I found Interview kind of fascinating, especially in the ways that Buscemi and Miller make their performances into commentaries on the types of characters they play.

The movie is effective, well-acted and convincing.

Science-fiction fans will like it, and also brainiacs, and those who sometimes look at the sky and think, man, there's a lot going on up there, and we can't even define precisely what a soliton is.

While the plot often travels familiar paths and even the impressive camerawork is evocative of other films, Mean Dreams has a few story tricks up its sleeve — and it has Bill Paxton, playing one of the most odious characters he ever played, and doing it with absolute mastery.

This movie, like Boyz N the Hood, is uncompromising in its view of how things work in a neighborhood like South Central. It was made before the Los Angeles riots in April, 1992, but it provides a stark picture of the anger that was waiting to boil over.

One of the best-looking animated films ever made.

Lee uses visual imagination to lift his material into the realms of hopes and dreams.

The Muppets Take Manhattan is yet another retread of the reliable old formula in which somebody says "Hey, gang! Our senior class musical show is so good, I'll bet we could be stars on Broadway!" The fact that this plot is not original does not deter you, Kermit, nor should it. It's still a good plot.

Alien: Romulus sometimes plays like little more than a greatest hits mashup of the first two films, but that’s enough to carry the day.

Heaven Help Us has assembled a lot of the right elements for a movie about a Catholic boys' high school - the locations, the actors, and a lot of the right memories. But it has not found its tone. Maybe the filmmakers just never did really decide what they thought about the subject. For their penance, they should see "Rock and Roll High School."

Directors Jennifer Lee (who also wrote the screenplay) and Chris Buck, along with the obligatory army of talented Disney animators, deliver one brilliantly rendered set piece after another.

The film is founded on three performances by Annette Bening, Kerry Washington and Naomi Watts. All have rarely been better.

An idea is not enough for a movie. Characters have to be developed, comic situations have to be set up before they can pay off and the story should have a conclusion instead of a dead stop. Real Life fails in all of those areas -- fails so miserably that it lets its audiences down.

Even when Disconnect follows the path we expect it to follow, it does so in a way that keeps us intensely engaged. There wasn't a moment during this movie when I thought about anything other than this movie.

So yes, “MaXXXine” is sometimes more style than substance. Still, amid all the clever inside jokes and Easter eggs, writer-director-producer-editor West delivers a masterfully paced horror film set against the dichotomy between actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” and the reality of 1985 Hollywood and its grimy, exploitative, misogynist underbelly.

Too much self-pity.

Andrea Yates believed she was possessed by Satan and could save her children by drowning them. Frailty is as chilling.

The film is bold and passionate, but not subtle, and that is its downfall.

Movies like 8 Women are essentially made for movie-lovers. You have to have seen overdecorated studio musicals, and you have to know who Darrieux and Deneuve and Beart and Huppert and Ardant are, to get the full flavor. It also helps if you have seen Agatha Christie's "The Mousetrap."

Pennies from Heaven is dazzling and disappointing in equal measure. It's a musical with an idea, and ideas usually have been deadly to the musical, that most gloriously heedless of movie genres.

Sudeikis and Brie make for one of the most endearing pairings of the year, and Headland has delivered one of my favorite romantic comedies in recent memory.

The way to enjoy this film is to put your logic on hold, along with any higher sensitivities that might be vulnerable and immerse yourself as if in a video game.

I haven't been exactly a fan of the "Nightmare" series, but I found this movie, with its unsettling questions about the effect of horror on those who create it, strangely intriguing.

A funny movie with its heart finally in the right place, but all sorts of unacknowledged complications lurk just beneath its polished surface.

Some viewers may find the film confusing; I found it absorbing.

The performance and the character are fully realized, even in this movie that finds room for so many loose ends and dead ends.

The thriller occupies the same territory as countless science fiction movies about deadly invasions and high-tech conspiracies, but has been made with intelligence and an appealing human dimension.

Van Damme says worse things about himself than critics would dream of saying, and the effect is shockingly truthful.