The Mission is "The Killing Fields" without Dith Pran, a movie that simply asks the audience to share its moral smugness. It wants us to feel good about feeling bad. [14 Nov 1986, p.AC]

Even if the film should be retitled "For a Fairly Good Time, Call ..." at least we're not back on the couch with another variation on the same old group of arrested-development young adult males, hanging on to their adolescence with as much determination as their marijuana intake allows.

Jim Carrey is good as Scrooge. There’s surprisingly little shtick in his performance.

This is the kind of movie that nice people call ambitious. Let's just leave it at that.

The surface pleasures of Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights may be plenty, but the story itself, well, it never achieves climax.

For all the over-the-top operatic moments — car wrecks and prom throwbacks and rifles at the dinner table — there's something about the wild tonal shifts and chaos of Almost Christmas that rings true about the holiday season.

The solid cast and honest Austen scholarship make Becoming Jane fitfully entertaining. But it's hard for the film to escape the shadow of Austen's superior talent when it filches so much from her books.

Breillat has long been fascinated with the idea that women are not allowed to go through puberty in private but instead seem to be on display for all to watch, a situation that has no parallel with boys. A Real Young Girl seems acutely aware of this paradox.

This is "Fight Club" without the irony or the metaphysical gaming.

This is very light material, and, unusually for a Lee picture, not everybody in the ensemble appears to be acting in the same universe, let alone the same story. On the other hand: It’s fun.

Deftly uses the conventions of the urban buddy/ romance film to create a fast and loose, often humorous, atmosphere.

The Eagle becomes more interesting the further north it travels.

It's Mary Stuart Masterson, bringing a depth and tenacity to her role that nowhere appears in the screenplay, who leaves the lasting impression. She escapes the airiness of Hughes's vision to establish something like a human being. [22 Feb 1987]

Extremely well wrought. Not overwrought. Not underwrought. Just wrought.

The jaunty, energetic first 10 minutes of The Brothers Bloom are easily the best first 10 minutes of any film I've seen this year. And while the succeeding hour and 43 minutes doesn't hold up to the movie's opening scenes, the whole endeavor is still an awfully good time.

There are scattered pleasures throughout the film due to its two lead performances, which are the equal of the work done in the original. It's just that with a few exceptions, the characters Miyagi and Daniel are forced into conflict with aren't worthy of their time.

The movie doesn't really work, but it's fascinating in the ways it doesn't. Then again, I enjoyed the spacey insanity of the Wachowskis' "Speed Racer," which they didn't even like in Asia.

I prefer [HBO's Hitchcock biopic] "The Girl," not because of its salaciousness but because it gets at something underneath the great (truly, great) director's skin.

The film is easy to take, though it must be said: It's almost 100 percent blather.

The music's the best thing ... But it isn't enough to lift this middlebrow, middleweight and middling project ... above its misjudgments and limitations.

Is the central hook in “Old” enough? For many, I suspect, the answer will be not quite. The film, well-crafted when the characters quit reiterating the previous what’s-going-on-here? reiteration, could use a little more nerve and a little less plot machinery, designed to provide audiences with a happier ending than the graphic novel’s, and a lot of scientific folderol.

Dark Shadows illustrates the fine line in a pop reboot between "relaxed" and "lazy."

Though jarringly violent at times, the film becomes a wash of low-keyed comic attitudes thrown into the works of a crime story.

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

A flashy, splashy and violent chase thriller.

Does have heart and enthusiasm. But it might have worked better if it had been glitzed up and energized the way "Fame" was. It's not a script that can survive this kind of minimal, earnest, self-congratulatory treatment.

Not for the sexually conservative. Not even for the sexually moderate liberal. It is, however, for the right crowd in the right mood, a very fine film.

Twohy pulls all the strings to create an inventive genre piece.