A little more zip, and Hero might really have worked. It has all the ingredients for a terrific entertainment, but it lingers over the kinds of details that belong in a different kind of movie.

Trucker sets out on a difficult and tricky path, and doesn't put a foot wrong.

I admired the movie. It is made with quiet competence, and will remind some viewers of the Hitchcock who made “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “Foreign Correspondent.”

Cat People moves back and forth between its mythic and realistic levels, held together primarily by the strength of Kinski's performance and John Heard's obsession. Kinski is something. She never overacts in this movie, never steps wrong, never seems ridiculous; she just steps onscreen and convincingly underplays a leopard. Heard also is good.

The Karate Kid was one of the nice surprises of 1984 -- an exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long time.

Choppy at times and indulging in familiar dog-movie scenarios on a steady basis, “Dog” isn’t going to enter any annual conversations about the best canine films of all time, but Lulu is basically a good girl and Briggs is basically a good guy, and we’re glad they were given the high-concept road trip adventure they deserve.

The Big Chill is a splendid technical exercise. It has all the right moves. It knows all the right words. Its characters have all the right clothes, expressions, fears, lusts and ambitions. But there's no payoff and it doesn't lead anywhere. I thought at first that was a weakness of the movie. There also is the possibility that it's the movie's message.

It seems aimed at people who loved "Pulp Fiction'' and have strong stomachs. Like it or hate it (or both), you have to admire its skill, and the over-the-top virtuosity of Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland as the girl and the wolf.

It confronts the relationship between Fonda and Voight with unusual frankness -- and with emotional tenderness and subtlety that is, if anything, even harder to portray.

Director Showalter (who mined similar territory in “The Big Sick,” one of the best movies of 2017) and screenwriters David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage display a deft touch for blending wry humor with heartfelt drama, and Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge have a natural and comfortable chemistry in a story that hits a lot of familiar notes but contains some creatively clever devices while packing, yes, a whole lot of heart.

Vulgarity is a very tricky thing to handle in a comedy; tone is everything, and the makers of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" have an absolute gift for taking potentially funny situations and turning them into general embarrassment. They're tone-deaf.

Star Maps is not, to be sure, boring. But it is wildly unfocused.

Its hero upstages anything the plot can possibly come up with.

Never comes alive.

Has too much docudrama and not enough soul.

The movie is both interesting and unsatisfying. The Keitel performance is over the top, inviting us to side with Furtwangler simply because his interrogator is so vile.

Sometimes we feel as if the film careens from one colorful event to another without respite, but sometimes it must have seemed to Frida Kahlo as if her life did, too.

It is a brave experiment, based on life and using actors who play themselves, but it buys into the whole false notion that artists are somehow too brilliant to be sober.

This movie is so excruciatingly dumb I felt as if someone had shaved 10 points off my I.Q. by the time I bolted for the exits.

The long-run fallout of the Louis C.K. scandal is the subject of the thought-provoking New York Times documentary “Sorry/Not Sorry” from directors and producers Caroline Suh and Cara Mones, which shines a spotlight on the difficult questions raised when someone’s egregious actions result in them being “canceled.”

Picks and chooses cleverly, skipping blithely past the entire Russian Revolution but lingering on mad monks, green goblins, storms at sea, train wrecks and youthful romance.

Project X is not a great movie because its screenplay doesn't really try for greatness. It's content to be a well-made, intelligent entertainment aimed primarily, I imagine, at bright teenagers. It works on that level.

The Soloist has all the elements of an uplifting drama, except for the uplift.

Perfectly sweet and civilized.

This is a brighter, more engaging film than the original "Madagascar."

As McKay acknowledges in the introduction, Dick Cheney remains an enigma after all these years. I’m not sure Vice sheds any new light on the Cheney story. It places him in a spotlight that continually changes colors and tones but is almost never flattering.

The movie was made with a lot of love and startingly fresh memories of the early 1940s, and reminds us once again that Spacek is a treasure.

While the spectacularly gifted and enormously likable cast has the firepower and charisma to match the testosterone-fueled ensembles of those earlier films, Ocean’s 8 is more of a smooth glide than an exhilarating adventure.

The film's heart is in the right place, and Ferris Bueller is slight, whimsical and sweet.

For a time in her life, a woman's pregnancy is the most important thing about her. That is the subject of Hideaway.

The dialogue in As They Made Us rings authentic and the performances are universally strong, but there’s a dour air to the proceedings, and we wind up thinking Abigail would have been better off if she, too, had left home the moment it was possible and had never looked back.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

Respect is filled with memorable supporting turns, including Audra McDonald as Aretha’s mother and Saycon Sengbloh and Hailey Kilgore as her sisters, who were often in the background in more ways than one — but an old-fashioned show-business biopic such as this rises and falls on the talents of the lead, and it’s hard to imagine anyone in the world doing more justice to the legacy of Aretha Franklin than Jennifer Hudson.

