By turns strikingly original and dramatically slick, deeply felt and a little cooked up. It’s well worth seeing, though.

It’s an agreeable diversion.

The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.

Some will say weird is fun for its own sake, but we say weird does not equal cinematic satisfaction. [05 Mar 1999, p.C6]

One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.

Miss Juneteenth is a simple story but a resonant one: modest but impactful, focused on one woman’s pride and her daughter’s future while unfolding in the bedrock of a known and loved environment. You can feel the history coming up through its pores.

The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.

There's conspiracy here, as there is in all of Dick's books, and it wraps the film up with a moving but somewhat neat bowtie.

A chillingly effective documentary.

It takes a woman to make a great film about the all-male bastion of the French Foreign Legion. Claire Denis did so in her elliptical desert updating of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” in “Beau Travail” (1999), and her fellow French director Sarah Leonor nearly equals that feat in The Great Man.

An almost fetishistic re-creation of a horror-suspense movie from around 1978.

Unfortunately, Durkin’s script is so shallow that every character is reduced to a simple sketch.

Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.

Jensen's charming film, is perhaps one of the first in which the actors are credited not by the size of their salaries and egos, but by their vocal ranges.

Can't outrun its very visible limits.

This is a deeper film, delving into the twisted motives that rule lives, the lethal cycles that shackle progress, and, ultimately, the courage it takes to choose life.

Charming and, compared with most Hollywood films like it, refreshing.

The leads save it, particularly Cotillard, who once again subverts her own glamour with ferocious lack of ego. The movie itself only occasionally matches her intensity.

Inland Empire may be the most aggressively surreal feature film ever released to movie theaters in this country, and it's possibly close to the movie David Lynch carries around in his head.

Its strength and limitation is that it’s a gimmick that works.

Down in the Delta, Maya Angelou's film-directing debut, strongly establishes her ability to command emotional authenticity and fashion-rich, beautifully wrought images that tap into the stabilizing dignity of family life. [25 Dec 1998, p.C7]

Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.

The lawyers in the film are compared to superheroes, to David and Goliath. But they know their efforts are not enough.

Awash in strangeness, a poem that details what it's like to be 13 at the end of a millennium.

Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.

A bittersweet musing about the nature of parenthood and about the conflict between nature and nurture, it is as banal and insightful as its title.

By centering Fair Play on a working woman who (at least at first) bends over backward to soothe the anxieties of the men surrounding her, Domont nods to the erotic thrillers of yore and then speeds past them, creating something sexy and exciting, but also gleefully modern.

Lupita Nyong’o (“12 Years a Slave”) finally gets a movie role worthy of her status as an Oscar winner. She isn’t hidden behind pixels, as in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” or “The Jungle Book.” You can see her. She’s magnificent.

Kim is a hard director to pin down. This is the first time the inconsistency has spilled onto the screen, though.

The strangest thing about Todd Haynes's new movie isn't that he cast six actors to play the various faces and phases of Bob Dylan. It's that he needed only six.

This handsome remake has distinction, but isn't as wrenching, urgent or keeningly lyrical as that 1939 original. [16 Oct 1992, p.33]

Inside Out 2 is serviceable entertainment. That’s a sad thing to say about a Pixar film, especially when you consider they made classics like “Toy Story,” “The Incredibles,” and, well, the first “Inside Out.”

A near-masterpiece of mood and menace, and one that deserves to be seen on the largest screen possible.

Valli's touch as an artist is too light, and his dramatic sense too timid, to make the film much more than a collection of pretty pictures.

The film does not offer an optimistic view of relationships.

A triumph of gentility that earns its moments of pathos.

Lacks the requisite sense of dread.

The way Greengrass lets you feel the violence is impressive. Most movie heroes punch through armies without scraping their knuckles, but Bourne's a believable wreck by midpoint.

The Fall Guy isn’t just a throwback to the 1980s television show that inspired it; it’s an old-fashioned romp that knows how to build on its gags.

The backstory between Donny and Dame is too heavy and complex for a movie that aims to be a crowd-pleaser, but Majors and Jordan do their best to balance the material.

The biggest problem I had with this visually unappealing cinematic version of “Wicked,” is that it can’t handle the tonal shifts.

Think “An Inconvenient Truth” meets “Babe,” or “The Good Earth” meets a biodiverse “Marley & Me,” with a dash of the Food Network’s “Pioneer Woman” tossed in. Among other things, that means furry critters romping to a folksy soundtrack with tubas and banjos employed unironically. It means circle-of-life lessons and sun-dappled everything. It means check your cynicism and snark at the gate, if you dare.

Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.

Full of elegance but hampered by lack of depth.

The great pleasure of le Carré-land — for some, it’s the frustration — is that one’s own moral certainties are quickly stood on their head.

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

The movie has more style than depth and it's sometimes in danger of confusing the two.

Breillat’s film can seem at times like a far less opaque version of another story set in the 17th century about sex and power: Peter Greenaway’s “The Draughtman’s Contract.’’

The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.

A rousing, sometimes funny, frequently depressing documentary.

