A powerful indictment of a religious mind set and is sure to spark plenty of post-screening discussion.

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]

Leave it to the first-class actors dining out on those roles to make the cat and the mouse interesting and unpredictable.

The French filmmakers lend it their special aesthetic/dramatic sense, and the Masai actors ground the story in everyday realism and humanity. Together, they create a film and a legend to remember.

Valmont is a superb piece of craftsmanship, impeccable in every detail from lighting to costuming, but as a work of art it remains tentative and blurred. [17 Nov 1989]

However sterling the craftsmanship, the film adaptation inflates the meaning and buffs the atmospheric surfaces of Yates' story, rather than digging into its guts.

The lead actors, Li Yixiang and Wang Shuangbao, are completely believable, sucking us into their casually cruel world.

Waterworld is often entertaining because it's screwy. Could even Ed Wood Jr. have come up with those cigarette-puffing villains, in a world with hardly enough dirt for a tobacco plant? [28 July 1995]

The last 25 minutes of Thor aren't much better than the first. But that hour in between - tasty, funny, robustly acted - more than compensates.

Writer-director Gary David Goldberg's script is full of complex and lively love patter, which Cusack especially rattles off with sometimes breakneck speed.

Ishtar is a good movie, but you can't help but wonder if, lurking somewhere in those cans of outtakes, there isn't a great movie, too. [15 May 1987]

Janssen is an intense screen presence. Too often she's stuck playing humorless towering antagonists. Here, happily, she's allowed to be a real person.

The story is dumb --Elvis is a race-car driver bellhopping and entering talent contests in Vegas to raise money for his car -- but the songs are hot. And you can't beat that chemistry with the Queen of '60s shimmy, Ann-Margret. [14 Aug 1997, p.7]

As close to fraudulent as a documentary can get and still be worth seeing.

This is a modest but expertly performed piece. And this summer, surrounded by lesser, louder, bigger and dumber diversions, it's especially welcome.

The movie is pretty droll, and it agitates for cross-species friendship; its aggressively packaged heart-tugging elements come with an interplanetary friendly resolution. Followed by a dance party.

Writer-director Tilman Singer casts a trancelike swirl incorporating elements of hypnosis, demonic transference, memories of sexual abuse and one of the furthest-out, least by-the-book police procedurals put on film.

At a time when new westerns are in short supply, Devil a sight for sore eyes.

It's very slight, and very short (barely 75 minutes minus the end credits), but the material is just effective and affecting enough to make up for its own schematic quality. It's a matter of watching a series of actors, led by Tomlin, tag off on their respective scenes.

Movies like First Snow rise or fall on characters and atmosphere, and Fergus gets them both. But though the story's resolution does have irony and even a certain power, it lacks the charge, the Serlingesque "gotcha," that it needs.

Kindergarten Cop never feels mercenary in the manner of, say, "Look Who's Talking Too" or "Three Men and a Little Lady." It is, instead, an extremely amiable, good-hearted film, unashamed of its desire to please and quite entertaining for it. [21 Dec 1990, p.B]

At its best, though, The Muppets cuts back on the '80s-flashback self-consciousness and believes in the dream.

Ends up a few frames short of the perfect horror film, but very few.

Both Pacino and Barkin are quite good playing battle-scarred veterans of mature relationships. Just like New Yorkers who lock their doors, these two characters have locked their hearts. This is Pacino's quietest and best performance since The Godfather Part Two. Credit director Harold Becker for helping to keep Pacino from spitting his way through another role.

If anything, director Cooper is so intent on portraying Bulger as a man, not a monster, the man comes off a little softer than he was, probably.

At its best, this new film does mix grandeur with skepticism, excitement with reflection. In the end, like Harry, it redeems itself.

The quintessential Wertmuller couple--sad-eyed Giancarlo Giannini and maneater Mariangela Melato--rev up this lively, devilish Faustian comedy about a hapless industrial worker caught in the Mafia's universal machine. [17 Oct 1995, p.3C]

A successful lifestyle journalist, Elizabeth (Barbara Stanwyck) is lauded by her readers as the sweetest, most efficient homemaker in the countryside. Problem is, she is a chain-smoking urbanite in a city apartment. [05 Dec 2014, p.C2]