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.

Frisky and oddball in ways that are sometimes annoying and more often ingratiating.

The bromance often seems generic, too. Fishburne gives a highly nuanced performance, one of his best, as he allows us to see in this man of God flashes of the rogue he once was. But the movie ultimately must be defined by Doc, and we never really get inside his head.

Loving is a decent and heartfelt movie that, rarity of rarity these days, suffers from being too decent and heartfelt. It is so careful not to give offense that, in some ways, it’s more admirable for what it doesn’t do than for what it does.

Hayek gives one of her better performances, though – she makes it clear that Beatriz may be righteous, but she’s also more than a bit unhinged – and Lithgow is so good at playing CEO oiliness that you have to smile. He’s the man you love to hate.

Hollywood has never been the best arena to hash out policy debates. But social-issue movies can have real societal impact. That's why Won't Back Down, which presses a lot of hot buttons, deserves to be taken seriously, and criticized seriously, on its own terms.

Directing the action from a screenplay he wrote with Michael Thomas and Stephen Ward, filmmaker Softley keeps the pace reasonably quick and the images reasonably absorbing. [15 Apr 1994, p.13]

Much more silly than romantic.

At 88, Christopher is at the top of his game. He turns Getty into a dastardly miser with an aggrieved core. There hasn’t been such a lonely mogul in the movies since Orson Welles’s Charles Foster Kane expired with “Rosebud” on his lips.

Téchiné's movies are always worth seeing, and The Girl on the Train, for all its faults, has moments that resonate

Wise, who is noticeably older than the 29-year-old Ruskin was at the time the events occurred in real life, gives a tense, implacable performance, and Fanning is touching. The movie, however, directed by Richard Laxton, could use a lot more oomph.

Moving from the Dark Ages of old Europe to the Lite Ages of new California, this brash comedy pits a Valley Girl against a vampire. Kristy Swanson heads the likable cast, with Donald Sutherland and Paul Reubens in standout supporting performances. [31 Jul 1992].

An OK action film, but only the humorless will find it heretical – or educational.

Director Alexandra Lipsitz doesn't do much more than chronicle the noise, but it's intermittently fun stuff.

Dunkirk, with its scaled-to-be-a-masterpiece visual grandiosity, aims to be an epic of the spirit, but there is something weirdly underpowered about it. It’s a series of riveting tableaux, but the human center is lacking.

At times this indie is as repetitive and self-indulgent as its protagonist, but it captures a bit of the madness of being unrequitedly in love.

The filmmakers may be just as clueless as Buddy when it comes to Mavis, who resembles nothing so much as a snooty stalker.

There’s a pretty good movie buried somewhere deep inside the ungainly pastry that is Chef.

The film is meandering and highly uneven, but Robert Downey Jr. is truly oddball as a venomous drama critic, and watching that ball once again roll through Bill Buckner's legs is torture (for Red Sox fans anyway).

For me, there is too much rue that goes unacknowledged by the filmmakers. When great musicians must adulterate their art in order to find an audience, I see no pressing reason to cheer.

It has sharp performances in the title roles, by British actors Tim Roth and Paul Rhys, and its color scheme is so pungent I'm sure the real Van Gogh would applaud it. But it doesn't have the wide-ranging visual imagination of Mr. Altman's best work. [28 Nov 1990, p.14]

In its own coy way, the film celebrates “the slop” it pretends to deride.

No one else in Inglourious Basterds comes close to Landa for sheer charisma.

The rural atmosphere is well wrought and so is the depiction of phony evangelism – but it all devolves into the usual heebie-jeebies by the end.

The filmmakers are smart enough – or cynical enough – to realize that we don't watch movies like Under the Same Moon in order to be surprised. We go to them for a good cry.

The humor is broad, the jokes not of the first freshness, and the cast, especially Bousdoukus, is hammy. And, for the record, the upscale menu, which is supposed to be scrumptious, doesn't look as tasty as the downscale one.

I wish the film had probed more deeply into why anybody would face those odds. George Mallory’s “Because it’s there” has never quite cut it for me.

Schrader’s chief influence here, as in many of his other films, is the great French director Robert Bresson, especially his “Diary of a Country Priest.” But Bresson’s spare stylistics achieved a sublimity while Schrader’s, though intermittently powerful, too often feel schematic.