If the movie had spent more time walking that tightrope between the acceptable and the offensive, between what we have in common and what divides us, it would have been more daring.

This movie doesn't contain "offensive language." The offensive language contains the movie.

It's fitfully funny but never really takes off. Out of the corners of our eyes we glimpse the missed opportunities for some real satirical digging.

It is always a problem in a love story when the rival seems more interesting than the hero, and that's what happens here.

At the end, there is no great revelation, but Huppert has succeeded once again in making us wonder what's going on in there.

Scott keeps the story from becoming cloying and sentimental. He is aided by smart, low-key work from his cast, especially Huard, who easily embodies the persona of an adult slacker, instilling him with a warm charm.

Far and Away is a movie that joins astonishing visual splendor with a story so simple-minded it seems intended for adolescents.

[An] insightful and occasionally revealing look at the 88-year-old Manhattan institution where the rich and famous enjoy being rich and famous.

The real star is cinematographer James Wong Howe, who distracts us from the character's lulling conversations with himself -- and Tracy's grim voiceovers -- with his magisterial seascapes and sunsets. [18 Feb 1999, p.31]

I enjoyed a lot of the movie in a relaxed sort of fashion; it's not essential or original in the way "The Truman Show'' was, and it hasn't done any really hard thinking about the ways we interact with TV.

Smart, sly and subtle, Georgetown is in the tradition of Reversal of Fortune, The Informant! and Catch Me If You Can — fictionalized and stylized entertainment based on true crime events.

Like The Flintstones and The Addams Family, Casper is an attempt to bring cartoons to life while incorporating them with real actors and sets. As a technical achievement, it's impressive, and entertaining.

Reeves has many arrows in his quiver, but screwball comedy isn't one of them.

What a mess. What a pretentious, uneven, off-putting, not-nearly-as-clever-as-it-thinkd-it-is MESS.

The mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.

Great Balls of Fire gives us a Jerry Lee Lewis who has been sanitized, popularized and lobotomized. Even then, the story ends in 1959 - before most of the events for which "The Killer" became notorious.

It is violent, funny, scary, contains boldly outlined characters, and gets us involved. It also has a lot of style.

Could metamorphose into an entertaining sitcom.

In its mastery of its moments, Jackpot has charm, humor and poignancy. What it lacks is necessity. There's a sense in which we're always waiting for it to kick in.

The movie is ambitious, has good energy and is well-acted, but tells a familiar story in a familiar way. The parallels to Brian De Palma's "Scarface" are underlined by scenes from that movie which are watched by the characters in this one.

Has just a little too much of the whodunit and the thriller and not enough of the temper of its clash between cultures, but it works, maybe because the simplicity of the underlying plot is masked by the oddness of the characters.

From Streep and DiCaprio and Lawrence through the supporting players, Don’t Look Up is filled with greatly talented actors really and truly selling this material — but the volume remains at 11 throughout the story when some changes in tone here and there might have more effectively carried the day.

What we have here is a dirty soap opera. It is dirty because it intends to be, but it is a soap opera only by default.

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 true strength of Spurlock’s documentary is how he showcases the behind-the-scenes, off-stage personalities of the One Direction boys.

For most of the film, I sat in quiet amazement: I was witnessing a complex, well-crafted, clearly told story, in a screenplay that moved well and had dialogue that sounded colorful without resembling a Quentin Tarantino clone. [8 Oct 1997, p.47]

Tron: Legacy, a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great. Both films, made so many years apart, can fairly lay claim to being state of the art. This time that includes the use of 3-D.

The movie is funny without being hilarious, touching but not tearful, and articulate in the way that Burns is articulate, by nibbling earnestly around an idea as if afraid that the core has seeds.

A well-crafted entertainment containing enough ideas to qualify it as science fiction and not just as a futurist thriller.

The story is nuts-and-bolts space opera, without the intelligence and daring of, say, Steven Spielberg's ''A.I.'' But the look of the film is revolutionary. Final Fantasy is a technical milestone, like the first talkies or 3-D movies.

Like "The Godfather," it shows him (Makovski) as a crook with certain standards, surrounded by rats with none.

This version of The Thing, directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., provides such graphic and detailed views of the creature that we are essentially reduced to looking at special effects, and being aware that we are. Think how little you ever really saw in the first "Alien" movie, and how frightening it was.

At times The Fifth Estate seems as cutting-edge as the 21st century techno-info revolution it portrays. On other occasions... it’s almost like an expensive “Funny or Die” bit.

This is not a great comedy and will be soon forgotten, but it has nice moments.

What might have been a slick, smash-mouth, fast-paced piece of entertainment clocking in at 90 or 100 minutes somehow turns into a bloated, half-baked pie that drags on for 2 hours and 20 minutes.

This is a dismal, dreary and fairly desperate movie, in which the actors try very hard but are unable to overcome an uninspired screenplay.

