Look, this isn't a great movie. If you're not a kid, don't go unless there's a kid you want to take. But if you are a kid, and you have ever for a moment wondered what it would be like to play major-league ball at your age, then take it from the old Little Leaguer and see this movie.

The movie, based on the famous comic novel by Stella Gibbons, is dour, eccentric and very funny, and depends on the British gift for treating madness as good common sense.

Hypnotic is an uneven, at times mesmerizing and dazzling mind-bender of a psychological thriller that plays like a drive-in movie version of a Christopher Nolan film.

This is a movie that raises questions that get to the heart of the matter in more ways than one, challenges our perceptions of what it means to be human — and has a wonderfully strange vibe while doing so. It’s unsettling, in the best possible way.

Life in a Day 2020 is an affirmation of life, of the simple joys experienced by citizens of the planet over the course of a single day. We’d never have met any of them without this film, and we’re grateful for the opportunity to get to know them a little bit.

Aniston, as a sweet kindergarten teacher and fiancee, shows again (after "The Good Girl") that she really will have a movie career.

I’m going to tread lightly so as not to spoil too many of the twists and turns, but I will say it’s not often you experience a film that at times plays like a rom-com from the 1990s spliced with something from the John Carpenter playbook.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

Felicity Jones gives a fierce and moving performance as Nelly.

In the autobiographical documentary McEnroe... we’re reminded of McEnroe’s dominance on the court — as well as the antics that earned him a reputation as a brat who polarized the tennis world.

There's a high gloss and some nice payoffs, but not quite as much humor as usual; Bond seems to be straying from his tongue-in-cheek origins into the realm of conventional techno-thrillers.

Curiously enough, the movie isn't really about what happens. It's about how it feels. This is a story more interested in tone and mood than in big plot points.

It is the first directing effort by Lili Zanuck, co-producer of Driving Miss Daisy, but feels like the work of a more experienced director, especially in the way she gives full measure to the many strong supporting performances in the film.

Even with the occasional stumble and that self-indulgent running time, this is a unique and at times brilliant piece of work.

Richard Curtis is good at handling large casts, establishing all the characters and keeping them alive.

Yet with all the futuristic splendor and the suitably majestic score and the fine performances, “Into Darkness” only occasionally soars, mostly settling for being a solid but unspectacular effort that sets the stage for the next chapter(s).

It’s a well-made, sometimes horrifyingly realistic re-creation of events — but it often feels like a formulaic disaster film.

There’s not a single character in this film that doesn’t come across as authentic.

The point is, adults can attend this movie with a fair degree of pleasure. That's not always the case with movies for kids, as no parent needs to be reminded. There may even be some moms who insist that the kids need to see this movie. You know who you are.

The screenplay by Carolyn Shelby, Christopher Ames and Samantha Shad contains dialogue scenes so well-heard and written it's hard to believe this is a Hollywood movie, with Hollywood's tendency to have characters underline every emotion so the audience won't have to listen so carefully.

Dumb as they (allegedly) are, the characters in Small Time Crooks are smarter, edgier and more original than the dreary crowd in so many new comedies.

A delightful surprise because despite all the backstage drama, this is a movie that tells stories that work -- is charming, is moving, is funny and looks professional.

Sweet and kind of touching, and I liked it. The difference, I think, is that the new one is lower on cynicism and higher on wisdom, and might actually contain some truth about the agonies of high school insecurity.

Part psychological thriller, part moody thought piece, part romance, “All of Us Strangers” feels like a feature-length update of a classic “Twilight Zone” episode, and we mean that as a high compliment.

The Scotsman who often plays majestic characters and the Texan who specializes in playing antiheroes play beautifully off one another in writer-director Rodrigo Garcia’s offbeat gem, which starts like an adaptation of a Sam Shepard play before eventually settling into something a little more conventional, but nonetheless satisfying.

The French Dispatch is filled with a sense of wistful longing, delivered from the perspectives of creative and observant strangers in a wonderfully strange land.

It's a feel-good film, warm and good-hearted, and as it was heading for its happy ending, I was still a little astonished how much I was enjoying it.

The movie is in the naughty-but-nice British tradition in which characters walk on the wild side but never seem to do anything else there.

There won't be a person in the audience who can't guess exactly how it will turn out. Yet it goes through its paces with such skill and charm that, yes, I enjoyed it.

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

Although we find out a lot about this virtual hermit and develop an admiration for his cantankerous principles, the movie leaves some questions unanswered.

The characters deserve a better movie, but they get a pretty good one.

A preposterous plot, but it's not about a plot, it's about acting.

As for disappointments ... Judd Nelson wasn’t available for the documentary, while Molly Ringwald declined to participate. Perhaps she’s learned to let it go. One hopes McCarthy will be able to do the same after making this film, but we get the distinct impression the best he can hope for is to learn to live with it and realize it doesn’t define him.

