This big, brawny historical drama feels more personal to its maker as both an artist and an Australian. For better and for worse, the movie’s a labor of love and of national identification.

Although Truth or Dare makes you wish it had dug more deeply, it nevertheless convinces you that there's more to Madonna than the stage personas she sheds like skins. It's as much an exercise in packaging as in documentary, but at least the package isn't empty. [17 May 1991, p.29]

Early in the documentary The Eyes of Orson Welles, a box is taken out of long years of archival storage at the University of Michigan and opened to reveal an entire alternate career: pages upon pages of Welles’s graphic artwork. For this, Mark Cousins’s documentary is necessary viewing. For the glutinous narrative voice-over of Cousins himself, it’s decidedly less so.

Moviemaking doesn’t come any tauter or with more velocity. But that confusion is a warning. It’s going to apply to the entire movie; and the longer “Tenet” lasts, the more of an issue confusion becomes.

Brolin's performance is funny, masterful, confident, and more than a little unsettling. If one human being can sample another, that's what's going on here. The rest of Men in Black 3 is about as good as one could hope for from an unnecessary sequel that's a decade late to the party.

Debt is bad, we can all agree, as is its conceptual cousin, greed. It would have been intellectually bracing, though, to have a Gordon Gekko equivalent on hand to argue otherwise.

3 Ninjas is a skilled balancing act, a throwback to Disney's old live-action family films, starring and targeted to pre-teens. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]

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.

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

Overall “Lucy and Desi” is very much a valentine.

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

Maybe it's a cheap shot to call Revolutionary Road "American Beauty" without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem.

A loud but proficient slab of explode-o-rama summer blockbuster nonsense, perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing, extremely skippable if you don't.

Even as a romantic confection it would soar higher, glow brighter, if it had permitted itself some texture, some bite. It's too simply emblematic to muster all the magic it needs, even though it has a pair of utterly winning performances by Nicolas Cage and Bridget Fonda. [29 July 1994, p.53]

The cast is up to the challenges of that arc, but the plot doesn't always keep them afloat.

Confusing storytelling and bad dialogue.

If I must watch two men not be gay together for the 300th time this summer, those men should be Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds.

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

A passable, sometimes skillful farce.

As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.

Though Courtney and Harrison give their all, this is a slick-looking yet routine exercise that wastes an ideal premise.

The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.

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.

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.

What’s best about the documentary is all that Obama sun. It’s hard to come by these days, even in retrospect. The shade, however, and what occasions it, is all too available.

Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding.

With his thoughtful exploration of the conflict between desire and responsibility, and his self-reflexive exploration of the themes of voyeurism, ambition, and personal identity, Reeves’s debut shows signs of a talented filmmaker.

It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."

The movie's amiable, impulsive, intense, and scattershot, and since those are qualities associated with Vaughn himself, in the end it's a fair representation.

Some films wear their length like an epic and some just wear you out; Army of the Dead tends increasingly toward the latter.

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

Just Wright is as formulaic as they come, but at its core is a surprisingly tender romantic drama.

The film at times genuinely touches on the bittersweet magic of first love.

Completely unoriginal, sure, but watchable and even likable.

Martin makes Bilko's roguishness endearing, and entertaining enough to carry the film even if it is essentially an overextended half-hour sitcom episode. [29 Mar 1996, p.105]

Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]

A fertile example of the Studio Film Gone Berserk, where too many characters and too many story lines geometrically progress until a level of blissful absurdity is reached.

A problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters.

You may not recognize the Vignelli name, but you certainly recognize their designs.

It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.

A charming, spiky period piece that might be called "Boo Radley: The Final Years."

So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.

A sequel that is noisy, fast, and pretty smart but that lacks the spark of gonzo originality that made the first movie an out-of-nowhere treat.

Dream Horse is a very nice movie, about very nice people, but nice is rarely enough, and thank goodness Toni Collette knows that.

Consistently intriguing as all the lit-process tidbits are, the film struggles to mesh footnotes and somber notes.

This does seem to leave room for bigger, bolder, more momentous adventures down the line.

A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."

A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.

If you go into "Wanted and Desired" with preconceptions, prepare to feel them challenged and altered, even if they are ultimately confirmed. The facts speak loudly.

It rockets along entertainingly enough for most of its running time - only that it's made with a self-importance the story itself doesn't warrant.

