As written, “Rustin” does a pretty good job of making the (re-)introductions. As acted, the movie transcends pretty-good.

This odd-couple angle is a terrific formula for a movie, creating at least three stories: The plight of each man, their joint effort to accomplish their goal and the changing dynamic of their relationship as the story progresses. As if that weren't enough, The Falcon and the Snowman also turns into a how-to movie with a fine sense of detail for the worlds of espionage and drugs. But towering over all of this--and even over the angry politics of the film--are two special performances by two extremely talented young actors.

There's a zest and brilliance in Neil Jordan's racy heist thriller The Good Thief that makes it almost intoxicating to watch.

Has the kind of super-cinematic qualities and bravura acting that make up for almost anything.

The movie’s an artfully sustained guessing game, tense and rarely dull. It’s also afflicted with a jokey, jaunty tone as deliberate as it is limiting.

It's worth seeing just for the banter between Segel and Hader, which recalls the peak conversational riffs from "Knocked Up."

It's a cool breeze of a comedy, with a slant on things that's dark but compassionate. Watching Bottle Rocket doesn't just make you laugh. It makes you smile between the laughs, think beneath the smiles.

As with most Cameron blockbusters, “The Way of Water” has a way of pulling you in, surrounding you with gorgeous, violent chaos and finishing with a quick rinse to get the remnants of its teeny-tiny plot out of your eyes by the final credits.

This is a terrific movie: jolting, savage, horrifically funny, nightmarishly exciting but also brainy and compassionate.

Green is a rare bird in American filmmaking: a humanist who knows how to tell a story.

It’s a comedy with a lot of very big laughs.

Though much of Naked Lunch is flip, hip and hilariously funny, it never wanders far from a profoundly melancholic undertone - Cronenberg's unshakable sense of loneliness, isolation and anxiety. [10 Jan 1992]

It's an intriguing premise, weakened by a script lacking in strong forward motion.

The moments between mother and son are some of the most intimate and moving of the film.

Even though the actors are good, their characters stay stock.

Ultimately, this talking dog don't hunt.

Like the work of an expert tailor, it's done with unobtrusive skill, essential warmth and seamless grace.

Aside from Henry, Gunn's cast is on a collective wavelength. Banks, whose perkiness carries a slightly demented edge, matches up well with Nathan Fillion, who plays the lovelorn police chief.

At Close Range is impeccably photographed, and its other technical credits are fine, too. But this excellence serves a dubious, confused cause, and on that basis the film cannot be recommended.

Writer-director Lisa Krueger displays some talent in creating the Mary Kay Place character; I expect more daring work from her next time. [30 Aug 1996, p.2]

Vox Lux is the sardonic yang to the sincere, heart-yanking yin of this season’s big awards fave, “A Star is Born.”

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.

A John Hughes-ish teen drama unaccountably complicated by politics and method acting.

It's a modest but highly enjoyable tribute.

There may be less than meets the eye here. But what meets the eye is pretty striking.

Russian Dolls, like "L'Auberge," has an excellent cast (mostly the same one, in fact) and an impish style and speed that gives it more obvious audience appeal than the average French film.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

What emerges is a far more accurate, complete and endearingly human portrait of Mozart than any documentary has ever painted.

Outrageous-plus, but often hilarious.

The Door in the Floor feels more about a situation than actual people. It's sensitively rendered, filled with those necessary evocative details, and it never rings true.

Lyne indulges in baroque touches-he is fond of open-grate elevators and water, be it rain or from faucets-but mostly he tells the story in well- tailored vignettes that range from horrifying to humorous. [21 Sep 1987, p.5]

One of the most hopeful movies I've seen recently--not just for its humane, realistic story line, but in its very being.

This film would be an excellent companion piece to Wim Wenders' "Wings of Desire," which deals with angels looking down on this scarred city. Berlin Babylon isn't nearly as lush, but in its own curious way, it's every bit as spiritual.

Its fascination may be limited to those already very familiar with his works and collaborators - and his sensual, highly subjective style.

A horror movie with a Hitchcockian veneer of the everyday, a story that taps into our fear not only of the paranormal but also of insanity and the secret evil that may lie beneath ordinary lives.

This movie, the subject of controversy, is a defiantly personal statement on what the war really is--laced with that now-familiar "Roger and Me" mix of homespun wit, pop culture playfulness, populist heart twisting and "gotcha" guerilla film-making tactics.

