It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.

Intelligent and earnest, The Fault in Our Stars works well enough to keep a doubter from feeling mugged by sentiment.

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

We have lots of terminology for what happens when two male stars appear to have the platonic hots for each other. The genre is called bromance. The feelings are bromantic. The orientation is bromosexuality. What Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum have in 21 Jump Street scrambles, transcends, and explodes all of that.

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.

This is frostbitten Fellini -- a film that finds fresh beauty and contentment in the wake of centuries of conquering armies. The great joke of Vodka Lemon is that the conquerors missed what was there all along.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.

It's not a perfect film. In fact, it's in many ways a messy film. But if it's disjointed, so are its characters' lives. And they're put onscreen with a veracity and an emotional authenticity that draw you into their tight little barnyard world. [17 Jul 1992, p.31]

It takes a while for the movie to build to its wicked possibilities and only a few scenes to squander them.

It’s a fable that ties up too neatly to be believed, and it’s a story I’m tired of hearing.

Guncrazy, a film more about limits than about bullets, is a pretty compelling little pistols 'n' potency outing, and Barrymore's sprung teen is what makes it almost mandatory viewing. In her chopped blond hair, creamy skin, strong chin and perfectly curved jawline, she's Lolita with the safety catch off. [05 Feb 1993, p.30]

Hardy once again shows what quiet force and phenomenal range he has.

The result is, like its characters, a good and decent film in a world that rather heartlessly demands more.

The result is Grade-A agitpop, a mixture of archival footage and cheeky, creative animated reconstruction that's funny and frightening in equal measure.

Fans of the animated wildlife adventure show will be in warthog heaven; others need not necessarily apply.

The film's triumph - and it is a triumph - in the end rests on the ability of Hrebejk and his actors to convince us that they never stop being normal people.

The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.

Wants to be as shocking as its title, but it doesn't have the nerve.

The movie is of this precise moment and you should probably see it now, since it will be dated by next Tuesday.

It makes a nicely grim little Halloween appetizer, although you may want to go home and hide under the bed afterward.

It spreads the punishment around, from the executive suites of Hollywood to the mean streets of Baghdad. Everyone here comes out smelling bad - that's why the film's so good.

A League of Their Own may not boost its material into the level of pop myth as, say, last year's great female buddy movie, "Thelma & Louise," did. It's a bit too concerned with being likable to make that kind of bold leap. But if A League of Their Own doesn't knock the ball out of the park, it's a clean hit, with extra bases written all over it. [1 July 1992, p.41]

Moore shows newsreel footage of Hitler delivering a speech. Only it’s not Hitler’s voice we hear. It’s Trump’s. Get it? Sure you do, and as you do the documentary slips the surly bonds of sanity — even of agitprop — to enter a realm of its own polemical making. Words cannot do justice to such an editorial decision. Well, maybe five can: intellectually null and morally contemptible.

Watching Happiest Season is like opening the wrong present on Christmas morning: You’re a little bummed out and it’s too late to put it back in the box.

The Outfit would be a splendid thing if limited to Rylance’s voiceover and long lingering shots of him working with fabrics.

All the actors are very good, though Raiff, who’s in almost every scene, can get a little wearying with his combination of high energy and touch of winsomeness.

Crazy Love doesn't downplay the awfulness of what happened , but it also knows a good media circus when it sees one.

It's all breezy and predictable.

It’s a lot of fun before it wears you out, and it wears you out sooner than it should.

A lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image.

A tale of narrow talent destroyed by pop hubris, raging insecurity, substance abuse, and murder.

Sometimes gets bogged down in its own wordiness.

The Cuckoo is smart enough to steer away from allegory and into the specific every chance it gets, though -- so much so that when the film finally does slip the mortal coil, you still hang with it.

A climactic explosion is too obviously a rigged gunpowder charge, and it becomes a metaphor for the film's mistake of diminishing the frantic motion that kept things fizzy and fun.

When Shirley MacLaine made this same movie, more or less, as "Madame Sousatzka," there was a whole lot of acting going on. Sharif brings us to Ibrahim with a modesty that oddly reminds you of why the actor is a legend.

Banek is one of the more complex characters Affleck has attempted, but the performance comes off flat and uninvolving.

If anything, Chernick’s film shows a life that may be too perfect. In addition to his triumphant career, Perlman has a seemingly ideal marriage — to Toby, a woman who is his match in ebullience, wit, and passion for art and music. It has lasted for more than 50 years.

The moral weight of Hitler's Children is unmistakable. So is that weight's inertness.

Though I could easily predict what’s coming next in Carry-On, that didn’t stop me from having a good time. The twists were executed successfully, and I liked that the heroic characters did some unlikable things in order to save themselves.

A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.

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

Darkly funny though it is, Sightseers has undercurrents of genuine and very British weirdness...Way down beneath the whimsy is a class rage as heartfelt as it is warped.

The movie is mostly grim, largely nasty, and gloatingly violent. (It is never a good idea to start a film with a child subjected to violence.) Really, what Harder is is glorified, post-Tarantino violence punctuated by exposition.

People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.

Here's a good, honorable, but not great anti-apartheid movie, the first directed by a black woman. A Dry White Season unravels when it opts for a wrap-up-the-loose-ends thriller finish, but there's no faulting the level of acting or the level of commitment in it. [17 Sept 1989, p.B4]

The pleasure of Infamous is in its gallery of larger-than-life portrayals.

