Roberts, in her “serious” performances, is often a tad too stiff and monochromic, but she works well here with Hedges, who knows how to be volatile without chewing the scenery. They are quite believable as mother and son.

The mordancy of this movie will not surprise Solondz devotees, but unknowing audiences expecting a raunchy teen comedy from the film’s title should be forewarned. This is not “American Pie” in a kennel.

There's no reason for stretching this tale to more than two hours, but Huston is amusingly tart as the stepmom, and it's hard to resist a movie that substitutes Leonardo da Vinci for the traditional fairy godmother.

With material this powerful, we shouldn’t have to continually be puzzling out what’s real and what’s staged.

The Founder remains fascinating largely because Keaton is so good at guile and bile. Not once does he wink at the audience or overplay the obvious. His Kroc is magnetically repellent – more so, I venture to guess, than the filmmakers intended him to be.

The film itself vaporizes before your eyes, but it’s likable. Given its unstable mishmash of thuggery and whimsy, that’s something of an achievement.

Weaver is superb in a movie as scary and provocative as the timely subject it explores.

Some scenes of Ulrich Seidl's first fiction feature (he's already a respected documentary maker) are so brutal and degrading that they're hard to watch. Others are highly atmospheric and sometimes quite funny.

Best of all, Ben Kingsley as the menacing man in the yellow suit, brings the picture pungently to life every time he flashes his enigmatic smile.

Visually stunning animation.

Director Stefan Forbes interviews a slew of victims and beneficiaries of the Atwater attack machine and, in the process, gives us an even-handed portrait of a man who, as much as anybody, bears responsibility for the toxicity of high stakes political campaigning on both sides of the aisle.

This is a movie that cries out for more than the too-cool-for-school Coppola’s trademark hipster anomie. She may be too much a part of the celebrity-mongering world she portrays to do justice to its injustices.

Written and directed by Sidney Lumet, who pushes the material so hard it loses credibility and even entertainment value after a while. [27 Apr 1990, p.10]

Damon is an agile comic performer, and Soderbergh knows how to serve him up without losing sight of the ultimate seriousness behind it all.

The result is that the wonderment, with nothing serious at risk, seems lackluster.

Overall, Diggers is like an Ed Burns movie -- but with fishing gear.

True love beckons in the guise of a dingbat played by Julianne Moore and all is right with the world. As Jon’s father, a man whose lifeblood is yelling, Tony Danza is very funny. He makes you understand what his son is escaping from.

There's hardly an original shot in the picture, and the screenplay ignores all opportunities to explore the patterns of poverty and racism that contribute to mob behavior. [22 Apr 1988]

Just a few years ago, the generally felt aspiration of ethnic groups was to blend in with the majority culture. Today it's to flourish in modern society while actively remembering old-country values...Bend It Like Beckham could cement the trend.

Has its moments.

Any highfalutin interpretations of his new film only serve to camouflage what is, in essence, a scam about a scam.

King is above all a pleasure-giver. He wants to heighten the knockabout joys of unfettered high spirits.

The film basically upholds the verity of the news story while not condoning the sloppiness, and it’s worth seeing mostly for Cate Blanchett’s firebrand performance as Mapes, a battler consumed by righteousness.

While this may seem like an apologia for randy older men, it doesn't come off that way, and Cruz gives her best performance to date.

Kazi is a bundle of energy, and the film touches on an important and often-overlooked issue: The commercial pressure that is often brought to bear on rappers to be scurrilous and offensive. This project, which was produced by Bruce Willis and Queen Latifah, shows that there is another way.

In Gyllenhaal's all-out performance, it reminded me most of Judy Davis in "High Tide," another movie directed by a woman (Gillian Armstrong) about a misfit mother and her daughter. It has the same fierce honesty.

The story is dark and often violent, but it's told with a remarkable sense of visual energy and imagination.

Danes doesn't quite fit into the mindscape – she's too bland for a human star – but Cox comes of age quite convincingly, De Niro is a hoot, as is Ricky Gervais as a slimy tradesman. Pfeiffer has a field day.

