This is not a particularly memorable film, but Polanski brings a great deal of skill to its staging, and it looks as if the actors enjoy themselves.

Tolkin gives us one richly detailed set piece after another, involving luncheons, openings, massages, telephone tag, psychic consultations, sex, heartfelt conversation, and pagan rituals led by a bald-headed woman who sees what others cannot see.

Film by film, Ang Lee, from Taipei out of the University of Illinois, has become one of the world's leading directors. This film was his second Golden Lion winner in three years at the Venice Film Festival. But it is not among his best films. It lacks the focus and fire that his characters finally find. Less sense, more sensibility.

Everything comes down to an epic battle between the Transformers and the Decepticons, and that's when my attention began to wander, and the movie lost a potential fourth star.

Any movie featuring cameos ranging from Lou Reed to Mikhail Gorbachev has its heart in the right place. That heart is what sustains it; though long and uneven, occasionally sentimental and portentous in its message, Faraway, So Close comes close enough to greatness. [23 Dec 1993, p.29]

This Apple TV+ original film, directed by Jon S. Baird, doesn’t attempt to replicate the entertainingly addictive block-stacking puzzle game because I don’t know how you’d make a movie out of that; it’s a fictionalized and creatively stylized origins story that plays like a Cold War thriller version of “The Social Network.”

The movie is ultimately not quite successful; when it was over I felt there was some additional payoff or explanation still due. Perhaps the arbitrary, unfinished nature of the story is part of its purpose. But I felt that characters this interesting should not be allowed to remain complete ciphers. Still, in individual moments, The Comfort of Strangers has an eerie, atmospheric charm.

With a combination of bone-dry wit and blood-drenched horror, writer-director Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw skewers some of the most pretentious denizens of the art world you’d ever want NOT to meet — and does so with precision and flair and pitch-black humor.

Dead Snow, as you may have gathered, is a comedy, but played absolutely seriously by sincere, earnest young actors.

Eisenberg is a fine writer and shows clear promise as a visual storyteller, but it becomes a chore to spend even an 88-minute movie with his increasingly off-putting characters. We know they’re not supposed to be likable, but they should be more interesting.

Lars von Trier exhibits the imagination of an artist and the pedantry of a crank in Dogville, a film that works as a demonstration of how a good idea can go wrong.

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

This is a brave, layered film that challenges the wisdom of victory at any price. Both of its central characters would slip easily into conventional plot formulas, but Bahrani looks deeply into their souls and finds so much more.

The Bourne Legacy is always gripping in the moment. The problem is in getting the moments to add up.

Damon’s everyman workhorse is tragically sympathetic, plodding ahead against all odds. Copley is brilliant as the sadistic villain. Foster is … well, you gotta see it to believe it. In the meantime, you’ll be treated to one of the most entertaining action films of the year.

It has everything you want: shadows, screams, feverish scientific speculations, guttering candle flames, flowing diaphanous gowns, midnights, dawns and worms. Russell was once, and no doubt will be again, considered an important director. This is the sort of exercise he could film with one hand tied behind his back, and it looks like that was indeed more or less his approach.

This is a fresh and cheerful movie with a goofy sense of humor and a good ear for how teenagers talk.

The director Brad Anderson, working from a screenplay by Scott Kosar, wants to convey a state of mind, and he and Bale do that with disturbing effectiveness.

Biloxi Blues may indeed be based on memories from Neil Simon’s experiences in basic training during World War II, but it seems equally based on every movie ever made about basic training, and it suffers by comparison with most of them.

The Wolverine is one of the better comic-book movies of 2013, thanks in large part to an electric performance by Hugh Jackman.

This is one of my favorite movies of 2018.

If you've seen “The Karate Kid” (1984), the memories will come back during this 2010 remake. That's a compliment.

Writer-director Fennell, who won an Oscar for her screenplay of her film “Promising Young Woman” (2020), once again proves to be a cinematic provocateur capable of creating memorable shock-value moments, though at times the candy-colored, exquisitely staged yet often brutally ugly histrionics are more about the fireworks than substance.

Mo' Better Blues is not a great film, but it's an interesting one, which is almost as rare.

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.

Firth is brilliant. He’s playing a veteran super spy in a very violent but very silly movie, but even when Harry is explaining why there’s a dead stuffed dog in his bathroom, Firth gives a disciplined, serious performance.

Robbie turns in a much richer and funnier and layered performance as Harley this time around, thanks in large part to the stiletto-sharp screenplay by Christina Hodson.

Nightmare Cinema as a whole is the bloodiest, most violent, most gruesome and most twisted movie I’ve seen this year. And I mean that mostly in a good way.