Rendering experience synthetic, replacing desperation with cuteness, Frankie & Johnny is Love Lite. [11 Oct 1991, p.49]

The film's invented Paris -- endless restaurants, boutiques, and impossibly large apartments, with a little artificial ''grit'' thrown in -- is pretty, and the neatly wrapped plot provides the comforting illusion that one's own family dramas can be as easily and amusingly resolved.

In Robot Stories, technology hasn't colonized human life, it's finding ways to make living (and loving) better.

What keeps the film going, and helps it keep its comic tone, is the constant threat of cataclysm - and the deadpan Buster Keaton charm of the ever-responsive Pinon as he combats the giant Rube Goldberg meat-grinder that the house, in effect, is. [17 Apr 1992]

Alan Rudolph's beautifully burnished, heartache-filled evocation of Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Tablemates bites off a bit more than it can spew. But a couple of things make it special. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]

Deadpool 2 is very good at what it does, which is flattering the audience into feeling like it’s in on the joke. If you’re a doubter, though, you may wonder if the joke’s on us.

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

From its opening evolution sequence of squiggly things in the water through its references to the great circle of life, The Land Before Time embraces a larger perspective than merely that of the adventure story. It's an affecting work, and a work of quality. [18 Nov 1988, p.29]

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

The movie’s best moments illustrate the lines that Mazur won’t cross, plus a few that he will.

The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.

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]

Mary Poppins Returns is torn between taking audiences back to their childhoods and treating them like children. You might have a good time but don’t be surprised if you feel a little dociousaliexpeisticfragicalirupus afterward.

The big surprise is that none of these talented voice actors bring anything new or interesting to their one-dimensional roles.

The Fairy may be as close as we'll ever get to a live-action cartoon.

The stakes in the film are high enough for some plot, but low enough to maintain healthy blood pressure. There is a delicious lack of exposition — and plenty of inside jokes for the true fans.

Even in the city’s most crowded place, Giroux makes his lovers seem like the only couple on Earth.

Last year’s biggest animated feature was Pixar’s Soul. The best thing about it was a rare feeling for music, an ability to express jazz visually and rhythmically. At times, Vivo does the same even better for Latin music.

It’s like Sinatra said: If you can make (do without) it there, you can make (do without) it anywhere. The movie leaves it up to you.

Like [The Purge and The Conjuring], Adam Wingard’s sly, diabolical, and oddly moral You’re Next draws on the home invasion/haunted house scenario, but outclasses them with its wit, irony, and technically proficient terror.

As powerful as the movie is, it stays on the outside of a culture looking in.

"Star Trek VI" is one of the weaker additions to the Enterprise enterprise. It merely goes through the motions, including requisite moments that feel obligatory and uninspired. There's nothing gravely wrong here - no embarrassing scenes or egregious plot gaffes. There's simply nothing new, and certainly nothing fresh or reinvented. [6 Dec. 1991, p.53]

You feel embarrassed for Streep and Jones (Streep especially) because of the situations, often sexual, they're put in. They're definitely not mailing in their performances.

It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.

It's neither a neat little allegory about faith nor a transcendently entertaining one. I Am Legend is actually about the last man on earth played by one of the last real movie stars on earth. To be honest, Smith was all I was thinking about while I sat through I Am Legend.

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 makes a sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all.

Mixes ''Jetsons''-style futuristic hijinks with a reliable story of a boy inadvertently whisked ''over the rainbow'' to another galaxy where his mettle is tested.

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.

August's production, while not on a level with either of those memorable predecessors, is solid nonetheless. Its strengths are its handsome amplitude and the intelligent clarity with which the various strands of the novel are advanced by a smoothly meshed international cast. [01 May 1998, p.D4]

Anyone looking for a more practical horror film than ''The Fog" should try The Future of Food.

The cast does good work, despite a less-than-great screenplay.

