It’s the lack of depth that ultimately may keep you from committing to 1917 or even respecting it — the movie’s sense that war is simply something that happens to people rather than being caused by them. Don’t forget that World War I was once called The War to End All Wars. It wasn’t and according to the headlines it still isn’t, but this movie never stops running to bother ask why.

Outrage succeeds as activism, but it excels as a window into certain political psyches.

This time, the over-the-top craziness that Spencer slyly serves up fills more than just a pie plate.

May ultimately be no more than the sum of its (body) parts, but it's still a ghastly service-industry horror story - a film to make you wonder what might be roiling beneath the surface of the placid young woman who hands you your Grande Latte every morning.

The story is a mess. But On Guard was directed by the reliable Philippe de Broca, who imbues the whole affair with high-calorie silliness.

There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.

It's a quiet little gag homage both to Boris Karloff and to the set up of shelf-loads of pulp novels and films noir. And Peltola, with his flat, serious face and damp, oil-black hair, happens to look, at times, like Richard Widmark and Kirk Douglas.

The longer the film goes on, the more you crave a vaster history of modern Liberia, originally a colony founded by former slaves from the United States.

The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.

Most bewildering of all, Bridge of Spies is a moral drama driven by an insurance lawyer. That it works at all is a miracle — or would be, if anyone other than St. Steven were involved.

It's a tale powerfully told, nevertheless, with an unusual vantage point in its upper-class young hero.

The movie's overlong and there are lumps in the batter, but this is a ''Charlie" that the author would recognize as upholding his playfully dyspeptic tradition.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

There is a fair share of such Betty White-ish feistiness on display, but the pathos creeps in unexpectedly.

An invitation to see something a little less pretty, and potentially more enduring.

Zanuck draws impressive performances from her actors. Gregg Allman is surprisingly strong as a slyly menacing dealer, and Max Perlich, as an unpredictable stoolie, makes his scenes pop. The down-and-dirty Rush puts a lot of punch into enervation. [10 Jan 1992, p.77]

The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.

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.

Through Ferreira’s skillful navigation of her character’s growth, and Leguizamo’s preternatural ability to show kindness in earnest, the film worked its way around my defenses and hit me square in the tear ducts more than once.

Morlang is a repressed creep whose worst crime, as far as the audience is concerned, is dullness.

The latest and most creatively unhinged film from director Takashi Miike.

A key point, though, is that all the scientists profiled have staked their careers on this one discovery.

Despite a deceptively aimless surface that seems to take off from the initial character's musings on roads not taken, Slacker is more than a gallery of alienated post-collegiates spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen. [4 Oct. 1991, p.47]

It's an outstanding, warts-and-all look at reggae legend Bob Marley.

Sword of Trust has a dogged weirdness all its own, a singularity that extends to Maron having written the excellently jangly score. When was the last time you saw — or heard — a movie where the star composed the music? It’s just part of the its-own-world quality of Sword of Trust.

Week in and week out, horror movies cheat us, so it's wonderfully cathartic to watch a bunch of kids cheat death in what turns out to be the best installment yet in the "Final Destination" franchise.

Dìdi reminds us that our parents aren’t just our parents — they’re people who have their own hopes and dreams. It’s not just about us.

The movie has a great time playing with ideas of scope and perspective, shifting between microscopic and macroscopic.