As for the murder mystery, some of the supporting players barely get enough screen time or enough of a backstory to be considered serious suspects, but even when “Death on the Nile” skirts the edge of camp, the fastidious and melancholy Poirot is always there to guide us through the rough spots and solve the case in the nick of time.

The reality depicted is sometimes too emotional to watch, because it’s such a personal story for all involved.

Considering how tidy and self-aware most such Hollywood projects are, any movie that can give Phillips' Mexican-Indian a monologue in which he painfully recounts the massacre only he survived and then blithely rejoices in idiot gunfire is a movie you have to respect. [12 Aug 1988, p.35]

The movie works well on its chosen level. The big action scenes are cleverly staged and Eddie Murphy is back on his game again, with a high-energy performance and crisp dialogue.

Geraldine Viswanathan, fresh off her scene-stealing turn as the intrepid high school newspaper reporter in “Bad Education,” gives a knockout performance.

The Great Raid is perhaps more timely now than it would have been a few years ago, when "smart bombs" and a couple of weeks of warfare were supposed to solve the Iraq situation. Now that we are involved in a lengthy and bloody ground war there, it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost.

A valuable, heartbreaking film about the way those resources are plugged into a system, drained of their usefulness and discarded.

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

Kimi is filled with the kind of sparkling cameos and supporting work we’ve come to expect from a Soderbergh cast — but always and throughout, this is Zoë Kravitz’s vehicle, and she delivers a smart, empathetic and badass performance in this nifty gem about a woman who has to step outside in more ways than one.

De Niro is so good at playing a man who has essentially emasculated himself because of fear of his anger, so that sex and anger may be leashed in precisely the opposite way, as in "Raging Bull." And Norton, the puppetmaster - it may not even be freedom he requires, but simply the pleasure of controlling others to obtain it.

A demonstration of the way time can sometimes give us a break.

This is Agnes’ story, and this is Kelly Macdonald’s movie.

As you’d expect from this cast, the performances are uniformly excellent, with the standout being Jayne Houdyshell, the only holdover from the Broadway production, who reprises her Tony-winning role and is mesmerizing as an ordinary woman with an extraordinary capacity to get through the night, the week, the year, the life, she’s been given.

It’s a beautiful film, finely written and well acted.

Mermaids is not exactly good, but it is not boring. Winona Ryder, in another of her alienated outsider roles, generates real charisma. And what the movie is saying about Cher is as elusive as it is intriguing.

The film's anti-Semitism is articulate but wrong, and the conflict between what the hero says and what he believes (or does not want to believe) is at the very center of the story.

Last Chance Harvey is a tremendously appealing love story surrounded by a movie not worthy of it.

The Sapphires is clearly a labor of love for all involved. It's also a warm tribute to four women for whom success as performers was just the beginning.

Still, this is a breathtakingly gorgeous, sometimes thrilling, well-acted and suitably profound sendoff to Daniel Craig in all his ice-blue-eyed, tightly wound, gritty gravitas —a Bond who seemed much more of this world than, say Roger Moore’s 007, a Bond who bled when he was cut and bruised when he was beaten, a Bond who grieved deeply for those he lost, a Bond who will be a very, very tough act to follow.

A small and warmhearted gem starring one of our finest veteran actors in a well-crafted and emotionally involving remake of a film about a widowed curmudgeon who begins to grow and change after experiencing some major life setbacks.

One of the movie's intriguing qualities is that its horrors take place within a world that is not as cruel and painful as we know it could be.

Now this is strange. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory succeeds in spite of Johnny Depp's performance, which should have been the high point of the movie.

The reason to see it is for Jones. This man who can stride fearlessly through roles requiring strong, determined men, this actor who can seem in complete control, finds a character here who seems unlike any other he has played and plays it bravely.

Christian Bale is heroic in the way he allows the character to leap joyfully into despicability.

What We Do in the Shadows is a bracing reminder of how the right burst of energy and style breathes fresh ideas into a genre threatened with creative exhaustion.

The story, based on an 18th century French play by Pierre Marivaux, is the sort of thing that inspired operas and Shakespeare comedies: It's all premise, no plausibility, and so what?

The film, directed by Daniel Sullivan, is brave, I think, to offer us a complicated scenario without an easy moral compass.

We realize that the most frightening outcome of the movie would be if it contained no surprises, no revelations, no quirky twist at the end.

The movie is passable as a story but fascinating as a document. It gives a more complete visual picture of the borders, the Palestinian settlements and the streets of Jerusalem than we ever see on the news.

There is a lot of plot in this movie - probably too much. The best thing to do is to accept the plot, and then disregard it, and pay attention to the scenes of passion. They really work.

Goya's Ghosts is like the sketchbook Goya might have made with a camera.

It’s a funky, violent, nasty exploitation film, highlighted by a performance of operatic madness by the one and only Nicolas Cage.

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.

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.

