People who love Lennon will almost certainly like the film; his detractors will almost certainly howl "bias!" Even so, it's a movie that, at its best, makes you ache with the memory of an anguished era and its fallen pop culture hero.

Sirens is a brazen, luscious Australian sex comedy full of nature and nudity, flesh, food and fantasy. With its theme of erotic awakening on a painter's sunny Blue Mountains estate, and its frequent scenes of lush female models scampering around naked, it's often a pretty silly film. But it's also an immensely enjoyable one: a fairy tale in which everything-fashions, scenery, badinage, music, even moments of angst-becomes a kind of goofy aphrodisiac. [11 March 1994, p.C2]

The full-on assault on the audience’s tear ducts in much of “Guardians 3″ may be sincere, but the rhythms and pacing of the film never find the beat. We end up waiting for the reductive punchline, or for another round of wanton slaughter.

Songwriter bio on Gus Kahn (Danny Thomas); Day is his long-suffering mainstay. [13 Apr 2007, p.C5]

When the actors get their chances, Crown Heights rises above the routine.

A charming, adult-oriented saga of the famous cartoon character that comes alive only when Popeye finds his baby, Swee'pea. [19 Dec 1980, p.10]

Gigante represents the sort of artful low-budget accomplishment that could, and should, be coming out of distressingly stingy Chicago once a year — whatever the subject, whatever the sensibility.

An operatic rarity worth catching even if you don't happen to be an opera fan.

It's tantalizing, delectable and randy, a movie of melting eroticism and toothsome humor.

A well-researched and well-illustrated, if often facetious, record of the U.S. government's longtime war on cannabis. And while it's a little too single-minded, it's both fun to watch and quite informative.

Fundamentally Blades of Glory works; it's full of laughs both subtle and ridiculous.

It has a rich premise and no lack of amazements. What it lacks in any sort of dramatic shape.

State of Play isn't a kinetic fireball like the second or third "Bourne" installment; like its protagonist, it's defiantly old school, "Three Days of the Condor" bleeding into "All the President's Men."

Little Odessa is a portrait of New York subcultures, the Russian immigrant community itself and the orginizatsya, or Russian mafia, that employs Joshua. The cityscapes are wintry and menacing. The characters have a strong pulse.

With its modest, no-nonsense approach, Hamburger Hill seems, curiously, more like the first film in a cycle than a late entry. After the baroque extravagance of the Vietnam films that have come before it, the movie runs a good chance of being overlooked. But it's an intelligent, craftsmanlike job, with a power of its own; it merits recognition. [28 Aug 1987, p.AC]

Around the midpoint, Pineapple Express falls apart and keeps falling, and the comedy, spiced with considerable, unevenly effective violence in that first hour, goes out the window, and in comes all the gore and the bone-crunching.

For all the boozed and abusive amusement provided by the great Bill Murray in the good-enough St. Vincent, the moment I liked best was Naomi Watts as a pregnant Russian stripper, manhandling a vacuum across the Murray character's ancient carpet. In movies as in life, it's the little things.

Ynpretentious and efficient, Curtis Hanson`s suspense drama The Hand That Rocks the Cradle suggests, after the monstrous ego trips of this past holiday season, that some sense of professionalism continues to reside in Hollywood.

Cradle Will Rock is the masterpiece that wasn't, a magnificent opportunity blown to hell.

It's less a western than a loping buddy picture.

It's meant to be uplifting, but the material is so undernourished that bench-pressing a phone book already seems beyond it. None of the characters has been filled out beyond the underlying conventions and the few distinctive mannerisms contributed by the actresses who portray them.

Watching bear cubs and walrus pups struggling to survive against increasingly tough odds, and on ever-slushier ice shelves, has both its shamelessly manipulative side and its dramatically necessary side, as handled here. This proves one thing: Unlike global warming, some stories really do have two sides.

A fairly good, extremely grueling movie as far as it goes — tracks the true-life fortunes of a battered group of climbers to the highest place on Earth. Yet somehow it doesn't go far enough.

It’s not a movie, really. It’s a commemorative “Downton Abbey” throw pillow.

Superhero comic book movie with a script so feeble it might have been written with crayons.

A brilliant, giddy satiric romp with a discreetly moralistic viewpoint beneath its high-style wit.

A rich, shining valentine to the British theater and the eternal joys of Shakespeare,

Walken is an odd choice for a D.C. power player, wasting his creepiness on this straight, respectable role.

This magnificent pair are the heart of Techine's film, and the sense of frayed, aging beauty and handsomeness they now carry helps project the picture's main theme: the imperishability of true love.

A visually sumptuous, bullet-train-paced thriller with a really provocative theme.

Hilary Swank gives a powerhouse performance as a maverick high school teacher in Freedom Writers, an often gripping and sometimes even inspiring film drama taken from the real-life story of Erin Gruwell.

For a good hour, this is the picture Kevin Smith was trying to make with "Cop Out."

