Loony, but spellbinding. [28 Apr 2006, p.C9]

This peek into a famous love story makes the audience a participant in the affair, inspiring questions of perspective and truth in love and art, where the only truth worth anything is one deeply felt.

An inspirational movie about a inspiring figure: Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah of Ghana.

The result is something so old it's new, so corny it's funny. And while Tears of the Black Tiger is nothing more than entertaining, at least it's that.

We've gotten perhaps too used to the computerized wizardry of our own cartoon features; Kon, like Miyazaki shows us some older ways that can still transfix us.

If you want a list of comics-derived spectacles less successful and worthy than this one, "Suicide Squad" heads the list. And that's the only list it'll ever head.

Its dramatic vexations are at war with Denis' prodigious visual skill. And the fight, ultimately, rewards the viewer.

When a filmmaker can get Imelda Marcos, once one of the 10 richest women in the world, to pull out a Sharpie and draw a Pac-Man, she's alright by me.

Featuring an all-black cast, this little film is a revelation, primarily because it provides black faces with the most natural dialogue they've had in years. She`s Gotta Have It is neither a crime story nor a heavy message movie, and the conversations in it are therefore free of the shackles of most minority-oriented stories.

What “Frida” does, it does well. It also does too much, probably, crowding its subject with expressive add-ons.

The action in this live-action adaptation is sanded down and decidedly safe. Bobin loses the geographical thread in the film’s climax in and around Parapata, but it’s never about the visual thrills, it’s about the girl at the center of it all.

It's a winner with flaws.

The film's snappy action and frank sexuality are reminiscent of "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," while the mordant humor and conflicting identities are vintage Allen.

Sicko doesn't formulate a way out of this heartless craps game we're playing. It is, however, a very entertaining position paper, and a reminder that we should do better by more of our citizenry.

The film's flaws in pacing and suspense are easily overlooked in the shadow of Chastain's moving performance, as well as the performances of those around her. Caro unspools an evergreen tale about the clarifying power of empathy to diffuse fear and hatred.

The message itself is poignant, and never gets lost in the antics or humor.

The film is Nolan's labyrinth all the way, and it's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.

What charmed me most about the movie was the interaction of the dogs themselves. [02 Jun 1995, p.J]

Yellow Rose is an emotional blunt instrument. It’s not exactly subtle, but then again, the best country songs, and the best coming-of-age tales, rarely are.

A powerful indictment of a religious mind set and is sure to spark plenty of post-screening discussion.

Even when it's stiff and staid in moviemaking terms, Peyton Place has every kind of performance working for it, or against it. Over here, there's Turner's gliding charisma; over there, you get the powerful skill of Oscar nominees Varsi and Hope Lange. Through it all, Lloyd Nolan anchors the frothy seas as the sensible, seen-it-all town doctor, the one who knows all and tells some, depending on the needs of the story. [31 Mar 2020, p.C1]

Leave it to the first-class actors dining out on those roles to make the cat and the mouse interesting and unpredictable.

The French filmmakers lend it their special aesthetic/dramatic sense, and the Masai actors ground the story in everyday realism and humanity. Together, they create a film and a legend to remember.

Valmont is a superb piece of craftsmanship, impeccable in every detail from lighting to costuming, but as a work of art it remains tentative and blurred. [17 Nov 1989]

However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of Yates' story, rather than digging into its guts.

The lead actors, Li Yixiang and Wang Shuangbao, are completely believable, sucking us into their casually cruel world.

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

The last 25 minutes of Thor aren't much better than the first. But that hour in between - tasty, funny, robustly acted - more than compensates.

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

Ishtar is a good movie, but you can't help but wonder if, lurking somewhere in those cans of outtakes, there isn't a great movie, too. [15 May 1987]

Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person.

The story is dumb --Elvis is a race-car driver bellhopping and entering talent contests in Vegas to raise money for his car -- but the songs are hot. And you can't beat that chemistry with the Queen of '60s shimmy, Ann-Margret. [14 Aug 1997, p.7]

As close to fraudulent as a documentary can get and still be worth seeing.

This is a modest but expertly performed piece. And this summer, surrounded by lesser, louder, bigger and dumber diversions, it's especially welcome.

