This is one of my favorite movies of 2018.

If you've seen “The Karate Kid” (1984), the memories will come back during this 2010 remake. That's a compliment.

Writer-director Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay of her film “Promising Young Woman” (2020), once again proves to be a cinematic provocateur capable of creating memorable shock-value moments, though at times the candy-colored, exquisitely staged yet often brutally ugly histrionics are more about the fireworks than substance.

Mo' Better Blues is not a great film, but it's an interesting one, which is almost as rare.

Evil Under The Sun is not, alas, as good as Beat the Devil, but it is the best of the recent group of Christie retreads.

Firth is brilliant. He’s playing a veteran super spy in a very violent but very silly movie, but even when Harry is explaining why there’s a dead stuffed dog in his bathroom, Firth gives a disciplined, serious performance.

Robbie turns in a much richer and funnier and layered performance as Harley this time around, thanks in large part to the stiletto-sharp screenplay by Christina Hodson.

Nightmare Cinema as a whole is the bloodiest, most violent, most gruesome and most twisted movie I’ve seen this year. And I mean that mostly in a good way.

If you think Kevin Hart is funny — as I do — you’ll laugh frequently, as I did. If you don’t, you’re not going to this movie in the first place, are you?

This is a slice-of-life movie, the kind that director Jonathan (Melvin and Howard) Demme is good at.

Thanks to a legendary director at the top of his game, this is easily one of the best action movies of the year.

The movie is successful largely because [DiCaprio] is a good enough actor to hold his own in his scenes with De Niro, so that the movie remains his story, and isn't upstaged by the loathsome but colorful Dwight.

Even with a coked-up George Carlin (a spot-on Matthew Rhys) and the ubiquity of marijuana and the hard-R language, “Saturday Night” is a smooth and polished gem — a far cry from the spirt of raw anarchy permeating the birth of the series.

The thing about Funny People is that it's a real movie. That means carefully written dialogue and carefully placed supporting performances -- and it's ABOUT SOMETHING.

A gorgeous but plodding and borderline ludicrous period-piece weeper.

With a running time of 1 hour 55 minutes, Bad Hair might have benefited from a quick trim (sorry), and it’s a real mess at times, but you won’t soon shake off its genuinely scary and originally twisted delight

I think if you care for James, you must see it. It is not an adaptation but an interpretation.

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.

Surprisingly sweet and gentle comedy.

Tab Hunter Confidential is a well-crafted if not particularly deep bio-documentary.

An admittedly distinctive but ultimately mediocre movie that provides far more empty calories of exploitation than genuine food for thought.

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.

The Lost City breezes along in predictable fashion, touching all the familiar bases of this genre, as the scowling Abigail and his helpless henchmen pursue Loretta and Alan, and oh, there’s a volcano that’s about to erupt. If only Loretta and Alan could have unearthed a more interesting story, we might have had something.

So what has happened is that this uptight, ferocious, little gamin Lisbeth has won our hearts, and we care about these stories and think there had better be more.

As pure movie, The X-Files more or less works. As a story, it needs a sequel, a prequel, and Cliff Notes.

This movie is not a collection of parts from other films. It's an original, and what it does best is show how strangers can become friends, and friends can become like family.

It's an ambitious undertaking, this mix of Mamet and Godard, and it is to Nolan's credit that he takes it on so early in his cinematic career. It doesn't completely click, but there is plenty in this 70-minute black-and-white exercise to keep us involved.

The film is confoundingly watchable.

It is a minor movie, but a big-time minor movie...If there is such a thing as a must-see three-star movie, here it is.

It is not a serious film about its subject, nor is it quite a dark comedy, despite some of Pacino's good lines. The epilogue, indeed, cheats in a way I thought had been left behind in grade school. And yet there are splendid moments.

This is the 24th Bond film and it ranks solidly in the middle of the all-time rankings, which means it’s still a slick, beautifully photographed, action-packed, international thriller with a number of wonderfully, ludicrously entertaining set pieces, a sprinkling of dry wit, myriad gorgeous women and a classic psycho-villain who is clearly out of his mind but seems to like it that way.

This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven't had as much fun second-guessing a movie since "Mulholland Drive."

There has to come a time when inspiration gives way to habit, and I think the Pink Panther series is just about at that point. That's not to say this film isn't funny -- it has moments as good as anything Sellers and Edwards have ever done -- but that it's time for them to move on.

The movie's not without its moments.

Well written. The dialogue is smart and fresh.

Ghostbusters is a horror from start to finish, and that’s not me saying it’s legitimately scary. More like I was horrified by what was transpiring onscreen.

