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

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

There are two entertaining small characters in Freejack - Amanda Plummer as a gun-toting nun and Johansen as Estevez's exploitive pal. As the lead, Estevez is appealing, if bland. He takes his future shocks in stride. [18 Jan 1982, p.12]

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.

The best scenes come when the family gathers under tense circumstances that give Ian Bannen (as the MP's father) and Miranda Richardson (as his wife) the chance to unleash some civilized ferocity that's genial in his case and icy in hers. Her spurned-wife scene toward the end is the film's most powerful, and still would be even if the stilted sex scenes were volcanic. [22 Jan 1993, p.25]

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]

There's talent on view in Renegades, even if it's mostly subordinated to formula and marketing imperatives. [02 Jun 1989, p.33]

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.

Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.

It's an amiable little low-grade comedy that gets by with goofing on movies and TV shows as John Ritter, a couch potato Faust, signs up for a cable package from hell (it's got 666 channels - the devil's number, get it?) from satanic Jeffrey Jones. [14 Aug 1992, p.46]

While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]

This handsome remake has distinction, but isn't as wrenching, urgent or keeningly lyrical as that 1939 original. [16 Oct 1992, p.33]

The series’ many diehard fans will still, and should, flock to their beloved Downton and its denizens. But, as a standalone film, the fatigued period drama goes in one era and out the other with little to add.

Taking Care of Business could be a lot worse. It's a swift, if entirely predictable, identity-switch movie that wastes little time on the way to its morality play conclusion. [17 Aug 1990, p.36p]

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

A predictable, semi-shameless, yet not-unsatisfying action drama.

Heart and Souls is a sweet but wispy little comedy of ectoplasm that doesn't give its engaging stars quite enough to do. After a while, you're grateful for the special effects that let the film's quartet of suspended souls fade smoothly in and out while Robert Downey Jr. pretends to let them take turns inhabiting his body. [13 Aug 1993, p.45]

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

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.

Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.

William Friedkin directs the adaptation of Matt Crowley's off-Broadway play about a group of gay men in Manhattan speaking increasingly frankly as a birthday party wears on. Sufficiently effective that you wonder what Friedkin was thinking with Cruising. [09 Nov 2008, p.N16]

The most remarkable thing about Brendan J. Byrne’s documentary — for anyone who’s followed Bill Bulger’s career it’s shocking, really — is the degree of cooperation Byrne got from the Bulger family for this joint portrayal of the two brothers. It started out as a profile of Bill, Byrne says, but he quickly realized he couldn’t tell the story of the younger brother without also telling the story of the older.

As anyone who saw Pelle the Conqueror remembers, August is great with landscapes, but perhaps because he was telling Bergman's story here instead of his own, he seems on this occasion too reverent. Considering the fierce emotions that are the film's subject, The Best Intentions is too hushed, decorous, solemn. [14 Aug 1992, p.43]

Visually, it’s the experience of falling in love turned inside out. “The Worst Person in the World” is showing how it looks to feel like the only couple in the world.

From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.

A good movie, Lost Illusions aspires to be a great one, but that ambition helps keep it from being a better movie. It’s overstuffed and a mite too leisurely: a self-consciously dignified film whose least dignified characters are its most compelling ones.

[Gyllenhaal’s] direction is unemphatic without ever being tentative, and she’s made a film with a relaxed, easy rhythm — but not too easy.

Lyrical and episodic, Belfast is often affecting, if far too sentimental.

The Baby-Sitters Club is far from an unalloyed success, but it offers more pluses than minuses and is both gentle and instructive. [18 Aug 1995, p.50]

There are moments watching it when you can’t help but think of “Don’t Look Up” (comet, moon, whatever). Honestly, though, “Moonfall” is more fun, even if far less substantial and nowhere near as much talent went into making it.

Julia, a brisk documentary survey of Julia Child’s life, is warmly admiring. This makes sense, as there’s lots to admire.

So “Marcel” is sweet, it’s charming, it’s clever. It’s also about as long an 89 minutes as you’re likely to spend in a movie theater this summer.

It’s refreshing that Lemmons focuses on the highs rather than the lows, even if it feels like buffing off the edges of her complex protagonist. But that won’t matter to Houston fans: They’ll get so emotional, baby.