Summer of 85, the latest from the prolific director of Swimming Pool (2002) and By the Grace of God (2018), looks like a sunny, sybaritic gay coming-of-age story along the lines of Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name (2017), but it turns out to be something darker and more ambiguous, less about sexuality than self.

Unlike “Belle,” however, in this case Asante does not allow her story to be overwhelmed by period decor and costumes.

Fast-moving, light-handed, assured, even witty at times, and filled with satisfying special effects, Tremors plays like a redneck "Dune." [19 Jan 1990, p.23]

The Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

Notwithstanding its irresistible rhinestone array of mid-’60s popular culture, Last Night in Soho is an exercise in nostalgia only in passing. What it is is a horror movie, released just in time for Halloween.

White Men Can't Jump isn't perfect. But most of the time it's a lot of fun. Its funky moves are going to put more smiles on more faces than any regular season or tournament basketball TV throws at you. [27 Mar 1992, p.25]

Buried works better as an evocation of "Twilight Zone'' eeriness. Even then, it's silly and gimmicky.

Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.

So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.

The problem is that the heart of the movie is McGowan. He's just not a very compelling figure. He's a bit doughy and inert.

It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.

With its sketchy characters, slick production values, frequent backlighting, smart pacing and effective half-light, this Body Snatchers is good if not great scare stuff. It's almost too efficient, too technological-looking to generate the kind of primal fears it wants. Still, those pods are nothing to sneeze at. They remain one of insomnia's greatest hits. [25 Feb 1994, p.48]

Distinguishes itself from the recent glut of mediocre political documentaries by opting for nonpartisanship.

Colman and Banderas have a great time hamming it up, and their fun is quite infectious. Walters is also at her spiky best. They help make this a worthwhile afternoon at the cinema.

In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

The score is the most effective thing about the film. Sometimes it's a suspicious, mischie-vous distraction from the reality that not enough of this makes sense.

Stars at Noon trades too much on a tradition of older, maybe not better but certainly more urgent movies. Somewhere deep, deep in its heart is the memory of Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum.

Unusually compelling, even if it's treacly enough to be "The Chorus" in goose step.

The Butler is a remarkable, even exhilarating movie not for its inherent Gump-itude but for the social portrait that gimmick allows.

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

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.

A firm, ringing yes and no on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read -- or re-read -- the book.

Miraculously, the opera comes off, simultaneously ridiculous and thrilling, in a blaze of pageantry.

The ideas are generous and inclusive rather than divisive: Zinn wants history to be seen and to be experienced from every possible perspective.

From Marber's fiercely polished writing, Nichols wrings every drop of acid, yet it's a show of the director's goodness that a movie fundamentally preoccupied with interpersonal ugliness is allowed to end on a convincing note of beauty.

Paul Haggis switches from the problem of racism to the problem of Iraq. The war is a better fit. None of the exasperating guilt on display in "Crash" has made it into In the Valley of Elah, a solidly made genre movie: the Army mystery.

The film's a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both its nuances and implausibilities.

Leconte's writing is tight and nimble, and while the tests of the duo's friendship are facile, under the circumstances, they make sense. The bond between Francois and Bruno approximates the real thing; Leconte seems to be arguing that you can grow a flower from fake soil.

The Client is slick, but not much more than the sum of its surfaces. [20 July 1994, p.23]

Mystery Science Theater 3000 restores your faith in an ordered universe, compelling you to reflect that those campy movies from the '50s and '60s did, after all, have a purpose, although it wasn't easy to discern at the time. [19 Apr 1996, p.54]

Yet despite the retrospective sensationalism, Lovett's 70-minute documentary is a sobering anti-erotic cautionary tale.

The Visitor arrived at the height of a sci-fi and horror film revival, when “serious” directors... embraced genre conventions and made them their own. Paradise stole from them all. But unlike these directors, his ambition was coupled with delusional ineptitude.

For a film about the power of speech, it's the quiet moments of rapture that say everything.

Lacks the creepy immediacy of even the most misbegotten of the found-footage genre.

