The movie assumes its multiculturalism with grace and humor, moving between its various worlds with a delighted eye for distinguishing features and a rich sense of character. [14 Feb 1992, p.B7]

Testament does manage to convey in its surprisingly quiet and non-theatrical way the very point that its creators surely wanted to make: that human stupidity can destroy the world, but it cannot erase human dignity. [08 Nov 1983]

Doggedly, or rather wolfishly, the film doesn't go in for camp or mirth, at least until its misjudged and semi-endless wolf-on-wolf climax.

Coscarelli has captured the texture of a disjointed, half-remembered nightmare, full of figures and events that seem to have some symbolic value, but which have lost their precise meaning in the process of floating up from the subconscious.

A throwback to the family films of the 1970s, like one of Disney's goofy capers crossed with "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory."

A little of Barinholtz goes a pretty good distance for me, but sharing scenes with Mann (who has the timing of a wizard) and blocklike Cena (funny just standing there, with his “cop haircut” and perpetually aghast reactions), he’s what the movie needs: a relaxed wildcard.

Eichner makes Bros easy company, even when the character isn’t easy, because he knows there is more than one side to even the most rabid pop culture fiend. And more than one way to score a laugh.

The audience gets all of the love, with none of the guilt. It's enough to give you faith in family dramas again.

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

There's the script -- and that's the problem.

Sue wins out, and the film is worth seeing, if only for the reminder of how badly justice can miscarry if enough millions are spent by the U.S. government.

Successfully avoids the grandiose mythmaking that has been the bane of the baseball movie from ''Pride of the Yankees'' to ''The Natural.'' Rather than a vapid national epic, it is a warm, droll, deftly cracked romantic comedy. [15 June 1988]

Biloxi Blues also wants to be a confessional, coming-of-age memoir, but again, it works better around the edges than it does in its central conception.

Has such a cheerfully zingy energy that you keep rooting for it even when its jokes turn flatter than a jump shot at a YMCA pickup game.

The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]

A pleasure to watch and also serves as a reminder of a time when "right over might" was at the core of a powerful country's credo. [28 May 1999, Tempo, p.5]

Any movie that manages to work in a dig at the National Theatre's heavier pretensions — in a subway sequence, Paddington trots by a National poster for a (fake) play with the amusingly dour title "Damned by Despair" — is OK with me.

The visual style is typical, ultra crisp computer animation, bright, sharp, somewhat clinical.

It's a funny-sad portrait of fame and its junkies, and of an era and its music.

The movie's fun. And now, thanks to our annual Neeson thriller, spring can come soon.

Appeals to a universal appetite for stories that are as rich and warm as they are flavorful.

The Nativity Story surprised me. I didn't expect such an obvious art film approach. Yet the Bible, in the King James version, is great English literature.

Even if Godzilla vs. Kong feels more a tad more mecha than human, it satisfies nonetheless. The MonsterVerse remains a better-than-average franchise, pulling enough variations on its theme of Titans, clashing, to keep on keepin’ on.

A Fantastic Woman is the likely front-runner for this year’s foreign language Academy Award. Its clarity of purpose translates to an effectively lean and straightforward story of adversity and survival, in any language.

This is a film for actual moviegoing grown-ups who don't mind a little quality now and then.

Power is cast exceedingly well, with director Lumet being one of the best-connected directors in New York. Power gives us the likes of Gene Hackman, Julie Christie, E.G. Marshall, Fritz Weaver and Beatrice Straight in supporting roles! [31 Jan 1986, p.30N]

A gripping, very intelligent British thriller. Slowly, inexorably, it ties you in knots.

The attitudes evinced by most of the characters, and the movie itself, are those of the admiring tourist, and as two-hour tours go, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel goes smoothly.

It's an ensemble piece with a dark, salty mood that reminded me of Robert Altman and Robert Aldrich, with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola. It's notably non-"gung ho."

The film may be depressing. But even with a terrible, watery musical score, it's also good.

With his thin-lipped grimace and big, soulful eyes, Lindon's an ideal actor for this sort of puzzle.

A powerhouse of a film about modern journalism and war, with battle scenes that have the immediacy and impact of the famed opening sequence of "Saving Private Ryan."

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.

It’s wonderful to watch Gosling mine the non-verbal comedy in his character’s 50/50 swagger and insecurity. Blunt’s both a sterling comic foil and a soulful romantic one. Audiences crave romantic comedies with real wit, and the spirit of adventure, because romance is nothing without it. If someone could write one of those for these two, I’d appreciate it. The Fall Guy will do for now.

An unashamed art picture, the kind of film where extreme aestheticism mixes with nightmare dread, where the story resembles a bad dream and where Freudian symbols cluster around the events like a swarm of insects. It's a very pretty film, but it's also lean, enigmatic and so obscure.

