There are endearing and powerful moments which thankfully overshadow the occasional clichéd passages.

To say it right out, The Bostonians is the best movie I've seen all year.

The foundation of this sympathy is Hoover's complicated sexuality. Eastwood and Black have attempted to provide Hoover with the balm he denied himself in his own lifetime. It doesn't work.

Although it’s refreshing to see a movie that stands up for charter schools and takes on teachers unions for their hammerlock on educational oversight, Bowdon overcorrects. His home state of New Jersey may not be an isolated case but neither, with its high level of corruption, should it be seen as altogether representative of all countrywide educational ills.

Firth is very good at playing racked men of high principle. He’s so well cast as Lomax that, at times, he’s almost too perfect in the role. He’s still the best thing about the movie.

The film is attractively designed and energetically edited, in the usual Disney fashion, and it's interesting to see the Disney folks convey such a hearty endorsement of interracial dating.

Parents will yawn, but younger children may enjoy the fun. [09 Aug 1985, p.24]

This may be the first crime thriller to explicitly utilize superstring theory but, in its woozy romanticism, it's not that far removed from this year's other time-warp movie, "The Lake House," about two lovers living in parallel years - or "Frequency," which starred Jim Caviezel as a good guy.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

It's awfully difficult at this point in film history to come up with a car chase that's startlingly new, but Gray pulls it off. It's the best of its kind since "The French Connection."

So many movies these days are being linked, often quite tenuously, to current politics. Let this new film be no exception. I am happy to say that Ice Age: The Meltdown points up for toddlers the dangers of global warming.

The acting is amiable but the story isn't much deeper than the callow main characters.

It's encouraging to see Hollywood tackle themes of faith and religion, but here, too, Shyamalan is timid, reducing them to fuzzy New Age clichés. Add wooden acting, stilted dialogue, and a faux-arty style, and you have a thudding disappointment.

The satire is crammed with sexual and scatological humor; some may find this Rabelaisian and refreshing, while others will detect the end of civilization as we know it.

Pinter's screenplay offers an exciting mixture of psychological suspense and storytelling surprise, and the lead performances are close to flawless.

The story of this Spanish thriller is weak in psychological credibility but strong in suspense, novelty, and imagination.

His readings of his own work are especially thoughtful, moving, and provocative in the best possible ways.

Given the high quotient of hypotheticals in the story line, Nixon & Elvis can’t really be said to add to the historical record, but it’s an entertaining, deadpan jape that, with a bit of tweaking, could probably work as a stage play.

Witherspoon fills the screen with bright-eyed bounce. The rest of the cast is as forgettable as the flimsy story.

So how good/bad is Cars 3? If we’re talking Pixar threepeats here, it’s certainly no “Toy Story 3.” Instead, it’s a reasonably diverting, somewhat sluggish attempt to reinstall the “heart” of the first installment.

This movie has promising ingredients. But you'll leave wanting much, much more.

Savages isn't about anything except flashily directed mayhem. In this nest of vipers, it's the slitheriest varieties that survive – at least for a time.

As Molière, Romain Duris is frisky and, playing the wife of his benefactor, Laura Morante proves once again that she is one of the most intelligent and attractive actresses in the world.

Some of the suspense set-pieces are impressive, but the picture would pack a greater wallop if it were stitched together more tightly and consistently.

The action is fast, furious, and loaded with explosive effects, but the theme is a regrettable return to the us-against-them paranoia that dominated much science fiction in the cold-war era.

The film is as tricky and superficial as its low-life characters, using visual flimflam to mask its lack of substance.