Hamnet’s sweetest note is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the actual Hamnet. The script hangs on our immediate devotion to the boy and he stands up to the challenge.

The Road to Hong Kong was the last of the Hope-Crosby "Road" pictures, and even though a lot stiffer in the joints than the others, well worth watching -- especially for Peter Sellers' wacky scene. [07 Dec 1990, p.F20]

Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect.

Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can’t break free of generational trauma.

Fehlbaum milks a good amount of tension out of men in headsets barking orders at their desks, although the conceit is harder to pull off once the action moves farther away and news comes in slower and slower.

One can appreciate the effort behind this well-made Bonjour Tristesse without necessarily feeling its turmoil.

If you started the movie at the end, you wouldn’t be champing to find out what happens next. But the apocalyptic opening act is pretty great.

Just when the central characters’ fascinating messiness achieves peak interest, you realize this movie’s earnest commercial shimmer is never going to segue into a denser, darker poetry.

As with a lot of filmmakers transitioning to long-form narrative after success with bite-sized flash, “The Assessment” is a commanding mood piece until our thirst for deeper emotional and thematic resonance reveals its shortcomings.

While After the Thin Man offers Powell and Loy plenty to drink and lots of fine banter, it doesn't hold up as well as the first picture. [13 Nov 1997, p.F15]

Riff Raff is a solid crime comedy with unusual wiring.

Polanski over-thinks much of this film -- in the same ways that many of us may over-think the details at these moments. He reaches for a psychological instead of an active tone. But the movie still has a taut and creepy impact, like a bug crawling up your arm. [25 Oct 1991, p.F29]

A Valentine’s Day massacre in which PDA leads to public executions, it’s got decent gags, middling scares and a rationale sloppier than two dogs sharing a strand of spaghetti. As date night fare, it’ll do.

This soft-jab tragedy never finds the depth of expression to become a truly layered tale about choices, regrets and what we do with the rounds we have left.

Sommersby is not quite the old-fashioned romantic classic it tries to be. But given its problems, what is surprising about this three-hanky film is how close it gets at times to providing the traditional satisfactions of the genre.

A tender city romance about about gentrification and Black melancholy, “Love, Brooklyn” brings together appealing actors and the charms of New York’s ever-changing borough into soft focus. It feels a little too carefully arranged to ever truly get under your skin as a modern-day affair about disillusioned hearts.

Brooks can merely offer this flawed pair more kindness than they grant each other (or themselves). Which makes “Oh, Hi!” a pleasant if perilous date night film. Having spent an enjoyable evening with it myself, I have to admit: I like the movie fine, but I’m not in love.

Palud’s directorial emphasis on that internal experience, guided by a simple shooting style trained on Vartolomei, is what keeps Being Maria afloat on its turbulent seas.

Pellington bestows on the film a distracting, if occasionally effective, amount of video technique, and Wakefield’s story is rich and often truthful.

I liked the plot better on a second watch when I knew not to expect Jamie Lee Curtis on all fours. The ending is great and the build up to it, though draggy, gives you space to think about the interdependence between our species.

This recycled trash is no treasure, but I’m betting the majority of this redo’s audience will be young enough to find ’90s-style schlock adorably quaint.

It’s a painless watch, and, in its cheery, fantastic absurdity, something of a respite from the messier, crazier, more unbelievable world awaiting you once the credits have rolled.

There’s an elegant severity to the natural elements that share the frame with the movie’s characters, manifested in silhouettes against vast cloudy skies, delicate snowfalls, shafts of light in dark interiors and crisp air filled with smoke and dust. A testament to lives cut short, Rust is beautifully filmed and all the sadder for it

There isn’t much of an original signature here. Returning director Dan Trachtenberg hits the beats competently but not too stridently, like a good superfan should.

Despite this sequel’s thin and rote stretches, it once again closes strong with a few images that will stick in your head for at least a week or two. No spoilers, but it’s no coincidence that “Here I Come” finally gets more interesting once it tires of hide and seek. Finding a fresh plot twist is the only way it ekes out a draw.

For all the movie’s crisp attention to bifurcated lives, The History of Sound more aptly resembles a painstakingly dry still life than a moving picture.

As sloppy as it is, there’s no denying that Honey Don’t! works as a noir with a pleasant, peppery flavor. Yet, there’s a snap missing in its rhythm, a sense that it doesn’t know when and how its gags should hit.

Figgis gets moments of real tension and genuine behind-the-scenes drama, but is also too respectful and admiring of Coppola, understandably so, to push his own inquiry to its limits.

There’s reason to celebrate that Daniel Day-Lewis has chosen, at least temporarily, to cancel his retirement, but “Anemone” as a whole strains for a greatness that its star effortlessly conveys. Amid the film’s self-conscious depiction of a brewing tempest, he remains a true force of nature.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions. His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart.

