattie's early negotiation with a Fort Smith merchant should win you over to this movie's high linguistic wit. If not, you may as well slip out of the theater and into "Little Fockers."

With his instinct and craft, Miller has provided more autosuggestive violence on a $1 million budget than The Blues Brothers did with half the Chicago police force and $30 million.

It is a serious, often hilarious peek under the rock where nightmares strut in $800 suits and Armageddon lies around the next twist of treason.

The film offers no message, no solutions, only a great time at the movies.

Alvin's tragic memories give perspective to the triumph of his trek, even as Farnsworth's weathered brilliance makes this movie a G as in gem.

The summer's zazziest action movie.

Besides rehabbing a hero who overcomes anxiety to save the world and defeat the terror-industrial complex by the simple matter of cloning his body armor, the movie proves that there’s still intelligent life on Planet Marvel. As you’re propelled out of the theater on IM3′s hydraulic lift of pleasures, you’re likely to say, “That is how it’s done.”

See Hairspray. It's light and airy, but it will stick around: the first aerosol movie. [29 Feb 1988, p.101]

The picture delivers the high-octane, testosteronic goods of a warm-weather smash, and maybe the first great film of the post-human era. It's just a shame that every theater showing this nonstop auto race, this animated car-toon, can't be a drive-in.

It's best to see this as a drug buffet. Graze through the vignettes... and you'll find three or four tasty bits to snack on.

Has so much razzle-dazzle that viewers may end up both raised and dazed. It's remorselessly inventive, trying anything fast and sassy to keep you watching. In other words, it's the most honest display of showpeople's need to be noticed this side of a Madonna concert.

Gives its fine actors room to breathe and behave--and in Michelle Rodriguez's case, glow.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

If The Equalizer is the hit it should be, it will give this veteran action star his very first movie franchise. In the sequel, Denzel-McCall could make things right in Ukraine as Obama’s Secretary of Defense and one-man army.

A fanciful film with the patina of hyper-realism, Looper is well served by actors who behave not as if they were dropped carelessly into the future but spent their whole desperate lives there.

The movie has its political-parable aspect, with malevolent forces convincing both the 1% and the 99% that they have reasons to fear the other. But The Boxtrolls is mainly a delight for the sharp eye and the capricious mind.

An exhilarating ride, start to finish. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg set a high bar for this subgenre with "Shaun of the Dead," but Reese, Werner and Fleischer may have trumped them. This isn't just a good zombie comedy. It's a damn fine movie, period. And that's high praise, coming from a vampire guy.

The film dances; the heart sings.

For all its japes and jokes, the movie is really about exhaustion of the spirit: sitting in a bleak hotel suite at 4 a.m. with the bad taste of last night in the mouth and the feeling that tomorrow will not be a better day.

This one starts at the level of lunacy and keeps on escalating. Next to Filth, "Trainspotting" looks as sedate as "The Polar Express."

The fun in this moody, pounding, overlong, rewarding bring-down of a film is seeing Eddie’s curled lip of contempt, which he flashes at all the suckers, freeze into a rictus when he gets his.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

Cool, shiny, handsomely made and, in its compelling-repelling way, mordantly funny.

At two hours, the film version is a third the miniseries' length, requiring severe compression by screenwriters Peter Straughan (The Debt) and Bridget O'Connor, which they've accomplished smartly.

The film's pleasures are simple and obvious: an original plot, lots of slapstick and a lead performance by the Bushman N!xau, who registers every absurdity with the aplomb of an aboriginal Buster Keaton.

Marvin's Room, the 1991 Scott McPherson play, filmed by Jerry Zaks, is an old-fashioned weepie of noble mien with many bright moments and a superb cast.

Cecil B. proves how a dose of smart bad taste can be jolly good fun.

Without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker.

Obsession has seldom looked as gaudy or thrilling as here.

Under the suave direction of Jonathan Frakes, who also plays the Enterprise's second-in-command, the movie glides along with purpose and style.

Binoche is especially subtle and radiant in another splendid drama from Leconte.

Shine a Light isn't the record of a unique event, so it's not on the exalted level of "The Last Waltz." But it has its own fascination. The film is less about the music than about the dedication of show-biz troupers--about doing your job, year after year, as if it's your joy.

With Half-Blood Prince, again we have a stalwart, satisfying visualization of the Rowling cosmos.

Here's another warning: you may laugh yourself sick--as sick as this ruthlessly funny movie is.