Sam Dunn's unabashed wet kiss to his favorite genre of music, heavy metal, a.k.a. devil's music.

There's little doubt that Jacob's Ladder is a failure-it's a messy, unsatisfying and often overreaching film-yet it fails in interesting, ambitious ways. It's a must-see disaster. [2 Nov 1990, p.C]

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

The sexual component to Splice pushes the story in provocatively eerie directions.

This is good-natured terror, the sort that can take time at the height of action for a quick joke. [18 May 1987, p.3C]

Whatever audiences think of it, I'd say the latest "Apes" picture is just that: a solid success, sharing many of its predecessor's swift, exciting storytelling and motion-capture technology virtues.

The component genre parts coexist, excitingly, without veering into camp or facetious desperation. Alien-invasion aficionados should be pleased. Western nostalgists may be pleasantly surprised. Fans of cowboys-versus-aliens movies, well, it's been a long wait and here's your movie.

Even and assured, Colors may not descend to the sloppy, indulgent depths of ''Easy Rider'' and ''The Last Movie,'' but neither does it rise to the delirious, dangerous heights of those films. [15 Apr 1988]

A surprisingly well-made action movie with a definite directorial personality. [03 Sep 1986, p.7C]

There is enough intelligence and craftsmanship in the execution of Hoosiers to make it seem, if not exactly fresh, at least respectably entertaining. [27 Feb 1987, Friday, p.A]

For Keitel, this is the Scorsese film that Scorsese never gave him, in which he gets to elbow Robert De Niro away from center stage and take the best part for himself. He seizes the opportunity: Bad Lieutenant immediately becomes one of the defining roles of his career. [22 Jan 1993, Friday, p.C]

A lot of fun, with an undeniable energy sparked by two actresses in their 50s working at the peak of their powers. Juicy roles for older women? Let the revolution begin.

A stark, painful drama about pregnancy--a subject rarely treated this fully, candidly or tragically.

All of us had at least one teacher who inspired us during our formative years, and Mr. Holland's Opus is a cinematic thank you to all those chalk-stained magicians who were somehow able to spin flax into gold. It's a moving tale of sacrifice that is well worth seeing.

The most coldly compelling version yet of the tale dreamed up by the late Stieg Larsson.

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

Chicago-bred Haskell is such an intense, contentious, prickly figure, he would tend to take over any film portrait, and he definitely dominates here.

The movie’s engagement is more about casual precision than cinematic exuberance, and the banter’s democratically distributed among all its characters, right on the edge of caricature.

Occasionally very funny, and moderately funny the rest of the time. In mathematical terms that adds up to pretty funny or "funny enough."

Like the whole of this easygoing plea for a better future, it's sweet.

The gay sex in Second Skin is vividly displayed and erotically charged, while the heterosexual material is presented discreetly.

Life can be funny, sad, conventional, unpredictable -- or a pain in the tail. And so can Life, the new Eddie Murphy movie. [16 April 1999, Tempo, p.4]

A classic play has been reduced a decent movie. It's a shame it couldn't be as good as the play; it's a small pleasure that it's as entertaining as it is. [20 Dec 1985]

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

Sayles accomplishes another of his coups here. Eschewing all sentiment, avoiding all pathos, keeping his film and most of the women hard as nails, he manages to tell a compelling story.

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

Sleight fuses superhero story with a tough coming-of-age tale, and it enlivens and elevates both genres into something new and different, while heralding the arrival of Latimore as a star.

McGrath's version of Nicholas Nickleby cashes in on age-old show biz wisdom of "always leave 'em wanting more." It's a pity we're only allowed such a small nibble of one of Dickens' richest works.

The more familiar you are with Menace II Society, Poetic Justice, and Boyz N the Hood, the more you will enjoy this picture, which has a lot of big laughs. [19 Jan 1996, p.B]

For a while the actors seem intimidated by the `50s references, but the film eventually develops a musical energy that carries the day. Amy Locane shows promise as the virtuous girl who falls for juvenile delinquent Johnny Depp.

There's something very right with Off the Black in terms of pure emotion and performance craft.

Nobody's Fool was written and directed by Robert Benton, and he does a better job with his camera than with his pen. The town of North Bath is perfectly captured with rusting signage, a classic diner and bar, and dirty snow everywhere. We never feel like Newman is slumming in this town, and that is also a measure of his performance.

there are times when Grease really kicks in. I'm fond of Channing singing "Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee, rotten with virginity" and then telling an imaginary Troy Donahue, "I know what you wanna do." And most of the big musical numbers work, especially the showstopper: the sunlit Danny-Sandy duet to "Summer Dreams." Greasy kid stuff it all may be, but just like rock 'n' roll, it'll probably never die. [27 Mar 1998, p.A]

Without making a big deal out of it, Big Hero 6 features a shrewdly balanced and engaging group of male and female characters of various ethnic backgrounds. It'd be nice to live in a world where this wasn't worth a mention, but it is. And yet the movie belongs to the big guy.