The movie is pretty droll, and it agitates for cross-species friendship; its aggressively packaged heart-tugging elements come with an interplanetary friendly resolution. Followed by a dance party.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

At a time when new westerns are in short supply, Devil a sight for sore eyes.

It's very slight, and very short (barely 75 minutes minus the end credits), but the material is just effective and affecting enough to make up for its own schematic quality. It's a matter of watching a series of actors, led by Tomlin, tag off on their respective scenes.

Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.

Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]

At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.

Ends up a few frames short of the perfect horror film, but very few.

Both Pacino and Barkin are quite good playing battle-scarred veterans of mature relationships. Just like New Yorkers who lock their doors, these two characters have locked their hearts. This is Pacino's quietest and best performance since The Godfather Part Two. Credit director Harold Becker for helping to keep Pacino from spitting his way through another role.

If anything, director Cooper is so intent on portraying Bulger as a man, not a monster, the man comes off a little softer than he was, probably.

At its best, this new film does mix grandeur with skepticism, excitement with reflection. In the end, like Harry, it redeems itself.

The quintessential Wertmuller couple--sad-eyed Giancarlo Giannini and maneater Mariangela Melato--rev up this lively, devilish Faustian comedy about a hapless industrial worker caught in the Mafia's universal machine. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

A successful lifestyle journalist, Elizabeth (Barbara Stanwyck) is lauded by her readers as the sweetest, most efficient homemaker in the countryside. Problem is, she is a chain-smoking urbanite in a city apartment. [05 Dec 2014, p.C2]

Sick provides no easy answers but stands as a strangely powerful testament of a man who laughed in the face of terminal illness and fought for his life using the tools of self-destruction, including the occasional hammer and nail.

The drug humor in 21 Jump Street carries its own distinction, in that it's actually humor.

The reason Just Wright works is simple. It finds ways to let familiar characters move around inside a familiar premise like living, breathing, likable human beings.

Professionalism is both Nothing in Common's greatest strength and its greatest limitation. It's a very finely crafted piece, a product of hard work and careful consideration, yet nothing breaks through the craft--there's no personal drive to it.

You'll find heartbreakingly star-crossed lovers, a heartless villain (Wilson) and a dazzling backdrop of aristocratic life before and after the Russian Revolution.

Contains some gaspingly funny moments. [29 July 1988, Friday, p.A]

The movie is held together by the scenes between Thomas and Zylberstein, which are superbly acted.

Petersen is to be congratulated for creating a solid character out of a film that likes its decor and soundtrack more than its actors. [1 Nov 1985, p.A]

A welcome respite from verbal nastiness and sexual cynicism. It's nice to see characters who enjoy falling in love, even if it's to a schmaltzy light-soul score.

Abrams knits together the ordinary stories of the mill town's inhabitants in a way that feels dramatic without showing their contrivances too obviously. And his casting of Courtney and Fanning was fortuitous, though Abrams' banter for the supporting kids grows tiresome in that "Goonies" way.

Director Claire Denis has attempted a meditative mood piece on the intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love. It's difficult, in fact, to tell which is the metaphor for which. But while the movie's tone is impeccably muted, and though its horizontally composed images are striking, and its dramatic rhythms are subtle and sure, there is something gnawingly simplistic in the conception. [12 May 1989, p.A]

The movie itself occasionally gets lost in those woods, but finds its way back out again.

These two actors have a kind of genius for dark comedy: Stiller for suffering through crises and De Niro for creating them.

Much of Nebraska is ordinary prose, but the best parts are plain-spoken comic poetry.

Emmerich has no time for poetry or magic, even when the director and his digital wizards (here doing wildly variable work) are trying to dazzle. He’s a taskmaster and a field marshall, not a visionary. But I enjoyed 10,000 B.C. more and more, and more than just about anything Emmerich’s done before.

The film is a success. It works. Greatness eludes it, yes. But greatness eludes almost every film adaptation of a major novel, which we must remember when confronted by a good one.

Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation.

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.

I like the new “Jurassic World” movie better than the 2015 edition. Bayona’s direction is considerably more stylish and actively mobile than Colin Trevorrow’s was.

Q's adventure is a passionate and creative retelling of a time-honored tale, and one that will appeal to audiences both old and new to the genre. Hughes would approve.

