One of the strengths of The Illusionist: Everyone in it actually appears to be acting in the same era.

Drably shot, unimaginatively written and shallowly acted, it's a poor example of the "daffy, goofy, sex-crazed guys" occupational comedies that flourished throughout the job-obsessed '80s. [19 Feb 1999]

It's a horror movie for aficionados. But it's also for people who don't usually like horror movies at all, who regard them as cheap, crude and over-obvious.There's nothing cheap or crude in Pulse," a fine, shivery movie about the terror of solitude and emptiness.

The depiction of Havana neither sugarcoats nor grunges-up the harsh reality. The movement intoxicates, but the situations are tough.

Now, about the spider. Julia Roberts voices Charlotte in a way that suggests ... not much, I'm afraid. She may be a genuine movie star and can be a good actress, but her voice -- and what she does with it -- never has been one of her strengths.

It’s a lively and absorbing picture — intelligently sexy, tastefully salacious but serious enough to stick.

True to form, Guest's newest doesn't pull out the long knives. On the gentleness scale, this one's way over here, as opposed to the film of the moment, "Borat," which is way, way over there.

More than a female singing cowboy, Vargas was ranchera incarnate, whether singing the material of drinking companion Jose Alfredo Jimenez or her own cathartic cries from the heart. The film is a fond but clear-eyed tribute.

Brewer achieves near perfection in this tense, intimate meeting between two lifelong hustlers.

This is Hollywood expertise and Hollywood civic idealism at high levels.

Richard Jewell is a sincere and extremely well-acted irritant from 89-year-old director Clint Eastwood. It’s destined to get under the hides of different moviegoers in radically different ways.

The result is both engrossing and moving, a poem about a love that breaks barriers and passes understanding.

Liman packs enough firepower into The Bourne Identity to please the summer action fan, including a reshot climax that contains one of the niftier stunts I've seen recently. The centerpiece action sequence is a bravura car chase through Paris, yet the moments that bookend it are equally impressive.

While the movie's heroes lay everything on the line, Miracle is too content to skate along the surface.

The story is engrossing, full of thrills and humor, the period re-creation wondrous and the pace intoxicatingly brisk. And the actors are all so good and their parts so well-written that we're engaged emotionally as well.

In The Night House, narratively faulty but full of insinuating shivers, Hall once again expands her range. She intensifies what could’ve been just another woman with a flashlight in a haunted house movie, peering into the beyond.

Tangling reality and fiction into one impossible knot is at the core of this story, and the form follows that function.

A very Peckinpah-influenced film about the James Gang with four sets of real-life brothers playing the outlaw broods. [16 Jul 2004, p.C4]

"Popstar" is most comfortable with material that simply comes out of nowhere.

The actors are excellent. Rogen falls very comfortably into the role of a 29-year-old who has fallen very comfortably into a living thing - a marriage - and stopped working on it.

Everybody Knows finds Farhadi (working with longtime editor Hayedeh Safiyari) consciously going for quicker-than-usual cutting, rarely lingering over anything, always setting up the next part of the mystery. The acting’s uniformly strong, always at the service of a knotty story.

One of those sweet, intelligent, nicely made films.

It’s not quite an airball; you won’t find yourself returning to it again and again, either. But there’s a part of me that’s just happy to see non-blockbuster movies about human-scaled dilemmas still getting made.

A rich, vexing experience.

While parts of Thank You for Your Service work well, overall, the film is inconsistent.

The value of Romantico is that it lets us experience vicariously what Carmelo and others like him go through.

Archangel is a perfectly self-contained aesthetic object, maddening in its arbitrariness and opacity, yet wholly absorbing in its flurry of urgent yet incomprehensible significations.

The all-time great Stoller-Lieber title number, performed by The King in jailbird regalia, is just one highlight of this '50s rock-the-house classic. [04 Sep 1998, p.H]

A salute to those who were blessed not only with savvy and courage, but something between an uncanny sense of foresight and an unforeseen stroke of good fortune.

The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

It's a strange, fascinating exercise in what Joel Coen once described as "tone management," job No. 1 for any director.

Fletch is more than funny; it's funny and exciting.[31 May 1985, p.A]

F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something.

