Mamet takes exactly those qualities that we most prize in genre movies -- characters, cleverness and high style -- and refines them to a high shine.

Epidemic will never be confused with von Trier's great films. But it is an intriguing introduction to his later cinematic obsessions.

One of the last and best of the Hammer vampire flicks has Lee doing his umpteenth turn as Transylvania's thirstiest and most sexually active aristocrat. [05 Jul 1985, p.47C]

Elf, formulaic but lovable, is essentially "Big" in pointy shoes.

The result is a brisk trot through a story that is, at heart, a tough slog.

More often then not, the relationships and performances are strong and moving, with an effect both breezy-fun and profound.

One of the most honest movies ever made about male friendship. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

Harriet is a deeply spiritual film that asks the audience to take Harriet’s experience and religious beliefs at face value, but it’s fascinating to watch how Harriet’s faith in God evolves and expands to include faith in herself and her own power.

Noa is a genuinely touching creation, no little thanks to the expressive pain and fear and pathos finessed, artfully, by Teague in the motion capture stage.

Jones lets it all loose here. It's the performance of a lifetime: full of menace and venom, eloquence and fire, rot and pathos, crackling rawness and realism.

The storytelling rhythm gets a bit pokey for the amount of story being told.... But director Yates knows his way around this stuff. The visual evocation of '20s Manhattan with a twist offers considerable satisfaction, as does Redmayne's embodiment of a boy-man more comfortable in the company of animals than with humans.

There’s no way to experience Becoming apolitically, not now. You don’t have to consider it first-rate documentary filmmaking of any sort to feel something watching it.

Here’s the surprise: Bandslam may come from synthetic materials, but the characters are a little more complicated than usual.

There isn't a better time at the movies right now than Earth Girls Are Easy, a delirious pop musical directed by Julien Temple as a widescreen swirl of color and high spirits.

Mountainhead is a talky movie and I tend to like talky movies. But at some point in the nearly two-hour running time, it just becomes boring.

Fascinating as Buzz often is, the film obviously was made with limited resources, transferred to film from DV, with grainy clips from the trailers for Bezzerides-scripted movies rather than snippets of the movies themselves.

Mission: Impossible III hasn't the kinks or the oddball Continental chic of the first "Mission: Impossible," but it's less pretentious and obsessively pretty than the second movie.

Shifting her "Silence of the Lambs" accent a bit westward, the always-reliable Foster is given little to do except react and smile enigmatically, while the always-wooden Gere is all grins and charm, coming across less as a shadowy protagonist than a State Farm agent. [05 Feb 1993, p.B]

They're a ragtag assembly for sure, and the results aren't pretty. But on a simple mission of entertainment, they get the job done.

Frankie & Johnny manages to work as a sudsy romantic picture about big city loneliness despite an awkward performance by Al Pacino in the role of a hash-house dispenser of wisdom.

Like Workman's other films, it's a time capsule that sings.

A fine French comedy-drama.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro's "Delicatessen" is an exuberantly wacky, perversely droll black comedy with an ample dose of gentle whimsy-"Eating Raoul" out of "Mr. Hulot's Holiday." [17 Apr 1992]

Mrs. Parker is a comedy even though it's sad, and a sort of tragedy even though it's funny, with such foggy borders between the two that pathos and humor seem to smear all over each other, like makeup running with tears. [23 Dec 1994, p.N]

Deadpool 2 is just like “Deadpool” only more so. It’s actually a fair bit better — funnier, more inventive than the 2016 smash...and more consistent in its chosen tone and style: ultraviolent screwball comedy.

With The Way Back, Ben Affleck didn’t have to deliver his biggest or most attention-getting performance, simply — and simplicity is hard — his truest.

It is, in the best Disney tradition, a story of childhood's end, of leaving the family and accepting adult responsibilities. Bluth relates it through a smooth counterpoint of humor, sadness and horror.

Much of Puzzle feels schematic and, in the convenient solution to the family’s financial problems, a bit lazy. Yet Macdonald is so good, on her own or with a scene partner, director Marc Turtletaub’s movie refuses to fall apart.

The acting’s uniformly strong, and the script is distressingly weak.

The Infiltrator works best in its unglamorous scenes of everyday deception.

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.

The original “Mary Poppins” was exuberant, fueled by terrific Sherman brothers songs. Mary Poppins Returns is often just pushy.

Like the moving 1999 American "A Walk on the Moon," with Diane Lane and Viggo Mortensen, Hard Goodbyes juxtaposes a family crisis with the excitement of the period before and during Neil Armstrong's 1969 moonwalk.

