There's much subtle beauty in the last movie completed by Merchant Ivory Productions before Merchant's untimely death.

The Whistleblower is frustratingly uneven, but at least it affords us the rare opportunity these days to meet up with a movie hero who isn't wearing jammies and a cape.

A true story of the Memphis Belle's magnitude deserved to be told with as much dramatic intensity and as much natural humanity as possible. It deserved to be more than just an action-adventure dressed in phony heroic conventions.

I wish the film, which is mostly a standard-issue talking-heads-and-clips affair, had showcased more of her performing, but what we see still justifies her fleeting fame.

Isn't terrible exactly, but it's bland, and in some ways that's worse. It's a romance posing as a detective story in which the solution is obvious and not worth the fuss.

Its eventual failure to make sense indicates that it's intended more as a surrealistic fable than an ordinary sex-and-violence adventure.

The story suggests a more violent "Seven Samurai," full of jungle mayhem and eloquently filmed action-movie suspense.

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.

Splendidly acted and directed.

Radcliffe and Kazan have a nice nerds-in-clover rapport. If only the movie wasn’t so satisfied with how cute it is.

This is a funny idea, but the movie is too thinly written to build any real credibility, and the cast rarely seems in tune with the vapid vulgarities that dominate the dialogue.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

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

What actors! The great Miriam Margolyes has a wonderful cameo as a scullery maid, and Colin Firth manfully endures a face full of frosting. And then there's Angela Lansbury, playing her first movie role in 20 years as the villainous Aunt Adelaide.

It's a soggy farce that not even its top-notch cast can rescue – though not for want of trying.

Cameron, tall and lanky, fitted himself into the podlike chamber and dropped seven miles to the ocean floor. Although he didn’t encounter anything other than barrenness, he did bring back to the surface 100 new species of microorganisms. I hope National Geographic appreciates the effort.

The plot has something to do with the primordial battle between light and dark forces in the universe, and though several critics have written that it contains everything but the kitchen sink, I beg to differ. I saw a kitchen sink spinning around in there, too.

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.

The film benefits greatly from Rahim's subtle, effective performance.

You can blissfully zone out on the director's pretty pictures, which is a permissible indulgence when the pictures are as delicately alluring as they are here. Also, the performances of Kikuchi and Hatsune are first-rate.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

Along with its try-anything-for-a-yuk screenplay, the worst thing about Hitch is its running time of almost two hours. Did the studio forget to edit this flimsy thing down?

Streep’s performance has been criticized for being too theatrical, but that’s off the mark: The character she’s playing is supposed to be theatrical. She’s a woman playing a part – the ravaged matriarch.

The picture is a little too pretentious to achieve its artistic and emotional goals, but its ambition and imagination are impressive at times.

I suppose it's asking too much of Ratner to impart some kind of visionary flourish to the proceedings. But without it, these comic-book movies all tend to look the same.

Hanks and Ryan are as appealing as ever, and Ephron's fashion-conscious camera gives the action a slickly attractive sheen.

Despite all the heavy artistic artillery Mendes has brought to bear, his movie isn't all that far removed conceptually from "Top Gun" - which was also about military men itching for a chance to rock 'n' roll. The only difference is, "Top Gun" was unabashedly a popcorn movie while Jarhead is a box of unpopped kernels passing itself off as a full meal.

Rodriguez makes a promising debut with this unsentimental drama. If she keeps working on her screenwriting skills, she could become a filmmaker to reckon with.

Gene Hackman is excellent when he isn't overdoing his patented nice-guy routine.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

Other welcome faces include Alicia Vikander as a CIA analyst who has a better bead on Bourne than her superiors; Julia Stiles, in a repeat appearance as the spy’s former contact; and Riz Ahmed as a Silicon Valley billionaire.

Hoffman's acting is poignant and compassionate, etching a profoundly sad character with no trace of compromise, and Bates gives one of her most controlled performances ever.

Rush and Davis shine, and the drama is engrossingly told until it turns sadly sentimental in the last minutes.

On the level of pure craft, Disclosure is first-rate in every department. Levinson's directing is cogent and colorful, and cinematography by camera wizard Tony Pierce-Roberts is dazzling. [9 Dec 1994]

The subject and the film clips are great, although the documentary as a whole is a bit gimmicky.

The best of it has the comradely, free-swinging bawdiness of Robert Altman's "M*A*S*H."

Fiennes brings to the role a shimmering subtlety.

Its metaphors are too obvious (as before, Cimino's analogy for death is more death) and its treatment of social problems is skin-deep. Although the screenplay throws sops to many cultural and ethnic groups, it's riddled with racist and sexist attitudes. [23 Aug 1985, p.25]

A travelogue unlike any other.

Has good intentions, but its exaggerated celebration of quick-witted improvisation ultimately trivializes the human and historical horrors evoked by the story.

Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”

The first-time director, James Marsh, and his co-writer Milo Addica (who wrote "Monster's Ball"), sustain a black-comic tone, and the performances, as far they go, are quietly chilling.

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.

Meant to be a romp in the old Ken Kesey tradition, it's more like a dull drive with a bunch of leftover flower children.

It's a heroic story, and Zwick frames it rather too strenuously as an antidote to the generic Holocaust stories of Jewish passivity and martyrdom. And yet, as a piece of historical redress, a great service has been done in bringing this narrative to the screen.

