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

Life with Mikey is awfully easy to take, thanks mostly to Fox's breezy charm. [4 June 1993, p.51]

A hip-hop cousin of Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which had braver fashion sense and better original songs.

The coolest animation in town.

What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.

Though the last third of the film feels rushed, and Bennebjerg’s performance hews dangerously close to mustache-twirling-villain territory, there is much to admire and enjoy here. Arcel has made the kind of cinematic spectacle Hollywood used to excel at, but doesn’t make anymore.

Green and his cast deliver a wonderful surprise. Echo himself, a generically precious alien, is the least of it. The funny, moving, authentic bond among the kids in the movie is the unadvertised draw.

The filmmaker invites us to reconsider the author as someone warmer and less intimidating than his body of work. On that count, Wrestling With Angels succeeds.

No one here is prodding you to laugh. It just happens.

Not your everyday dilemma, but as depicted in this lushly detailed and passionately performed melodrama, the mores and traditions of this sequestered, seldom depicted group take on a broader relevance.

Either you'll find the man hilarious -- or he'll seem like one of those awful, tedious comedians who only THINKS he's hilarious.

At its core, a perceptive satire of the interpersonal boiling points in buddy-cop pictures.

It's assured and neatly crafted - the time zips by while you're watching it.

Of all the comic book movies that have spun out of theaters this long and pulpy summer, Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy II: The Golden Army is the most unapologetically comic book-y.

Less striking for its storyline than for the world it presents -- a rural moonscape of coal-dust, casual environmental disaster, and atavistic behavior.

Isn't so much a story of perseverance and musical triumph as it is of despair, acceptance, and social commitment. The movie's a call to arms: We are our brothers' keepers, it says, and our brothers are in terrible shape.

A modest but extremely enjoyable movie.

More than anything else, Oldboy recalls Alfred Hitchcock with all restraint tossed to the wind, or Hitchcock's most obsessed devotee, Brian De Palma, at his most nastily inspired.

Rise is very consciously a drama about a Simian Spring, and it's close enough in its details to a recent documentary to be thought of as "Project Nim: The Revenge."

You can't help cheering on Shallow Hal. That and the fact that it's not at all politically correct. It's something better. It's big-hearted, and it's funny.

A dinner-from-hell comedy about a pretty Jewish Spaniard who brings a nice Palestinian guy home to her outspoken Madrid family.

It captures a version of our best worst selves.

The movie's queer delight is contagious. You'll exit lip-synching.

So despite Tcheng's effort to add a metaphysical layer to the film, it pretty much repeats the narrative seen in many other documentaries about the fashion world, from Wim Wenders's “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” (1989), to “Unzipped” (1995), to “Valentino: The Last Emperor” (2008).

A ton of fun, and then some.

The real core of The Core is the beautiful friendship between a highly emotive Eckhart and the sacrificial Karyo. Their bond is the best thing to happen to Franco-American relations since SpaghettiOs.

It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.

The Big Chill is not an ode to the '60s or '80s, but a touching, sincere account of boys and girls who became men and women. [30 Sep 1983, p.1]

Through luck or Huber’s eye for the odd detail, it adds up to an unexpectedly moving portrait of a maverick at twilight.

Too many of the sequences are two-character dialogues that take place in restaurants; after a while, the film starts to resemble sketch existentialism.

Meier’s soft touch with the offbeat material is surprisingly mature, to the point of maybe being a bit too reserved.

Acridly funny.

Entertaining.

Although the film is full of the sensory jolts common to this genre, it also has more humor than most, thanks to Richard Rice's tough, witty script. [15 Sep 1989, p.37]

Wrestling gets in America's face and Blaustein gets in wrestling's face. It's a fascinating tango.

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

This version may not be as stylish or as sparkling as Richard Lester's 1974 outing with Michael York as D'Artagnan, but it's winningly rambunctious and pushes ahead in livelier fashion than the other versions. [12 May 1993, p.48]

As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.

By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

The scariest aspect of New Order is that in 2021 it doesn’t feel far-fetched at all.

Because its gaze is so level and so unyielding, it stands as one of the better dramatic films made on this subject (although it's not nearly as fine as Louis Malle's "Au Revoir les Enfants."

The songs, written by Carney and Gary Clark, have a goofy but genuine appeal. Watch out, or you might end up downloading the soundtrack.

The important thing is that the film knows how to make itself likable. It's executed with warmth and affection and a high enough energy level to keep it entertaining. [15 Oct 1993, p.53]

Of an Age successfully captures the fear that the object of one’s queer affection may be straight and unwilling to reciprocate.

Watson's character grows in importance until she eclipses the recessive Luzhin.

In the end, it's simple warmth and sincerity that make this ensemble piece so disarming.

There's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]

It takes almost an hour for The Legend of Leigh Bowery to make a case for Bowery's sort of genius, and in the last third, the movie gives a real sense of what made him him.

It’s like an international-relations microcosm imagined by the Coen brothers, down to an occasional sense that the absurdity isn’t taking us anywhere.

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

Has a novelist's human touch. Were it a book, it would go somewhere on the shelf with Jonathan Safran Foer and early Philip Roth.

