Everyone involved is far too talented to mess this up too badly, but it soon becomes clear that Curtis intends to reduce us to quivering sobs mixed with heartfelt gratitude for every blessed day of life.

What makes the movie work is that Pitt and Jolie have fun together on the screen, and they're able to find a rhythm that allows them to be understated and amused even during the most alarming developments.

It’s a dopey, only mildly chilling, uneasy mix of horror and dark comedy, scoring few points in either category.

From the unconvincing CGI to the meandering and convoluted storyline to the preachy messaging to the unfortunately hammy performances, “Megalopolis” is a most foul and unpleasant journey.

Overall this is a solid, intelligent movie about the joys of expanding our horizons — in all directions.

I don’t see Aquaman ever reaching icon status, but I’ll say this: He’s a lot more fun on his own, when he’s not saddled with those overly serious stiffs Superman and Batman.

Now comes the gruesomely bloody, cheerfully tasteless, fantastically naughty and entertaining Christmas thriller Violent Night, which is basically “Die Hard” with candy canes in a mansion.

The stars are Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep -- arguably the two most distinguished American movie actors under fifty. They have a genuine chemistry together on the screen and undeniable charisma. And that's it in this movie, which gives them not one memorable line of dialogue, not one inventive situation, not one moment when we don't groan at the startling array of clichés they have to march through.

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs, until at times Curtis seems to be working from a checklist of obligatory movie love situations and doesn't want to leave anything out.

The most that can be said for the characters here is they all seem mighty pleased.

In its best moments it travels into the heart of darkness with “Richard III” and brings to life the unique, all-involving heartbeat of theater performed before a live audience.

Wahlberg has grown so much as an actor we can pretty much buy him as a college professor/author. There’s just not enough depth to the character of Jim, and not much of a story arc.

A sweet and touching film, worth a visit.

Despite a far-too-long running time and a second half that often relies on audience-pleasing gimmickry in favor of a compelling story arc, The Flash is an exceedingly well-acted adventure with just enough gas in the accelerator to make it to the finish line before wearing out its welcome.

Sayles handles this material with gentle delicacy, as if aware that the issues are too fraught to be approached with simple messages.

A surprisingly funny movie, the best of the 1970s recycling jobs, with one laugh ("Are you OK, little pony?") almost as funny as the moment in "Dumb and Dumber" when the kid figured out his parakeet's head was Scotch-taped on.

Begins as a great movie (I was spellbound by the first 30 minutes) but ends as only a good one, and I think that's because the screenplay, by Mitch Glazer, too closely follows the romantic line.

This is a well-crafted movie by a man who knows how to hook the audience with his story; it's Frankenheimer's best work in years.

With Ferrell and Reynolds striking just the right combination of hipster comedy with genuine sincerity, and the musical numbers working as parody but also toe-tapping entertainment, Spirited is … that’s right … a big cup of holiday cheer for the whole family.

Beloved evokes some of the fine moments in the careers of Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni, but it doesn't re-create them.

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 a movie about ideas, a drama based on the ancient war between science and superstition. At its center is a woman who in the fourth century A.D. was a scientist, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer and teacher, respected in Egypt, although women were not expected to be any of those things.

Even though there’s a tragic offscreen death and a devastatingly brutal confrontation scene between the two leads, Military Wives is like that one friend of yours who’s always in a good mood and is forever lifting everyone’s spirits, even at somber occasions and during the toughest of times.

Familiar family dynamics are amusingly exaggerated in the Paleolithic setting, where the most basic necessities require everyone's full-time attention.

The story itself doesn't matter much. We go to a classic John Wayne Western not to see anything new, but to see the old done again, done well, so that we can sink into the genre and feel confident we won't be betrayed.

Individual moments and lines and events in I Heart Huckabees are funny in and of themselves. Viewers may be mystified but will occasionally be amused. It took boundless optimism and energy for Russell to make the film, but it reminds me of the Buster Keaton short where he builds a boat but doesn't know how to get it out of the basement.

Rendition is valuable and rare. As I wrote from Toronto: "It is a movie about the theory and practice of two things: torture and personal responsibility. And it is wise about what is right, and what is wrong."

On all levels, Trolls delivers. It is nicely paced, the jokes are spot-on (and will work for both the kids and their parents) and, again, this is visually a very special piece of animated artistry.

These days too many children's movies are infected by the virus of Winning, as if kids are nothing more than underage pro athletes, and the values of Vince Lombardi prevail: It's not how you play the game, but whether you win or lose. This is a movie that breaks with that tradition, that allows its kids to be kids, that shows them in the insular world of imagination and dreaming that children create entirely apart from adult domains and values.