While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.

It plays like Scorsese's ``After Hours,'' but for higher stakes.

A heart-rending account of people trying to dodge the hurdles that politics puts in front of them. By the end of this humanist epic, some are ennobled by their struggle. Most are exhausted.

After an hour of biting charm, Something Wild turns into something else. In a twist that turns the movie into a silly story of violence, Demme surrenders his style to a stupid plot. [7 Nov 1986]

The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.

The cast is earnest and they almost convince us they’re doing important rather than self-important work.

All three actors are excellent. So’s Gil Birmingham, as the victim’s father.

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

As a star-studded (and highly fictionalized) history lesson, Air is massively entertaining and one of the best films of 2023 so far. It also works as a nostalgia piece for people like me who, in their youth, lusted after the pricey footwear.

The gusto in the flying bullets, the fleeing lovers, and the flowing music will make you want to hang around until the party is over.

Bernstein communicates Ungerer’s manic spirit and his irrepressible creativity by punctuating the conventions of talking-head interviews and archival footage with animated snippets of Ungerer’s thousands of illustrations.

Raimi crafted a complicated hero who is a welcome relief from the usual two-dimensional offerings. That said, we could use some moxie in the sequel.

Compared to a second installment that expanded the established Keanuscape in ways the “Matrix” sequels only wish they had, “Wick 3” fumbles for compelling, organically incorporated territory to explore.

Poised at the midway point between an ultraviolent video game and a neo-classic dance musical. As midnight-movie mash-ups go, it's pretty amazing.

Sonatine is less stylish and affecting than Fireworks. Its deadpan satire becomes indistinguishable from numbing slack as the waiting game is played out.[17 Apr 1998, p.F7]

This is music to gorge on, raw ethnic survival in the form of sound.

Has its moments of grace, but too often resorts to conventions and a tone of high lugubriousness.

Entertaining.

McQueen has matters of life and death on his mind, and the final act of “Supernova” puts them on the table with a frankness that’s admirable without wholly succeeding as drama; the script’s schematic nature shows through the cracks even as the actors themselves can’t be faulted.

Distress of Parents is a real pleasure.

Unfortunately, as the story builds toward tenderness, it’s undercut with slathering tongues and bare-chested stud-muffin shots.

Snazzy visuals, of which she (Moss) is one, carry The Matrix past its klutzy script.

Overall “Lucy and Desi” is very much a valentine.

An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.

A straight-up drama and thus the only film in "The Trilogy" not forced into a genre straitjacket -- suspense thriller ("On the Run") or farce ("An Amazing Couple") -- "Life" is also the finest of the three. This isn't a coincidence.

Gathers a sort of darkness as it comes to its oblique conclusion.

There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.

Watching it is like being lost in somebody's richly moody campfire story -- it's so good, in fact, that only once it's over do you realize you've been holding your marshmallows too close to the flame.

I don't usually make recommendations of this kind, but if you or your kids have gone to a burger joint in the last few weeks, you really do need to see this movie.

This is a well-made film that will seem revelatory to moviegoers unfamiliar with the huge, worldwide gaming culture. They’re going to be pretty hard to find, however.

Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.

This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.

Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh very much, and the story didn’t work as well as the movies that inspired it.

Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.

Cross Fame and Spinal Tap, color it Irish, and you've got The Commitments, the summer's most irresistible movie. [30 Aug 1991, p.79]

Hou Hsiao-hsien is one of the masters of world cinema, and Flowers of Shanghai represents a shift for him. Stunning and hypnotic, it's his first period piece. [07 Apr 2000]

The British actor Christian McKay resurrects the young Welles as a magnificent mountain of talent, ego, and unsliced ham. He, and he alone, is reason enough to see this movie. The problem is the “Me’’ - Zac Efron.

When it's not opting for whimsy, Rocket Science makes you cringe, which is what's good about it.

American Sniper may be the hardest, truest movie ever made about the experience of men in war. Why? Because there’s no glory in it.

The movie could also teach something to the makers of "Pirates of the Caribbean" about delivering a story quirky enough to actually stick with you.

Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.

For a few years, Veit Harlan must have felt he was the right filmmaker at the right place at the right time. Did he ever stop to think that his luck also meant the doom of millions? Moeller’s documentary can’t supply an answer. It does, however, make the rest of us wonder.

A poignant, all-too-common tale of casual abuse in a workplace that is candidly labeled "better than most."

Channeling Nye’s own gift for making complex ideas simple and clear, the filmmakers edit together these various aspects of Nye’s life with deceptive ease, drawing on interviews and archival material and following him throughout his hectic schedule. This is not hagiography, however; they don’t back off from examining some of his more controversial endeavors and characteristics. That includes his fondness for the spotlight and his ambition, which in a couple of instances has backfired on him.

Marston's a miniaturist even when The Forgiveness of Blood calls out for larger gestures, and you occasionally sense a more bruising, compelling movie lurking behind this one.

As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.

Lively and loving documentary.

It’s a mordant if unwieldy thriller examining how evil not only becomes the norm, but a virtue.