For all its energy and charm, this overlong film contains its share of undermining missteps.

Alive does everything it ought to except the one thing you really want with a story like this, and that is transcend its material. A once-in-a-lifetime situation, filled with incidents that almost defy belief, calls for more of a once-in-a-lifetime movie, and that is beyond this film’s powers.

Clever and amusing though it often is, “Murder” is also Allen’s whiniest film to date, and your appreciation of its pleasures will fluctuate according to your tolerance for his Angst .

Combined with the terrific creature effects, this smug stew results in at least a couple-of-dozen moments of wildly inventive fun and roughly twice as many puerile groaners. “Freaked” is a whole lot more entertaining than most films that open in a single theater without press screenings, but neither Tod Browning’s nor Monty Python’s reputation is in danger just yet.

Like its juvenile characters, Yes Day sometimes goes too far, with over-the-top scenes that lessen the impact of the genuine emotions elsewhere. But will kids whine about it (other than for their own Yes Day)? Probably not, and parents likely won’t mind either.

It's a beautifully austere piece of work -- it's rare to see a film these days that's as carefully designed as this one. But the design hasn't been given enough human contours. It's as if the film makers had forgotten the raging emotions that all that design and austerity were supposed to repress. [07 Mar 1990, p.F1]

Even as the concept of crowdsourcing isn’t as novel as it was at the time of the film’s predecessor and the 90-minute running time can feel unnecessarily expansive given the repetition of those pandemic-related sequences, “Life in a Day 2020” nevertheless serves as a telling time capsule. The world has never felt so compact.

This John Hughes production (citywide) based on the Hank Ketcham comic strip is pretty tepid tomfoolery but at least it’s not assaultive in the way that most kids’ films are nowadays. It’s trying for giggles instead of guffaws.

The boys are breezy; their companions glib and glittery. This big studio mix of bang-bang and badinage isn’t really a bad movie. But a lot of it suggests a fancy misfire: a super-powered evening at the town’s most expensive eatery, where everybody starts out psyched up to have Big Fun, and things start to slide. What happens? The food disappears. The music is too loud. The conversations are brittle, the jokes are pushed too hard, everyone laughs too much. And, at the end, in case your attention starts wandering, people start pulling out guns and killing each other.

For better or worse, it’s very much a Zack Snyder production: unwieldy but absorbing, awash in stilted dialogue, flimsy characters, bone-crunching violence, ridiculous-verging-on-sublime needle drops . . . and have-it-both-ways political subtext.

Henry and June is so gentle it almost floats away--but it’s a movie that can’t just be dismissed. It may be a failure but it’s a one-of-a-kind-failure.

The role fits Fox like a glove but perhaps at this point in his career he should be scouting for something less form-fitting.

The brawny Enforcement doesn’t shy away from brutal action, but the film is more in line with recent police thrillers like Deon Taylor’s “Black and Blue,” and Ladj Ly’s “Les Misérables,” which fuse overt sociopolitical commentary with genre thrills.

A First Farewell is a gorgeously shot window into a world most of us hadn’t looked through before, but it’s worth examining the meanings of its images.

The January Man is nothing to seek out if you want airtight logic. What it offers is charm, blather, the dazzlement of writing and performance that wear thin well before the final, credulity-straining quarter.

The Independents is a wisp of a movie, generally likable but largely insubstantial. But when Price, Naughton and Chartrand start to play? The film becomes a warm and welcoming celebration of music for music’s sake.

Grant and Kermani skillfully keep the audience in suspense from start to finish, even if it’s just by withholding what the heck is actually happening.

Kavanagh and Matichak do a remarkable job of capturing an amped-up version of everyday parental paranoia. This is ultimately a movie about a woman who loves her child so intensely that she becomes irrational — and dangerous.

The People vs. Agent Orange has a gripping urgency, especially as a reminder that the history of chemicals’ effects on our bodies is still being written and fought over, and that what a secretive industry is allowed to cover up, it will.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent knows that what it has going for it is Nicolas Cage, and Nicolas Cage is what makes this otherwise forgettable comedy worth the watch. It’s not necessarily only for super fans, but super fans will be richly rewarded by this love letter to Cage, who, remember, never went away.

The plainness of Kinkle’s style makes it all the more shocking when the story gets increasingly gory, as the gentle and mundane alike are shattered by the disturbing echoes of past trauma.