The failure of Morgan is in its lack of restraint. The first half of the film is as tightly controlled as the lab facility, with small moments of foreshadowing planted expertly, if obviously. The second half descends into a violent bloodbath, and the twists in the story that lie just below the surface waiting to be discovered are spoken aloud, taken from theory to fact

It's simply a more focused scenario than usual, full of violence done up with a little more coherence and visceral impact than usual.

It boasts the filmmaker’s usual high level of unassuming craft; a superb cast; and a couple of limitations, though not flaws, worth noting.

With such skilled filmmaking and committed acting on display, Narc is far more a score than a bust.

His latest film, Gold, directed by Stephen Gaghan, is his most extreme character work yet, with him playing a balding, paunchy, cigarette chomping gold prospector in the 1980s, and yet McConaughey is so good he makes it work.

You don't believe a second of it, but it's easy to enjoy, partly because of the casting of all three leads.

It's a fast, funny picture, and the worst thing you can say about it is that it's no "Toy Story," no "Shrek." That may be true, but one thing Ice Age proves is that the new digitized cartoons are a form whose time has come.

As pure, outlandish outlaw cinema it's undeniable.

What’s frustrating about this worthwhile movie is pretty simple: All Anderson needed to do, really, was to let more of the characters, dog and human, female and male, have a say in how the story gets told.

An unusual, agreeable heist picture with just enough feeling behind the style to make it stick, Lucky Grandma rests almost wholly on the withering glances of Tsai Chin.

Source Code is a contraption, no doubt. But it works.

The film works because the screenwriters, Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, have a knack for juggling a dozen-plus major characters without succumbing to the obvious class-warfare gags every 90 seconds.

For once, underneath all the motion capture folderol, the key performance really does feel like a full, real, vital performance.

Kwietniowski turns up the tension so incrementally, we don't realize the scope of Mahowny's moral wreck until it is too late.

Be sure to hang around for the closing credits, which imagine all sorts of "Jump Street" sequels to come.

The central relationship in Unexpected ebbs and flows, and even when you sense the edges smoothed over to the point of blandness, the actors keep it on track.

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

It’s a familiar but enjoyably vindictive PG-13 thriller about mother/daughter trust issues. Plus a little psychopathology.

The abundance of visual and verbal wit here ensures that the pleasure of watching Snatch need not be guilty.

Small as it is, the film itself functions as a catchy, bittersweet waltz. You've heard it before, but the dancers are fun to watch.

It's Williams you never question, who makes every detail and close-up and impulse natural. She's spectacularly good.

I do think “Wakanda Forever” has plenty of what the enormous “Black Panther” fan base wants in a “Black Panther” sequel. There’s real emotion in the best material here. The loss of Boseman was enormous. So is the skill level of the actors, returning and new, who make the most of a pretty good sequel.

The film mixes unashamed kitsch, thrilling airfight scenes and dark historical drama. But what gives it a special charge is its portrait of the Czech RAF group: what happened to them before, during and after the war.

It's nice to see an action movie take more than a passing interest in where our country is at the moment, and then exaggerating that moment into the realm of shrewd exploitation. To wit: Any film combining an indictment of false religiosity with an indictment of violence-solves-violence political pandering in a single line of dialogue — "These weapons have been cleansed with holy water!" — is OK by me.

If Kneecap has a somewhat pushy sense of broad comedy or, in the final third, some predictable dramatic beats, its visual invention wins the day, because it’s so comfortably allied with the songs of protest and release.

Happiest Season” isn’t full-on farce; it’s lower-key, and runs into trouble only when the script contends with confessional monologues right up against hiding-in-a-literal-closet routines or routine slapstick, as it does in the climax. But you know? It works.

The desert isn't necessarily a desolate place, and this film makes it come alive. [15 May 1987, p.65C]

Nicely acted by all and photographed in creepy, cold, under-lit tones.

With its welcome lessons on friendship and self-esteem, is not only appropriate for preschoolers, but it also has enough sophistication for older kids.

Stumbles a bit towards the end when it focuses too much on a convoluted robbery attempt, but overall, it is a slick and intelligent look at life in the passing lane.

If you require fine writing, sharp plotting and consistently good acting, you will be in for a long 86 minutes.