The stars of The Bear are compulsively watchable. Just the way they move their bodies is endlessly fascinating. Ditto for the magnificent Canadian scenery. [08 Nov 1989, p.11]

RED is a poisoned valentine to the CIA, and that approach, too, is in keeping with its cold-war sentimentality.

This is a movie about how one’s passion can burn away and leave in its place a vast nostalgia.

The best things about Never Been Kissed are its colorful camera work and funny dialogue.

No "JFK," but the story is weirdly compelling when it focuses on the journalist's growing paranoia as he plunges ever more deeply into a world of conspiracies that may or may not really exist.

When he's good, Mr. Mamet is very good indeed, and Spartan stands with the best work he's done. It's fast-moving, unpredictable, and as tautly, tightly wound as thrillers get.

The best commentator is Alda, whose rueful memories of being raised as a boy in burlesque are the film's highlight. "It was a form of abuse," he says of those days, but without rancor. It was, after all, the only childhood he knew.

Kittelsen is a funny, expansive actress, and director Anne Sewitsky manages the sad-comic tonal shifts with emotional accuracy.

Carrère, wisely I think, doesn’t turn the film into a reformist anthem. Shooting in a semidocumentary style, he allows us to absorb, along with Marianne, the relentless accretion of injustices. He also gives us some of the most believable portraits of female friendship I’ve ever seen in a movie.

Ramis doesn't reach the comic heights of his "Groundhog Day," but the acting is excellent and the screenplay offers some hearty laughs if you can stand bursts of violence and language as foul as a Mafioso's business agenda.

The most refreshing aspect of Red Dragon is its reliance on old-fashioned acting instead of computer-aided gizmos. Hopkins overdoes his role at times -- his vocal tones are almost campy -- but his piercing eyes are as menacing as ever, and Ralph Fiennes is scarily good as his fellow lunatic.

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

Flashy but uninvolving crime thriller.

What really hurts is the movie's shallow screenwriting, self-indulgent acting, and woozy camerawork.

Don't race to see it unless a female "Full Monty" is just what you've been waiting for.

The main performances are generally weak, although the smaller ones are sometimes brilliant, and the yarn never builds much momentum as it leapfrogs from one subplot to another. [28 Dec 1990, Arts, p.14]

What Trust conveys, at its best, is that ultimately parental protections are not fullproof, and that is the greatest horror of all.

Bill Murray's manic performance is the main selling point of this mildly amusing farce about a psychiatrist with a patient who literally drives him crazy

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

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.

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

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.

Although the cast, which also includes Jennifer Jason Leigh and Christine Lahti in sharp cameos, is very good, Wiig’s performance is self-effacing to a fault. Like a lot of comic actors, she overcompensates in dramatic roles by wearing a very long face.

It's as if we were watching one of those buddy-buddy bromances told, this time, from the perspective of the woman who is normally on the sidelines of the men's attentions and affections. It's a welcome angle.

The filmmakers are smart enough – or cynical enough – to realize that we don't watch movies like Under the Same Moon in order to be surprised. We go to them for a good cry.

It is one continuous fight sequence from opening scene to final credits, but lacks the blood, profanity, and gore that would have merited a more adult rating.

Although it's less novel and feisty than the original "Fantasia" of 1940, this collection of music-filled animations is highly entertaining at times.

Dive right in if you're looking for an old-fashioned entertainment that delivers corny romance, turbulent action, and enough wave-churning seascapes to make "Titanic" seem landlocked.

This is basically a 10th-tier rehash of the Indiana Jones genre, laced with moments that are actually clever and exciting. Dawson is alluring, Scott is smug and bratty, Walken is terrific, and The Rock is, well, The Rock.

Zemeckis has converted the epic poem about the warrior who slays the monster Grendel into a species of computer game. He employs the same motion-capture technology that he first used in "The Polar Express," to slightly better effect.

Pacino still gets a blast out of acting. His performance in this film about a blocked performer is gloriously unblocked – a valentine to vanity.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

Cillian Murphy plays a hyper-feminine transvestite who spends much of the movie traipsing about an increasingly violent landscape in search of his long lost mother. His whirligig encounters, political and sexual, rarely soar.

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

Woo's patented pyrotechnics - intricate editing, acrobatic camera movements, slow-motion mayhem - lend intermittent sparks to the violent action sequences, but the two-dimensional characters have little personality.

A gripping documentary, although we learn too little of the relationship between the filmmaker and his subjects.

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.

The story isn't as funny as it tries to be, but it grows increasingly winning as it goes along.

Bond is impersonated by 007 newcomer Timothy Dalton, who does little that's identifiable as acting, although he looks the part. Come back, Sean, all is forgiven!

The story's emphasis is on action, but there are some sensitive moments and interesting ideas along the way.

Offbeat tale, which tackles weighty themes. But sentimentality overtakes intelligence.

Glover and Bassett play the title characters with great energy, and Berry has invested the movie with the moral conscience that underpinned his entire career.

Energetic acting and directing make it a less exasperating experience than it might have been.

At its best, A Home at the End of the World has great emotional strength. But it's not the towering achievement it might have been if Cunningham had stayed truer to his original inspiration.

