The uncomfortable reality remains that although this movie is effective moment to moment, very little of it lingers in the mind afterward. The ideal vehicle for our age of immediate sensation and instant gratification, it disappears without a trace almost as soon as it's consumed.

Captain America is first and foremost an origins story. Almost half of the film's running time elapses before Rogers gets any kind of power at all, and though its elements are awfully familiar, it's the most involving part of the film because it takes advantage of Evans' performance.

[Reynor's] performance — fractured yet strong — is a big reason why Glassland works so well.

All three look great and the filmmakers deliver a certain artiness, but their overall triviality and the unpleasantness of the first two make for an extremely distasteful experience.

Although it runs just a fleet 40 minutes, the film proves a rich and memorable journey.

The world's most successful ring of diamond thieves is inventively and insightfully explored in the documentary Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers.

Clunky elements aside, the film's distillation of firsthand testimony and archival material has haunting implications.

Even as the low-key mockumentary Brian and Charles impressively scales down a sci-fi concept to fable size, it neither does much to maintain its oddness nor finds that right mix of comedy and pathos to have much impact.

A taut and incisive thriller, stylishly incorporating a multi-image technique and a stream-of-conscious narrative. [12 Aug 1999, p.F15]

De Felitta ("Two Family House") gives all his actors plenty of room to roam. Garcia, afforded the chance to stretch his comic muscles and play a working stiff, comes off best, nailing Vince's good-natured vulnerability.

The suspenseful Missing plows through nearly two hours of shocking plot twists at a breakneck pace. And while it’s entertaining to be sure, it also takes on a somber tone as it reckons with grief, loss and intimate partner violence in a way that’s very real, backed up by headlines ripped from the news, and yes, those true crime series and TikToks that are so very compelling.

Artful and atmospheric to the max, Never Here is a study in personality disintegration dressed up as a whodunit. The film marks an auspicious debut for writer-director Camille Thoman.

Stumbles in miscalculating how far it needs to go to make this particular romance convincing when, as another romantic comedy character put it, it had us from hello.

Impossibly long and angular, with a brutally beautiful face, she represents something that's been rare in the popular culture in the past decade: an artist with a voice and a vision.

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

A thoughtful, nuanced examination of a complex thinker.

The film is not quite smart enough to overcome the clichés and stereotypes it acknowledges but can’t entirely dismantle. At the same time, it often isn’t quite outrageous enough, as if it should be more willing to be outright offensive.

Marquette, aided by Frank Langella's precise narration, has crafted an engrossing and disturbing tribute.

Pamela Yates’ 500 Years is a palpably passionate if somewhat less contained effort than the two films preceding it.

Unfortunately, the director’s breezy approach doesn’t always make for a captivating viewing experience.

While a fair amount of its subject matter overlaps with Ava DuVernay's incendiary "13th," Matthew Cooke's "Survivors Guide to Prison" nevertheless serves as a valuable primer for those estimated 13 million Americans who are arrested every year.

Producer-director Kenneth A. Carlson (a teammate of Catena's at Brown) absorbingly, unfussily captures Catena's daily challenges and feats while also painting a vivid, often heartbreaking portrait of a forgotten people trapped in an underreported sociopolitical nightmare.

Is it possible to be a great filmmaker and not make great films? Steve Mitchell’s entertaining documentary “King Cohen” makes that case for prolific writer-director-producer Larry Cohen.

With every line and look, Loren both reminds us of her legacy playing tenacious women and paints Rosa’s distinctive fire and grief like an artisan. It’s a compact master class in the movie star’s craft: exquisitely tailored glamour and deft characterization working seamlessly in tandem.

The absorbing romantic drama Cicada feels as real as it gets.

The movie suffers from the same malaise Romero diagnoses in society. It's just too mediated to be scary, despite its zeal for gore. You can't feel the characters' fear, and they don't seem to feel it either.

Difficult to experience though its finale may be, Peterloo very much gives off the sense that watching is essential. This fight for democracy is our story too, and the end has yet to be written.

A good, solid, admirable, deeply felt movie.

Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.

In taking Partridge to the movies, the writers go broader and deeper than they typically do with the story.

Hamilton's story is so filled with dramatic incident and personal and psychological complexity, not to mention spectacular visuals of waves upward of 100 feet tall, that it compels attention whether surfing means anything to you or not.

Mandoki, who with this film returns to the Spanish-speaking cinema after a string of Hollywood films, has brought a sure sense of the visual and taut construction to Innocent Voices, based on a true story. It is filled with wrenching images.

An adroit, beautifully acted, sophisticated film with some drier-than-dust humor about unsophisticated people and is impressive as such. It's too bad that it's not more engaging much earlier on.