Even when the movie sags and strains a bit in Act III, Clooney keeps it flying with old-fashioned movie-star allure. He's got it all: Cary Grant's looks and, inside, Bob Hope's snake-oil-salesman soul.

Constantine is a one-of-a-kind hybrid: a theological noir action film. And until it goes irrevocably goofy at the end, it's a smart ride--and smart-looking too.

You could also say the picture lacks a coherent plot and complex characterization, but those are irrelevant to the genre. The movie is like a superior athlete who gets tongue-tied in a post-game interview but on the field is poetry in motion.

If this riveting, repelling film is to be seen, it must be not at home but in a theater, where you are confined in a room, like Sandra and Becky, deciding whether to watch, and how you would react.

A small epic with subtle strengths.

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

Sometimes engrossing, sometimes exasperating romance. In these scenes, Cotillard shows she doesn't need the validation of Cannes or the Academy. Her strong, subtle performance is gloriously winning on its own.

Boldly and gaily sustained the madcap momentum for the whole of its eighty-few minutes.

If this sounds like an old-fashioned sex comedy, it is -- sexy, for sure, and funny, in wild spurts.

It's a long drink of water at the fountain of pop-social memory.

A movie like Selma should be a relic in a time capsule from 1965, a clue to how well we heeded King’s words and how far we have advanced. Instead it is a reminder that the “American problem” has yet to be solved.

"Shrek," this film's prime competition for the first Animated Feature Oscar, is a synoptic parody of fairy tales. In Monsters, Inc. the gags aren't as spot-on but the technique is miles ahead. The vision is grander and warmer.

[A] sexy, spiky love story.

For stretches of the film, von Trieria is as welcome as Siberia. You must stay to the end for a potent payoff, when the tragic magic of the opening scenes is reasserted.

Designed and destined to win no awards, Machete is expert, cartoon-violent, lighthearted fun. Just the thing to send Junior back to school in a good mood.

Indeed, the entire film is a kind of sock-hop benefit for Approaching Middle Age. This maturing generation never played Taps with such glamour or good humor. Play the music and let the big chill—the knowledge that "we're all alone out there, and we're going out there tomorrow"—melt away in the warmth of the feel-good movie of '83.

This documentary, a gallivanting time trip through a bolder film era, is Herzog's final collaboration with Kinski: an act of love and exorcism.

Transcending Holo-kitsch, In Darkness is often a thrilling adventure picture - as if Anne Frank had found an "Inglourious Basterd" to help her make "The Great Escape."

[Filmmaker John] Hughes must refer to this as his ‘”Bergman film”: lots of deep talk and ripping off of psychic scabs. But this film maker is, spookily, inside kids. He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel: why the nerd would carry a fake ID (”So I can vote”), and why the deb would finally be nice to the strange girl (” ‘Cause you’re letting me”). He has learned their dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults. With a minimum of genre pandering—only one Footloose dance imitation—and with the help of his gifted young ensemble, Hughes shows there is a life form after teenpix. It is called goodpix.

At times Dead Ringers also tilts out of coherence, with scenes that are dramatically stillborn. But Irons is splendid in both roles, and Cronenberg can create tour-de-force tableaux with his effortless black magic. [26 Sept 1988]

As both harangue and movie tragicomedy, Sicko is socko.

Enjoy the savory witches' brew that Cuaron has cooked up in his Harry pot. For on its own terms, this one is truly wizard.

Take a while to get their vehicle to sail and soar. But when it does, this Planet is a treasure.

A romantic comedy so smart and sweetly mature, it's liberating.

Body Heat is full of meaty characters and pungent performances...a film to be seen at a drive-in, on a heavy summer night, with someone you trust.

The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.

This may seem too inside-cricket for a U.S. audience. And it's true that Cock and Bull is so postpostmodern, it's very nearly postmovie. But it's no less diverting for all that. It would be a shame if the great novel no one has read becomes the terrific film nobody bothers to see.

In a movie of subtle tones and wild swerves, Pike expertly mixes a cocktail of hot and cold blood. She is the Amazing Amy you could fall for, till death do you part.

The movie wants to entertain and educate, not leer, about people flummoxed by participating in a revolution they had meant only to calibrate, and at that it succeeds handsomely.

Not a conventionally satisfying movie but a kind of illustrated journalism: an engrossing, insider's tour of the world's hottest spots, grandest schemes and most dangerous men.

