I like the movie on a simple physical level. There is no deeper meaning and no higher skill involved; just professional action, well-staged and filmed with a certain stylistic elegance.

Above all, this is a movie where the characters ask the same questions we do: They're as smart about themselves as we are.

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.

Has the same mixture of dumb puns, corny sight gags and sly, even sophisticated in-jokes. It's a lot of fun.

Teeming with familiar war-film clichés and at times almost unbearably melodramatic, Twice Born is nevertheless worth the effort, thanks in large part to a magnificent performance from Penelope Cruz and some fine work from the international supporting cast.

The ghost of anime can be seen here trying to dive into the shell of the movie mainstream. But this particular film is too complex and murky to reach a large audience, I suspect; it's not until the second hour that the story begins to reveal its meaning. But I enjoyed its visuals, its evocative soundtrack (including a suite for percussion and heavy breathing), and its ideas.

With cinematographer David Ungaro providing hand-held docudrama work in saturated colors, “Asphalt City” is bleak and heavy-handed, yet we get the feeling a lot of paramedics in major cities would say it’s not all that far from the harsh realities of the job.

Remarkable, how in a film where we KNOW with an absolute certainty that all or most of the dogs must survive, Eight Below succeeds as an effective story. It works by focusing on the dogs.

Much of what transpires in “Cuckoo” depends on your willingness to just go with it, and your forgiveness for a couple of loose ends that remain untied throughout. The fun here is enjoying the screen-popping performances by Schafer and Dan Stevens as a snarling villain, not to mention the quality Jump Scares and the overall creepy vibe.

Huston films the horrifying assault scenes to provoke disgust, outrage, fear and pity. She doesn't flinch. She refuses to soften the situation. Her Carolina is painful to watch. It's meant to be. [13 Dec 1996, p.65nc]

The documentary homes in on the ideas of community, about caregiving and giving care, about human nature and humanity, about parenting and becoming parents to the people we once called mom and dad.

Director Mark Mori, whose last feature documentary was the 1991 exposé “Building Bombs,” does an entertaining job of conveying Page’s entire life in her own words and illustrating why she has become a worldwide symbol of liberated sexuality.

Servillo charms in his dual turn, then takes it up a notch when one brother shows off his childhood knack for impersonating his look-alike.

Director Craig Gillespie (“Lars and the Real Girl,” “I, Tonya”) has delivered a clever, devilishly offbeat story with appropriately over-the-top and wildly entertaining performances from Emma Stone as the titular character and Emma Thompson as her nemesis, who is so casually cruel (in a manner of speaking), so cold and cunning, she makes Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” look like the Employer of the Year.

The Breakfast Club doesn't need earthshaking revelations; it's about kids who grow willing to talk to one another, and it has a surprisingly good ear for the way they speak.

What's effective is how matter-of-fact Fair Game is. This isn't a lathering, angry attack picture.

Odd and intense, very well acted, and impossible to dismiss.

Other pleasures: The wicked trick used to smuggle Connery into the locked car with the gold; the chase scene on top of the train; and, of course, the exquisite presence of Down, who has a bedroom scene with Connery that makes James Bond look curiously like Sherlock Holmes.

Kevin Bacon is on a roll right now after several good roles, and here he channels diabolical sleaze while mugging joylessly before the telethon cameras.

I liked the action, I liked the absurdity, I liked the incongruous use and misuse of mutant powers, and I especially liked the way it introduces all of those political issues and lets them fight it out with the special effects.

Beautiful, languorous, passive -- it plays like background music for itself.

A rarity, a movie that seems to be on autopilot for the first two acts and then reveals that it was not, with a third act that causes us to rethink everything that has gone before. Ingenious, how simple and yet how devious the solution is.

So assured and perceptive in its style, so loving, so intensely right, that if you can receive on that frequency, the film is like a voluptuous feast.

If you’ve seen “Wonder,” it will add some depth and context to the viewing experience, but with the surehanded direction from Forster, the excellent script by Bomback and the strong performances from the veteran actors as well as the younger faces, “White Bird” flies quite well on its own.

Rebecca Hall gives one of the great performances of the year as the title character in Christine, an intense, stomach-churning, unblinking drama.

If you respond to film noir, if you like dark streets and women with scarlet lips and big fast cars with running boards, the look of this movie will work some kind of magic. The story itself may not be so mesmerizing, but who really cares? Style and tone are everything with a movie like this, which wants to bring to life a dark secret place in the lurid pulp imagination.

I would not want to see a sequel to the film, and at 81 minutes it isn't a second too short, but what it does, it does cheerfully, with great energy, and very well.

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

We get a parable of individualism and its perils for a turn-of-the-20th century woman, one proclaimed by a critic of her time “a revolt against nature: a woman genius.”

Cuoco and Davidson make for an endearingly offbeat, magnetic pairing; the two actors are up to the challenge of playing different shades within their respective characters.

It doesn’t break any new ground and I’m not convinced it required a 2 hour and 41 minute running time, but despite a few overlong interludes midway through the story and a couple of battle sequences that pretty much look like the fight scenes in a dozen or two previous MCU movies, this is a rousing adventure and a most welcome return to one of the most visually arresting and culturally rich settings in the superhero universe: the kingdom of Wakanda.

