Freaky Friday version 2003 is a shinier, snappier animal, partly because young girls now dress like Avril Lavigne, and partly because Jamie Lee Curtis has her best role in years and knows it.

Would it be rude to suggest that your time might be better spent with your own children?

Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.

It's a heart-warmer, a well-meaning movie that sets out to wring a modern message (and preferably some tears) from a famous but largely forgotten moment in history.

The Krays is one of the artiest, eeriest gangster movies ever made. [15 Sep 1990, p.14p]

The idea behind Eugene Jarecki’s nonfiction film The King — you can’t really call it a documentary — is crazy-good inspired.

Together Together sounds like a really bad idea on paper, and for the first half-hour or so, it’s a really bad idea on screen. Yet a funny thing happens to this surrogate-pregnancy romantic comedy (I told you it was a bad idea) as it bumps along: It develops curious and unexpected pockets of feeling.

The good news is that the movie advertises Dolan's delirious visual talent.

Brisk and deeply engrossing.

Works purely as a series of complex snapshots of the conflict in Iraq.

The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.

As easy as this movie is to watch, it's artificially flavored. "Golden Flower" runs on crocodile tears and corn-syrup blood.

The whole thing's weightless: An upscale date-movie bonbon that keeps yielding pungent aftertastes.

Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice is full of crazy ideas, but its most daring leap occurs when Grabinski’s screenplay finds room for an investigation into the feelings of its characters. The film takes the time for everyone to get personal and emotional gripes off their chests, and does so in such earnest fashion that it balances out the absurdity.

This pop-up book of a film is an ideal arrangement between director and star.

Touches smartly and wistfully on a number of themes, not least the notion that the marginal members of society - the ones who get spit out on the sidewalk with no idea of how it happened - might benefit from a helping hand and a friendly kick in the pants.

The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.

Sings in the key of life.

It's a powerful depth charge of a film about reinvented family values. In Denis's hands, this urgent, loving brother and sister act is lyrical, exhilarating, flecked with mystery. [24 Oct 1997, p.C6]

Though it has a few things to say about class — and how even the most downtrodden are entitled to hopes, dreams, passions, and solidarity — Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris never devolves into a preachy treatise. Instead, it’s a soothing tonic, a nice little escape from the troubles of the world. Sure, its plot hinges on a materialistic desire, but capitalism has seldom felt this comforting.

The Syrian Bride could be one of those big, teeming matrimony comedies like "Monsoon Wedding" or "Father of the Bride" but for the barbed wire running right down the middle of the aisle.

What Meet the Patels could use is a little more meat.

As a consideration of faith and propriety, the movie never managed to boil my blood or break my heart.

Lassgård won’t let you off easy: A scene in which Ove weeps hopelessly before the magnitude of his loneliness will bring tears to the eyes of anyone who has suffered a loss. His Ove is a man indeed.

Rebuilding Paradise is well worth seeing, but know that Howard’s taste for the upbeat keeps getting drowned out by a dire and dissonant doomsday drum.

An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]

This saga, for all its twists and turns, comes to a relatively neat end. Those living in the real world aren’t so lucky. In the meantime, Zoabi seems to say, we can at least laugh about it.

Combining as it does great admiration with an acknowledgment of flaws, “Sidney” is like Ethan Hawke’s recent HBO Max documentary about Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, “The Last Movie Stars.”