With the deadpan-great Benedict Cumberbatch effortlessly sliding back into the role of the brilliant and immensely powerful but sometimes shortsighted and narcissistic Doctor Stephen Strange and a bizarro plot that serves up philosophical, ethical and spiritual mind games in between the sometimes repetitive but slick and exhilarating action sequences, this is one of the weirder Marvel movies yet.

The movie is the latest horror show from Stuart Gordon, whose Re-Animator was one of the great trash pictures of 1985. From Beyond doesn't quite measure up - it's not trashy enough and it doesn't have the insane tunnel vision of the first movie - but in its own way, this is quite a job.

What sets this film above so many movies about animals is that it's about a dog who is realistic in every aspect.

It's refreshing, this late in the summer, to find a hot weather comedy that doesn't hate its characters and embed them in scatology and sexual impossibilities.

This is an old-fashioned and borderline corny biopic that looks like it could have been made 40 years ago — but it’s also a true-life story about a man who denounced his racist lineage and dedicated himself to the cause, a man who is still with us today, and it’s a story well worth telling.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of charm and excitement, a sort of bittersweet farewell to a time when a man with an airplane could make a living taking the citizens of Nebraska on their first fiveminute flights.

What we have here is basically two hours of inventive, colorfully imagined entertainment, with the Brinks job laid on top: A movie-movie, so to speak, and fun from beginning to end.

This movie is knowledgeable about the city and the people who make accommodations with it.

The best reason to see it is simply because of the creativity of its visuals. They're entrancing.

The movie is never quite bold enough to point out the contradiction of Muslims and Christians hating one another, even though they both in theory worship the same god.

It's more of a melodrama, a film that doesn't say priests are bad but observes that priests are human and some humans are bad.

The movie is pieced together out of uneven footage, and the idea of a documentary seems to have occurred in the midst of filming.

The machinery in this movie is so efficient that we don't know the answer until the very last shot.

This is yet another meta story with the characters commenting on the story as it goes along, and while that gimmick is becoming tiresome, this is solidly constructed piece of lightweight entertainment with terrific period-piece costumes and sets, and suitably theatrical performances from a talented cast that is clearly enjoying itself while delivering a quality spoof.

Masterson, like many actors, is an assured director even in her debut; working with her brother Pete as cinematographer, she creates a spell and a tenderness and pushes exactly as far as this story should go.

Jeremy Renner doesn’t put much movie-star mustard on his performance as a newspaper reporter in Kill the Messenger, and that’s one of the reasons the work is so strong.

A whimsical comedy, very whimsical, depending on the warmth of Segal and Sarandon, the discontent of Helms and Greer, and still more warmth that enters at midpoint with Carol (Rae Dawn Chong), Sarandon's co-worker at the office.

Breathe In is all simmer, no boil, despite an abrupt, overwrought, agonizing emotional climax that’s too much, too late.

This is a movie in the true tradition of film noir -- which someone who didn't write a dictionary once described as a movie where an ordinary guy indulges the weak side of his character, and hell opens up beneath his feet.

It has charm, a sly intelligence, and the courage to go for special effects sequences.

It shares one annoying practice with their other early films: They like to use distracting little zooms in and out for no reason at all, except possibly to remind us the film is being shot with a camera.

Not even the star power of Clooney and Pitt can elevate this beyond the level of a passable, disposable thriller.

There is a real terror in the faces of these kids as they realize that people have died, that guns kill, that your life can be ruined, or over, in an instant.

The great Bryan Cranston sinks his teeth into the title role and chews the scenery with such gusto I half-expected him to spit out a chunk of period-piece furniture before we were through. There’s a lot of ham and cheese in the performance, but it’s great fun to watch.

As a drama about the ravages of mental illness, the movie works; too bad most of the critics read it only as a romantic soap opera in which the hero is an obsessive sap. They read the signs but miss the diagnosis.

It's nice, but it's not much of a comedy.

The important thing about "The Importance" is that all depends on the style of the actors, and Oliver Parker's film is well cast.

A movie with the nerve to end with melodramatic sentiment--and get away with it, because it means it. Expect lots of damp eyes in the audience.

The Clearing doesn't feel bound by the usual formulas of crime movies. What eventually happens will emerge from the personalities of the characters, not from the requirements of Hollywood endings.

It’s a sharply honed, darkly funny, ultra-violent and wildly entertaining late 1960s period piece about the making of future made man Tony Soprano, the early criminal escapades of many key characters from the HBO series — and the blood oaths and ruthless betrayals that would set the checkered table for virtually everything that would happen to the Sopranos, their extended family and their associates some three decades later.

One question is not addressed by the movie: Why were the children deported in the first place? Yes, we know the "reasons," but what were the motives?

While both have Broadway-level pipes, neither has a particularly distinctive, knock-it-out-of-the park voice. It doesn’t help that the songs, while solid, become repetitive in melody. And there’s not a home run in the bunch. I walked out humming … nothing from this movie.

