Really two movies: a taut, terrific, realistic crime drama, and, by the end, an over-the top, high-tech extravaganza which tries to out-Woo John Woo and turn Cruise into another Terminator.

Alden Ehrenreich resembles a young, somewhat graver Robert Wagner, though he’s a better actor than the young Robert Wagner was. Ehrenreich’s contained, methodical brand of swagger matches up pretty well with the Han Solo we know from the ’77-’83 Harrison Ford edition.

The acting's very strong throughout, though few would argue that the final half-hour satisfies either as suspense, or narrative, or social observation.

The film manages to crack all its codes, and even when it sags a bit, it's never lacking grace and some wit. Not enigmatically at all, it pleases and teases us -- in high style.

Among the finest hours of horror star Boris Karloff. [18 Oct 2005, p.C3]

The movie delivers on its own terms. It may emerge a bit bruised and tattered around the edges, but its ever-beating heart provides the ultimate Proof of Life.

A classic adventure movie. [07 Mar 2008, p.C8]

I liked the movie mainly for Barrymore. The way she handles the crucial, early "I love you" moment (he's saying it to her, and the camera shows us what she's thinking), you think: This is one canny actress.

The definitive Sunday ride/Sunday race motorcycle film. Released in 1971 by famed surf documentary pioneer Bruce Brown, it showed the broad expanse of the motorcycling experience in the America of that time, from serious racers to enthusiasts such as movie star Steve McQueen. [07 Nov 2014, p.C6]

But if Brooks doesn't get the sting of reality he's looking for in Life Stinks, he does succeed with the film's fantasy elements-most memorably, a dance sequence set to Cole Porter's Easy to Love and performed by Warren and Brooks in a colorful used-clothing warehouse.

When a new actor slips on the Spandex for a superhero franchise reboot, we should, you know, notice. And we do with Andrew Garfield.

In other words, nothing much held me back from enjoying writer-director Stephen Merchant’s engaging, charismatically acted underdog fable.

It lays the groundwork for such collaborations by suggesting that all forms of music must come full circle before evolving into something new.

The stirring, somewhat too earnest story of a white newspaper editor in racist South Africa who rallied to defend black activist Steve Biko, who was beaten to death in jail in 1977. The film is weighted to the story of the editor (Kevin Kline)-his education about Biko, his subsequent determination to spread the word of the widespread bigotry in South Africa and his adventure story of his family fleeing their native land before they were all jailed for treason. Directed by Richard Attenborough (Gandhi) in the same noble, yet effective manner. [06 Nov 1987, p.41]

The structural sibling to Paul Haggis' race relations opus ("Crash"), but beyond the similarly interwoven vignettes, it's a different animal altogether: messier, more complicated and ultimately more interesting.

The outline of Murder by Numbers may be familiar, but the filmmakers and Bullock do an expert job of filling in the colors.

Despite its many charms, the title of the film -- both complaint and boast -- makes clear whose point of view this is. Gainsbourg is delightful, intelligent and sexy, but this isn't her film.

What a relief! John Hughes has decided to quit being the patron saint of sniveling teens and to turn his sympathetic gaze on sniveling adults.

So it's a bit squishy at the center. But the film is sleek, purposeful and extremely well acted.

For 40 minutes or so it's really good, in fact, as lovely and daft as the stop-motion animated W&G shorts that preceded it.

Haunts the conscience, troubles the spirit.

Gleeson carries the film with wonderful, natural authority. He's a little better than the movie itself, which is glib to a fault.

The key to this 1956 bio-pic is the sumptuous cinematography and art direction, which is to be expected from the man who gave us "An American in Paris" and "Gigi." [23 Nov 2001, p.C11]

Against all odds this "Terminator" deserves to be welcomed back.

Contrivances come, and go, but The Ballad of Wallis Island rolls along, with just enough casual wit to buoy the story.

Schroeder brings a decidedly un-Hollywood approach to the material, which is both the source of the film's greatest aesthetic strength (it is unusually attentive to questions of character and form) and most crippling commercial weakness. American audiences, used to nonstop action, will probably grow impatient with Schroeder's slow, nuanced approach.

