Some of the film's more thought-provoking scenes involves games played at Chicago's Near North Elementary. The players are obviously emulating pro games they've seen on TV. It's not a "game" for them. They go for hard hits.

By the end of the film, you admire the artistry and the care, you know that the actors worked hard and are grateful for their labors, but you wonder who in God's name thought this was a promising scenario for a movie. It's not a story, it's an idea.

A handsome and sometimes harrowing film, and will be completely unintelligible for anyone coming to the series for the first time.

The movie version of Garp, however, left me entertained but unmoved, and perhaps the movie's basic failing is that it did not inspire me to walk out on it. Something has to be wrong with a film that can take material as intractable as Garp and make it palatable.

Ask the Dust requires an audience with a special love for film noir, with a feeling for the loneliness and misery of the writer.

Look Who's Talking is full of good feeling, and director Amy Heckerling finds a light touch for her lightweight material.

Just as Whannell breathed new life into the story of “The Invisible Man” in 2020, he offers a fresh and grotesquely chilling take on the well-trodden storyline of the man who becomes ... something else.

Directed and co-written by Shawn Snyder, To Dust is a dark but not bleak comedy, an oddly effective love story and also a classic buddy movie, albeit presented within a framework I don’t we’ve ever seen before in the genre. It’s also lovely and offbeat and kind of wonderful.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, doesn't make level one thrillers, and his characters may be smarter than us, or dumber. It's never just about the plot, anyway. It has to do with random accidents, dangerous coincidences, miscalculations, simple mistakes. And the motives are never simple.

The characters in Girls Trip aren’t always three-dimensional and their actions aren’t always completely believable — but even in their worst moments, their humanity shines through and they are consistently likable.

Michael Dorman (virtually unrecognizable and about 40 pounds lighter than when he played Gordo Stevens in the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind) channels James-Dean-meets-Stephen-Dorff in a mesmerizingly good performance as Jesse, a charming bounder who has a good heart and some talent as a singer-songwriter but is always getting in his own way and stepping in some serious, um, stuff.

And So It Goes is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. The pleasure comes from experiencing the fine performances and semi-frequent smile-inducing dialogue, bolstered in no small fashion by the wonderful comedic timing of Michael Douglas and Diane Keaton.

This is a film so sweet it might give you a contact sugar rush, but it features two inherently likable, great-looking romantic leads, a fine supporting performance by the always reliable Virginia Madsen, a timeless true-meaning-of-Christmas message — and a genuinely cinematic style, mostly because the movie was actually filmed on Andrews Air Force base in Guam and the surrounding beaches and jungles and islands.

The scenes between the old man and the teenager are at the heart of the movie, and it's a pleasure to watch the rapport between Connery, in his 50th year of acting, and Brown, in his first role.

No Man's Land is better than the average thriller because it is interested in those moral questions - in the way money and beautiful women and fast cars look more exciting than good police work.

The facts in the film are slippery, but the revelation of a human personality is surprisingly moving.

What you remember most are the shots of Baker roaming around Santa Monica, Calif., in what feels like endless late-afternoon sun, or riding at night in the back of a convertible with a woman on each arm.

You know all those sports documentaries about fallen heroes who had enormous talent but squandered it away through a combination of bad breaks and bad decisions, injuries and/or snorting enough cocaine to fill a first-base line? “Facing Nolan” is the antithesis of those cautionary tales, in that Ryan was a straight shooter on and off the field.

Although it seems to borrow the pattern of the traditional boxing movie, the boxer here is not the usual self-destructive character, but the center of maturity and balance in a community in turmoil.

This is a rousing and satisfying actioner that occasionally gets bogged down in complicated exposition but presents some intriguing twists on time-honored themes about the double-edged sword of immortality.

Although the actors are convincing and the film well-crafted, The Company Men delivers few satisfactory character portraits because the movie isn't really about characters, it's about economic units.

The film is funny, energetic, teeth-gnashingly venomous and animated with an eye to exploiting the 3-D process with such sure-fire techniques as a visit to an amusement park. The sad thing, I am forced to report, is that the 3-D process produces a picture more dim than it should be.

McFarlane goes as goofy as you’d expect, but there’s a fairly soft and traditional center lurking inside this hard-R candy.

Even if you’re never seen the first two “A Quiet Place” films (though we highly recommend that you do), “Day One” writer-director Michael Samoski, working from a story he conceived with John Krasinski, delivers a compelling and at time surprisingly poetic and melancholy survival story, with the brilliant Lupita Nyong’o carrying the film every quiet step of the way.

The climactic scenes when all hell breaks loose are gripping and enthralling, and in the midst of all the blood, sweat and tears, Joel Kinnaman is kicking ass and taking names in true action movie-star fashion.

The Great Waldo Pepper is a film of charm and excitement, a sort of bittersweet farewell to a time when a man with an airplane could make a living taking the citizens of Nebraska on their first fiveminute flights.

The movie is so gloriously bloody-minded, so perverse in its obstinacy, that it rises to a kind of mad purity. The longer the movie ran, the less I liked it and the more I admired it.

Claire Denis, born in French Africa, is a director who seems drawn to stories about characters who want to build families out of unconventional elements. With Nenette et Boni, she makes a more delicate film. She feels affection for the characters, especially Boni, and is very familiar with them. Maybe that's why she feels free to tell the story so indirectly.