Though never disorienting or obnoxious (à la “Euphoria”), it can get tiring: a restlessness of spirit and technique that occasionally separates us from this lost antihero when we crave a closer connection to him. Especially since first-time actor Marini is stellar casting.

There are scenes of nerve-jangling terror that weld you to your seat, but they’re sandwiched in between a lot that feels very much sculpted for three-act character arc effect by Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby.

Many of its 94 minutes are occupied with well-mounted car chases, stunts and gunfights, obviating the need for character development, past the traditional foes-become-friends dynamic. But the cast does not treat the material with contempt, and though no one is stretching any harder than a house cat waking from a nap, they’re pros and pretend not to notice when the film gets ridiculous or runs into a plot hole. You’ll possibly notice, but may not mind.

“Steve,” sincere in its hardcore concern, believably acted, is too scattered and schematically plotted to fully pull us into the emotional toll and scruffy joys of this work.

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.

What makes the film worth seeing anyway is the brazen richness of the production. It's as if the filmmakers, closed off from making even a suggestively sensual experience, threw their energies into the colors and textures of their people's lives. [06 Mar 1991, p.F7]

Cheesy but entertaining 1957 thriller. [29 Oct 2003, p.E5]

Directed by Mellencamp from a script by Larry McMurtry, the result is a curious, wayward blend of small-town anomie and intrigue and hero-worshipping narcissism. [21 Feb 1992, p.F10]

The veteran Marshall has proved a quick study, serving up the pastiche with panache so the stars mostly shine, the story snippets mostly amuse and you'll barely notice all the empty spots where a plot used to be.

There's no real depth or texture to the characters of any sort, sentimental or otherwise, and I say that as someone who can be brought to tears by a Hallmark commercial.

The story is poignant and compelling, but ultimately the film doesn't have the heft it needs to fill out the big screen.

By turns warmly sentimental, serial-killer sinister and science-fiction fantastical, The Lovely Bones was an unlikely book to achieve worldwide success. In the film version, those mismatched elements come back to haunt the story, so to speak, making the final product more hit-and-miss than unblemished triumph.

The Road is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.

The problem with It's Complicated, a romantic comedy about the menopausal crowd starring Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin, is that it's not nearly complicated enough.

Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.

As far as the new disaster film 2012 is concerned, the world will end with both a bang and a whimper, the bang of undeniably impressive special effects and the whimper of inept writing and characterization. You pays your money, you takes your chances.

The group's intent is not to insult those physically or mentally challenged in any manner of degree but, rather, to disturb middle-class types as much as they possibly can.

Try as they might, the filmmakers never hit the outer reaches of imagination that both Kubrick and Bowie did. Which is not to say the film completely implodes into a black hole either.

Structurally, 44 Inch Chest resembles "Reservoir Dogs"; but, without the added amusement of Tarantino's skewing of narrative time, it feels very much more like a direct adaptation of a stage play (which apparently it's not). The filmmakers do goose things up by playing with reality in the second half, but it all leads to a payoff that, while perfectly legitimate, feels limp.

Sheridan seems as conflicted as the Cahills about their virtues and failings. The underlying themes -- love, loyalty, decency, duty, honor, betrayal -- that screenwriter David Benioff will use to both bind and break this family seem to bedevil him more than inspire him this time out.

It's a missed opportunity. The premise is OK enough, even if it is like one of those old "Star Trek" episodes.

When the film's fate rests on the alchemy of its stars, you really don't want to get that wrong. But here, chemistry is a problem, and it proves a significant one.

Exhilarating or excruciating, depending on your point of view.

Any glimpse of emotional honesty comes courtesy of the actors, who manage to do a credible job despite the material.

While Extract is mildly amusing and a slice of a mostly working-class world that doesn't make it into comedy that much anymore, it's not completely convincing as a movie.

Numerous good things can be said about Apocalypto, the director's foray into the decaying Mayan civilization of the early 1500s, but every last one of them is overshadowed by Gibson's well-established penchant for depictions of stupendous amounts of violence.

Plays like "Transformers" for tots, a "Pinocchio" story that stays true to its source material's storied past without adding much in the way of interest, outside of some clankingly obvious political subtext that will alienate people of all stripes.

Diablo Cody's glib teen-hip dialogue mostly feels like self-conscious splatter over a sorely lackluster scare flick.

Clocking in at more than two hours, the movie teeters between psychological horror and violent blood-letting and, as such, probably won't completely satisfy fans in either camp.

Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

Cirque is a harmless bit of fluff with a very cool look, but there's just never enough bite.