Like many modern children's films, Stuart Little 2 can't decide between teaching good values ("You're only as big as you feel") and tossing out fake-hip jokes. Though it doesn't happen as often as it should, this is a better film when it allows itself simply to be sweet.

A shimmeringly beautiful and wise reverie on love and desire.

There are no big surprises in Caetano's film, which plays out exactly as ordained, only a sense of life at its most precarious and real.

In Auto Focus, the strangely wonderful and weirdly touching new film from Paul Schrader, the comedy and the tragedy keep getting mixed up.

Heart may be what the movie needs most, but a bit of clarity wouldn't hurt either. Even here in gangsterland, where random characters are cherished and non sequiturs are considered wisecracks, there is a difference between complications and impenetrability, and this plot is a bloody thicket.. [5 Oct 1990, Calendar, p.F-10]

The movie’s grating a lot of the time, but often very funny, and perversely fascinating. Most importantly, it's always as honest as it is painful.

Tonally, Devotion remains steady, never going for over-the-top emotion or sensation, simply seeking to express something authentically moving and human. It unmistakably achieves that, delivering a stirring story of friendship during war, and beyond, that is both rare and real.

Dark Horse is a comedy of bad manners that's imbued with uncertainty about the world and one man's place in it. Modest and mildly entertaining, it's a miniature portrait of a potentially jumbo-sized failure.

Branagh has mastered the tricky high-wire act of simultaneously kidding the conventions he is being absolutely faithful to, allowing us to squeal with both fright and knowing laughter. His is a film lover's film [23 Aug 1991, Calendar, p.F1]

The Optimists is filled with first-person testimony from Jews who were saved and non-Jews who saved them, people like Rubin Dimitrov, a baker who hid Jews in his ovens and says simply, "a true human being is obliged to help." As a rescued Jew says with emotion at the film's conclusion, "to be a Bulgarian is to be a mensch."

You can't cure what you don't understand is one of the film's sobering messages.

If it lacks its predecessor’s bracing sense of emotional discovery, it nonetheless understands and impressively re-creates the chief source of that movie’s delight: a group of characters who, for all their stresses and struggles, were a warm, easygoing pleasure to spend time with.

There has been no shortage of films tracking the immigrant pursuit of the American dream, but few have been as laugh-out-loud delightful as The Tiger Hunter, a sparkling first feature by Lena Khan.

Truth and delusion intermingle within this space, materializing not as spectacle or doubt, but rather as an embodied, if not literalized, study of the ways in which women attempt to intellectually and emotionally make sense of their experiences of exploitation.

By the end of this clumsy, audacious story — the title of which turns out to have a doozy of a double meaning — Ben will be stripped of every last secret and falsehood, left with no more room to run or hide. You believe him at long last, even if believing the movie is a trickier proposition.

The juxtaposition of formal beauty and surpassing human ugliness is hardly the least of “Wiener-Dog’s” numerous internal contradictions, some of which are more resolvable than others.

Anderson’s story becomes a tale of perseverance, about a passionate woman still searching for her happy ending.

While it's difficult to dislike what this film tries to do, the way it does it is more problematic.

[Hancock] turns the unlikely subject of a fast-food chain into a quasi-religious satire, a parable of American striving and, ultimately, a study of artisanal integrity gradually caving in to commercial compromise.

An unusual work that mixes genres to at times awkward but always powerful effect.

The Tainted Veil resists taking a stance, and both sides of the argument are compelling and persuasive.

As you watch Argentina, it truly is about the all-as-one: the music, the dance, the light Saura provides, and the illumination these performers bring themselves.

Lives Well Lived isn't exactly artful moviemaking, but it's a heartfelt reminder that for many, age is just a number.

What audiences are likely to come away with most of all is a pondering over how these many sides could coexist in the same person, perhaps wondering what they think of him — and finding it difficult to arrive at an answer.

With a patient and unobtrusive eye, filmmakers Lucas and Bresnan paint impressionistic portraits of a quartet of charismatic teenagers over the course of a pivotal school year.

The movie’s premise is clever; but what really makes it work is that these two use this ghost schtick as a way to examine the ways that friendship can be a hassle.

This revealing film is filled with pleasant balladry from a likable troubadour; but it also shows what it’s like to sing his little tunes while under unfathomable pressure.

The story embedded within it is an important one. A historic shift did occur. The account is well-told and worth knowing, even without conspiratorial murmurs.

One of the movie’s persistent problems is that it often seems to be nothing but lessons — most of them bluntly spelled out, swiftly absorbed and almost automatically rewarded, in ways that short-circuit tension and emotion.

The Angels' Share leaves a warm glow.

Lee keeps his celebration smart and not soppy. He gets you excited, makes you feel the moment, see what was new in it, why it mattered.

