Wickedly effective thriller.

Learning of this story, I thought, aw, come on, give me a break. But it turns out the story is not only based on fact, but the actual dolphin involved, named Winter, stars in the movie as herself. Her new tail functions admirably.

Essentially silliness crossed with science fiction. The actors make it fun to watch.

Yes, it feels as if we’ve seen this movie before — but thanks to the suitably gritty and grainy, New England-set direction by Hans Petter Moland, the still-resonant star power of Neeson and a terrific supporting cast, “Absolution” delivers a punch with a sting all its own.

You might think Tom Hanks is miscast as the lovable sinner. Dennis Quaid, maybe, or Woody Harrelson. But Hanks brings something unique to the role.

The four main players are all excellent, with Amber Midthunder delivering particularly outstanding work that shows she is a young actor capable of great things.

The screenplay is dense with crackling dialogue, and the performances are uniformly excellent, with Shea Whigham leading the way in a badass anti-hero performance.

"Brigsby” wins the day thanks in large part to the sharp and original screenplay, and the uniformly fine work from one of the more interesting casts of the year.

What Felicity Huffman brings to Bree is the newness of a Jane Austen heroine. She has been waiting a long time to be an ingenue, and what an irony that she must begin as a mother.

This is a simple film, but a special one.

Oshima, directing his first film in 14 years, has found an actor with the physical attributes to play the character and seems content to leave it at that; his camera regards Sozaburo as an object of beauty but hardly seems to engage him.

An Almodovar film is always an exercise in style, but High Heels also generates narrative energy and mystery, and provides what was, for me, a genuine surprise at the end.

Dumplin’ sometimes takes the easy road.... But there’s so much more to enjoy, from the nuanced work by Jennifer Aniston that ensures Rosie’s never a caricature of a pageant mom; to the warm and natural best-buddy chemistry between Danielle MacDonald and Odeya Rush; to that instant classic of a soundtrack courtesy of Ms. Parton, with a little help from her friends.

A powerful, brutal film containing a definitive Charles Bronson performance.

After it is over, you will want to go back and think things through again, and I can help you by suggesting there is one, and only one, interpretation that resolves all of the difficulties, but if I told you, you would have to kill me.

I should have brought a big yellow legal pad to the screening, so I could take detailed notes just to keep the time-lines straight. And yet the movie is fun, mostly because it's so screwy.

More often than not, the dialogue turns into quotable speechifying and the overwrought score pounds the points home in decidedly unsubtle fashion, but thanks to the performances of an outstanding ensemble led by Colman Domingo’s electric and moving work in the title role, this is a valuable portrait of a man who hasn’t exactly been forgotten to history but is hardly a household name. (He should be.)

Not one of the great dog movies, but it's a good one, abandoning wall-to-wall cuteness for a drama about a homeless puppy.

I admire The Rite because while it delivers what I suppose should be called horror, it is atmospheric, its cinematography is eerie and evocative, and the actors enrich it.

One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass' screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this.

The 24th is an important reminder of a dark chapter in American history.

Strong performances, particularly by Glenn as the hard-bitten climber with a private agenda, Vertical Limit delivers.

Payne is played in the movie by Damon Wayans, in the best work he's done since the inspired "In Living Color" TV series.

A subtle but unmistakable aura of jolliness sneaks from the screen.

Yes, Letterman is a big U2 guy (he once had the band on for an entire week’s worth of shows) — but this is one odd albeit sometimes charming duck of a documentary.

This story is unthinkable in a Hollywood movie, but there is something about the matter-of-fact way Saeko explains her problem, and the surprised but not stunned way that Yosuke hears her, that takes the edge off.

All of the performances are pitched correctly. Nobody pushes too hard. Nobody underlines anything. Perhaps calmed by Van Sant, the characters seem peaceful, not troubled (as they should be).

An energetic and eccentric animated cartoon.

While there’s a whole lot of fiction in this based-on-real-events tale, the essence of truth rings through.

I am not one of you. But I have enough of you in me to pass along the word. Far out.

There is much cleverness and ingenuity in Payback, but Mel Gibson is the key. The movie wouldn't work with an actor who was heavy on his feet, or was too sincere about the material.

The Goonies, like Gremlins, shows that Spielberg and his directors are absolute masters of how to excite and involve an audience. "E.T." was more like "Close Encounters"; it didn't simply want us to feel, but also to wonder, and to dream.

This is also one dark and wickedly funny comedy.

Surely few actors have faces that project sorrow more completely than Bardem.

This story is told by writer-director Im Sang-soo with cool, elegant cinematography and sinuous visual movements. The dominant mood is gothic, with the persistent sadomasochistic undertones that seem inescapable in so much Korean cinema.

The result is a movie character who seems half real, half animated.

