The interviews are often revealing and funny. And much of the music is tremendous.

Spontaneous allows Langford’s Mara, blasé swagger incarnate, and Plummer’s stealth charmer enough unaffected sincerity to make it stick. Onto that sticky stuff, the script applies comforting reminders: Stuff happens. We don’t know how long we have. Seize the day.

As an affirmation of one famous fan’s dedication, “Let’s Play Two” works well enough. As a Pearl Jam documentary, not so much.

Branagh’s portrayal of a somewhat older and wearier Poirot, muted but carefully calibrated, remains two steps ahead of Branagh’s direction.

This is digital fake-ism all the way. Audiences bought it the first time; they're likely to buy it a second time.

It's a relief — even though the movie isn't much — to see Danner in a leading role on screen again.

The film positions Black women at the center of their own stories, and this authentic portrayal of the platonic relationships that hold them together feels rich and true, a celebration of a feminine community that becomes family.

A confusing and not entirely believable ending clouds the issue, though, burying some fine performances and cinematography under an avalanche of gore and plot twists.

The picture, intelligent but mild, has more of a 10-volt hum than a true spark.

At its best, Seasons shakes off its predecessors and captures the simple, grand ideas it's after purely visually.

The kind of movie that gives sequels a bad name, even though, strangely enough, it's better than the 1995 hit that spawned it.

Pap, but easygoing pap with a cast you can live with for a couple of hours.

Sea Fever only momentarily touches the highest registers of operatic bloody horrors and outlandish fantasy sci-fi. Rather, it remains in the realm of the moral, the ethical, the human-scaled losses and decisions, which makes for just as, if not more, torturous personal quandaries. It's an absorbing (if sometimes muted) wrestle with the notions of ethics and infection, in a moment that couldn't be more appropriate.

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.

Farmanara, a gifted director, seems to be getting his artistic legs again, but he spends far too much time following his protagonist in and out of buildings as he smokes cigarettes and otherwise mopes about.

If you are willing to overlook the occasional missed block, clumsy tackle or dropped pass, there is more than enough in Varsity Blues to keep you engrossed.

Starts strong but eventually collapses under its weighty sense of responsibility.

The problem is that we never see Dex employing the Steve technique to bed a female.

Fat Man and Little Boy tries to cover too much territory by introducing corny romantic subplots involving Oppenheimer's mistress and a relationship between a young scientist (John Cusack) and a nurse (Laura Dern). These awkwardly written sequences remind us that we are watching a conventional movie and destroy any documentarylike reality. [20 Oct 1989, p.A]

Power Rangers maintains the essence of its origins in that it's rather pleasantly bonkers.

A film of honorable ambitions severely compromised by a creeping show-biz phoniness.

Though not originally produced with streaming in mind, Finch absolutely feels like it was designed by algorithm.

While parts of Thank You for Your Service work well, overall, the film is inconsistent.

Nightwatch is more stylish and well-plotted than your typical slasher film, but it doesn't quite stand out in a world where the horrific has become routine. [17 Apr 1998]

Crossroads doesn't contain most of the common sins of today's youth films: cheap sex, fast cars and food fights. But you can't reward a film very much for what isn't there, if what is there leaves you wishing that its lead characters would break free from a tired story and sing and play with abandon. [14 March 1986, p.A]

It is filled with imposing and beautiful imagery, though it becomes increasingly monotonous.

An independent American art film that seems to be masquerading as Victorian-era pornography--and it's not quite as interesting or provocative as that description might make it sound.

Refreshingly resistant to predictability.

The actors are strong, however, and Banks in particular shows some skill and wiles in keeping her rascally stepmother stereotype lively.

Director Espinosa shoots virtually everything in tight but wobbly close-up, and the human and vehicular combat often brakes right at the edge of visual incoherence. Just as often the brakes give out completely.

It remains an expertly assembled companion piece to its source material, with charms you can't overlook. But the great Harry Potter should be casting a more powerful spell.

As much a curiosity piece as anything else.

By the end, despite the film’s beautiful cinematography, persuasive subjects and ironically upbeat soundtrack, we just feel bludgeoned.

If You’re Cordially Invited strains to bring its amped-up, often wearying feud to a satisfying conclusion, the stars give it their best shot, while the ringers do their thing with blithe assurance.

127 Hours never calms down. You suspect you're only getting half the truth of what this ordeal must've been like.

I'll admit most of the movie is great. The plot is strong, and it's funny too. But then the ending cancels out everything you just saw. What a tease. There's nothing behind a good front. [5 Apr 1991, p.J]

It's a better-than-average gay relationship film, largely because neither plot mechanics nor the same old camp intrude much.

Despite the film's pat plot turns and instructional tone, there are moments of charm, thanks to the fetching, committed cast.

It's fairly absorbing though, increasingly, a bit of an eye-roller, and it's designed, photographed and edited to make you itchy with paranoia.

The movie contains its moments, charms and felicities-even its sharp stings of pleasure and pain. [20 May 1994]

At its fizziest, the camaraderie among the principals buoys the picture. Hemsworth and Thompson in particular toss off their lines with throwaway aplomb. Waititi’s heart plainly belongs to the muttered asides and the eccentric details; the action sequences, meanwhile, squeak by, and barely.

Completely successful or not, films like Saudade do Futuro are needed. And we need people like the Nordestinos.

As beautiful as all the film's technology is, it needs more real human beings around - to pull the switches, man the pumps and scuttle through those corridors.

Allen and Gant are principals in Mythgarden, a movie production company that promotes gay and lesbian storytelling, and Save Me makes a respectable showing as an early effort.

I admired the craft more than I loved the results. But The Tales of Despereaux is still better-than-average animation.

A bawdy comedy that convincingly celebrates the resilience of the urban poor and the power of friendship in the teeth of despair.

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]

Sophisticated cinephiles aren't likely to go ga-ga over this one, but Opal Dream is a worthwhile family film, graced with an ambivalent, bittersweet ending and just the right touch of cinematic poetry turning on the gemstone in its title.

I prefer [HBO's Hitchcock biopic] "The Girl," not because of its salaciousness but because it gets at something underneath the great (truly, great) director's skin.

Youth in Revolt isn't bad -- the cast is too good for it to be bad.

McKinnon’s apparent improvisations and inventions create a second, better movie in the margins.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

I'm not sure the director should return to this particular genre, whatever you'd call it. But he is, in fact, a real director.

Otto Preminger's adaptation of Leon Uris' best seller about the founding of the state of Israel occasionally threatens to collapse under its own weight, but a strong cast, including Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Ralph Richardson, Lee J. Cobb and an Oscar-nominated Sal Mineo, helps maintain focus. [08 Nov 2008, p.C10]

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.

Succeeds as a guilty pleasure, a monster mash that clobbers the recent lackluster sequels plaguing both legacies. If only that were a higher compliment.

It's a big, smiley, free-floating blimp of a comedy: a farce about reluctant fatherhood that could use some parental guidance. [12 July 1995, p.N16]

Everyone on screen is good enough to do this sort of thing in their sleep, which isn’t to say Harrelson, Eisenberg, Stone, Breslin and Deutch laze through the assignment. The first “Zombieland” remains director Fleischer’s best movie by a mile; this one acknowledges, brazenly, the familiarity of it all.

This minor relationship picture comes and goes, but her (Carter's) performance lingers.

The second half of The Mother settles for the usual. But getting there makes for a fairly diverting series of melees in the name of child protection, with services rendered by a tough-love mom who does it all.

It’s Blocker’s story, and Bale’s very good. But for Hostiles to fully make sense of its introductory on-screen D.H. Lawrence quotation — “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted” — we’d need a tougher, less comforting ending than the one Cooper provides.

By accident or design the film is seriously unbalanced.

If director Fabian’s touch is a little heavy and coy, the actors lighten it every preordained step of the way. A lot of folks will enjoy the wish-fulfillment. We need it: Not a lot in the real world right now is fully cooperating in that regard.

Many will forgive all the contrivances and a muted ending that doesn't quite come off. It is, after all, a submarine picture.

It's an engrossing peek at an era that now seems as meteoric, crazy and distant as the Roaring Twenties.

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.

Just because a movie was inspired by real life and has good intentions doesn't mean it can't wind up as phony as a three-dollar bill.

In this defiantly ridiculous movie, David Zucker, of the old Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker Airplane! movies, once again unleashes on the world the sexiest (and dumbest) 66-year-old accident-prone cop in the history of the movies, Leslie Nielsen's Lt. Frank Drebin. The jokes still come at you in a dense Hellzapoppin' blizzard. But more of them seem crude, mean-spirited, a little sour.

Director Richard Rush is one of the more talented and mysterious figures in American filmmaking. But though it has been 14 years since his last feature (the 1980 live-wire classic "The Stunt Man"), his new movie, The Color of Night, is sometimes just as hip, lively and blast-your-eyes funny as ever.

Storks is at times cacophonous and overly busy, and the animation tends toward the goofily humorous rather than the spectacular. However, Stoller manages to pull off a third act and emotional resolution that's genuinely moving.

Despite an overly broad third act, one can't fault the film's message of family unity, underscored by a memorable use of the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love."

A big, creepy dollhouse of a movie--a sometimes engrossing shocker with a surprise ending that isn't especially shocking or surprising.

The results go only so far. Yet already Ferrell has come a long way as a seriocomic screen presence.

Like the cerebral palsy-stricken Irish artist Christy Brown of "My Left Foot," Daniel Day-Lewis' Oscar-winning role, Ami is forced to fight such overwhelming odds to express himself that his very limitations become an aid to his vision.

It's an extraordinary performance in an often brave and intelligent film that, unfortunately, tends to collapse around him in the end -- just as the world of Kline's character, tweedy but likable William Hundert, deconstructs around him.

Like so many lovely cinematic dreams, Mister Lonely inevitably descends into nightmare, with an unsettlingly grim conclusion that, again, seems more imagistic than idea-driven.

When it works it’s enjoyable; when it doesn’t, it falls into a generic sort of bustle, missing the darker, more troubling layers underneath.

It is a film of many ploooooches, meaning: stake in the chest? Ploooooch goes the sound effect. Yank it out again: ploooooch. Wipe. Rinse. Repeat.

Kika is kind of a mess. But it's a charming, stimulating, talented and ingratiating mess, none-the-less.

A grim yet snappy little thriller.

Hits more laughs than it misses and its characters are likable, empathetic people.

So intent on driving home its worthy if not mind-blowing message that it becomes surprisingly conventional.

The movie overflows with action, slapstick and cliches, but the cliches never impede the action, and the slapstick is so expertly performed, it doesn't annoy you -- much.

The men here are negligible, but all the actresses are good -- especially Dunst, who shows a previously unrevealed gift for blending cold conservative roots, starchy appearance, forgiveness and unexpected redemption.

Tries to blend old film noir and new high-tech thriller styles with only sporadic impact.

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.

Democracy might not really come from a bottle of shampoo, but "Beauty Academy" teaches us that, sometimes, mascara really matters.

It's a misfire--but a fascinating, magnetic misfire, a film full of first-rate talents forced into absurdity, struggling to bring believability to nonsense. [22 September 1995, Friday, p. C]

Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.

It’s absorbing. The world came perilously close to losing so many Rembrandts, so many Klimts. The cultural casualties, near and actual, may be dwarfed by the millions slaughtered in the same churn of history. But we are what we create, and when emblems of a civilization are reduced to pawns of wartime, there is no victor.

Vol. II turns into a battle (like most von Trier films) between the filmmaker's baser instincts and his searching ones.

Forgettably entertaining/entertainingly forgettable.

Is this the modern version of "Going My Way," with those squabbling, heart-warming Irish Catholic priests mixing up pop songs and hymns? Well, in a way it almost is, though its mood is far different and it's set in a far different world that moves to a different tempo and has graver and more troubling social crises.

It's a slick, ambitious movie that doesn't always nail all the many moods and themes it's after.

Traveller is a low-key, intelligent examination of some fascinating people who must do plenty of fast talking just to survive. [25 Apr 1997]

Where Surf's Up falls down is in its central relationships. (A few more jokes wouldn't have hurt either).

The film is likable. Its messages, many of them Lord-oriented, are all equally heartfelt.

Olsen is pretty good, too, though with her bald-faced, moon-eyed disdain for everyone around her, the material loses some of its tension between repressed surface and roiling underbelly.