Following the shows from rehearsals to Tony Awards night, she gets behind the scenes and does a good job conveying the incessant anxieties and glee of the talents involved.

If lush landscapes and exotic wildlife are what you're after, this isn't the safari for you. But many moviegoers will respond to its mixture of family drama and Holocaust-era history.

Kevin Spacey gives a richly nuanced performance as the accused killer, and director Clint Eastwood makes the sometimes sordid story less sensationalistic than it might have seemed in less accomplished hands.

Edward Zwick directed this reasonably thoughtful drama, helped by Denzel Washington and Meg Ryan in the main roles.

This intellectual allegory would carry more punch if it didn't slip into melodrama so often, but it marks Aronofsky as an exceptionally promising new filmmaker.

Overlong and repetitive as it is, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, at least delivers the goods.

The problem with The Good Shepherd is that it's a closed-off movie about a closed-off individual. Wilson is inscrutable from the get-go, and remains so. Damon does subtle work within the narrowest of confines.

It's an uneven film, but Dickens admirers shouldn't miss it.

It's bold, and big, and even beautiful at times. That's more than most recent movies can claim. [26 Aug 1982, p.19]

American Fiction is a serious-minded satire about race relations that is often exasperatingly at odds with itself.

Spielberg is such a supersleek craftsman that what might have been intended as a deep dive instead comes across for the most part as a sprightly gloss.

"Axe Murderer" resembles a dozen other films, yet it has its one charm - Myers himself, who sometimes borders on being adorable but is smart enough never to sink the viewer in gooey sweetness.

The new “Mission: Impossible,” while not peerless entertainment, is a much better sequel. When not bogged down by unnecessary exposition – really, who bothers to follow the plot of these movies anyway? – it’s a giddy, globe-spanning thrill ride.

It’s not simply that it’s “too soon” for such movies. That’s highly debatable. More to the point is that the stark reality of these explosive events as we live through them – in the news, in real time, on TV and through investigative documentaries – potentially outflanks any attempt to dramatize them using embellished scenarios and famous actors.

It’s a movie knowingly at odds with itself, and the disequilibrium, for all the film’s high cheer, sits uneasily on the screen.

It's all very pretty, but its use of motion-picture possibilities is unimaginative. What lifts The Best Intentions above its visual limitations, and makes it seem impressive, is the extraordinary depth and sincerity of Bergman's screenplay.

The whole family can enjoy That Christmas, a bright and cheerful animated movie.

Moana 2 touts the power of human (and non-human) connection, and the film will certainly connect with its target audience. But it doesn’t trust viewers enough to feel for themselves.

An honorable try, the movie nevertheless doesn’t fully capture the enormity of the tragedy. At best it’s a sorrowful, necessary dirge. Other times, it’s like “Goodfellas” on the range but, understandably, without the spring-coiled momentum of that film.

More so than with some of his recent films, like “The French Dispatch,” or even such earlier celebrated works as “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” not only did I marvel at its color-coordinated craftsmanship, but I also found parts of it to be emotionally moving – a rarity in the Anderson canon.

It has one big thing in its favor: Sally Hawkins’ performance as Langley. She’s perfectly cast, which, as a general rule, does not always translate into a perfect performance. Not so here.

The one thing that isn’t artificial – the most important element of all – is the movie’s spirit. Acting in franchise blockbusters often amounts to get-the-job-done professionalism. In “Jungle Cruise,” however, the actors approach the material as if they’re enjoying a day out at Disneyland.

Given the pitfalls of gush and treacle in this type of material, The Friend is no small achievement. Is it impertinent to say that Watts has never had a better partner in the movies? The levels of emotion she brings to the role clearly have much to do with her co-star.

Mississippi Masala is too ambitious for its own good, but it takes you to parts of the world - and parts of the American scene - that have waited too long for a place on the wide screen.

Although it has more clever ideas than actual laughs, the screenplay by Alan Zweibel and Andrew Scheinman packs more on-target social satire than any film in recent memory, and zesty performances keep it clicking along at a rapid pace.

[An] affectionate documentary.

For all its skill and scrupulousness, I found the film a strangely remote emotional experience – a slice of black and white that never quite bursts into living color.

What finally holds all the hokum together is Pitt. Even though the movie keeps ramming home the idea that Formula One racing is a team sport, Sonny’s outlaw vibe is clearly its focus.

