A documentary that does the job it sets out to do. I wish it had tried for more. It is a competent TV sports doc, the sort you'd expect to see on ESPN. Unless you are a big fan of Senna or Formula One, I don't know why you'd want to pay first-run prices to see it.

Fatal Attraction is a spellbinding psychological thriller that could have been a great movie if the filmmakers had not thrown character and plausibility to the winds in the last minutes to give us their version of a grown-up "Friday the 13th."

The movie presents the surfaces of Obermaier's life but never lets us understand who she was.

Hitchcock liked typecasting, he said, because if an actor was right for a role, that made less work for the director in getting the audience to accept the character. Here the casting is so wrong that nothing quite works.

Begins rather awkwardly, but ends by making a statement that explains a great many things. One question left unasked: Why did we promise to defend Taiwan with nuclear weapons but refuse to recognize it as a sovereign nation?

Is this a good movie? Not exactly; too much of it is on automatic pilot, as it must be, to satisfy the fans of the original Shaft. Is it better than I expected? Yes.

It's got a unique . . . well, I was about to say charm, but the movie's last scene doesn't quite let me get away with that.

Queer is a good-looking film with moments of great promise that is much like Lee in that it wears out its welcome and tries your patience far too often.

The Two Popes is the kind of well-made but flawed release you can wait to catch on home video.

It's fun, it's slick and it's carefully put together, but it's more of an exercise than an accomplishment. Everyone does their schtick, the plot complications unfold like clockwork, but we find ourselves not really caring.

Who was this movie made for? Not for me, that's sure, but I have a hunch younger kids will find it satisfying.

Burton's made a film that's respectful to the original, and respectable in itself, but that's not enough. Ten years from now, it will be the 1968 version that people are still renting.

It's one of those movies where you smile and laugh and are reasonably entertained, but you get no sense of a mighty enterprise sweeping you along with its comedic force. There is not a movie here. Just scenes in search of one.

I liked it in the same way I might like an arcade game: It holds your attention until you run out of quarters, and then you wander away without giving it another thought.

Director April Mullen shoots Wander like a kinetic horror film, which results in some pretty cool sequences but also far too many quick-cut flashbacks to the deadly auto accident, which results in us feeling more annoyed and manipulated than intrigued.

Palo Alto is a well-directed but relatively slight, only occasionally provocative and unremittingly bleak slice of life.

The saving grace for this film is the group of young actors.

Although Sanctuary is stylish and initially intriguing, it’s eventually a real chore to spend an entire feature-length film (even with a relatively brief running time of 96 minutes) with two boors who are also kind of boring, despite all the histrionics and fang-baring and manipulative mind games. They find themselves and each other a lot more interesting than we do.

The central weakness of Cocoon: the Return is that the film lacks any compelling reason to exist. Yes, it is a heartwarming film.

The Last Starfighter is a well-made movie. The special effects are competent. The acting is good, and I enjoyed Robert Preston's fast-talking The Music Man reprise (we've got trouble, right here in the galaxy) and the gentle wit of Dan O'Herlihy's extraterrestrial. But the final spark was missing, the final burst of inspiration that might have pulled all these concepts and inspirations and retreads together into a good movie.

When you wind a plot up as tightly as this one, it runs along nicely for awhile, but then the last half-hour has to be spent simply resolving everything.

I found the idea of the plot more interesting than the plot itself, and am finding the movie more fun to write about than to see.

The Aristocrats might have made a nice short subject. At 87 minutes, it's like the boozy salesman who corners you with the Pinocchio torture.

We go expecting to be inspired and uplifted, and we leave somewhat satisfied in those areas, but with reluctant questions about how well the story has aged, and how relevant it is today.

Variable ratings: The Hand (4 stars), Equilibrium (3 stars), The Dangerous Thread of Things (1 star).

The biggest reason to see the Italian dramedy “Mia Madre” can be summed up in two words: John Turturro.

For all its predictability and averageness, Texas Chainsaw Massacre does have two fantastically executed shock scenes.

Doesn't quite click.