Setsuko’s pathetic attempt to claim a new life for herself is touching. The film never makes fun of her.

At times, “Homecoming” resembles a very good after-school special embedded in a cacophonous franchise flick. That’s probably not the demographic the filmmakers were most hoping to please.

It's all rather sweet but instantly evanescent.

Garner is good, and so is Brian Dennehy as a crusty ranch owner; Abigail Breslin, playing a leukemia patient, demonstrates that she was not a one-note wonder in "Little Miss Sunshine."

It's more than enough that the Wilsons were punished and pilloried for telling the truth. We don't need to see them sanctified by righteousness.

Gene Hackman is solid as the hero, and Dennis Hopper does his best screen work ever. [6 Mar 1987, Arts & Leisure, p.23]

The action is fast and involving until the three-quarter mark, when the David Himmelstein screenplay loses its focus and everything muddies up. [31 Jan 1986, p.23]

The conceit here is that if a boy and a girl love the same music, that means they're in love. Who am I to argue with such poetic whimsy?

Could have used a lot more grit. Without it, we're left with a crime movie fantasia that slips all too easily into the ether.

The action, directed by Joe and Anthony Russo, is thuddingly effective without being terribly imaginative, but at least it’s not in the clobber-the-audience “Transformers” category.

Has its lewd funniness, though not often enough to make it worthy of not only "Bad Santa" but, more to the point, "School of Rock."

It's a carefully manicured, almost genteel piece of moviemaking. The film is paradoxically both rousing and lulling.

If Freedomland reminds you of Spike Lee's "Clockers," that's not by accident. Like that film, it's adapted by Richard Price from his novel and is set in the neighboring Northern New Jersey communities of Dempsy, predominantly poor and African-American, and the largely white blue-collar suburb of Gannon.

Although his movie often resembles the kind of promotional video one might find as an extra on a concert DVD, N'Dour in full throttle is a sight, and sound, to behold.

What the film is saying, so far as I can tell, is that, if cut, you will bleed. And bleed. As the vampire's kindred Seven Deadly Sinner, wild-haired Kim Ok-vin looks like she's having a high old time.

My only regret is that the film could not somehow take a leap forward to 1988. I would love to have seen what Lee and Will could do with "Die Hard."

I wish Mo' Better Blues were a little mo' better than it is, but Spike Lee remains a major filmmaking talent, and even his second-best work has an awful lot going for it.

Radcliffe's fidgety performance is convincing, and he does come across as an adult, though a very young one.

Abbott has a compelling unpredictability, though, and in a couple of his scenes with Lynskey, you can spot the stirrings of a more complex film than the one we finally ended up with.

It's an omnisexual variation on François Truffaut's "Jules and Jim," although stylistically, with its emphases on hipper-than-thou attitudes and moody-blues visuals, it's much closer to the early work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.

If the film had focused on more than the Algiers Motel incident, if, as it starts out to do, it had attempted to convey a comprehensive and incendiary portrait of a city in crisis, it would have rendered far more justice to those times – and our own.

We see him (Brolin) whip up a first-class chili, but his specialty is peach pie, which we watch him prepare so lovingly that I was surprised Reitman didn’t include the recipe in the end credits.

Wilson has a gawky affability here that helps redeem much that might otherwise seem tasteless (as opposed to tasteless-but-funny).

Warrior becomes increasingly shameless until, by the end, with the big fights fought, we are clearly meant to rise as one and applaud the indomitability of the human spirit. But the only indomitable thing about Warrior are its clichés.

July, like Hal Hartley, another overrated art-house luminary, is an acquired taste I have yet to acquire.

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

Fred Schepisi, one of the world's great directors ("The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith," "A Cry in the Dark") is working at half-speed in The Eye of the Storm, a convoluted family drama derived from a Patrick White novel.

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.

Compared to "Capote," this new film is altogether lighter.

There's something foul about staging the assassination of a sitting president in order to push a political agenda that could just as easily have been put forward without resorting to such sensationalism.

Deft and fast-moving, but shouldn’t a musical have at least a few songs you can hum on your way home?

Syriana falls down at the most basic storytelling level, and this incoherence damages even the good parts.

It's all tease in the first half, and all implausibilities in the second. Still, Thomas is always worth watching, in French or in English, whether her mood be chilly or tropical.

Anonyma stands out in A Woman in Berlin not only because of her ragged nobility but also because, alas, Färberböck has surrounded her with a gaggle of Berliners who seem right out of Central Casting.

Despite the film’s intentions, Idris and Seun can’t really stand in for anybody but themselves. What they go through, as middle-class kids in a privileged school system, seems far less race-based than the filmmakers would have us believe.

