Love & Other Drugs is a slick weepie made by smart guys who want you to know they're better than the schlockmeisters. They've outsmarted themselves.

Invictus has an understated grace, but too often it comes across as hero-worshipy.

A sensitive, nicely made character drama.

Chapman coaxes good performances from his cast, especially Wilson, who makes Joe's immense conflicts a matter of empathy as much as abhorrence.

Too much of this movie is a conventionally rendered gloss that, in its own way, also attempts to cast Bauman as an inspirational icon. He is, but we can see in Gyllenhaal’s looks of grief and panic the makings of the more complex movie this might have been.

Perfect Stranger is far from Hitchcock, and Berry, although she gets an A for effort, can't do much with the half-baked characterizations.

Movies don’t become great by association, and Wonder Wheel is a far cry from “Streetcar.” There are ample flaws in this film, but they certainly don’t rise to the level of tragic.

Dash deserves great credit for reaching toward a new kind of cinematic structure that blends compassionate character exploration with a deep interest in the world of nature, and a bold willingness to let storytelling take care of itself at its own unhurried pace. One hopes, however, that in future works she will lean more decisively in a single clear direction - toward painterly visualization or toward psychological narrative. [30 Jan 1992, p.12]

This love letter to Valentino from director Matt Tyrnauer seems intended for the already smitten.

This is a technological breakthrough, all right, but a breakthrough to what?

The funny thing about this series is that, although we are regularly shown the most exquisite dishes, neither Coogan nor Brydon has much to say about them beyond the mandatory oohs and aahs. Winterbottom works in some midlife crises material, as he also did in “The Trip to Italy,” but to less effect here.

While it loses the charm of Romero’s low-budget clunkiness, it is in all other regards superior. Unfortunately, it’s not better than “28 Days Later...,” which is close enough to count as an unofficial remake.

Too much of Sunshine is like a cross between a middling "Alien" movie and "Solaris" (the woozy Steven Soderbergh version).

The fact that it's based on a true story doesn't alter the fact that, like most such Hollywood movies, it seems fabricated.

What keeps the film watchable, aside from the vibrant musical numbers in the nightclub, is Garcia's obvious love for the Cuba of his ancestors, of his dreams. A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch.

It's a modest film in most respects, but Albert Finney as Alfie is a man of great importance indeed, reminding us again that he's one of the most towering talents in film today.

It’s respectable, safe, intelligent – and a bit dull.

The film is never less than intelligent and never more than accomplished.

I wish the film had gone even further into loopiness. Like Ant-Man, the film, directed by Peyton Reed, comes in two sizes – it’s sometimes big on laughs but often small on risk-taking.

For all her chops as a dramatic actor, she's our new Judy Holliday and Goldie Hawn, only even sharper.

There are some rollicky moments in Finding Dory, which comes 13 years after the markedly better “Finding Nemo,” both directed by Andrew Stanton.

In Sidney Lumet's "Dog Day Afternoon," which only looks better with the years, New York was as much a character in that film as its people. It was a movie that took its cue from the energy of the city. The Inside Man takes its cue mostly from other movies.

Capotondi keeps circling his movie in and out of dream states and waking states as the whodunit morphs into who-cares-who-dunit?

In more ways than one, MacFarlane is trying to outgross Mel Brooks.

Vigorous but rather scattered account of two gallant young runners in the 1924 Olympics, based on the real-life experiences of Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell.

Janney knows how to nail a line like few others in the business. It helps that, in this film, she has most of the best ones.

As a piece of storytelling, Everybody Knows covers a vast expanse of human experience, but it doesn’t dive very deep.

Essentially The Conspirator is a courtroom drama with occasional bulletins from the outside world. It plays out to its predictable end with the doggedness, if not the verve, of a "Law and Order" episode.

The result is more of an illustrated storybook of a cherished classic than a living thing in its own right.

Set in 2029, Logan is the closest thing to a valedictory the Marvel universe has yet concocted. Depending on how sentimental you are about these things – me, not much – it’s a bittersweet event.

Dyrholm’s extraordinary performance is conspicuously better than Thomsen’s. She’s the best – the only – reason to check out The Commune.

The best parts of Wonder Woman are frivolous in the best way.

Although substantially shortened for its United States release, this violent drama still has the feel of an epic, as director Sergio Leone explores the seamiest byways of urban Americana through the story of two gangsters who start their partnership as Brooklyn kids in 1921 and tragically end it in the late '60s. Yet the story has gaps and many of the incidents have a flatness which suggest deeper flaws than cutting and trimming probably account for. [U.S. theatrical release]

Too often Churchill feels more like an exposé than a deep-dish psychological exploration

Boenish’s wife, Jean, who trained to jump with him, is interviewed extensively, and, although Strauch doesn’t provide much backstory for her, she emerges as that rarity – a perfect matchup to a seemingly unmatchable man.

The result may have value to '60s sociologists, ethnologists, superannuated hippies, and Kesey fanatics, but for the most part what is on view is a jumble of scenes featuring pranksters getting high on grass and LSD.

The one full-fledged inspiration of Outrageous Fortune is the pairing of Long and Midler into a team that adds up to even more than the sum of its parts.

As it is, The Maid is a study of a character who rarely emerges from the opaque end of the spectrum.

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

It’s a dirgelike odyssey sparked by Julianne Moore’s overheated turn as George’s best friend – a welcome respite from Firth’s clenched emoting.

Bob Hoskins doesn't succeed at making the hero's wild mood swings credible, but Cathy Tyson makes the most stunning screen debut in recent memory. The movie seems genuinely saddened, moreover, by its own nasty view of London lowlife. [13 June 1986, p.25]

His performance in Gold, as Kenny Wells, isn’t quite up to his Oscar-winning work in "Dallas Buyers Club," but it’s nevertheless a rousing feat without which this movie would have far less to recommend it.

The movie's gross-out effects are impressive but wearying. How apt that the director's name is Gore.

The film in the end seems more of an expertly orchestrated blood bath than a full-scale tragedy.

Tomorrowland is a rather sweet excursion into speculative sci-fi, and, wonder of wonders, it doesn’t even seemed primed for a sequel. But this movie about the thrill of the visionary is, alas, mostly earthbound.

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

The subject matter, already troubling, is made even more so by Vinterberg’s almost sadomasochistic penchant for propping up Lucas’s martyrdom. He’s gunning for prey, too.

An overly stately affair that often substitutes production values for imagination.

Depp and Rush are still in there plugging away. They’re troupers, but the series is all used up. If there is to be another sequel it will have to be called "Pirates of the Caribbean – At Wit's End."

Once summer ends and the kids enroll in school, the jig will be up. The film ends with that eventuality. It would have been richer if it had opened with it.

Jenkins has an admirable feeling for, as the French would say, mise en scène, and a gift for placing actors in naturalistic settings. What he lacks at this point is a strong story sense.

Peirce is gifted, but she lacks the ability of directors like DePalma to transform schlock into something deeply personal.

This is Téchiné’s seventh film featuring Deneuve, and it’s not one of the better ones. (The best is probably 1986’s “Scene of the Crime.”) Still, it has its true-crime fascinations, and, until its misbegotten 30-year flash-forward to Maurice’s trial, it has a silky allure of sun-kissed depravity.

I wish the film had done more – anything – to analyze Petit’s psyche. But he barely exists in the movie except as a certified daredevil.

Zamperini’s life story is genuinely inspirational, but the movie seems fashioned as a standard-issue profile in courage, with Zamperini, after a troubled youth, transformed into an almost saintlike figure. He would have been every bit as inspirational, even more so, without the halo.

Messrs. Iñárritu and Arriaga have played this card one too many times. If they really want to appear radical the next time out, my advice is: Tell a single story and tell it well. What a concept.

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.

The plot is ''Pygmalion'' warmed over, but Michael Caine and Julie Walters give sparkling performances, and director Lewis Gilbert keeps the action humming along.

We’re left with an enigma that is insufficiently probed: How does art this banal nevertheless capture us?

Of all the Star Wars-themed movies, this one is the closest to a Saturday afternoon serial/western. Don’t expect more than that. But it could have been less.

Garland is great at setting a tone of creepy ominousness, and the women’s foray into the swampy terrain is an unnerving blend of lustrous loveliness and split-second horror. But the visual effects throughout the film are often disconcertingly cheesy, and the pulp elements pile up with an extra serving of gore.

A brisk, black-and-white, worst-possible-case dinner party scenario overflowing with good actors and bad vibes.

Like all too many docs these days, it chronicles a contest while caricaturing the contestants.

As Leonard, Nivola isn’t bad, which is good, since the entire movie revolves around him.