Fans of the nasty Baron Cohen may regret his being borderline nice in The Dictator. But we should welcome his decision to stop being the best at something few others dare try and instead to inhabit a more familiar comedy style--just going denser, wilder, better. He pulls it off.

An excellent film. [16 Jan 1989, p.64]

By the end of the movie, whether or not you're a member of Sinn Fein, the Brits' brutality toward the Conlons will get your Irish up.

Nichols and his once and current partner, screenwriter Elaine May, can make a funny, knowing, ultimately judicious film from the deliciously satyric satire.

Mirren, who won an Emmy playing Elizabeth I for HBO, may deserve an Oscar for this ripe appraisal of Elizabeth II.

The film doesn't judge or prod its characters, just watches the long fuse of the plot dwindle, then explode.

The fascinating film equivalent of a humane execution.

Watchmen has moments of greatness. It proves again that the action movie is where the best young Hollywood brains have gone to bring flesh to their fantasies.

The message to take from Jodorowsky’s Dune: movies once had brains and balls, and lost them.

Hazel and Augustus will live in film lore because of the young actors who play them.

You may leave the movie with Seussian anapests dancing in your happy head. Here's mine: A treat for the eye, an epic event/ This film is delightful, one hundred percent.

A savory cocktail with a bitter twist.

This film is as smart and funny as its topic and its stars.

Knightley embodies Anna as a girlish woman who has never felt erotic love; once smitten, she is raised to heavenly ecstasy before tumbling into the abyss of shame. It's a nervy performance, acutely attuned to the volcanic changes a naive creature must enjoy and endure on her first leap into mad passion. She helps make Anna Karenina an operatic romance worth singing about.

Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.

Directing with a cool, steady hand that renounces shaky-cam the way Fletcher would denounce rock ‘n roll, and getting strong performances from his two leads, Chazelle provides a potent metaphor for artistic ambition as both a religion and an addiction.

A tortured testament from a true believer.

Sixty years after Snow White, Hercules proves that Walt's art form is still sassy and snazzy.

The Avengers doesn't aim for transcendence, only for the juggler's skill of keeping the balls smoothly airborne, and in 3-D too (converted after production). At that it succeeds.

The Merchant-Ivory attention to period detail often seems like the movie equivalent of good penmanship. But here it accrues a kind of ethical eloquence.

Fast, bold, harsh and primitive, like a prodigious student film with equal parts promise and threat.

A furiously time-looping joy ride and the smartest action film of the early summer season.

If you don't go in panting for a Pixar-level masterpiece, you should have a blast at this cartoon carnaval.

The purity of Dequenne's performance inspires awe.

So here's a tip for those attending this handsomely acted, epic-length little film. Ease into the sleaze, stare at the party animals, look but don't touch, and, oh, boogie all night. [October 6, 1997]

The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups. [24 Sept 1990, p.83]

Well acted and acutely observed, the film doesn't try to be a conventionally satisfying coke-land action film.

A.I. will beguile some viewers, perplex others. Its vision is too capacious, its narrative route too extended, the shift in tone (from suburban domestic to rural nightmare to urban archaeology) too ornery to make the film a flat-out wowser of the E.T. stripe.

In its pagan fervor, this is an almost religious experience.

Rescue Dawn is a tale of heroism untainted by political skepticism. In an age when U.S. soldiers are seen as villains or victims, the movie offers a GI who bravely, or madly, simply refuses to die.

Where can mass-moviegoers find release for their tenderer feelings? Only at dozens of inspirational sports movies, where guys (on screen and in the audience) get to cry and cheer and win. And, this weekend, at Spider-Man 3.

It turns a hot topic into a pretty cool entertainment--one that satisfies the viewers' need for righteous revenge while leaving them a queasy little question on the way out: Does gun diplomacy make sense only in movies? Or do Americans want it to play out in real life?

Nettelbeck is a sharp observer of life's surprises, and Gedeck has an appraising, intelligent beauty. Her Martha is like the film: tart on the outside, sweet on the inside, with a delectable aftertaste.

An enthralled and mostly enthralling guided tour of what Herzog describes as "one of the greatest art discoveries in the history of human culture."

Like the virtual game he plays on us, the film is weird, it's addictive, and Lord, it's alive!

It is pristinely acted; and its range and heart dwarf other summer films, so cogent is it about our common aches and dreams.

