The Wave, directed by Roar Uthaug, is pretty good. It’s also pretty strange. At least for American viewers – and Norwegians, too? – experiencing all these familiar disaster movie tropes in a Scandinavian setting, even on a relatively low budget, can be weirdly disorienting.

Provides a compassionate look at problems of old age that Hollywood rarely bothers to treat seriously.

As deliciously eccentric as the real-life characters it chronicles.

Slums of Beverly Hills is less a hard-edged exposé than a mood-shifting satire, though approaching its subject with a wryly ironic touch.

The movie peaks about halfway through, when town officials try to stop Perry from revealing what's going on.

Quirky, heartfelt acting makes this a superior entry in the perennial teenage-misfit genre.

The film discusses important social and personal issues, although the interview subjects don't always have enlightening things to say.

I found it immensely touching that these women found it in themselves to keep plugging away. Despite everything, they ended their days with a measure of peace and happiness.

It’s fun for a while to see Kurt Russell hamming it up behind his voluminous mustache or Samuel L. Jackson once again raising rafters by laying down the law. But the film is pointless, even as entertainment, because it builds to nothing more than a comic book blood bath.

The profoundly strange presence of Rodney Dangerfield triumphs over sloppy writing and lumpy editing in this sometimes raunchy farce about a middle-aged dad who joins his son as a freshman at college. The theme of father-son loyalty is attractive, and the supporting cast is strong.

It's a ridiculous story, and the screenplay (by Phil Alden Robinson) stuffs it with low jokes and bathroom humor. Yet a number of scenes are sly as well as silly, and director Carl Reiner knows when to inject a little pathos for a change of pace. He also uses touches of jazz that lend a gentle rhythm the movie would otherwise lack. [25 Sep 1984, p.23]

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

In a surprise move, the creator of "Beavis and Butt-Head" has made a laid-back, even subtle comedy that generally favors mischievous ironies over outlandish jokes.

The saving grace of Queen and Country is that its nostalgia is not laced with sentimentality. Even working in this conventional mode, Boorman doesn’t try to strong-arm us into blubberiness.

For Your Consideration is, except for "Borat," the funniest film of the year. Or, it's the funniest film that you don't have to watch through parted fingers.

Maglietta gives a magical performance in this lightweight but flavorsome comedy.

Tykwer doesn't aim for the heights of excitement and invention he reached in "Run Lola Run," but he blends an impressively varied palette of moods into an intriguingly unpredictable story that's never short of ideas.

Films borrow tricks from pictures made years ago -- try to watch Bourne without thinking of "The Manchurian Candidate."

Like the Oscar-nominated "Seabiscuit," though, Miracle fails to ring true as it tries to make a sporting event an all-embracing metaphor for the American way.

Polley has a sometimes graceful understanding of emotional temperate zones and Williams, when she isn't being zombielike, is touching. But Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.

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

Scott has the courage to let the imaginative story unfold at its own leisurely pace, and it's not surprising that the acting is excellent, considering that he's among the very best American screen actors.

The most interesting character in Imperium is not even Nate. It’s Gerry Conway (Sam Trammell), a seemingly normal family man who reads the great philosophers and loves the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, even making an exception for the recordings of Jewish maestro Leonard Bernstein. Terrorists come in all flavors.

Myers, whose background is in documentaries involving Afghanistan and Iraq War vets, is good at capturing the revealing, offhand moments in this story, but Maggie’s conflicts about motherhood and the military needed a greater psychological scope than this film provides.

The account is highly informative, although it would come across more vividly if there were fewer talking heads and longer stretches of archival footage.

Although von Trotta seems to regard von Bingen – played with a cool ferocity by Barbara Sukowa – as some sort of medieval feminist precursor, there are enough fault lines in the portrayal to subvert hagiography.

Some of the sequences are undeniably thrilling but, at about 2-1/2 hours, overkill sets in early.

What finally holds all the hokum together is Pitt. Even though the movie keeps ramming home the idea that Formula One racing is a team sport, Sonny’s outlaw vibe is clearly its focus.