Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle directed by Alan Rudolph, a wildly uneven filmmaker who's happily at the top of his form in this offbeat drama.

Considered as a whole, The Chosen is indeed a maverick movie, depicting its characters and their milieu with restraint and respect. Yet it doesn't measure up to the fine Chaim Potok novel it takes its story from.

It's a beautiful movie to watch, and the cartoony characters are as endearing as they come.

On its own limited terms, The Infiltrator, like its hero, delivers the goods.

It’s well crafted, well acted, and features some terrific live-action/animation combos. But it never quite achieves liftoff, which is a big problem for a musical – especially this musical.

It’s always gratifying to see a movie in which an ostensibly closed-off community is depicted humanely rather than voyeuristically.

It all seems like a stunt, especially since Beaven has also written a just-published book about his experiences, but he and Conlin are an engaging pair who don't let zealotry get in the way of humor.

It starts with a promising angle, portraying the perennial conflict between the Federation and the Klingons as an allegory for real East-West relations. But the screenplay does little to capitalize on this. The result is an ordinary science-fiction adventure. [12 Dec. 1991, p.14]

If the film doesn't really explore the pain and bitterness of this marriage, it's still leagues ahead of most such attempts.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

Smith, it should be noted, has compared Neville in interviews to Job. Tone down the highfalutin references. In the end, this is a sci-fi zombie movie, folks.

You may find the film as outrageous as it is outlandish, and Bowery would have taken that as a compliment.

A series of vignettes...Some are weak, some are superb -- there's a priceless one with Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan as Brits with different feelings about learning they're cousins -- but they get better as they go along.

Informative documentary about the recent history of efforts to legalize gay marriage, tying these in with the history of marriage as an institution.

Neeson and Rush give emotionally rich portrayals of the main characters, and August's proudly classical filmmaking keeps the dramatic energy high even when the secondary performances sag in the story's second half. [08 May 1998, p.10]

Written and directed by Julian Schnabel, himself a gifted painter, this is one of the rare art-world movies that succeeds as both human drama and visual artistry.

A lumpy admixture of politics and carnality, but when it all comes together, it has a lingering force.

At least “Hidden Figures” was savvy enough to please its crowds. A United Kingdom, with its saintly good folk and sneering bad folk emptily exhorting, is closer to a dry historical tutorial.

The movie doesn't add up to very much, though. It's breezy, likable, forgettable.

A faltering attempt at black comedy mixed with romantic melodrama, Married Life is always on the verge of being interesting but never quite gets there.

You could argue, I suppose, that this film, a Sundance hit, is essentially a funny sketch padded out to feature length. And what of it, my man?

Writer-director Carl Franklin offers up a tone of heightened reverence that weighs down the material, but there are small, lovely moments when the magic realism approaches the magical.

The movie confirms what most of us have known all along: Electability is all about staying on message.

Paddington in Peru is a worthy addition to the beloved franchise. Buoyed by strong performances and the everlasting charm of Paddington’s unflappable British manners, it’s a supremely entertaining story for Hollywood’s favorite marmalade-loving bear.

Ungainly and overly ambitious, The Butler tries to encompass too much history within too narrow a framework.

The story is winning but the telling, with Dai adapting and directing from his own novel, is too sentimental in the long run.

Columbus has done a rousing job of bringing Rowling's rambunctious story to the screen. The eerie corridors and ever-shifting stairways of Hogwarts are as daunting, haunting, initially bewildering, and ultimately comforting as when Rowling painted them in prose.

Music buffs may wish there were a lot more Puccini and a little less talking-head chitchat.