Nine to Five is a good-hearted, simple-minded comedy that will win a place in film history, I suspect, primarily because it contains the movie debut of Dolly Parton. She is, on the basis of this one film, a natural-born movie star, a performer who holds our attention so easily that it's hard to believe it's her first film.

Inferno delivers as an engaging thriller that I frankly enjoyed far more than Howard’s last Brown outing.

One of the pleasures is watching the gears mesh. The screenplay has been written by Corneau and Nathalie Carter with meticulous attention to detail. Like classic mystery authors, they play fair, so that the surprises at the end are consistent with what we've seen - although we didn't realize it at the time.

Infused with a stylish and shadowy style courtesy of director Rob Savage (“Host,” “Dashcam”), with a sharp screenplay by Scott Beck, Bryan Woods and Mark Heyman, The Boogeyman is a familiar but still effectively unsettling variation on the time-honored story of the terrifying entity who’s in the closet or under the bed or maybe just down the hall, waiting to pounce on you and your loved ones, even as everyone around thinks you’re nutso for insisting there’s a Boogeyman living rent-free in your house.

One of those films where you don't know whether to laugh or cringe, and find yourself doing both. It's a challenge: How do we respond to this loaded material?

It’s not shocking or groundbreaking or attention-getting; it’s just consistently good at telling the story of a handful of characters who feel fully lived in and utterly real.

We forgive Elephant its conceits because it’s such a joy to observe the rituals of these incredible, amazing creatures.

Compellingly watchable.

Mistress of Evil is an entertaining thrill ride with a sly sense of humor and some admirable albeit obvious political and social commentary, with messages along the lines of, “It doesn’t matter where you come from, it matters who you love.”

The film is confoundingly watchable.

To Annette Bening’s credit, she finds just the right notes to illustrate Grace’s capacity for love, as well as her special gift for never letting up and driving you a little bit crazy.

This formula is fraught with pitfalls, but the characters and the actors redeem it with a surprising emotional impact.

Confounds all convention and denies all expected pleasures, providing instead the delight of watching Herzog feed the police hostage formula into the Mixmaster of his imagination.

Director Jim Mickle, who co-wrote the film with his star Nick Damici, has crafted a good-looking, well-played and atmospheric apocalyptic vision.

I was entertained, and yet I felt a little empty-handed at the end, as if an enormous effort had been spent on making these dinosaurs seem real, and then an even greater effort was spent on undermining the illusion.

Effective without being overwhelming.

It has that unwound Roddy Doyle humor; the laughs don't hit you over the head, but tickle you behind the knee.

With Rebel in the Rye, we get a solid, well-acted and basically standard biopic about the man who created Holden Caulfield, largely in his own image.

Because they all seem to be people first and genders second, they see the humor in their bewildering situation as quickly as anyone, and their cheerful ability to rise to a series of implausible occasions makes Victor/Victoria not only a funny movie, but, unexpectedly, a warm and friendly one.

One of the best things about Stay Hungry is that we have almost no idea where it's going; it's as free-form as Nashville and Rafelson is cheerfully willing to pause here and there for set pieces.

So many animated films are multi-layered efforts brimming with jokes only the adults will catch, but Spirit Untamed is pure and unbridled family fun, pardon the pun.

Some people will find it emotionally manipulative. Some people like to be emotionally manipulated. I do, when it's done well.

Motel Hell is a welcome change-of-pace; it's to "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" as "Airplane!" is to "Airport." It has some great moments.

An impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation. Its fault is that of the dinner guest who tells you something fascinating, and then tells you again, and then a third time. At 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome.

The movie pays off in a kind of emotional complexity rarely seen in crime movies.

Begley and Stevens add tone to the cast, and Hingle comes over like an especially earnest Karl Malden. The moral of the story is vaguely against capital punishment, and there's a lot of that thin, windblown guitar twanging for you thin, wind-blown guitar twanging fans.

Foster Boy certainly follows the legal thriller blueprint, sometimes to credulity-stretching limits — but this is a solid and important story about systematic abuse within the foster care system, featuring an outstanding cast including a half-dozen seasoned veterans who know how to sell even the most melodramatic moments.

It works gloriously as space opera.

Though the original is superior, this glossy entertainment is far more popular with audiences. [25 Dec 1998, p.13]

They’re all terrific, but Emma Stone in particular kills with a sharply honed, funny and endearing performance as the battle-tested and cynical Wichita, who is fearless when it comes to taking on zombies, but terrified when it comes to fully committing to a human connection.

This is the kind of movie that baffles Hollywood, because it isn't made from any known formula and doesn't follow the rules.

Suspension of disbelief, always necessary in a thriller, is required here in wholesale quantities. But in a movie like Out of Time I'm not looking for realism, I'm looking for a sense of style brought to genre material.