At his best, Costner both exalts and complicates the strong and silent types who crowd, often to diminishing effect, so much of our American movie mythology.

The director, Bruce Beresford, is so eager to crowd the screen with eccentric details of behavior and setting that the verbal subtleties and rhythms get twisted out of shape. Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton give all-out performances that occasionally jell into true ensemble work. [12 Dec 1986, p.35]

It has a sweetness all its own.

Dazzling but lightweight epic about a young scientist kidnapped into a computer, where he battles an evil master control program that runs the place like an electronic fascist. Has some tantalizing moments, as when computer-generated characters debate the religious question of whether users really exist. In the end, though, it's squarely in the old Walt Disney tradition of anthropomorphizing everything in sight, only this time it's circuits (instead of cuddly animals) that look and talk like people.

Much of the acting is solid, but earnest performances can't give the picture all the bite and excitement it sorely needs.

Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

If Baron Cohen is going to continue making scripted comedies, he needs to work with directors far less slapdash than Larry Charles. He can be one of the funniest people on the planet, but he needs a real dictator – I mean, director – calling the shots.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

Blossoms of Fire fulfills the first criterion of any good ethnographic study: It's about an inherently interesting subject.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

The movie becomes, perhaps inadvertently, a celebration of selling out.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

A few miscalculated scenes aside, this low-budget drama is stunningly smart and powerful, with real-as-life lead performances and a style as gripping as it is unpretentious.

Like the nuclear sub it's named after, the picture is big, shiny, and expensive. It's also cold, hard, and cumbersome, and lacking the barest hint of emotional or psychological depth. [9 Mar 1990, Arts, p.10]

This is an op-ed polemic, and it's refreshing to see one so skillfully produced by filmmakers with a shoestring budget and meager access to mainstream distribution. A must-see movie, no matter what your politics are.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

“Twilight” is essentially an adolescent female fantasia about coming to terms with one’s sexuality. There I’ve said it. And I’m sure no one else has ever said it.

A likable though slender documentary.

The acting is solid, but Tony Pierce-Roberts's unimaginative camera work falls short of his highest standard.

Less a biography than an essay on theatrical illusion and the changing nature of comedy. Love it or hate it, you've never seen anything quite like it.

The overall effect is imaginative but overambitious, though Troche unquestionably has cinematic talent.

The aliens are as gloppy and gross as ever. I especially liked the joke about Andy Warhol being an alien – except didn't we know that already?

What a waste of a fine cast.

Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” is, almost inevitably, a stronger experience. That, too, was a species of political thriller but, unlike Stone’s film, it’s actually thrilling.

It's an imperfect movie, but a tantalizing and rewarding one.

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

It’s a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Miss Firecracker is a movie that tries too hard. You want to like it, but in the end it just tires you out.

The movie is reasonably smart and touching when it deals with the plight of a family on the rocks, but it pushes too many emotional buttons when the ex-wife is diagnosed with a fatal illness that proceeds to take over the story.

It's fun to see Val Kilmer assume a sort of Young Republican look after his hippie shenanigans in "The Doors," and the story raises some important issues. But there's little else to praise in this pretentious and overlong drama. It was directed by Michael Apted, who should stick to documentaries like his recent and superb "35 Up." [3 Apr 1992, p.12]

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

Can a mild-mannered toxicologist and an eccentric Alcatraz veteran stop him before it's too late? Learning the answer means sitting through more than two hours of violence, vulgarity, and all-around excess, served up with high-tech trimmings by director Michael Bay.

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.

Overacted, overdirected, and overcooked in the usual Tornatore manner, but sheer energy and enthusiasm keep it watchable and listenable most of the way through.

To its credit, the movie has as little patience for nonessential nonsense as the women it portrays.

Ask the Dust does manage to cast a spell. The film is not only an evocation of a bygone era but an emanation of it as well.

As unlikely as it seems, Mr. Dalton actually appears to be growing in the Bond role, which is potentially stifling because its own popularity has so rigidly defined it.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

The law of diminishing returns is no more apparent than in the movie world. A sequel, with rare exceptions, is worse than the film it follows, and sequels of sequels fare even worse. Such is the case with Shrek the Third.

It’s not just the technique of this movie that is resolutely old-fashioned. So are its attitudes. The film may feature practically wall-to-wall monster storms but undergirding it all is a cushion of straight-arrow sentimentalism. It harks back to a rosy neverland when men were men and women stood by them.

Suspenseful and psychologically rich.

Articulate interviews and an unusually creative visual style make the picture as lively to watch as it is illuminating to think about.

The characters are sharply etched but the plot is made deliberately ambiguous, suggesting that family life is so emotionally intricate that no single story can contain or explain it.

Isn't just a double whammy, it's a whammy squared - a goofy, stylish heist movie that'll steal moviegoers from other pictures.

Less original than the first "Star Wars" and less resonant than "The Empire Strikes Back," but packed with fast-paced action and downright cuddly Ewoks.

The film is provocative but also scattershot and not nearly as conclusive as it pretends to be. The almost complete absence of naysayers in any of the sections is a tip-off that the game is rigged.

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

Haskins comes across as too pure. When he plays only his black athletes in the championship finals, his monomania is presented as a good thing. After all, he won, didn't he?

Scarlett Johansson plays the head zookeeper and she's a lot less mannered than usual.

The presentation has verve. But the story is confusingly told - everything is NOT illuminated - and, as the seeker, Elijah Wood is a big blank.