This relaxed, agreeable comedy, filmed near but not in Montauk, works because the stars make it work, and the premise — a little hoary — doesn’t sweat the logic part. Lawrence has fantastic timing and a kind of take-it-or-leave-it confidence that energizes a formulaic comedy.

For such a sweet film, Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles evolves into a complex exploration of the symbiotic relationship between money and art, and questions what the visibility of that conspicuous consumption could portend.

For all the fresh originality of the first half, why do we have to retread Kubrick’s film again? Leashing the film adaptation so closely to Kubrick’s film is a missed opportunity for this story to realize the full mystical potential promised.

It's meant to be open, heartwarming and real, but beneath its often attractively performed surface, the clichés are grinding as heavily as in any ''Rambo'' picture [21 Oct 1988]

Whether a legend was born (or retired) that night at the Garden remains to be seen, but even on film, it was one killer show.

It's an intelligent and informed look at the preposterous ways our leaders are often picked and sabotaged.

I like the way DiCaprio and Hammer capture the little things - the byplay, the moments in which two men are "playing" FBI agents, partly for show, partly for real. At times, DiCaprio's macho posturing recalls a junior G-man version of Marlon Brando's self-hating homosexual in "Reflections of a Golden Eye."

More than anything Minkoff's project feels like a protracted episode of "Jimmy Neutron," a show with characters for whom I don't have the same affection.

What it doesn't have is a way of making sense of its comic and dramatic strains, together, in the same movie.

Even when the film's cheating, Firth refuses to tidy up the fictionalized Lomax's emotional state. The actor, so good at playing stalwart men contending with inner demons, can utter a simple line — "I don't think I can be put back together" — and break your heart, legitimately, without histrionics.

The script of Follow That Bird simply plays like a TV vignette blown up to movie size, failing to fill both the screen and our imagination. [06 Aug 1985, p.5C]

It's an almost overwhelmingly professional picture, murderously fast, slick and full of outlandish notions, painstakingly realized. And it's also surprisingly satisfying -- thanks to Washington, a good cast, Tony Scott's swift direction and that unyielding professionalism.

Cocaine Cowboys would be a great one-hour television piece. Unfortunately, it's a two-hour long documentary that recalls, in scrupulous, unnecessary detail, the rise and fall of Miami's role as the cocaine capital of America.

The film is a more quiet, wintry contemplation and tortured soul-searching. If not entirely successful, it’s still a fascinating take on how we put rock stars on screen, and a valiant attempt to understand how they make the music that moves us.

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.

It's reflective of the Ginsburgs' real-life egalitarian marriage, almost never seen in Hollywood films. But the role is so much more than just the typical gender-swapped "spouse on phone" roles most often seen, and Hammer is a delight as the sunny Marty.

Directed, frantically, by Jaume Collet-Serra, written by Brad Ingelsby, Run All Night promises a sprint punctuated by a lot of gunfire, and bleeding, and bodies. Mission accomplished.

The essential problem with The Black Cauldron is that the central human character in the story is a complete drip, making it difficult to root for his success at saving the world from ruination.

Gray’s writing lacks the punch and zing that might take your mind off such rickety plotting.

Ever Again isn't a subtle film, but then it never pretends to be. More lecture than conversation, it's not designed to delicately challenge opposing viewpoints.

This "Ice Age" is still a good movie (especially for kids) with top-of-the-tech CGI.

Though this film shows flashes of the electric writer Mamet was to become, Lakeboat is mostly distant thunder over choppy waters.

Signs -- though Shyamalan's most visually beautiful work -- seems thinner, barely more than a sketch for a movie, with characters trapped in formulas. Beautifully trapped perhaps -- but paralyzed nonetheless.

For my taste, too much of the new Powers looks like bad TV and sounds like old burlesque.

Mix of stylish action and meta-musings, provides plenty of confusing, satisfying surprises, though it could have used more tightness and punch.

While Nico and Dani presents itself as a no-frills coming-of-age tale, its soundtrack seems lifted from a teen comedy like "American Pie."

It's a small film, perhaps less ambitious or probing (even in a comic vein) than it might've been. But it's a good one, and the actors go to town without turning Elvis & Nixon into a chance meeting between an Elvis impersonator and Rich Little.

Witherspoon goes further, pouring so much humor and pizzazz into Elle that she lifts up the whole movie.