It's a movie of uncommon eloquence and elegance, acted by a truly gifted cast.

It's such a knowledgeable work and so pleasantly obsessed with its subject that it will interest even audiences whose attraction to wine is only casual.

A smart, spectacular and rousing piece of work, one that strains against but can't quite escape the natural limitations imposed by a sequel. [4 July 1990, p.C1]

Blaze is a high-spirited, though slightly botched follow-up to Shelton's appealing Bull Durham of 1988, drawing on the same combination of enthusiastic heterosexuality and cozy male bonding. Politics here takes the place of baseball in the earlier film: another all-American team sport, with its veterans and rookies, official rules and unspoken scams, high idealism and casual corruption. [13 Dec 1989, p.1C]

The Wall is no endurance test; rather, it presents the facts of the case, adding an eerie low hum to the soundtrack whenever Gedeck's character edges near her outer limits.

It’s a fairly engrossing bit of fan service, boasting many clever touches and a few disappointing ones. Director and co-writer David Gordon Green’s picture veers erratically in tone, and the killings are sort of a drag after a while, en route to a rousing vengeance finale.

As a director, Kaufman isn't yet his own best salesman. He's not enough of a visual stylist to sell his script's most challenging conceits. But the cast rises to a very strange and rich occasion.

In Edge of Seventeen, a sensitive if racy evocation of coming-of-age in Ohio of the mid-1980s, writer Todd Stephens and director David Moreton show a gift for solid, emotionally realistic storytelling. [02 Jul 1999, p.B]

It is well made as far as it goes. I wish it went beyond its own carefully prescribed limits of the commercially acceptable.

Canvas is a thoughtful, sweet film that handles its difficult topic--schizophrenia--with tact and tenderness.

It never should've been OK'd in the first place and never should've gotten past the first day. This has a mixed effect on the movie itself, which inevitably fights against its own sense of dulled outrage and methodical role-playing. But it's pretty gripping all the same.

The Armstrong Lie gets going, and gets pretty good, when Gibney is able to focus on the 2009 Tour de France itself, a race fraught with old rivalries and backstage dramas. It's the movie he set out to make in the beginning, after all. But getting there is tough going.

Anne Hathaway basically saves it from itself.

Sammy and Rosie is a writer's film, with all the pluses and minuses that go with that status. The language is marvelously clear and the structure exquisitely wrought; on the other hand, the film lacks the sense of discovery and spontaneity a more creative director might have brought to it.

An engaging yarn about a wealthy kid who learns to fight his way out of trouble in a rough Chicago public school. He also learns not to believe in labels placed on people. [19 Dec 1980, p.10]

By accident or design the film is seriously unbalanced.

It's not closed text, but a work of art that needles and disturbs. [14 May 1993, p.H2]

The poetry of Last Days has a stoned grandeur.

The film lacks a single emotionally authentic moment.

It's a movie drama with a surface so bleak and an interior so hot with eroticism that it twists your guts to watch it.

It's an intellectual family film for literate parents and children, immensely pleasing if not perfect, perhaps a smidgen too brightly evasive and determinedly charming.

This is a movie that really has little to offer but performances and ideas. For a while, that's enough.

A searing documentary with an agenda.

As wide and deep as the directors fish for anecdotes, it's surprising that there isn't more focus, more context.

In terms of its title, Haywire doesn't quite go there; it's more "Haywire-ish." But it's eccentric, and the on-screen violence is sharp and exciting - brutal without being either subhumanly sadistic or superhumanly ridiculous.

The acting is uniformly strong, the visual approach self-effacingly honest.

Special-effects wiz Douglas Trumbull made his directorial debut on this flawed movie. Its ecological sensibilities, however noble, emerge as severely dated just 16 years later. Nevertheless, this is nifty robovideo. [21 Apr 1988, p.95]

Yes, the Frenchman Carax’s first film in English isn’t life-affirming so much as it is art-affirming. But it’s a weirdly compelling experience in blunt, arguably misogynist, harshly beautiful cinema.

Chappaquiddick misses that target. But it’s a fairly intriguing mixture of strengths and weaknesses, a case of a sharp cast and a careful director toning up a script best described as “a good try.”

There's still enough hardcore Williams-when he's sitting by himself in his studio-to make Good Morning, Vietnam worthwhile, but the alarm bells are sounding. Heres another comic who wants to play Hamlet.

