If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

The movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: "The 40 Year Old Virgin" with a shoe phone.

Deathtrap is slick enough that you can't disengage from it without missing something. [19 Mar 1982]

The film, like the tour it documents, wallops you in the face with politics.

No one here is prodding you to laugh. It just happens.

At its best, it will impale you on its raw urgency. At other times, it's a slog through long improvisations that never achieve dramatic liftoff.

If Return to Me is ultimately too bland and safe, it'll nevertheless serve as a calling card for Hunt's future directorial projects.

Filmed with panache, wit, chic amorality, and an inexhaustible supply of Micro Uzi ammunition, ''Killer'' nevertheless represents a baroque dead end for the Hong Kong action genre.

What the Hughes brothers have come up with is, to borrow another phrase from that bygone age, a penny dreadful.

Think low-budget ''Moonstruck'' but think again: A regional dish in the most heartwarming sense.

It’s an entertaining piece of Hollywood waxworks if you don’t set your expectations very high and it’s probably the best movie Rob Reiner has directed in more than a decade. (This only sounds like a compliment.)

I wish Blue Chips had pursued its indictment further up the food chain. But it brings off its tricky double mission, being entertaining while not letting anybody off the hook as it reminds us that amateur athletics is big business. [18 Feb 1994, p.39]

The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.

Particularly because Savini obviously feels a responsibility to the original, it's impossible for this new film to unfold with any sense of discovery or surprise. It's almost all just at the level of dutiful replication. [19 Oct 1990, p.35]

The movie has to twist your arm to get you to feel for these people. But you wouldn’t be wrong to think it’s been broken.

O'Brien and his castmates seem to play loose with his script a bit more than they should in an effort to give the material a lived-in feeling.

At times, the dead space in Escape from L.A. becomes impossible to ignore. But if it never quite becomes the wild ride it sets out to be, it's seldom boring to watch, either. [09 Aug 1996, p.C6]

The thrill of watching an Olivier Assayas movie is that you often have no idea where it’s going next. This time out, it seems, neither does he.

Inspiring, or amusing? Appealingly, Eddie the Eagle invites both tags.

I would be much harder on this movie if I didn’t have such a good time watching it. Admittedly, it’s ridiculous, but I absorbed all of its haphazard chaos with a huge smile on my face.

True to its title, Moxie has a lot of moxie, and it’s an easy watch, smartly acted by a crew of young talents.

If you were ever curious how a bad director can destroy the work of two talented actors and a slight, but funny, script, you need look no further than Educating Rita. [28 Oct 1983]

What the filmmakers come up with is a modestly likable mix of zany and gently warmhearted, even if they overdo both elements at times.

Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.

More of a sand-and-noodles western set in the Far East.

The movie’s a platypus: cute as the dickens but what the heck is it?

Oblivion is a lot like its star: clean, cold, efficient, increasingly overblown, and not a little inexplicable.

Isn’t it a bit early for Isabelle Huppert to be entering the late Bette Davis era of her career? Why else on God’s green earth would she be appearing in Greta, a botched attempt to build a camp horror movie around a grand diva of the screen?

It's not that Jenna Fischer is miscast in A Little Help. It's that she's mis-everything else: misused, misdirected, misanthropic.

Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.

It’s a big deal for the NFL and ESPN, no doubt, and Draft Day serves as 110 minutes of product placement for both.

The most disappointing thing here, besides Perry's ongoing visual impairment (he deserves better cinematography and editing) is Scott.

The slightly androgynous Curtis is always interesting to watch; her sentience, her thin lips pressed into an ironic smile, her hood-ornament sleekness are tempered by a believable capacity for edgy affection. But the fact that the force is against her is minor compared to the way the film is against her. Blue Steel victimizes her more than any of the celluloid heavies in it. [16 Mar 1990, p.42]

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.

Avoids the potentially suffocating pall of uplift hovering over its quite exhilarating story.

Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.

This is an unapologetic audience-pleaser, though it’s not for the squeamish. Say no to drugs. Say yes to “Cocaine Bear.”

This new movie is crazier, scarier, funnier, and more bewildering. It's the strangest movie I expect to see from a Hollywood studio for the rest of the year.

Talking heads are overused in documentaries, but in this case a dose of perspective, a point of view or two, would have a gone a long way toward turning a pageant of unreliable voices and morbid images into a portrait of the artists and their deadly scene as something more than misunderstood.

It ain’t Shakespeare, or even Kurosawa. But it’s an acceptable remake of a western that itself was an acceptable remake of one of the greatest movies ever made. Enjoyable, even, until the last act proves how dull an overextended gun battle can get.

Fueled by off-kilter characters, charming and funny -- if haltingly awkward -- dialogue, and a reasonable amount of thematic ingenuity, "Blackballed" succeeds as a modest tribute to the kind of aging boys club that idles for hours in somebody's parents' rumpus room, its members tossing around big-man talk but trapped in emotional adolescence.

Even if you’ve only seen one of these films, you won’t need to spend 156 minutes witnessing the rise of a madman whose actions never required any backstory in the first place.

The movie’s a watchable affair for most of the running time, not so much subverting cliches of the serial-killer genre as keeping the audience in suspense as to how, if, and when those cliches will be observed.

