Strikes me as something of an elaborate mistake, a wasted opportunity and a script Hartley should have discarded. But I liked it anyway.

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

Norma Rae is not a bad film, just one that made me angry for what it might have been. Imagine another, more skillful actor, say Dustin Hoffman or Al Pacino, in Leibman's part; then strip away some of the more broadly drawn scenes, and Norma Rae could have been yet another fine film by director Martin Ritt ("Hud," "Sounder," and "Conrack"). [2 March 1979, p.4-12]

Even the verifiably true material in King Richard has a way of coming off like a Hollywood movie in the most “Hollywood movie” sense of those words.

That first hour is big, and imposing. The rest grows smaller, with the script's self-conscious deeper meanings either layered on top, like pelts, or — more successfully — left to Luzbeki's meticulous images of a sun-dappled 19th century Eden now home to one too many Wal-Mart stores.

If a film can essentially succeed while also remaining essentially frustrating, here's a prime example.

Not for a moment did I believe any of these characters. They were not as provocative as the clips Fiennes was selling, and, in a strange way, "Strange Days" is undone by the very product it condemns. [13 Oct 1995, p.B]

Gets by for many of the same reasons "Date Night" got by, all of them performance-related.

As bizarre, provocative and almost deliberately off-putting an indie picture as anything that's popped up in theaters recently.

Call it a weepy for the gay community:The Trip is an oddly marketed, oddly titled romance. Yes, there is a trip, but it takes place during the last 15 minutes of the film and seems almost tangential.

The King simply unsettles and bothers us -- and it finally misses both the true terror and the twisted redemption it needs for its wicked song, a would-be "Heartbreak Hotel" of horror, to really chill our spines.

Wildly uneven.

The script’s a messy sort of mess. There are also clear signs of a nervy director at work.

In Edge of Seventeen, a sensitive if racy evocation of coming-of-age in Ohio of the mid-1980s, writer Todd Stephens and director David Moreton show a gift for solid, emotionally realistic storytelling. [02 Jul 1999, p.B]

This is "Ghostbusters" meets "Men in Black" meets a whole lot of butt humor.

While its globe-trotting itinerary recalls the mad whirl of a "Bourne" picture, nothing about this film's style resembles the second or third "Bourne" outings (which I loved).

This is a mixed blessing. For a story replete with open-air combat 300 is strangely claustrophobic. And for a film with lotsa flesh and even more blood, it's light on flesh-and-blood characters.

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.

Aside from its leading lady, what Everything, Everything has going for it is its light, fantastical aesthetic, an unexpected sense of buoyancy and light.

It starts out good and turns out dumb, ditching a promising, nicely suggestive first half for second-half payoffs (revealed in the trailer) taking director Dave Franco’s feature directorial debut into lame and lamer slasher-film territory.

Entertaining but frustratingly uneven.

See the movie, flaws and all, simply to see where you stand in this digital river that runs through all our lives, connecting and isolating us in ways we're barely able to comprehend.

The movie feels torn between styles and intentions. It’s trippier than “Ex Machina,” and Garland makes a valiant go of its concerns, but Annihilation feels like a short-story amount of story pulled and twisted into feature length.

Explorers offers an attractive premise to a very small payoff.

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

Entertaining, but it doesn't add enough to the genre to make it truly blessed.

A dish that's pretty easy to swallow, but if it could have borrowed some of Isabella's more potent spices, it might have boasted a more lasting flavor.

The surface may be ominous, richly textured and morbidly fascinating, but storywise, it remains shallow.

It’s uneven and, in many instances, avoidably cheesy.

Yauch clearly understands this world, but his film would have profited from looking more deeply at fewer players.

Writer and director Alex Sharfman’s splurchy dark comedy carves itself into halves, a clever first half followed by a more routine second one. Yet it’s a feature film debut signaling a filmmaker of actual wit. So you go with it — I did, anyway, most of it, more or less — even when its sense of tone and direction goes sideways.

It’s a pretty interesting nature documentary as far as it goes. But given its globe-trotting scope and the risky location work involved for the filmmakers, it’s a tiny bit strange Aquarela goes only so far.

The film is a clever if increasingly mechanical suspense contraption, yanking our sympathies this way and that, before turning into a different sort of movie entirely.

It's not that the movie is bad; it's merely uninspired and relatively clueless about Kaufman.

It's more or less a grown-up picture, and not bad at that, though its muted and patient style has both its merits and its drawbacks. Still, as I say: not bad.

