Slow, unadorned, compassionate, and earnest, Loggerheads is a low-fi throwback to the independent films of the 1980s and '90s.

If some light deja vu is the price horror fans must pay for a mainstream offering this spine-tingling, most will still come away feeling spooked and satisfied.

Story lines don't come any clammier.

A talky movie like this one succeeds only if its leads have chemistry and understand their characters. Both actors fit the bill, giving committed performances that elevate the material.

Leclerc and company manage to raise serious points and deliver intelligent laughs at the same time, which is no small feat.

The film captures both the claustrophobic and melancholic mood of Giger’s house, and also, perhaps, his mind.

Engrossingly manic version of Tracy Letts's great stage play.

Kazan's dislocating strategies carry Dream Lover past a few stumblings and credibility lapses, ushering us into Ray's debilitating alienation, imprisoning us with Spader in Ray's projection of his fantasies onto a woman he realizes he knows nothing about. "Dream Lover" is a thriller that demonizes women more cleverly and slickly than most. [20 May 1994, p.52]

The First Beautiful Thing is the kind of movie - that escapes the sick room to cavort at carnivals and eat cotton candy until the inevitable relapse.

A bracing, highly enjoyable mix of medieval intrigue and epic action.

Rodney Ascher directed Glitch. He’s best known for Room 237 (2012), an inspired look at several bizarre theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Glitch ups the ante on that documentary and then some. It looks at a bizarre theory about everything. The result is lively, playful, and busy — in a very good way.

Neither dense, distracting makeup nor confused, convoluted chronology can disguise the fact that Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer, scripted by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, is a mediocre mash-up of genre clichés.

The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.

Another phantasmagorical tale of life among the Nazis, is upon us. This one works much better.

A film that begins with a train wreck and then, figuratively speaking, becomes one.

The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.

The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.

The film's meta-fey title alone is an example of why some people adore Anderson and why he drives others absolutely crazy.

Zahedi's search for fulfillment is depleting, like throwing good sex after bad. The more we learn about the hole in his soul, the more vivid his misogamy becomes.

I'm not sure that I really want to see "Scream 3,'" but Craven, Williamson, and the screamers certainly bring this one off by not only slapping all their cards on the table, but insisting we admire the way they play them.

"Bad Santa" it's not. Bumptiously entertaining it is.

Veteran London theater director Dominic Cooke (the BBC’s “The Hollow Crown”) and acclaimed novelist Ian McEwan adapt the fractured-narrative feature from McEwan’s book, enhancing the elegant prose with additional bits of rich characterization and handsomely shot scenery.

The small Indonesian island of Bali still evokes images of a tropical paradise where Westerners can escape the discontents of the so-called developed world. Much of that romance lingers in Bitter Honey.

A solid entry in the real estate horror genre and an impressively taut feature directing debut for actor Dave Franco. Relying far more on psychology than bloodletting, the movie nevertheless exudes a growing sense of dread that’s difficult to shake.

It's nearly over the top in the compassion department, but Random Harvest nevertheless has its satisfactions. [16 Oct 1992, p.38]

A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.

If you’re willing to just go with it, no questions asked, “Cuckoo” is an entertaining horror offering. But I must warn you that trying to make sense of the plot will drive you, well, cuckoo.

Putting the film’s thesis statement in the mouth of its maternal figure feels intentional; so does the laissez-faire tone. As a result, we laugh so that we may not cry.

It's predictable fluff, sometimes pleasantly so, at others times irritatingly.

Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere.

What Gibson gives us is a portrait of a man behaving gracefully under several kinds of pressure, some of it shamefully unfair. It's a solid acting achievement, and his directing, which never calls attention to itself, is right on the money, too. The Man Without a Face is an affecting evocation of a man of principle who teaches a boy what's important. [25 Aug 1993, p.53]

It’s all ridiculous and enjoyable, and at the movie’s center is an actress creatively guessing at what omniscience might feel like.