The comedy here isn't all on the surface, and Viterelli [the bodyguard Jelly] is one reason why.

Ghostlight becomes a love letter to the power of theater, to the power of the timeless written word, to move us, to make us feel, to change us.

Bullock brings a kind of ground-level vulnerability to 28 Days that doesn't make her into a victim but simply into one more suitable case for treatment.

As Fyre makes painfully clear, just about everyone involved with the project — including the co-founders — had to have known they were tumbling down a mountain at rapid speed and headed for almost guaranteed scandal and disaster, yet everyone kept on working, as if the denial would somehow soften the blow.

It's Mamet in a lighthearted mood, playing with dialogue, repeating phrases just because he likes them, and supplying us with a closing line that achieves, I think, a kind of greatness.

The characters involve us, we sympathize with their dreams and despair of their matrimonial tunnel vision, and at the end we are relieved that we listened to Miss Watson and became the wonderful people who we are today.

An imperfect movie with so many moments of truth that you forgive its stumbles. You also note that it's probably of historical value, because it centers on the first performance of an actress who is going to be a big star.

All classic and airtight, and handled by Richet with economy and a sturdy clarity of action; he doesn't go overboard with manic action scenes.

So likable, we go with it on its chosen level.

This feature film debut by Williams is an ambitious, gritty and at times downright scary urban drama with a message of hope and redemption. [04 Nov 1998, p.44]

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.

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.

Little Ashes is absorbing but not compelling. Most of its action is inward.

Before Sunrise is so much like real life - like a documentary with an invisible camera - that I found myself remembering real conversations I had experienced with more or less the same words.

In the hands of the Danish director Tobias Lindholm and screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917,” “Last Night in Soho”) and thanks in large part to the towering twin performances of the equally chameleon-like Chastain and Redmayne, The Good Nurse is a solid albeit conventional medical thriller that overcomes a few plodding stretches and ends in bittersweet fashion.

The joy of Dirty Work is in Macdonald's observational writing and sardonic delivery. Because he and director Bob Saget never take the film too seriously, nearly every scene transcends the ordinariness of the movie's plot line by giving way to Macdonald's charisma. [15 Jun 1998, p.32]

Sometimes overwrought excess can be its own reward. If Obsession had been even a little more subtle, had made even a little more sense on some boring logical plane, it wouldn't have worked at all.

A movie like this lives or dies with its performances, and the actors in My Beautiful Laundrette are a fascinating group of unknowns.

A warm human comedy.

The portrait of everyday Japan in The Eel is intriguing; the quiet area where the story is set is filled with people who take a lively interest in one another's business, while all the time seeming to keep their distance. [11 Sep 1998, p.32]

Dogtooth is like a car crash. You cannot look away. The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos tells his story with complete command of visuals and performances. His cinematography is like a series of family photographs of a family with something wrong with it.

Not that this film (or for that matter, any other Western made in the last 30 years) can stack up to “Unforgiven,” but it is a lean and brutally authentic tale bolstered by outstanding performances from Mortensen, the versatile Vicky Krieps and a terrific supporting cast.

This is a B-movie through and through, but thanks in large part to a deep cast of familiar faces and reliable character actors, it’s a solid crime thriller that respects the true-life blueprint of the story.

This movie leaves me looking forward to the director's next film; we can say of Rian Johnson, as somebody once said about a dame named Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "You're good. You're very good."

The last act of A Brilliant Young Mind is undeniably moving but not entirely believable and a little too neat and clean. Still, long after you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember the wonderfully nuanced work of the cast.

Culkin plays Alig as clueless to the end, living so firmly in his fantasy world that nothing can penetrate his chirpy persona. Whether this is accurate--whether indeed any of the facts in the film are accurate--is not for me to say, but it works.

The documentary is at its best when we observe Fox in quiet, warm and funny moments with his wife and their four children, and when it’s just Fox facing the camera, talking with his typical candor and humor about his condition and refusing to be painted as some kind of martyr.

This is a deliberately off-kilter, cheerfully violent, hit-and-miss effort with just enough moments of inspiration to warrant a recommendation — especially if you know what you’re getting into.

I WANTED it to be a typical romantic comedy starring those two lovable people, Sandra Bullock and Hugh Grant. And it was. And some of the dialogue has a real zing to it. There were wicked little one-liners that slipped in under the radar and nudged the audience in the ribs.

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

Tony Hale took neurotic brilliance to the next level on Arrested Development and then Veep, and he’s squarely in his comfort zone playing another cringe-inducing, socially awkward and hilariously tone-deaf character in the offbeat charmer Eat Wheaties!, one of the most endearing movies about light stalking you’ll ever see.

Dhoom:3 entertains as a spectacle of chases, bank capers, magic acts and song-and-dance numbers.

The film is entertaining in its own right, and thought-provoking. Why don't more people quickly see through their hoaxes?

