The actors in Nadja seem to be having such a good time that it's a shame the movie doesn't give them more room, and get even wilder and more eccentric.

Although Star Maps has some merit as a mood piece, Arteta's treatment of the audience has parallels to Pepe's treatment of Carlos, as he hammers home a message of no hope. [8 Aug 1997, p.K]

Campbell and her character are willing to take chances. But Toback's tangled noirish plot, with Vera as a post-feminist femme fatale, isn't particularly clever or original.

It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.

Carpenter writes his own scripts -- here with past collaborator Larry Sulkis -- and their "Ghosts" screenplay lacks the density, character and humor of a Hollywood genre classic.

Possession needs a sharp eye, a wicked tongue, less reverence and much more of its author's voice.

Role Models wouldn't be anything without Mintz-Plasse, whose character occasions what may be the cinema's first really funny Marvin Hamlisch joke, and whose camera presence is at once unfailingly modest and distinctive.

It's a very small film, undermined by a puttering rhythm and Pinter-worthy pauses in the second half and a resolution neither satisfyingly oblique nor conventionally pleasing.

Ultimately the film functions as an elbow to the ribs: “Remember this? Remember how fun it was?”

By salvaging a troubled script with deep, committed, touching portrayals, Plummer and Walsh help prove Schroeder’s points about how Hollywood isn’t just the province of the rich, young and pretty.

An odd, one-sided documentary that nevertheless opens a window onto Australian class struggles and a world weirdly familiar and exotic simultaneously.

The script is half-a-fortune at best, and visually the picture is staid. But you stick with it, because it's Williams and because certainly no one since Williams has written this sort of embroidered dialogue.

A handsome but lightweight period piece about passions indulged and repressed, and the calamitous outcomes that result from both courses.

The content may be dubious, but the execution is hypnotic.

To what degree does Zoo test our limits of tolerance? In the end, not much, which is why Devor's strange, carefully composed objet d'art is a limited achievement.

From first to last frame, Total Recall is in your face. Its rather elegant little science-fiction story is as suffocated as the Martians are. The director has violated his own movie, going so far over the top he's still out there-weightless. [1 June 1990, Friday, p.C]

In many respects, Forgiving Dr. Mengele is an ordinary documentary, stylistically and technically unexceptional. But its subject enobles the work. So does Kor : determined, indomitable, and by the end of the movie, a symbol herself of both survival and mercy.

What the Bleep Do We Know? is both modern science for dummies and a feisty extension of our ongoing religious debate.

At heart, though, odd as it sounds, Gray has created a pocket-sized version of “Apocalypse Now.” Ad Astra bends the Francis Ford Coppola Vietnam-era extravagance, about the rogue commander, Kurtz, and the errand boy, Willard, into its own thing. Like Coppola’s film, and the Joseph Conrad novel “Heart of Darkness," the new film examines the limits of colonialist hubris. It’s also, and primarily, a father/son parable of betrayal, confrontation and forgiveness.

If "Roll Bounce" and "Boyz n the Hood" fell in love and had a PG-13 baby, it would be ATL.

If you're in the mood for something strange, this film may please you, twice over.

Just because it's true to life doesn't mean it can sing.

It suffers from stilted Vista Vision staging and a lack of gloss -- but has some sparkling Cole Porter musical numbers. [26 Sep 1999, p.26C]

The movie, like Smith, is breezy, fun and keeps comin' at ya. [22 Dec 2006, p.5]

The major problem with the sequel therefore is really the script, which was not written by Diane Thomas and which, coincidentally, did not meet with immediate approval by Turner. And so instead of surprising us in the rapid-fire manner of the original, ''The Jewel of the Nile'' takes people we know and runs them ragged through a new but unappealing location--the Arab desert--as they get caught in the middle of a holy war that doesn`t have much entertainment value given the recent number of incidents involving real-life terrorism in the area.

Eric Bana doesn’t have much to do as Henry VIII except play the monarch as an overgrown spoiled brat. He is, however, awfully nice to look at.

While the film runs a bit too long, and the heartstring tugging becomes overwrought, overall, this family melodrama about a devastating illness and the freak accident that cured it is surprisingly effective, even for those of little faith.

Starts like a house afire and then suffers an imagination burnout.