Mirren holds the film together with her narration, but she can’t save the film from Forster’s penchant for overdoing emotional scenes or from Thomas Newman’s intrusive score.

When the action shifts inside the ropes, which happens often, "Gladiator" pulses with energy, and Marshall shines. Boxing purists may wince at the freewheeling fisticuffs - there is enough kicking, eye-gouging and head-butting going on to make viewers wonder why anyone bothered with a referee - but the electricity in these scenes is undeniable. [6 March 1992, p.31]

At least a plot point about “secret formula” is sort of clever. The rest comes across as gibberish.

Considering the sunny, relatively pleasurable romantic business that precedes it, the elderly stuff seems dark, morbid, and forced upon us.

An honest, honorable indie chamber drama that, if anything, errs on the side of caution. It benefits from a scrupulously observed performance by Kevin Bacon.

Hearts Beat Loud is gentle, funny, humane, and predictable, kept from becoming tiresome by a cast of pros that includes not only Offerman but Toni Collette as Frank’s landlady and possible love interest and a frisky Ted Danson as a philosophic stoner who owns the neighborhood watering hole.

The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.

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

So, yeah, Kin is a bit of a biker movie, too. More important, it’s also a family drama. In their first-time feature-directing effort, twin brothers Jonathan and Josh Baker — speaking of kin — turn Cain and Abel inside out and upside down. Why be east of Eden when you end up that far west of Motown?

Put Christian Bale behind the wheel, and Hit & Run would make a billion bucks - except then there'd be no room for Shepard, and that movie would hardly be worth watching.

Ham-handedly manipulative film.

The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.

Miami Blues is just good enough to make you wish Demme would come back with Ward and direct another film based on Willeford's deceptively casual you-saw-it-here-first laser-beam vision of Miami as surreal American litmus. [20 Apr 1990, p.31]

Worth staying with for the respect it pays to its characters' emotions.

Spike Lee has been treading similar terrain with both greater cogency and fewer similarities to Bertolt Brecht. Manderlay, though, is mad and perplexed in its own inscrutable, schematic way. The trouble is the angrier it gets, the more infuriatingly banal it becomes.

Achache's direction is deft and assured. She lends the film a nice, easy rhythm that conceals the story's alternating whimsy and melodrama and almost compensates for them (almost).

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.

Fly Me to the Moon is a crummy movie for kids, yet it still holds out the prospect of past wonders and future marvels. It's one small step for a housefly, one giant leap for 3-D.

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 Accountant keeps you hanging on all the way to the looney-toon ending, well past the point where your higher brain functions have called it a night. It’s not a good movie but it’s not a bad way to kill a few hours.

A brilliant production of a mediocre play.

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

And there you have the problem with The Zookeeper’s Wife: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer.

It’s an understatement to say that Tcheng is drawn to this material. He revels in it. Yet he’s too clear-eyed to turn Halston’s story into a morality tale.

The debut feature from 26-year-old director Richard Kelly shows plenty of promise, but it's somewhat self-involved and won't appeal to audiences who like a straightforward -- even if fantastical -- narrative.

Ultimately, cast and crew conjure up horror that’s more efficient than terrifying.

This is quite enjoyable as creature features go, and Bale continues to demonstrate his curious under-the-radar appeal. As for McConaughey, let's just say a star is reborn. Suddenly that whole naked-bongo-playing incident makes a lot more sense.

Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.

Many of the film's images will prove more than some viewers can take.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Book Club: The Next Chapter was not only watchable but occasionally amusing.

Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.

The film has an ending that anyone who has watched a movie in the last 15 years will see coming half an hour into the film. But even with that, the weight of the performances from Yu Nan and Bater is enough to make for a satisfying, if uneven, film.

It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.

Thanks to its two leads, The Good House very much succeeds as character study. As narrative, it doesn’t fare anywhere near as well.

You’ll just have to look to your own effects-jazzed inner child to find a kid who’s relatable here.

Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.

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).

It's better to see it on the stage... a moderately enjoyable film that lacks the awe-inspiring visual and aural aplomb of Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil's live shows.

Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.

This is an old-fashioned sports hagiography of the sort that Gary Cooper used to star in while Teresa Wright sat smiling and worried on the sidelines, and, amazingly, it engages your attention and even respect while trotting out every clubhouse cliche in the book.

“Don’t Worry” is not a conventional biopic. That makes sense — Callahan sure isn’t a conventional biopic subject — but that unconventionality can present problems. Sometimes the movie is sentimental. More often, it’s scabrous. Maybe if the movie didn’t feel overlong (trim and tight it’s not), those qualities might seem better balanced.

Tricky territory to navigate, but it ultimately lends some genuine poignancy to the story’s familiar accidental-family themes. If there’s someplace Roth makes a mark, it’s here.

Color Me Kubrick digs all sorts of devilish ironies out of this "true...ish story," and it's a fine dark farce before turning sad and, worse, monotonous. The con wears off before the movie does, but while it's in the air, "Kubrick" spins with bogus cheer.

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.

What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.

Bratton’s unique perspective is so much more interesting when you hear him talk about The Inspection that you often wonder where it is when you’re watching it.