Whatever else Proyas has done in Knowing, he has created an ending that is sure to divide audiences into camps of love it or hate it, deeming its message either hopeful or hopelessly heavy-handed. For me, it doesn't quite work; still I'm glad he took the risk.

Surprisingly free of gore, unlike its predecessors.

As enervating as it is long -- and at 2 hours and 47 minutes it is quite long -- this version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald fantasy short story is a baffling project, an endurance test of a movie that feels like it was made on a dare.

The Wrestler doesn't add up. It's constructed with great care around a lead performance that is everything it could possibly be, but the picture itself is off-putting and disappointing.

Somehow when State of Play should be at its stomach-clenching best, the tension simply evaporates.

Could have taken a more relevant, insightful and even funnier cut at a very rich topic. But the filmmakers didn't; they went with dog poo instead.

There is always a fine line between moving and manipulation in telling heartbreaking stories, and it is here that Cassavetes largely fails us. Where restraint might have raised up My Sister's Keeper, a heavy hand has brought it down.

300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated.

By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.

Though aspects of it are entertaining, the presence of all these mismatched pieces give Spider-Man 3 an ungainly, cumbersome feeling, as if its plot elements were the product of competing contractors who never saw the need to cooperate on a coherent final product.

A compelling monotony, but one that's never quite pleasure, never quite pain and, therefore, never quite an experience.

Shot on grainy, often blown-out and distorted consumer-grade video, scored to a feedback distortion-heavy soundtrack that will be familiar to fans and tinnitus sufferers alike, and clocking in at one merciful minute under three hours, Lynch's much-anticipated follow-up to "Mulholland Drive" signals a hale swan-dive off the deep end, away from any pretense of narrative logic and into the purer realm of unconscious free association. I found myself pining for "The Elephant Man," but that's just me.

The movie version of karaoke. It sings the same tune as the 2007 British underground hit, but it's a little, and at times a lot, off-key.

So, while the movie at times warmed my own middle-class, private school-educated cockles to a toasty complacency, there's an undercurrent of friendly fascism running through it like a nasty draft.

Since the film is based on the Atari video game of the same name, it also has much to appeal to headbangers: fast pace, lots of gadgets, monsters, explosive special effects, plenty of inscrutable plot twists and turns.

Never quite works as a film. The failure to create appropriate cinematic metaphors reduces it to "happiness is a warm puppy" superficiality.

What begins, rather promisingly, as a visceral yawp against class difference in contemporary South Korea slowly devolves into a prolonged exercise in pointless sadomasochism.

Simply too tedious and stretched out to be amusing. Had Schorr brought in his picture at 80 or 90 minutes Schultze might have been a different story.

Outdoes recent releases such as "Boogeyman" in the fright department, but the "Dawson's Creek" sensitivity and unsatisfying effects undermine the lupine anxiety.

God-natured comedy.

Boorman's stars Juliette Binoche and Samuel L. Jackson are valiant - even impressive - but they cannot rescue this grueling film or its mechanical plot.

The force of the film is not as profound as Shakhnazarov clearly intended, and The Rider Named Death is easier to respect than enjoy.

Director Kevin Rodney Sullivan milks the film's one joke for all it's worth - which isn't much - before settling into the rote rhythms of a buddy picture.

For a relentlessly violent and exploitive noir knockoff, Sin City is mystifyingly flat and static - cartoonish, even, if you want to get tautological about it.

Breck Eisner, son of former Disney mogul Michael and something of a protégé of Steven Spielberg, for whom he directed an episode of the miniseries "Taken," guides Sahara's big action set pieces with assurance, but would have been better served by a tighter script.

An elegantly told tale of obsession that, in failing to take on any larger meaning, rapidly becomes depressing to watch.

The cartoonish movie might have made for a funny half-hour short or sitcom pilot but runs out of track well before its conclusion.

Provides little insight beyond hanging out with its super-sized star and would not be out of place as halftime filler except for its nearly 90-minute running time.

Two movies in one, but it's no bargain. A charming romantic comedy... transforms awkwardly into a hedonistic crime thriller, with the two genres violently butting heads.

There are some inspired off-the-wall moments, but they are more than offset by a pervasive aura of tedium and the lack of any sense of the forward momentum necessary to sustain an adventure of this kind.

A threadbare comedy glomming onto the ample talent of its star, Will Ferrell.

If you're thinking of seeing it, and you're old enough to drive (or even read this), do yourself a favor and rent the original instead.

Instantly forgettable.

The strongest scenes are those between Elliot and Richard, which give Second Best a verisimilitude lacking in the rest of the film. The truest thing here is that these two guys have been friends forever and always will be.

Hurting the film is the fact that the central character, Anthony, is so self-absorbed.