It’s probably best to call it after this one. But I remain astonished at the rewatchability of these “Trip to” films.

Pugh excels throughout. The movie works best, I think, as a black-comic treatise on what can befall a garden-variety passive-aggressive mixed blessing of a boyfriend if he’s not careful.

Its devotion to the untamed territory of the human heart, its artfully discombobulating time and locale shifts, the shifting personae handled with marvelous fluidity by Seydoux; it takes you somewhere, and more than one somewhere.

Die-hard devotees of “The Crown” likely won’t like the taste of ashes swirling around in all that’s served here. But there’s more than one way to dramatize the public/private schisms of celebrity, and this way feels right for this director, this actress and this movie.

A gloriously giddy movie about theater, love and artifice, an unabashed art film.

It's a warmly realistic comedy-drama that pulls you right into its lively, well-drawn L.A. milieu.

The surprise here isn't that 15 Minutes isn't a masterpiece; it's that the movie works at all.

Broken Arrow is much better than the average big-time action movie because Woo has blazing style and a unique, even eccentric viewpoint. [9 Feb 1996, p.C]

What is undeniably good about Rocky V is that our working-class hero returns to the grimy neighborhood from which he sprang. Seeing a more slender, "street" Rocky is a refreshing change of pace from the muscle-bound champ of Parts 3 and 4. [16 Nov 1990, p.C]

The film doesn't so much build as glide, in a pleasing, half-stumbling way, to the first day of school, which links Everybody Wants Some!! to Linklater's previous film, the gentle masterwork "Boyhood."

Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.

The gall of Peter and Bobby Farrelly. To think that a romantic comedy might work absent a sleazy wager or maddening miscommunication takes a lot of chutzpah.

You may buy the ending or not. The filmmakers certainly do, which helps. And the film is modest but skillful and heartfelt, spiced just so by Plaza and company.

Bradley’s film is a lyrical documentary, a piece that feels like a poem or a prayer, an almost meditative experience, set to a plaintive piano score.

While the film is roughly half grit and half sugar, it works because Smith sticks to a tougher, more rewarding recipe of 99.9 percent grit and only .1 percent sugar.

Boasts the elements of something greater than a love story. Too bad it devotes them to something less than a great love story. [22 November 1996, Friday, p.A]

Millennium is a throwback to 1950s, B-grade science fiction movies in which the love story and the concepts had to cover for special effects that weren't too special. [30 Aug 1989, p.3C]

After playing one too many sullen poseurs it’s clear Colin Farrell and Ralph Fiennes had a ball making an inky black comedy seething with grandiose invective.

The Last Days, despite its great subject, is not quite a great non-fiction film. It's too reserved and careful in tone to reach the heights of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. [12 Feb 1999, p.I]

Addams Family Values is another big opportunistic, pre-marketed studio show, but it has laughs, flair. At its best, it's a valentine of venom, sent with mirth and malice aforethought.

The film's greatest moments take place in space. There, words are unnecessary, the images transfixing.

At times Tomorrowland plays like such a throwback to those sweetly naive, low-rent, live-action Disney matinees of the '60s and '70s, George Clooney is like a Fred MacMurray with gravitas, gruff and grizzle, predictably warming up to a young dreamer (a terrific Britt Robertson) of cheer and vision.

Horror films often offer catharsis, but rarely are they also as deeply sorrowful as Keith Thomas’s The Vigil, a horror film based in Jewish faith and culture.

It’s a history lesson, a look at ’60s strife inside a corner far removed from our more familiar American images of that era. It’s also brightly performed, from sullen, boorish, yet charismatic Scamarcio to the instinctive, charming, infuriating characterization by Germano.

May be the most fascinating, richly accomplished screw-up you'll see all year. Von Trier, who has always had a talent for provocation, nails another heroine to the cross while playing his role to the hilt - a moviemaking rebel in his own dog days.

