It’s a solid, entertaining, well-paced sequel featuring terrific voice work, a clever script and some ingenious action sequences. It just doesn’t quite reach the soaring heights of inspirational storytelling and elevated humor of the original.

It is just plain talky and boring. You know there's something wrong with a movie when the last third feels like the last half.

The movie is, indeed, perhaps the most believable that Herzog has made. For a director who gravitates toward the extremes of human behavior, this film involves extreme behavior, yes, but behavior forced by the circumstances.

No Way Out is a superior example of the genre, a film in which a simple situation grows more and more complex until it turns into a nightmare not only for the hero but also for everyone associated with him. At the same time, it respects the audience's intelligence, gives us a great deal of information, trusts us to put it together and makes the intellectual analysis of the situation one of the movie's great pleasures.

Whether the protest movement hastened the end of the Vietnam War is hard to say, but it is likely that Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for re-election was influenced by the climate it helped to create.

Sleeper establishes Woody Allen as the best comic director and actor in America, a distinction that would mean more if there were more comedies being made.

This is a portrait of tunnel vision. Jiro exists to make sushi. Sushi exists to be made by Jiro.

Burden of Dreams gives us an extraordinary portrait of Herzog trapped in the middle of one of his wildest dreams.

This is a tense, nerve-wracking thriller of the mind, with first-rate performances by Bateman, Hall and Edgerton — a tightly spun thriller with a wicked sense of humor and a wonderfully warped take on long-range karma.

Tatum O’Neal creates a character out of thin air, makes us watch her every moment and literally makes the movie work.

The violence in this movie is gruesome (a scene involving the disposal of bodies is particularly graphic). But the movie has many human qualities and contains what will be remembered as one of Pacino's finest scenes.

The end of the film understandably lays on the emotion a little heavily, but until then Courage Under Fire has been a fascinating emotional and logistical puzzle--almost a courtroom movie, with the desert as the courtroom.

It seems to me that Campbell has a good case here--good enough, anyway, to convince the judges on the African court.

The filmmakers behind Paddington successfully bring the lovable bear into the future and strike a balance between honoring the spirit of the original books and updating the story for today’s young audiences. This is a charming film whose underlying message of tolerance and acceptance strikes a palpable chord in today’s world — both for children and adults.

Though the subject matter is intense and shocking, the intuitively sensitive and subtle Polley teams with a brilliant ensemble cast to tell the story with grace and empathy and even some much-needed doses of earned humor. It’s a film you won’t soon forget.

Mississippi Grind is the cinematic equivalent of the unassuming, quiet player at the poker table who allows you to believe you have him pegged — and that’s when he springs the trap on you and shows you something you never saw coming.

[Coppola] has the courage to play it in a minor key.

What I will remember is the photography, and the bliss (just this side of madness) with which the Jeff Daniels character invents his foolhardy schemes.

Has the courage to work without a net, aware that when you're a teenager, your life is not a story so much as a million possible stories.

Pollock is confident, insightful work--one of the year's best films.

In the world of this film, conventional piety is overturned and we see into the soul of a human monster.

It is pitch-perfect, telling the story through the enthusiastic and single-minded vision of its hero Ralphie, and finding in young Peter Billingsley a sly combination of innocence and calculation.

There are many scholars and critics here, most of them useful and pleasant, who obviously love him. Most remarkably, there is his granddaughter, Bel Kaufman, still looking terrific at 100, who had writing in her blood and wrote "Up the Down Staircase."

If everyone behaved the way the characters in Wild Tales behave, civilization would crumble. But the real take-away lesson here is how easy it might be for any of us, swept up in a moment of bloodlust, to consider pure raging hostility a fair trade.

Directed in capable, straightforward fashion by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, and featuring voice-over narration from the artist herself, The Sound of My Voice is like a well-sourced and thorough video Wikipedia entry about the life and times of the now 73-year-old Ronstadt.

There were moments in Stand and Deliver that moved me very deeply and other moments so artificial and contrived that I wanted to edit them out, right then and there. The result is a film that makes a brave, bold statement about an unexpected subject, but that lacks the full emotional power it really should have.

Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick turn in layered, nuanced performances, while the male actors playing varying degrees of scumbag are suitably and effectively nauseating and intimidating. The Royal Hotel is a little like the Hotel California in that you can check out any time you’d like, but on some level, you can never really leave.

Kramer vs. Kramer is a movie of good performances, and it had to be, because the performances can't rest on conventional melodrama.

There's not a scene here where Badham doesn't seem to know what he's doing, weaving a complex web of computerese, personalities and puzzles; the movie absorbs us on emotional and intellectual levels at the same time. And the ending, a moment of blinding and yet utterly elementary insight, is wonderful.

Funny, in that peculiar British way where jokes are told sideways, with the obvious point and then the delayed zinger.

