The film has its momentary diversions, a few good throwaway jokes amid a tremendous amount of PG-13 maiming and destruction.

It's a strange, fascinating exercise in what Joel Coen once described as "tone management," job No. 1 for any director.

Fletch is more than funny; it's funny and exciting.[31 May 1985, p.A]

F1 is a pretty decent summer picture, and if it were half as crisp off the track as it is on the track, we’d really have something.

Somehow, An Inconvenient Sequel is empowering, not depressing.

The film's not as good as its cast, but The Way, Way Back has its moments.

Favreau's masterly light touch as an actor hasn't yet translated to a similarly deft offhandedness behind the camera. The movie, slick and shallow, is fairly entertaining anyway.

The oddly beautiful documentary made by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Gray is subtler and richer than its blunt title suggests.

A stylish remake of Michael Curtiz' shocker "Mystery of the Wax Museum"--about a museum-art gallery filled with wax-dipped murder victims, run by the fiendish Vincent Price. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

A pretty entertaining case against our current war and question the integrity of our president, but more than that, these docs manipulate imagery, music and sound bites to work their audiences into a frenzy.

There’s enough good humor and just a dash of vinegar to temper the tone from becoming too treacly or sentimental, though the triumphant moments are incredibly effective and moving.

The biggest surprise with On Golden Pond is that the best performance in the film is not turned in by a Fonda. Rather, it is Katharine Hepburn, in a performance without gimmicks or "great scenes," who communicates so much of the film's emotional power as a portrait of the serenity and anger associated with old age.

What Levinson has created here is a generic memory film, so vague in its particulars that virtually anyone's family experiences can be plugged into it. [19 Oct 1990, p.B]

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."

It's fresh, funny, biting, fast-paced and reasonably perceptive about people and their problems.

At its sharpest Elissa Down's feature directorial debut is guided by intense, rough-edged emotional swings that feel authentically alive, even when the script settles for tidiness.

For all these self-effacing but highly valuable reasons, when the triumphs of the human, agricultural and engineering spirits arrive, they work. It’s moving, and it’s earned. Ejiofor is off and running as a director.

Timecrimes doesn't end as well as it begins. Then again, writer-director Nacho Vigalondo deliberately fudges the beginning and endpoints of his premise, which involves one of those nutty causal loops so dear to writers and consumers of science fiction.

Acutely perceptive and slyly quick-witted.

If it has the edge over the 2018 and 2020 movies, the reason is simple though her talent certainly isn’t: Lupita Nyong’o.

Crime 101 overstays its welcome and is rife with bland story filler, but there’s no denying that it is handsomely made and rarely boring, offering the nominal pleasures of a good-looking serious adult crime drama, which is all too rare these days.

A good-hearted comedy of clashing cultures. The film finds great fun in coaxing out and mocking a range of regional differences, from mutually impenetrable accents to radical variants in dress codes, but miraculously never descends to broad, dismissive caricatures.

This movie lets the characters and tropes borrowed from the original Stan Lee comic live and breathe.

Gary Busey, Robbie Robertson, and Jodi Foster star in a romantic triangle about some carnival sharpies and a runaway girl. A beautiful portrait of the carnival as an American institution. [18 July 1980, p.8]

A cautionary tale of paranoia and prejudice. [25 Jul 2003, p.C1]

Engaging, intelligent and enjoyable.

Finally, a word about John Candy, the Second City-trained performer who has worked with great success on the "SCTV" shows. Candy, the plump one of the troupe, is more than just a jolly fat man in "Stripes." He becomes one of Murray's allies, because his comic persona allows him to be as sharp-witted as the next man. This is a switch, because the fat man in a comedy usually is the butt of a lot of physical humor...The point is this: Candy deserves to star in his own movie. He's that funny.

As bittersweet farewells go, this one’s quite good.