The first-time director is Mateo Gil, known for the screenplays of "Open Your Eyes," "The Sea Inside" and "Agora." Ironic, that the film's weakness is its screenplay.

What is most beguiling about Addams Family Values is the way the relationship between Gomez and Morticia has ripened.

The movie proceeds quickly, seems to know its subject matter, is fascinating in its portrait of the inner politics and structure of the terrorist group, and comes uncomfortably close to reality. But what holds it together is the Cheadle character.

I have no idea if this movie was made stoned. Like its predecessors by Cheech and Chong, it might as well have been.

I expected another mindless surfing movie. Blue Crush is anything but.

A wacky and eccentric heist comedy with many virtues, but it is also a remake of "Big Deal on Madonna Street" (1958), a movie much beloved by me. Some scenes are so close to the original it's kind of uncanny.

Not a successful movie--it's too stilted and pre-programmed to come alive--but in the center of it McDormand occupies a place for her character and makes that place into a brilliant movie of its own.

Any attempt to defend this movie on rational grounds is futile. The whole point is Jackie Chan, he does what he does better than anybody. He's having fun. If we allow ourselves to get in the right frame of mind, so are we.

The film's title is never explained. What does Moore mean? Maybe it's that capitalism means never having to say you're sorry.

It is a great film about greatness, the story of the horse and the no less brave woman who had faith in him.

She's So Lovely does not depict choices most audiences will condone, or even understand, but the film is not boring, and has the dread hypnotic appeal of a slowly developing traffic accident (in which we think there will probably be no fatalities).

It has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you.

For all of von Trier’s attempts to go big and go bold, the two Nymphomaniac films ultimately come across as a self-indulgent marathon run on a treadmill.

Wah-Wah has a sequence, based on old newsreels, in which the flag is lowered and the sun sets on another bit of the empire. Odd how many critics have felt the whole movie should be about this. I don't see why. The story is about people who lived closed lives, and a film about them would necessarily give independence only a supporting role.

Against all odds, the billion-dollar “Fast & Furious” franchise is actually picking up momentum, with “FF6” clocking in as the fastest, funniest and most outlandish chapter yet.

Few actors have played a wider variety of characters, and even fewer have done it without making it seem like a stunt.

Connery labors mightily. There is still the same Bond grin, still the cool humor under fire, still the slight element of satire. But when he puts on his cute little helmet and is strapped into his helicopter, somehow the whole illusion falls apart and what we're left with is a million-dollar playpen in which everything works but nothing does anything.

The new globetrotting, caper-packed romp with Kermit, Miss Piggy and the rest of the lovable team certainly is just as good as, and often an improvement on, the 2011 offering.

The story fluctuates between the uninspired and the just plain weird — and then gets even weirder. It’s too basic and familiar to keep parents and older children consistently entertained, and too trippy and existential for the little ones.

Dripping in fantasy sequences and popping with vibrantly rendered set pieces, this is a monumental ego trip as well as an admirably candid therapy session, and there’s even some amusing, self-deprecating stuff as well.

The movie would have benefitted from a tight rewrite (it is too ambitious in including plot threads it doesn't have time to deal with), but Gibson's strong central performance speeds it along.

Sort of entertaining, but lacks the focus and comic energy of Judge's "Office Space" (1999), and to believe that Suzie would be attracted to the gigolo requires not merely the suspension of disbelief, but its demolition.

The kind of comedy where funny people say funny things in funny situations, not the kind of comedy that whacks you with manic shocks to force an audible Pavlovian response.

Like "House of Sand and Fog" and "Man Push Cart," it helps us to understand that the newcomers among us come from somewhere and are somebody.

Since you have probably not seen "Nine Queens," Criminal will be new to you, and I predict you'll like the remake about as much as I liked the original -- three stars' worth. If, however, you've seen "Nine Queens," you may agree that some journeys, however entertaining, need only be taken once.

As Darabont directs it, it tells a story with beginning, middle, end, vivid characters, humor, outrage and emotional release. Dickensian.

Chick Flick indeed! Guys, take your best buddy to see this movie. Tell him, "It's really cool, dude, even though there aren't any eviscerations."

Fosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man.

A riot of visual invention and weird humor that works on its chosen sub-moronic level, and on several others as well, including some fairly sophisticated ones.

No actor is more aware of his own instruments, and Eastwood demonstrates that in Pale Rider, a film he dominates so completely that only later do we realize how little we really saw of him.

By the time the Incredible Hulk had completed his hulk-on-hulk showdown with the Incredible Blonsky, I had been using my Timex with the illuminated dial way too often.

The Front Runner doesn’t hit us over the head with parallels to today’s political and media world. It doesn’t have to.

This performance, unlike anything Paul Dano has ever done, must have required some courage. It requires an actor to cast aside all conceits of performance, presence, charisma and even timing.