It is a splendidly appropriate project for Otto Preminger, even though he hasn't succeeded at making the most of it.

The filmmakers's attempts to balance out the gung-ho shoot-'em-ups with an overlay of "fairness" are rudimentary. The movie works us into a frenzy of righteous revenge, it makes us cheer each kill by the FBI warriors, and then it tells us that this violence only breeds more violence.

It has weak spots, including bits of mystical mumbo jumbo about a legendary "Indian runner" with a ghostly message. But most of the film is articulate and absorbing.

The greatest performance, though, is Vanessa Redgrave's as Martius's blood-lusting mother, Volumnia. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of acting, all controlled rage. When, in the end, that rage erupts, her vehemence splits the screen.

Some of the human-interest stories are compelling, but too much of this film is as dry as a high school classroom presentation.

Not much depth or political examination here. The film works best as a survivalist’s manual.

At around the halfway point the film takes an intriguing swerve, as Kyle is canonized and Lance is unexpectedly launched into celebrityhood. Flashes of deadpan outrageousness occasionally redeem the dourness.

Most of the film, which also has links to Spike Jonze’s "Being John Malkovich," plays like a variation on some of Spike Lee’s more scabrous racial fantasias like “Bamboozled.” It’s also very much in the vein of films like “Get Out,” which also mixed horror, racial comedy, and social consciousness, though here to far less effect.

Savages isn't about anything except flashily directed mayhem. In this nest of vipers, it's the slitheriest varieties that survive – at least for a time.

The best reason to check the film out is Ejiofor's performance, which is packed with grace and wit and pathos.

No doubt some of it is charming enough to induce giggles in its preteen target audience.

The fact that this movie, with its 65,000 painted frames, was even attempted, is daunting. It’s the kind of folly that demands a measure of respect, for the effort, if not altogether for the result.

Was Maher afraid he might muddy his clownish jape if he actually brought into the mix a learned theologian?

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

Kaling’s naive earnestness in the role is very winning, and Thompson makes her boss lady clichés seem almost fresh. Not quite fresh enough, though, to rescue the movie.

The most perplexing thing about this portrait is that, against all odds, the kids mostly seem outlandishly resilient and good-natured. I say “seem” because, again, I don’t entirely trust this portrait. Too much of what Moselle shows us looks tenderized.

What it's mainly about is movie stars skittering from locale to locale while bullets whiz by and the plot thickens – or, more to the point, curdles.

Art School Confidential mostly just makes you feel bad - period. It puts you in a foul mood and leaves you there.

Because Crowe is hamstrung by his role, he never strikes the requisite sparks with Cotillard. This is quite an achievement, since her beauty is on par with Provence's.

The Upside is a movie that somehow works, at least some of the time, even when it shouldn’t.

The children are under the aegis of Miss Peregrine – played with divaesque triumphalism by Eva Green – who is capable of transforming herself into a falcon.

In the name of unblinking realism, Szász overdoes the allegory. There are no sacrificial gestures here, no heroism, no tears. He comes on as truth-teller, but he’s only telling half the truth.

The action isn't as consistently funny or surprising this time, but there's a lot of laughter to be found between the merely crude moments. [2 Dec 1988]

Wilkinson’s acting is likely to be undervalued simply because it seems effortless.

Far from a flop, and I'm sure the Spider-maniacs will eat it up. For me, it's a buffet without much aftertaste.

Cronenberg has a distinctive style – deadpan absurdism laced with fright and all executed with slow deliberation. But too much of Eastern Promises is cultish and silly.

The film is deliberately old-fashioned in its approach; the story line is resolutely linear and the production values are deluxe. It all makes for a fairly enjoyable, if schematic, backstage extravaganza.

Marginally better than its predecessor, but the same problem still remains: Cars just aren't very interesting as anthropomorphic animation vehicles (pun intended).

Ratner, who has been accurately dubbed a "fauxteur," does an OK job keeping the action swirling, especially in the finale atop the Eiffel Tower.

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.

It doesn’t help that most of the film is shot in a thick gray-green overlay that sets an immediate tone of abject dreariness. I’m not implying that Portman should have included high-kicking musical numbers to lighten the mood, but there is a Jewish tradition of mining the black comedy in tragedy that the film would have done well to avail itself of.

Although it's slavishly similar to the original Home Alone, which was a colossal hit, this sequel has lots of color and Christmas warmth to recommend it.

At heart, Lindholm may be more of a documentarian, a glib documentarian, than he realizes. He goes with the surface of things.