Intense and affecting. [24 Jun 1990, p.67]

Although the whole thing’s a bit of a jumble, the L.A.-set film becomes more immersive as we slowly adjust to its ambitious conceit and unique rhythms. A solid third-act twist helps square the preceding puzzle pieces and takes us out on a satisfying and moving note.

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.

An accomplished film that continually takes us beyond our first impressions of people and situations.

One of the achievements of Buirski’s absorbing documentary is that it allows Lumet to remind us, in his own voice, of the passion in his ostensible dispassion — the way he deftly subsumed self-expression within the brisk rhythms of his material and the superb performances of his actors.

The plot does little more than link a string of vaguely related episodes, intended to provide comedy, excitement and music. But even at their least original, the Disney artists provide better animation--and more entertainment--than the recent animated features

In Roman Polanski's Frantic--an elegant, icy thriller about an American doctor chasing his wife's kidnapers through the deadlier byways of Paris--we can tell after 10 minutes that we're in the hands of a superb craftsman.

The sheer audacity of Fast Five is kind of breathtaking in a metal-twisting, death-defying, mission-implausible, B-movie-on-steroids kind of way. Not complaining, just saying.

The Sound of Silence, anchored by a superbly modulated performance by the always intriguing Peter Sarsgaard, is fascinating, original and, yes, deeply resonant.

The film brings us vividly inside the life - and head - of its determined hero, Bud Clayman, as he depicts the process of what he calls "getting normal."

This is a bore -- arch and unfunny 80% of the way. [26 May 1987, p.1]

Nothing that happens in Hollywood Stargirl is consequential or surprising. But the cast is likable, the music is good (featuring winning covers of canonical California songs like Brian Wilson’s “Love and Mercy” and Cass Elliot’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music”) and, as with “Stargirl,” there’s a bone-deep decency to this sequel that’s pretty disarming.

Are we looking for the human in the Sasquatch? Or for the Sasquatch in us? The movie works either way, but in its refusal to hew to a familiar plot trajectory, it holds up a mirror to our own narcissism.

Russell is unusual among first-time directors in his ability to mold and shape performance. [28 Jul 1994 Pg. F2]

Even at its most pulse-pounding, Bloody Marie remains locked on its sympathetically pathetic protagonist.

Unlike "In Bruges," the outlandish parts of Seven Psychopaths, though often bleakly entertaining in their own right, remain a collection of weird riffs that not even engaging acting by Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Tom Waits can bring together.

The ending packs a lovely surprise, not because you don’t see it coming, but because for once you’re not simply grateful that it’s arrived.

The story does build, in its second act, to an unsettlingly persuasive indictment of a society that teaches even its youngest members to hate, condemn and destroy women. But did the movie have to fixate so lovingly on that destruction, or make its chief destroyer so compelling?

A sweeping romantic fable about love and mortality, targets an audience of girls in their early teens, but has been made with such skill and sensitivity that its appeal spans generations.

Strangely entertaining.

A stunning-to-look-at film marred by a less than searing pace and some narrative incoherence.

Like their Oscar-nominated “A Cat in Paris” (2010), Phantom Boy by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gangol is a modest, engaging film that reminds viewers of the intimate pleasures of drawn animation in an era of CG blockbusters.

The best parts of "Elstree," not surprisingly, are the war stories these nine men and one woman share, their vivid memories of a shoot one calls "as primitive as it gets."

The lovely, heartbreaking Fly Away benefits from superb performances and a gripping story managed with simplicity and grace by writer-producer-director Janet Grillo.

Despite the film’s compact length, it contains a wealth of tense action, complex emotion, deft observations, vital messaging and gorgeous vistas.

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

A hugely entertaining, efficiently crafted documentary about a ruthless, if undeniably clever, American political force.

An even-tempered slice of pro-animal sentimentality that may not be the smoothest piece of filmmaking, but wears its emotions honestly and benefits from offering a look at a rarely explored arena of human-animal relationships: dogs trained for combat.

Make no mistake, it is lovely to look at this celebrity bedazzled bit of L.A. crime history for a while. But the movie ultimately leaves you feeling as empty as the lives it means to portray.

The Report parcels out its intel efficiently enough, though it creaks a bit more than it crackles.

Less would have been considerably more in the case of Tread, a needlessly overstuffed documentary chronicling the path that led to a disgruntled muffler repair shop owner going on a remarkable 2004 rampage in a heavily armored bulldozer through the streets of Granby, Colo.

Henry is such an earthy, captivating presence that he holds the center of gravity in Causeway — when he’s not on screen, the film drifts, rudderless, as Lynsey does.

Messy and ungovernable at its strongest, Lafosse’s film is a story of heartbreak and real estate and, not least, money, viewed from within the still-smoldering ruins.

In each story the imagery dazzles at first, then becomes somewhat dreary; Ocelot's storytelling never quite matches his visual abilities.