[Murray] has the natural actor's charm of making manners matter. He carries Groundhog Day with his uniquely frittery nonchalance and makes the movie a comic time warp anyone should be happy to get stuck in. [15 Feb 1993, p.63]

Cheers for a Cannes director who has infused his technical mastery with radiant life. In the Museum of the World of Wes Anderson, the dolls are dancing.

Gremlins has enough style and savvy to stand on its own as the summer's most original Hollywood picture.

Most films today are afraid to try anything new. Natural Born Killers is an explosive device for the sleepy movie audience, a wake-up call in the form of a frag bomb. [29 August 1994, p.66]

The filmmakers throw in a few cheesy scares: mom in a monster mask, a baby sitter jumping in front of a camera. But the rest is pretty freaking cool.

The trilogy ascends and soars with the two combatants and ends not with a whimper but with a blast of light. Thus the fabulous original film has found an honorable way to sign off. For those who didn't bother to join the early crowds, The Matrix Revolutions is a definite might see.

In a movie age when there's hardly a garde, let alone an avant-garde, Maddin proves there are many languages to cinema, including the dead one of antique film. And in that language, he sings, he soars.

Toss in enough gorgeous bluegrass music to make the movie's CD a must-have, and you have prime, picaresque entertainment.

Pummeling, exhilarating.

Cronenberg delivers.

Boyle's ingenuity with the camera gives this fraught journey plenty of menace and pizazz.

The Woman in Black is a welcome addition to the old canon; renouncing innovation, embracing anachronism, it's almost "The Artist" of ghost movies. To anyone who fancies throwback stories of the supernatural, there's nothing so appealing as a well-preserved corpse.

A serious, handsome, excruciating film that radiates total commitment.

Steve and the movie still fly high through plot twists and cool stunts.

For those who park their sense and sensibility at the 'plex door, there's plenty to enjoy in the performances, the rowdy innocence of the whole thing, the closing sing-along of Build Me Up Buttercup--and the vision of Cameron Diaz in giggly, gangly bloom.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

The warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. [24 Feb 1997, p. 67]

You watch these impossible stunts with fear and gratitude for the hardest-working man in show biz. To see your first Jackie Chan movie is to fall in love with what the movies once were: a comic ballet of bodies in motion.

The whole movie has a warmth about it that never slops over into sentiment: there is much more here than tall-guy, short-guy jokes. [12 Dec 1988, p.82]

A fine copy.

Here’s the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good — the summer’s most urgent, highest-IQ action picture.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy.

There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment.

This series will survive as well, until 2016 — when, you can bet, there will be a third Star Trek to celebrate the TV show’s 50th anniversary. Here’s hoping that those three years will bestow a measure of maturity on all concerned: Kirk and his bright curators too.

It's good to spend time with a movie that takes its time. Granted, Harris doesn't advance the genre; instead he burrows into it, finds a home there, as one might retreat to musty library stacks, where old pleasures and treasures await.

It's an enjoyably old-fashioned shoot-out, if you can shake off the current headlines and sink in to a fantasy of hyper-violence that plays like an NRA vision of America the Beautiful.

As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.

It's like a giant sculpture that is so strange and off-putting, it's instantly, intriguingly post-modern. Swept up in the film's pile-driving self-assurance, even Bay-haters may absorb the pain to enjoy the gain.

The battle skirmishes here mix sudden violence with slow-motion artistry. The attractive cast can sell an obsession or articulate a conundrum with equal fervor.

Belushi mines quick charm out of his surly role. And Arnold, starched tongue in cheek, is a doll: G.I. Joe in Soviet mufti. He could beat the stuffing out of a toy Rambo. [20 June 1988, p.88]

Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.

Gaudily entertaining, occasionally wearying sequel.

Despite its star's heroic efforts, The Aviator is a gorgeous jet, flying on automatic pilot.

For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors along familiar trails. So ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks. [24 Dec 1990, p.77]

A decent entertainment -- not up there with the "Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings" sagas, but a notch above "The Golden Compass" and "Narnia."

Can't touch the 1972 film's austere poignancy, and McElhone lacks the bewitching beauty of Natalya Bondarchuk in the original Solaris. But the project's gravity and ambition can't be denied.

Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market.

Take this Shower and feel refreshed; it's a cool dip on a hot day.

In Rapace, it has an actress who brings a memorable literary character to indelible movie life, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett O'Hara.