Heart-pounding melodrama.

When Cohen and Ferrell are eyeing each other, you never saw a loopier pair.

Not a deep movie. It is a very honest one, though - there's not a cheap cinematic trick in sight - and it's a graceful one, energizing its small-town story with eloquent camera work and ingenious musical touches.

Like much reality TV, sections of American Teen seem patently staged, or coached, for the camera.

Bogosian's performance is one of the film's weaker links, however; he misses the full-bodied intensity his character demands.

The movie has nothing intelligent to say about post-cold-war tensions or anything else, but it's great fun to watch Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington square off in a submarine that looks like a cross between the Starship Enterprise and something you'd get in a cereal box.

Obviously a movie made by smart and talented people but sometimes you can outsmart yourself.

Nothing in this film approaches the boy's-eye view of war that, say, John Boorman achieved in "Hope and Glory," but it's an affecting, if somewhat flavorless, journey.

This doesn't mean Maelström is for everyone. It's a strange and quirky yarn, moving between deceptively calm scenes and episodes as tempestuous as its title.

Critics who come out against Kick-Ass are leaving themselves open to that worst of contemporary accusations: a failure to be cool. But pretending that Kick-Ass is just another good-time comic book blowout is the greater failure.

Soldier's Daughter thrives less on Hollywood-style drama than on nuances of personality, details of everyday life, and emotions so commonplace that conventional movies rarely take the time to acknowledge them, much less explore them with loving care.

The screenplay by Tina Fey -- head writer for "Saturday Night Live" -- is marvelously smart, though, and the ensemble cast is uncannily in sync with it.

The best, and perhaps the only, reason to see Duncan Tucker's Transamerica is for Felicity Huffman's touching, shape-shifting performance.

Strains too hard to seem smart and savvy.

Some will find it exhilarating fun.

Demme's filmmaking makes up in sincerity what it lacks in originality, and he gets a remarkable amount of emotional mileage from simple close-ups of expressive faces. [24 Dec 1993]

As an experiment in filmmaking, the movie is too self-conscious and sentimental to be entirely successful. But it has a lot of heart, and the unexpectedly pungent ending makes a powerful comment on today's urban problems.

The script is more functional than funny, and the animation, while adept, is not altogether memorable.

Directed rather broadly by Norman Jewison, but well acted and intelligent. [04 Oct 1984, p.27]

Right away in Miami Vice you know you're waist-deep in movieland.

The best episodes have the emotional resonance of full-length features, and yet I didn't want them to be a moment longer than they are.

Although Howard doesn’t go in for a lot of musicological analysis of Pavarotti’s genius, which would have enriched the presentation, he compensates by giving us an ample dose of the singing.

La Vie en Rose elevates Piaf the archetype over Piaf the artist. Although I question this approach, I'm not sure it could have been done any differently, at least given the facts of Piaf's life. If there is such a way, Duhan didn't find it.

Most middle movies in a trilogy simply mark time. Not this one.

The whiz-bang stuff doesn't kick in until the Peter-Gwen relationship (which is the best thing in the movie) is firmly established.

Stone does a masterly job of balancing two Nixons, the ruthless power-monger and the sadly vulnerable man, allowing each to flourish as a fully rounded screen figure. Yet here, as in many of his other movies, Stone pushes the envelope a little too far, allowing his own similarities to Nixon. [20 Dec 1995, p.14]

A story of overwhelming humanitarian sacrifice.

Fans of the genre will enjoy it if they're not distracted by trite plot twists.

The ultimate challenge of making a first-rate caper movie is dishing up often-used ingredients with enough novel twists to make them seem familiar and fresh at the same time. Mamet soars over the hurdles with energy and imagination to spare.

It's a terrific movie, smart and funny enough to hold up at any time of year.

Weir has an epic imagination but, unlike, say David Lean, he doesn't fill out the epic vision with epic characters. The result is a film that seems simultaneously grand and skimpy.