With a mix of old characters and new, worldly upheaval and small-town dramas, Fellowes illustrates what "Downton" has always done best, which is a social examination of how much things have changed and how they haven’t changed at all.

Not up to one of the greatest of all novels, of course, but a terrific movie romance with a great ballroom scene. [16 Mar 2007, p.C4]

As Kay and Arnold struggle to reconnect, Hope Springs stays close to the task at hand. The characters aren't fabulously dimensional, but the actors are.

Catfish is fascinating. At the same time, it emits a condescending, pitying odor.

Smith carries it, even after the story loses its nerve. This film is the opposite of “Transformers”: It’s all about the unsettling silence, not the noise.

Clever and funny, with a dense surface of ideas and moods.

The draggy ones make you restless while the best ones, like the movie's title ingredients, provide a buzz that doesn't last long enough.

At times playful and inventive, at others simplistic and silly. Ultimately, Werner Herzog's free-form, idiosyncratic devolution of the documentary is beautiful but dull.

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.

I do wish Felicity Jones’ character popped the way Daisy Ridley’s did in last year’s franchise offering. “The Force Awakens,” directed by J.J. Abrams, was smooth, consistent, even-toned, nostalgic. Rogue One zigzags, and it’s more willfully jarring. Yet it takes time for callbacks and shout-outs to characters we’ve seen before, and we’ll see again. And again. And again.

While liberally dosing the action with humor, Underwood is able to preserve an undertone of genuine menace and substantial suspense. His shooting style is clean and classical, distinguished by camera movements that emphasize the line of the action without becoming conspicuous in themselves.

Foster and McGillis never quite make the transition from ideological mouthpieces to fully developed dramatic figures. [14 Oct 1988, p.C]

It's a funny, frequently rousing film, with a warmly appealing acting partnership at its center-between basketball hustlers Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson.

This exercise in racked nerves makes most of the year's thrillers look like flailing maniacs by comparison.

It seems carefully calibrated to shock viewers out of a familiar frame of reference, while leaving nothing behind to take its place.

The movie can still make temperatures rise -- though for musical rather than political reasons.

A marvel of shadows and fog -- literal and psychic. [12 Mar 2010, p.C9]

It’s a close call, but Grace is Gone is worth seeing for the way John Cusack works with Shelan O’Keefe and Gracie Bednarczyk, two of the least affected and most affecting young actors to hit the screen this year.

While White plays it supercool, Tommy Davidson and Arsenio Hall (as Cream Corn and Tasty Freeze, respectively) swing for the fences, without much in the way of a bat.

The results are pretty, and sometimes beautiful. They're also a tad stiff, and the dialogue and voice-over narration sometimes has the ring of a scrupulously faithful adaptation.

The movie takes paranoia to a far edge. And some audiences will admire it simply because it doesn't waste time on the normality it's going to end up subverting-because it's more fixated on its pods than its people. [25 Feb 1994, p.C]

The film's triple thesis is that elections are run badly, Democrats are often clueless and Republicans are clever. Maybe--but that still leaves too many unanswered questions.

The second half’s a letdown — the audience knows where the movie’s going, and gets there before the movie does. Nonetheless it bodes nicely for longtime horror producer Travis Stevens, here making his feature debut behind the camera.

Begins like a house afire and then fizzles out into a quasi-supernatural dead end.

The film is a competent but callow work dealing with a monstrous subject that automatically rejects callowness.

The Butler tells a lot of different stories, some more effectively than others.

An oddity: an adaptation of a popular novel co-written and directed by the novelist himself. It's also a fine, gentle film love story and a cinematic tribute to the power and manifold benefits of communications between different cultures and nations.

Does it immerse the uninitiated into a new, fabulous world? Yes. To the book's many readers, does this feel like the real "Harry Potter"? For the most part, yes.

Though it's well directed, written and performed, Rain Main still slips irreversibly into the so-what category. [16 Dec 1988]

Few directors are more adept at playing with all this anguish and exhilaration than Mike Nichols.

In the end the violence is too realistic (though not terribly graphic) to qualify as cartoony escapism, yet the movie lacks the sophistication, vision or satirical edge to lay claim to any higher purpose. It's merely dark for dark's sake.

Tommy Lee Jones is marvelous in the film. He has one scene in particular, a simple two-person encounter, that's as good as it gets in the realm of American screen acting.