I like the way the slacker characters maintain their slothful gormlessness in the face of urgent danger, and I like the way the British bourgeois values of Shaun's mum and dad assert themselves even in the face of catastrophe.

Sea of Love tells an ingeniously constructed story that depends for its suspense on the same question posed by Jagged Edge and Fatal Attraction: What happens when you fall in love with a person who may be quite prepared to murder you?

The film is upbeat, wholesome, chirpy, positive, sunny, cheerful, optimistic and squeaky-clean. It bears so little resemblance to the more complicated worlds of many members of its target audience (girls 4 to 11) that it may work as pure escapism.

The idea of the story within a story is one of the nice touches in The NeverEnding Story. Another one is the idea of a child's faith being able to change the course of fate. Maybe not since the kids in the audience were asked to save Tinker Bell in Peter Pan has the outcome of a story been left so clearly up to a child's willingness to believe.

It is an enchanted folly suggesting that romance is a matter of chance, since love is blind; at the right moment we are likely to fall in love with the first person our eyes light upon.

For a time, “Moana 2” seems more fixated with creating memorably weird imagery than telling a story, but it regains its footing in a third act filled with genuine emotion and a spiritually rousing finale.

What she hasn't done is make a terrifically entertaining film. Although this version dumps many of the novel's passages, particularly from the later chapters, it's dreary and slow-paced, heavy on atmosphere, introverted. I suppose life on an isolated moor was like that at the time, but do we need this much atmosphere?

Tells this story in a straightforward, calm way that works ideally as the chronicle of a man's life but perhaps less ideally as drama.

Either you stand back and resist it, or you plunge in. There was something about its innocence and spunk that got to me, and I caved in.

Levy now takes his quadruple-threat skill set to feature-length film by directing, writing, producing and starring in the warm and lovely albeit formulaic weeper “Good Grief,” which is not the story of the adult Charlie Brown (rats!) but the tale of a man who turns to his best friends for solace in his time of great need.

Cate Blanchett plays Guerin in a way that fascinated me for reasons the movie probably did not intend.

If you like him on TV, you'll like him here, too, because it's more of the same stuff, only outdoors and with animals and shooting stars and the kinds of balloons people can go up in.

Steve Martin is good at that aspect of the Bilko persona, and good, too, at suggesting that there's not a mean bone in the sergeant's body.

The pairing of Law and Coon as a married couple doing an extended love/hate dance in The Nest results in an absolute master class in acting.

The Piersons went, they showed movies, they returned. Taveuni is more or less the same. But by living and coping together for a year, the family is probably stronger and richer.

Passionada assembles the elements for a soap opera, and turns them into a bubble bath.

Trekkies talk at length about how the world would be a saner and more peaceful place if the "Star Trek" philosophy ruled our lives. No doubt it would be a lot more entertaining, too, especially during root canals.

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.

Falling Down does a good job of representing a real feeling in our society today. It would be a shame if it is seen only on a superficial level.

The masterstroke is the use of Bryan Adams, who seems like a joke when he first appears (the movie knows this), but is used by Konchalovsky in such a way that eventually be becomes the embodiment of the ability to imagine and dream--an ability, the movie implies, that's the only thing keeping these crazy people sane.

It's fun to watch 2 Days in the Valley” in the moment, and then fun afterward to think about the way the story was put together, and all of those lives connected.

Becky is a deeply fractured fairy tale that leaves logic at the door and revels in elaborate set pieces that usually wind up with someone maimed or dead.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon plays like a graphic novel come to life. Everything has a heightened sense of color, and the soundtrack pulses with banger tunes and wall-rattling EDM.

The filmmakers (working from a script by Kaluuya and Joe Murtagh) deftly blend some stunning action sequences with moments of quiet beauty, as when a large contingent from The Kitchen gathers at Life After Life for a memorial service for one of their own.

Even though Pain & Gain does indeed mine laughs from some very violent acts, there is nothing in this movie that glamorizes those three meatheads. Kudos to Bay and his screenwriters for making sure we’re laughing at them, not with them.

The Samaritan isn't a great noir, but it's true to the tradition and gives Samuel L. Jackson one of his best recent roles.

There is not much here that comes as a blinding plot revelation, but the movie has a raffish charm and good-hearted characters, and like "The Full Monty" it makes good use of the desperation beneath the comedy.

Starman contains the potential to be a very silly movie, but the two actors have so much sympathy for their characters that the movie, advertised as space fiction, turns into one of 1984's more touching love stories.

Parker reaches with both hands for greatness and falls short — but this is nevertheless a solid and strong and valuable piece of work.

The movie lacks the cleanedged economy of the screenplay for The Player, and it could have benefitted from less talkiness and fewer characters, but as a portrait of a particular Hollywood strata it is bittersweet and knowledgeable.

The movie is not quite successful. It is too secretive about its heart.

A movie about this subject matter is a tough sell, but Swank and Rossum are brilliant, and in its own unique way, You’re Not You is one of the best buddy movies of the year.

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

His film is pro-Kerry, yes, but the focus is on history, not polemics, and provides a record of the crucial role of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.