A fine afternoon at the megaplex. And it will make a welcome addition your home library when it's released on video.

At more leisurely, less furious moments, meanwhile, the cast shows the easy chemistry that comes with having now done a couple of these all-hands-on-deck episodes.

(Washington's is) an astonishing performance, partly because it's so devoid of histrionics, and it has Oscar nomination written all over it.

It's all glossy urban fairy-tale stuff, laid on with style to spare, given added resonance by a mini-pantheon of French movie goddesses.

I found it too repetitious at times, and Hamid’s constant raving, though understandable, wore thin. Despite those flaws, this is still a good film — and an important one worth seeing.

The things in Licorice Pizza that are so good, like the performances from Haim and Hoffman and Cooper and the period fidelity, make you wish that the entire movie was just as good.

Illusionist is like an overupholstered wing chair in the corner of a men's club -- you settle in only to be startled by how ridiculously comfy you are.

Knowlton has landed on four stories that deserve to be told, and she's told them in a straightforward way that gets the job done, with obvious dedication and love.

Quite easily Live-in Maid could have descended into a kind of Joan Crawford-Bette Davis gorgon salute. But everyone here seems way too smart for that, though apparently the movie is being prepped for an English-language version. So beware.

The Pigeon Tunnel is mannered, but one could argue that’s fitting. It’s hard to get more mannered than the le Carré prose style and plotting. Yet no character inhabiting the novels, not even George Smiley, is as riveting and memorable as David Cornwell. Anything that gets between him and the viewer is not a good thing.

The movie unfolds like something out of E.M. Forster, but Assayas isn't all that interested in family dynamics. Instead, he's made a chronicle of how the children will handle the sale of the house and its treasures.

These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.

War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.

Once again, Odenkirk is lots of fun as filmdom’s most unexpected purveyor of brute force.

To paraphrase the old ad for Levy's rye bread, you don't have to be Jewish to love "Keeping Up With the Steins," but it helps.

Tearjerking aside, Untamed Heart reminds us of the bravery it takes to love. That's the ultimate source of its appeal. [12 Feb 1993, p.50]

Hurwitz takes a terrific subject and treats it with undisguised, and justified, affection.

Once again, Streep is a fierce force of nature, slaying all with an icy stare and a cutting verbal wit.

In reality, it's messy in the way that life is, and with a rare and welcome obstreperousness.

This is a sizzling, invigorating Hamlet.

This is much too buoyant a movie for tragedy. But Koreeda's achievement is that he gives us children who might weigh more, emotionally, than their parents, yet they're still these little creatures learning how to wield and bear that weight.

Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.

In the end, it's a lovely little movie about very big things, and the smallness both illuminates it and keeps it from greatness.

I'd take a chance on it anyway, even if it stumbles and loses its way.

Succeeds in its central goal: to turn a forgotten class of women into real, memorable human beings who deserve a different life.

It's fast, it's funny, and it works.

The movie's sharp-tongued and softhearted, a Sundance kind of film that mostly sidesteps generic Sundanceyness.

I went into Haunted Mansion expecting a hot mess on par with Murphy’s movie. Instead, I found an engaging and sweet action comedy, one that’s not only very funny but also quite touching. Much of the credit goes to the cast, specifically the lead performance by LaKeith Stanfield as Ben Matthias.

Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.

The message is clear, if not original: stray from the herd and you’re dead. What makes Hirayanagi’s iteration of this familiar theme appealing are the quirky characters, the nuanced performances, and the curious cultural topography of Tokyo.

While I enjoyed “Elio,” and I appreciated the animation and Rob Simonsen’s lovely orchestral score, I felt that this film was more tailor-made for adult sci-fi fans rather than their young kids. To be clear, I’m not saying you should leave your kids at home — there’s nothing objectionable here. I’m just saying they might be as bored as you usually are at some of these movies.

The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.

As for Drucker and Ménochet, they vividly embody the roles of abuser and victim but have little else to work with.

A lot of jazz labels have mattered, but none has mattered the way Blue Note did — and, thanks to a proudly hip-hop-inflected present, still does. It’s the gold standard of recorded improvisational music. Sophie Huber’s briskly reverential documentary, Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes, lets us see and hear why.

As usual, Gladstone is excellent, and she doesn’t mind ceding the spotlight to Deroy-Olson. The two craft a convincing family unit, one we don’t want to see broken. And though the film hits familiar plot beats, it loses none of its redemptive power.

His (Hawke) subtle performance also draws attention away from the creaky plot machinery, as does the Spierig brothers’ eye for the seemingly throwaway but pregnant detail.

A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.

The film is touchingly firm about leveling with children, drawing a careful, crucial line between fantasy and reality, without patronizing or haranguing them.

There are a number of reasons “Covenant” works where “Prometheus” struggled to work. The characters are more incisively drawn this time, and their relationships inherently more dramatic.

Girls Trip is a hilarious reminder that we all need a Flossy Posse to make us laugh until our sides ache and give it to us straight when no one else will. Black girl magic, indeed.

Where Do We Go Now? has a heart and an anger to offset its structural fuzziness. It's refreshingly open-minded about faith, too.

The result is a story that’s awfully scattered thematically, but one with such inventive wit and screwball-quick pacing that issues like spongy motivation hardly seem to matter.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.

Despite the fine acting, Rustin is still a standard-issue biopic that traffics in the expected tropes. It’s the film’s perspective that elevates it, as no major movie has witnessed this era through the eyes of a gay man. I did find myself wishing it were a bit grittier; there’s a level of optimism flowing through the film that threatens to dilute some of its darker elements.

In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.

Jim Parsons brings his own irrepressible energy to DreamWorks’ 3-D animated Home, segueing from almost-alien misfit Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory” to alien misfit, period.

