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.

Throw out any expectations you might have of coherent narrative structure or directorial control, and you might have a pretty good time.

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

Basically an addiction thriller in which the thirst is for the acquisition and execution of knowledge. So you need an actor who seems surprised by how smart he is but not afraid to be charmingly intelligent. Cooper turns out to be perfect for the part.

Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]

It’s a happy task to report that Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore is a marked improvement on “Crimes.”

The Danish Gir” wants to introduce us to a woman who helped forge a new way of thinking about what defines a person as a man or a woman. Mostly, though, it’s about the joy of sets.

Between Josh Gad’s charmingly earnest voice-over performance and more of the arthouse gloss that Hallström has drizzled on everything from “The Hundred-Foot Journey” to “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” it’s a weepie that can be tough to resist.

Good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis's smooth direction.

Unfolds with an absolute minimum of dramatic highs and lows, and it's so disaffected that it prompts laughter at the wrong moments.

Visually, this translates into thrilling action sequences of lone knife-wielders hewing down ranks of adversaries with balletic precision. If preserving this means sacrificing a scruple or two, it’s worth the trade.

At the very least, Agora finally gives Rachel Weisz a role that almost exactly matches her intense, humorless, but undeniable star charisma.

By the end, we're left with a feeling of depletion rather than resolution, which may have been Gray's intention.

While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.

The Daddy Day Care business model appears to be the 1983 Michael Keaton vehicle ''Mr. Mom,'' put on an unstoppable sugar high.

The movie's an easy, engaging watch, even if it's literally all over the map.

A bittersweet musing about the nature of parenthood and about the conflict between nature and nurture, it is as banal and insightful as its title.

Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.

The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.

Denys Arcand has satiric fun with the media's way of taking celebrity culture at face value and nothing but. Eventually, though, the film becomes what it's ridiculing.

The results are visually dazzling. The movie as a whole is something less.

It is epic in scope, intimate in detail, and otherworldly in its dimensions, like the Bayeux Tapestry with special effects and a stentorian soundtrack.

There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]

As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.

As a depiction of extralegal activity, 12 O’Clock Boys is eye-opening but sometimes needlessly ambiguous.

The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.

Has something many movies don't these days: interesting and attractive people talking to each other.

High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.

Good Kill is by necessity a grim piece of work, one that fields a powerful and unexpectedly terse performance from Ethan Hawke while stumbling over plot developments that seem increasingly forced. Niccol can be forgiven his outrage even as it leads him to create drama out of agenda instead of the other way around.

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.

Enjoy the sense of never quite knowing when the movie is going to stick another pin in its balloon of sincerity, and you’ll like the Coopers well enough.

Youth is, among many other things, a lovely valentine to both Caine and Keitel, two performers who have seen it all and know what to do with it.

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

The documentary doesn’t give the sense of McEnroe as a person that Douglas’s film does. But it gives a rather astonishing sense of him as a player. With all due respect to those other McEnroe guises, that’s the one that matters.

Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.

Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.

A classy unintentional hoot.

As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.

It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

Much like a Sox starter struggling for the first couple of innings before settling down, The Perfect Game takes a while to get to the parts worth cheering.

My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

O'Brien and his castmates seem to play loose with his script a bit more than they should in an effort to give the material a lived-in feeling.

Quest for Camelot is easy to sit through and reasonably entertaining. Certainly it should satisfy its target audience. But Warner really needs to journey more boldly toward a personality of its own and offer a real alternative. [15 May 1998, p.D5]

Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.

What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick the movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt.

Undersea photographer Rob Stewart, who directed, wrote, narrated, stars in, and helped shoot Sharkwater, really, really loves sharks. He also fears for their future on the planet. His lively documentary makes you see why, on both counts.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.

Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.

Hawke delivers a strong melancholy variation on his familiar emotional cool as Reverend Toller.

War of the Worlds pushes some of the right buttons and enough of the wrong ones to make you wish that Spielberg would move on from aliens already and use his unparalleled talents to focus once more on earth.

Though Mazer’s ambition is laudable, he has not yet integrated the comedy of manners into the comedy of no manners.

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

It's a treat, nevertheless, to watch the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in a rare leading role. Chiara Mastroianni has her mother's hair and face with her father's sorrowful eyes stuck smack in the middle, and she moves as if conscious of the weight of her genetic splendor.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

Nicely shot and edited, but the movie is a narrative mess, which wouldn't be so bad if all it were up to was depicting Lucia's ups and downs. But the film takes too many illogical detours to be of much use.

T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.

According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.

Whenever Ronan’s not on the screen, “See” seems to lose something. It’s no mystery why.

Once again, the most resonant drama here is all about conveying a self-loathing born of inescapable circumstances.

Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

The movie flaunts its ridiculousness and offers a relentless string of jokes about blindness, groin-bashing, and bodily odors.

Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.

Neeson is much better suited to the loneliness and self-doubt of Martin's crisis than he was for the thuggery of the previous movie.

It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

It’s a strong story with devastating implications, but also one told at an artistic remove that renders its meanings less subtle than diminished. There’s a fury underlying this film that goes unexpressed to the point of almost going unacknowledged, and it saps The Third Wife of a strength and momentum it could use. If Ash Mayfair ever taps into that fury, she may become a filmmaker to reckon with.

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.

Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.

Pleasantly inspirational on its own terms, "Clear" is no one's idea of fresh goods.

The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.

It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.

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.

There's no Passion in this psychological drama.

Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, "New York" spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.

More than any of the sappy writing ever does, their collective presence reminds us that any church is about community. The film is tired and trite, but they're terrific, every last one of them. [10 Dec 1993, p.53]

Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"

At times you feel Weitz flipping the pages and dog-earing wildly, and that's a shame: This is a movie that needs to be lengthy and discursive, the better to duck into the back alleys of its invention. A visionary is required. This director isn't one.

The creepiest part of XX, a quartet of short horror films by women, might be the Jan Svankmejer-like stop-action segments between each of them. Sofia Carrillo’s animated antique dolls and little furniture walking on stilt-like legs are the stuff of nightmares.

The story and settings hold interest throughout, but at times the very lack of emotional connection that Yeshi laments in his father seems to hinder the film.