This is one of Haneke's least powerful films, although the excellent cast is interesting to watch.

Luca stays close to the surface instead of diving deep into an exploration of how much freedom to give children. Arriving at a time when there’s a robust debate over how best to raise kids in the 21st century, it’s a missed opportunity. Luca is nonetheless a pleasurable movie experience. A summer vacation in one’s living room, it will leave you smiling from gill to gill.

Altman is one of very few directors who could have assembled such a superb ensemble, and he makes the most of it from first scene to last.

Viewers with a taste for bizarre, even surreal, humor will have a ball.

Snarky and enjoyable, but it could have been a ferocious black comedy. No Thank You For Playing It Safe.

Aniston and Reilly give the best of many excellent performances. A few plotty scenes aside, this quietly directed drama paints a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of modern malaise, and has a smart sense of humor as a bonus.

Intolerable Cruelty is a romantic comedy, but it has enough dark, strange, and cynical moments to qualify as a full-fledged part of the Coen canon.

Leconte justifies his vaunted reputation by lending freshness and feeling to what could have been a gimmicky tragicomedy.

Factotum is so sly and low-key hilarious that anybody can be in on the joke.

Biting as it tries to be, Tropic Thunder is mostly toothless. Its targets – Hollywood vanity, Hollywood tantrums – are easy hits.

A third aspect of The Tracker is less successful. In a badly calculated move, Mr. de Heer and singer Graham Tardif fill the soundtrack with songs full of clichés, platitudes, and truisms.

Hilarious, frenetic, and touching, but stereotyped and superficial in its treatment of both homosexuals and conservatives.

As fiercely unsentimental as Disgrace is, it offers by the end a measure of hope, and because that hope is so hard-won, it has the ring of truth.

Matt Damon and Robin Williams give touching performances, but Gus Van Sant's filmmaking is surprisingly ordinary.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

Here's hoping other filmmakers will follow its spirit, if not all of its methods.

Family home movies and photos and archival clips round out the film, which holds its hero-worshiping to fairly tolerable levels.

Colorful, if not exciting.

The directors, George Miller and George Ogilvie, borrow from every source they can find; movie buffs can pass the time spotting the Lynch shot, the Leone shot, the Jodorowski shot, and all kinds of others.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

Cruise is better than he’s been in a while because he damps down his usual all-intensity-all-the-time MO. He’s best here when his character seems the most scared. And Emily Blunt as a commando legend is indomitable, a credit to her exoskeleton.

Mahieux gives a bravura performance as the title character. Director Garrone keeps the story involving even though it doesn't quite live up to the star's strong talents.

It’s the sort of poetic conceit that needs a filmmaker far more rapt and intuitive than Haynes, whose jeweler’s precision keeps everything at an emotional remove.

The mid-'50s version is slow going most of the way, but there's no beating Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in the charm department, and director Leo McCarey comes up with some amusing moments that are more diverting than anything in Beatty's updated edition. [13 Oct 1994, p.10]

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.”

Tom Hanks makes his directorial debut with this likable comedy, which shows that while pop culture is a business like any other, enthusiasm and high spirits can lead to satisfaction even if major success proves elusive.

Nathalie Baye is remarkable in Le Petit Lieutenant where she plays Caroline Vaudieu, a Parisian police inspector who returns to her post after a bout with alcoholism following her child's death.

The athletic scenes are so lively and the main performances are so magnetic that even moviegoers who resist sports-centered pictures may be won over. [11 Sep 1998, p.B2]