Despite the sometimes clever and surely deliberately anachronistic dialogue from the terrific screenwriter Beau Willimon (“The Ides of March,” the Netflix series “House of Cards”), capable direction from Josie Rourke and strong performances from Saoirse Ronan as Mary Stuart and Margot Robbie as Queen Elizabeth, Mary Queen of Scots often comes across as stultified and stagnant.

The movie is directed with efficiency by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) who knows that pacing is indispensable to a procedural.

The movie plays like the kind of line a rich older guy would lay on a teenage model,suppressing his own intelligence and irony in order to spread out before her the wonderful world he would like to give her as a gift.

The movie is entertaining, perhaps more so if you’re at one of those establishments where they allow you to bring a generous pour of wine into the theater.

If Fugitive Pieces has a message, it is that life can heal us, if we allow it.

A smart and good movie that could have been a great one if it had a little more daring.

Thanks to the razor-sharp screenplay by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick and the stylish and Wes Craven-influenced direction by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and the ease with which Campbell, Cox and Arquette return to their roles, the new “Scream” stabs and jabs at our memories of the original and creates some bloody fresh twists of its own.

Fiennes and Richardson make this film work with the quiet strangeness of their performances; if they insist on their eccentricities, it's because they've paid them off and own them outright.

This is a high-concept and yes, meta, film that springs from a clever premise and delivers wholesome, energetic, positive-messaging entertainment — even if there are some plot developments straight out of “Interstellar” meets “Back to the Future” that will sail above the heads of the little ones.

Yes, it’s a raunchy, edgy, hard-R comedy about a trio of 12-year-old boys who drop the f-bomb every other sentence and get involved in all sorts of predicaments featuring sex toys and beer and molly — but even the most hardcore jokes have a good-natured and even sweet larger context.

A good film in many ways, but its best achievement is the casting of Jamal Woolard, a rapper named Gravy, in the title role.

Motherless Brooklyn isn’t in the same league as obvious influences such as “The Maltese Falcon” and “Chinatown,” but it’s an effective mood piece and a worthy entry in the genre.

Fraser becomes Charlie and infuses him with intelligence, pathos, humor and heart. It is one of the best performances of the year in one of the best movies of the year.

Director Mike Newell and screenwriter David Nicholls focus on the major plot points of the well-known story. Their attempts mostly work but at times the film, despite its two-hour-plus length, feels rushed and truncated.

A well-paced, nicely directed, post-apocalyptic love story with a terrific sense of humor and the, um, guts to be unabashedly romantic and unapologetically optimistic.

We're swept up in the story's need to find a happy ending.

The most valuable task of the film is to re-create the historic legal struggles that led to Brown, and to remember heroes who have been almost forgotten by history.

Hardly the sporting-movie equivalent of a Hail Mary touchdown pass or a homer in the bottom of the ninth, yet McFarland, USA still has plenty of moments where you find yourself rooting hard for these kids, even though you know you’re watching a re-creation of events from the mid-1980s

Told in flashback, with David revisiting the past as he rides into his future on an artifically lit train, The Neon Bible glows darkly on the outside, but its pilot light is barely flickering. [05 Apr 1996, p.33]

Bride Flight takes this melodrama and adds details of period, of behavior, of personality, to somewhat redeem its rather inevitable conclusion.

It's an old-fashioned romantic triangle, told with schmaltzy music on the sound track and a heroine with a smoky singing voice, and then the Nazis turn up and it gets very complicated and heartbreaking.

Even when the story comes close to flying off the rails, Matt Damon holds steady and commands the screen.

The screenplay reads like a collaboration between Jekyll and Hyde.

The Star Chamber works brilliantly until it locks into a plot. Then it stops dancing and starts marching.

With an eclectic soundtrack that features...well-timed editing and crisp cinematography — and of course that terrific cast led by the great Del Toro — A Perfect Day is a rough-edged gem.

The problem with a story like this is that it's almost too perfect. It tends to break out of the boundaries of the typical sports movie, and undermine those easy cliches that are so reassuring to sports fans.

The movie is so sincere and confused in its values that it mirrors the goofy loyalties and violent pathology of its characters.

In the earlier films, we really identified with the small cadre of surviving humans. They were seen as positive characters, and we cared about them. This time, the humans are mostly unpleasant, violent, insane or so noble that we can predict with utter certainty that they will survive.

One of the most complex and visually interesting science fiction movies in a long time.

To be sure, we get a classic comic book movie storyline about a megalomaniacal madman intent on taking over the world, but there’s often a relatively light tone to the proceedings. This is a throwback piece of pure pop entertainment.