Tom Keogh

With its boyhood-to-manhood tropes (growing up means getting a girl’s attention and winning an idol’s respect), London Town can’t be taken too seriously. But it’s nice to see part of the Clash’s populist legacy in a fan’s journey.

If McCulloch can draw this much humanity out of his actors, and do it in comedies with a deceptively easygoing poignancy, he's definitely a director to watch.

The film’s bleached colors and Reeves’ trademark woodenness add to its emotional remoteness, though Basso, Zellweger and Belushi create a convincing family in crisis. Zellweger, especially, delivers a fascinating, complex performance as a damaged survivor.

Lawrence's style is purely will-it-stick-the-wall-or-not, and when it doesn't he looks pretty puny up there on the big screen.

Though Dough is often in danger of running off the rails with improbable and unnecessary plot twists, it is always essentially entertaining and warm in its observations of hope rekindled through simple relationships.

The film's bemused but genuine respect for the ingenious obviousness of a bygone cinematic language is quite moving.

Look to the cast as the best reason to see this film.

Bell can sculpt a funny moment to polished realization, but deprive it of oxygen at the same time. It’s not until late in the film’s third act that a different feeling emerges, a looser hand that provides room for characters to be more warm and human than pieces in a constricted design.

Doesn't go the distance in either story or style, unwilling to liberate itself from real or presumed expectations about what it takes to sell a movie featuring teenagers.

Despite promising elements of mixed-genre thrills, the film is finally the underwhelming sum of too many plot devices.

Gun Shy can't rise on wobbly legs, and its real potential is lost for good.

The film's light success really comes down to Shannon, though, the exuberant "SNL" star whose alter ego actually seems more real and sympathetic here than she does in brief TV skits.

Captivating an audience from the get-go and drawing our attention and emotions ever deeper into the layered mysteries of a dreamy fable.

Will eventually be remembered as a disposable farce, but one that leaves a happy memory.

A careful, intelligent, and seamless design that makes room for a couple of unexpected twists.

Let your children have their childhood while you have a rare, grown-up experience at the multi-plex for a change.

Within this uncertain world, Lopéz-Gallego relishes such noir staples as fatalistic shadows, eruptive mayhem and terse, ironic dialogue. But he and his cinematographer, Jose David Montero, also carve out fresh visual territory.

An excruciating misfire.

While we may like what we see, it's impossible to comprehend what much of it means or why we should care.

A mixed bag, all in all (casting Huey Lewis was not the best idea), but worth seeing.

It does yield solidly comic performances.

Pali Road — an engrossing psychological thriller with a trapped damsel’s very sanity on the line — demonstrates how an enigmatic story can unabashedly overflow with disorienting puzzles and perverse twists, all for the sake of blurring the line between reality and illusion.

What we have here is a small story in an oversized setting.

Comes across as a deceptively streamlined comic-drama; an unnervingly violent, gritty film noir with a wink.

In more careless hands, Middle Man’s deranged farce could have resulted in an unchecked, undisciplined movie with nothing to say. But beneath the roller-coaster madness here is an earthbound terror that art is meant to reveal.

Mercury Rising could have been a terrific movie with a little more gumption. [3 Apr 1998, p.G5]

Quite smart, sensitive, and relatively sophisticated.

So mired in his own ludicrous equation for contemporary action pictures that it's constantly stuck in first gear.