The movie’s good even when it goes in too many directions at once, because it gets the kids right.

It's a corker of a story - a polished yarn full of desire, desperation and despair.

The movie is funny, but it's also touching and poetic -- and Bertin's scenes are devastating.

Extracting a meat-and-potato slickness from the screenplay by James Toback (a sucker for facile laughs), director Barry Levinson (Rain Man) provides a good chunk of entertainment if not much creative risk. Fast-paced in its first half, Bugsy eventually slips into a stall, especially in the clumsy scenes where the protagonist tries to handle domesticity with his long- suffering family.

Well, it's a masterpiece compared with 'Little Fockers,' the last movie featuring Barbra Streisand.

Nothing in the movie is quite up to Scofield's Danforth. But what a mighty performance that is.

Although the film in no way measures up to the features made under Disney's personal supervision, it does contain some far more imaginative and adept animation than the last several post-Walt titles.

I liked The Claim -- as much for its stark visual beauty and impassioned performances as its intelligent script and willingness to probe the tragic side of life.

While Bad Hair is more humorously incisive than truly terrifying, Lorraine, in the leading role, sells it, while Simien creates space to discuss the ways in which women enforce unfair standards of beauty on each other in a white patriarchal society, using the horror genre as a blunt but effective tool to clear the path.

A clever, amiably low-key mix of family drama and romantic comedy.[18 August 1995, Friday, p.C]

Even if Talk to Me feels at times as if some crucial, characters-just-hanging-out material failed to make the final cut, the movie gets under your skin.

A smart, spectacular and rousing piece of work, one that strains against but can't quite escape the natural limitations imposed by a sequel. [4 July 1990, p.C1]

Preparation for the Next Life is a powerful assertion of dreams, humanity and hard work — arguing that every person has a past, a future and a story to tell.

The best of Prometheus is nonverbal and purely atmospheric: Fassbender's "Lawrence of Arabia"-loving character bouncing a basketball as he patrols the spaceship while his human cohorts finish up their two-year nap.

The ideas aren’t exactly new here, and one need only look at the entire career of Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg (a producer here) to realize the difficulty of shaping living, breathing, vital art out of gormless improv techniques. Here, clearly, the actors have been well and truly guided along the way, and Howard is a serious find.

What makes Synchronic sing is the two together, zinging each other with sardonic one-liners, their conversations meandering to the cosmic and the macabre after a few whiskeys.

Zellweger’s film — and it is hers — creates an intimate illusion that feels authentic, witty and affecting.

While it's effects-heavy, the movie itself does not feel heavy. Consider it a fanciful extension of the recent and very fine documentary "Project Nim."

Time to Leave may not have made me cry, but it's affecting nonetheless.

A simple, eloquent drama.

For about an hour Looper really cooks. Its second half is more of a medium boil, and less fun. But watching it, I realized how few commercial entertainments hold up straight through to the end-point.

It's entertaining, and following an old Disney tradition Frozen works some old-school magic in its nonhuman characters.

A Christmas perennial: a witty, polished, lushly sentimental and amusingly sexless romantic comedy in which suave angel Cary Grant mixes in the affairs of troubled bishop David Niven and his lovely wife Loretta Young. [24 Dec 2004, p.C10]

Laurel Canyon itself feels musical: languid, rich in color and light, and deliciously sensual.

An elegant miniature, Rama Burshtein's Fill the Void labors under a narrative inevitability, but it's artful work nonetheless.

The final third of this grim, accomplished film felt sluggish to me; just when he might’ve profitably gone crazier with the scenario, and the storytelling rhythm, Cronenberg putters and lets the audience get out ahead of the developments.

The movie’s a little sketchy and underwritten, and it feels sometimes as if scenes have been pared away or cut altogether to concentrate on Ahmed. But Ahmed really is terrific. Director Marder has a knack for both observing and igniting human behavior, through character. And supervising sound editor Nicolas Baker’s work astounds, period.

A relaxed-looking expert piece that immerses us in another world. At the end, Hanson has a bonus. He and his producers hired Bob Dylan for the Oscar-winning "Things Have Changed" in "Wonder Boys," and Hanson brings Dylan back here, for a folky, bluesy number called "Huck's Tune."