While the climax of Beneath the Harvest Sky is a jumble of crosscutting, thunderstorms, and an inconveniently collapsing house, the movie never loses the pulse of people and tragedies it knows too well.

If you've got some very small fry on your hands and 75 minutes to kill, this is as bright, colorful, and fuzzy as you're going to get.

It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.

An uneven spectacle that can’t sustain its solid first-half character moments. But the movie can also flash a surprising, often clever sense of legacy, and is intermittently capable of thrilling us.

If we are in the midst of a culture war, as many people proclaim in Jesus Camp, then the left should be concerned. The right's Christian soldiers appear to be extremely well trained.

Turns out to be a sweetly grim lark: a road film through Limbo. It takes the self-pity associated with ending one's life and uses it for the purposes of mordantly aware comic fantasy.

The strength of Jacob's Ladder is that we never know what the next scene will be. But that's also its weakness. We don't feel involved with the characters here. We just feel jerked around. Jacob's Ladder, finally, is bummer theater. [2 Nov 1990, p.73]

It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.

Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.

The film has mood and feeling, but it can't take the material that final mile into the inexplicable. [10 Jul 1992, p.35]

Bitter Moon would be a camp classic if it weren't so dispiriting watching Roman Polanski cannibalize and then finally parody himself into narrative and artistic collapse. The film's big problem is that it's so totally devoid of the sexual energy it needs to traverse the gantlet of perversity through which Polanski sends it. [15 Apr 1994, p.94]

Kon-Tiki is stalwart and uplifting and there are passing moments of wonder.

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

The romantic love triangle dramedy “Love, Brooklyn” is more than just a visual showcase for the favorite borough of the average New York City hipster. It’s also an unabashed devotional to the interior design of the Brooklyn brownstone.

The film evokes all of the usual biopic tropes while painting a standard picture of an extraordinary hero.

Begin Again is pleasantly predictable if you’re in an undemanding mood. If you’re not, it’s unbearable, like hearing a treasured folk song given a Hot 97 makeover.

The film builds into a lurid and suspenseful thriller.

Still manages to be a Steve Martin vanity project in ways that are fairly creepy.

In Catch a Fire Noyce has caught the holy spirit. The movie is a thriller that wants to lift you up.

It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.

Breezy humor and a dazzling heist keep 'Ocean' franchise in the money.

Amusing Made doesn't quite measure up to expectations.

There's an engagingly homegrown quality to much of the footage.

Grittily beautiful film that looks, sounds, and feels more like an extended, open-ended poem than a traditionally structured story.

At a certain point, The Duchess stops attending to the topiary and becomes a women's melodrama instead.

More than just a footnote to a wayward period of cultural history, The Source Family portrays an American type, the transcendent charlatan, a latter-day Gatsby, not of material riches but of the soul.

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

There's justification for Hearst's bitter reflection that her real crime consisted in surviving. There's also some intelligent work in Patty Hearst. Still, it's more pat and less disturbing than you feel it should be. [23 Sep 1988, p.56]

A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.

Since this is a Tim Burton movie, you can safely assume the love story is the most twisted subplot of all. Still, the actors hold our interest and make the movie believable.

Big Eyes may not be Tim Burton’s absolute worst movie — we’ll always have “Planet of the Apes” — but it’s pretty close to the bottom. It’s also the film that reveals his weaknesses as a director and, by their absence, his strengths. Gaudy, shallow, shrill, smug, the movie proves beyond a whisker of doubt that Burton has little interest in human beings unless they can be reduced to cartoons.

An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.

A solidly crafted, suspensefully written, powerfully acted little juggernaut.

Red, White & Royal Blue is sweet and funny, and it doesn’t scrimp on the sex scenes. Horny and corny is a good combination for a rom-com, if you ask me.

Genuine, artful simplicity may be an impossible quality in a modern children's movie, so Curious George opts instead for mayhem under a blanket of sweetness. The little ones understand.

It can seem sometimes that Hollywood has a monopoly on stupid, obnoxious comedy. Anyone who sees Klown will learn otherwise. Comedy can be just as stupid and obnoxious in Danish.

Henry & June is a gorgeous film, one aimed at the intelligent and discriminating. As iconography, it's a stunner. But it would be better off as a silent. It's an example of talent and intelligence determined to do everything right, only to have almost everything come out wrong. [05 Oct 1990, p.53p]

The Children Act isn’t all that interesting a movie, despite the many talented people involved and the generally high level of work they do. The most interesting thing about it is how it presents a case study in the very different way style can determine what works on the screen vs. what works on the page.

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.

Predictable and not terribly clever, but among the slim pickings of movies geared to the pre-school and grade-school set, it could be much worse.

The most consistently funny of the ''Austin Powers'' films.

Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.

They’re calling it a movie, but no matter how you squint at it it’s a TV show.

Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]

The charm of Conversations With Other Women, a gimmicky but oddly moving two-character drama that flies in from who knows where, is its intelligentknowingness.

A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.

The performances are what put it over -- that and the observant camera of director Udayan Prasad.

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

The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.

Something to Talk About is one of the summer's very few adult movies, and while it's flawed and meanders into slackness, it also offers kinds of rewards few studio movies do. [4 Aug 1995, p.49]

Keep your big-budget horror movie expectations locked away in a separate crawl space, because this grainy feature debut from writer-director Ti West demands that you buy into the silliness, and the cheese.

Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash” seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and Bleed for This earns your respect for him.

Off the Black is a small, dry, emotionally loaded short story that has been carried to film like baked fish to a platter.

lluminating and exceptional docu-portrait.

Confusing storytelling and bad dialogue.

A juicy and gratifying teacher movie (a genre to which I'm partial). The joy in performance shared by Connery and Brown is the big reason.

Stark, haunting, epic, and mournful, The Claim is a mountain of a film.

The film's no masterpiece, but at least you're in the hands of people who know what they're doing.

"Chances Are is a sweetly likable little romantic comedy that would be even more likable if it didn't require the season's most massive suspension of disbelief. [10 March 1989, p.32]

The filmmaking is stylish yet impersonal — or can true style be impersonal? Maybe that’s why proficiency is a better word. A general slickness obtains.

Five Minutes of Heaven’reduces Northern Ireland’s troubles to a gimmick, but it’s an interesting gimmick, and the two men hoisted on its petard work at vivid cross-purposes. If nothing else, the film’s worth seeing as a demonstration of opposing acting techniques.

As a coherent, well-judged alternative history, the movie's a mess. As a thought-provoking and frequently hilarious jeremiad, it scores again and again.

With its bonus points for campy fun, Cats Don't Dance is an all-around winner for all ages. [26 Mar 1997, p.D8]

Cruise is believable as an athlete; and the cocky bravado he emits to impress his girlfriend (played with matching complexity and maturity by Lea Thompson) has a fetching sense of lift, too. But his vulnerability is what's most refreshing and ingratiating about Cruise's Stef. [05 Nov 1983]

Entertaining set pieces, the lively give-and-take of Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster and James Garner and a playful affection for old Westerns carry Maverick past some soft spots and emphasize its adult wit and intelligence. [20 May 1994, p.49]

The scope of the ’toon espionage-adventure goings-on is surprisingly limited. But the filmmakers so clearly love working on these characters, their creative joy is infectious.

The thrill isn't gone from the sequel, but the surprise is, and it hurts more than you'd think.

If you want state of the art anime that comes within spitting distance of escaping the limits of its genre, this might be your cup of bootleg sake.

A crass, foul-mouthed, mostly hilarious, surprisingly sentimental bromance.

Visitors is lovely, soothing, like the cinematic equivalent of tasteful elevator music, but it doesn’t convey as much truth as a single glimpse into Triska’s eyes.

But, fittingly, it's the kids who carry this outing. They're led by Sean Astin, who's rightly more of a dreamer than the others. Jeff B. Cohen engagingly handles the most cliched role, the fat kid who keeps stuffing his face. And I couldn't help wondering if Ke Huy Quan, who played Indy's sidekick in the Temple of Doom, knows that not all movies are made in caves. In any case, you can relax. The Goonies is entertaining despite its calculated flavor. [7 Jun 1985, p.61]

There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.

The movie's cheap, it's clever - it's even a little scary in places.

Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.

Never lets down, even if depth of character always takes second place to depth charges.

What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.

If Saved! sinks into formula -- any movie with a showdown at a prom is treading a well-worn path -- you're grateful for its forgiving spirit.

Takes you inside a kingdom you've never seen the likes of before. Not only is it an IMAX film, with all the superlatives (six-story screen, 12,000 seat-rumbling watts of digital sound) this implies, but it's also computer-generated 3D animation.

As moviemaking, it's monotonous. But its insistence on breaking our hearts proves a reliable weapon.

A squeaky clean, family-friendly comedy that merely sounds like an unreleased Cheech and Chong romp.

Expanded, Major Dundee is still a mess of great scenes sprinkled among some fairly monotonous action.

It flirts intriguingly with the unknowable, what it shows us of the knowable isn't terribly interesting.

German director Uli Edel's film of Last Exit to Brooklyn, while honorable, just doesn't roar off the screen the way the novel roared off the page. [11 May 1990, p.33p]

Five-Year Engagement alternates between realistic scenes of couples bickering and broad character farce, and the two halves mesh uneasily.

Sometimes Free Guy expands on its predecessors, just as often it doesn’t. In such an uninspired movie summer, derivativeness may not be as much of a problem, and the movie does have its moments.

Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.

Empire of the Sun is an imperfect film, but at its best it's grand and haunting in ways that only a movie can be. [11 Dec 1987]

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

Micmacs is the equivalent of a circus troupe setting up a tent in a war zone: You're entertained, even delighted, but after a while you suspect there are more serious matters at hand.

Eva Vitija’s documentary is lean and lucid and even at 84 minutes never feels hurried.

Once the cat is out of the bag, "Incident" becomes simultaneously entertaining and disappointing.

It’s an awkward balancing act. The result is more Benigni than Bertolucci, and though Diliberto achieves moments of poignancy and touches on insightful psychological truths, it doesn’t look like he’ll be winning any Oscars soon.

Underneath its mea culpas lies a subtext that exonerates the post-Third Reich generations of its past.

Albert Finney's name on a cast list is a guarantee of pleasure, and there's much to savor besides in Suri Krishnamma's A Man of No Importance. [03 Feb 1995]

The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.

In balancing the more objective cultural history of delis with a personal profile, Anjou serves neither well. Perhaps he should have chosen one course or the other.

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.