Indivisible is surprisingly engaging. With a host of characters, there's plenty to hook into, even if the multiple storylines are all a bit shallow, and the actors are appealing, especially Skye P. Marshall, an Air Force vet who plays the hard-charging Sgt. Shonda Peterson.

Such stalwarts as Judi Dench, Julia Ormond, Toby Jones and Dominic Cooper spice things up as characters of various degrees of familiarity.

The filmmaker's imagination is too rich for Spy Kids 3-D to be written off as a failure. But it's too bad that while the visuals have gained a dimension, the story has lost one.

It's a fairly entertaining bash, with a travelogue vibe established by director Larry Charles ("Borat"). It’s also smug as all hell.

Crushingly realistic one minute and melodramatically hokey the next.

At times, though, the appealing but uneven film seems rather disjointed, with Anders not quite getting a handle on her material, which is weakened by a sometimes-murky storyline (some of the minor characters drift in and out for no apparent reason) and pretention (there is a lot of talk at the end about the desert being a kind of metaphor for hope and renewal). Still, Anders decidedly is a director worth watching. [6 Nov 1992, p.J]

Dolls leaves no cliche unmined, with the result that every scary moment is its own comic relief. [27 Mar 1987, p.L]

At its best, The Seeker is a pretty vivid fantasy book come-to-life; it does a decent, passable job of adding to the canon of kid-lit flicks.

Exhaustive and at turns exhausting.

The Statement is an older man's film, and compassion is one of its strengths; Jewison and Caine make us feel pity and terror for the victims as well.

It's a uniquely feminine kind of villainy that's transfixed us since classical Hollywood, and Di Novi and Heigl understand it implicitly in order to execute it perfectly.

A shy and depressed college graduate falls in love with a Bohemian artist, as in Woody Allen's "Manhattan."

Doesn't quite work but is worth seeing anyway.

The core of Fey’s storyline hasn’t changed, even if technology has. It embraces, with trace elements of sincerity, the juicy comic extremes of mean-girldom, complete with an 11th-hour repudiation and a reminder to be nicer. Before it’s too late.

Known for her lovable roles in "The Help" and "Hidden Figures," Spencer goes dark and sadistic with an enthusiastic glee, her signature smile (and those bangs!), and she creates one of the most memorable horror villains in recent history. She makes "Ma" worth it.

Treats its now-mythic Brooklyn Dodger with respect, reverence and love. But who's in there, underneath the mythology?

There’s more deliciously creepy anticipation in “Chapter Two,” but once again, Muschietti buttresses up the spook factor with too many computer-generated monsters that inevitably become banal. Through it all, Hader cracks wise, Ransone worries, Chastain emotes, McAvoy broods and monsters jump, but we lose the most important thing of all: the Losers themselves.

The more this filmmaker can learn about matching his musical taste and invention with cinematic tonal range and control worthy of those sounds, the harder we’ll fall for whatever he does next.

For a while, Trance had me guessing, and more or less hooked. Then the violence, motivations, double-crosses and fantasy/reality tangles became tedious.

Even if you enjoyed the mean, funny 1995 John Travolta-Elmore Leonard crime comedy "Get Shorty"-and many of us did-this forced sequel isn't likely to help you repeat the experience.

This otherwise predictable romantic comedy does have several genuinely funny scenes, thanks to Monica Potter's comic delivery and charm.

Vera, as written and as acted, remains a sympathetic and watchful conduit, a peg, rather than a vividly realized engine. We see everything she endures, and all she sacrifices. Yet we are not left with lingering impressions beyond the facts of a fascinating life.

Though stylistically all over the place, it's not without interest.

The film works best when widening its focus to include the Federal Communications Commission's often baffling and hypocritical stances regarding what's OK to say, or show, on TV and radio, and what isn't.

You want big wows with this sort of entertainment, and the wows here are medium.

One of those movies with good things going in one direction, and cheesy things going in the other. The ever-valuable Farmiga is a faceless voice after her sole on-screen appearance, and director Collet-Serra’s frantic, hand-held technique ensures that every supporting player looks as guilty as possible.

Even a first-rate director can get a little lost in the tone management and narrative streamlining process.

There's something light and insubstantial about this movie. It almost floats away as you watch it.

This sequel succeeds as a slightly convoluted, paint-by-the-numbers buddy/action comedy with fast, funny banter and well-choreographed fight scenes.

More sentimental and ruder than its predecessor, though its brand of raunch tends to curdle halfway out of the characters' mouths.

Once it gets going and commits to its time-worn inspirational formula, it's not half-bad.

Ultimately a disappointment because it refuses to take any aspect of itself seriously.

