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

Despite a couple of large, genie-blue stumbles along the way, Guy Ritchie’s live-action version of Disney’s Aladdin is on balance a colorful and lively adventure suitable for all ages and a touching romance featuring two attractive leads — and has enough creative musical energy to introduce this story to A. Whole. New. World.

Killing Gunther is filled with explosive action. As a director, Killam displays a veteran’s knack for shooting the shootouts and fisticuffs, nearly all of it carried out in slapstick, nearly “Three Stooges”-level comedic fashion.

It's a bludgeon movie with little respect for the audience's intelligence, and simply pounds us over the head with violence whenever there threatens to be a lull. Anyone can make a movie like this.

Coscarelli knows how to exploit horror/sci-fi tropes and adeptly meld a practical effect with a well-timed gag. Many could depict a man's disembodied moustache with the right degree of farcicality, but few can imbue it with such an oddball credibility.

Thanks to the stylish directing by Everardo Valerio Gout, a tight screenplay from series creator James DeMonaco and a terrific ensemble cast that elevates the material, The Forever Purge is a fast-paced jam that would play well on a drive-in movie screen. Take the whole thing with a big tub of popcorn and many grains of salt.

Despite the undeniable importance of this story and the obvious passion of those involved in telling it, Emancipation is more than anything a relatively standard-issue, period-piece action film — and that’s a shame, because we see glimpses of how it could have been something much more than that.

This empty parody of "coming of age in the 'hood" movies is short on storyline, originality and legitimate laughs. [15 Jan 1996, p.30]

This is a movie for those who sometimes, in the stillness of the sleepless night, are so filled with hope and longing that they feel like -- well, like uttering wild goat cries to the moon. You know who you are.

The movie seemed the stuff of anecdote, not drama, and as the alleged protagonist, Luca/Franco is too young much of the time to play more than a bystander's role.

A musical and a biography, and brings to both of those genres a worldly sophistication that is rare in the movies.

The peculiar quality of Vanity Fair, which sets it aside from the Austen adaptations such as "Sense and Sensibility" and "Pride and Prejudice," is that it's not about very nice people. That makes them much more interesting.

Parables are stories about other people that help us live our own lives. The problem with the French film Ricky is that the lesson of the parable is far from clear, and nobody is likely to encounter this situation in his own life.

Following the tradition governing such movies, the story eventually comes to a moral decision at which a bad boy has to decide whether to become a good man -- and that's too bad, because until the movie turns predictable, it is very, very good. The acting, the direction and the sense of place in Bad Boys is so strong that the movie deserves more than an obligatory right scene for its conclusion.

We know we’re being manipulated from time to time, but the messaging is so earnest and the performances are so heartfelt, we’re willing to go with it. Call it a Comfort Movie.

If the movie is a moral labyrinth, it is paradoxically straightforward and powerful in the moment; each individual story has an authenticity and impact of its own.

The cast is wonderful, the laughs are frequent, and the ending is truly touching.

It's a shaggy ghost story, an exercise in style, a film made with a certain breezy contempt for audiences.

This is dicey material for a screwball comedy, even one with dark undertones, and despite the best efforts of the ensemble, She Came to Me drifts further and further away from anything approaching reality or relatability. Nearly every major character in this film is exhausting to be around and/or thinly drawn.

Narrow Margin is a clumsy version of the Idiot Plot, dressed up as a high-gloss chase thriller. The Idiot Plot, of course, is any plot that would be resolved in five minutes if everyone in the story were not an idiot. And rarely has there been a film in which more idiots make more mistakes than in this one.

Intended as a farce, but lacks farcical insanity and settles for being a sitcom, not a very good one.

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.

In Flag Day, Sean Penn directs himself for the first time and has cast Dylan Penn, his daughter with Robin Wright, as the lead — and the two are absolutely mesmerizing together, beautifully capturing the enormously complicated dynamic between a con man of a father who rolls out of bed with a fresh set of lies ready to go every morning, and an emotionally broken and bruised daughter who knows her dad is a walking bundle of disappointment but wants to believe that this time — this one time — he really has changed.

It's a strong, intelligent performance [by Gibson], filled with life, and it makes this into a surprisingly robust Hamlet.

The performances are spot on, and I especially like the spunky Gyllenhaal, who with this film and the underrated "Secretary" (2002), has built up a nice sideline in sexual exploration.

The movie is wonderfully entertaining, red-blooded and rousing, and with a production design that makes it uncommonly handsome.

This is a rip-snorting adventure fantasy for families, especially the younger members who are not insistent on continuity. Director Michael Apted may be too good for this material, but he attacks with gusto.

Based on the novel of the same name by M.T. Anderson, the third effort from the talented Finley (“Thoroughbreds,” “Bad Education”) features some impressively staged sequences and terrific performances, but awkwardly straddles the fence between biting social commentary and dark humor, never quite finding its footing and ending on a curiously flat note.