The film is slow going with its mix of stilted political discourse and restless village folk just looking to celebrate life and dance. At times, it’s like “Footloose” gone didactic.

At nearly two hours Lunacy becomes repetitive, at first ingeniously and then with a slowly dulling edge. The meat parade ceases to shock.

This is moviemaking that honors the craftsmanship of its subject.

Lem’s story is merely a springboard for Folman’s wildly sprawling meditations on what the advent of virtual performance means — for artistic integrity, creative spirit, celebrity culture, human identity, even our hold on reality.

For most of its running time, the movie works as a sharp, generous human comedy about fear of family (among other things), with Page once again reminding us that she’s one of the most deft and underutilized actors of her generation. You’re already sold on Janney, I hope.

Eating is an eventful afternoon with a bunch of colorful characters. They're oh-so-enlightened, and they're oh-so-miserable. [10 May 1991, p.29]

Honeymoon in Vegas is a sweet but tepid comedy so short on real goofiness that when you do encounter some, you tend to be inordinately grateful. [28 Aug 1992, p.49]

Green Zone is somewhere between a blockbuster and a tract -- a traction movie. It whizzes and bangs and sizzles as it chases the truth like a dog off its leash.

Assassination reminds you that Penn can be very funny.

A flaky, tedious, intermittently likable fable about being crazy in a crazy world.

Damsel, goofy, absurdist, and subversive, feels like a brave step in an uncertain direction.

Moves the franchise even closer to Indiana Jones territory, with bloodcurdling action scenes and a passel of climactic computer-generated slime beasties unparalleled in their potential ability to -- I'm quoting from both book and film here -- '' rip, tear, rend, kill. ''

Master Gardener is the third film in writer-director Paul Schrader’s redemption trilogy. The series includes 2017′s “First Reformed,” which is good, and 2021′s “The Card Counter,” which is not. Unfortunately, the trilogy ends with its worst entry, an excruciatingly slow white-savior narrative that aims to provoke yet does nothing but bore.

The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.

The flashbacks and overbearing music serve as this film’s emotional core, and the result rings false and superficial.

A breezily stylized, very enjoyable trot through the writer's life, theme by theme, era by era.

The sterling and reliable Strathairn brings stoic dignity to the husband's role, young Mazzello takes advantage of the chance to show more here than he did in Jurassic Park and Curtis Hanson's direction is expeditious and unpretentious. But River Wild is a Streeporama, and Streep at the flood tide is something to see. [20 Sep 1994, p.61]

A deft, disturbing piece of work, as cold around the heart as the Kubrick film, if infinitely more dismissible. It gets in, it messes with your mind, and it vanishes, leaving only an unsettling aftertaste of unresolved narrative. It’s an exercise, but some exercise leaves you gasping.

It's polished-looking, yet dull.

It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.

An efficient, good-looking production that amounts to the kind of safari with which Disney's customers will feel comfortable. [23 Dec 1994, p.53]

Single White Female is a frustrating proposition. It has impact, given its two stars. But it spends a lot of time trying to get its footing, find its tone and rhythm. Surprisingly, Schroeder has trouble pacing a film any one of a dozen Hollywood hacks could have handled more sure-handedly. [14 Aug 1992, p.41]

Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.

Could have been -- and should have been -- richer and more resonant. It's Hollywood Babylon Lite, only TV movie-deep. But at least it's tangy.

Shares many things with ''Not One Less'' and ''The Road Home,'' among them a grass-roots sensibility that ultimately puts a premium on hope and simple kindnesses, while acknowledging the seductive power of money and superficial success.

Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.

Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.

This is an old man's movie, without an old man's experience. Despite McGinly's stated affection for Kreskin (the movie ends with a written appreciation of him), there's nothing personal about it. It's the movie equivalent of handing us a business card.

Precise, expert execution can’t compensate for forced situations and an unenforced imaginative rigor. It’s not so much that all the characters are so unsympathetic. It’s that they’re all so uninteresting. Caricature without gusto is shrink wrap covering . . . shrink wrap.

The follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.

Mostly Let Him Go is about what would happen if “Death Wish” were cast with the couple from “American Gothic.”

Eden is "Once" after two kids and 10 years of marriage have sucked the music out of life.

Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.

The movie has a dramatic thinness, breezy tone, and unconvincing happy-ish ending that make it feel more inconsequential than anything about killers and imperiled children probably should.

World War Z is epically realized entertainment that feeds on our fears of apocalypse, but it’s just fast enough and smart enough — and, more importantly, human enough — to keep an audience on edge from start to finish.

As the plot swings haphazardly between drug-induced hallucinations and reality, we lose trust in what we are seeing.

Field next tries to touch our hearts with her pitifulness. Stay away, crazy woman! At times she seems about to turn into Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction.”

All in all, Beaton could have been a character in an Evelyn Waugh novel — both belonged to the Bright Young Things, in ’20s London — except that he and Waugh detested each other.

Shot with intentionally banal anti-style - minimal soundtrack music, found sound, jitter-cam - the movie achieves a wisdom that's bigger than it seems.

The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.

Like all of Jacquot's movies, it's not crazy enough.