Mr. Jealousy isn't quite successful, but it does provide more evidence of Baumbach's talent.

Slice is schlock, but that’s kind of the point. It doesn’t have a tenth of the production values of, say, last week’s violent thriller “Peppermint” (and no doubt it was made for even less than a tenth of that film’s budget). But it has originality, and originality goes a long way.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips uses its budget quietly, with good taste, and succeeds in being a big movie without being a gross one. I think I enjoyed it about as much as any road show since Funny Girl.

I like the way the personalities are allowed to upstage the plot in Fighting, a routine three-act fight story that creates uncommonly interesting characters.

Adult World does have some smart, funny and wincingly painful things to say about the desire to make art vs. the desire to be famous for it.

Nearly every step of the way, Stargirl finds just the right notes to find the right side of the line between precious and lovely, between arbitrary and plausible, between serendipitous and condescendingly magical.

Luckily, there's enough of the domestic comedy to make the movie work despite its crasser instincts. One of the big surprises in the movie is Selleck's wonderful performance as the bachelor architect. After playing action heroes on TV and in the movies, he now reveals himself to be a light comedian in the Cary Grant tradition - a big, handsome guy with tenderness and vulnerability

While it’s great to see a Latino hero from the DC Universe get center stage in the form of Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle, and the dynamic among the loving and fiercely protective extended Reyes family is the highlight of the film, this is a mostly by-the-numbers origin story with underwhelming VFX, a disappointingly cartoonish villain and a final battle sequence and epilogue that follow the pattern of a dozen or more previous superhero origin stories.

Thanks in large part to Munn’s elegant, authentic, grounded and moving performance, we’re rooting hard for Violet to find some inner peace.

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

In this film, Metallica elevates headbanging to matters of the head that will consume the viewer long after the fade to black.

The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.

A movie like this falls outside ordinary critical language. Is it good or bad? Is there too much melodrama? I don't have any idea. It triggered too many thoughts of my own for me to have much attention left over for footnotes.

Most movies remain at the top level of action: They are about what happens. A few consider the meaning of what happened, and even fewer deal with the fact that we have a choice, some of the time, about what happens and what we do about it.

This is not a particularly memorable film, but Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves.

Tolkin gives us one richly detailed set piece after another, involving luncheons, openings, massages, telephone tag, psychic consultations, sex, heartfelt conversation, and pagan rituals led by a bald-headed woman who sees what others cannot see.

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world's leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

Everything comes down to an epic battle between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and that's when my attention began to wander, and the movie lost a potential fourth star.

Any movie featuring cameos ranging from Lou Reed to Mikhail Gorbachev has its heart in the right place. That heart is what sustains it; though long and uneven, occasionally sentimental and portentous in its message, Faraway, So Close comes close enough to greatness. [23 Dec 1993, p.29]

This Apple TV+ original film, directed by Jon S. Baird, doesn’t attempt to replicate the entertainingly addictive block-stacking puzzle game because I don’t know how you’d make a movie out of that; it’s a fictionalized and creatively stylized origins story that plays like a Cold War thriller version of “The Social Network.”

The movie is ultimately not quite successful; when it was over I felt there was some additional payoff or explanation still due. Perhaps the arbitrary, unfinished nature of the story is part of its purpose. But I felt that characters this interesting should not be allowed to remain complete ciphers. Still, in individual moments, The Comfort of Strangers has an eerie, atmospheric charm.

With a combination of bone-dry wit and blood-drenched horror, writer-director Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw skewers some of the most pretentious denizens of the art world you’d ever want NOT to meet — and does so with precision and flair and pitch-black humor.

Dead Snow, as you may have gathered, is a comedy, but played absolutely seriously by sincere, earnest young actors.

Eisenberg is a fine writer and shows clear promise as a visual storyteller, but it becomes a chore to spend even an 88-minute movie with his increasingly off-putting characters. We know they’re not supposed to be likable, but they should be more interesting.

Lars von Trier exhibits the imagination of an artist and the pedantry of a crank in Dogville, a film that works as a demonstration of how a good idea can go wrong.

Of all the ridiculous and overblown albeit entertainingly grisly “Scream” finales, this might be the most outlandish and spectacularly brutal ending of all.

This is a brave, layered film that challenges the wisdom of victory at any price. Both of its central characters would slip easily into conventional plot formulas, but Bahrani looks deeply into their souls and finds so much more.

The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up.

Damon’s everyman workhorse is tragically sympathetic, plodding ahead against all odds. Copley is brilliant as the sadistic villain. Foster is … well, you gotta see it to believe it. In the meantime, you’ll be treated to one of the most entertaining action films of the year.

It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns and worms. Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.

This is a fresh and cheerful movie with a goofy sense of humor and a good ear for how teenagers talk.

The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness.