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.

Keanu Reeves's portrayal of Siddartha is less than inspired, and there are candid depictions of human suffering in his portion of the movie that could be troubling for some spectators. As a work of visual art, the film is deeply impressive, however, reconfirming Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro as brilliant choreographers of cinematic time and space. [03 Jun 1994, p.10]

Better than bland but never quite rises above the level of a pretty good TV movie of the week.

There is a great movie to be made about the first stirrings of rock 'n' roll. Honeydripper is not that film, but it certainly whets your appetite for it.

In Beautiful Boy, Ku manages to take a new-to-movie subject and flatten it into something that, despite its harrowing contours, is often grindingly familiar.

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.

Spielberg wants us to drop the techno-gadgets and join hands, but it’s the VR world that really juices him. He’s the ultimate fanboy making a movie about the need to move beyond being a fan.

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

The tale doesn't always seem sure where it's going, and for once in his career, Leigh doesn't always appear to have a firm grasp on his project.

A heavy dose of corn syrup. Director Darren Aronofsky's herky-jerky, hand-held camera stylistics have a veneer of verity, but don't be fooled. This pastiche, written by Robert Siegel, is purest Hollywood.

Because of its subject matter, and because of the actors, it's impossible to watch this film without being moved. But a martinet is running the show.

Well-observed and unassuming as this film is, it glides along rather too blandly.

The Karate Kid will probably work best for young audiences unaware of its predecessor – or of much of anything else for that matter.

Resembles nothing so much as a workmanlike TV crime thriller.

Whether this is all a case of life imitating art or vice versa matters little. Few of these movies aspire to art. What counts is the trajectory of uplift.

The result, as might be expected, is strong on acting and overly stagey.

Oswalt captures the rabidness of the die-hard fan, the kind you can hear at any moment on the sports talk shows.

Good at scenes of high-level nastiness, but there's too much confusing exposition in this "Legacy" and the action scenes, some of them good, are too little and too late.

As the pushback to Gerwig’s force field, Kirke may at times be too mousy for her own (or the film’s) good, but her stillnesses are often a welcome respite in this whirligig.

The best parts of the movie are its occasional animated sequences.

Some of the set pieces are ravishing, more often they're ravishingly clunky.

Harrelson does his considerable best to redeem the hackneyed role of the dreamboat do-gooder. No matter how conventional his roles may be, he always gives them a feral quality, an eccentricity, that lifts them out of the ordinary.

When Cohen and Ferrell are eyeing each other, you never saw a loopier pair.

It's all a lot closer to melodrama than drama, but Thalbach is a dynamo.

It should all be sharper and funnier than it is.

Only Amy Adams, playing Mickey's tough-tender girlfriend Char­lene, manages to be convincingly working-class without seeming either dopey or rabid or strung-out.

There are some touching interactions between the players, but the film’s humanism is too predictably calibrated.

The best parts of The Shape of Water, a fantasy fairy tale set in 1962 in a top-secret aerospace research center, are marvelously rhapsodic in ways that recall films like Jean Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” without ever seeming slavish.