Decision has real velocity without in any way feeling hectic or rushed.

Expanded, Major Dundee is still a mess of great scenes sprinkled among some fairly monotonous action.

A comedy of chaos, an ensemble comedy, with characters swirling around one another unaware, in their uniform desperation, of how funny they are.

Rat may be lightweight, but it's never cheesy.

This is a disarming and, in its own way, delightful vehicle for its star and executive producer, the comedian and actress Mo'Nique. Who could hate this movie?

Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.

The Protector is about 84 minutes long, and only four of those minutes are devoted to plot.

It's thoughtful as well as funny, and you never want to take your eyes off Barkin. [10 May 1991, p.27]

Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.

The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."

Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.

It's intriguing. To be honest, though, there is less to it all than meets the eye.

In Darkness is a disaster movie, and the disaster is the Holocaust. In the space between the two halves of that sentence, you have what works about the film and what's a little creepy.

High-concept, low-budget, proudly set-bound, Hotel Artemis shouldn’t work at all. Somehow, miraculously, it does.

A rich mood piece, a study in bleakness, spiritual exhaustion and death. [02 June 1995, p.56]

Brightly sidesteps the cliches that cling to the genre like barnacles and reinvents a lot of the old moves.

The film’s energy is contagious.

Slightly misshapen and unbalanced, with a few loose ends, a few extraneous dream sequences. But there's something going on all the time.

This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject.

For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.

The movie keeps you guessing, mostly in pleasure, at both its meanings and its methods.

The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.

The Trigger Effect is a smarter-than- average thriller that proves David Koepp can direct films as well as write them. [30 Aug 1996, p.F1]

In The Desert of Forbidden Art, documentarians Amanda Pope and Tchavdar Georgiev offer some background on the late Savitsky, a painter who initially collected ethnic folk art quashed by the Stalin regime.

Thankfully, the movie approaches this subject the way one might a used car, with suspicion and an extra helping of mordant humor. It just folds in the endorphins gradually, until you understand why audiences voted it their favorite film at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

A celebration of a time when secret agents dressed impeccably, bantered with style, and had exceptionally cool toys. That the movie is almost instantly forgettable is part of the pleasure.

No Way Home is overlong and its various temporal loop-the-loops start to wear out their welcome...All that said, there’s an imaginativeness to No Way Home, along with a ton of energy, that makes the viewer cut it a lot of slack.

It's a solid, earnest drama of moral redemption that places old cliches in an unfamiliar setting.

As amusing as it is, the comedy here consists mostly of predictable potshots.

This is a ride, a video game, a soundtrack -- unapologetic and clearly labeled as such. It has no middle speed.

Lightyear overcomes gravity of the physical sort. That’s what Space Command specializes in. It has a harder time with the emotional kind.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

In pace, sensibility, and big, beating heart, this is a child's first indie film, and it's the better for it.

Vividly captures a period of movie history. It’s just that the period seems less vital -- sleepier, if you will -- than it once did.

It’s cheap pandering to fans, but I really couldn’t stay mad at a movie that uses Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon” as a point of contention and has two shout-outs to one of the best movies of 1985, “Real Genius.”

Without even trying, Coccio may have stumbled over the truest metaphor for Columbine yet.

The small Indonesian island of Bali still evokes images of a tropical paradise where Westerners can escape the discontents of the so-called developed world. Much of that romance lingers in Bitter Honey.

Gilliam has a vision and a viewpoint, and he puts it on screen with an extravagance, a humanistic generosity and a visual imagination that make it a standout in 1989's virtual cinematic vacuum. [10 Mar 1989, p.32]

The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.

The word “feminism” itself has become toxified. For young women who might be despairing as they fight the good fight, this film provides context, roots, and the wisdom of elders.

The movie is always entertaining and frequently smart about the new ground one girl will break to humiliate another.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.

Just what Gooding needed to restart his stalled career.

Because its subjects are so driven and so talented, First Position, which is about ballet, is more gripping than the norm.

My Girl is a pleasant surprise. It's sweet, offbeat and ultimately slight, but likable nevertheless for the emotional integrity it maintains in its story of a girl coming to terms with the death of someone close to her. It's one of the few American movies that tries to be honest about death and give kids credit for being able to cope with it, and that alone makes it recommendable. [27 Nov 1991, p.23]

Into the Blue is as much a mesmerizing aquatic expedition as it is a reasonably suspenseful action adventure.

The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.

The acting is playful aces all around: Fillion gives good exhausted incredulity, Banks gives good virginal idiocy, and Rooker gives great conflicted monster arrogance even before the aliens get him.

American Dreamz pitches its softballs with style. Martin Tweed, the preeningly heartless British host of the title TV show, just may be the great comic role that has always eluded Hugh Grant.