Darling never quite ignites. The closest it gets to ignition is Pugh’s performance. Styles is perfectly fine, but it’s her movie.

Benediction has at least three things in common with its immediate predecessor, “A Quiet Passion” (2016). Both are biographies of poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Emily Dickinson, respectively. Both are suffused with great feeling. And despite having much to recommend them, both don’t really work.

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

It’s amiable and unpretentious, if also slack and diffuse.

The movie is what it is: relentless, shameless, and purely as an exercise in technique almost dementedly skilled. A Bay explosion explodes, a Bay collision collides, and Ambulance has both in abundance. For some viewers, the result will be 2 hours and 16 minutes of movie heaven. It might make others want to call for an ambulance.

Journal is Canedy’s story, but it’s Michael B. Jordan’s movie. Stalwart, quietly forceful, he seems positively . . . Denzelian.

Tight close-ups, jittery hand-held camera — lots and lots of jittery hand-held camera. The idea, presumably, is to impart urgency, immediacy, dynamism. Instead it causes visual exhaustion.

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

The film includes the standard escalating horror set pieces — one occurs on fiery scaffolding, another inside a different flooded subway — that grow repetitive in their oscillating bouts of tension and release. But Nyong’o and Quinn manage to keep the film anchored in connection.

All the actors are very good, though Raiff, who’s in almost every scene, can get a little wearying with his combination of high energy and touch of winsomeness.

GdTP starts out pretty slow and doesn’t speed up for far too long — it’s the rare movie that might accurately be described as more imaginative than good — but the occasional bit of inspiration like the tree-branch proboscis encourages the viewer to hang on. It’s a nose job like no other.

Open-endedness in a narrative can be a good and challenging thing; or it can be a sign of having gotten in too deep and not being able to figure out how to get out. “Get Out” knew how to get out. “Master” doesn’t.

The heart of the movie is the discussions among the divers and, even more, the scenes in the caves. Simply as a technical achievement, the underground and underwater filming is highly impressive.

What Emily the Criminal really is is a character study; and this is where Plaza comes in. She’s the really good thing the movie has going for it. Over the course of 96 minutes, Emily will do some surprising things. Plaza makes them seem as natural as swiping a credit card, and in both senses of the verb.

Like many other contemporary psychological thrillers, “Resurrection” is far better at building up tension than it is in pulling together its narrative threads. It’s a little over-infatuated with its own perceived complexity, as if giving the audience any kind of conventionally plausible wrap-up is beneath its mission.

The unhurried pace Denis maintains insures that the subplots feel less like distractions than a nod to the contradictoriness of daily life.

This is a movie that’s definitely got game. But what’s richest and best about Hustle is how, yes, it’s a character study. It’s not in the same league as “Hoop Dreams” or “High Flying Bird” or even “Hoosiers” (1986) — what is it about basketball-movie titles and the letter “h”? — but it’s smart and agreeable and, emotionally, it gives a true bounce.

The filmmaking is stylish yet impersonal — or can true style be impersonal? Maybe that’s why proficiency is a better word. A general slickness obtains.

Till avoids all flash. That makes it a bit didactic at times, but didacticism is a form of commitment: not so much political, though there’s certainly that, but also to emotional truth and simple human decency.

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.

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.

Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.

It's a morality play, full of hopeless tosh. Still, Hitchcock manages to include a hallucination sequence and a highly suggestive spurt from a soda siphon. [12 Jan 2020]

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.

Stars at Noon trades too much on a tradition of older, maybe not better but certainly more urgent movies. Somewhere deep, deep in its heart is the memory of Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum.

Ramsey is close to a force of nature, equally skilled at conveying Birdy’s curiosity, humor, orneriness, and not-infrequent bewilderment. In other words, she’s a 14-year-old.

Despite the film’s tendency to drag, Vicky Krieps remains compulsively watchable, as always. She almost saves the movie.

The look of the film is so spectacular that I almost want to recommend you see it solely for that reason. It wasn’t enough to save the film for me.

