A carnival geek show elevated in the direction of art. It never quite gets there, but it tries with every fiber of its craft to redeem its pulp origins, and we must give it credit for the courage of its depravity.

The movie's shot in black and white; Allen is one of the rare and valuable directors who sometimes insists in working in the format that is the soul of cinema.

Passes the time pleasantly and has a few good laughs.

It isn't a masterpiece, but it is a good-hearted, sweet comedy, featuring an overland chase that isn't original but sure is energetic.

Dark Places does its best to stir a multitude of emotions within us, but in doing so, the film feels contrived and hurried.

All of this could have been nice and juicy if Walter Hill had done a few more things with his screenplay, such as made the characters into people.

Stretched over 135 minutes and overloaded with shout-to-the-rafters confrontations, Her Smell has too much talking and squawking, and not enough rocking and rolling.

While Gun’s story is certainly worth telling and this is a well-intentioned, solid film with fine work from Knightley, Official Secrets is too heavy-handed and drab, and falls far short of procedural thrillers such as “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight” and “The Post” or broadly entertaining whistleblower stories such as “Erin Brockovich.”

In its clumsy way, it throws in comments now and then to show it knows the difference between Arab terrorists and American citizens.

The movie breaks down into anecdotes that don't flow or build, and everything is narrated by the Gilot character.

The Family Plan exists in a world that defies all logic and reality. Granted, this is an over-the-top comedy, and yes, there are a few dark laughs, but this is basically a live-action cartoon with a deadly premise.

Green Lantern does not intend to be plausible. It intends to be a sound-and-light show, assaulting the audience with sensational special effects. If that's what you want, that's what you get.

This is the kind of movie you happen across on TV, and linger to watch out of curiosity, but its inspired moments serve only to point out how routine, and occasionally how slow and wordy, the rest of it is.

It drifts above the surface of its natural subjects, content to be a genre picture. We're always aware of the formula--and in a picture based on real life, we shouldn't be.

This movie will no doubt be pitched to the same audiences that loved "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel." It even brings Maggie Smith along. But it lacks that film's life, intelligence and spirit. It has a good heart. I'll give it that. Maybe what it needs is more exotic marigolds.

Sex Is Comedy is not sure what it's really about, or how to get there; the director is seen as flighty and impulsive, the situations seem like set-ups, and we never know what the Actor and Actress are really thinking -- or if thinking has anything to do with it.

Every character in the Netflix teenage rom-com “Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between” is just so nice that we wish them all well, but we’re not fully convinced there’s enough here for an actual movie.

An enjoyable film, and yet it left me somehow unsatisfied...there is too much contrivance in the way [Austen] dispatches her men to London when she is done with them.

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

Seven Years in Tibet is an ambitious and beautiful movie with much to interest the patient viewer, but it makes the common mistake of many films about travelers and explorers: It is more concerned with their adventures than with what they discover.

Sandra Bullock has starred in only seven films in the last decade, and along with Gravity in 2013, her two most intriguing roles by far have been courtesy of the streaming giant Netflix: first with the smash hit horror film Bird Box (2018) and now with The Unforgivable, which has prestige credentials, a brilliant, A-list cast and a few moments of near-greatness, but is ultimately a disappointing and frustrating viewing experience due mostly to script and editing problems.

It's fast-footed and fun. "Rugrats in Paris" had charms for grownups, however, Recess: School's Out seems aimed more directly at grade-schoolers.

The Thing is basically just a geek show, a gross-out movie in which teenagers can dare one another to watch the screen. There's nothing wrong with that; I like being scared and I was scared by many scenes in The Thing. But it seems clear that Carpenter made his choice early on to concentrate on the special effects and the technology and to allow the story and people to become secondary.

As dopey as some of the flashbacks to MacLeod's early days are, they feature some spectacular shots of Scotland. It's best to just gawk at the visuals rather than concentrate on the story, however. The plot barely exists. [29 Jan 1995, p.58]

Pleasant and well-acted and easy to watch.

It aims straight for our hearts, sometimes hitting the target, especially in some of the quieter scenes with Conor and his mother. But then the preachy tree rears its thorny head, and it keeps on talking and explaining, long after we get it, we get it, we get it.

There were moments in Stand and Deliver that moved me very deeply and other moments so artificial and contrived that I wanted to edit them out, right then and there. The result is a film that makes a brave, bold statement about an unexpected subject, but that lacks the full emotional power it really should have.

It's not enough to like such films because they're "so bad they're good." You need to specialize, and like the films because they're so good about being so bad they're good. Modus Operandi, a film by Frankie Latina that has won praise on the midnight movie festival circuit, is such a film.