It’s a modest coming-of-age period piece that incidentally diverges into over-the-top dreamscapes.

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage.

While We Broke Up is focused, lean and heartfelt, it does feel at times a bit insubstantial.

The Legend of Molly Johnson is too ploddingly paced and too visually bland to stand with the great movie westerns — American or Australian. But Purcell does give a heartrending lead performance, playing a woman whose iron will may not be able to withstand the mob’s prejudices.

Anna’s interactions with Moody and Rembrandt are ultimately a double-edged sword: They give facets to Anna that show she is not just a means to connect the various (impressive) action scenes. But that makes you want more for Anna and Q than the cliched backstory the movie ultimately delivers

For the most part, The Djinn is effectively taut and tense, helped along by a spooky, synth-heavy score, some nifty special effects and a genuinely disturbing twist ending.

Jennifer 8 is smarter than most of the swanky scare machines, but it’s also too hemmed-in by convention and programmed scares. The game is too rigid: the player’s skills are being wasted. The movie, perhaps, should have been built entirely around those Garcia-Malkovich scenes--because it’s in the exchange of glances between those two, the scraped wariness of Garcia, the quiet, almost lazy sadism of Malkovich, that it really chills the blood.

Is there enough reason for Gary Sinise to have remade Of Mice and Men? You can respond to Steinbeck’s qualities of feeling in the movie, but Sinise, who directed as well as stars as the itinerant ranch hand George opposite John Malkovich’s hulking, feeble-minded Lennie, doesn’t really make the material his own. It’s a “distinguished” piece of filmmaking in that somewhat lifeless, classical tradition where all the actors seem a bit too posed to be believable and all the colors seem too bright and varnished.

Credit Wilson and Sheen . . . Nothing that happens in 12 Mighty Orphans is unexpected, but these two pros still react with infectious wonder as the messages they send to their students take root and then sprout.

It's a swift, shrewdly devised youth comedy, a reliable blend of dazzling stunts on the slopes, including mind-boggling somersaults on skis and cornball humor. [15 Jan 1990, p.F9]

A slight but high-spirited musical that entertains without ever really grabbing you. [29 Jan 1988, p.21]

[The] story never fully comes into focus. You catch glimpses of it in between the busy, mechanical lurchings of the plot, in the swirling movement of a camera pan and the ardent commitment of the actors.

It’s not the gem it wants to be, but it’s good in comparison to many of the sensation-hungry pictures around it; it’s not just a movie only a mother could love.

The plot chugs along with no surprises, but that’s beside the point. While it’s not exactly a laugh riot, the film’s humor tends to land.

Lee (who directed episodes of “Broad City”) and Glazer swerve from comedy to horror, using the genre as a vehicle for social commentary about modern motherhood, misogyny and manipulation. False Positive is Glazer’s “Get Out,” which is a phrase you want to scream at her character, Lucy, over and over again.

It wins a few, loses a few. It makes us laugh, gets mileage out of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” In the end, the actors save it, especially two of the actors: star Robert Downey Jr., who may have moved into the Robin Williams-Steve Martin-Whoopi Goldberg category, and supporting actor David Paymer, who never hits a false note.

Although overly self-involved, Penn is surprisingly focused as a director.

When rock star wattage is the focus, “Like a Rolling Stone” doesn’t distinguish itself, but when Kai finds those ties in Fong-Torres’ life between the son who dreamed and the man who accomplished, the movie is like airplay for an album deep cut: what was always there getting some well-deserved attention.

Roth wisely manages to avoid excess mawkishness and keeps the action moving apace.

It's the feeling of Grodin as the muttering, dutiful cement in this family unit that holds the movie together -- for as long as it can be said to be held. [09 May 1986, p.14]

Caveat is like a gothic horror tone poem, with pungent notes of decay.

It’s an unhurried reverie that’s sometimes as wonderfully sustained as a fermata but also occasionally stifling due to filmmaker Eva Husson’s dedication to that tonal approach above all else.

Kate has its charms.

A luminous, ambitious but only fitfully alive adaptation (by Harold Pinter) of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished Hollywood novel. Robert De Niro is wonderful as the extraordinarily complex, subtle and perceptive Monroe Stahr, whom Fitzgerald based on Irving Thalberg. [01 Oct 1989, p.7]

Unfortunately, Electric Dreams has another thing in common with most rock videos: It’s strong on music and visual effects, while somewhat lacking in story development.