Lady Macbeth” is thus simple in the telling while leaving us with a lapful of thorns; it’s as sensual as a tryst and as wintry as a grave.

It's a merry deconstructive delight and easily the best party in town.

Movingly recounts a hitherto untold story in the voices of the people who lived it.

Kline's combination of pratfalls and urbanity is funny, but it rubs against the rest of the movie's effortless rustic charm. He's like Errol Flynn on a hayride.

If Plympton is making pastiche, he's also having a laugh at a universal experience that for a lot of people was probably pretty crummy. Apparently, it was a little crummier for him.

Run the game, bow to the movies that did it better and before, keep the dialogue on the line between hard-boiled and hokey, and throw one last curveball before the lights come up. It's a con in itself, but the reward's in the playing.

As generic as its title, but two things enable it to land: the basic likability of Mark Wahlberg as the wannabe protagonist, and the contagious energies in the rock concert sequences.

Despite outstanding performances, the characters lose subtlety as they grow more extreme, and their secrets when spelled out become anticlimactic. Maybe with a little more mystery, the evil would seem less banal.

Eva Vitija’s documentary is lean and lucid and even at 84 minutes never feels hurried.

A wide-ranging new survey of the toy’s global subculture and appeal.

Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .

The first half of Moonlight Mile feels like the runaway trailer for a movie that can't wait to jerk your tears. But to quote Joe in a moment of epiphany, there's a ''truth enema'' out there, and, boy, it really brings this movie around.

Slight but fascinating.

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]

Dodging the pitfalls of making a film about a writer is no small challenge, but Campion succeeds unforgettably in Angel at My Table. [14 Jun 1991, p.31]

You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.

The film belongs to Donohue's cool, toothy slinker, who sports instant fangs when she lures a pimply student into her bath and later shimmies deadpan out of an art nouveau urn when the snake-charming record starts its amplified grooving. [11 Nov 1988, p.61]

Wonderfully deranged.

Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.

Suffice it to say that Chris Smith's Home Movie is the most bananas episode of ''Cribs'' ever. The film is Smith's ballad of the wacky homeowner.

Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do.

At its most effective, the movie is a chastening, sobering, and thorough work of film journalism, however shortsighted.

For all her “Clueless” comedy cred, Silverstone just might be at her best conveying a mother’s special knack for witheringly guilting her boys.

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.

Tone is everything here, and the film never loses the smiling poise and benevolence that help you buy its gauzy plot as the three sashay through it. Douglas Carter Beane's script is witty as well as buoyant, which is a big help. [08 Sep 1995, p.99]

There is a surprise waiting in Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten, a labor of love that Pirozzi painstakingly assembled over a span of close to a decade, although the story it tells holds no mystery.

It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.

Likable, go-with-the-flow comedy.

Cannon actually is funny -- not to mention funny-looking. Plastic surgery has left her physically absurd, like a vaguely glamorous R. Crumb cartoon.

The film has sprung from the mind of the Frenchman Leos Carax and ought to be seen to be believed, on the largest screen you can find, and probably sober, too, since it becomes its own narcotic.

The thrill isn't gone from the sequel, but the surprise is, and it hurts more than you'd think.

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

After watching David Douglas and Drew Fellman’s visually spectacular, technically amazing, and occasionally cutesy documentary, Pandas, you’d think that IMAX 3-D was invented solely for close-ups of adorable panda cubs, their giant doleful, domino faces peering out with cuddly curiosity.

The truth is that this is a mystery movie, and the mystery is trying to figure out exactly what the heck is going on here.

Fascinating, like a car wreck seen through a rearview mirror.

These actors offset the modern-day ordinariness of the leads -- Jackson, especially, seems as if he's just driven over from a mall tour -- and so, ultimately, does the exquisite moral dilemma of Tuck Everlasting.

The actor's (McConaughey) lovable exuberance is exactly what this heartsick movie needs.

How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.

I'm wary of implying that it's your civic duty to see The House I Live In, but - guess what - it is. And see it with someone whose views are different from your own. We're going to need everyone to help get us out of this mess.

There's no gore in Campillo's tale, just a group of emotionally remote but otherwise seemingly healthy undead who inexplicably wander back into the world a world unsure how to reassimilate them, be it in the workplace or more intimate fronts. The complications he imagines are achingly smart; witness the grieving parents feeling even further despair at the realization that their returned little boy isn't truly all there. The film does, ultimately, lack closure, but maybe that's part of the point. [26 June 2005]

Once “M:I-TFR” kicks into action mode, the film becomes riveting as we await whatever crazy stunt Tom Cruise is going to spring on us.

What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.

There are moments -- just a few of them -- when the film . . . does feel a bit like work, a relentless civics lesson about the storm and its still-unfolding aftermath.

This is extreme comedy, and it's amazing how director Jeff Tremaine, who along with Spike Jonze has been affiliated with this troupe from its outset, creates an environment where self-inflicted torture is uncontrollably funny without being morally offensive.

No porno flick posing as art. Nor is it science fiction, though it does contain a few scenes with B-movie overtones. This is a deep and meaningful film, ultimately far more poignant than it is titillating.

We may someday look back on He Named Me Malala as a film that told us much about a future world leader — or one that told us surprisingly little.

A solid, not to say ironclad, winner in the less than overcrowded family animation arena.

It's huge, brilliant, dark and cathartic, with a towering and complex performance by Anthony Hopkins that humanizes Nixon more than Nixon ever was able to humanize himself. [20 Dec 1995, p.33]

At 102 minutes, The Bob’s Burgers Movie feels more like five continuous episodes stitched together than something new that’s been abstracted from its origins. The one place it dares to outshine the show is in its emotional moments, where it allows the heart that has always been beating under its surface to grow three sizes bigger.