Star Trek Beyond plays like an episode of the old “Star Trek” TV series. This, I submit, is what’s enjoyable about it.

It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker

Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.

If the documentary isn’t especially deep, maybe that’s because its subject wasn’t.

Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.

Marty, Life Is Short allows you to be a fly on the wall for all that relentless merriment while reminding you to enjoy your own life while you can.

The role of investment banker Naomi Bishop seems right for Gunn, no question, and it’s one that she approaches with conviction. So why is it so hard to root for her, or for any of the characters here?

So Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, the directors of Art and Craft, have themselves an enticing subject in Landis’s activities. They do not have an enticing subject in Landis himself.

What The Hunger Games does have is a game cast, a large budget well spent, Collins on board as co-writer, and Lawrence as Katniss.

There isn't much to The Housekeeper, really, but it plumbs depths of male unease that louder and less wise movies strain to reach.

In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.

In My Skin takes that pain/pleasure principle and magnifies it until you're either dumbstruck or running screaming from the theater.

This movie could have been a nagging, preachy headache had either man exhibited a tendency for self-righteousness. But both are friendly, almost humble about their mischief.

The movie feels padded. And Hopkins's deft touch as a writer and director leaves him when it comes to casting.

A film of great ingenuity and imagination, full of suggestive power, and it deserves to be seen.

The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.

The decadence is obvious. But true to the Valentino prerogative, it's beautiful - sad, too: a dream life moving into the unknown.

For a passive-depressive Norwegian crime drama with not a lot in the way of plot, A Somewhat Gentle Man has a charmingly fluky sense of humor.

I wanted to keep watching. I wanted to leave. In between, I prayed for the piano-accordion soundtrack to silence itself for just one scene (it's like being trapped in a little French restaurant that refuses to close).

Abramoff may be in prison but the mindset that produced him -- and the pay-to-play government it needs to survive -- is triumphant.

People called the Bhuttos "The Kennedys of Pakistan" and, in a parallel with our losses, the Pakistanis suffered the untimely deaths of Benazir, her father, and her two brothers.

Miller is going to take some heat for making this new film inhabit a cruel world. But better that than sugarcoating the story. He's found a way to recycle a popular film - choppily perhaps, episodically perhaps, but provocatively. [25 Nov 1998, p.C1]

Once it finds its footing in old-fashioned journalism, the film packs a wallop.

Like its hero, the movie doesn't flinch for most of its running time.

The fun is in watching these robustly generic people trip over and pinball off of each other, seeing them eddy around Carell, who as the straight man here is getting dangerously close to Greg Kinnear's territory - where comedy is too self-serious to laugh at.

A taut, engrossing action movie about real-life heroes, so why is it a disappointment? Because director Peter Berg is telling the wrong story.

Until it goes off course, Limbo not only is up to Sayles's high standard, but extends it. [04 Jun 1999, p.C4]

It’s the mark of many a standout sports movie that you don’t necessarily have to be a fan to enjoy the story. The real-life pro wrestling portrait Fighting With My Family is a hugely entertaining case in point.

The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.

Say what you will about Gibson, but he's a genuine filmmaker, and Apocalypto gallops along the thin line between the deluded and the inspired with such conviction that you're yanked into its wake.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels essentially remains a duet of exquisitely turned gestures exchanged by Martin and Caine. It isn't killer comedy. Sometimes its leisurely pace veers dangerously close to slackness. But it's as close as Hollywood comedy comes to chamber music. [14 Dec 1988, p.77]

What the movie utterly fails to resolve is what François Ozon is up to here and where he's going next.

While not all transitions to adulthood are so fraught, there's much truth and no small amount of poetry in Girls Can't Swim.

Richly compelling.

Hopped up on standard action riffs, most of the film feels like hand-me-downs purchased from the John Woo outlet.

Yet for all the gags that fall flat and scenes that don’t quite play, there are enough that fuse shock humor and sly moral commentary to combust in your face.

Too quick to uncritically and unthinkingly accept its subject's rollickingly self-mythologizing take on himself.

Quite simply, The Adventures of Tintin is a model of modern movie craftsmanship. It's also, I'm afraid, rather dull.

The one thing going for Becket is actually two things: Burton and O'Toole.

The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.

In Bopha! the usual apartheid-struggle elements never thin out into abstractions. They're elemental, encapsulating a country's tragedy resonantly and powerfully in a single family's. [24 Sept 1993, p.51]

The Meddler is a disappointment after the talent Scafaria demonstrated in her 2012 feature debut “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.”

The film is at its best in Utah, both because in David Gribble's exhilarating cinematography we finally get to feel the full power and intoxication of the sport.

Leave it to James to sum up a legendary, culture-altering talent: “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Both sides of that coin live on in our modern culture, and Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet. Two decades after her death, she’s still the ghost in the machine.

[A] peripatetic and ultimately poignant documentary.

As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.

Brims with forboding, but it pulses with candy colors and the hum of neon signs.

A movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that’s a key part of the joke.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

This odd, ungainly western is harsh in its details, wayward in the telling, yet increasingly powerful as it wends its way back East toward civilization.

The best thing about Akin’s film is the dance stuff. The movie begins with arresting black-and-white archival footage of Georgian dancing. The rehearsals in the dance studio come alive, thanks in no small part to the drum-and-accordion accompaniment. Kinetically, the style of dance is percussive and assertive. It doesn’t so much flow as boil.