Although their responses too often seem rehearsed, their innocence is touching and redemptive.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

It's fun to watch the gifted Marisa Tomei and the lively Rosie Perez, but Christian Slater is less engaging as the waif of the story, and the screenplay is loaded with sentimentality. [26 Feb 1993, p.14]

The story wants to be a sort of "Last Tango in Paris" redux, but it falls into mere melodrama after a brilliant beginning.

Fans of ultraviolent sword-and-sorcery nonsense will have a good time; others will head for the exit. [19 Feb 1993, Arts, p.10]

Given the impossibility of crafting William Shakespeare into a believable human being, the film is an honorable try.

The story is a sort of "Stella Dallas Meets Slums of Beverly Hills," helped by heartfelt acting from its talented stars.

The movie has magical moments, but it's too contrived to gather much comic or dramatic power.

As quietly dazzling as a small, very precious stone.

The dialogue is often silly but Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn deliver it with enough crackerjack energy to keep audiences laughing.

Superbly acted.

Smart and engrossing, if too heavy on the symbolism at times.

Must-see viewing if you're not quite sure the sun really set over the British Empire.

In all, it's “Diner,'' female style. Directed by Donald Petrie from a blatantly manipulative screenplay that took four people to cook up. [24 Oct 1988]

Steven Spielberg's blockbuster whips up superficial sorts of excitement, and unlike the original "Jurassic Park," the picture looks tacky around the edges.

The story is so calculated that it ultimately bears little relation to the real world.

There are endearing and powerful moments which thankfully overshadow the occasional clichéd passages.

To say it right out, The Bostonians is the best movie I've seen all year.

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.

Although it’s refreshing to see a movie that stands up for charter schools and takes on teachers unions for their hammerlock on educational oversight, Bowdon overcorrects. His home state of New Jersey may not be an isolated case but neither, with its high level of corruption, should it be seen as altogether representative of all countrywide educational ills.

Firth is very good at playing racked men of high principle. He’s so well cast as Lomax that, at times, he’s almost too perfect in the role. He’s still the best thing about the movie.

The film is attractively designed and energetically edited, in the usual Disney fashion, and it's interesting to see the Disney folks convey such a hearty endorsement of interracial dating.

Parents will yawn, but younger children may enjoy the fun. [09 Aug 1985, p.24]

This may be the first crime thriller to explicitly utilize superstring theory but, in its woozy romanticism, it's not that far removed from this year's other time-warp movie, "The Lake House," about two lovers living in parallel years - or "Frequency," which starred Jim Caviezel as a good guy.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."

So many movies these days are being linked, often quite tenuously, to current politics. Let this new film be no exception. I am happy to say that Ice Age: The Meltdown points up for toddlers the dangers of global warming.

The acting is amiable but the story isn't much deeper than the callow main characters.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

The satire is crammed with sexual and scatological humor; some may find this Rabelaisian and refreshing, while others will detect the end of civilization as we know it.

Pinter's screenplay offers an exciting mixture of psychological suspense and storytelling surprise, and the lead performances are close to flawless.

The story of this Spanish thriller is weak in psychological credibility but strong in suspense, novelty, and imagination.

His readings of his own work are especially thoughtful, moving, and provocative in the best possible ways.

Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.

Witherspoon fills the screen with bright-eyed bounce. The rest of the cast is as forgettable as the flimsy story.

So how good/bad is Cars 3? If we’re talking Pixar threepeats here, it’s certainly no “Toy Story 3.” Instead, it’s a reasonably diverting, somewhat sluggish attempt to reinstall the “heart” of the first installment.

This movie has promising ingredients. But you'll leave wanting much, much more.

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.

As Molière, Romain Duris is frisky and, playing the wife of his benefactor, Laura Morante proves once again that she is one of the most intelligent and attractive actresses in the world.

Some of the suspense set-pieces are impressive, but the picture would pack a greater wallop if it were stitched together more tightly and consistently.

The action is fast, furious, and loaded with explosive effects, but the theme is a regrettable return to the us-against-them paranoia that dominated much science fiction in the cold-war era.

The film is as tricky and superficial as its low-life characters, using visual flimflam to mask its lack of substance.

The gimmick behind the screenplay is clever, but the filmmakers don't rise to the challenge they've set themselves, merely spinning two unimaginative stories for the price of one.

Lots of lively tunes and spirited acting.

Horror buffs will find plenty of split-second suspense and in-your-face carnage, while others will scramble for the exit as quickly as the characters race away from their apocalyptic foes.

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 would you do if you could take a pill and suddenly access 100 percent of your brain power? This is the premise behind Limitless, a sci-fi thriller that looks as if its makers utilized around 30 percent of theirs.

Trevorrow and his co-screenwriters (Rick Jaffa, Amanda Silver, and Derek Connolly) do bring some nice low-key touches to the thudfest, and action is satisfying, if not galvanizing.

Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman give sturdy performances, but Neil Jordan's historically based drama seems oddly cool and distant with regard to its incendiary subject.

LaBute is coming of age as an artist, and his future looks brighter than I ever would have suspected a year ago. Enfant terrible or not, he's starting to become a substantial figure in American film.

Its best moments offer a sense of motion-picture poetry that will lift receptive viewers out of their seats.

No-nonsense critiques of Brazil's endemic poverty and deeply flawed criminal-justice system lend substance to what otherwise might have seemed a flimsy and sensationalistic tale.