Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]

The script by Ian Abrams puts them through strictly formulaic moves, but it has flashes of wit and it's even literate. [10 Sept 1993, p.47]

Some films wear their length like an epic and some just wear you out; Army of the Dead tends increasingly toward the latter.

Voyagers shows that Burger can still move a story along with craft, pace, and skill, even if that story is, in the end, awfully predictable.

Petite Maman feels more like an extended short story. That’s only in part owing to its having a runtime of just 72 minutes. It also has a deceptive uneventfulness and a sense of everything being casually . . . just so.

There are two entertaining small characters in Freejack - Amanda Plummer as a gun-toting nun and Johansen as Estevez's exploitive pal. As the lead, Estevez is appealing, if bland. He takes his future shocks in stride. [18 Jan 1982, p.12]

One nice thing about Mila Kunis’s portrayal of a heroin addict in Rodrigo García’s Four Good Days is that the vanity’s up front, in the character and in the star’s nervy embrace of a woman who has become human wreckage.

The best scenes come when the family gathers under tense circumstances that give Ian Bannen (as the MP's father) and Miranda Richardson (as his wife) the chance to unleash some civilized ferocity that's genial in his case and icy in hers. Her spurned-wife scene toward the end is the film's most powerful, and still would be even if the stilted sex scenes were volcanic. [22 Jan 1993, p.25]

When the action shifts inside the ropes, which happens often, "Gladiator" pulses with energy, and Marshall shines. Boxing purists may wince at the freewheeling fisticuffs - there is enough kicking, eye-gouging and head-butting going on to make viewers wonder why anyone bothered with a referee - but the electricity in these scenes is undeniable. [6 March 1992, p.31]

There's talent on view in Renegades, even if it's mostly subordinated to formula and marketing imperatives. [02 Jun 1989, p.33]

Believability takes a back seat here, obviously, and the special effects are so over-the-top bloody as to be more comical than scary; unlike In the Earth, a much slicker British horror film opening in theaters this week, Jakob’s Wife proudly embraces its inherent B-ness. But it’s the star who makes this a low-down hoot while rooting it in some tart and deserved observations about the battle of the sexes.

Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.

It's an amiable little low-grade comedy that gets by with goofing on movies and TV shows as John Ritter, a couch potato Faust, signs up for a cable package from hell (it's got 666 channels - the devil's number, get it?) from satanic Jeffrey Jones. [14 Aug 1992, p.46]

While Q & A derails, it's still marked by a love of language and a genuine civic passion that isn't afraid to face ugly facts, and of how many films can that be said? [27 Apr 1990, p.29p]

This handsome remake has distinction, but isn't as wrenching, urgent or keeningly lyrical as that 1939 original. [16 Oct 1992, p.33]

The series’ many diehard fans will still, and should, flock to their beloved Downton and its denizens. But, as a standalone film, the fatigued period drama goes in one era and out the other with little to add.

Taking Care of Business could be a lot worse. It's a swift, if entirely predictable, identity-switch movie that wastes little time on the way to its morality play conclusion. [17 Aug 1990, p.36p]

Old is a fiendish idea only partially realized.

A predictable, semi-shameless, yet not-unsatisfying action drama.

Heart and Souls is a sweet but wispy little comedy of ectoplasm that doesn't give its engaging stars quite enough to do. After a while, you're grateful for the special effects that let the film's quartet of suspended souls fade smoothly in and out while Robert Downey Jr. pretends to let them take turns inhabiting his body. [13 Aug 1993, p.45]

It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]

Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.

Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.

Campion’s best-known films (the remarkable The Piano, 1993; The Portrait of a Lady, 1996) are not just set in the past but summon it up with a rare capacity to make viewers feel a sort of displacement from the present. She does that here, too.

Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.

William Friedkin directs the adaptation of Matt Crowley's off-Broadway play about a group of gay men in Manhattan speaking increasingly frankly as a birthday party wears on. Sufficiently effective that you wonder what Friedkin was thinking with Cruising. [09 Nov 2008, p.N16]

The most remarkable thing about Brendan J. Byrne’s documentary — for anyone who’s followed Bill Bulger’s career it’s shocking, really — is the degree of cooperation Byrne got from the Bulger family for this joint portrayal of the two brothers. It started out as a profile of Bill, Byrne says, but he quickly realized he couldn’t tell the story of the younger brother without also telling the story of the older.