Thoughtful, exciting, moving.

It's too emotionally honest and psychologically dense for its own good. It's a movie that demands more than one viewing to absorb all its ideas and feelings.

The performances are stronger than the movie itself. Jodie Foster shows continued growth as an actress, and her girlfriends are skillfully portrayed. [21 Mar 1980, p.15]

As the movie moves through its murder mystery mode and begins racking up political points, Hank becomes a stand-in for all those Americans bewildered and beleaguered by the war. He becomes a Symbol.

Although they might have wished for something less conventional, it's the thrills that make this movie.

Patrice Leconte has directed excellent serious films such as "Monsieur Hire" and "Man on the Train," but when it comes to humor he loses his bearings. His latest attempt at seriocomedy, My Best Friend, is a premise in search of a film.

The show provides a prodigious number of giggles, and it's so short (well under 90 minutes) that you'll have plenty of time to rent the original This Island Earth and test out wisecracks of your own.

Succeeds in bringing a lump to the throat without, as is de rigueur these days, insulting our intelligence.

An absorbing new spin on the ingenious "Rear Window" concept, with poignant comments on aging in modern society.

The movie often seems on the verge of being interesting but repeatedly retreats into a formless vapidity.

Buscemi's directing blends hard-hitting visual qualities with great emotional energy.

Solid acting and an intriguing plot compensate for some dull spots.

Part of the movie's fascination is watching Ms. Bening play a role that tantalizingly mirrors her own position in today's movie world - and she does it with wit, sparkle, and all-out energy.

Cruise gives his energetic all to the role, but he, too, doesn’t seem to be quite aware that Seal was morally compromised far beyond the shallow confines of this film.

Gandolfini, though, is a standout as the old-school father who can't abide his new-style son (but loves him anyway).

The film is frustrating because so many of its best possibilities are missed. But Bening keeps you watching, and, to a lesser extent, so does Jamie Bell as Peter Turner.

Splendid acting helps Jordan achieve most of his goals, although some may find the romantic and religious elements an uneasy mixture.

Writer-director Ray Lawrence, well regarded for his two previous films, "Bliss" and "Lantana," expands Carver's work into an indictment of colonialism and an examination of the chasm that supposedly exists between men and women over matters of the heart.

The bromance often seems generic, too. Fishburne gives a highly nuanced performance, one of his best, as he allows us to see in this man of God flashes of the rogue he once was. But the movie ultimately must be defined by Doc, and we never really get inside his head.

The music and camera work are dazzling, and the story has solid sociological insights into a fascinating pop-culture period.

The cast is something of an indie movie hall of fame that includes Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Steenburgen, Brittany Murphy, and Toni Collette. Marcia Gay Harden is particularly fine as the murdered girl's mother.

Despite its arty veneer and its ostensibly political edge, Circumstance seems more interested in titillation than revelation.

The story is thin, but it's fun to spend time with more likable African-American characters than most Hollywood movies ever put under the spotlight. [21 Mar 1997, p.13]

Be warned that the violence-prone Spielberg of "Saving Private Ryan" and "Schindler's List" is also on display.

This modestly produced drama isn't acted or directed with much flair, but it shows a welcome awareness of the complex links between personal and political impulses.

Quite restrained for what's basically a horror movie, and very well acted.

The best moments in “Parnassus” are not otherwordly but worldly. It’s a movie about a dying magician and the death of magic. This is a subject that obviously means a lot to Gilliam, and he makes us feel it in our bones.

Comically grotesque, strikingly filmed.

Has touching and instructive moments.

Much of The Runaways plays out in the key of dreary. But there's a flinty integrity in this movie's look at the rock grind, and Stewart and Fanning are intensely watchable.

Overall this is a film in which, as the end credit documentary footage attests, the real story overwhelms its dramatization.

Branagh is marvelous at conveying his exasperation. His conceit is that Olivier offstage acted the same as Olivier onstage – as if all of life was a vast playlet. For someone as thoroughly actorly as Olivier, this is probably no exaggeration. I would like to think that the great man himself would have smiled at Branagh's rollicking rendition of tantrums.

Director and co-writer John Krokidas doesn’t have a very fluent gift for period re-creation – everything seems stagy – and most of the actors, playing divas of various stripes, overact.

