The film looks and feels good, and Washington's performance is the more uncanny the more we think back over it. The ending is "flawed," as we critics like to say, but it's so magnificently, shamelessly, implausibly flawed that (a) it breaks apart from the movie and has a life of its own, or (b) at least it avoids being predictable.

It is a skillful, well-made film, although, since Ellsberg is the narrator, it doesn't probe him very deeply.

Director Green isn’t trying to reinvent the squeal. Halloween, the 2018 version, is the B-movie sequel “Halloween,” the 1978 version, has always deserved.

Works as Gothic melodrama because it understands the genre so well.

Quick Change is a funny but not an inspired comedy. It has two directors - Howard Franklin and Bill Murray - and I wonder if that has anything to do with its inability to be more than just efficiently entertaining.

The director of the film is Tim Hunter, whose feature career goes back to such 1980s gems as “Tex” and “River’s Edge,” and whose TV credits include everything from episodes of the original “Twin Peaks” to “Mad Men.” That explains why it’s such a good-looking film. Nicolas Cage’s starring presence explains why it’s such a compelling and offbeat little thriller.

This delightful, silly animated romp makes for a really fun time in the theater.

The dynamic between Dern and O’Connell is powerful and palpable, even though their bond develops solely through written correspondence and prison conversations in which they’re talking on the telephone and separated by thick glass.

Antonio Banderas is reason enough to see the movie.

The result is not a formal doc but an extended chat between two professionals who, as Pollack puts it, search for "a sliver of space in the commercial world where you can make a difference."

Watts is such a chameleon of an actress, such a pro at slipping into a vast array of roles without drawing attention to the mechanics of her work, that we almost take for granted how damn good she is — and she delivers beautiful and resonant work as Sam.

It's the individual moments, not the payoff, that make it so effective.

The movie is a thriller, with all the usual trappings of a thriller, but the director, Jonathan Kaplan, is able to place the story in a plausible world. The performances go for unstrained realism, the settings are slice-of-life, and until the final scenes even the sicko cop seems somewhere within the realm of possibility.

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.

Slocombe may not carve up his kin for Cold Turkey, but he serves a wry repast.

The movie hums along with a kind of sublime craftsmanship, fueled by the consistent performances of Hackman and Hoffman (in their first film together), the remarkable ease of John Cusack (the most relaxed and natural of actors since Robert Mitchum), and the juicy typecasting in the supporting roles.

A film that unfolds like a court case in which all of the testimony sounds like the simple truth, and none of it agrees.

The movie is bright, the dialogue has wit and intelligence, and Roberts and Grant are very easy to like. By the end, as much as we're aware of the ancient story machinery groaning away below deck, we're smiling.

I wouldn't go so far as to claim Manderlay is fun to watch. Von Trier, who can made compulsively watchable films ("Breaking the Waves"), has found a style that will alienate most audiences. Maybe it's necessary.

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.

To describe the plot is to miss the point. Fallen Angels takes the materials of the plot -- the characters and what they do -- and assembles them like a photo montage. At the end, you have impressions, not conclusions.

I've seen so many thrillers that, frankly, I don't always care how they turn out — unless they're really well-crafted. What I like about Eyewitness is that, although it does care how it turns out, it cares even more about the texture of the scenes leading to the denouement.

There is one surprise in the movie, a decision having nothing to do with the reactor, that depends entirely on the ability of the characters to act convincingly under enormous pressure; casting stars of roughly equal weight helps it to work.

Working Girls is not a slick and dramatic movie. There are moments that seem forced and amateurish, and the over-all structure of the story is fairly predictable. What the movie does have, though, is the feeling of real life being observed accurately.

Logan's Run is a vast, silly extravaganza that delivers a certain amount of fun, once it stops taking itself seriously.

With the cinematography by Bruce Francis Cole capturing the mid-2000s Florida setting and the score from Este Haim and Christopher Stracey helping to set the right mood, “Suncoast” eschews heavy-handed messaging about whether one is really and truly alive when one cannot survive on their own in favor of a quietly moving, occasionally surprising and ultimately lovely and thought-provoking work.

The chaos in Kika is so brilliantly orchestrated, and so gamely acted, you can't help being drawn into it. There is, truly, never a dull moment. And, in patented Almodovar fashion, the bold, kitschy colors of the costumes and settings, provide their own charm. [27 May 1994, p.43]

This is a sentimental, utterly predictable and thoroughly charming confection from Jack C. Newell (head of TV, film & digital for Second City), featuring a myriad of gifted local actors delivering warm and witty performances against the backdrop of wintry locales that look like the inside of a snow globe.