This isn't "2001," by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.

The movie will divide some Eastwood fans, conquer others. The naysayers will be grateful that, from this healthy, workaholic actor-director, there is always the promise of a good movie - if not here, then hereafter.

Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

Sassy but never cynical, Mikey is first seen, through some cunningly simple special effects, as a kind of hot-rodding sperm cruising up the Fallopian tube to the tune of the Beach Boys' I Get Around. [20 Nov 1989, p.98]

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

This Mafia tale doesn’t aspire to the heights of a "Godfather" or the epic sprawl of "The Sopranos." Vromen and cowriter Morgan Land are content to bring subtle shadings to the tale of a strange man in a dirty business.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

The film, which had a troubled history and a humongous reported price tag of $120 million, could have been a fiasco; instead, it smartly remythologizes this indispensable Hollywood icon. [01 Jul 1996 Pg.65]

Nair sleekly manages the story’s thriller aspects, especially the kidnapping. But this is a character study, and she has found some superb actors to fill it.

Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled.

Luhrmann, an Australian who pretty much let his camera go nuts in the egregiously overrated "Strictly Ballroom", here makes reasonable, imaginative decisions that are, arguably, true to Shakespeare.

Major League doesn't try too hard or aim too high, but it is pretty funny. With its stock characters, breezy dialogue, dense ambience and instinct for easy emotions, it could serve as the pilot for a pay-cable sitcom. The film's tone is acerb, but its climax is as predictably uplifting as Rocky's and as surefire effective as Damn Yankees'.

Savvy family entertainment.

Another Saturday Night Live skit is turned into a winning movie. And this one has a little heart. [2 Aug 1993]

Rather than juicing each element to blockbuster volume, Clooney has delivered it in the tone of a memorial lecture, warm and ambling, given by one of the distinguished academics he put in his movie.

The movie is finally predictable, but it has connected with a generation that believes it has been saddled with the thankless job of raising its own parents.

It has the slapdash air of a movie that was a little more fun to shoot than to watch. To say that Blades is a little sharper than "Kicking and Screaming," but not nearly so smart as the best parts of "Talladega," is like taste-testing a Big Mac against a Whopper and a Wendy's Classic Double.

Salaam Bombay! deserves a broad audience, not just to open American eyes to plights of hunger and homelessness abroad, but to open American minds to the vitality of a cinema without rim shots and happy endings.

Harrelson rewards watching; he's no less potent at rest than when he explodes in calculated rage.

An adoring tone and the familiar slo-mo, wide-angle baskebatics.

Blane's snooty friend Steff (Spader) could be a tired stereotype, but with his all-year tan, his hip-blase voice and hs view of high school as a "career," Steff becomes a recognizable character of any age: upscale slime in embryo. [3 Mar 1996, p.83]

True to its grim prospectus, The Grey dwells in haunted machismo to the very end.

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

It provides intimate glimpses of people usually seen, and then only briefly, as faces on a post-office wall or numbers in a cemetery.

I wish I found The Illusionist as pleasing to sit through (twice) as to write about. I'm glad there's a "new" "Tati" film to add to his small, important body of work, yet I wish that the creator of "The Triplets of Belleville" had made a true Chomet film instead. I'll be waiting for that, with a hope to be found nowhere in this handsome, airless movie.

An action figure with a sweet core, Johnson can pump up the humanity of any franchise, whether he’s playing a stepdad who becomes a hero in Journey 2 or, as here, a stud soldier who treats Flint and Jaye like his grown children and shepherds them through peril. Following those younger Joes, the Retaliation audience is encouraged to clamber up on Johnson’s huge soldiers and go along for a pretty cool ride.

When else has the obscenity of child murder been the cause of such gravity and grace?

Because the emotional drama is so one-sided, I just can't love you.

With more sentiment and splash than the original’s sharp wit, Mr. Peabody & Sherman ends up teaching the same lesson as “Peabody’s Improbable History”: every dog should have a boy.

Quibbles aside, John Wick is the smartest display of the implacable but somehow ethical Reeves character since the "2008 Street Kings."

Inside Llewyn Davis is more deserving of a Grammy than an Oscar. Problematic movie, great album.

Slick, brutal and almost human, this is the team-spirit action movie Mission: Impossible should have been.

Doesn't aim too high or strain too hard; it is at ease inhabiting its pretty, miniature realm.

So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.