Crystal Skull is a fun ride, but if we have to wait 19 years for the next one, that's OK by me.

The only thing missing from Salt is Lotte Lenya's Rosa Klebb with her steel blade-tipped shoes from "From Russia With Love." Come to think of it, the Russian defector here does indeed kill with steel-blade shoes. Nice touch.

Director Francis Lawrence stages the action sequences, both aboveground and underground, with a modicum of flair, and Julianne Moore as rebel leader Coin gives off some sparks – she’s a reformer with a totalitarian streak – but for the most part there is nothing divertingly new or different about this franchise fade-out.

The movie, at its best, is compellingly odd, which is also the most accurate description of Carrey's performance.

One of those documentaries that is more testimonial than investigation.

Waters fills the movie with his usual touches of outrageously bad taste, but beneath the sophomoric shocks his story has a serious message about self-absorbed artists who care more about their own careers than the privacy of the people around them.

If there is a single image that we take away from Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman," it is of Willy Loman weighted down to his very soul by his suitcases. The image that holds in this modern-day salesman's serenade is Nick the salesman reduced to selling off his own life.

[Apted] also has an unfortunate penchant for bland stateliness, and never more so than in Amazing Grace, a well-intentioned piece of historical waxworks.

Also predictable is the film's simplistic treatment of themes from religion and myth… It's curious that Spielberg and Lucas see these venerated objects not as symbols of divine inspiration but as repositories of a blind, undiscriminating force that can be wielded (like the three wishes from a genie or a magic lamp) by whoever gets their hands on them. [13 June 1989, Arts, p.11]

A gifted cast and a surprisingly delicate ending are the movie's best assets.

Details of the 1963 period are weakly handled, though, and the ending is as false as it is sentimental. [21 Aug 1987]

Thompson is very good at playing imperious, and she even manages an unexpected trace of flirtiness in a few offhanded moments with Hanks.

I would rather have seen a documentary about the real women instead of this workmanlike dramatic rendition.

The acting is also solid, starting with Branagh's believable Georgia accent.

Seeing it will probably send you back to the original animated movie for refreshment.

Riveting and unique.

Rossi investigates the increasing use of massive open online courses and other flexible programs and talks to such education experts as Columbia professor Andrew Delbanco.

Redeemed by sensitive acting.

At least Erik/Magneto, as played by Michael Fassbender, is, well, magnetic.

His (Hamer) new film, 1001 Grams, is almost as good as “Kitchen Stories,” with a story equally unpromising – but only in theory.

We’re still essentially in the Land of Retread: An outer space voyage turns grisly-ghastly as gloppy, befanged creatures invade the crew’s innards and pop out – gotcha! – right on cue.

Keep your ears tuned for Helen Mirren as the imperious Dean Hardscrabble. Hogwarts would have loved her.

It seems less irreverent than self-congratulatory.

Scurlock's filmmaking style leans more heavily on woebegone personal testimony than facts and figures, but politicians willing to go up against the credit industry's lobbyists would be well advised to take a look.

Redford's storytelling skills aren't strong enough to make the tale appear as seamless as it should.

It wants to be a movie about the intersection between criminality and the class system but, for that, it could have used a bit more class.

The film rapidly devolves into a lame buddy picture, part thriller, mostly goof.

The odd-couple pairing does yield its occasional rewards, though. The collision between Everett’s monosyllabic gruffness and Maud’s chatty ditherings is inherently funny, and so is her insistence on marriage before sex, which he finds confounding.

Carax's cinematic imagination makes it worth viewing by movie buffs with a sense of adventure and a tolerance for explicit sex.

Foster is fine, but the story's outcome would seem a tad more uncertain if another actress had the part. How scary are three New York tough guys when you've handled Hannibal Lecter in your time?

The coach is certainly an offensive goofball, and the Bears are certainly a pack of hard-to-handle whippersnappers. But the picture's point is that surfaces don't tell the whole story about people, about teams, or about anything.

Many episodes have an appealingly old-fashioned air, but the classic mood is disrupted by some violent hallucination scenes with jarringly modern special effects. [27 Dec, 1985 p.19]

It would be even more impressive if the story and characters lived up to the inventive techniques, though.