This is a splendid, rousing historical adventure, an example of what can happen when the best direction, acting, writing and technical credits are brought to bear on what might look like shopworn material.

This movie is just about perfect for teenagers, and it's a surprise that even their parents are allowed to have minds of their own.

A paean to creative impulses, this work channels the vision of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

The movie seems to be going for a highly mannered, elliptical, enigmatic style, and it gets there. We don't. [15 Feb 1972]

Flatliners is an original, intelligent thriller, well-directed by Joel Schumacher. I only wish it had been restructured so we didn't need to go through the same crisis so many times.

Caveman seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's 2000.

Butcher’s Crossing is a tightly spun, well-acted, beautifully shot and unforgiving slice of Old West madness.

The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious.

It's easy to like the movie because we like the actors in it, and because the movie makes it easy on us and has charming moments. But it feels too much like an exercise. It's yuppie lite--affluent, articulate people who, except for those who are ill, have problems that are almost pleasant.

Antonio Banderas is reason enough to see the movie.

A delight on its own terms, even if it has little to do with the real Goethe; here is a randy young man not a million miles apart from Tom Jones.

Born to Win is a good-bad movie that doesn't always work but has some really brilliant scenes.

Beast and Scorpion -- with its wicked giant arachnids that pluck human victims from a wrecked train like diners selecting shrimp from a buffet -- are fan favorites. [16 Jan 2004, p.11]

It's a showcase leading role for Parker Posey, who obviously has the stuff, and generates wacky charm. But the movie never pulls itself together.

But the later Rocky movies have been low on inspiration and eager to repeat the same formula, in which everything leads up to a climactic fight scene and a triumphant fadeout. Stallone is smart enough that he could have made this series into a meditation on sports celebrity in America, but that theme has always been at the edge of the stories; the formula takes center ring. If Rocky seems to be running on autopilot, that's also the case for the other characters. [16 Nov 1990, p.49]

This plot, recycled from Austen, is the clothesline for a series of dance numbers that, like Hong Kong action sequences, are set in unlikely locations and use props found there; how else to explain the sequence set in, yes, a Mexican restaurant?

This is a modest but likable film, and Anjelica Huston plays a heroine who makes us smile.

The makers of this film got so carried away by their High Concept that they missed the point of the whole story.

While there are some sparks of creativity in the script by Michael Mitnick and some strong performances (most notably from Shannon and Waterston), it fizzles out under the weight of a pompous and meandering storyline that includes cryptic flashbacks to a wartime encounter, and a strange subplot about the advent of the electric chair.

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

Here is a movie so concerned with in-jokes and updates for Trekkers that it can barely tear itself away long enough to tell a story. From the weight and attention given to the transfer of command on the Starship Enterprise, you'd think a millennium was ending - which is, by the end of the film, how it feels.

This is quite possibly the most self-referential, inside-jokey, look-at-how-clever-we-are, off-the-charts Meta Movie I’ve ever seen. Sometimes that’s pretty great. At other times, it detracts from the core story at hand.

A modest, cheerful little movie like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is so refreshing. Here is a movie that wants nothing more than to allow some high-spirited kids to sing and dance their way through a silly plot just long enough to make us grin.

King of the Corner is not plot-driven. It's like life: just one damned thing after another

Redford considers this material in an unusually literate and thoughtful historical film, working from years of research by his screenwriter, James Solomon. I found it absorbing and relevant today.

Streep kills each of her numbers (no surprise there), while Jo Ellen Pellman more than holds her own with the big-name stars and gives the story its heart and smile with her empathetic portrayal of Emma.

While the musical numbers don’t match the impact of the originals and there’s a bit of a lull in the second act where not all that much seems to be happening, The Lion King is on balance a solid and at times stunningly beautiful film.

Watching MirrorMask, I suspected the filmmakers began with a lot of ideas about how the movie should look, but without a clue about pacing, plotting or destination.

The scenes between Gleeson and Huppert are rendered in muted tones and are sweet and effective. Subplots involving Sylvia and Paul are flat and uninteresting.

This is not a movie you forget about as you’re heading for the exit. I’m not sure it’s a movie you’ll ever forget.

This movie plays better than perhaps it should. Directed as a debut by Daniel Barber, it places story and character above manufactured "thrills" and works better.

You can see how this movie could have been jacked up into a one-level action picture, but what makes it special is how Thornton modulates the material.

Told with the frank simplicity of a classic well-made picture, it tells its story, nothing more, nothing less, with no fancy stuff. We relax as if we've found a good movie on cable. Story is everything here.