While the movie is strong on the history of its subject, it allows some yawns to enter its own account of a big, heavily hyped tournament. Still, it's very entertaining.

You may not literally laugh or cry, as the ads promise. But you'll have a good time watching the dream-fulfilling denims make their comic-romantic rounds.

Cobb would be a more persuasive picture if the filmmakers had a clearer idea of their intentions.

The film is fine enough to make you forgive, if not forget, the fact that it exists primarily as a corporate enterprise and not as an imaginative tour de force.

This documentary about the evangelical belief in biblical prophecy is both overly ambitious and skimpy.

It's an expertly engineered popcorn movie - hold the butter substitute - but it also tries (and fails) to be a love story for the ages.

The movie will disappoint people expecting a genuine superhero epic or an over-the-top spoof. But those in the mood for an offbeat satire with a gifted cast will have a surprisingly good time.

It's the kind of movie that creeps up on you, and this is due almost entirely to its lead actress, María Onetto, who looks as though she actually could solve one of those 8,000-piece puzzles.

The fine cast helps an old-fashioned screenplay seem reasonably fresh most of the time.

Four stories with automatons as important characters...The last is the most touching, but all are skillfully made.

Delicatessen seems overstuffed at times, unable to digest its own surfeit of jokes, tricks, and surprises.

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle directed by Alan Rudolph, a wildly uneven filmmaker who's happily at the top of his form in this offbeat drama.

Considered as a whole, The Chosen is indeed a maverick movie, depicting its characters and their milieu with restraint and respect. Yet it doesn't measure up to the fine Chaim Potok novel it takes its story from.

It's a beautiful movie to watch, and the cartoony characters are as endearing as they come.

On its own limited terms, The Infiltrator, like its hero, delivers the goods.

It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

It starts with a promising angle, portraying the perennial conflict between the Federation and the Klingons as an allegory for real East-West relations. But the screenplay does little to capitalize on this. The result is an ordinary science-fiction adventure. [12 Dec. 1991, p.14]

If the film doesn't really explore the pain and bitterness of this marriage, it's still leagues ahead of most such attempts.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

Smith, it should be noted, has compared Neville in interviews to Job. Tone down the highfalutin references. In the end, this is a sci-fi zombie movie, folks.

You may find the film as outrageous as it is outlandish, and Bowery would have taken that as a compliment.

A series of vignettes...Some are weak, some are superb -- there's a priceless one with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as Brits with different feelings about learning they're cousins -- but they get better as they go along.

Informative documentary about the recent history of efforts to legalize gay marriage, tying these in with the history of marriage as an institution.

Neeson and Rush give emotionally rich portrayals of the main characters, and August's proudly classical filmmaking keeps the dramatic energy high even when the secondary performances sag in the story's second half. [08 May 1998, p.10]

Written and directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a gifted painter, this is one of the rare art-world movies that succeeds as both human drama and visual artistry.

A lumpy admixture of politics and carnality, but when it all comes together, it has a lingering force.

At least “Hidden Figures” was savvy enough to please its crowds. A United Kingdom, with its saintly good folk and sneering bad folk emptily exhorting, is closer to a dry historical tutorial.

The movie doesn't add up to very much, though. It's breezy, likable, forgettable.

A faltering attempt at black comedy mixed with romantic melodrama, Married Life is always on the verge of being interesting but never quite gets there.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

The movie confirms what most of us have known all along: Electability is all about staying on message.

Paddington in Peru is a worthy addition to the beloved franchise. Buoyed by strong performances and the everlasting charm of Paddington’s unflappable British manners, it’s a supremely entertaining story for Hollywood’s favorite marmalade-loving bear.

Ungainly and overly ambitious, The Butler tries to encompass too much history within too narrow a framework.

The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.

Columbus has done a rousing job of bringing Rowling's rambunctious story to the screen. The eerie corridors and ever-shifting stairways of Hogwarts are as daunting, haunting, initially bewildering, and ultimately comforting as when Rowling painted them in prose.

Music buffs may wish there were a lot more Puccini and a little less talking-head chitchat.