In the film’s sharpest visual sequence, they land in ancient Egypt, with the filmmakers entertainingly cribbing from “Indiana Jones” and “The Wizard of Oz” to get them out of tight spots.

Actually, everything in Bowdon’s rant about America’s woeful public school system is important, including Bowdon.

Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.

While the film grabs us on cue with its sudden strikes that end with blood dripping from the monster's dragon fangs as it zips back into the dark, it's also true that predictability robs the thrust and counterthrust of the purely visceral impact it once had. The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered despite its diversionary moves. [22 May 1992, p.29]

Throughout, Firth compellingly plays a man struggling to make sense of the ordeal that his life has become. Too often, though, you can feel the movie struggling right along with him.

Pays high-toned tribute to its subject. How high-toned? Bach and Ravel play on the soundtrack as a honeyed light streams through the windows of Cartier-Bresson's Paris apartment.

Perhaps Poe’s tone poses a problem; the edge-of-hysteria voice does not hold up well over the course of a feature-length film.

The result is entertainment whose pace and sound, while dizzyingly brisk at points, still accommodates characters and a setting that are terrifically rich — a menagerie more fully, memorably realized than “Zootopia.”

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

The resulting movie is atmospheric and compelling, and it makes an empathetic case for Borden as an intelligent, passionate woman so stifled by her father and the suffocating society he represented that she lashed out (and then some).

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has enough good material to make you wish it were better. Unfortunately, it owes debts to the biopic genre that no honest film can pay.

This is a movie whose cynicism in the name of idealism might have appealed to Billy Wilder.

There's a lot to like in Mr. Holland's Opus, even if you find yourself wishing it had been more artfully written, directed - and trimmed. [19 Jan 1996, p.58]

Watchable, illuminating, and ultimately unmemorable — inspiring without being inspired.

The story loses its convincingly scaled sense of jeopardy in the late going, and it ultimately unravels.

As blandly lucid as Barney's is wildly and perplexingly imaginative.

The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.

Ice Age: The Meltdown is pure sequel product that should make children and undemanding grown-ups happy even as it lacks anything resembling storytelling inspiration.

Feels a bit flat and underdeveloped.

The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.

Give your brain the night off, and Myers will make you smile too.

The film is rightfully carried by Nico and Dani and under Gay's artful helmsmanship it's carried with remarkable sympathy and believability.

Its quirks are exactly what make Signs interesting, entertaining, and good.

“Baby” is to Helen Fielding’s original 1996 novel and its 2001 movie adaptation what “Sex and the City 2” was to the HBO series — a cause not for celebration but overdue burial.

Elvis & Nixon strains itself to bring the title duo together and then relaxes — finally — while Spacey and Shannon perform the actor’s equivalent of a waltz.

There's always Witherspoon, swimming upstream and never letting it slow her down. Blindingly purposeful, she's a perky blond tornado. Marilyn Monroe would not only have cheered her on. She'd have learned something.

This is the rare movie that might benefit from silence. Partly that’s because of the squeezed syrup of Randy Newman’s score.

The first half of Moonlight Mile feels like the runaway trailer for a movie that can't wait to jerk your tears. But to quote Joe in a moment of epiphany, there's a ''truth enema'' out there, and, boy, it really brings this movie around.

It’s comedy with a hint of honesty — but we’re fine with shallow and sparkly, dahling.

Savages is Oliver Stone's strongest work in years - a stylish, violent, hallucinatory thriller with both a mean streak and a devilish sense of humor.

This nostalgic licorice whip of a movie assumes there's still an audience for a straight-faced, family-friendly salute to the 1970s heyday of competitive roller disco.

Visually as well as emotionally, there’s more energy here than in some action movies.

Showing up for Molière eager for the story of one of the theater's greatest comedy writers would be unwise. It's not that kind of party.

It'll be a test of whether Cruise's star power and De Palma's ability to seduce audiences with visual style can compensate for a fundamental hollowness at the center. Mission: Impossible plays like a project trying to become a movie and not quite making it. [22 May 1996, p.63]

You're hooked enough to keep watching, even if the characterizations veer toward the two-dimensional.

Run the game, bow to the movies that did it better and before, keep the dialogue on the line between hard-boiled and hokey, and throw one last curveball before the lights come up. It's a con in itself, but the reward's in the playing.