By peeling back the layers of the characters on both sides of the issue, the movie offers a potent reminder that, often, policy debates become mired in talking points. The danger is that we’ll miss the human stories at the heart of such matters.

Gleeson is a wonderful actor and he keeps a lid on the blarney. He manages to convey a lot – fear, anger, compassion, rue – with only the slightest of squints and frowns. But he’s still the center of a cooked-up cavalcade of souls.

It’s a truism, reinforced here, that actors often are the last to comprehend how they do what they do. No matter. What they give us is all that counts.

I’ve never seen a better performance – or whatever you want to call it – from a two-year-old.

Gretchen Mol is unrelentingly charming in the role and she almost - almost - makes you believe that someone as unclouded as this could actually exist. This film would go well on a double bill with "The Stepford Wives."

The film, which swivels frantically between first responders, survivors, and investigators, has a percussive force, but its best scene, unbearably tense, is a quiet one, when a Chinese app designer (an excellent Jimmy O. Yang) is carjacked by the Tsarnaev brothers.

Director Henry Selick is all too effective at conjuring grody ghastliness. He's less effective at giving that ghastliness a human dimension, a resonance, a reason for being beyond cheap thrills.

Unlike the first ''Back to the Future,'' though, the sequel doesn't stay fresh and surprising all the way through. After a few good scenes, the plot gets too tricky, and the filmmakers keep walloping us with one chase scene after another. [4 Dec. 1989, p.10]

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

With all the talk in Page One about the demise of print journalism and the rise of new media, this shiny spacious emporium seems like both a beacon and a staggering folly.

A daring but flawed achievement, diluting its emotional power and satirical bite with a self-consciously jagged structure, and a calculating, sometimes chilly untertone. [1 Oct 1993]

What The Revenant attempts but fails to do is create a larger vision from all this survivalist mayhem. It’s a useful how-to guide for how to stay alive after a bear attack – or a human attack, for that matter – but it doesn’t soar. It crawls.

Overwritten and overcooked, Remember Me still manages a few explosive sequences between Pattinson and Pierce Brosnan.

What we get are themes and variations on previous good work, to lessening effect.

One of those movies with a terrific premise left unfulfilled.

Lawrence is terrific at playing tough, as she also demonstrated in her previous outings with Russell, “Silver Linings Playbook” and, especially, “American Hustle." But maybe it’s time for her to take a rest from him for a while. There’s a lot more to this actress than bold and brassy.

Promised Land is more effective as an anti-fracking screed than as a drama. Damon has his low-key charisma and Van Sant captures the enraged anomie of the community, but, except for one big plot twist, everything in this film is telegraphed from the first frame.

Low point would be Knightley's hysterical opening sequences in which she appears to be trying to trying to contort herself into a Moebius strip. Overacting this gross can only have been enabled by a director. Didn't Cronenberg look at the rushes? Or did he think he was back in "Dead Ringers" territory?

If we are being asked to regard BlacKkKlansman as more than a movie, this may be another way of admitting that, on some fundamental level, it falls down as anything but revue sketch agitprop.

Despite the all-too-harrowing familiarity of these scenes, they seem more like illustrations than dramatizations of trauma.

If Hollywood must have franchises, we could do worse than one highlighting people who have lived a long life and are not on altogether friendly terms with technology. But imagine what this cast could do with something less tutti-frutti!

The film's predictability dampens its best parts. Having decided to make a movie about a dreaded subject, the filmmakers too often retreat into the comfort zone of easy assurances and flip quips.

Travolta gives a hangdog performance as the world-weary cop obsessed with rooting out the killers. Hayek and Leto share a few tart black comic moments as the film spirals into a bloodbath.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

O'Neill and Curry, both heretofore nonactors, can't put across much more than a single emotion at a time, but their amateurishness isn't as annoying as it might have been in a movie with higher aspirations and artistry.

Not quite funny enough, or serious enough, falls into the muddle middle.

Stallone's writing and direction pull off a considerable level of pathos and suspense as Rocky mourns his wife's passing and tries to develop a closer relationship with his resentful son.

What you get in Trouble with the Curve is standard-issue late-career Eastwoodiana. The growl, the snarl, the crotchetiness are already familiar to us from "Million Dollar Baby" (2004) and "Gran Torino" (2009), his last appearance as an actor.

