Good Kill is by necessity a grim piece of work, one that fields a powerful and unexpectedly terse performance from Ethan Hawke while stumbling over plot developments that seem increasingly forced. Niccol can be forgiven his outrage even as it leads him to create drama out of agenda instead of the other way around.

Runs dry amid the cactus and sagebrush, but Graham's cartoony take on angelic unstoppableness makes us not mind so much.

Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.

Enjoy the sense of never quite knowing when the movie is going to stick another pin in its balloon of sincerity, and you’ll like the Coopers well enough.

Youth is, among many other things, a lovely valentine to both Caine and Keitel, two performers who have seen it all and know what to do with it.

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

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.

Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.

Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.

A classy unintentional hoot.

As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.

It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.

A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?

Much like a Sox starter struggling for the first couple of innings before settling down, The Perfect Game takes a while to get to the parts worth cheering.

My Cousin Vinny is a cement-handed courtroom comedy that somehow lands on its feet when it should fall on its face. In fact, it does fall on its face, more than once. There isn't a single thing in it that you don't know isn't coming. But the chemistry between Joe Pesci as a wiseguy-out-of-water and Marisa Tomei as his shrewd and adorable Brooklyn girlfriend, adrift in the Alabama legal system, keeps it worth watching. [13 Mar 1992, p.28]

The movie is too pious for farce and too eager to please to comment persuasively on the racial horrors of the Deep South at that time.

The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.

Whatever Evening is saying about life, death, and guilt isn't terribly new or interesting.

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.

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]

Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.

What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick the movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt.

Undersea photographer Rob Stewart, who directed, wrote, narrated, stars in, and helped shoot Sharkwater, really, really loves sharks. He also fears for their future on the planet. His lively documentary makes you see why, on both counts.

Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.

The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.

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.