Is a mellowed Herzog to be believed?

To paraphrase Andre Malraux, it invokes but it doesn't always supply, doesn't course strongly enough with the book's themes of blood and earth and dislocation.

Isn't just a feel-good movie; it's a feel-good-and-righteous movie. And audiences will forgive its flaws.

A powerful and surehandedly crafted depth charge of a movie.

Beautiful to look at and acted with full and tempestuous conviction, it still seems to be taking place in an apartment far across the way.

While the story couldn't be simpler and the filmmaking is crude, it forcefully addresses a reality.

One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.

Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.

Phar Lap wastes its brilliant potential through embarrassingly inept acting, a cloying soundtrack, stereotyped characters and pedestrian direction. [13 Jul 1984]

Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.

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.

A hilarious, touching, and (except for a dip into melodrama near the end) skillful blend of subtle emotional depths and a dazzlingly playful surface.

Radnor's script is more bittersweet than laugh-out-loud funny.

It’s McKellen’s and Mirren’s. Their back-and-forth provides a satisfaction akin to watching two masters volley at Wimbledon. Unfortunately, the ball these masters are playing with manages the perplexing trick of being worn and waterlogged while also far too bouncy: stodginess and over-plotting is not a good combination.

Even if you think Cruise has never had a moment of doubt in his life, he makes Nathan's self-loathing palpable, and the character's regeneration has a hoarse, cautious purposefulness that's striking.

In this era of Apatow and Ferrell and Rogen and Wilson, of men monopolizing movie comedy, Baby Mama feels absurdly momentous, and even political. Fey and Poehler aren't just taking back control of their bodies. They're taking back control of their profession.

Not horrifying enough.

The duo provide a bit of wit and warmth amid the contrived subplots and the self-satisfied moralism.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.

It's called Pride, and, while it's neither as socially urgent as "Freedom Writers" nor as danceable and soapy as "Stomp the Yard," it's better acted and tougher to resist

Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

Ben Stiller is like a guy on the 1919 White Sox. He's rigged to lose. His comedy is the stuff of failure, and sometimes it's pleasurable watching him flit around in funny get-ups, only to have a pretty costar put him down.

It’s cute and clever to a point -- especially if you don’t know much about the film’s premise going in -- but then the cleverness runs on like the one-note punch line of an interminable “Saturday Night Live’’ sketch, sponsored by Audi.

With so much going on, that means a lot of balls need to be kept in the air. Some of them drop. Of course they do: The Adam Project is entertaining but no masterpiece. What’s unusual, and impressive, is that the dropped balls often keep bouncing. That’s a tribute to the movie’s wit, energy, and imaginativeness.

once Carpenter delivers his throwback-to-the-'50s visuals, complete with plump little B-movie flying saucers, and makes his point that the rich are fascist fiends, They Live starts running low on imagination and inventiveness. The big alley-fight scene between Piper and David, in which the former tries to punch some awareness into the latter and make him put on the X-ray sunglasses, is as contrived as it is brutal. And the ending isn't much. The acting has the good sense not to try to be anything more than two-dimensional, though, which keeps the entertainment value at a lively comic-strip level. As sci-fi horror comedy, "They Live," with its wake-up call to the world, is in a class with "Terminator" and "Robocop," even though its hero doesn't sport bionic biceps. [4 Nov 1988, p.52]

Jim Parsons brings his own irrepressible energy to DreamWorks’ 3-D animated Home, segueing from almost-alien misfit Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory” to alien misfit, period.

The camerawork is steady, the editing patient, the choreography playful. It's a zippy and inspired piece of moviemaking. But there's one problem. It's playing under the closing credits.

This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.

Surviving Picasso is always intelligent and often entertaining, even when it perhaps inevitably takes on the character of an upmarket wax museum. [4 Oct 1996]

Only in the epilogue does the film mention that none of the miners was compensated and no one was held responsible.

It has in Leonardo DiCaprio — magnificent is the only word to describe this performance — the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman.

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."

Even squeamish viewers are apt to be captivated by the tight, credible scripting; these 20-somethings talk and behave like today's irony-clad young sophisticates. And whatever your opinion of the subject matter, you can't fault the filmmaking.

Individual parts of “The Bride!” work, but as a whole, the critic in me found it confusing and irritating.

Handsomely shot and edited, The Bank benefits greatly from the brutal ministrations of LaPaglia,

It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.

You can’t make this stuff up, but you can botch the telling of it, and that’s what sinks this satiric drama.

Above all, it is predictable.

To answer your first question: like a cross between Shrek, the Frankenstein monster, and a Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robot.

It’s a simple story, really, but Nair mucks it up with the hot-button suspense of the framing scenes: surging crowds and rooftop standoffs, panicky cellphone calls and crackling walkie-talkies.

A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.

Writer Peter Harness has based his screenplay on his own childhood experiences, but personal doesn't necessarily translate to fresh.

Viewed en masse, V/H/S can't generate the necessary suspense, and buy-in, to truly get under your skin.

Like a Bond picture with no spies or villains or car chases or gadgets or explosions.

A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.

Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.

Neither rare nor particularly well done. If you're looking for Danish meatballs served on dark wry, though, you could do worse.