What happens, when it happens, is … well, either enough or too much, depending on your taste for the fantastic.

Still, it's a pleasant surprise about an unpleasant guy brought to life by an ingratiating paradox, a movie star who has turned into a wily character man.

Inspirational biographical movie that really works.

McCarthy is following well-established story grooves here, but scene to scene, he allows the dialogue to breathe and reveal bits of character along with the more expedient bits of plot advancement.

An absorbing story. Even though it takes you to places you may not want to go, the film never loses its human touch--that feel of skin on skin or of the past inescapably invading the present.

In the past few years, we've seen or heard every teenage joke at least twice. What we haven't seen much of is a little teenage tenderness, the kind that we find in the concluding scenes of The Sure Thing. [1 Mar 1985, p.FN]

What the movie occasionally lacks is dramatic juice. A reader of the novel will have a greater sense of the obstacles keeping Lily and Lawrence apart than fresh viewers of the movie will.

The film, both light-hearted and serious, suggests that freedom comes more easily within restrictions--and that's true of Albou's approach as well.

Director John Landis' comic timing is a little slow in spots - we get the joke before he thinks we will - but Oscar generates a solid pace of rolling big laughs and winds up as a pretty good time at the movies. [26 Apr 1991, p.C]

More of a physical achievement in moviemaking than a piece of storytelling, but I do recommend it on that basis. [15 January 1999, Friday, p.A]

After Dark, My Sweet does capture Thompson's characteristic mood - a sort of lurid fatality, where moral questions have long since dropped out and there isn't much use struggling - but it doesn't have much of his distinctive, disruptive texture. The film is much too smooth for that, much too professional and much too carefully executed. [24 Aug 1990, p.H]

The film struggles to capture what Hudson’s personality was like in private. Nor does it talk about his drinking, which reportedly became an issue later in life. But it’s a terrific portrait of how Hollywood once functioned — and the artifice of it all.

Good, expensive, easygoing fun. It's no masterpiece, but why should Soderbergh -- or anybody -- get three in a row?

Though the characters played by Martin and Hawn - a lonely architect and the confidence woman who moves into his country home, claiming to be his wife after a one-night stand - don't have much inside them but sawdust, their surface reactions are entertaining and engaging enough to make Housesitter a winning romantic comedy. [12 June 1992, p.C]

Lewis Milestone preserves more of the original play than Hawks in His Girl Friday, but it's a much thinner movie: more mechanical, less chilling or ripe in its cynicism, the pace less nimble and charged. Still, the dialogue is gritty, magical, top-flight. Modern screenwriters, see this and weep. [25 Jul 1999, p.43C]

I can't help but wish this new Far From the Madding Crowd came with the thrill of interpretive discovery, the way Jane Campion gave Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady" a good shaking-up or, more conventionally, the way James Ivory mainstreamed E.M. Forester in "A Room With a View" and "Howards End."

I hope Spacek gets a role as spacious and accommodating as Redford’s someday. By contrast, Spacek’s co-star delivers what he has been best at: a single, careful look, or mood, or understated note at a time. Redford is not a chord man. I wouldn’t call the film itself complex, but it’s sweet-natured.

Martin Lawrence and Ashton Kutcher may seem like an odd-sounding comedy team, but in some weird way, they click as voice-actors and cartoon buddies in Open Season.

One of the more intelligent, better-made new movies around right now, but, despite everything, it doesn't really connect with the nerves and heart. It's a romance without anguish, although the pain of love is really what it's all about.

Nick Kroll is shrewdly cast as the Lovings' ACLU lawyer, green but enthusiastic; my favorite of the supporting turns comes from Sharon Blackwood, as Richard's rock-solid midwife mother.

Neil Burger's sharply conceived, inventive movie is a highly involving piece of work.

Blast is as bleak as noir gets, packed with black-and-white images of '60s New York City that recall Jean-Pierre Melville's French thrillers, and a street-tough taste that suggests Cassavetes and points ahead to Scorsese. [29 Oct 2004, p.C2]

Instead of a modern classic, able to travel the globe with ease, Il Divo is merely a wonderfully cast, tonally assured achievement, with a uniquely strange tour de force at its core.