Neither sinful nor particularly bad, the movie nonetheless diverts us when it should transport us. Its heroes' hearts may lie out at sea, but its soul never leaves dry land.

The movie struggles to turn the story into a paradoxical easygoing thriller, befitting the age bracket of its key ensemble members.

Robin Williams is such a great comic virtuoso that it can almost hurt to see him straining to pump life into a conventional, uninspired, sometimes-goofy big-studio comedy such as RV.

M. Butterfly, David Cronenberg's visually stunning but oddly cold and sparkless adaptation of the much-prized David Henry Hwang play. [08 Oct 1993]

It's a maddeningly uneven picture, with an action climax staged and executed with the air of a contractual agreement.

What’s missing are unexpected beats, some rougher edges, a few plot-undependent moments that bring us closer to the way these characters live, breathe and feel.

Like an episode of "Friends" where the entire cast has been given aphrodisiacs and locked up.

They Will Kill You is both irreverent, and reverential to its references, and cartoonishly violent in increasingly surreal ways, but it also maintains the emotional core at the center, which is Asia’s blind big sister protectiveness over Maria, powered by the guilt she feels over not being there for her. It’s a simple, but primal character motivation that Beetz sells with a wild-eyed ferocity.

All four stories are worthwhile, though together they’re an awful lot for one modest doc to cover. Yu’s integration of cinematic and theatrical elements is uneven, and a bit stiff.

First, a few things The Water Horse is not: revolutionary, controversial or challenging. What it is: a sweet, familiar story, beautifully filmed and lovingly told.

There is a good movie to be made about someone like Brandon, especially with someone like Fassbender, a performer of exceptional technical facility and a fascinating sense of reserve. McQueen's isn't quite it.

The stylish and imaginative imagery in director Joseph Ruben's film, not to mention the parapsychological twists and mysteries, evoke the work of director M. Night Shyamalan.

It's still strangely remote, only fitfully romantic, never really convincing.

The late U.S. Rep. Sonny Bono and his widow and successor Mary Bono have spent a good deal of time trying to save it. It's a hard task, but the film does suggest there's more to the sea than meets the eye.

Underwater never quite breaches the surface from good to great, though this well-appointed creature feature proves to be an excellent showcase for Stewart’s screen presence.

This is a better movie than the vacuous "Insurrection," thanks largely to a sympathetic screenwriter, longtime "Trek" fanatic John Logan ("Gladiator"), and a crew (headed by Patrick Stewart's Capt. Jean-Luc Picard and Brent Spiner's android Data) determined to go out in glory.

The way it's shot and cut, it plays like a parody of a car commercial shot in the style of a Bond film.

I’d place Thanksgiving halfway between “fair” and “good.” Inevitably, Roth can’t keep his baser storytelling and filmmaking instincts at bay forever.

Despite its charms, and the refreshingly non-traditional characters, Lilo & Stitch seems diluted and too derivative to be as effective as one wants it to be.

Knows when to take itself seriously and when to laugh at itself -- even if its audience isn't laughing along at every gag.

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

Hunnam’s reliably charismatic in suffering and in joy, but with most of the political and wartime context shaved off the story, once again, we’re left with the basics.

Hoodwinked treats "Red Riding Hood" as a detective story we've never really understood until now, with nuttier motivations, more complex characters and a screwier climax.

An offbeat, poetic piece that eschews the terse, hard-boiled style of the standard cop movie or TV show for something softer-centered and more nakedly emotional.

It’s campy, it’s cheesy, it’s way more fun than you expect it to be, but there’s a knowingness to the whole endeavor on behalf of magician and audience. “Now You See Me: Now You Don’t” is the kind of lightweight, harmless and ephemeral entertainment that allows us to be escape artists from reality for a minute — so go ahead and indulge.

The movie doesn’t need higher stakes, really, or more conflict; what’s there is fine, but the flights of deadpan insanity only fly so high.

Carrera's style is hard-hitting, lucid and technically superior (if unimaginative). El Crimen del Padre Amaro eventually moves and stirs you, even if it often resembles those steamy Mexican TV dramas/soap operas called telenovelas.

The movie is slick, predictable and, thanks mainly to Washington's canny underplaying, fairly diverting.

The script isn't really good enough to worry about whether it's being over-directed; in fact, E. Elias Merhige's over-direction is one of the best things about this movie--along with Ben Kingsley's grimly unstoppable killer-of-killers, Benjamin O'Ryan.

Both script and performance, however, waver between black comedy and more routine international-thriller concerns.