Eddie Murphy in another mediocre family comedy? Imagine that.

This story of how corporate interests collude against the common good is surely worthy. But you might ask if the facts of the case might have made a better documentary, not a drama.

The quest ends in a surprise Capra-esque resolution, which both satisfies and cloys.

What the movie lacks in technical polish (it's not very handsome-looking) and dramatic perfection, it makes up for in unusual social sophistication.

Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.

Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.

Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.

If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.

Like Life itself, this alien is nasty, brutish, and short.

Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.

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.

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]

Humor in 'Jim' is a little too dry.

Kim doesn't sweat interweaving his story threads in any tightly controlled way. Just when the need-for-speed stuff really starts to gain traction, he'll shift for a surprisingly lengthy stretch to comic relief with the deputies and local wacko Johnny Knoxville.

See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.

Captures a shadowy scene.

While the film dutifully reproduces many incidents from the book, it lacks the spirit and vitality of its source. And - no small problem - it lacks McCourt's voice knitting the vignettes together.

Is all the sound and fury worthwhile, the four years of championing, the four hours up on the screen? To the fans who’ve been in it for the long haul, of course. To HBO Max executives, you bet. To casual moviegoers, probably not.

The movie’s heart is completely in the right place, which, frankly, can make it a bit of a chore to watch. Moral righteousness makes the world a better place, but filmic it’s not.

One roots for Lucas to get the next film sorted out, and to resurrect the humanity and soul that first made so many fall in love a long time ago with that galaxy far, far away.

I enjoyed the first three adventures of the Dragon Warrior, but the best thing he can do now is to give this series a much needed skadoosh, sending it to rest in the cinematic spirit realm.

The chief culprits are Townsend's TV-movie characterizations and a very muddled message.

Behind the familiar hits, Jersey Boys is a story about the pressures and rewards of professionalism. Far too little of that has made it into this biopic. It’s just too mediocre to be true.

Though programmatic in its plotting, “Effie” does aspire to obliqueness in its imagery. In “Mr. Turner,” Leigh evokes the painter of the title in the film’s stunning visuals. In “Effie,” the pseudo-medieval lushness and literalness of the Pre-Raphaelites permeates much of cinematography by Andrew Dunn.

The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.

Please, moviegoers, time is running out for us. Our civilization (and bottom line) depend on fast-food kiddie meals stuffed with toys. In this way, we conquer the solar system.

Like most movies about men and horses, Hidalgo spares no expense in matters of corniness. Set in the 1890s, it's sort of a throwback movie, executed with the boyish kick of dusty old cowboy matinees.

The genius - and there is a cockeyed genius permeating "The Brady Bunch" - is that it nails the entrapment and anxiety beneath the happy faces as unmistakably as the films of Douglas Sirk did the decade before. [17 Feb 1995, p.41]

Zwigoff's overdue for a turkey, in other words. Art School Confidential is it.

Because Demme genuinely likes people and is interested in them, Ricki and the Flash feels like “Stella Dallas” as remade by Jean Renoir — it’s a humanist suburban fable.

The buzz was negative on So I Married an Axe Murderer, but the buzz was wrong. Mike Myers' new comedy isn't quite as fresh and bubbly and goofy as "Wayne's World," but it's hip, lively fun, with only a slight bit of sag. [30 July 1993, p.29]

It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.

A blood-smeared and almost completely scurrilous love letter to anyone who ever appeared in the junk movies of the '60s through '80s.

It’s the kind of outrageous comedy that you might even take your folks to, though probably not your kids. Say what you will about Harmony Korine and his demented geriatrics, at least they take their trash seriously.

10 Items or Less is nearly an acting class exercise, except for the fact that these two have long since graduated.

The highlight is Duran and Arcel’s bonding in the corner between rounds. We’ll take more of this revealing brand of drama anytime.

A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.

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]

Danish photojournalist-turned-director Nicolai Fuglsig channels his experience into a credibly stark snapshot of war, one that helps audiences further grasp why the region has been so hellishly problematic for American troops.

Doesn't entirely work.

Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.

Friday is funnier and funkier than "Bad Boys," more homegrown-seeming, less manufactured. It plays like "House Party" with attitude. [26 Apr 1995]

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

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

In an age in which it feels as if seemingly pure intimacy no longer exists, this film thrives on nothing but intimate moments.

I should have been more affected by Arthur the King because, after all, “Old Yeller” conditioned my generation to erupt in tears whenever a dog’s fate looks dire. And yet, all I saw were the familiar gears churning underneath.

In the new comedy Hamlet 2, Coogan comes perilously close to wearing out his welcome. It's actually a pretty fascinating sight.

Compared to the first two movie installments, this one is uncharacteristically scattershot in the life-lessons department.

Brüno is what "Borat’" was too well-done to be: a publicity stunt about publicity stunts.

Throughout the mayhem, Marcus and Mike bicker like an old married couple. While this interplay has always been the best element of the “Bad Boys” universe, Smith and Lawrence look disinterested this time. It’s as if they’re getting too old for this [expletive], to use a phrase from a much better buddy-cop movie series.