But what's the excuse for the film's script? What we get is a reworking of "Flashdance" and "Footlose" into a routine story about a couple of high school kids who want to become regular dancers on a show called "Dance TV," or "DTV" for short. [10 May 1985, p.LN]

It's a particularly great pleasure to encounter Quick Change, a wonderfully loose and graceful character comedy. [13 Jul 990, p.C]

The movie's fun. And now, thanks to our annual Neeson thriller, spring can come soon.

Extreme Measures is a suspense picture that should excite thinking audiences as well as thrill-crazy ones. One possible exception: fans of Michael Palmer's novel, who may wonder why his plot and people disappeared. But after all, in movies as in medicine, extreme measures may be necessary.

It's only a mild disappointment. The talent is still there, the film better than most. It just needs less crime, more love.

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.

It's a procedural, often absorbing, rarely surprising, about a briefcase bomb and a near-miss. Yet there's no question the film feels dodgy and vague when it comes to the personalities and ideology of the men onscreen.

To my taste there's too much of everything. The soundtrack never shuts up with the wind, the murmurings, the shudderings. And while director Nixey has talent, his indiscriminately roving camera tends to diffuse the tension, not heighten it.

Only Viswanathan, wonderful in “Hala” and others, comes close to locating a tone that makes some human sense inside this wildly uneven material, careening all across the character-to-caricature spectrum.

Date Night is a product substantially inferior to the material routinely finessed by Carell and Fey, on their respective hit shows, into comic gold.

Whitman's a wily cross between Janeane Garofalo and Ellen Page and in her scenes with her motivational-speaker single mother (Allison Janney), you sense a better movie lurking in the shadows.

In the end you feel like you've been taken on a pleasing, professionally run tourist trip that let you enjoy the sights without ever really inhabiting the land.

It's a dreary movie about a dreary character, offering little insight into her poetry or the mental illness that ultimately conquered her.

Sweet-tempered, good-looking, goofy and not too sharp. The movie doesn't make much sense and neither does Danny, played by Welsh heartthrob Rhys Ifans.

A caveat to viewers: This brand of movie sex, as directed by 30-year-old Lionel Baier, is emphatically not for the puritanical.

Though the new "Sabrina" has been updated to include micro-chips and corporate raiders, French fashion shoots and the Concorde, it doesn't transcend its time the way the old screwball comedies did. It doesn't even illustrate its own time memorably. Instead, the movie leaves us peeking through the trees like Sabrina, while trying to tell us that old movie fairy tales like this one are eternal, as relevant in our day as in their own. It's doubtful the people who made "Sabrina" themselves really believe that -- though they'd obviously like to. [15 Dec 1995, p.C]

A thoughtful, exceedingly well-produced science-fiction drama about a scientist (Charlie Sheen) who becomes convinced that he's received radio signals from alien beings. Trying to locate them, he runs into a lot of official government opposition, and his pursuit of the truth takes him (and us) to unexpected places. Sheen is not the most appealing of actors, particularly wearing a Fu Manchu beard, but director Twohy carries us through the story with high energy nonetheless. [31 May 1996, p.B]

Though overexplicit and underdeveloped, Clive Barker`s Hellraiser is a horror film with enough personality and ambition to rise slightly above the run of the genre.

Forbidden Fruits can’t reconcile all of its influences and just ends up as a collection of references and high style without much staying power — it’s essentially the fast fashion of girly pop horror.

How is that Vikander, who played the robot in the recent (and worthwhile) "Ex Machina," was twice as lively and five times as human in that picture than in The Man from U.N.C.L.E.?

The Brave One is "Death Wish" with a guilty conscience, and while it may be a bit of a hypocrite as vigilante thrillers go, the internal contradictions of the thing make for a very interesting picture.

As horror movies go, this is a pretty good one.

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.

The world of Wall Street is that of a lush soap opera-"Dynasty" with a moral. It gets the barn burning, all right, but it has no impact. [11 Dec 1987, p.A]

I suspect a lot of what I found synthetic and sort of galling in Real Steel will work just fine with the target audience.

Sleek and, until a stupidly violent climax, very entertaining, Unknown is the opposite of "Memento."

There isn't a sophisticated or "adult" perspective to be found in The Rum Diary.

For the record: Josh Duhamel brings some welcome exuberance to the role of the goofball suitor, Hobart. Like Oh, he's fun to watch. This is something never to be underestimated