There are two basic weaknesses. One is that the boy supplies the point of view, and yet the story is not about him, so instead of identifying with him, we are simply frustrated in our wish to see more than he can see. The other problem is that Gong Li's character is thoroughly unlikable.

Basically the movie is a bubble-headed series of teenage crises and crushes, alternating with historically accurate choreography of such forgotten dances as the Madison and the Roach.

Red Riding Trilogy is an immersive experience like "The Best of Youth," "Brideshead Revisited" or "Nicholas Nickleby."

It’s a brilliant character study, a devilishly confounding murder mystery, a legitimately haunting psychological thriller, a hell of a ghost story — and one of the most memorable viewing experiences I’ve had in the last few years.

Eminem survives the X-ray truth-telling of the movie camera, which is so good at spotting phonies. He is on the level.

The director's key achievement is creating a convincing sense of daily life in the household and neighborhood. This is not a narrow drama that focuses on a few themes; it paints a whole style of life, the good times with the bad.

This movie is the work of a man who knows how to direct a thriller. Smooth, calm, confident, it builds suspense instead of depending on shock and action.

Thanks to director Jon Favreau’s visionary guidance and some of the most impressive blends of live-action and CGI we’ve yet seen, The Jungle Book is a beautifully rendered, visually arresting take on Rudyard Kipling’s oft-filmed tales.

[Kirby Dick's] new documentary enrages, yet makes its case in an even-tempered manner.

If While We’re Young hadn’t gone quite so broad at the finish line, it would be a contender for my favorite movie of the still-young year.

The documentary shows what a tight-knit group the Chicks are.

Director and co-writer Clint Bentley’s sun-dappled, beautifully photographed, rough-and-tumble backstretch drama “Jockey” gets the rollercoaster life and often tough times of the jockey and the horse racing world just right.

The screenplay by David Mamet is a wonder of good dialogue, strongly seen characters and a structure that pays off in the big courtroom scene - as the genre requires.

Thanks to the superb screenplay by Craig Borten and Melisa Wallack and the brilliant, brave performances by the cast, Dallas Buyers Club gets just about everything right, save for a few over-the-top scenes that hammer home points that have already been made.

Win It All is just the latest stellar collaboration between Swanberg and Johnson.... This is their most conventional film in terms of story arc, but it still has a nifty, indie-without-trying-to-be-hipster feel.

Firth plays George superbly, as a man who prepares a face to meet the faces that he meets.

Many of the scenes in this movie are almost formula, despite the energy of Scorsese's direction and the good performances. They come in the same places we would expect them to come in a movie by anybody else, and they contain the same events.

The characters aren’t consistent, and Cliff eventually becomes so unbelievable that we just stop caring. The movie’s ending is an exercise in plot; its beginning and its music deserve better than that.

This is a writer's picture, no less than a visual experience that approaches its subject as tactfully as the messengers do. No fancy camerawork. It happens, we absorb it.

Maybe the movie has too much coherence, and the plot is too predictable; that's a weakness of films based on well-made Broadway plays. Still, that's hardly a serious complaint about something as funny as Play It Again, Sam.

Watching the movie, I was reminded of the documentary "Crumb"...There is a line that sometimes runs between genius and madness, sometimes encircles them.

It contains risk, violence, a little romance, even fleeting moments of humor, but most of all, it sees what danger and heartbreak are involved. It is riveting from start to finish.

Children of Heaven is very nearly a perfect movie for children, and of course that means adults will like it, too.

A contagious enthusiasm runs through the heart of Jon Angio’s Revenge of the Mekons, a documentary that celebrates and explores the evolving ethos of the seminal British punk band The Mekons while also proving that some of rock’s most interesting stories come not from success but survival.

Though set in a real place and occurring within a historically accurate framework, The Nightingale often feels like a journey through Hell itself. It’s that punishing. That bleak. That horrific. That haunting. It’s also a powerful, gripping, masterfully filmed tale.

What is remarkable is that this film is based on a true story, and filmed on the actual locations. These are hard, violent men, risking their lives to save an animal species.

At times Grandma overdoes it with the stand-alone scenes in which crusty ol’ Elle causes a scene or sticks it to some jerk. It’s a little too neat. Mostly, though, Weitz’s screenplay strikes sharp note after sharp note.

Everything we witness in this film is literally seen through the point of view of a spectral presence, but it’s the machinations of a deeply dysfunctional nuclear family that makes it all so intriguing.

The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking, and Mad Max 2 is a movie like no other.

I, Tonya is kitschy and smart and funny and insightful, and sometimes sobering.

There is a jolting surprise in discovering that this film has free will, and can end as it wants, and that its director can make her point, however brutally.

Not an easy film and is for those few moviegoers who approach a serious movie almost in the attitude of prayer.

Nunez has a gift for finding the essence, the soul, of his actors.

