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.

Why can’t the film maintain its subtler shadings throughout? It’s a puzzle.

Bird on a Wire is pedal-to-the-metal moviemaking by the numbers. What it's got going for it is that Goldie Hawn is cute and Mel Gibson is cuter as they struggle to mate screwball comedy to a chase thriller. The pleasant surprise is that Gibson has a flair for light comedy and the timing to bring off double-takes. It's a relief, too, because little else in Bird on a Wire is fresh. [18 May 1990, p.77p]

A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.

The Accused is far from a perfect film, but it's got a terrific performance by Foster, a pretty good one by McGillis, and Lansing's knack for casting women's issues in a form that makes people go see them at the movies. [14 Oct 1988, p.49]

Earth Girls Are Easy is 90 minutes of bubble and squeak that doesn't shrink from sharing its subject's vacuousness. But it works often enough. And when it does, it plays like a collision between Zippy and Hairspray. [12 May 1989, p.45]

While The Last Boy Scout covers no new ground, and while it features one of the heftier plot missteps in recent junk-movie history, it's far from the worst of shoot-'em-ups to burst onscreen lately. [13 Dec 1991, p.55]

Profile is one big gimmick, but the gimmickiness, you might say, is that in a very real sense it’s shot entirely on location. Is it a great movie? No, but it’s something rare in any medium, film or otherwise: a work in which form really is content.

Every time the kid looks at a field of numbers and symbols that start jiggling across a screen to clicky music, but not jiggling as fast as his brain, he's exiling the kind of hero played by Willis to the scrapheap of history. [3 Apr 1998, p.D10]

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]

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?

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.

A line gets crossed. It isn’t the one between California and Nevada. It’s the one from “Bad” to worse.

It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.

The pervasive, absorbing bitterness and hurt falter only when the story eases off its characters’ cynical insistence that people don’t change. Sudeikis knows how to play jarringly nasty — see “Colossal,” for one — but choked-up can be a reach here.

“Dunkirk” or “1917,” this is not. But as a window onto an under-acknowledged arena of combat and a starting point for armchair military historians, Greyhound is seaworthy enough to make it across.

Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]

Though sometimes it seems like a promotional video, the film offers a glimpse into the vagaries of class, culture, celebrity, and social mores since the hotel was first established back in 1930.

What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.

What we’re left with, then, is yet another “Terminator” far easier to appreciate for isolated bits of inspiration than for any stroke of genius it manages overall.

Keener’s performance keeps the film grounded even as blunt scenes of the opposing camp’s machinations flirt with soap opera villainy.

A Very Brady Sequel is a little like the meatloaf prepared by Alice, the Bradys' maid - padded, but palatable. It walks a line between evoking the old TV show and kidding it and it's as surprisingly lively a sequel as the original was for a big-screen treatment of an old TV staple. [23 Aug 1996, p.F4]

“Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.

Bonhôte and Ettedgui leave viewers winded from the pace of the ascent. But much the way we know that there was a rise, we also know a fall is imminent. This is where McQueen wobbles.

Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.

The movie convinces us that the hero sees and understands Simone’s evil even as he continues to enable it — even as he allows his own life to be ruined. Dogman ends with a paroxysm of cathartic violence and an eerie echo of Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (also with Mastroianni).

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.

Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.

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.

A watchable, unnecessary re-do that works hard but lacks the charm to really zing.

The Captain pretends to be a serious movie about the banality of evil; sometimes, despite itself, it is.

Anchoring this diverting, disparate collage are interviews with those who still believe in Van Tassel’s faith and message.

Muppetmaster Jim Henson has done a good job of translating the Turtles - and their 4-foot-tall rat guru, Splinter - into animatronic form. [30 Mar 1990, p.28p]

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

This franchise might be all about shedding light on lost details, but “Mistress of Evil” sometimes leaves us in the dark.

With Johnson’s arrival, “Jungle Cruise” enters “Raiders of the Lost Ark” territory. It’s not just the cascading action adventure in an exotic setting. It’s also James Howard Newton’s score sounding so much like John Williams that Williams should get royalties.