No one else could have elicited these responses from the songstress other than her own daughter, and for that this is a worthy, if historically vague, effort.

In the terms it sets at the start, Dachra is mostly but not entirely successful. It’s not overtly political (though an argument could be made that it’s partly about how Tunisia has changed since 2011’s civil unrest), and it is pretty gripping.

All the ways in which the killer’s evil spreads and manifests itself are consistently dazzling. The trouble is that they show up the film’s human relationships as drab and conventional in comparison.

Narrow Margin is nothing if not a hard-edge train thriller and to swathe it in so much atmospheric murk that audiences are going to suspect the premature arrival of cataracts seems counterproductive, at the very least.

This is a different kind of prison escape picture, focusing on the stifling confines of a life devoid of possibility.

Although Goulet’s film is ultimately better at scene-setting than storytelling, the world she builds is a remarkably detailed, revealing reflection of our own.

Determined to use melodrama as a vehicle to get to other places and explore other possibilities, Sayles simply assumes the audience will go along with him. His skill is such that we invariably do, but the journey, like that of his characters, is not always an easy one. [04 Jun 1999, p.F6]

Like the real-life events that inspired it, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is most thrilling when it’s at its vaguest — like a juicy rumor that’s impossible to confirm.

Moonfall is stupid, in other words, but I don’t mind admitting that it feels, at this point in time, like my kind of stupidity.

For the chance to become acquainted with Salomon’s tragic and unique tale, as well as with her enduring output, this well-intended portrait is worth a look.

The filmmakers and Hardy sharply capture a particular type: the performative rebel, laser-focused on pushing other people’s buttons even while fleeing a demon.

Despite many fine moments and a valuable story to tell, “Golden Voices,” directed by Evgeny Ruman, feels like a missed opportunity.

Muted and ambiguous — sometimes to a fault — “A Banquet” is well acted and well crafted and should resonate with viewers who have had experiences similar to those of the movie’s perpetually anxious mother.

For all its formulaic faults, The Wheel is unusually astute about the ways some couples avoid the hard truths about each other because they’re afraid of ripping their whole lives apart.

When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.

Everything that ensues is laughably predictable and silly, but primitive as it is, Spider Baby is a professional effort in which Hill makes an attempt at style, aided by Al Taylor's shadowy black-and-white cinematography and Chaney's willingness to play straight. [01 Apr 1994, p.F8]

The story is thematically muddy at best and problematic at worst in the ways it handles Sparkle’s newfound independence and the horrors she experiences. Despite these issues, the arresting images of She Paradise and the distinctive voice of its director mark Cozier as a filmmaker to watch.

Involving as the film is, it is decidedly short on propulsion and significant conflict.

Ambulance is not good, exactly. Still it is an enjoyable, oddly inspiring reminder of how many more flavors not-good used to come in, in the olden days, back when we had the luxury of regarding Michael Bay’s brand of adrenalized, lobotomized moviemaking as a menace to blockbuster cinema, rather than — gulp — one of its potential saviors.

It’s a film of modest charms and secondhand pleasures, enough to help pass a summer afternoon, if not to quell the sense that it was made for less-than-creative reasons.

If it sounds critical to say that the resolution of the murder at the center of the narrative is the least interesting aspect of the movie’s intrigue, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

It works best when it’s at its loosest and most improvisatory. Whenever the seams in the script show, the film loses its grit and takes on the aspects of a made-for-TV drama about runaways.

The dire theme of innocent children being blamed for “the sins of the father” — and the attendant social and political turbulence they face — as efforts are made to find these youngsters a safe and loving place in the world receives a vital spotlight here.

Despite being often preposterous, the cross-cultural comedy Book of Love is an entertaining watch. Just don’t scratch even the slightest bit beneath its glossy, super-contrived surface.

John Sturges directed this overlong but intermittently entertaining action-thriller. [24 Jul 2002, p.2]

Despite an undercurrent of rebellion against adult attitudes, the point of view about sex is so conservative that the film could have been shown at PTA meetings without a murmur of protest. [25 Nov 1990, p.62]

It’s a nice story of master and protégé, and in many scenes the bond between the irrepressible, humorous Guy and the quiet, observant Sullivan seems genuine.

Definition Please is one of those debuts that doesn’t fully cohere on its own but hints at the promise of what the filmmaker can do.