A playful French meta-mystery that's occasionally too proud of its own cleverness.

A charming and funny look at the independent filmmaking business and the thin line between a masterpiece and a $9 nap.

Kendrick’s interplay with Lively crackles, whether they’re going for laughs or something darker. Both are big selling points — as is their director, even if it’s not as advertised.

Halfway into this film, I wanted to smack the mopey bohemian couple played by July and Hamish Linklater; by the end, I realized the director was smacking them for me, and hard. In a case of biting the hand that feeds her, July has made possibly the worst date movie ever for trendy modern couples - a work that traps a pair of passive-aggressive hipsters in a drift of their own making.

With this entertaining, funny, and informative movie, McKenzie can add documentary filmmaker to his CV. I doubt it will convince anyone who has bought into the legends of cryptocurrency to change their outlook, but skeptics will definitely get a kick out of this three year journey, which started during the pandemic in 2020.

Reducing Life of Pi to a homily does it a disservice. Lee gives the framing story short shrift and concentrates on visualizing the inner tale with as much detail and power as possible.

Actually an above-average farce, at least as featherweight chick flicks go.

Durkin has a filmmaking style of indirect direction, one that leans on certain ’70s suspense-movie tricks: slow zooms into figures standing at windows, eerie soundtrack drones. But the performances are bold: Law making the grand, obvious gestures of a poor kid pretending to be rich and Coon turning Allison’s unhappiness into open rebellion in a restaurant scene that leads to a delirious solo night on the town.

It's the most touching love story about tragically separated sexy beasts since "Cold Mountain."

To a Western audience, the movie may at times feel pat, cooked up, wishful beyond realistic measure. But we're not the ones who need to see it.

What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.

Love hurts in Secretary -- but not too much. It's not impossible to imagine adventurous young couples seeing this movie and rushing home to try out the handcuffs and paddles.

Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]

The result is entertainment whose pace and sound, while dizzyingly brisk at points, still accommodates characters and a setting that are terrifically rich — a menagerie more fully, memorably realized than “Zootopia.”

The film never quite hits a sure-footed stride. The fictional love story stays fictional. But ''Pearl Harbor'' delivers the main event.

Kong: Skull Island isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.

It needs only to entertain. And that it does thoroughly, leaving us both charmed and enriched without feeling very preached at. Praise be.

Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action.

Schreck matches the wit and fire of her writing with a riveting performance that often does not feel like a performance at all, but rather a cri de coeur wrenched up from a deep place where the personal, the historical, and the universal have met and merged.

The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.

The Brutalist reminded me of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood.” With both films, I found the first half spectacular, while the second half left me dissatisfied and scratching my head.

Here's a film made by grown-ups for grown-ups, on grown-up themes of statelessness and belonging. Yet you could show it to a 6-year-old and have him or her understand all the nuances of plot and characterization.

Those who can endure it will find Kirby Dick's film provocative and surprisingly touching. [14 Nov 1997, p.D11]

Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

A Royal Affair is tosh but it's ripely entertaining tosh, with emotions as flamboyant as the window treatments. There is nothing like a Dane.

What is the value of art in times of strife? Should people be sitting in the theater or rioting in the streets? Walter's film reminds us that once there was a man whose work made no distinction between the two.

It’s unnerving in ways that elude easy explanation and that slip under your skin and stay there.

Jimmy Carter Rock & Roll President isn’t a political documentary, but it is a civics lesson.

The Crimson Rivers could teach many an American thriller a thing or two about sophisticated creepiness.

Maybe the biggest problem with Muscle Shoals is that it doesn’t dig deeper into something even more miraculous than the music.

What Redbelt reminded me of more than anything else was a modern version of a classic film noir, particularly 1950's brilliantly seedy "Night and the City," with its pro-wrestling subplot.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

A cautionary tale for the fleet-fingered social media generation, Zola explodes off the screen in a burst of emoji confetti.

Imelda is at its most acridly useful when comparing the former first lady's recollections with others' less sanguine memories.

It’s one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.

By the end, you don't entirely understand either of these people, but you come to understand why they need each other.

They’ve built up a vast ensemble of character types, all of them played by better-than-average actors, and that they can mix and match the drama, comedy, or action as they see fit.

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

Going the Distance earns its R rating, often by daring to say what goes frequently unsaid by women in raunchy comedies. It's not a very good movie. The entire second half is a sitcom.

The movie star Julie Christie turned 62 last month, and anyone under the impression that she merely floated through her prime heedless of the age in which she worked should catch her in A Decade Under the Influence.

From start to finish, you don’t know what’s coming next in Nope. When was the last time you saw a movie where that was true? Nope is deeply strange, and Jordan Peele knows exactly what he’s doing with that strangeness. It’s designedly strange. It’s coherently strange.

It’s as slickly enjoyable as anything you’d see on VH1.

There are many indicators of star power. Not the least of them is unforgettability. On screen, no less than in the laboratory, Eric Kandel has star power.

There’s no backstage dirt, then — for that, pick up the 2002 “uncensored history” written by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller — but there is an honest appraisal of the show’s peaks and valleys over the years.

The good news is that the movie advertises Dolan's delirious visual talent.