You're never unaware of the calculation underlying this Jetsons movie. Still, it succeeds in teleporting the clan to the movie screen. [6 July 1990, p.61]

Jungle 2 Jungle is surprisingly bearable. [07 Mar 1997, p.D5]

Franken's feel-good inanities make you laugh, but the insipid script in which they're embedded lacks the courage of its satiric convictions. [12 Apr 1995, p.90]

Brain Candy may be too safe a venture for the Kids in the Hall, but it still has more oddball charm than most Lorne Michaels-produced comedy on the big screen. [12 Apr 1996, p.68]

The documentary is good on the gay aspect of 54, and disco generally. Schrager became highly successful as an impresario of boutique hotels. Still, when he talks about Studio 54 there’s a touch of wonder in the tough-guy growl.

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]

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]

It's a lyrical, gorgeous, big-budget follow-up to "Like Water for Chocolate," and it's easy to take. It's easier still to fall in with the movie's openheartedness, its generosity of spirit. [11 Aug 1995, p.45]

Larger Than Life is a thin, disjointed road comedy that contains a few laughs despite itself. No matter how loosey-goosey and silly the script gets, and no matter how contrived the premise is, Bill Murray manages to sneak in a number of typically zany actions and reactions. [01 Nov 1996, p.E7]

A humane alternative that makes the phrase family values mean something. [14 July 1995, p.33]

It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.

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.

The movie’s dramatically uneven, as anthology movies tend to be, but is it worth watching on the big screen? If the idea of Monument Valley peopled with classic Coen misfits hits your sweet spot, by all means go.

For much of its first half, Chef Flynn feels like an after-school special with a difference — a big, big difference.

Gloria Bell is so comfortable in its skin because it’s a second skin. The talented Chilean writer-director Sebastián Lelio has done this before.

In Fabric is good bizarre fun, but after a while that’s all it is.

Rather than a suspenseful action exercise with volleys of gunfire, The Mule is more of a quixotic character picaresque, a distant relative of the recent Robert Redford farewell, “The Old Man & the Gun,” without being nearly as well written.

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

One quibble: For such a legendarily elusive spot, the snowmen’s Himalayan hideaway seems awfully well trodden these days. If you thought the similarity between, say, “Coco” and “The Book of Life” was a case of animators not looking resourcefully enough for inspiration, how about the trifecta of “Smallfoot,” “Missing Link,” and DreamWorks’s upcoming “Abominable”?

The documentary has its memorable moments. Period footage of the now-legendary 1973 auction of contemporary art by the collector Robert Scull is riveting.

Here’s the thing about Disney’s “live-action” remakes of its animated classics: The new versions may be bigger, louder, and more lavish, but they’ll never be original. The thrill of first impact is gone.

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.

Leave it to James to sum up a legendary, culture-altering talent: “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.” Both sides of that coin live on in our modern culture, and Kael’s voice fills every self-satisfied corner of the Internet. Two decades after her death, she’s still the ghost in the machine.

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.

Although Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson aren’t at all bad together, neither do they strike sparks. That’s unfortunate, since the movie flirts, and that is the word, with the idea of a romance between them.

Goofy is easy. Earnest is easy in a different way. Disturbing is both easy and hard. They’re all dissimilar, and Hail Satan? has lots of all three.

It’s silly-sweet rather than silly-stupid, the script has enough snap to count, and – really, now – it allows us to spend time with Issa Rae.

Tolkien gives us the passing of a vanished England and the loss of a generation but not quite enough about what was won, by him for us, nor the mystery of how he won it.

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

It’s an occasionally plodding but rarely dull movie, and one whose stakes outweigh its impact as drama. In the end, the message is both illuminating and disturbing.

The snake stuff is riveting — how could it not be? But Poulton and Madison Savage’s treatment of the rural community tilts toward the anthropological: A few corny bits of dialogue can make the parishioners feel like types instead of characters.

Who’s the audience for this? Well, me and about five other movie junkies at the crossroads of history and art. Maybe you, too, even if your knowledge of Buñuel stops with the slashed eyeball of “Un Chien Andalou” (1929), still one of the most shocking images in all cinema.