To the movie’s credit, it tries to balance action and thrills with domestic conflict. Perhaps not surprisingly, the family stuff feels seriously subsidiary to the scary stuff. Beast is going through the motions with father-daughter tension. The humans-as-prey tension, that’s a different story.

The documentary doesn’t give the sense of McEnroe as a person that Douglas’s film does. But it gives a rather astonishing sense of him as a player. With all due respect to those other McEnroe guises, that’s the one that matters.

Whenever Ronan’s not on the screen, “See” seems to lose something. It’s no mystery why.

Lane does know how to photograph his own interesting, large-eyed face to potent effect. He's an appealing talent, and Sidewalk Stories is a likable film. Beyond novelty value, it also finds modern ways of making contact with the very real feel for poverty that was so much a part of the early Chaplin films. [21 Sep 1989, p.60]

What I can say for sure is that Oppenheimer far too often feels like a three-hour Wikipedia entry than a compelling movie.

Once the comedy does kick in, around the 100-minute mark, it does so quite nastily. The movie never quite recovers.

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

Quest for Camelot is easy to sit through and reasonably entertaining. Certainly it should satisfy its target audience. But Warner really needs to journey more boldly toward a personality of its own and offer a real alternative. [15 May 1998, p.D5]

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.

The Good Nurse is at its best as a medical police procedural. It helps that Noah Emmerich and Nnamdi Asomugha, playing the cops, give solid, understated performances.

Enola doesn’t just break the fourth wall. She tickles it, winks at it, and tugs at its sleeve. With another actress, this would be annoying. With Brown, it’s charming.

Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.

Throughout the eight years covered by writer-director Davy Chou’s latest, Return to Seoul, Freddie will alienate the people around her and, by extension, the viewer.

With its preachy, dull love story between a boy made of water and a girl on fire, Elemental should have been called “Guess Who’s Coming to Disney.”

Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]

Ridiculous even by superhero standards, it remains more or less coherent.

It’s not that any of the actors are bad. Zendaya has a screen authority that goes way beyond that imperious look. It’s just that none of them is especially compelling.

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]

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]

The scariest thing about Scream VI isn’t seeing someone get knifed in the face 600 times; it’s this movie’s absurdly inaccurate depiction of New York City.

Though “Twisters” lives up to the sequel maxim of being louder, larger, and busier, director Lee Isaac Chung (“Minari”) and screenwriter Mark L. Smith don’t deviate from the first film’s formula. Watching the sequel is like playing Mad Libs with the original’s plot.

A more fleshed-out character might have grounded a last act burdened by an unconvincing plot twist, an odd moment of wish-fulfillment, and an over-reliance on the clichés that befall Black people in urban-set films.

If you can admire a movie’s technique (and its hotness) above all else, you’ll enjoy Passages. For me, it’s an intriguing near-miss.

Ultimately, Joy Ride is an uneasy melding of “Girls Trip” and “Return to Seoul”; it’s two pieces that work well by themselves but clash when forced to collaborate.

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

Though Trolls Band Together mercilessly beats its familiar, tired message about the importance of family into the ground, it’s still surprisingly watchable with plenty of voice and singing talent.

To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]

Director Ayer, whose career took off when he wrote 2001′s “Training Day,” has frequently attempted to create Action Movies That Matter (the stressful 2014 World War II picture “Fury,” for one); this is absolutely not one of those. He tackles this assignment without much self-seriousness but doesn’t seem keen to embrace its silliness quotient, either.

Dicks: The Musical is a three-star movie with a midnight crowd and a two-star movie when viewed at 3 p.m. My star rating splits the difference.

The Beast is an unusual film: challenging, ambitious, and inward. Even when inscrutable, as it often is, it holds the attention, though less so the longer it lasts, and it lasts nearly 2½ hours.

“A place is the people,” a closing screen credit tells us. It’s a lovely sentiment, but “We Grown Now” feels more like fleeting memories of those people rather than a fully formed reminiscence.

Civil War can, and frequently does, put its characters through an emotional wringer. It puts viewers through one, too. But those characters seem less like people with actual feelings to be wrung than means to Garland’s filmmaking ends.

IF is nonetheless an enjoyable watch, and a surprisingly gentle one, despite its bumbling cast of fiends, rascals, and other overlooked creatures.