At the heart of most of these encounters is talk about the nature of relationships -- cousins, twins, and peers. Mostly, though, Jarmusch displays an unexpected interest in the ironies and banalities of fame.

This is an easy movie to spoil. It's rather plotless. But things happen in precisely the way that life happens.

The film's insistence on the men's innocence is matter of fact. But it's also an urgent corrective to the suspicious eye the movies so often cast on Arabs and Islam.

All About the Benjamins has: flash, cash, and enough videogenic eye candy to make ''Miami Vice'' look like ''Little House on the Prairie.''

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.

The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.

Debbie gets away with being such a cauldron of extremes because the airy-voiced Mann is extremely good at playing them. She happens to be Apatow's wife (the kids in the movie are theirs), and with the possible exception of Téa Leoni , it's hard to imagine who else could get away with this combination of needling and affection.

[Krasinski's] direction is so efficient and assured that the three or four rather ridiculous plot elements go unnoticed until well after the movie’s over. That’s how absorbing Part II can be.

JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising.

Director Tomm Moore (the 2009 Oscar contender “The Secret of Kells”) crafts a traditionally rendered feature whose doe-eyed characters faintly echo Miyazaki yet offer a beauty all their own.

Too shapeless and cursorily plotted to fully work as a story, but Koppelman and his co-director, David Levien, generously surround the hero with reliable actors doing solid work; if you can get past the catastrophe of Ben’s behavior, the film’s a genuine pleasure.

It's as much a satire as a mystery, a film as much about art as it is about faith.

Exquisitely painful look at how Hollywood turns its hopefuls into whores. [03 May 1992, p.B35]

They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.

Stirs excitement about exploration of all kinds.

The movie is seriously sexy and seriously entertaining.

Seemingly limitless access is what makes the movie interesting.

A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.

Spaceballs has the happy air of a comic enterprise that knows it's going right. It just keeps spritzing the gags at us, Borscht Belt-style, confidently and rightly sensing that if we don't laugh at this one, we'll laugh at the next. And so we do. After a long dry spell, Brooks is back on the money with Spaceballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.33]

For audiences with an extremely high tolerance for brutally fetishized shootouts and bloodletting, this continuation of Reeves’s potential-filled reluctant hit man saga is electrifying, both visually and in its cracked narrative ambitions.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.

The movie stakes out a whole new arena - male social performance anxiety - and ruthlessly mines it for comic embarrassment.

The larger point Harvard Beats Yale makes, perhaps, is about the inevitability of loss. Many of these men, now in their early 60s, look terrific. Others, let us say, do not. Either way, all of them look very different from the helmeted young athletes of 40 years ago. A sense of mortality shadows the documentary. On or off the gridiron, time is the only opponent who always wins. Even at Harvard, even at Yale.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

There’s something happening here and it isn’t exactly clear. What is clear is that Eytan Fox may yet make a great film for the 21st century.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

In Batman Begins, Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen.

The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.

Harrowing and inexorable, the film recaptures the progressive insanity of Jim Jones and the hundreds of worshipers in his thrall, and it certainly gives you willies to last for days.

[A] crass, patchy, often shamelessly funny farce.

Though overloaded with narration, “Honey” triumphs visually, with stunning shots of bees in flight, tracked in slow motion, “Winged Migration”-style, by who-knows-what technical wizardry.

Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.

This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.

The movie is sufficiently in touch with current comic books that it’s keen to explore Batman’s psychology — breezily, but still.

A pretty decent crime drama - not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007's "Gone Baby Gone,'' but it's moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations.

Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.

Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.

This version of Where the Wilds Things Are isn’t about childhood at all but about childhood’s end and what’s gained and lost by it. That’s why very young kids, dull Disney princesses, overprotective parents, and self-serious grown-ups should probably stay away.

Shadow Magic isn't interested in psychology or character study. It's a series of tableaux and on that level succeeds admirably.

A steadily engaging and winningly humane film that loves its characters.

As eye-opening as this movie is, the real story is outside the Times building, in the browser windows and iPads of me and you and everyone we know.

Has a pleasantly freewheeling, European art film feel to it, a welcome reminder of the New Hollywood of the '70s. [04 Sep 2005]

The admirable feminist agenda occasionally trips up the narrative, but the film's performances keep it on track.

Exit 8 is based on a best-selling video game released in 2023. I have not played it, but if it’s anything like director Genki Kawamura’s adaptation, I’d say it’s enough to drive a person crazy.

Spider-Man: Homecoming, a superhero movie is adolescent in all the right ways: limber, reckless, full of youthful brio and uncertainty. Trying on new identities, overreaching, doubting, starting over again.

Where the average Japanese horror flick is petulant and nasty, Pulse is dolorous, shivery, and surreal.

Not all of Nine Lives clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.