Betzer's title suggests a hardy spirit and the resilience of childhood; the story, which unfolds in elliptical but often intriguing chapters, indicates the healing might be a little more complicated and difficult.

Mingling a frank trashiness with unexpected ambition, Wes Craven's The Serpent and the Rainbow emerges as one of the more commanding horror movies of recent months.

The film doesn't have the pace or the scale of Back to the Future, but it does have the same sweet moment when a child declares his love for his parents because he's seen them in a different light. Joey Cramer is quite winning as David.

Truly, this is a movie dependent on managed expectations and a forgiving attitude toward its tendency to overserve.

Thanks to Hamri's light touch and the considerable chemistry between Lathan and Baker, it's easy to forgive these missteps--leaving the film plenty of goodwill to spare.

Lean, mean and brutish, Nobody is best enjoyed as the juicy piece of pulp that it is. But Odenkirk, stepping into an action hero role for the first time, brings a sense of dolefulness and rue to this performance.

Adapted by Australian filmmaker Phillip Noyce ("Dead Calm") from Tom Clancy's best seller, "Patriot Games" is an uncomfortably angry, completely bald-faced fantasy about violence as an answer to middle-class, middle-age ennui. Sadder still, it isn't a very effective one. [5 June 1992, p.C2]

If we strip away the comets raining fire on the earth, this film is about how the ways in which how we treat each other can be a matter of life or death. Even in that darkness, it dares to have a little hope.

It’s a luxe treatment of some puny satiric ideas, toned up by a cast led by Emma Stone and Lanthimos first-timer Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize this year at Cannes. But everything has a chance to go wrong with a movie long before the actors film anything.

Spielberg’s control of pacing, rhythm, action dynamics and tonal juggling is so astute that the story of Wade never quite gets lost in all the fly-by jokes and references. Sheridan’s highly skillful, as is Cooke.

It Could Happen to You is the movie that "Sleepless in Seattle" wanted to be, an old-fashioned Hollywood romantic comedy for the '90s, brought candidly up to date for the post-sexual revolution era, yet shimmering with all the cockeyed satin-and-popcorn glamor of the past.

Madden honors the play's roots; he has not made the mistake of opening it up with a lot of obvious visual expansions. But the story's genial unpretentiousness has been darkened and weighed down, and what's left is less than prime.

Big, bright, corny, muscular, beautifully photographed. [12 Nov 2000, p.27]

One of the smartest and funniest films of the year, at least for those who care about its subject. Every regular filmgoer should. Through the story of a talented but naive film school graduate (Kevin Bacon`s Nick Chapman) who suddenly becomes the hottest property in Hollywood, Guest assembles a deadly accurate sociology of the contemporary film industry-and its accuracy makes The Big Picture both hilarious and terrifying.

A talky, plodding film that seems likely to bore children and adults in equal measure. [11 Dec 1992, p.B2]

Cafe Society is a good-looking nothing, but there are times — thanks more to Allen's direction than his writing, and thanks mostly to the people acting out the masquerade — when "nothing" is sufficient.

It's as if the movie itself has been sprinkled with fairy dust, and good thing, too: The world of Peter Pan is, at heart, so troublesome that it might as well also be enchanting.

A weirdly old-fashioned affair. If it weren't for the explicit sexual encounters, this could be an Ibsen or a Strindberg play, unclothed and unmoored from the late 19th or early 20th century.

Wildly inventive, sweetly subversive.

Made after Visconti's second paralyzing stroke, in darkly splendid Roman interiors, this is a somber, meditative, confessional work about corruption and mortality, the ways the world and desire batter down even the most protected doors. [17 Oct 1994, p.5C]

It's a tribute to the quality of writing, direction and photography in this film that we willingly go along with the story.

It’s an actual, conflicted and sporadically insightful film, dramatizing what made Trump Trump at an especially impressionable period in his rise.

It’s consistent, and there’s enough juice in Hanks’ personal, human-scaled interest in ordinary heroism under fire to make the movie underneath the labels work on its own terms.

A warm-hearted gem of a film based on the V.S. Naipaul novel of the same name.

The movie plays like a very expanded version of what would make -- and likely has made -- a cute TV newsmagazine segment.

Filled with dazzling moments, Vengo never quite reaches the heights those moments promise.

You never lose awareness that Fraser and, particularly, Elfman are acting alongside creatures they can't actually see, and you constantly think you should be having more fun than you are. In the end, you want to ask the filmmakers: Is that all, folks?

A violent, improbable movie done in tersely elegant style, and it may be the last action movie for one of the cinema's great action stars, Clint Eastwood.

The Fourth Protocol was a great in-flight read, and it will probably be a great in-flight movie, too-though in a theater it looks a little pale and overextended. [28 Aug 1987, p.FC]

Silverado is a completely successful physical attempt at reviving the western, but its script would need a complete rewrite for it to become more than just a small step in a full-scale western revival. [10 Jul 1985, p.5]

A Selznick-produced Hitchcock: a courtroom melodrama of murder and romantic degradation for which Hitch wanted Laurence Olivier, Greta Garbo and Robert Newton, but had to settle for Gregory Peck, Alida Valli and Louis Jourdan. [26 Nov 1999, p.A]

It wanders and putters and follows its main characters around.