Somehow, An Inconvenient Sequel is empowering, not depressing.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

Favreau's masterly light touch as an actor hasn't yet translated to a similarly deft offhandedness behind the camera. The movie, slick and shallow, is fairly entertaining anyway.

The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.

A stylish remake of Michael Curtiz' shocker "Mystery of the Wax Museum"--about a museum-art gallery filled with wax-dipped murder victims, run by the fiendish Vincent Price. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

A pretty entertaining case against our current war and question the integrity of our president, but more than that, these docs manipulate imagery, music and sound bites to work their audiences into a frenzy.

There’s enough good humor and just a dash of vinegar to temper the tone from becoming too treacly or sentimental, though the triumphant moments are incredibly effective and moving.

The biggest surprise with On Golden Pond is that the best performance in the film is not turned in by a Fonda. Rather, it is Katharine Hepburn, in a performance without gimmicks or "great scenes," who communicates so much of the film's emotional power as a portrait of the serenity and anger associated with old age.

What Levinson has created here is a generic memory film, so vague in its particulars that virtually anyone's family experiences can be plugged into it. [19 Oct 1990, p.B]

While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."

It's fresh, funny, biting, fast-paced and reasonably perceptive about people and their problems.

At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.

For all these self-effacing but highly valuable reasons, when the triumphs of the human, agricultural and engineering spirits arrive, they work. It’s moving, and it’s earned. Ejiofor is off and running as a director.

Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.

Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.

If it has the edge over the 2018 and 2020 movies, the reason is simple though her talent certainly isn’t: Lupita Nyong’o.

Crime 101 overstays its welcome and is rife with bland story filler, but there’s no denying that it is handsomely made and rarely boring, offering the nominal pleasures of a good-looking serious adult crime drama, which is all too rare these days.

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson, and Jodi Foster star in a romantic triangle about some carnival sharpies and a runaway girl. A beautiful portrait of the carnival as an American institution. [18 July 1980, p.8]

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

Engaging, intelligent and enjoyable.

Finally, a word about John Candy, the Second City-trained performer who has worked with great success on the "SCTV" shows. Candy, the plump one of the troupe, is more than just a jolly fat man in "Stripes." He becomes one of Murray's allies, because his comic persona allows him to be as sharp-witted as the next man. This is a switch, because the fat man in a comedy usually is the butt of a lot of physical humor...The point is this: Candy deserves to star in his own movie. He's that funny.

As bittersweet farewells go, this one’s quite good.

A River Runs Through It emerges as hopelessly middle-brow-the kind of diluted, prettified art traditionally associated with PBS and the Academy Awards. [09 Oct 1992]

Moretti weaves us in and out of high seriousness, crazy satire or sarcasm, political commentary, melancholy reverie and goofball japes. And though Moretti lacks the cartoonish physical presence of a Benigni or a Nichetti (or a Woody Allen) his unextraordinary demeanor-tall, bespectacled, lightly athletic, trim-bearded-fools you again. [25 Nov 1994, p.L]

Typical of a pretty good Sayles movie. There are few, if any, heroes and villains.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

By the time Watanabe encounters a holy senile fool in the forest, the film has foregone contemporary urban “King Lear” territory for something a lot closer to the Lifetime Channel.

In Night on Earth, Jarmusch is painting with colors he has never used before. The transformation is thrilling.

What’s missing, I think, is a sense of human complication within an inhuman judicial sphere. While Foxx works wonders, especially in his scenes with Jordan, Just Mercy rarely gets under the skin or behind the eyes of McMillian.

It is a better, more fully felt and moving picture than "Blue Valentine."

It's funny, sympathetic, mostly smart, and it boasts a likable cast of characters led by two performers who have star power and know how to use it.

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]

It's a far better piece of animation than the dismal Oliver and Company of 1988 and last year's smartly conceived but indifferently executed Little Mermaid. Butoy and Gabriel obviously love their medium, the first Disney directors to do so in years.

These extremely attractive characters deserve a better finish. [8 May 1987, p.7-D]

It's fun, but not obvious fun.