Both impressive and disappointing. From a technical and craft point of view it is first-rate; from its standing in the canon of the two directors, it is minor.

Body Heat is good enough to make film noir play like we hadn't seen it before.

It was produced, written and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also wrote American Graffiti, and it has the same sharp memory for those specific moments when young people suspect they are doing certain things for the last times in their lives. So it is bittersweet, of course -- bittersweet, that indispensable street you travel through adolescence on.

Maestro is sure to garner multiple Oscar nominations, and deservedly so.

There are a couple of moments in Jerry Maguire when you want to hug yourself with delight. Both of those moments involve the actress Renee Zellweger, whose lovability is one of the key elements in a movie that starts out looking cynical and quickly becomes a heartwarmer.

A collision at the intersection of farce and tragedy--the apocalypse as a joke on us.

Relic is the feel-dread movie of the year.

Ruby in Paradise is a breathtaking movie about a young woman who opens the book of her life to a fresh page, and begins to write.

It’s a shattering, thunderous wake-up alarm, a call to lay down arms, a gutsy social satire and a highly stylized work of fiction that sometimes feels as accurate and sobering as the crime reporting you see on the front page of this newspaper.

This is a pure comfort-viewing experience, filled with authentic characters who talk the way real people talk, even when the situations stretch credulity.

It's also interesting to see how little screen time the final disco competition really has, considering how large it looms in our memories.

Though the film is fitted with a basic, teen-rebel plot, its true substance comes from Mark's commentary. His observations are generally interesting and witty, and they almost always have the ring of truth. [22 Aug 1990, p.37]

It’s the kind of film that grabs you from the opening sequences and holds you in its grimy grip all the way through the closing credits, when the s- - - is still hitting the fan.

Jarecki's film makes a shattering case against the War on Drugs.

It's a movie about characters, primarily. It cares more about getting inside these people than it does about solving its crime.

Hicks may devote too much time on hospital errands and bedside moments as Terry’s health declines. But he succeeds at honoring the career of one man who is helping another’s.

Vinterberg has created a modern horror story about a man’s descent into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

The Boss is a poet with an axe, and sometimes an axe to grind — but whether he’s lamenting a tragedy or embracing the best of life, his works seem singularly American, through and through.

In the way it combines sports with human nature, it reminded me of another wonderful Indiana sports movie, "Breaking Away." It's a movie that is all heart.

A Touch of Sin is humanist critique of the country’s turn to capitalism.

The 1971 version of The Beguiled was blunt and overheated and a little bit nuts. The 2017 edition is more sophisticated and nuanced — but it’s still a little bit nuts.

If you see only one martial arts Western this year (and there is probably an excellent chance of that), this is the one.

Carnal Knowledge is clearly Mike Nichols' best film. It sets out to tell us certain things about these few characters and their sexual crucifixions, and it succeeds.

Director Steven Frears deserves special mention. A lesser filmmaker could so easily have turned this project into mushy, sentimental junk. The tear-jerking moments here are heartfelt and real. It’s the kind of filmmaking we see too little of today.

All of this is just plain enjoyable. I liked it, but please don't make me say it's deeply moving or redemptive and uplifting. It's a genre piece for character actors is what it is, and that's an honorable thing for it to be.

It is an angry, radical movie about the vise that traps workers between big industry and big labor. It's also an enormously entertaining movie; it earns its comparison with On the Waterfront. And it's an extraordinary directing debut for Paul Schrader, whose credits include Taxi Driver and Rolling Thunder.

Director Michael Barnett’s “Changing the Game” is an expertly crafted, empathetic, journalistically sound documentary following three strong, bright, likable and admirably accessible and forthcoming transgender teen athletes.

In an era when hundreds of lives are casually destroyed in action movies, here is an entire film in which one life is honored, and one death is avenged.

Not only does The Best Intentions work, it works so well that its emotions are hard to shake off. Here's an epic that pulls no punches in depicting the crushing, unresolvable conflict that frequently defines marriage more than hugs and kisses. Here's that rare soap opera with more hard lather than soft suds. [14 Aug 1992, p.42]

Arriving in theaters almost exactly 50 years since the Detroit riots of late July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit is a searing, pulse-pounding, shocking and deeply effective dramatic interpretation of events in and around the Algiers Motel.

Katie Dellamaggiore's inspiring documentary covers two years in the history of the school chess team, during which one team member, Rochelle Ballantyn, approaches her dream of becoming the first female African-American grandmaster in U.S history.

For all its moodiness and melancholy, Logan is also a rip-roaring action film — and it’s wickedly funny at times as well.

Some cases should never come to trial, because no verdict would be adequate. You are likely to be discussing this film long into the night.

The best elements of Water involve the young girl and the experiences seen through her eyes. I would have been content if the entire film had been her story.

A startling documentary.