Luc Besson's screenplay is dumb, but has just enough weird touches to give occasional glimmers of interest.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

If Baron Cohen is going to continue making scripted comedies, he needs to work with directors far less slapdash than Larry Charles. He can be one of the funniest people on the planet, but he needs a real dictator – I mean, director – calling the shots.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

Blossoms of Fire fulfills the first criterion of any good ethnographic study: It's about an inherently interesting subject.

His rise from a marginalized Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Paris to his chain-smoking fame as the composer of such Euro-hits as "Je t'Aime … Moi Non Plus" is presented as one long, hallucinatory jag, revealing far less about Gainsbourg, I would imagine, than about Sfar.

The movie becomes, perhaps inadvertently, a celebration of selling out.

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

A few miscalculated scenes aside, this low-budget drama is stunningly smart and powerful, with real-as-life lead performances and a style as gripping as it is unpretentious.

Like the nuclear sub it's named after, the picture is big, shiny, and expensive. It's also cold, hard, and cumbersome, and lacking the barest hint of emotional or psychological depth. [9 Mar 1990, Arts, p.10]

This is an op-ed polemic, and it's refreshing to see one so skillfully produced by filmmakers with a shoestring budget and meager access to mainstream distribution. A must-see movie, no matter what your politics are.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

The Express may prove valuable to movie historians since it's a compendium of virtually every sports movie cliché ever contrived.

“Twilight” is essentially an adolescent female fantasia about coming to terms with one’s sexuality. There I’ve said it. And I’m sure no one else has ever said it.

A likable though slender documentary.

The acting is solid, but Tony Pierce-Roberts's unimaginative camera work falls short of his highest standard.

Less a biography than an essay on theatrical illusion and the changing nature of comedy. Love it or hate it, you've never seen anything quite like it.

The overall effect is imaginative but overambitious, though Troche unquestionably has cinematic talent.

The aliens are as gloppy and gross as ever. I especially liked the joke about Andy Warhol being an alien – except didn't we know that already?

What a waste of a fine cast.

Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning 2014 Snowden documentary “Citizenfour” is, almost inevitably, a stronger experience. That, too, was a species of political thriller but, unlike Stone’s film, it’s actually thrilling.

It's an imperfect movie, but a tantalizing and rewarding one.

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

It’s a sweet, deliberately meandering movie, and it took me a while to connect with it. But it won me over because ultimately it conveys so well that feeling of estrangement that is both terrifying and comic for any farflung traveler.

Miss Firecracker is a movie that tries too hard. You want to like it, but in the end it just tires you out.

The movie is reasonably smart and touching when it deals with the plight of a family on the rocks, but it pushes too many emotional buttons when the ex-wife is diagnosed with a fatal illness that proceeds to take over the story.

It's fun to see Val Kilmer assume a sort of Young Republican look after his hippie shenanigans in "The Doors," and the story raises some important issues. But there's little else to praise in this pretentious and overlong drama. It was directed by Michael Apted, who should stick to documentaries like his recent and superb "35 Up." [3 Apr 1992, p.12]