If Morris and Aloni’s film is unfocused and weak in its patterning and construction, it is equally an important record of a living history that refuses to mythologize itself.

While undoubtedly a uniquely creative and singularly emotive film, it can be all just a little too, too much.

Salt in My Soul is emotionally affecting, but its ordinary approach hamstrings the story of a woman who seemed truly extraordinary.

The film itself feels as if it has emerged fully formed from the mind of its author, for better and for worse. It is a study of women’s sexuality, desire and autonomy that succeeds just as much as it stumbles, a method of feminist storytelling that privileges the pursuit of desire over an evenness of narrative. It cares not for the customary, but instead for the messiness of real life, which here is inextricable from its own means.

The movie is less successful at making its plot feel genuinely meaningful, rather than a simple delivery device for chases and shootouts. Still, for those who could use a break from real explosions on the news, the fake ones in “Black Crab” are well-crafted, exciting and mostly harmless.

If only co-writers Paul Riccio (he also directed) and Jamie Effros (he stars) had dropped some of their story’s quirks and shaggy-dog bits for a deeper, more authentic dive into their main characters’ truer selves, the film might have taken off in a more distinctive and memorable way.

There are set pieces scattered throughout Dark Eyes that are as strange — and as strangely beautiful — as the best of Argento, starting with an unnerving opening sequence that sees a group of people in a park gazing at a solar eclipse.

The Contractor is decidedly Pine’s film. His performance is as efficient as the script, which Saleh mirrors with a crisp, smooth aesthetic. There’s nothing particularly showy about the style, but it serves the story of this professional warrior working his way through an unfamiliar place.

The film’s overall tone is a bit dry, and the narrative lacks tension, aside from its central mystery. But the performances are strong, and the points the filmmakers are making about the slipperiness of memory do resonate.

The stylish Renfield is a bit of frothy fun. It may be too flip for some, but flippancy isn’t the issue — it’s the flimsiness. Hoult and Cage sell the toxic odd-couple dynamic well, but a sturdier story is required to fully support their performances, especially Cage’s operatic Dracula, who delights in terrorizing his foppish familiar.

The movie is also a strong spotlight for Salazar, a consistently fascinating and magnetic actress whose funny, warmhearted and ultimately inscrutable Maria represents the potential for meaningful human connection always just beyond Harrison’s reach.

Metal Lords traffics way too much in teen movie clichés; but whenever it sticks to the music and the relationships between its core trio of weirdoes, it’s genuinely affecting.

Even when the story doesn’t pop, Ryder is terrific.

The film has a striking look, filled with deep shadows, shimmering light, and flashes of color. “So Cold the River” also captures the ethical complications facing a reporter who begins to realize that the nature of her assignment may keep her from telling the public what they really need to know.

While the plot here is thin (and slow-paced, and oppressively grim), Owen has a remarkable facility for generating atmosphere. He’s made a film where one man’s internal strife has been effectively externalized as an inescapable, picturesque purgatory.

The movie’s aggressive hipness can be a turnoff at times. But once it settles down into a more typical coming-of-age story, Crush becomes disarmingly sweet and relatable.

Homebound burns too slowly in the early going, but the tension and confusion in the first half eventually explodes into chaos. Throughout, Loftus gives a gripping performance as a woman desperate to make a good impression on a family that may be evil.

"Apocalypse” is equal parts exhausting and impressive — though thanks to the giddy fun the filmmakers appear to be having, it’s mostly the latter.

While this movie could use more comic snap, it’s quite sharp about the daily challenges a Deaf actor faces in an industry built on winning people over with well-spoken bluster.

During their heyday, Cypress Hill pretty much went from high to high (no pun intended), which means this movie about the group is low on drama. But it’s filled with great music and welcome insight into some under-appreciated innovators.

Senior Year is not an ambitious movie, but it’s mostly a sweet one, and frequently funny.

Veteran action director Louis Leterrier delivers exactly what audiences expect: some banter, a couple of surprise plot twists and a few thrills. He does so more than capably, with two sequences in particular.

Though the movie lacks a strong central story, screenwriter Simon Allen and director Toby Meakins have come up with a genuinely clever concept that could be repeatable in multiple sequels — provided that the first wave of Netflix viewers aren’t too put off by the film’s many gross-out moments.

Just like the play, the first half is a delicious, hotel-room-set duel of desperate characters, while the second half goes awry. [01 Dec 1989, p.F18]