If you've never heard his voice, this is your chance, and you should take it.

The strong personalities of Maria Bello and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who play typical supportive wives, keep scenes from sagging.

A well-intentioned but overlong Czech drama that comes apart completely in the last 20 minutes?

An endearing, well-acted trifle with lovely intentions.

Weitz has done one remarkable thing in "Company" that doesn't strike you until later: He's given us a functional family that overcomes difficulties with patience and effort.

Though this film doesn't have the novelty value of the first or the complex plotting of the second, it boasts the most spectacular single sequence.

You know the feeling you get when you make a meal of two mildly savory appetizers that don't quite go together, and you leave you wishing you'd eaten one hefty entrée? That's Julie & Julia. Half an hour later, I wanted to watch another movie.

Whedon has more on his mind than he did in the last one. The Avengers seem not just contentious toward each other but weary, sick of their brutal responsibilities.

It's wise, funny, honest right up to its last sadly dishonest scene, doesn't mock us more than we deserve and offers attractive women in various stages of undress.

People talk non-stop at lightning speed, often while walking. The action sequences, underpinned by a loud and soppy symphonic score, actually provide a sense of respite, as Gojira methodically levels buildings and patiently releases streams of fire from his crimson throat.

Paul Schrader's movies depict dark nights of the soul, but sometimes you feel like you have to end the dark night with a shower. Auto Focus is such a movie.

It's handsomely shot, acted with fervor and reasonably subtle in delivering its message:

Del Toro gets the ghostly elements right, with red and black flesh-torn spooks wailing warnings to the receptive Edith. But he goes wildly overboard in aiming for atmosphere after the story shifts to the Sharpes’ crumbling English manor.

A gently spellbinding drama that captures the old-fashioned enchantment of Roald Dahl’s book.

A well-intentioned but obvious, often clumsy picture.

The feel-good movie of a feel-blah movie year, with all the positive qualities and one negative trait that this description implies.

To talk more about the movie's layers is to risk giving away too much. I'll say only that this film confirms Nolan's status as the director whose work I look forward to more than any other.

Its sensibility stays true to Gaiman's style: heroic, wryly funny, but bloodthirsty as great fairy tales can often be.

They've interspersed laugh-out-loud segments with dry, repetitive material.

The rest of us can pass this by, unless we're such fans of the actors - Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and Peter Krause - that we'd watch them in anything.

What makes the film watchable all the way through (and it is watchable, though never remarkable) is mostly the stunning scenery and the performance of Hopkins. [26 Sep 1997, p.9E]

There's plenty to admire in the performances and atmosphere, but the writer-director needed someone to pull him up short.

Beyond the philosophizing, Mean Girls is a standard collection of low comic jokes.

By the way, the other thing that keeps Transamerica from being a mainstream movie is its obsession with penises: showing them, talking about them, placing us in bathrooms and trailers when they're in use.

For all the satisfying details in the script, the big picture remains hopelessly and intentionally trite.

The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.

Chaplin's pathos was (at its best) touched with irony. Lane's isn't. [19 Jan 1990, p.68]

If you really must see Miami Vice (and you mustn't), buy a ticket to something better, then slip into "Vice" at the 95-minute mark and watch the last third of the movie. No one involved will profit by your curiosity, and you won't miss a thing of importance.

That dragon represents the best and worst things about the film. He’s terrifying yet slightly droll.

The deliberate editing and quirky cinematography (both done by Cahill) sometimes seem at odds with each other but never get in the way of the story's honesty.

Did we need another Spider-Man this quickly? Debatable. But if you wanted a new interpretation – especially one where story and action stay in the right balance – this is it.

The simple, utterly satisfying Premium Rush delivers just what the title promises.

95 breezy minutes that typify cotton-candy filmmaking.

A typical shallow caper film. Just assume the truth is the exact opposite of what's happening.

Will Ferrell strides through Elf like a crazily cheerful wind-up toy: arms swinging, legs stiff, mouth fixed in an impossibly happy grin, eyes wide with wonder. He's the Christmas gift nobody thought to ask for but everybody will want to play with.

This is strictly a picture for the target audience, though it seems to hit that target regularly.