Directed in the breathless inspirational tones of an infomercial, the film's an acceptable document of a thoroughly remarkable individual.

Macdonald knows plenty about crafting something evocative from unscripted material.

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.

You can feel the actors tossing energy, one-liners, and limbs off each other with gusto.

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

The lack of a deeper dive into its subject’s trials and tribulations is the biggest flaw of “Piece by Piece.” While the concept of making a documentary with Legos is an intriguing one, and it’s well executed, the film itself is a very shallow look at its subject.

Scott’s probably the perfect actor for this, since he’s too likably lightweight to suggest any emotion more crippling than exasperation.

Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]

Elegy drifts helplessly into melodrama, and it loses its bearings and its head in a ridiculous final act.

Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.

Foster and the rest of the cast are so good, I almost want to recommend that you go just for their performances. After all, it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts. That is, unless you’re making a murder mystery.

Thor’s bloodsport detour diverts an inordinate amount of the filmmakers’ attention, and ours, from the whole end-of-days buildup. Hopkins gets short shrift, as does Idris Elba’s returning interdimensional gatekeeper, Heimdall.

The problem with 8 1/2 Women isn't that what you see is what you get; it's that what you see is all you get.

The film keeps being yanked back from nothingness by this or that clever sendup, delivered by a small army of invigorated performers who seem to push off from one another's energy levels.

Schwartzberg does stumble upon some pretty fascinating people.

The best moments come when Robb's all-purpose toughness experiences vulnerable doubt. These moments are flickers, but they're bright and human.

The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.

To say that Oscar winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross go hard on the music would be an understatement. There were times when their beats vibrated through my theater chair, goosing me into thinking “Tron: Ares” is better than it is. Their contribution propels the action and makes you believe in the visual bedlam unfolding before you.

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.

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.

Just feels like it was made from the pieces of every fantasy-action movie ever made.

The remake is stranded between pushing the scatological envelope and caving in to the formulas the 1976 movie established, and until the well-nigh foolproof ending, it comes up gasping for air.

The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes.

I’m So Excited! is probably its director’s most forgettable work. But it has its trashy pleasures, and it beats an in-flight movie — the one place you can bet it will never be seen.

With more character development this might have been an eerie thriller; with better payoffs, it could have been a thinking man's monster movie.

Escape From Tomorrow, Moore’s sometimes surreal, sometimes sophomoric, black comic phantasmagoria, makes for a bumpy theme park ride.

By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.

The Invisibles favors quantity of remembrance over quality of any one experience.

Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.

It's still a film with genuine laugh-out-loud moments, most provided by comedian Dennis Miller. On first glance it would appear Miller is horribly miscast in this predictable fang flick. But Miller's ceaseless verbal machine gun of one-liners salvages the movie. [16 Aug 1996, p.D3]

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.

All these segments are well made and engaging, but their lack of interconnectedness reduces The Laundromat to a sketch comedy, and random guest appearances by actors like Sharon Stone (as a Vegas real estate saleswoman) and David Schwimmer (as a small-time lawyer) only add to the scattergun atmosphere.

It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.

It’s a pleasure watching Broadbent and Mirren share the screen. That’s true even when they bicker, which they frequently do.

Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.

A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.

The film comes across as an irksome contrivance. What’s meant to communicate the mysterious, even taboo allure of playing chameleon instead just leaves us scoffing.

Though Derrickson offers some new twists on old tricks, and evokes a mood of menace with rainy streets, gloomy interiors, and the transformation of comforting everyday objects into something horrible, the story soon devolves into variations of many movies we have seen before.

It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.

A brisk and reasonably thorough dog trot through a life that was simultaneously invisible and all powerful, and it’s goosed along with slick production techniques that more than once get in the way.

Though perhaps more suited to PBS or classrooms than to movie screens, the documentary is engrossing and just may encourage more people to look less to pharmacology for answers and more within.

It's a ponderous but not unenjoyable comedy.

The first half of The Heart of Me is just that sort of hoot. You know where it's all headed, and you can't wait for it to get there, as the cheap, cruel ironies pile up almost farcically.

It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.

The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors.

Lopez is not yet the actor Caviezel is. Still, she fills her performance with conviction, does a couple of her own stunts, and has enough star presence to fill the big screen.

Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.

Humor in 'Jim' is a little too dry.