In Hilary Swank, the film finds the right actress to embody gritty tenacity.

I Went Down is a crime movie in which the dialogue is a great deal more important than anything else. It takes the form of a road movie and the materials of gangster movies (do real gangsters learn how to act by watching movies?), but what happens is beside the point. It's what they say while it's happening that makes the movie so entertaining.

Cheadle the director, producer and co-writer boldly goes for broke with mixed results in this highly fictionalized version of the Miles Davis legend — and Cheadle the actor gives a brilliant performance worthy of an Oscar nomination.

The Bad News Bears is, in a way, [Ritchie's] most harrowing portrait of how we'd sometimes rather win than keep our self-respect. He directs scenes for comedy even in the face of his disturbing material and that makes the movie all the more effective; sometimes we laugh, and sometimes we can't, and the movie's working best when we're silent.

What it doesn't have is a narrative magnet to pull us through - a story line that makes us really care what happens, aside from the elegant but mechanical manipulations of the plot.

To watch Samuel L. Jackson in the role is to realize again what a gifted actor he is, how skilled at finding the right way to play a character who, in other hands, might be unplayable.

Breathe is an inspirational story well told, but it’s essentially a paint-by-numbers biopic of a very deserving subject, with only a few bursts of stylistic flair and a couple of minor surprises at best.

As breathtakingly gorgeous and well acted as The Walk is, if you had to choose between the doc and this solid fictionalized version, I’d say go with the documentary.

There are far more laugh-out-loud moments in the first half of Jumanji: The Next Level than in the second hour, but I liked the unexpected (if kinda trippy) spiritual element that comes into play late in the story.

This is the kind of movie where you squirm out of enjoyment, not terror, and it's probably going to be popular with younger audiences - it doesn't pound you over the head with violence. Like the spider itself, it has a certain respect for structure.

What's surprising is how well Whitmore, the director, manages to direct traffic. He's got one crisis cooling, another problem exploding, a third dilemma gathering steam and people exchanging significant looks about secrets still not introduced. It's sort of a screwball-comedy effect, but with a heart.

The result at times approaches screwball comedy. But no, this isn't deliberate comedy. It's essentially realistic. It's simply that the real lives of these figures are funny.

There’s little in the way of originality in Work It, but there’s a fresh, upbeat, infectious vibe to the silliness, thanks in large part to the talented and likable cast of young actors.

What is it about Indiana that inspires movies about small-town dreamers who come from behind to win?

You’re Next benefits from skilled script-keepers.

To see this movie is to understand why the faces on Mount Rushmore are so painful and galling to the first Americans. The movie's final image is haunting.

Death and the Maiden is all about acting. In other hands, even given the same director, this might have been a dreary slog.

Fey is such a likable and funny screen presence, but she’s no lightweight when it comes to playing subtle, honest drama.

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.

A bright and sometimes breathtaking retelling of the rock opera of the same name. It is, indeed, a triumph over that work; using most of the same words and music, it succeeds in being light instead of turgid, outward-looking instead of narcissistic.

Gremlins was hailed as another "E.T." It's not. It's in a different tradition. At the level of Serious Film Criticism, it's a meditation on the myths in our movies: Christmas, families, monsters, retail stores, movies, boogeymen. At the level of Pop Movie-going, it's a sophisticated, witty B movie, in which the monsters are devouring not only the defenseless town, but decades of defenseless clichés. But don't go if you still believe in Santa Claus.

This is no piece of pretentious fluff. It’s a grim and nasty but wickedly entertaining bit of business, seasoned with sharp little plot turns before an admittedly ludicrous but dramatically satisfying twist-on-top-of-a-twist ending.

Meg Ryan does this sort of thing about as well as it can possibly be done, and after "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail," here is another ingenious plot that teases us with the possibility that true love will fail, while winking that, of course, it will prevail.

Quaid is instantly likable, with that goofy smile. Richardson, who almost always plays tougher roles and harder women, this time is astonishing, she's so warm and attractive.

Harriet certainly doesn’t shy away from reminding us of the horrors of slavery, but it’s mostly about the quest for freedom, and a remarkable woman who found her own freedom wasn’t nearly enough.

That's what's intriguing about the film: Instead of pumping up the plot with recycled manufactured thrills, it's content to contemplate two reasonably sane adults who get themselves into an almost insoluble dilemma.

Students of the Little Movie Glossary may find it funny how carefully Tucker and Dale works its way through upended cliches. I though it had done a pretty complete job already, including the two or three chainsaws and the wood chipper, but I was much gratified at the end when a sawmill turned up.

It's one of those movies like "Ghost World" and "Legally Blonde" where the description can't do justice to the experience.

I'm glad I saw the film. It challenged me.

The Last Stand marks the American debut of the Korean director Jee-woon Kim, who delivers a half-dozen quality kills that will leave audiences squirming and then laughing at the sheer audacity of it all.