Don't see the movie if you can't handle two rather sexy senior citizens threatening to meet in body and mind.

The movie has a devilish wit that works for parent and child alike, and it moves like a bobsled. It's funny and fun, and if it's not up to Pixar level, it still represents the best of what the competition has to offer.

In occasional vignettes voiced over home movies and old photos, Chesney talks with humble conviction of reaching people in the cheap seats.

[A] sweet, dumb, unnecessary, and absurdly charming movie.

It plays like a crude "Godfather" parody, the sort that might amuse as a 10-minute sketch on "Saturday Night Live," but curdles and collapses as a 143-minute film. [09 Dec 1983]

Lively and beautiful filmmaking. It may leave you scratching your head, but it shouldn't leave you cold.

You can feel her (Bening) drag Being Julia uphill for an hour and a half until the final 15 minutes, when the ground finally levels out and the picture becomes fine, vengeful fun.

American Made really does deserve to be on a double-bill with “Top Gun,” and I’m betting Cruise knows it. The first film embodies the glorious shallowness of the Reagan Era. The second wallows in that shallowness while hinting at everything it cost.

For answers, prepare to sit through two hours of complications, though you will probably figure it out before the spectacular ending.

It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

Worth seeing as further proof that Annette Bening can do anything and for a touchingly flummoxed performance by Jamie Bell, once the kid of “Billy Elliot” and now a strapping romantic lead. But if it sends audiences back to explore the filmography of Gloria Grahame, the movie will have truly provided a public service.

The immaculately crafted film that just sits there and refuses to come to life.

Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.

A touching but fairly clumsy effort that only acquires the depths of sadness and resilience it needs if you have the memory of the earlier film shoring it up. It proves that second-hand grace is, after all, still grace.

Through it all, Fleck seems at a loss for words, stumbling through small talk and staring feebly as a Ugandan musician weeps during a song about his dead father.

Onstage, Noises Off was a riot. On film, it's in the salvage business, snatching a few vagrant laughs from a reworking that otherwise sinks like a failed souffle, reminding us yet again that farce onstage and farce on film are two fundamentally different constructs. [20 March 1992, p.30]

Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga deplores the corruption, gunplay, and oversexed misogyny plaguing his country - and he's going to show you as much of it as possible before the end credits roll.

In “Vengeance,” Novak proves his chops both as an adept filmmaker and skillful satirist of contemporary mores.

What follows is no “Citizen Kane,” or even “Velvet Goldmine” (1998), Todd Haynes’s arty tale of a reporter trying to track down a missing glam rock star, in which Collette also starred, playing the missing man’s alcoholic wife.

A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.

A rhapsodic erotic romance that takes place in a cultural prison, and it pulses with a defiance that would be mischievous if it weren't so rip-roaringly angry.

It's funky and funny, not just sleek, riding witty repartee that makes it seem an extension of the fizzy, romantic comedies of the '30s (as well as the Harlem Renaissance, invoked by its poetry club scenes). [14 Mar 1977, p.C1]

Spielberg has said that in their collaboration, cut short by Kubrick's death, Kubrick had opened his heart as never before. Although the fingerprint of each is upon A.I, there are times when the prints are blurred and merged. And this film will blur the hitherto distinctive profiles of each.

A Tale of Two Sisters reminds that few things are as terrifying as our own imaginations.

In short, “Imaginarium’’ is a Terry Gilliam movie and it’s a mess, which over the years have come to mean much the same thing. It’s one of his better messes, though, or at least this critic was won over by its ramshackle whimsies.

My only complaint about Naked Gun 2 1/2 is that it doesn't give you enough time to finish laughing at one gag before the next one comes along, cracking you up all over again. Naked Gun 2 1/2 is high-flying low comedy, 90 minutes of sublime nonsense that only the devoutly humorless could hate. [28 June 1991, p.69]

The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.

A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.

In rock, it's about the attitude as much as the music. In some cases, more so. And the Runaways were all attitude.