What's sort of wonderful is the way this movie takes that old formula and makes it fresh and new, with actors who give it wit and charm.

What they came out with is the most complete collection of cop-movie clichés since John Wayne played a Chicago cop in “McQ”.

American Reunion has a sense of deja vu, but it still delivers a lot of nice laughs.

The powerfully choreographed dances also address the idea that artistic vision is a potent antidote to repression.

Tornatore’s ideas about art, trust and intimacy are curious, even if they do not quite click.

It is encouraging that well-crafted thrillers are still being made about characters who have dialogue, identities, motives and clean shirts.

A movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.

In some ways, it’s not much, but in the ways that count, it’s more than enough.

The bloated, bombastic and brain-dead Netflix actioner The Gray Man is a depressingly formulaic waste of the talents of the Russo Brothers and the A-list cast — and a complete waste of 2 hours and 2 minutes of your time, unless you’re content to hit the “Recline” button on your theater seat, soak in the exotic locations, jam your arm into a bucket o’ popcorn and laugh at the hackneyed, cartoonishly violent and utterly ridiculous idiocy of the entire exercise.

Look at the cast and credits to form an idea of the directors and actors at work here. By its nature, New York, I Love You can't add up. It remains the sum of its parts. If one isn't working for you, wait a few minutes, here comes another one. New Yorkers, I love you.

Sam and Frankie are certainly interesting enough that a film about them coming to grips with this hidden truth would have been justified. It also would probably have been harder to write than this one, so People Like Us marches on with a coy little smile, toying with Frankie and the audience.

Texas Killing Fields begins along the lines of a police procedural and might have been perfectly absorbing if it had played by the rules: strict logic, attention to detail, reference to technical police work. Unfortunately, the movie often seems to stray from such discipline.

The most audacious, implausible, cheerfully offensive, hyperactive action picture I've seen since, oh, "Sin City," which in comparison was a chamber drama.

It's pretty trashy and sometimes stupid. But there was never a moment when I wasn't entertained on one level or another.

The Miracle Club contains few surprises, but that’s kind of the point of these kinds of movies, yes? We’re here for the comfort-viewing and the location scenery and the hand-me-a-tissue moments and the sublime performances.

It all comes down to whether you can tolerate Leon Barlow. I can't. Big Bad Love can, and is filled with characters who love and accept him, even though he is a full-time, gold-plated pain in the can.

There's a good story buried somewhere in this melee.

Sometimes it works to show their lips moving (it certainly did in "Babe"), but in Good Boy! the jaw movements are so mechanical it doesn't look like speech, it looks like a film loop.

Not one of the great dog movies, but it's a good one, abandoning wall-to-wall cuteness for a drama about a homeless puppy.

Sarah Michelle Gellar, the nominal star, has been in her share of horror movies, and all by herself could have written and directed a better one than this.

Most of the running time is occupied by action sequences, chase sequences, motorcycle sequences, plow-truck sequences, helicopter sequences, fighter-plane sequences, towering android sequences and fistfights. It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.

There is hardly a thing I can say in its favor, except that I was cheered by nearly every minute of it. I cannot argue for the script, the direction, the acting or even the mummy, but I can say that I was not bored and sometimes I was unreasonably pleased.

The only redeeming value of Bohemian Rhapsody is it’s so bad, there’s plenty of room left for a much better biopic about the one and only Freddie Mercury.

Watching this film was a cheerless exercise for me. The characters are manic and idiotic, the dialogue is rat-a-tat chatter, the action is entirely at the service of the 3-D, and the movie depends on bright colors, lots of noise and a few songs in between the whiplash moments.

What he has here is a story that probably cannot be believed in any conceivable level, and yet, to give him his due, he tells it with such conviction that it works anyway.

While these folks aren’t always the most pleasant to be around, we understand them and can relate to them, and at times feel empathy for their predicaments.

Hancock is a lot of fun, if perhaps a little top-heavy with stuff being destroyed. Smith makes the character more subtle than he has to be, more filled with self-doubt, more willing to learn.

Even when Mary finally gets her due, the film badly fumbles the moment.

Shapiro fails to sell Shavitz as the “wise and wry, ornery and opinionated” figure the press notes promise. No opinion, wise or otherwise, is uttered by this rustic quasi-eccentric, let alone a green ethos.

The visual style is all Zeffirelli, and it is interesting that the opera-within-the-film is not skimped on, as is usually the case in films containing scenes from other productions.

More than anything else, I responded to the performances. Feature films may be fiction, but they are certainly documentaries showing actors in front of a camera. Both Dafoe and Gainsbourg have been risk takers, as anyone working with von Trier must be. The ways they're called upon to act in this film are extraordinary. They respond without hesitation. More important, they convince.

Eyes of Laura Mars tries to say Serious Things about fashion photography, corruption in advertising, and the violence in our society. It does not succeed, but it tries. We would not, however, hold its Serious Things against it, if the movie also succeeded as a thriller. It doesn't, unless your idea of being thrilled is having people leap out of the shadows and then turn out to be friends.