Watching Invincible was a singular experience for me, because it reminded me of the fundamental power that the cinema had for us when we were children. The film exercises the power that fable has for the believing.

Rarely does a movie make you feel so warm and so uneasy at the same time.

Follows the "Lock, Stock" formula so slavishly it could be like a new arrangement of the same song.

A rare item these days: An erotic film made well enough to keep us interested. It's about beautiful people, has a lot of nudity, and the sex is as explicit as possible this side of porno.

Crossroads borrows so freely and is a reminder of so many other movies that it's a little startling, at the end, to realize how effective the movie is and how original it manages to feel despite all the plunderings.

A clunky Western that tries so hard to be Politically Correct that although young women are kidnapped by Indians to be sold into prostitution in Mexico, they are never molested by their captors.

Romance & Cigarettes is the real thing, a film that breaks out of Hollywood jail with audacious originality, startling sexuality, heartfelt emotions, and an anarchic liberty. The actors toss their heads and run their mouths like prisoners let loose to race free.

There is a word to explain why this particular film so appealed to me. Reader, that word is "escapism." If you understand why I used the word "reader" in just that way, you are possibly an ideal viewer for this movie.

While Mirren and McKellen are as wonderful as you’d expect, especially in the early going when their respective characters are just getting to know one another, even these two legendary talents can’t overcome a convoluted, unfocused and increasingly implausible storyline.

One only wishes Walker had stronger, better developed material instead of a promising drama that eventually unravels and seems overlong even with a running time of 96 minutes.

Beautifully designed, intelligently written, acted with conviction, it's an uncommonly thoughtful epic. Its power is compromised only by an ending that sheepishly backs away from what the film is really about.

Sometimes you see a play and you can imagine it being a movie. Sometimes you see a small movie like this, and you can imagine it working better as an intimate stage play.

This ensemble piece plays like “Crash” in a minor note, with one heavy-handed scene after another, all leading up to an ambivalent, unsatisfying ending.

So many great actors, cast adrift by a script that feels incomplete and a brilliant director delivering one of his lesser works.

This is a movie that has its commercial concept written all over it; it's so painstakingly crafted as a product that the messy spontaneity of life is rarely allowed to interrupt.

Nothing about The D Train feels the least bit authentic, and worse, little about it is funny.

Dolls remains only an idea, a concept. It doesn't become an engine to shock and involve us.

You will either be in sympathy with it, or not. Much depends on what you bring into the theater. It is possible that those who know most about Nijinsky will be most baffled, because this is not a film about knowing, but about feeling.

The point is to show us what can be done with recycled traditional animation in the IMAX 3-D process, and the demonstration is impressive.

Now Singleton, too, dares to take a hard look at his community. His characters are a little older, and he is older, too, and less forgiving.

In a miraculous gift to the audience, 20th Century-Fox does <I>not</I> reveal all of the best gags in its trailer.

It's sweet when it should be raunchy, or vice versa, and the result is a movie that seems uneasy with itself.

Either this is a tragic family or a satirical one, and the film seems uncertain which way to jump.

With echoes of “Back to the Future,” “The Terminator” and even a little of “Heaven Can Wait,” this is a consistently entertaining comedy-actioner with a lot of heart — and the perfect ending. Fine work, Adam(s).

The problem is, the story lacks originality and zest.

The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.

Amidst all the fireworks and the cascading champagne and the insanely over-the-top parties, we’re reminded again and again that The Great Gatsby is about a man who spends half a decade constructing an elaborate monument to the woman of his dreams.

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.

I Am Ali serves as further testimony Ali wasn’t simply a great boxer, he was a great man who happened to be a great boxer as well.

The movie has been slapped together by director Todd Phillips, who careens from scene to scene without it occurring to him that humor benefits from characterization, context and continuity. Otherwise, all you have is a lot of people acting goofy.

What I did appreciate is that City of Angels is one of the few angel movies that knows one essential fact about angels: They are not former people. &#148;Angels aren't human. We were never human,&#148; observes Seth. This is quite true. Angels are purely spiritual beings.

A mild pleasure from one end to the other, but not much more. Maybe that's enough, serving as a reminder that movie comedies still can be about ordinary people and do not necessarily have to feature vulgarity as their centerpiece.

Fat Kid Rules the World is a movie with a title that might be misleading: It's a lot better than it sounds like it has any right to be.

The three films of Body Bags were horrid, but they weren't horrifying. [06 Aug 1993, p.67]

All of the actors play without winks and spins, unless you consider Lebowskism itself a wink and spin.

Singleton's film is interesting for a lot of reasons, but especially because he stands outside this campus system and looks at it with a detached eye.