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]

This is pretty standard-issue Great Man of History psychobabble, and it’s insufficient, though somewhat satisfyingly so. The clichés go down easy.

It’s a strange, unsatisfying, fragmented movie, but at its best it belongs in the same unconventional continuum as Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There” (about Bob Dylan) and “Love and Mercy” (about Brian Wilson).

Whereas the original, directed by Joseph Sargent, was essentially a well-oiled B movie, the new incarnation, directed by Tony ("Enemy of the State") Scott, is bristling with high-tech gimcrackery and over-the-top camera flourishes.

Although the movie goes way back into Rumsfeld’s career, it is the Iraq section that is the most noteworthy – and disappointing. Morris elicits virtually nothing revelatory from Rumsfeld.

A nutty, awkward, oddly impassioned parable that mashes together so many different genres that calling it “unclassifiable” doesn’t really explain very much.

Gere is believable enough, and so are his costars (Steve Buscemi and Kyra Sedgwick turn up in small roles). Vereen is best – he creates a full-bodied character using the sparest of means. It’s a magnificent cameo.

Essentially three movies in one: The staged reenactment of Columbus's expedition, the filming of that staged expedition, and the contemporary local uprising. It's a lot to bite off, especially since Bollaín's budget doesn't seem to be much larger than Sebastián's.

The computer-animated portions that function as a real-world framing device are more tedious than fanciful.

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

He was the Beatles of the hair business.

It's worth noting that this movie is loosely based on actual people – except the real-life Driss character is, in fact, an Arab. If Driss had been an Arab, The Intouchables would have waded into less navigable waters, but it might have made for a tougher movie.

I will never be comfortable with the concept of Bosch as charming prankster. Just one look at the paintings will cure you of that notion.

By skewing the film into a father-son inspirational saga, the filmmakers sell out the best possibilities in their material. Lurie clearly wants Resurrecting the Champ to be "more" than a sports movie, or a newspaper movie. Ironically, he ends up with less.

If this was a quintessential Polanski movie, something malign would reside inside its heart: The sitcom would explode its boundaries. The movie is called Carnage, but the carnivores on display are toothless.

The action sequences, at least as feats of engineering, are mightily impressive. But Miller is so caught up in all his hardcore allegorical hoo-ha that he never lightens up. Does he think maybe he’s Homer?

It's never altogether clear why this visually blah and dramatically bland movie needed to be made at all (or why it wasn't made for television instead). The only answer I can come up with is that Murray wanted to show off with a cigarette-holder.

Miss Bala has been praised on the festival circuit for being a gritty look at the Mexican drug trade but too often it seemed like a bargain-bin "Scarface" to me.

Frankly, the most disturbing thing about Prime is that Uma Thurman is now officially an Older Woman.

Debbie’s assemblage of her crack team has its sly amusements, especially when Cate Blanchett, as Debbie’s hypercynical best friend, and Rihanna, playing a master hacker, show up. But Rihanna, along with Mindy Kaling, who plays a jewelry expert, are vastly underused, as is Awkwafina as a world-class pickpocket. On the other hand, hammy Helena Bonham Carter, as a cash-strapped fashion designer, is overused. Her hats are funnier than her dialogue.

Highly uneven, but at least it doesn’t glamorize Hawking’s life or turn it into a paean to endurance.

There are many things wrong with Julie and Julia but, if you're looking to get hitched, you won't find a better booster.

The young cast members, including Justin Long and Ryan Reynolds, are often spirited and funny, and restaurantgoers are left with a valuable lesson.

The best part of the movie is when the few who make it through are introduced to their new owners. It’s love at first touch.

Rust and Bone is made by filmmakers and actors who are capable of much more – and they know it. The result is a true oddity: an orgy of hokum dressed up as an art film.

Once you accept the fact that “Rogue Nation” is not going to be the wingding of the franchise, it becomes a lot easier to enjoy.

Dunst gives a strong, hard-bitten performance even though she is playing an attitude rather than a character. Much of Justine's upsets are recorded in Von Trier's shaky-cam style – seasick realism. The grand planet-busting finale, though, is a beauty.

In supporting roles, Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Rachel, the equally valiant house slave Newton makes his common-law wife, and Mahershala Ali as Moses, the leader of the renegade slaves, provide some powerful moments.

This should all be risible except that Dowdle, who has worked in the horror genre, knows how to amp the action and keep the terror taut.

Sigourney Weaver isn't quite up to her most demanding scenes, but Ben Kingsley is expertly enigmatic as the stranger, and Stuart Wilson is excellent as the husband who doesn't know whom to believe. [27 Jan 1995, p. 14]