Just as Anspaugh and Pizzo pushed all the obvious buttons with their high school basketballers in "Hoosiers," so they turn Rudy into the "Rocky" of South Bend. It may be that Rudy's crowning piece of perseverance consisted of his dogging Anspaugh and Pizzo to film his story. It must be a comfort to Hoosiers Larry Bird and Don Mattingly to know that when the time comes for their biofilms, Anspaugh and Pizzo are in the phone book. [13 Oct 1993, p.75]

For all of its engaging performances, this thoughtful yarn from the filmmaking tandem of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz is limited by a quaintly straightforward story line. Every choice the characters opt for, every bit of self-discovery they make, is as scripted as a rasslin’ baddie’s folding-chair cheap shot.

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.

Wolf relies on the videos far too much. That over-reliance makes Recorder feel padded, as does his frequent use of reenactments.

Haggis and Krauss’s desire to use the ward as a vehicle to tell a much larger and more complex story makes sense. Yet it ultimately takes away from the truly remarkable story they have to tell, a story that may actually be more complex than matters of government policy and public opinion.

Magid has made a film that’s cool, assured, and understated. Someone should sign her up to direct a techno-thriller. In which case, she should collaborate again with T. Griffin, whose stripped-down score never calls attention to itself even as it propels and enhances what we watch.

Demonstrating a mastery of euphemism and understatement, Ringo recalls how the Byrds “introduced us to a hallucinogenic situation, and we had a really good time.” Consistently amiable, if a bit wandery, Echo in the Canyon provides a good time, too.

It’s a strong story with devastating implications, but also one told at an artistic remove that renders its meanings less subtle than diminished. There’s a fury underlying this film that goes unexpressed to the point of almost going unacknowledged, and it saps The Third Wife of a strength and momentum it could use. If Ash Mayfair ever taps into that fury, she may become a filmmaker to reckon with.

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.

As The Climb wends its way through the years, and as the friends’ relationships with each other and their girlfriends and families take multiple turns, each “chapter” is presented in smartly thought-out single takes. Except when they’re not; it’s a tough gimmick to sustain and the filmmakers don’t seem too intent on trying.

So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.

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.

This Is Not Berlin is a relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama in which the student may have more maturity than the teachers.

It’s worth a look, if only to get in on the ground floor of a comic mind who will hopefully continue to grow. And it’s worth a listen, if only for observations like “You know what’s ironic? Arguing about Alanis Morissette with your gay boyfriend.”

It’s fiery. It’s big. It’s deafening. It’s dull.

Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.

Strange’s superpowers are many. So are Cumberbatch’s, and one of them is making sneering seem practically jolly.

A look at Morgan Neville’s 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is enough to remind a viewer how engaged Fred Rogers could be and was. By contrast, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood comes a little too close to turning him into a magical sprite. That’s a fairy tale that grown-ups may need, but something tells me the children know better.

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

A stirring if somewhat ham-fisted telling of a life that needs to be known by all Americans.

As true-story dramas about innocent men on death row go, Just Mercy is just above average. I still hope it reaches the widest audience possible. To quote a statistic cited in the film, for every nine prisoners executed in this country, one is found to have been wrongfully convicted. That’s a number to shame a nation.

What’s best about the movie is mood and texture, and the ensemble cast (the second best thing about the movie) mostly defers to those qualities. In that sense, Motherless Brooklyn might be described as novelistic, and in a good way.

There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.

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.

He (Kurzel) wants this “true history” to be a Rorschach blot of Australia’s national psychology, but he’s made something closer to splatter art instead.

A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.

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.

When a cast is assembled that is as elegantly depraved as the one in The Burnt Orange Heresy, attention must be paid. And this art-world thriller has enough burnished surfaces, glamorous locations, and dark doings to keep an audience rapt for much of the running time. Yet somehow you may end the movie feeling less full than when you began.

Staggeringly preposterous, yet not without a certain entertainment value. Except for the glasnost angle, there's nothing original about The Package, yet there's something amusing in its reminder of how the political assassination genre has come full circle since "The Manchurian Candidate."

What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.