Director Madden vacillates between treating the issues and historical context of The Debt seriously, and as the story demands, as pure, heavy-handed pulp. The cast does what it can in the service of this assignment. But some jobs simply resist satisfying completion.

For the film to be truer to the school’s reputation, it would have had to dig a little deeper.

For all its silliness and negligibility--a finale involving the Parisian "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" is one of its sillier, more negligible elements--My Best Friend is an amusing reinvention of "The Odd Couple."

Sometimes, it's exciting to watch a movie formula jell on screen-and that's what you can see happening in The Client, the latest, and best, of three successive films adapted from legal thrillers by John Grisham.

For many, a little of this joking will go a long way; devoted fans, however, will wish for a double-bill. Count me closer to the latter group.

If the central mystery is unsatisfying, Shalhoub remains the reason to watch. He imbues this difficult, ridiculous man with so much humanity in a performance that is both clenched and silly.

Despite script collaboration by his friend William Faulkner, this is Hawks' hokiest movie, a stilted Egyptian period piece about pyramid-building and sexual intrigue with Jack Hawkins as the Pharaoh and Joan Collins a conniving temptress with a jeweled navel. Yet the director gives it real spectacle; it looks great. [13 Feb 1998, p.N]

Largely male gay sex, with nary a lesbian in sight, or in mind.

Good story, well told. Interesting concept. I wonder if people will go for it.

It's a rare combination of romance and sly social commentary, delivered with a raw emotional punch.

Cheesy, yes, hit-and-miss, maybe, but the bits that work really do work.

Solid acting anchors "Laughter," but it's Margret Vilhjalmsdottir and Ugla Egilsdottir as Freya and Agga who carry the load.

Bening shines, and the film shines too.

It’s fairly entertaining even when it doesn’t quite work, directed for maximum pace by Cruise’s “Edge of Tomorrow” cohort, director Doug Liman.

If any one aspect of Chase's film keeps it from being more than merely coolly engaging (which it is), it's the casting.

The movie, directed by Paul McGuigan, may be a bit tame and well-behaved for its subjects. But it’s a valentine, not a psychodrama.

Few recent movie romances have a more chilling and peculiar feel -- and a more sobering aftertaste -- than Neil Jordan's heart-rendingly cold adaptation of Affair.

Besson is an accomplished technician, and his choice of shots-with an emphasis on bizarre, low angles, darting camera movements and large, abstract color fields-is consistently entertaining if not particularly expressive. [3 Apr 1991, Tempo, p.3]

While not everything in Jindabyne works, especially in its final, redemptive third, the film and its faces stay with you.

There's a good movie lurking somewhere in Susan Isaacs' script of her comic murder mystery novel "Compromising Positions" but neither Isaacs nor director Frank Perry has found it. [30 Aug 1985, p.A]

Very little sense of the performers' humanity emerges from behind their stage roles, perhaps because Bogdanovich has directed the supposedly spontaneous dialogue to sound just as forced and theatrical as the scripted lines. [20 March 1992, p.2]

As interesting, certainly, as “American Gangster,” and operating with a truer street sense of the characters involved.

Rounding, named after the hospital rounds medical students conduct with their mentors, casts enough of an atmospheric spell in its tale of psychological demons haunting a young medical student to linger in your psyche a while.

Wan is a humane sort of sadist. His latest offers little that's new, but the movie's finesse is something even non-horror fans can appreciate.

Feig stylishly waltzes us through this steamy, twisty mystery with ease, but not necessarily sophistication — this is the kind of frothy entertainment that you can still enjoyably comprehend after a glass or two, which in fact might enhance the experience.

For all its bright writing, TV Set is contrived and predictable, another morality lesson from a poisoned pen telling us what we've heard before.

The way Moncrieff has structured The Dead Girl, it's catnip for actors: Divided into five chapters, the script affords juicy roles requiring only a few days' work from each member of its impressive ensemble.

The film wages an internal battle between its ripely sensual atmosphere and its often stilted pacing and plotting.

At times Witcher leans too heavily on the familiar, with the ups and downs of the last half hour growing repetitive and wearisome. But his accomplishment is nonetheless impressive. [14 Mar 1997, p.A]

Pure magic, a three-act movie fantasy that transports us -- as the best films do -- to a world of its own, a place of ambiguous joy and delirious terror.

A searing reminder of the relevance of recent history and of the timeless power of fiction to humanize people and crystallize sweeping events into personal drama.

It's a stunningly creepy specimen of Asian horror.

If it doesn't make you laugh, nothing will. [28 June 1991]