Cars 3, a reasonably diverting account of middle-aged pity, humiliation and suffering as experienced by Rust-eze-sponsored race car Lightning McQueen, is not the weakest of the Disney/Pixar sequels (I’d vote “Cars 2” or “Monsters University,” those sour, desperate things). But it’s by far the most guilt-ridden.

The movie doesn't really jell. Glossy, good-looking and well-produced, it affects you and even sometimes moves you, but it doesn't really convincingly connect.

The whole thing feels a bit desperate.

It's not as if Stone is above this sort of pulp. But as rejiggered for the movies, Savages has trouble making us care what happens to the beautiful people - the untouchables - at the center of the sun-baked fairy tale.

The movie is a thing of honey and gloss, yet there's just enough heart in the central father/son relationship, and in the teenagers' ensemble interactions, to make it glide by.

Moliere transforms into a fuller piece whenever Morante takes center stage.

Mission: Impossible does provide enough old-fashioned fireworks for a big-budget summer spectacle. But despite the cinematic bravado, this mission ultimately represents a white flag being waved at the notion of updating the TV show. The movie seems to argue that because the Cold War is over, all the good global-conspiracy plots have become obsolete. The intrigue, instead, must turn in on itself like a snake devouring its own tail. [22 May 1996]

You find yourself tricked and having enjoyed the experience after all.

Eighty-six minutes proves to be more than enough time to spend with these characters, but the Hughes Brothers make the case that this is a subculture as compelling as it is repellent.

An irresistible Irish comedy, lovingly told, beautifully acted and graced with the perfect balance of chuckles and bittersweet heartache.

It is thought-provoking, to be sure, but does he finish the thought, or just provoke it?

Despite a big budget, lots of technical flair and a good cast headed by Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, it's mostly a bloody mess.

It's all a little ultra-cool for me. Shakespeare was right. Revenge is a dish best served ice-cold, not cool.

Almost all of it works as wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Bailed out by a few good jolts, Jurassic World gets by, barely, as a marauding-dinosaurs narrative designed for a more jaded audience than the one "Jurassic Park" conquered back in 1993.

The new martial-arts picture The Last Dragon is first and foremost a romantic comedy, and a very sweet one at that, and that's why it's martial-arts combat scenes work so well. We've been given enough time to care about who's kicking the stuffing out of whom.

Though Day Watch seems less shocking and overwhelmingly strange than "Night Watch," it's another rocking mix of gritty thriller and glitzy sci-fi, once again in the vein of the director Bekmambetov's idols Quentin Tarantino and the Wachowski brothers.

It's a shiny, glib, hollowly good-looking movie that always seems to be cooing at us-coldly. [23 Nov 1994, p.9C]

A romance incandescent, a fiery pageant of l'amour fou. Whatever its historical transgressions, it opens up a vein and lets life and blood pour out.

LaBute never loses sight of what shape he wishes this crafty story to take. In the end, his aim is true.

The film is a disturbing and frighteningly evocative assembly of imagery and hypnotic music.

This time around, the razors are a little duller, the clicks not as slick, the patter not as snappy.

It's a high-tech thriller that really works.

Has its satisfactions, thanks mainly to a cast skillful enough to finesse what is effectively two films sharing the same screen.

These are not people me and you and everyone we know know--these are "short version" people, characters who comfort each other by quoting Shakespeare.

Although you probably haven't heard much about Enemy Mine this season, you might want to check it out. You'll be pleasantly surprised. [23 Dec 1985, p.C2]

The B-17 was a machine designed to accomplish a specific task, and so is Memphis Belle. The mission of this movie is to provoke a strong but narrow range of emotions in the viewer. It may succeed, but its mechanical nature is never in doubt. [12 Oct 1990, p.C]

Bad Boys for Life may be a frantic visual blur but it’s razor-sharp thematically. Its mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a jaded 2020 audience glad to see these guys again. The movie’s not the point. The boys are the point.

I wish Learning to Drive imagined a fuller, more dimensional inner life for Wendy, but Clarkson develops a push-pull rapport with Kingsley that fills in the blanks — or, rather, mitigates the script's on-the-nose tendencies.

Erotically charged American films invariably are spiked with criminal danger. So "The Lover" - a movie about a young French girl's sexual awakening in colonial Vietnam that relies entirely on cinematic effects to evoke the sensuality of its time, place and events - is refreshing evidence that we don't need fear to trigger arousal.