''Bonjour" is especially lucky in having Shlomi Bar-Dayan, the 16-year-old misfit of the title, played by a young actor named Oshri Cohen, who's able to convey the impossibility of ever making sense of the world with a single bruised gaze.

American Pimp, if not quite a self-serving orgy of self-justification, can hardly be thought of as a searching look at the skin trade.

Highly unoriginal tale.

Believability takes a back seat here, obviously, and the special effects are so over-the-top bloody as to be more comical than scary; unlike In the Earth, a much slicker British horror film opening in theaters this week, Jakob’s Wife proudly embraces its inherent B-ness. But it’s the star who makes this a low-down hoot while rooting it in some tart and deserved observations about the battle of the sexes.

I save the zero star designation for movies that I think have no redeeming value whatsoever or are morally repugnant. “The Drama” meets both criteria.

The movie is weak on attempts at survivalist philosophy (anyone bit by a zombie is likely to become one). Even the religious overtones feel tinny and unpronounced.

The documentary is primarily a work of whimsy.

More to the point, the title doubles as accusation. Progress is dangerous and requires survival tactics, just as a hurricane or avalanche does.

Now in her seventh decade of starring in movies, Deneuve continues to glow onscreen. There’s such beautiful mischief in her eyes, and she’s at her most delectably dangerous when she’s not saying anything at all. These services are employed in a fun comedy that bends the truth until it nearly breaks.

Hava Nagila (The Movie) guarantees that the next time you hear the song at a party, you won’t think of it quite the same way. Of course, that won’t slow anyone rushing to the dance floor.

The Forgiven wants to have things both ways. Oh, look at how odiously these odious people behave — and let’s keep gawking at their odiousness. Sneering at slick emptiness becomes itself a kind of slick emptiness, only worse, since it’s self-congratulatory.

The violence in the final 45 minutes of Mr. Vengeance is tough to watch.

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.

Once again, Odenkirk is lots of fun as filmdom’s most unexpected purveyor of brute force.

Jurassic World is a roadworthy retread, a summer blockbuster that has more than its share of absurdities and bald patches but gets by anyway because dinosaurs.

Anyone looking for sleek futuristic action and production design should keep walking.

The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.

Junior isn't brilliant. A lot of its moves are as patently synthetic as Schwarzenegger's prosthetic stomach. But it goes through its paces with directness and savvy, arranges its big, bold elements into a likable pop construct (if you tune out the music), and some of Schwarzenegger's moves into motherhood will surprise you. [23 Nov 1994, p.25]

The documentary sweetly focuses our attention on the way human creativity transforms everything around it. Often in the nuttiest of ways, true. But still, it's a good thing.

A movie that seems to have been made mostly on the hard drive of a Power Mac G4. But whatever, we get it: Technology destroys everything.

No one around this beauty-first rendition of these addled artisans and their brief, obsessive affair really understands the attraction, so most people just get out of the way.

Takes a dedicated and true snapshot of African-American life. But so little of its presentation is memorable. This is a haircut movie that redefines ''fade.''

The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.

A stylish, watchable, very familiar future-cop action thriller. What was once original is now almost completely derivative.

The film's lack of focus is almost criminal, but schadenfreude energizes Stone.

Emotionally, the movie is a mess. It can be even messier tonally. As storytelling, though, “Dad” moves right along. Viewers may look away at times, but they don’t look at their watches.

Heights breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.

She has boundless energy, a wardrobe that won't quit, and enough real teenager in her to come across as more than a mere Disney creation.

Larysa Kondracki's impressive debut achieves its aim to shine light on an international human rights issue as well as signaling a new director to watch.

A missed opportunity is the effect of the school on the boys, and vice versa. Instead of sociology, More Than a Game focuses on personality.

Since each member of the 10-man crew is given his small equal share in the movie's script, none of them is able to add emotional weight to the realities of soldiering. That means that actors like Matthew Modine and Eric Stoltz have no place to go with their talent. Like the movie, no one is bad, really, but then no one is good. [12 Oct 1990, p.29p]

There’s some scary bad-guy stuff in the movie, but nothing to compare for fearfulness with its climactic forest fire.