The Stoning of Soraya M.”has such a powerful stoning sequence that I recommend it if only for its brutal ideological message. That the pitiful death of Soraya is followed by a false Hollywood upbeat ending involving tape recordings and silliness about a car that won't start is simply shameful. Nowrasteh, born in Colorado, attended the USC Film School. Is that what they teach there?

With Solomon & Gaenor, it is hard to overlook the folly of the characters. Does it count as a tragedy when the characters get more or less what they were asking for?

The movie doesn't bludgeon us with gags. It proceeds with a certain comic relentlessness from setup to payoff, and its deliberation is part of the fun.

A well-crafted entertainment containing enough ideas to qualify it as science fiction and not just as a futurist thriller.

Hancock is a lot of fun, if perhaps a little top-heavy with stuff being destroyed. Smith makes the character more subtle than he has to be, more filled with self-doubt, more willing to learn.

With a movie like this, either you’ll tap out after 15 minutes or you’ll settle in for an evening of popcorn and beverage-of-your choice escapism.

Who would have guessed such a funny movie as Zombieland could be made around zombies? No thanks to the zombies.

In Flag Day, Sean Penn directs himself for the first time and has cast Dylan Penn, his daughter with Robin Wright, as the lead — and the two are absolutely mesmerizing together, beautifully capturing the enormously complicated dynamic between a con man of a father who rolls out of bed with a fresh set of lies ready to go every morning, and an emotionally broken and bruised daughter who knows her dad is a walking bundle of disappointment but wants to believe that this time — this one time — he really has changed.

I would not have missed seeing this film, and I recommend it for its richness of imagery. But at 127 minutes, which seems a reasonable length, it plays long.

Christmas With the Campbells is like a weirdly creative holiday drink; you wouldn’t expect those ingredients to work together, but somehow, they do.

The whole movie, in fact, is smarter than most contemporary thrillers. It gives us credit for being able to figure things out, and it contains characters who are devilishly intelligent. Almost smart enough, we think for a while, to really pull this thing off.

The music probably sounds fine on a CD. Certainly it is well-rehearsed. But the overall sense of the film is of good riddance to a bad time.

It's a close call here. I guess I recommend the movie because the dramatic scenes are worth it. But if some studio executive came along and made Stone cut his movie down to two hours, I have the strangest feeling it wouldn't lose much of substance and might even play better.

Wildcat is an inventive and haunting mood piece with a number of memorable scenes.

[This] timely documentary is less persuasive about translating logic into political and economic reality.

It's about change, acceptance and love, and it rounds those three bases very nicely, even if it never quite gets to home.

Gets better the more attention you pay. To say "nothing happens" is to be blind to everyday life, during which we wage titanic struggles with our programming.

Of Amanda Bynes let us say that she is sunny and plucky and somehow finds a way to play her impossible role without clearing her throat more than six or eight times.

The movie's schizophrenia keeps it from greatness (this film has no firm idea of what it is about), but doesn't make it bad. It is, in fact, sort of fascinating: a film in the act of becoming, a field trial, an experiment in which a dreamy poet meditates on stark reality.

It’s filled with so many theatrical flourishes and fantastical touches, one can envision this material as a work for the stage, or even an animated film.

Almost nothing that takes place in the last 20 minutes of this movie could ever transpire in anything resembling the known universe. By then, you’ll have long since either checked out or decided to strap on the popcorn bag, put reality on hold and just go with it.

In a prison filled with vivid, Dickensian characters, several stand out. There is, for example, the unlikely couple of Lady Di (Rodrigo Santoro), tall and muscular, and No Way (Gero Camilo), a stunted little man. They are the great loves of each other's lives.

A satire with the reckless courage to take on both sides in the abortion debate.

I enjoyed this movie on its own dumb level.

My guess is that the average firefighter, like the average American moviegoer, might sort of enjoy the movie, which is a skillfully made example of your typical Schwarzenegger action film.

Riedelsheimer, earlier made "Rivers and Tides" (2002), about another artist from Scotland, Andy Goldsworthy, whose art involves materials found in nature...Evelyn Glennie and Andy Goldsworthy have in common a profound sensitivity to their environments.

Separate Lies reminded me of Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors"... seemingly about the portioning of blame. It is actually about the burden of guilt, which some can carry so easily while for others, it is intolerable.

Perhaps the whole business is too cerebral and circumspect to stir up emotional involvement, or perhaps there’s a tinge of wine snobbery that has a slightly distancing effect. Then again, maybe it’s wrong to expect much in the way of excitement from a quiet art best suited to the sedate setting of a fine restaurant.

The movie feels dark, clammy and exhilarating -- it's like belonging to a secret club where you can have a lot of fun but might get into trouble.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who has consistently delivered good work in countless genres on TV and in the movies, delivers one of her most memorable performances as the title character, who is smart and cool and infuriating and sympathetic and odious and entertaining and so much more.