Unlike so many of the cookie-cutter, wisecracking-assassin movies in recent memory, Bullet Train acknowledges its outlandishness from the beginning and yet also manages to connect so many dots in creative, gotcha fashion.

Four Brothers works as an urban thriller, if not precisely as a model of logic.

Unfortunately, “Y2K” fizzles out somewhere around the halfway point, in part because the characters aren’t fleshed out much beyond familiar tropes, and the screenplay seems not quite finished. It’s as if the filmmakers ran out of fresh ideas at some point but just plowed ahead anyway.

Caine, who has never been much for the stage, is a superb screen actor, so good his master classes on acting for the camera are on DVD. Here, dry and clipped, biting and savage, he goes for the kill.

In the case of David O. Russell’s jaw-droppingly terrible, aggressively tasteless, profoundly unfunny and interminably dull conspiracy thriller and would-be comedy “Amsterdam,” the all-star ensemble has less chemistry than a high school freshman on the first day of class.

The picture is haunted by a story problem: It isn't about anything but itself. There's no sense of life going on in the corners of the frame.

The suspense screws up tighter than a drum-head. The characters remain believable; we have a conflict of personalities, not stereotypes. The action coexists seamlessly with the message.

Despite the invaluable comedic/dramatic gifts of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, who do their best to inject some life and energy into the proceedings, Downhill is a pale, tame, broad and soft-edged remake of the far superior 2014 Swedish film “Force Majeure.”

Walking out of the screening, I was thinking: Elizabeth Hurley for girlfriend, Courtney Love for Satan.

How can one man juggle two women, possible expulsion, Mafia baseball bats and the meaning of life, while on acid? This is the kind of question only a Toback film thinks to ask, let alone answer.

The movie exhibits the usual indifference to the issues involved. Although it was written and directed by Elie Chouraqui, a Frenchman, it is comfortably xenophobic. Most Americans have never understood the differences among Croats, Serbs and Bosnians, and this film is no help.

I admired the scenes with De Niro so much I'm tempted to give Mary Shelley's Frankenstein a favorable verdict. But it's a near miss. The Creature is on target, but the rest of the film is so frantic, so manic, it doesn't pause to be sure its effects are registered.

The Vanishing is a textbook exercise in the trashing of a nearly perfect film, conducted oddly enough under the auspices of the man who directed it.

The plot has holes big enough to drive a Harley-Davidson through. But the film is better than it might have been, and better than it had to be. Take it on its own terms and you might find it interesting.

By removing elements of magic and operatic excess from the story, the brothers Scott focus on what is, underneath, a story as tragic (and less contrived) as the one cited in the ads, "Romeo and Juliet."

So many animated films are multi-layered efforts brimming with jokes only the adults will catch, but Spirit Untamed is pure and unbridled family fun, pardon the pun.

The town seems to be as preoccupied as ever with its own personalities and memories, as if it were sitting for its portrait.

This isn't a great movie, but it sure is a nice one.

Hook's visual sense is not acute here; he doesn't show the spontaneous sense of time and place that made his first film, The Kitchen Toto (1988), so convincing. He seems more concerned with telling the story than showing it, and there are too many passages in which the boys are simply trading dialogue.

Director Adam Robitel knows how to scare us with the classic, sudden-appearance-of-a-scary-thing-accompanied-by-a-loud-music-sting trick, which of course has been utilized a thousand times in hundreds of movies.

It’s nothing new for sure, but writer/director David Twohy...throws in enough entertaining touches to maintain interest — despite an overlong two-hour running time.

There's a lot to like in "Dennis the Menace." But Switchblade Sam prevents me from recommending it.

It’s a fantastically over-the-top, drive-in B-movie for the streaming generation.

The astonishing success of the original "MiB" was partly because it was fun, partly because it was unexpected. We'd never seen anything like it, while with MiBII, we've seen something exactly like it.

None of this amounts to anything more than goofy fun, but that's what the ads promise, and the movie delivers.

Father of the Bride Part II is not a great movie and not even as good as its 1991 inspiration. But it is warm and fuzzy, and has some good laughs and a lot of sweetness.

Its chief virtue is its lead performance, in which twin brothers are played by a promising new Argentinian actor named Viggo Mortensen.

I can imagine a film in which a creature like Sil struggles with her dual nature, and tries to find self-knowledge. Like Frankenstein's monster, she would be an object of pity. But that would be way too subtle for Species, which just adds a slick front end to the basic horror vocabulary of things jumping out from behind stuff.

This is a paint-by-numbers procedural that expects the audience to know the history of Watergate, hits the ground running—but then feels more like a steady jog through the past than a fast-paced thriller.

Sometimes you are either open to a movie, or closed. If you're convinced that An Unfinished Life is damaged goods, how can it begin its work on you?