The songs are catchy. The lip-synching, meanwhile, is always a little off, and the dancing is usually average at best.

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.

The movie's not even close to Pixar standards - the animation is slapdash and the story construction's a mess - but the vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian.

As generic as its title, but two things enable it to land: the basic likability of Mark Wahlberg as the wannabe protagonist, and the contagious energies in the rock concert sequences.

One for the fans, even though writer-director Rodger Grossman and co-writer Michelle Baer Ghaffari labor mightily to spin it into something larger.

Just because a Japanese animated film is screening at the Museum of Fine Arts doesn't mean that you can count on Miyazaki-caliber artistry.

Those looking for further enlightenment might want to pass on the feel-good cinematic hagiography known as Awake: The Life of Yogananda.

Disappointing for a number of reasons. For one thing, it's silly. For another, it's not always silly enough to be diverting.

Including the high expectations set up by the film’s early going, Eubank had a thoughtful thriller in the works but along the way he got his signals crossed.

In pace, sensibility, and big, beating heart, this is a child's first indie film, and it's the better for it.

At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."

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.

Unless you're on its let's-laugh-at-the-loonies wavelength, The Dream Team is singularly unfunny. The writing and direction are smugly vacant, behaving as if the basic concept is so innately hilarious that neither need bother fleshing it out with characterization and inventiveness. The only thing prodigious about The Dream Team is its cheap witlessness. It makes Rain Man look like King Lear. [07 Apr 1989, p.35]

Director Sam Mendes tries his hand at writing an original screenplay solo, and the results are far from magical. Instead, Empire of Light strands its poorly defined characters in a nostalgia piece filtered through the director’s love of the movies. (For a better film on the same theme, watch “The Fabelmans.”)

The young cast comes through with appealing, naturalistic performances. But Weber’s programmatic, preachy story and emotional manipulation is so blatant that it verges on the fatuous.

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

As a credible love story, though, the film never leaves the runway. If you're a fan of these actors, you may want to look up Jet Lag when it comes out on video, or catch it on an Air France flight while flirting with the passenger in the next seat.

It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.

If you are a devotee of sleaze, you'll salivate at the prospect of Mau Mau Sex Sex, a fond and fawning look back at exploitation, or grindhouse, movies from the 1930s through the 1960s.

'Trainspotting'' Lite.

You have an overstuffed story line, sloppy filmmaking, a general thinness of conception (if you've seen "Sister Act," you've pretty much seen The Fighting Temptations), and a lead performance that starts out obnoxious and becomes actively grating.

Silent Night wants to be the new action movie associated with Christmas. But don’t worry, fans of “Die Hard”; that movie’s place is still secure.

In lieu of suspense, Rosenthal relies on a mood of free-floating anxiety, enhanced by West Virginia (actually British Columbia) landscapes where the sun never shines. As one-note as the title suggests, A Single Shot misfires.

And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.

Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.

Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.

It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

A skillfully managed fairy tale about a mouse, a rat, and fairy tales in general.

Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.

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.

So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.

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.

If anything, The Big Year plays like Ron Howard's "Parenthood'' with birds instead of children.

This feeble excuse for a comedy made me angry, and if you have any cherished cinematic feelings for the quartet of actresses at its center, you may feel angry, too.

The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose.

As it escalates to a nasty conclusion, Alpha Dog doesn't have the moral or emotional weight of tragedy. These aren't the psychologically exploded youths of "Rebel Without a Cause," or even "The Outsiders." They're characters in a long, violent, unbleeped episode of MTV's "Cribs."

Pain plus impatience does not make for a favorable review, even if the film marks the return of one of our greatest living actors.

Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.

Time of Favor, which boasts a haunting score, is an unflinching, complex portrait of a modern Israel that is rarely seen on-screen.

The most traditional of Hollywood romances, in that it's resolutely about nice people with nice problems.

The producers of Ella Enchanted probably assume, correctly, that many more kids haven't read the book than have, and they're out to give that audience a slick, shallow good time.

Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.

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

Thank goodness for Method Man, who understood the assignment and made the film watchable and fun whenever Jordan showed up. When he isn’t on screen, “Bad Shabbos” is a mediocre movie.

In the end, that debate might not matter, anyway. What makes Don’t Stop Believin’  work is that we’re along for every step of Pineda’s journey, from his not-so-stunning first day of auditioning to his performances in front of huge crowds to his backstage massages from a masseuse (presumably the band’s).

For all of Alita’s she-Pinocchio charm — and her Cameronian estrogen-charged badass-itude — she can’t quite carry the audience all the way across that pesky uncanny valley.

The film is unobjectionable, sentimental, and not a little dull.

"Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.

In the Mouth of Madness is firmly lodged in the armpit of boredom. [03 Feb 1995, p.55]

The movie's fodder for tweener girls with indiscriminate Nick TV addictions, but there's just enough wit on display to make you realize it could have been worse.

“Axel F” is a joyless affair, a mediocre simulacrum that made me long for the original.

Lubezki is arguably this movie’s secret star, and he invests the movie’s Los Angeles settings with the strangeness and newness of a NASA rover traveling across Mars.

A proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.

In the end, this feeble effort remains tainted, however unfairly, by the creator’s personal life. Maybe Allen should have titled it “Rationalizing Man.”