As transparent as this device is, Angels has elemental satisfactions in its blend of movie genre that could appeal to wide segments of the audience.

The cluttered climax, in a Mother Bates cellar, explains little of the killers’ psychology; for that you have to read the book. But it does let Neeson assert his primacy as the cinema’s most graven, grieving, grievous senior citizen — a figure who doesn’t so much star in his films as haunt them. This ghost of a movie star is never more at home than when walking among the tombstones.

Somehow Neeson makes the ridiculous plausible. A mature, real man in an era of superhero fantasy, he radiates something rare in movie musclemen: a haunted gravity to match his outsize physique.

In a brief review in Time magazine this week, I gave Dan a gentleman's B-. Let me try to remember why. Because the pressure of keeping his ardor secret turns Dan pleasingly cranky.

The perfect summation of Hollywood at this moment - an apotheosis of American male infantilism - and, on its own, a most likable mess.

It is impressive enough that Paltrow holds your eye as a parade of lovelies and virtuoso actresses (Greta Scacchi, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson) march past. But her finest trick is to provide a comic subtext to Emma.

Jogs from one incident to the next, amassing information and dispensing attitude but rarely creating real characters. That's supposed to be director Milos Forman's forte; here, though, nearly everyone is an enemy or a stooge.

Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.

The best comic turns are by the Afro-Asian twins Keith and Kenny Lucas, whose timing is eerie and superb.

This fine, persuasive movie will have to serve as his testament, and it's a fitting one. How many men can say they wrote their own epitaphs in their own blood?

While the movie is glorious to watch, it brings no coherence or insight to its two main characters.

Tatum’s is the central performance: most daring because it’s least giving. He has often played young men of thick athleticism and slow wit. It’s proof of Tatum’s intelligence that he can make the audience feel smarter than the characters he plays – until they reveal a sly brilliance halfway through the movie.

At its metallic heart, T3 is another chase movie -- one figure relentlessly tracking three others, mostly in cars, at high speed through implausibly underpopulated Los Angeles streets.

The performances of these actors are reason enough to go. The reason to stay is Lawrence.

Makes for a long, lumpy trip with a charismatic guide and some brilliant detours.

The film is full of sharp acting and home truths, but its ambition to be different finally surrenders to its need to be loved.

in a larger sense Be Kind Rewind declares that the riches of cinema history touch each of us personally. Films become so deep a part of us that we own them that our memories of them, whether faithful or fanciful, become their meanings. As a movie critic and, even before and above that, a movie lover, how can I disagree with that?

Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

The film's success is due in large part to actors who are both faithful to all the social minutiae and seductive enough to keep you watching.

Fond, zippy new documentary about the Bruce who, on the Hollywood circuit, is the real Boss.

For a good hour, a very good first hour, the film efficiently accumulates small, terrifying incidents and images.

With their technical astonishments, Director Henson and Executive Producer Lucas have been faithful to the pioneering Disney spirit. In suggesting the thrilling dilemmas that await a wise child, they have flown worlds beyond Walt. [7 July 1986, p.65]

Ceases to be a cogent study of the disease of genius and devolves into two lesser creatures: an ordinary weepie and an Oscar contender.

This is a comedy with the old-time blend of wit and sentiment. Years from now, when you stumble across it on TV, you could persuade yourself that, back in the two-thousand-oughts, they made pretty good movies.

Plays like a vacation at a seedy seaside resort. The issue at hand - whether McKinney engaged in criminal behavior with Anderson - is of little moment; what's important is the personality of the lady in question.

Van Damme has been known as a martial-arts legend, movie star and pain in the ass. But never an actor -- until now.

What's unusual about the sometimes screwy but mostly smart and always heartfelt Perfect Sense - is its search for a middle ground.

The Debt is a little too gray and stolid - by which we may simply mean too true to its complex milieu - to qualify as scintillating entertainment. But at the end of a summer in which anything like reality was banned from movie houses, this gnarly political thriller has a tonic effect

If the modest and moving Trouble With the Curve won't overwhelm anybody, it's still an engaging winner, like a junk-ball pitcher who stays in the bigs on grit and heart.

Furious 6 is even cooler and more aerodynamically delirious than its predecessor, if such a thing is even theoretically possible.

A feel-good ending is mandatory, even in a comedy like this, which promises to be transgressive because it's the first major-studio job for a director with an underground reputation for being crazy-bold.