It’s a movie eager to examine the stigma of mental illness and the dynamics of victimization, to a point. Past that, it’s just distressing, narratively convenient exploitation that gets by on the strength of McAvoy’s fearless, electrifyingly adaptive performance.

Normal, as you’ve no doubt gathered by now, is pretty abnormal, and the extended reveal of the abnormality wastes much of what was good about the first half of the movie.

In this engaging, understated comedy, it is the journey and not the destination that matters.

If there's true magic to be found in the proceedings, it's in Garai's dexterous performance.

The stylishly crafted film mostly succeeds in its engaging (and tagline-ready) ambition to chronicle “how mankind discovered man’s best friend,” even if its naturalistic strengths are swapped out for an exaggeratedly epic tone in the later going.

The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.

A big, silly party.

For much of its first half, Chef Flynn feels like an after-school special with a difference — a big, big difference.

It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.

The Dreamers isn't that bad -- actually, it's funny, affecting, interestingly twisted, and seriously erotic before it heads south in the final stretch.

The period ambience, comforting yet urgent, is the best part of Kit Kittredge - that and Breslin, who never once gets actressy.

One of those overstaffed, overstuffed "when do we eat?" holiday dramedies. Call it a double-extra-strength episode of "Soul Food."

Robinson's impassioned decency and coruscating invective make "How to Get Ahead in Advertising" a high-minded, invigorating mess. [19 May 1989, p.47]

There are enough indie clichés to blunt this movie’s edge.

Once again, Streep is a fierce force of nature, slaying all with an icy stare and a cutting verbal wit.

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.

If you’re in the right mood and seeing it with the right crowd, Keanu can put you close to a giggle coma, even as you realize the material’s far beneath the talents of its stars. They’re Key and Peele, but the movie treats them like Abbott and Costello.

Like Field, the new movie has a sneakily dark sense of humor, a taste for the odd bit of gore, and a love of psychedelic mushrooms and cinematic hallucinations.

This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.

Why Branagh and the screenwriter, Michael Green (he also did the two earlier Poirot adaptations), would want to bring actual, real-life horror into a mystery movie masquerading as a horror movie is a mystery beyond the powers of even Poirot to solve.

The bliss of Megamind is the way it pursues solutions for tired problems.

The Signal is like a Romero zombie movie in which the zombies aren't dead, they're just really temperamental. Evil here is technology-born. Maybe our cellphones and satellite dishes are giving us all the crazy.

Shallow and proud of it, an antic cartoon that lacks the comic inspiration to go the distance.

Has the problem of drifting in and out of authenticity.

Anyone much over the age of 15 who saw the earlier movies knew they were silly. That didn’t matter. What mattered is that they didn’t feel silly. “Resurrections” does.

This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.

Derivative and flawed. But it does throw off a few sparks.

The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

The Phantom of the Opera was never a brilliant movie, but it remains great, ghoulish fun, with Chaney tiptoeing the line between sympathy and shudders.

The "troubles" in Northern Ireland would seem to be an excellent dramatic vehicle: tension, violence, a people torn apart by religious, political, and economic differences. But writer-director Tony Luraschi turns it into a polemic. Speeches replace action and the dialogue is wooden. [14 Feb 2014, p.G31]

Bubble is a stunt in search of a movie, and it almost finds one.

Is ATL even a hip-hop movie? There's hip-hop in it, certainly, but unlike the recent vehicles for Eminem and 50 Cent -- respectively, ''8 Mile" and ''Get Rich or Die Tryin' " -- it does not have a rapper hero.

The Lost Boys is schlock, but it's juicy schlock. [31 Jul 1987, p.34]

There are some good, sharp, surprising laughs in Youth in Revolt. So why does it feel so dreadfully familiar?

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

The movie’s electrifying without being completely satisfying. Zonca and his star don’t play by Hollywood rules, which is both good (keeps us off-balance) and less so (at times the film doesn’t seem sure where it’s going).

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

Maras and his cast craft such a chilling, narratively grueling dramatization of the episode — chaos worsened by the lack of tactical response forces in Mumbai — it’s tough to view quietly-played everyman heroics as the story’s takeaway. These striving unfortunates are just too hopelessly, fatally overmatched for that. Audiences are likelier to leave horrified or, at best, numb.

Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.

Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

The real villain is a cowed and lazy citizenry. Meaning all of us. Disappointingly, V for Vendetta makes this point early and moves on, at some point turning as shallow as what it protests against.

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

As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

Youth recedes, the body decays, life is a compromised thing: These are truths. But they're not fresh truths, and Moss's riverdogs are hardly the first to have discovered them.

Take away the storming music and grand vistas, and it's all a standard sword-and-sorcery adventure; director Andrew Adamson is more than a journeyman but much less than the visionary Peter Jackson is.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

Dreams Rewired is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling.

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

The best scenes are when Stark just cuts impatiently through the claptrap.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Although perhaps inescapably derivative, the film rides its cast's warm and vibrantly meshed energies - to say nothing of its gender novelty. It's filled with heart and muscle as the women tired of being scammed, slammed and rammed deposit the exploitation film in new realms of payback. [06 Nov 1996, p.D1]

It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.

The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.