The filmmakers beautifully balance goofy moments with Gothic darkness.

It's overwrought and overplotted, but it's plenty of fun.

There’s not much new to The Infiltrator – perhaps nothing, except the setting of the climax – but the vintage stuff is satisfying.

Just as I was starting to think of it as a “motiveless psychos terrorize rich family” movie (a la “The Purge”), it gave me good reasons to watch.

The first two-thirds are classic science fiction, technologically plausible and emotionally resonant. It's only when God enters the picture that things slide downhill.

Strip away [Hugo's] sociopolitical rhetoric, and you're left with a simple, heartfelt story. The film directed by Bille August and written by Rafael Yglesias does just that, rendering the plot handsomely. It's far from miserable, but it's not "Miserables," either. [01 May 1998, p.10E]

“Star Wars” movies have been dazzling, infuriating, heartbreaking, silly, witty, convoluted, gripping and overblown. But until Rogue One: A Star Wars story, I don’t think “dull” was the most appropriate adjective.

This isn't a film noir, but it hovers in the shadows of that genre of discontent and disillusionment.

Whitaker’s performance reveals a man who unobtrusively changes white people around him – perhaps without trying or even knowing it – through his demeanor and ability.

Can there be higher praise for a motion picture designed to capture a beloved book with fidelity, thoroughness and affection? Only this: They made it better.

It's the most claustrophobic, airless movie of the year, a menage a quatre among unstable, manipulative, needy people who prey on each other like sharks at a feeding frenzy of the emotions.

Journalists have a saying for someone who neglects or downplays the most important part of a news story: He buried the lead. That's what Paul Haggis does with "In the Valley of Elah," which submerges two important storylines beneath a pointless, unsatisfying whodunit.

Madden has the wisdom to give most of the heavy emotional lifting to Mirren, who continues to shine at the age of 66.

Eisele and Washington lacked faith in their material. So they've made the big debate opponent not USC but Harvard, a more clear-cut epitome of the white world of privilege that has to face the hard truths of racial equality.

Like a palate-cleansing sherbet in place of an entre?. It's mildly flavorful going down, leaves us hungry for something more substantial and fades from memory the moment we've finished it.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

Wan knows how to sustain tension through terror, though he could have abbreviated the flabby middle of the movie.

Writer-director Theodore Witcher fills his debut with jazz-cool atmosphere. He's got a fresh-faced but mature cast: Nia Long, Larenz Tate, Isaiah Washington. But once he's staked out the territory, he falls back into the most conventional kind of storytelling. [14 Mar 1997, p.4E]

At the center of the film lies a moral question, not a literary one: Should Ginsberg abandon the potentially visionary Carr when he turns out to be a liar, an exploiter and an emotional traitor? Should he, in fact, “kill his darling” when Carr commits a heinous act and asks Ginsberg to lie for him?

Both the good and bad remind us that the most special thing about "Skull" is the man wearing the fedora and the rakish grin. He has never worn out his welcome, and this valedictory – it can be nothing else – is a fitting one.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has the technical polish and competent acting of the four-film series, though less intensity. It contains no surprises and ends with an anticlimax I have heard is faithful to the book, though it doesn’t amount to much onscreen.

The movie is the usual kind of film biography of a respected figure from the distant past - honorable, oversimplified, handsome.

The vigorous, unsubtle acting provides consistent pleasure, once you stop expecting it to seem realistic.

Director John Lee Hancock and screenwriters Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith spend about a third of the film exploring Travers’ childhood in Australia, and there the film succeeds.

Most of the actors live their roles, and Fassbender (Rochester in the last "Jane Eyre") is superb as the wolflike, undisciplined assassin.

It’s impossible to envision a sequel with pleasure – this kind of lightning wouldn’t strike twice – but the first one could hardly be improved.

A wicked comedy with just the mildest amount of pathos to season the blend.

The sense of loneliness and disaffection makes its effect. Guédiguian offers no answers, and the hope he supplies is almost surreal.

Defies logic, the laws of physics and almost anyone's willingness to believe in it. But darned if it doesn't also keep us riveted to our seats.

The year's least necessary and most unimaginative remake slogs half-heartedly to its pre-destined conclusion without making a ripple.