The movie is more striking to watch than to hear, more interesting as a tone poem than as a drama. In the end, it's a half-successful film on a subject that could have been all fascinating.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Michael Caine gives the most ferocious comic performance of his career, while Elizabeth McGovern is deliciously understated as the ''sorceror's apprentice'' who unwittingly helps him. [23 Mar 1990]

All of this has its value, but Plummer, in rollicking good form, without a shred of sentimentality, is primed for greatness, and Mills keeps cutting away from him just when things are getting interesting.

Like Jim Carrey, Ferrell seems to think that the way to be taken seriously as a dramatic actor is to drain himself of everything that audiences love about him.

As Sam, the wayward stepsister of Charlie's sardonic friend Patrick (Ezra Miller), Watson doesn't lose her cool, or her warmth, in a role that might easily have devolved into terminal sappiness.

As the hero, Christopher Reeve oozes with sincerity in the world-peace scenes - he helped write the story of the film, and this may be why he overdoes it. But he's also funny when he gets back to being klutzy Clark Kent, so the movie doesn't completely drown in its own good intentions.

It's also a mistake, I think, to have Oliver and Jordana be so emotionally flat. No doubt Ayoade was reaching for a hipper-than-thou vibe here, but their inexpressiveness is more annoying than cool.

Blethyn, as Frank's wife, is less high-strung than usual, which is a boon.

As director, Harris takes this classical sense of the western too far, though, until it seems that the movie is carefully trying to keep the genre alive.

A privileged sanctimony clings to this movie that is not fully recognized by its filmmakers: After all, not every distraught new mother can afford a self-help guru.

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 entire film has the glibness of a music video. Boyle has managed to make dire poverty seem glossy.

Chemla has an expressive face and she’s photographed lovingly, in a way that would probably have caught the attentions of the great French Impressionists, but ultimately she is more of a sculptural presence than a fully fleshed-out protagonist.

Is Jack, who is patterned on a real-life character, sociopathic or just plain clueless? Gallo doesn't seem to care. He cares about parading before us lowlifes living the high life.

Keanu Reeves's portrayal of Siddartha is less than inspired, and there are candid depictions of human suffering in his portion of the movie that could be troubling for some spectators. As a work of visual art, the film is deeply impressive, however, reconfirming Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro as brilliant choreographers of cinematic time and space. [03 Jun 1994, p.10]

Better than bland but never quite rises above the level of a pretty good TV movie of the week.

There is a great movie to be made about the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll. Honeydripper is not that film, but it certainly whets your appetite for it.

In Beautiful Boy, Ku manages to take a new-to-movie subject and flatten it into something that, despite its harrowing contours, is often grindingly familiar.

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.

Spielberg wants us to drop the techno-gadgets and join hands, but it’s the VR world that really juices him. He’s the ultimate fanboy making a movie about the need to move beyond being a fan.

The performers are so likable that you stay with them even when, as is often the case, the material is hit-or-miss.

The tale doesn't always seem sure where it's going, and for once in his career, Leigh doesn't always appear to have a firm grasp on his project.

A heavy dose of corn syrup. Director Darren Aronofsky's herky-jerky, hand-held camera stylistics have a veneer of verity, but don't be fooled. This pastiche, written by Robert Siegel, is purest Hollywood.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

Well-observed and unassuming as this film is, it glides along rather too blandly.

The Karate Kid will probably work best for young audiences unaware of its predecessor – or of much of anything else for that matter.

Resembles nothing so much as a workmanlike TV crime thriller.

Whether this is all a case of life imitating art or vice versa matters little. Few of these movies aspire to art. What counts is the trajectory of uplift.

The result, as might be expected, is strong on acting and overly stagey.

Oswalt captures the rabidness of the die-hard fan, the kind you can hear at any moment on the sports talk shows.

Good at scenes of high-level nastiness, but there's too much confusing exposition in this "Legacy" and the action scenes, some of them good, are too little and too late.

As the pushback to Gerwig’s force field, Kirke may at times be too mousy for her own (or the film’s) good, but her stillnesses are often a welcome respite in this whirligig.

The best parts of the movie are its occasional animated sequences.

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

Harrelson does his considerable best to redeem the hackneyed role of the dreamboat do-gooder. No matter how conventional his roles may be, he always gives them a feral quality, an eccentricity, that lifts them out of the ordinary.

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

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

It should all be sharper and funnier than it is.

Only Amy Adams, playing Mickey's tough-tender girlfriend Char­lene, manages to be convincingly working-class without seeming either dopey or rabid or strung-out.

There are some touching interactions between the players, but the film’s humanism is too predictably calibrated.

The best parts of The Shape of Water, a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.