Originally titled "Orchestra Seats," Montaigne takes a page from the "Amelie" playbook, without the fancy visuals or magical realism.

Anonymous is ridiculous, and like Oliver Stone's "JFK" it sells its political conspiracy theories by weight and by volume. But dull, it's not.

Glib and charming in roughly equal measure.

The result is a Jewish “Death Wish,” to borrow Pauline Kael’s description of “Marathon Man,” amped up to epoch-changing proportions, made by a gentile writer-director with an unlimited appetite for celluloid, right down to its highly flammable properties.

Has a melodramatic glow.

I wish there were as many big payoffs and clever jokes as there are Bosleys in this movie. But Stewart and company have their fun, and we have a reasonable percentage of theirs.

Love can be a battleground, and, despite its homey-sounding title and gentle, almost nonchalant air, Jeff Lipsky's Flannel Pajamas gives us a series of messages from the front.

This script bumps along, good ideas jostling with weak, derivative ones, and Seftel doesn't seem to know which way he wants to handle the material. Also, with Cusack playing yet another soul-fried wiseacre running on emotional autopilot, the piece doesn't have much of an engine.

Like so many earlier movie biographies, Secret suffers from bathetic storytelling and dialogue, some of it laughable.

Rebecca Hall makes Maggie’s past and present states scarifyingly real. The film is often good; never for a moment is Hall’s performance anything less.

A sometimes stirring, sometimes preposterous movie.

Man on Fire, which starts off as a good example of super-glitz moviemaking, gradually turns into a movie on fire -- another helter-skelter, big-studio spending spree. Too bad. It could use a lot more of Walken, Fanning and some more honest drama.

The documentary is strongest when it simply lets Steve — who resembles his father, minus the poof of hair — sift through his memories. There’s a lot of regret and melancholy there. Admiration too. And legitimate anger at how the Ross name itself is no longer his own. It’s a messy and complicated story.

Bullying is not easy to watch on screen, even--or perhaps especially--if the viewer had the fortune to avoid either side of the bully/bullied equation.

The drawback of the film's visual approach, however, is a considerable one. The relentless first-person shooting in End of Watch - figurative and literal - is less about YouTube factuality than it is about Xbox gaming reconfigured for the movies.

I like a lot of the film despite its drawbacks; its violence isn't rote or numbing, and there's a simplicity and elegance to the digital-countdown effect.

The Joy Luck Club may be stylistically rickety, but Wang does a good job with the logistics of the movie, integrating multiple time periods, dialogue in two languages (English and Mandarin), two locations (San Francisco and China) and overlapping casts - several characters require two and even three actors to play them at different ages - to make a watchable whole. This is not a movie to be watched lackadaisically. Blink twice and you could lose the train of narration. [17 Sept 1993, p.C]

The cast is enjoyable, with Jason Segel (as Gulliver's lil' pal, Horatio) and Emily Blunt (the local princess) a witty cut above for this sort of thing.

The film moves along, in its paradoxically static way, at a pretty fair clip. I look forward to Green's follow-up.

One imagines that fans of Chase and Aykroyd will be mildly pleased with the results. As political humor, though, Spies is an uneasy blend of seriousness and farce--a picture whose antiwar theme seems designed to let its makers cash their paychecks and, at the same time, feel good about themselves. [06 Dec 1985, p.A]

John Sayles has directed an authentic looking and sounding film, featuring cinematography by the great Haskell Wexler. [02 Oct 1987, p.A]

There are times when the facile flimsiness of Hello I Must Be Going threatens to float right off the screen. But Lynskey has her ways of surprising us, even when nothing in the script itself is doing so.

With scanty and thin characterization and a twist you can see coming from miles away, 21 Bridges just doesn't make it all the way to the other side.

A real sentimental journey -- and luckily they've got both the right director (Darabont) and the right actor to squeeze our heartstrings.

As much as I admire the work of both (Roman) Polanski and (Jack) Nicholson, I found Chinatown tedious from beginning to just before the end. [15 July 1974]

Down in the Delta's large heart is certainly in the right place, but it is beating just a bit too slowly. [25 Dec 1998, p.S]

This often entertaining movie mixes grand, epic effects and amazing visualizations of catastrophe with a sappy family-in-crisis plot that would look hackneyed in a '60s Disney TV movie.

The actors are more or less saving this franchise's bacon. Insurgent is a tick or two livelier than the first one.