While the picture isn't brilliant, it is, at its most entertaining, a kicky, surprisingly astute throwback to bygone Hollywood social comedies.

The movie's sharp-tongued and softhearted, a Sundance kind of film that mostly sidesteps generic Sundanceyness.

There's a layer of grim comedy in Butterfly Kiss. But what's exciting about it is its gritty way of remaining so uncompromisingly bleak in its psychopathology. [7 Jun 1996, p.58]

The film is overripe with erotic symbols.

Scholey, Fothergill, and crew do impressive work, but we're also reminded that wild animals don't know from cues, marks, and scripts. That's part of what makes them so compelling.

Isn't always on the money, but when it is, it really is.

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

Heavy metal, alt-pop, southern rock, orchestral swells, wailing Middle Eastern tunes all vie for our attention, but none of this noise drowns out the sound of good intentions twisting themselves into an impotent knot.

What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.

I’m on the fence here. I enjoyed the animated version of this movie quite a bit, so I’m torn between being happy this film was nowhere near as bad as I’d expected and being frustrated that I sat through a carbon copy. Your enjoyment will depend on whether your Toothless nostalgia has a full set of teeth.

Leaves you longing for the other, better political thrillers it evokes.

To have been the film it could have been, crazy/beautiful needed to be messier.

The closest cinematic approximation to a beach novel that money and skill can buy.

Taken as a whole, the film says, "We grieve too, but like this, and this, and this."

The Poe-like atmosphere in Stolen is such a chilling success that when Mashberg says that Gardner would have cracked this case herself, it's impossible to imagine that she isn't out looking for those paintings right now.

Fascinating for its gonzo formal daring and brooding attitude, "Valhalla'' is still a trial for audiences seeking characters, plot, and things happening.

It needs only to entertain. And that it does thoroughly, leaving us both charmed and enriched without feeling very preached at. Praise be.

Le Pont du Nord is not one of Rivette’s greatest works — honor goes to “Celine and Julie” or 1991’s “La Belle Noiseuse” — but it’s a useful compendium of his themes and it captures a very specific time, place, and sensibility.

At its occasional best, A Birder’s Guide to Everything hints at the profound pleasure of standing very still and witnessing wonders the rest of the world passes by.

It’s not a gimmick if it works, and “Tower” works unnervingly well. The film is essentially an oral history, with firsthand accounts from those who were there — survivors, responders, and onlookers — with their words read by younger actors.

The setup is ridiculous, but the playing is pure comedy of mortification and watch-through-your-fingers funny.

Exquisitely painful look at how Hollywood turns its hopefuls into whores. [03 May 1992, p.B35]

"Dead" isn't a horror film but a study of human character under pressure, with Karloff's flawed, imperious General Pherides torn between rationalism and a homicidal belief in elder gods. [23 Mar 2014, p.N]

Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.

Though Mira shows skill at evoking mood and building tension despite the constrained circumstances of the premise, the narrative quickly and embarrassingly breaks down.

Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]

Ted Kotcheff's First Blood is a cute, slick anti-Vietnam war film carefully treated to go down for the pro-war constituency it's made for. [23 Oct 1982]

A gorgeous, meandering travelogue that only gradually bares its teeth.

The coolest animation in town.

We never know them as characters, particularly father figure Fish, because screenwriters Irena Brignull and Adam Pava have them speak an un-translated, Jawa-Gollum gibberish, not English.

Good Fortune showcases the virtues of the goofball side of Keanu Reeves. With all that great John Wick action, it’s easy to forget just how charming and lovable Reeves can be when playing an average joe or a misfit.

Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.

We may someday look back on He Named Me Malala as a film that told us much about a future world leader — or one that told us surprisingly little.

Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.

Gordon made similar lurches all over the map in his previous exercise in grotesquerie, "Edmond," which was based on a David Mamet play and starred William H. Macy as, of all things, a racist misogynist on a grisly bender. Stuck could have used some of that outrageousness.

Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.

An intelligent, often touching, sometimes pedestrian drama.

The documentary really lays on the praise and sentiment. That may not be unusual in such an enterprise, but it gets tired sooner rather than later.

Only occasionally do the thrill of the game and the passion of its players come together. That said, these guys' nakedly neurotic enthusiasm keeps the movie from being a total jumble.

Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.

In Mamet's understanding, straight white maleness is the most powerful weapon such men have. It can also be illusory, which is why the last scenes of Edmond are so touching.

Disappointingly, the movie runs along the track of many earlier coming-of-age dramas, with appointed station stops at Cynicism, Puppy Love, Puppy Sex, Puppy Heartbreak, and Greater Wisdom.

It captures a version of our best worst selves.

Because of the film’s earnest awkwardness, these excursions into the demimonde come off as campy.

The movie itself suffers from hyperbole, hyper-self-consciousness, at times hyperventilation. A magical-realist coming-of-age fairy tale set in Buffalo and environs, it toggles between whimsy and grim realism.

Slow but rarely tedious.

The Hero may not be a great movie but it’s a welcome tribute to a lanky, taciturn presence — a love letter to an actor that reminds us of why we ought to love him, too.

Without trivializing the disease, the film challenges AIDS' stigma (albeit for heterosexuals) at a moment when it was still considered a death sentence.

It's got all the energy and idiomatic rightness one could hope for, but, dramatically speaking, it lacks a knockout punch. The violent ending in an alley is flat. One reason may be that the boxing-card scam seems musty and dated. Winkler's got the right friends on camera, but you're never as interested in the story as you are in the characters inhabiting its sunless atmosphere. Night and the City is a qualified success. [23 Oct 1992, p.27]

The forced hijinks, sub-John Hughes emotional tropes, and Screenwriting 101 conventions — which include what can only be called Chekhov’s Taser — cut crassly against the grain of a subject that is fundamentally personal and inherently political.

What Conviction lacks in characterization (the people here are monochromes - bright ones, but monochromes nonetheless) it makes up for with personality.

Song Sung Blue leans too far into biopic tropes, and Brewer rushes through tragic and life-changing events far too quickly for a film that runs almost 2½ hours.

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

Robertson’s ex-wife, Dominique. Her thoughtful presence is a very welcome departure from the standard rock-doc formula. She provides the kind of reality check — an under-the-influence Manuel almost got her killed when he totaled her Mustang, with her in the passenger seat — rarely found in such films. In that sense, it isn’t just the Band that was different but “Once Were Brothers” is, too.

An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.

Basically, “Avatar: Fire and Ash” is the same movie as “Avatar: The Way of Water,” the franchise’s prior installment. The only difference is that fire is the primary element, and the new villain looks like a gigantic, enraged chicken.

Wonderfully deranged.

Wolpert and Reynolds seem to be aiming for the ''Titantic'' audience at the expense of sophistication and historical relevance. It's too bad. The able cast, not to mention Alexandre Dumas, deserves better.

Oleanna slips to the level of a crass political cartoon, not an examination of human conduct embracing its problematic complexity. And after the first meeting blows up in his face, you can't believe the prof and the student would meet again alone in his office. There's nothing bringing them and keeping them together except the playwright's need to play out his scenario. [11 Nov 1994, p.47]

In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.

The Man with Two Brains has moments, but they aren't inspired. [04 Jun 1983]

Its animal spin on unlikely-buddies interplay is amusing enough, but hardly as inspired as the teaser promised.

While Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a disappointment — how could it not be? — it’s not for lack of trying. If anything, the movie tries too hard.

Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.

Babylon is a labor of love that never feels laborious. But as the allusions and inside jokes pile up, they become distracting. Or they do if you care about old movies.

Cool It arrives having been labeled the anti-"An Inconvenient Truth." It is. But not in the philistinistic way you'd expect.