The audience gets as pulverizing a workout as the stars do. Or rather, the stars' stunt doubles, who deserve Oscars for best supporting masochism.

In his third consecutive Cronenberg film (after playing the righteous killers of A History of Violence and Eastern Promises), Mortensen is a happy surprise. Never has this tightly-wound actor seemed so relaxed in a difficult role; he is the charming papa Jung hates to overthrow but knows he must.

Documentaries don't fly on figures, or even controversial arguments; they come to life with real, engaging people. And when this freakumentary hooks up with Urail King, it gets an A.

Politics aside, this is a handsome film with orange skies to die for, or under, and a lovely score by Carter Burwell. The picture has some ponderous and snooze-worthy stretches, but it attains a certain melancholic grandeur, with the actors and crew fighting as desperately as Crockett and Bowie to make the best of a fated adventure.

You can try not liking this adaptation of the Off-Broadway musical hit -- it has no polish and a pushy way with a gag -- but the movie sneaks up on you. [29 Dec 1986, p.71]

For closeup conflict and emotional kick, the Frost/Nixon movie tops the play. But neither can match the tension and weird poignancy of the original interviews -- reality TV of the highest, queasiest order.

At its best moments, Thor weaves a spot of magic from the complex science of $150-million fantasy-film technology.

The film gives Jones (Oxford) a chance to take control of its emotional center, and she seizes it with spectacular subtlety. She proves that behind this Great Man movie is a woman – an actress – who’s every bit her man’s equal.

Wants to contain multitudes -- high ideals and high tech, the poignant and the silly. Doing so, it becomes a lexicon of modern filmmaking. It could be its own creature: Super-Generico. That's not the worst thing for a movie to be, but it's not quite Marvel-ous either.

Jason Patric is the chief sleaze; Ben Stiller adds to his gallery of wormy guys; and Aaron Eckhart is the doleful husband who, when asked who his best lay was, unabashedly answers, "Me." [24 August 1998, p. 85]

The Iron Lady is a clever and oddly touching entertainment.

Vivid, relevant and of elevating scariness.

In its purposeful accumulation of depravities, both individual and institutional, the director's non-style has an honorable payoff that's rare in modern Hollywood cinema: the story's weight could come close to burying you in despair.

The differences between the two Assaults--the new one's pretty good, the old one near great--are of tone, style and perspective.

Motion capture, which transforms actors into cartoon characters in a vividly animated landscape, is the technique Spielberg has been waiting for - the Christmas gift, or senior-citizen birthday present that he's dreamed of since his movie childhood.

The full-bodied performances of Merad and Darroussin give everyone - everyone with an indulgence for old movies about old values - a reason to see this Well Digger's Daughter.

But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

An agreeable time-waster for the onlookers and its star. The Rum Diary isn't a corrective to Johnny Depp's kid-centric career, more like a vacation from it, in a resort where the visitors are strange, the natives are restless and the flow of alcohol endless.

We should hail a movie that recalls creepy political thrillers of the mid-'70s, back when some films were made for grownups and the comfortable catharsis of a happy ending was not required -- think of the panoramically cryptic worldview of "The Parallax View" and "Three Days of the Condor," and of course, "Chinatown."

The new Panda has a bright palette, an amiable vibe and enough vivacity to keep kids entertained and any accompanying moms from bolting for "Bridesmaids."

O.K., Ritchie mistakes flash for style. Perhaps that's the price you pay for storytelling exuberance. If he keeps making films as down and witty as Snatch, we may learn to forgive him.

The picture is worth catching for the delicate and toxic nuances of Rudd's performance. And one of its funniest corollaries is that it shows how hilarious and instructive a star this perennial supporting player can be.

On its own, Captain America is a modestly engaging little-big movie in the median range: well below the first "Iron Man," somewhat above "X-Men: First Class."

Chow Yun-fat, the epitome of swaggering suavity in John Woo's Hong Kong crime films, wears his role as a good-bad cop dapperly in this good-middling drama set in Manhattan's Chinatown.

There are a few longueurs, and moments when the plot trips, like Jeremy, over its own complications. But The Secret of NIMH is more important as Bon Bluth's declaration of dependence on a form of popular art that can infuse every corner of the imagination with its rainbow light.

So Twilight isn't a masterpiece -- no matter. It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss.

Accepting Pawlikowski's mood of poetic seriousness may be a chore for some. Others will find this creepy little sonata a dream or nightmare worth succumbing to, and believing in.