It's refreshing to see a non-mainstream movie that wears its heart and lust on its sleeve, and has anything but violence on its mind.

Call The Grey "Deliverance" Lite, with snow, and wolves. And call it a solid January surprise.

Linklater's working-class mosaic is seriously interested in how most of this country gets by for a living. And that, sadly, makes it distinctive.

Serial Mom is a typically funny and cheerfully outrageous John Waters' comedy about the conjunction of suburbia and hell, perfect families and serial killers. [15 Apr 1994, p.C]

Those receptive to Godard's sense of humor will find Film Socialisme an elusive yet expansive provocation. Those less receptive will find it elusive, period.

What makes Synchronic sing is the two together, zinging each other with sardonic one-liners, their conversations meandering to the cosmic and the macabre after a few whiskeys.

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.

More explosive laughs from Leslie Nielsen, Pricilla Presley, and friends (George Kennedy, O.J. Simpson) in another madcap police farce that is often so funny you lose track of the terrorist story. Alas, the comic pace is not sustained to the finish, but maybe it couldn't be. [18 Mar 1994, p.C]

The results take neither the high road nor the low road, settling instead for an oddly bland middle course.

(The film is) one of the most anguished, intense and weirdly brilliant of the year.

Willis never develops a rapport with Def, and in the end it's not the predictable action but this lack of chemistry and camaraderie that sinks 16 Blocks.

Though "Caterina" is unusually well-acted and crafted for this kind of movie--and both more than casually insightful and irreverent about modern Italian school life, teenage mores and politics--Giancarlo is the one character who makes the movie special.

It's worth seeing simply to make the acquaintance of Tobias, a really extraordinary old guy.

All the accolades Lyne got for "Fatal Attraction" -- and didn't really merit -- he deserves here.

The "comedy" part of Sex is Comedy comes intentionally from cast-crew interaction.

Any film about the folk tradition is required to have a stellar soundtrack, and Songcatcher does not disappoint.

Monsters is a sharp little low-fi monster movie operating from a tantalizing premise.

Even with its story hiccups — and by the end, they’re practically contagious — The Creator creates images of the future you have not seen before, at least not quite this way. The movie is messy and knotty but co-writer and director Gareth Edwards has yet to make an uninteresting piece of science fiction.

Once "Backbeat" catches the beat, it keeps it up, drives right through to the last soul-shattering coda and fadeout. [22 Apr 1994, p.01]

There's something too slickly contrived and hollow about this film. It's a yuppified wish-fulfillment piece dangling between real world and fairy tale, and it's mostly the actors --especially Lindsay and Elaine Hendrix (as the conniving publicist who is trying to marry Hallie and Annie's dad) -- who manage to bring it off. [29 July 1998]

But by not "saying" ANYTHING about the lives behind all the lovely, easygoing footage of infants making their way to their first steps and beyond, Babies feels a tad dodgy (and repetitive) by the hour mark.

One super non-stop thrill show, it is also a dishearteningly detached and grim piece of work. [20 Aug 1993, p.C]

A thoroughly enjoyable Raiders of the Lost Ark inspired adventure film, set in the present and starring Michael Douglas as an American hustler in Columbia who helps uptight romance novelist Kathleen Turner search for buried treasure. [22 June 1984, p.12]

The movie’s a rom-com at heart, but there is no other one like it.

Though I would agree it's original -- it's the first aboveground romance movie I've seen in which the heroine is repeatedly spanked, verbally tormented and tied to a chair by her lover--- it's not an experience I much enjoyed.

That it's got a positive message may strike some as decidedly not "edgy" -- but they should be too busy stomping their feet to notice.

Though I wouldn't call He Loves Me a total success, it's smart, intriguing and quite ambitious, a first film by a talented young filmmaker that displays superstar Tautou's gifts in an eerie new light.

Fessenden cooks up a likably offbeat horror movie. But somehow, it never jells, never really scares us.

It's a twisty, hell-for-leather crime thriller, and director Carl Franklin gives it all the slick, modern trimmings.

As a whole, though, the movie is much less magnetic or believable than its star.

When the story’s twist arrives, you half-expect Twohy to throw in a couple of reels from "Dead Again," plus outtakes from "The Usual Suspects." It’s a lulu; I'm just not sure if it's the sort of lulu that will lead to great word-of-mouth.

Scott Thomas can play these sorts of ice queens in her sleep, but I've long thought she's a more effective and nuanced performer in French-language projects than in English-language ones. The performance is laced with just enough wit to make it sting.

The tunes are so good, you can’t believe the film itself doesn’t amount to more, especially with the rightness of the casting. Still, a few laughs are better than none.

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]