Here is a film about African Americans that sidesteps all the usual, hopeful cliches and comments on how one failed generation raises another.

[Del Toro] carries this sometimes convoluted and derivative thriller into three-star territory with an absolutely mesmerizing and authentic performance that conjures up memories of past anti-hero greats such as Bogart and Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Sterling Hayden. It’s authentic, grounded, stunning work.

The moral reasoning in the film is so confusing that only by completely sidestepping it can the plot work at all.

If you want to see a solid movie about Bundy as mostly experienced through the viewpoint of the single mother who fell in love with him without knowing he was a murderer, check out the Netflix feature film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Vile and Evil.

Malice is one of the busiest movies I've ever seen, a film jampacked with characters and incidents and blind alleys and red herrings. Offhand, this is the only movie I can recall in which an entire subplot about a serial killer is thrown in simply for atmosphere.

Feels a little uncertain, as if it's moving from present to past under the demands of a screenplay rather than because it really feels that way. But the growing-up stuff is kind of wonderful.

No better or worse than the movies that inspired it, but that is a compliment, I think.

Ruffalo plays the character with that elusive charm he also revealed in "You Can Count on Me."

Never quite lifts off. The elements are here, but not the magic.

Whoopi Goldberg is the only original or interesting thing about Jumpin' Jack Flash. And she tries, but she's not enough.

The mother-daughter dynamic in Four Good Days is powerful and lasting and devastating and maybe the thing that will help Molly save her life.

It considers, or pretends to consider, some of the most basic questions of human morality and treats them on the level of "Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Old Convent."

Casting can be the reason that one movie works and another doesn't. It is the first reason for the success of The Girl From Monaco, the kind of romantic comedy with a twist that used to star Jack Lemmon.

A sweet but inconsequential romantic comedy.

The chemistry between Rockwell and Kendrick drives the movie. They’re fast and wonderful together. But Mr. Right has an abundance of strong supporting performances as well.

Even though it is quite likely the longest romance in movie history in terms of the time period covered, the one-point premise is stretched washi paper-thin over the course of just 92 minutes.

The photography is undeniably beautiful, but there comes a point when we've had too many mountains and too little plot. All that holds the movie together is the screen persona of Eastwood, who is so convincingly tight-lipped that sometimes you have the feeling he knows what's going on and just won't tell.

Three Days of Rain is only a sketch compared to the power of Rodrigo Garcia's "Nine Lives," which continues to grow in my memory.

Even the world-class cast can’t save this one from teetering into the abyss.

The result is that we feel deliberately distanced from the film. It is not so much an exercise in style as an exercise in search of a style. The story doesn't involve us because we can't follow it, and we doubt if the characters can, either.

You can sense the difference between a movie that's a technical exercise ("Resident Evil") and one steamed in the dread cauldrons of the filmmaker's imagination.

The Mothman is singularly ineffective as a threat because it is only vaguely glimpsed, has no nature we can understand, doesn't operate under rules that the story can focus on, and seems to be involved in space-time shifts far beyond its presumed focus. There is also the problem that insects make unsatisfactory villains unless they are very big.

There’s just not enough gristle and gore on the bone of this story to make for a memorably haunting viewer experience.

Writer-director Nathalie Biancheri treats this potentially sensational material with sensitivity and empathy, though Wolf sometimes careens in the direction of a pure horror film and introduces some late elements that border on the grotesque and seem superfluous to the main story. Still, this is an involving and dark fairy tale, with great performances from MacKay and Depp.

As you’d expect, It’s a Wonderful Knife is filled with blood-spattered twists on holiday movie tropes. Unfortunately, there are few surprises and only a handful of genuine scares, and the film suffers from subpar lighting and occasionally clunky editing. It’s a “Knife” in need of some sharpening.

A Little Romance has been described as a movie about the way kids behave when adults aren't looking. I think it's quite the opposite: A movie about the way kids behave when adults are looking - and when adults are writing the dialog and directing the action, too. It gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm.

After all these years, the land of Zamunda is still the world capital of comedy.

I think more edge is needed, more reality about the racial situation at the time, more insight into how and why R&B and rock ’n’ roll actually did forever transform societies in America and the world.