The cast manages some sweet moments, and Plowright lends a touch of grace and wit to each new indignity or kindness. Yet the whole thing feels programmed; the movie's sense of humor lacks understatement.

If your kid has SpongeBob SquarePants underwear, it's a good bet she or he will relish The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie.

Halfway through, it becomes clear that the filmmakers don't know how to end the film.

A blend of the classical and the trite, the beautiful and tawdry, the genuinely moving and the cornball. Oddly, producer-director-star Costner often can't seem to tell the difference.

Stylish, ingenious and gleaming with charm, wit and malice, it's another expert blend of domestic drama and crime thriller, a vivisection of the bourgeoisie.

Though The Ninth Day longs for a grander scope, it never lifts much beyond Kremer's personal dilemma.

Apatow's greatest strength as a filmmaker is an eye for charismatic performers who are just fun to be around, and The King of Staten Island is a testament to that. In Davidson, Apatow has a uniquely compelling young comedian.

A colorful version of Bram Stoker's deathless tale of the bloodsucking count has Christopher Lee as a suave Dracula and Peter Cushing as his nemesis Von Helsing. [02 Oct 1998, p.J]

A very flashy Hong Kong variation on Mean Streets. [19 Dec 1996, p.7]

I would see The Ides of March again just for the way Jeffrey Wright takes command of the screen in the secondary role of a senator who is either a cipher, a sphinx, a two-faced sphinx, a lying sack of D.C. dung or a steely man of principle.

A shy and depressed college graduate falls in love with a Bohemian artist, as in Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

The movie is awash in great performances by actors known and otherwise.

To say Enemy of the State is senseless is an understatement. This is a movie where logic is the enemy.

Poison is not a film that will play the shopping malls, but it remains a most imaginative, exquisite and compassionate piece of work.

FernGully is surprisingly courageous in its politics and adventurous in its stylistic choices.

Plenty of fun, less for its many plot twists than for its large and varied assortment of vibrant characters. [12 Mar 1999]

Although the film isn't an empty picture, it is too much of a good thing. Voight delivers a wonderful speech to Roberts about survival, but it's only one of many such monologues. Similarly, Roberts is tiring in his frantic reactions.

The stars, it must be said, are slightly more interesting than the characters, which is another way of saying Rogowski and Huller amplify what’s there on the page.

The wild L.A. romance of a museum curator and a parking lot attendant. [09 Jan 1998, p.C]

The script is corny and cliched and goes the way you expect it to go. But those things never stopped any movie from working with an audience.

This cynical film paints a hugely unflattering portrait of life in Hollywood's fast lane. I have no way of knowing exactly how much is exaggeration, but I've got a creepy feeling that the film is closer to the mark than I want to believe.

Though too dear at times, overly sentimental in its conclusion and sporadically overreaching to be the voice of a generation, it's otherwise emotionally spot-on as it follows Andrew back to his Garden State hometown for his mother's funeral.

Pulls you into a well-observed world and its characters.

It's "Veep," but less absurdly acid-tongued, and a lot more swoony. Still, the incisive cultural and political commentary cuts deep, and Theron and Rogen turn out to be a winning pair.

The revelation here is Vaughn, who in his 6-foot-5-inch frame, physically channels the body language and gestures of an otherwise petite, cowering teen.

The movie is tightly packed with incident, maybe overpacked, but Saxon’s fairy tale is an intense, lived-in experience, its centuries-old folkloric atmosphere dotted with all the usual intrusive elements of progress.

The scenery is pretty and the locals endearing, but Schorr never gets past charming.

It's roughly as realistic as Georges Melies' "A Trip to the Moon," of course. But revisiting our old pals (one of whom is played by an actor who is no longer with us) and watching them survive one unsurvivable collision or plunge after another, continues against the odds to have a walloping charm all its own.

Whannell is learning how forward motion can allow a filmmaker to get away with some pretty outlandish brutality. I wish the talk-dependent sequences weren’t so foreshadowed and clunky; only Gabriel transcends them.

It's an old, cliche-ridden story made fresh by Middler's energy.

The surreal is appropriate to a story based on fantasy, but the unevenness in tone here makes watching ''The Boy Who Could Fly'' a little like hitting airpockets in a puddlejumper.

Facetious form dictates hollow content in Brothers of the Head.