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.

At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.

The movie's silly, predictable, and surprisingly sweet - the sort of thing you can and probably should take your mother to.

Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.

As visually overstuffed as a hoarder’s apartment, the movie improves as it goes.

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

There's a certain pleasure to be had in some of the physical blowouts.

It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.

As murky and derivative-looking as the film is, it moves with an authority that pummels you into submission.

That uncertainty is the strength of writer-director Tayarisha Poe’s debut feature and ultimately its undoing. There’s dramatic ambiguity and there’s a muddle, and you may spend the movie’s 97 minutes trying to untwine one from the other.

Some of the exotic landscape the group trailblazes looks imported from “Avatar” — happily, bringing that immersively dimensionalized, eye-catching quality along with it.

With Too Late, Hauck confirms that he’s a master of the film medium. What’s less convincing is why this film matters.

It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.

Acute and skillfully made, Candyman is also pointedly political.

The documentary’s chief virtue, after the very considerable pleasure of getting to spend time in Sacks’s company, is learning how much his personal life rivaled his career in remarkableness.

The movie is a holiday romantic comedy that wants to put the holiday romantic comedy out of business.

Uncompromising and unforgiving, but ultimately more self-destructive than any of its characters.

In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”

Crimes of the Future works better as sort-of treatise than sort-of thriller. It’s a paradoxical thing to say about a filmmaker as intensely visual as Cronenberg, but his ideas are even more shocking than his images.

For the next two decades, the end notes reveal, Baker made the best music of his career. The film does its job if it encourages people to give that music a listen.

For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching Serenity is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.

Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.

The Batman doesn’t plod, but it sure lacks a spring in its cinematic step.

As an entry in the advocacy-entertainment genre, in which glamorous movie stars bring our attention to the plight of the less fortunate, Blood Diamond is superior to 2003's ridiculous "Beyond Borders" while looking strident and obvious next to last year's "The Constant Gardener."

The movie will be remembered primarily for the huge, emerging talent of James Franco, who plays De Niro's troubled son.

This is one of those rare movies that genuinely likes its characters and wishes them the best; as agonizing as it can be to watch Jack fumble toward human connection, Hoffman knows the fumbling's the point.

Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?

As documentary, it’s low concept. But it’s never dull.

The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.

Suicide Squad prides itself on being “dark,” but it’s really just jokey, cynical, and violent, not to mention visually ugly as sin. It’s as subversive as milk. But the cast and the pacing keep it moving.

Miller is certainly faithful to the spirit of Rendell's psychologically probing, class-dissecting novels, even if his probing doesn't go nearly as deep and his storytelling isn't as compelling.

The Neon Bible doesn't always supply the depth or underpinning its images demand, but there's nice work in it, and it won't bore you. [19 Apr 1996, p.55]

In the end, the lure of the gimmick proves too much for Meyjes, clearly a writer-director of talent. If Max were half as audacious, it would be twice as good.

Bulging with period details and a large and busy cast, Parkland is well made and at times queasily fascinating. At others, it gives in to melodrama and the ticking off of facts.

Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.

An amusingly damning portrait of a man trying to impose his will on a world that, really, has better things to do.

It’s a mechanical exercise that lacks suspense, is too long (at 148 minutes, it’s the franchise’s lengthiest film), and is so chockfull of exposition that I took more notes than I’ve done in years.

There’s a reason the names in the title don’t appear in alphabetical order. Abdul is the far more interesting character, but it’s her majesty the movie dotes on. God save the queen? Oh yes, and God help the rest of us.

It's a deceptively small film, one whose observations may continue to detonate quietly in your mind after the lights have come up.

The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.

A less than inspiring documentary about extremely inspiring individuals, High Ground is worth seeing for what it shows rather than how it shows it.

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 new Stuart Little is OK, but it's never so charming that you forget you're watching a manufactured object.

Provoke us into examining whether the onus is on the man for turning it into a commercial proposition or the woman for agreeing to his offer.

This movie can't commit to a genre, let alone a logical sequence or complete idea. But there is a wisdom in its blasé assessments and frivolous air: What's the point; where's the wine?

When Elvis is good, it’s quite good, in an awful sort of way. When it’s awful, it’s quite awful, in an entertaining sort of way. The movie can’t make up its mind if it’s chronicling a struggle for the soul of America (spoiler alert: bye-bye Beale Street, hello, Vegas) or it’s just a tabloid schlockfest.

Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.

One thing's clear: R.J. Reynolds won't be showing Constantine at the company picnic any time soon.

Flipper, the latest incarnation of everybody's favorite dolphin, doesn't exactly make waves, but it's easy to take, especially when the underwater cameras are working. [17 May 1996, p.56]

Eventually it straightens out into a fast, funny, emotionally resonant story about mothers and daughters, but it takes a while to get there and it's never less than weird.

By any other standard, the creatures in Monsters, Inc. would be impressive. But by the high standard Pixar not only set itself, but invented, they're only ordinary.

The stand-up routines — from Jackie and the pros alike — are funny and blue enough to shock a few laughs out of you, sometimes in spite of your better judgment, and the star seems once again genuinely invested in creating a character.