The new “John Wick” spinoff Ballerina is recommendable, -ish, primarily for the way Anjelica Huston, as the Russian mob boss, makes a meal out of a single-syllable word near the end, delivered after a pause so unerringly timed it’s almost too good for this world.

The films are not works of genius. They are, however, wily reminders of the virtues of restraint when you're out for a scare.

Keeps you interested in its characters and isn’t afraid of complicating your sympathies a little. In these dog-day months for romantic comedy, that means a lot.

In a year of mass culture that gave us HBO’s excellent “Chernobyl,” Joker can claim the grimmest depiction of a meltdown.

Subtle lessons on friendship, materialism and cooperation along with clever touches.

Might be best described as Thailand's version of "The Alamo."

The actors make up for the relative thinness of the material. Smith navigates the emotional terrain with great skill. The script is often funny but just as often cutesy.

The changes really help. The fleshed-out central romance, the performances of Halle Bailey (Ariel, the mermaid, with songs belted like nobody’s business) and, as her Above World love Prince Eric, Jonah Hauer-King — it all basically works.

Miller's quiet artistry is at its peak, and though "Lili" is not as subtle, profound or moving a work as Chekhov's play, it's an intelligent, first-rate piece of cinema.

Adapted from the Goodrich-Hackett play, it just misses the spiritual and emotional majesty it reaches for.

What If brings up the distinctions among wit, jokes and robotic banter, and this new romantic comedy has a bit of the first and a few of the second, but it's largely a case of the third.

Some of LaGravenese's dialogue crackles, but it's a dry crackle, a hollow cough. And that's despite Leary-and in spite of Judy Davis and Kevin Spacey, two of the best actors around these days.

Russell, who looks younger with each movie, holds his own against the formidable force that is Dakota Fanning.

On your deathbed you will want back the time it takes to see this one.

Grant and Barrymore are very enjoyable together onscreen. Who would've guessed that Barrymore would turn into such a deft comedian?

Probably ranks as one of the most frightening shark movies ever---but sharks are the victims.

It displays a growing sense of fluidity and craft [from Apatow]. ... But much of the script feels oddly dishonest and dodgy.

What we have here is a smoothly crafted error in judgment.

Nanny McPhee maintains a satisfying, all-ages balance between broad comedy and human warmth.

Despite Fiennes' splendid moodiness and Tyler's radiant vulnerability, despite lovely settings... this movie is dull.

It's a harmless enough movie, and quite a good-looking one; Bettany and Dunst are an attractive enough couple, even if Lizzie has been written as a selfish little snip and he as a whining man-child.

Energetic but unusually foolish "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!" high-school musical, redeemed by the exuberantly talented Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland combo, as a couple of kids preparing jaw-dropping numbers (choreographed by Berkeley) for a Paul Whiteman radio contest. [12 Dec 1997]

What Happens Later is so deeply heartfelt, and so beautifully performed, that it stirs something within — a hope, not necessarily for an airport rendezvous, but for a moment of healing, the kind that everyone desires and everyone deserves.

It lacks a sharp look and satisfyingly fleshed-out story and compensates with one numbing round of insect- or human-based peril after another.

The result is a feeling of standing in an OTB with lots of races from lots of places--too many stories calling for attention--instead of the Kentucky Derby, which for two minutes each year focuses the sports world like a laser.

The film's occasional toe-dips into real-world politics, sectarian conflict and the horrors of war are demure and unruffling. What's missing is a point of view beyond Hallstrom's interest in making his actors look as attractive as possible.

The results are visually exacting if ideologically muddled. Biller's trying to find ways to make the old misogyny usefully ironic. But the acting is so amateurish, partly by accident and partly by design, that the film remains confined to an exercise in replicative style.

A contemporary Russian movie that you could honestly call revolutionary, more for its style than its politics.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come feels behind the ball, not ahead of the game, and unfortunately, this is no escapist, or even cathartic, horror romp. Read the news instead if you’d like a real scare.

By the end of Novocaine, it’s as if the filmmakers — who have talent, and who are now off and running in a commercial sense — forgot how their movie started: with Quaid and Midthunder getting the material and the screen time needed to hook an audience’s interest, before the jocular sadism commenced in earnest.

Carter comes off as compassionate and intelligent. But the complex issues brought up in his book don’t get much more than a superficial debate.