It ambles along gracefully, picking up points for subtle detail; but its conventions belong to light comedy, and they overwhelm most of the complexities the director has devised.

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.

A wry romantic comedy set among Bruno's targets, the Grenoble bourgeois.

What makes XX/XY so engaging; it attempts to define love through broken characters who know neither themselves nor the meaning of love.

Good, grungy fun.

Sex, lies, and videotape discovers a distinctive, laconic rhythm right from the start, thanks to Soderbergh's taste for holding his shots just a bit longer than conventional, slick editing technique would allow. [11 Aug 1989, Friday, p.A]

Delightful coming-of-age film that becomes universal by way of its subject matter.

This is not high art. It might not qualify as low art. But it is 90 minutes or so during which people can put their brains on the shelf and enjoy a few laughs.

Much to their credit, filmmakers Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields leave almost all the talking to band members and their inner circle. That gives this documentary--their first film--a brisk authority, humor and directness true to the band's scrappy story.

The chief limitation of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is an old story: However touching, Cooke's Rachel is there mainly to prop up the sweetly messed-up young male lead, and then to quietly guide him toward adulthood.

As a sheer ghostly thriller, it's mostly a spell-binder, but I was disappointed at the ending.

Now 94, Squibb takes care of business every minute in the enjoyable contrivance Thelma, which succeeds, sometimes in spite of itself, for reasons revealed in the first minute of writer-director Josh Margolin’s comedy.

Compelling and intensely provocative.

Badham uses faster cuts and cockeyed camera angles to give us Fonda's unsettled view of the world in the early scenes, then settles into a more conventional action vocabulary. He relies on stylish production design - Fonda's cell boasts a high-tech cantilevered bed - to suggest that this adventure is fantastic, even alien, to most sensibilities. (Besson used the opposite tack. His production design for the long training sequence of the film was naturalistic, his camera approaches quirky and alienated.) [19 March 1993, p.C]

Mantel and Skrovan's documentary astutely reminds us of why we need the world's Naders. It's a reasonable movie about an often admirably unreasonable man.

Anspaugh, whose "Hoosiers" showed he knows from feel-good movies, directs this story as if he were conducting "Bolero," carefully building climax upon climax as the story spirals to an underdog triumph every bit as tearful as that of "Rocky."

Starts out wobbly but ends up quite nicely, primarily because Carrey has a wonderful acting partner in Zooey Deschanel.

This is straight-up commercial comedy, low-keyed diversion, and while it can't hold a candle to recent, dark-comic Israeli achievements such as Joseph Cedar's "Footnote," the actors more than save it.

Nichols has yet to make an uninteresting film; this one’s a stimulating collision of myth and realism, and keeping Comer at the core was a very smart move.

You don't need to be a soccer fan to, like Cosmos fans, fall for this captivating tale, told in "Rashomon"-like style.

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

A good summer movie, directed with great verve and imagination and filled with innovative, eye-popping effects. Cameron never relinquishes his grip on the audience, smoothly segueing from action sequence to action sequence and topping himself each time. [3 July 1991, Tempo, p.1]

It's a film that is mystifying and haunting -- a cool, brotherly vision of the last day and the coming flood, of American dreams and the vanishing frontier.

A preposterous but beautifully polished Danish thriller.

Respect runs into trouble when its own respect toward Aretha Franklin, the woman who gave us the voice of a century, settles for garden-variety adoration. But longtime stage director Liesl Tommy’s debut feature, working from a screenplay by dramatist and screenwriter Tracey Scott Wilson, offers plenty of compensations amid its biopic conventions.

Hogan is an appealing performer, and Kozlowski has a brisk charm as his love interest. Indeed, the film functions far better as romantic comedy than it does as social satire, building an entertaining sexual suspense as an unacknowledged attraction builds between the two leads.

The jokes, mostly bitter, deadpan asides in a depiction of U.S. anti-terrorist activity as its own form of domestic terrorism, arrive just in time. The pacing’s both swift and, in proud, sour comic tradition, Swiftian.

Some of the action (and violence) in A Cat in Paris borders on the jarring, and the slam-bang finale - set atop Notre Dame Cathedral - favors bombast over wit. But getting there is a lot of fun, in part because the animators take time to make Dino a truly charismatic animal.

Danny Trejo plays Sherry's sometime lover and friend, and he's a big asset to a small, sharp film that won't be for everyone. That's a compliment.