Sharp, well-acted film.

A smart, witty, sexy take on the perils of becoming an adult.

There’s nothing vague about the narrative of The Killing of a Sacred Deer. Its strangeness is crystal clear. It plays out in ways both sardonically funny and extremely cruel.

If you're looking for a rock star to carry a movie mostly by himself, though, Iggy (aka James Osterberg), now 69, is a good candidate.

The late '40s world Coppola has put together for Tucker is an extremely stylized one: Vittorio Storaro's cinematography has the bright, hard, almost lacquered look of old Technicolor; Dean Tavoularis' sets, built with slanting floors and surfaces, create an imaginary, compacted space in which actors and objects seem to be thrusting out toward the camera; and the transitions between scenes, based on visual rhymes and elaborate wipes, effectively remove the movie from the orderly flow of normal film time. [12 Aug 1988]

It's a good ol' boy version of "Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?," but whereas that classic had four characters in direct conflict, "Fool for Love" essentially is a two-character duel to the quick.

When Aimee and Jaguar gets on one of its frequent rolls, it can evoke memories of Bertolucci or even De Sica.

Luckily, Wilde has style to spare -- as well as the perfect player to impersonate the flamboyant Irish writer: actor-writer Stephen Fry. [12 Jun 1998, p.H]

It's Complicated isn’t: It’s pretty simple. It’s simply a good time.

It's not Maddin's best work -- it may even be the least of his four features to date -- but there's something mesmerizing about it all the same, a quality of perverse wit and unbuttoned imagination you see too rarely.

Has the literary richness, depth of character and tone that such a morally difficult, powerful narrative requires.

The interview sessions are all disastrous in one way or another; Let It Rain is at its wittiest when Michel flails around, grousing about his own divorce and child custody troubles without ever quite asking his interview subject an actual question

Factotum, starring Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor in two of their best film performances, is a good movie about the L.A. underbelly, as recalled by an expert: Charles Bukowski.

Evil Dead 2 is, pardon the expression, consistently lively--a ghoulish splatter comedy that uses wildly excessive gore to provoke the kind of shock that lies between a laugh and a scream. [10 Apr 1987, Friday, p.M]

Ladron plays like a telenovela without the melodrama. The characters are brightly drawn archetypes, and the humor's very broad. But the tone is nice and brash.

Whatever the numbers, testimony cited in Nanking portrays the episode as a horrifying chapter in man’s renowned inhumanity to man.

The film sags in the middle section, and it's more a novelty item than a fully formed work . But it's very entertaining. And Van Damme proves himself a brave, possibly foolhardy actor, which is more than Steven Seagal ever did.

The film isn't much as cinema, but it doesn't really matter. The final half-hour, in particular, generates the sort of suspense you rarely get in a sports documentary.

Twohy pulls all the strings to create an inventive genre piece.

John Travolta stars as a Texas construction worker who spends his nights chasing a woman and the cowboy myth in a huge honky-tonk bar. Debra Winger is a standout as the object of Travolta's anger and affections. [11 July 1980, p.8]

Hartigan has a knack for sensitive, human dramas, and while Little Fish takes place in a near-future heightened reality, the story is relatable not only because we’re all living through a pandemic ourselves, dealing with grief and loss on a scale that ranges from the deeply personal to the impossibly large, but because this kind of loss is also very real.

In film circles there's a name for pictures like Lifeforce. Film Comment magazine has dubbed them guilty pleasures, movies you're embarrassed to admit you like. Maybe somebody spiked my popcorn, but I can't deny that I liked Lifeforce.

The latest film version loosely adapting the Wells story exploits it both ways, subtly and crassly. It works, thanks largely to a riveting and fearsomely committed Elisabeth Moss mining writer-director Leigh Whannell’s stalker scenario for all sorts of psychological nuance.

Captures the complex dynamic of a mentoring relationship like few movies before it.