Mortal Thoughts has strong moments, but fails to keep you riveted to the end.

Bad movies invariably stem from bad ideas, and the worst of the several rancid ideas packed inside of Dan in Real Life is that Steve Carell could be the new Alan Alda.

Brand can seem simultaneously randy and strung-out and is often very funny. Hill is surprisingly touching.

Nicely acted.

The film suffers at times from biopic-itis – the narrative unfolds with the requisite heartbreak carefully apportioned – but it's always eye-catching.

What keeps the movie from championship status is a sense that the filmmakers see Ali's social and political contributions as extra added attractions, ultimately less important than his greatness in the ring.

Most of the time, however, we are watching pathology without benefit of insight.

On its own intimate terms, it's one of the most winning films on family life to reach the screen in ages.

Karsin doesn't adequately detail the political complexities of the struggle, but how can one not respond to someone like tribal leader Flor Ilva, who declares, "We women are warriors, not with weapons, but with our thoughts and through raising our children."

What does it all mean? I'm not convinced that Fricke's movies are much more than exalted travelogues, but you certainly feel as if you've been somewhere after you've seen one of them.

I call it art. And as long as I’m on the subject, I think the Grand Canyon is the greatest sculpture I have ever seen.

An inchoate mass of half-baked (and sometimes blackened) Oedipal dramaturgy. Coppola has made some of the greatest films ever made in traditional narrative mode, but whenever he goes into his indie-outsider dance, he stumbles badly.

While I don't entirely rule out the possibility that Bruce is a hoaxster, it seems more likely that his story is one of those weird scientific anomalies that more frequently turn up as an Oliver Sacks case history.

I wish Fontaine would follow up with a sequel: "Coco After Chanel." Tautou's performance cries out for a second act.

De Villa's debut film is persuasively written and acted, if a tad rougher around the edges than one might wish.

Most Mafia movies are unduly sympathetic, but this one takes the cake. Peter Dinklage is excellent as the mob's chief lawyer.

Joe Eszterhas's screenplay is vastly more thoughtful than his scripts for "Basic Instinct" and its ilk, but the storytelling is too spotty for the movie to become the effective moral tale it might have been.

Compassionate and marvelously acted, although a subplot about the gay grandson slows the story down for a while.

A jagged, uneven, often unfulfilling experience, but there are a few first-rate scenes between Joseph and Hannah that convincingly put forward the capacity for redemption in even the most ravaged of souls.

Lots of brilliant filmmaking and high-spirited acting, at least until the story turns repetitious and formulaic in the last 30 minutes.

Acted as a drama, paced like a ritual, filmed as a slice of rural Iranian life.

The film, refreshingly, is less concerned with how Nathan performs in the competition than in how he navigates his way through the bramble of human interactions leading up to it.

It has sharp performances in the title roles, by British actors Tim Roth and Paul Rhys, and its color scheme is so pungent I'm sure the real Van Gogh would applaud it. But it doesn't have the wide-ranging visual imagination of Mr. Altman's best work. [28 Nov 1990, p.14]

Altogether remarkable, a near-masterpiece.

The actors, who also include Rosamund Pike as a woman whose family was massacred by the Comanche, and Ben Foster, as a member of the military who killed an American Indian family, are all strikingly good.

Like most of its characters, it's rough and sometimes raw to visit with, blending sharp insights into the world of inner-city youth with a weakness for melodrama and touches of silly humor. But to see it is to visit a world rarely touched by mainstream movies. [15 Mar 1993, p.14]

Is there a moral objection to be raised about a movie that features a teenage girl as an assassin? I suppose there is, but I couldn't find it in me to object.

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

Rarely have Gibson's tears seemed more fictional than in this supposedly authentic account of a historical event that's far too tragic to merit such superficial treatment.

Part 1 of the final installment, 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,' is another scrupulous adaptation of J.K Rowling's books.

This movie is a one-of-a-kind experience – blarney carried to rhapsodic heights.

Writer-director David Jacobson has a good eye for widescreen compositions and sustains a low-key note of dread but is less successful in his attempt to graft a neo-Western to a neo-noir.