There's also nothing here that has much to do with what makes Prior such a powerful artist. [2 Apr 1982, p.3-6]

By Lithgow's standards this is pretty low-keyed acting, but he may have played one too many blowhards in his recent career. His performance works, but it lacks surprise and, as written, he's a bit much.

Disappointing... Jack Nicholson parodies himself while Kubrick fails to provide any thrills. [11 July 1980, p.8]

All the "Star Wars" movies will continue to entertain us for many years to come. They were grand fun, and this last one's a corker.

The actors, remarkable and seasoned, take care of their end of things, stylishly and (when and where it can be arranged) truthfully.

It’s nicely packed and quite funny, when it isn’t giving into Gunn’s trademark air of merry depravity.

It is a film, often breathtaking without settling for being pretty, filled with nervous silence.

Effective dialogue doesn't necessarily mean witty dialogue, but wit certainly helps, and you tend not to get much of it in a low-key legal thriller. Fracture is an exception.

The acting is quite deft, if extremely broad, but screenwriter Kundo Koyama seesaws uncertainly between jokes and grief.

It's great fun, propelled by a terrific musical score by Roque Banos that combines the hammering doom of Bernard Herrmann, the antic jollity of Nino Rota and the urgent sprints of Lalo "Mission: Impossible" Schifrin--often in the same crazy scene.

Veber's early stage training serves him well both as an adapter (he wrote the "La Cage aux Folles" screenplay) and as a maker of originals though, truth be told, The Valet isn't especially original.

Fun to watch it may be, but it's shallow fun. Like the drugs and booze the characters keep using -- and even the sex -- it's a passing pleasure.

It's an entertaining picture, classy and well executed, but as much as any film I've seen recently, this lush new version of the 1969 Michael Caine thriller tends to prove that, where thrillers are concerned, "more" is often less.

Turns increasingly interior and emotionally complex. It refuses to connect, putting the pressure entirely on its viewers to reach their own conclusions.

The result: a swirling, kaleidoscopic take on a familiar concept, and a raucous, you-are-there atmosphere.

All four stories are worthwhile, though together they’re an awful lot for one modest doc to cover. Yu’s integration of cinematic and theatrical elements is uneven, and a bit stiff.

Given the complexity of attitudes and the ambiguous take on the family represented in such Spielberg films as “E.T.'' and “Poltergeist,'' the bland affirmations of Jurassic Park seem platitudinous and insincere. He's forcing it here, and it shows. [11 June 1993, Friday, p.A]

One part smart, one part stupid and three parts jokes about body parts, the extremely raunchy Neighbors is a strange success story.

Yet the film, no more than the novel, shouldn't be described as depressing. Both of them shine with heightened vision and poetics. [01 Nov 1996]

A bunch of scattered laughs. [22 June 1984, p.5-12]

Neither fish nor fowl, neither foul nor inspiring, director and co-writer Darren Aronofsky's strange and often rich new movie Noah has enough actual filmmaking to its name to deserve better handling than a plainly nervous Paramount Pictures has given it.

Rhythmically Crimes of the Future maintains a rigorous sense of calm throughout, which can get a little pokey in some scenes. But Mortensen, Seydoux and especially Stewart invest fully, so some of us, anyway, can too.

I suspect the Cage fans who will enjoy this movie won’t care if it’s fundamentally sloppy and lazy moviemaking. The star of the show is neither.

On the whole I’d rather watch a few more episodes of “Loki.” But Black Widow is pretty good Marvel, with an excellent cast, the usual generic third-act destruction and a bonus plot twist.

Barrymore’s direction is generous to a fault, and there are times when you wish Whip It simply moved faster, on and off the track. It succeeds because of the emotional rather than comic payoffs.

A visual delight and a dramatic letdown. [10 Jun 1990, p.4C]

An upbeat, thoroughly entertaining street film about an entertainment revolution in the depressed South Bronx, featuring break dancing, graffiti art and record mixing. A black and Puerto Rican version of Saturday Night Fever. [08 June 1984, p.12]

Trachtman says she made the film to illustrate the plight of disabled Americans who must contend with houses of worship that lack handicapped access, but her documentary itself isn’t always so sensitive.