Even if it ultimately doesn’t quite take off, it’s a marvel of craft and care and detail. It’s also not quite like anything else.

The film is more interesting as a phenomenon than as a movie. [27 Feb 1981]

May be the most successful forgery in the history of hate.

The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.

The movie is extremely well produced, it features two excellent lead performances, and it is dull.

Warm, intelligent, humane, The Bear is everything you could hope for in an outdoor adventure. [27 Oct 1989, p.33p]

"The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.

This feature adaptation of kid-lit author R.L. Stine’s best-selling horror-comedy series is out to thrill fans with a story that’s just as obsessively invested as they are, right down to Black’s meta casting as Stine himself.

This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.

Like ''Blair,'' it never quite finds a way out of its own built-in dead-end.

When Spartan is good, it's surprisingly gripping and fresh, and when it's bad, it's just another overcooked Hollywood paranoid thriller.

D'Onofrio's affably wide-eyed weirdness generates not only pleasure, but a genuinely authentic conundrum, bouncing forward and backward toward the truth.

A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese. I just couldn't hate this movie, and I really, really tried. It's tightly made and well written in deceptive ways that don't reveal themselves until past the halfway point.

The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.

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.

What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.

A drably directed yet terrifically affecting drama about family bonds, classic rock, and the human brain. It's sentimental, yet so honest and eccentric that it rises above schmaltz.

It’s a worthwhile alternative to the comic-book movie opening this week, provided you’re open to a dark comedy that teeters precariously on the edge of the abyss.

As Hopkins's Lecter is concerned, it's official: He's Freddy Krueger.

The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.

A desperate, cynical self-parody.

More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.

Norman gets most of its punch from two terrific performances.

Director/co-writer Ariel Vromen has made a grimly passable crime drama in the sub-“GoodFellas”/“Sopranos” vein, and if you’re looking for something to order up on a slow Saturday night, it’ll do.

The best audiences for this thrilling confabulation may be younger ones: They’ll feel their minds expand with inspiration and be less inclined to deflate back to earth afterward. Somebody did something amazing back in 1862; The Aeronauts commemorates it with artifice, enthusiasm, and a smattering of the truth.

This is a grim, at times lurid tale with hard observations about growing up poor, Black, and male in America — about the cycles of defeat that can land multiple generations in prison — and many of the details have the sting of the rap songs that permeate the soundtrack. Elsewhere, however, All Day and a Night plays like an urban crime thriller made with more earnestness than style.

The dread in Mitchell’s film never cuts to the bone, because we never really care about his characters.

"Hobbs & Shaw” is fine summer meathead entertainment, a brainless bone-cruncher with clever players, a decent script, and enough demolition derby mayhem to satisfy the yahoo lurking within the most civilized of moviegoers.

You can picture the DreamWorks corporate confab: "OK, the kids respond to move-it, move-it repetition - give us something else repetitive, and let's get herding." It wasn't just desperate, it was insulting.

Essentially, it's 90 minutes of mostly disarming nothingness. [10 Dec 1993, p.59]

This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.

You may find yourself wishing that Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) would just power through court. We’d gladly watch more of Grace and Evans silhouetted against the sunset, their connection evident in his indulgent posing as her makeshift jungle gym.

The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained.

Everyone from Channing Tatum to Danny DeVito to Hollywood transplant LeBron James is here voicing the movie’s winsomely rendered snow creatures, but it’s the creative story more than the routine-if-likable characters that makes this one so engaging.

For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.

Isn't awful, but neither is it the tangy entertainment it could have been.

As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.

House of Gucci is pretty much can’t-miss. Except that it does.

Like the title characters and the performances that go with them, Being the Ricardos has real zip. It’s a virtue of Sorkin’s tendency to glibness. His writing can be irritatingly slick, but never boring.

This is no “Bridesmaids.” What the film’s premise has in novelty, it lacks in execution. The characters are uninspired, and they continue to lack depth and plausibility throughout.

I wish I could tell you that Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is ridiculous and I hated it, but the fact is that it’s ridiculous and I loved every minute.

The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.

The movie never fully clicks.

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.

Part detective story, part coming of political age saga, and all teenage identity crisis, Captive is the first film written and directed by Gaston Biraben , who has worked steadily as a Hollywood sound editor since the early '90s. That professionalism shows in the polished filmmaking as well as an occasional tendency toward shallower melodrama than the situation deserves.

The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.

At its best the film evokes the palpable terror of a city where uniformed thugs could arrest or kill anyone at any time with impunity.

The idea behind Girl Rising is strikingly simple and even more strikingly imaginative.

Perhaps Crowley was trying to deconstruct the clichés we’ve become accustomed to in romantic movies since the old studio system started churning them out. But even that explanation fails to hold water as “We Live in Time” repeatedly falls back on those dated, tired tropes.

Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.

A solid two-bagger, not a home run.

The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.

It's a refreshing alternative to hipper-than-thou moviemaking.

Comes on like a runaway Humvee.

'Titanic'' was a case of a cheeseball story riding terrific effects. The Perfect Storm is in every important way deeper.

Not all of it works - and not all of it works the way the target audience of jacked-up young males might want it to - but the movie is hugely provocative fun, and I'm pretty sure that's on purpose.

So the big surprise about White Boy Rick is how well the movie works. It’s one thing to know a story is based on nonfiction. Being made to believe its plausibility is something else. White Boy Rick you believe.

For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

Ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.

Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.

Hard-driving and propulsive as it is, the film is unable to hide the fact that Woo seems not only to be repeating himself, but parodying his earlier films on a much bigger scale, more crudely and coarsely.

Unbroken stirs a moviegoer by default; it’s an astounding story of human endurance that has been brought a little too safely to the screen.

The endearing and cheeky ensemble works hard, and Ken Scott's script finds ways of wringing irreverence from the apparent good nature of the situation.

If there’s one popcorn movie so far this summer that actually makes us fear for — and care for — its protagonist, this is it.

This cacophonous ending may serve to reinforce the filmmakers' cynical themes, but it leaves viewers trying desperately to remember the part of the film that had brains, wit, and so much promise.

As a suspenseful true crime story, 24 Days succeeds. As a warning against the ever present dangers of anti-Semitism, it is eloquent and disturbing. It’s in combining the two that Arcady mishandles the case.

It's too fragmented and diffuse to ever bring its parts together in any really satisfying manner.

Bobby marks a turning point for Colin Farrell, whose vulgarities and inelegance tend to get the better of his range.

All in all, maybe the best 90 minutes of romantic comedy in theaters this fall. Unfortunately, the film is 122 minutes long.

Like an old college wrestler, Harris saunters through this toasty little piece of biographical fiction in love with the part's fixins'.

With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.

The particulars are often fascinating, but all the solemnity does work against a more rousing finish. The Netflix-distributed feature might equal “Braveheart” (1995) in its gritty authenticity, but that standard-setter’s memorably transportive quality was ultimately a far battle cry from this.

In the end, what makes Inside Hana's Suitcase so powerful is the most traditional technique of all: authentic and eloquent storytelling by memorable characters.

A semisweet nugget, an insinuating, low-budget little charmer. [27 Aug 1999, p.E4]

Sarah Silverman is far and away the best part of I Smile Back, a strained entry in the Mad Housewife genre.

Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.

Tearjerking aside, Untamed Heart reminds us of the bravery it takes to love. That's the ultimate source of its appeal. [12 Feb 1993, p.50]

Luckily, the movie has Scott Thomas. She knows her radiance can't be helped, so she uses it here like a searchlight.

Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

That’s the ultimate dividedness of “The Silent Twins.” What feels most fresh and true in it is, literally, imaginary, June and Jennifer’s flights of fancy. What feels most leaden and movie-phony is based on fact.

A paranoid male fantasy about cheating, with surface similarities to Hollywood movies like ''Fatal Attraction" and ''Unfaithful." This one's Italian, though, and its attitude toward adultery is more European.

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

All is True is expertly acted and handsomely filmed but suffers from an excess of sentimentality, a rash of revelations, and a surfeit of subtext, with characters blurting out the hidden motives for their behavior instead of simply behaving them. I imagine Shakespeare himself might be simultaneously tickled and appalled.

Ultimately undercut by its fictional elements and its flat characters.

Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.

It has every mark of inspiration by imitation.

The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.

I suppose that if you’re familiar with the designer and his history, you’ll find this movie entertaining. But there’s nothing here for newbies or those wanting to know more about its subject. I found little of use, so it was a long, dreary slog to get to the end credits.

It’s another brightly rendered effort, but, as the title indicates, a lot of the real creativity seems to have been used up the first time around.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

Though fitfully entertaining, it lacks the conviction and urgency present in even the weakest of his quasi agit-prop productions.

Ultimately, No Hard Feelings is the story of two people who are afraid of life for different reasons, and how they help each other lose that fear. I’ve heard complaints that it sacrifices filth for feelings. To those folks, I say — you can always watch “Porky’s” instead.

Not surprisingly, Doctor Sleep splits the difference, dutifully attempting to honor both King’s writing and Kubrick’s film simultaneously. The movie actually manages to pull it off for a time, until in the last act revisited concepts start to play more like ill-advised retreads.

Wonderfully cast and slickly directed, but so crudely written.

This is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a coldblooded assassin.

The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.

Becomes a creepy yet amusing look at how he tries to take control of the film being made about him.