All this is mighty silly, but there's something to be said for watching a French movie that, for a change, isn't about l'amour, existential angst, or madness. It's oddly reassuring to know that Hollywood isn't the only place where dithery, disposable spy spoofs are manufactured.

First Man pays lip service to the politics of the cold war that surrounded the moon shot, but it’s not that kind of movie, really. For all its scale and ambition, it’s essentially a small-scale character study. The character, Armstrong, is microscopic, and the backdrop is macroscopic. It’s an odd, uneasy fit.

The action is rousing and the suspense is relentless in this adventure yarn about a San Francisco cop and an Oregon mountain-man chasing a psychopathic killer through the wilderness. [19 Feb 1988, p.21]

Because we know almost from the get-go that things will turn out bad-to-bittersweet for them, the movie is like one long autopsy of what went wrong, starting with Day No. 488.

At worst is inoffensive. But that's the point. When you're making a movie about people whose lives are torn up in this way, inoffensiveness is, well, offensive.

Too often the sequences in this movie play out like snatches from a terrific play that somehow got lost along the way.

The film isn't helped by Kline's cameo, although his comic timing is impeccable. The problem is that what he's timing – the role of an aging ego-swelled roué – is very tired stuff.

It’s all fitfully sharp and amusing but hardly a masterpiece.

Although the filmmakers try to avoid roteness, the conflicts tend to play out along circumscribed lines. This gives the film a seesaw sameness. It's all a bit too diagrammed.

Now that it is at last on screen, my reaction is ... what's all the fuss?

Bay and his screenwriter, Chuck Hogan, adapting the nonfiction bestseller “13 Hours,” by Mitchell Zuckoff and the members of the Annex Security Team, resolutely avoid any overt political inferences.

Director Marc Forster is very good at amping up the terror, but after a while, we reach zombie overload and we might as well be watching an infestation of Transformers.

Although the drama doesn't quite live up to its early promise, much of it is emotionally involving and intellectually stimulating. [22 May 1992, p.12]

Pratt does a creditable job of playing distraught without seeming like a ninny, and Lawrence at least looks stylish, though she’s not called upon to do much acting. You can almost hear her saying to herself, "I wonder what David O. Russell has planned for his next movie and can I pretty please have a role in it?"

The cast is uniformly good, although Tomlin overdoes the crusty-crone routine. She scowls a lot, but we all know she’s a secret softy.

Despite the drawbacks of the Silkwood screenplay, written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen, this is a directorial triumph for a filmmaker who has artistically matured during his absence from the screen these past several years.

It's movie-making as match-making.

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 film's one extraordinary aspect, which makes it well worth seeing despite its carefully coiffed shagginess, is Maya Rudolph's performance.

Here’s a valuable moviegoing rule: Just because you use up an entire handful of hankies doesn’t mean a movie’s great. But Stamp and Redgrave are the real deal.

Whoopi Goldberg has a lot of heart; Neil Patrick Harris gives a sensitive performance as her young friend; and the supporting cast is solid. The screenplay is gushy, though, and director Robert Mulligan rarely tones it down. [14 Oct 1988, p.21]

McDormand is a bit too spartan and sealed off in the role. Her steeliness doesn’t have enough emotional levels.

It’s another one of those films, like “Book Club,” in which the cast far outshines the material.

Gavron’s conventional approach to the material compares unfavorably to the newsreels and stills of the actual suffragettes that close out the film. The harsh reality comes through in that footage in a way that the film as a whole only approaches in bits and pieces.

One of those documentaries that is more testimonial than investigation.

The war scenes in Hacksaw Ridge, which take up almost half the screen time, are almost on a level with the D-Day invasion sequence from “Saving Private Ryan.”

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.

Frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating.

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.

Loving is a decent and heartfelt movie that, rarity of rarity these days, suffers from being too decent and heartfelt. It is so careful not to give offense that, in some ways, it’s more admirable for what it doesn’t do than for what it does.

Hayek gives one of her better performances, though – she makes it clear that Beatriz may be righteous, but she’s also more than a bit unhinged – and Lithgow is so good at playing CEO oiliness that you have to smile. He’s the man you love to hate.

Hollywood has never been the best arena to hash out policy debates. But social-issue movies can have real societal impact. That's why Won't Back Down, which presses a lot of hot buttons, deserves to be taken seriously, and criticized seriously, on its own terms.

Directing the action from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, filmmaker Softley keeps the pace reasonably quick and the images reasonably absorbing. [15 Apr 1994, p.13]

Much more silly than romantic.