Technically, the film is as sexy as art house sex gets, as the bold and precocious girl initiates the coupling in the "bachelor's room" the man rents in Saigon's teeming Chinese quarter. But the couplings lack heat and intimacy and spontaneity in ways that have nothing to do with the man's tentativeness. What you feel as these scenes unfold isn't passion, but a sense of how carefully the bodies are being arranged, how artfully they're being lit. What we're experiencing here isn't ardor; it's up-market craftsmanship. There's much more of a sexual charge in their first scene together, when he glimpses her on a ferry, is smitten, offers her a ride in his splendid chauffeured limo, tentatively moves his hand toward hers in the back seat, takes a deep breath, touches her hand, then exhales with relief when she doesn't push his hand away. [13 Nov 1992, p.32]

As a big fan of the franchise, I admit I had a good amount of fun watching “Ballerina.”

Siberia is a Freudian wallow made by a New York street fighter of a Fellini, and it is nothing if not authentic in its stress-fractured machismo.

Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cut their teeth on 2010's glib social-media mystery "Catfish,'' and since they're clever boys, they make the most of the series' new toy. Otherwise, Paranormal Activity 3 is almost identical to, and just as eerily effective as, the first two films in its alternation of cheesy "boo!'' tactics and genuine scares.

If this blend of community service, innovative teaching, and creative approach to design and construction sounds idealistic, the film’s final scenes deliver enough stress and sweat to show that idealism takes hard work, too.

Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

The Jim Henson folks...come up with another winner.

Choppy, cheesy historical war epic really has only a couple of things going for it, and its biggest asset remains the heroic popular legend that inspired its making.

As for The Little Mermaid, it’s one of Disney’s better remakes. But don’t throw away your DVD of the original.

It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.

Admittedly, Carmen is an acquired taste. But if you’re in the mood for something that will stun your senses, I highly recommended it.

The movie has a problem, too: Spall is likable, Kazan is adorable, Driver is amusing enough as the blowhard best friend, and Radcliffe as Wallace is . . . a passive-aggressive lump.

More outrageousness, less sentimentality and eagerness to please would have been welcome. But while The Ref isn't falling-out-of-your-seat funny, it uncorks a steady supply of laughs. It's a throwback to those Disney movies of the '80s that used to star Bette Midler. And it strikes a blow against forced holiday jollity. [11 Mar 1994, p.67]

Just rent the kid ''National Velvet" when you get home. That movie's proof you don't need a true story to be inspired.

For a film about a gaggle of slackers, Beautiful Losers is remarkably polished; with its quicksilver editing and fastidious mise-en-scene, it's as tight as the artists are slack.

In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.

George Nolfi directs with a TV-movie straightforwardness and at two hours the film is overlong, but the story is an eye-opener and the central performances are terrific.

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.

The best scenes - the only time This Is 40 taps into genuinely messy comic anxiety - feature Brooks, who shpritzes shabby false confidence as Pete's pop, saddled with a younger wife and triplets he can't tell apart. Otherwise, the movie never quite comes to a point.

Kohl-eyed and in command, she vamps, she camps, she stamps — and not just her foot. If Stone put any more spin on her line readings, she could audition to play a gyroscope.

Thompson adapted the screenplay from Christianna Brand's "Nurse Matilda" books, and she and director Kirk Jones balance the slapstick and levity with darker enchantments. At its most enjoyable the film feels like Roald Dahl's idea of "Mary Poppins."

A confident and promising directorial debut, one that has the feel of an experienced director to it, from the hypnotic unfolding of scenes to the finely observed character details.

Wimbledon is refried "Notting Hill" with a Teen People glaze. The latter movie also gave us an American star cheering up some tired British guy. Wimbledon is blander and far less worth rooting for.

The movie has a great time playing with ideas of scope and perspective, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic.

A compelling look at the price paid by the men who devote their lives to these extraordinary animals.

It's all been called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, just like Paul Torday's 2007 novel, and, except for some despicable behavior in the later going, it couldn't be more harmless.

Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?

Unfortunately, “The Roses” is a toothless take on the material. The stakes are never as high as they were in the 1989 movie, and the film takes too much time trying to humanize these people. By the time they’re actively trying to sabotage and murder one another, the movie has completely lost its nerve. The end result feels rushed and weak-willed.

Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot have assembled a straightforward documentary that uses Yoni's own words - in the form of his moving, eloquent letters and poems - to create a searing portrait of his short but meaningful life.