It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

Where Do We Go Now? has a heart and an anger to offset its structural fuzziness. It's refreshingly open-minded about faith, too.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

So, how's the food? The camera never even goes up close. That's the kind of restaurant documentary this is.

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

It’s an engrossing portrait not only of government intrigue and crusading after the truth, but of media and their tangled motivations. Engrossing enough, in fact, that Cuesta needn’t try as hard as he occasionally does to heighten the drama and give it added flash.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

There aren’t sufficient words to describe the remarkable visual environment; suffice it to say that the production designers are the stars here as much as the cast. More so, really.

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]

Wolfs has enough action to keep us from contemplating how silly it is.

Hinds and Manville do a credible job of portraying a marriage that has run its course, and their best work occurs in the silences that pass between their characters, Gerry and Sheila.

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.

Juice is a film about choices. The right ones. The tragically wrong ones. There will be comparisons to Matty Rich's brilliant "Straight Out of Brooklyn," but Dickerson's effort is more richly textured, more grounded in an ordinary kid's point of view. And Dickerson's dogged determination to film from that perspective has resulted in a film rich in the right lingo, the right clothes, the right attitudes. [17 Jan 1992, p.67]

Cranston’s performance is the motor that runs Trumbo, and that motor never idles, never flags in momentum or magnetism or idealistic scorn. At its entertaining worst, the movie’s a high-spirited game of Hollywood dress-up.

A likable satire on celebrity, Flemish-style, it is no less pointed than its American counterparts, just a lot less pompous.

A delightful alternative to most current multiplex fare, which wouldn't recognize a juicy bon mot if it tripped over one in the aisle.

The film doesn't amount to an emotionally palpable experience. Most of the stops it attempts to pull out are rusty. The movie ends with a gigantic lump in its throat, one that would take a tall glass of Barbara Stanwyck to wash down.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

Has extraordinary depth and insight about the limitations and follies of human beings.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

As a Goodfellas-ish crime drama that vividly evokes time and place, Saints is rendered with enough bare-knuckled verve, unpredictability, and darkly glinting wit to make it work.

Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.

A pretty good movie expansion of a pretty good stage musical; what bumps it up into contention and makes it of interest beyond devotees of musical theater — you know who you are — is Kendrick.