Cook has as much depth as a coaster, so it's impossible under any circumstances to imagine Binoche falling in love with him. Her complicated, heartfelt performance is the reason to see the film: When she's around, she pierces the soothing gray nothingness with shafts of sunlight.

Overlong, entertaining, sense-assaulting drama.

The credits say DiNorscio, who died during filming in 2004, never informed on anyone. But is that such a great thing? If you live in a sewer, is it so terrible to be a rat?

Remains gripping until the final 15 minutes, when a series of sudden, unjustified plot twists leave us shaking our heads.

Anyone familiar with the movies of Julio Medem knows where "Sex and Lucia" is going. Or, rather, knows that it's impossible to know.

The film, though seldom sleepy, is often hollow.

One of those movies that sticks to your mind like a briar to wool slacks. It has no revelations, no high drama, no heartbreaking tragedy. What it does have is bone-deep honesty, and that's enough for once.

Brice stops his story just before it becomes redundant – most filmmakers these days can’t say that – and although I didn’t believe the outrageous next-to-last scene, he caps it with a laugh-out-loud joke.

Hanna's a memorable creation, a girl who carries danger with her like a plague.

All performances remain irrelevant in the face of such expensive, explosive combat and destruction, and there the film excels: You will feel blown back into your seat, starting 40 seconds into the story.

Some scenes achieve dramatic greatness and emotions that reach to the heart's core. Almost as many have the tinny ring of a badly counterfeited coin.

Movies can certainly be worse than bad sitcoms, and this is one of them.

It's grim, funny in one sequence about shapeshifters, vivid in moments of violent action, nearly devoid of plot twists and marked by long patches where Harry, Ron and Hermione camp in the woods or by the sea or near a frozen lake and ponder What It All Means.

Anton has a sad, gentle detachment that allows him to turn the other cheek literally through a series of slaps.

Guy Pearce isn’t as physically formidable as Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson in Leone’s classics, but he’s just as determined and dangerous.

A diverting and loosely connected series of episodes about the most bizarre screen family of 2004.

The result owes a little to the 1927 "Metropolis," a little to film noir, a little to early depictions of H.G. Wells' science fiction -- notably the 1936 "Things to Come" -- and a little to lovably far-fetched sci-fi serials.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

You'll depart with memories of a well-crafted study in quiet horror, and with ideas whirling in your head about the nature of evil and what happens to children caught in its grip.

His movies are thrilling and ridiculous in equal measure, and I often laughed with incredulous approval as he wreaked havoc.

The director is strong on setups, and the hunt for the virus is tense. [10 Mar 1995, p.1F]

You'll respect him more as an actor if you see this film – and you should, even if you haven't enjoyed the action movies he's made over two decades.

Though the writing isn't always specific, Williams is. He differentiates between the murderer in "Insomnia," who wants a cop to understand his motives, and Sy, who realizes no one ever could.

I predict Northfork will give you food for reflection or a case of the hives. I stopped scratching 20 minutes into the movie, settled into its lulling rhythm and floated away into the Polish brothers' flaky, austere dreamworld.

Hoffman and Harwood aren't afraid to show us old people who are rude, demanding, unreasonable and foolish, though the final overall mood remains blissful. Hoffman might have more to say as a director, if anyone in Hollywood cares to find out.

It's clumsy revisionism. As storytelling, its simplistic characters and ludicrous situations would embarrass a ninth-grader shooting a short film on a digital phone. Not one of its alleged revelations has the power to surprise.

Heartfelt, if rather repetitive, documentary.

My sentimentality meter never went off, and Smith proved what people have forgotten since his breakthroughs in "Where the Day Takes You" and "Six Degrees of Separation" 13 years ago: He's a serious actor.

The film works best among the beasts. Their training is impeccable, their emotions are palpable, and almost all of their behavior is credible. One "Jaws"-like encounter sends a carnivorous leopard seal after a fleeing canine, and it's as tense as anything I hope to see this spring.

Most of the actors keep an icicle-stiff upper lip except for Winslet, who darts around like a finch with a beak full of sunflower seeds, and Burrows, who exudes a musk of refined sexiness.