Arias has a tendency toward creative overkill, mostly in the climax that renders with apocalyptic imagery the metaphysical consequences of Black and White's separation.

The gory final act can't help but be an explanatory letdown after so much enigmatic fizz, but that's little bother when the rest of "Honeymoon" delivers a steady dose of newlywed nightmare.

This movie may be a convulsively entertaining throwback to Scott’s glory days, but to look upon Fassbender, with his icy and seductive post-human gaze, is to behold this franchise’s future.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is an old-school, old-fashioned entertainment, a romantic drama bursting with scenic vistas and earnest charm that contains just enough mystery to keep us involved.

It’s a compelling thesis, though predicated less on supporting arguments than on dramatic feints and hallucinations, on scenes that either evaporate like smoke or strand the viewer in a thick cloud of metaphor. Sunset is maddening and mesmerizing.

The relative lack of “action” in Bull does mean the audience has to make more of an effort to engage with the film. But like the recent arthouse favorites “The Rider” and “Lean on Pete,” this movie has a rare sense of place. It preserves an entire world and the fragile people within it.

The animation is snappy in the way it handles an extremely eclectic-looking bunch of monsters. The 3-D effects are nifty but, as with so much about "MU," not necessary.

This superman approach to character doesn't jibe with David's crisis of conscience. His smothering of his Jewish identity may make dramatic sense, but, the way it's enacted, it doesn't make much psychological sense. As Fraser plays him, David has such a robust sense of identity that his covertness isn't really believable. We keep hoping the film will turn into a movie about a kid who declared his Jewishness and fought the consequences.

As it is, Bustin' Bonaparte is an enjoyable diversion, but with more energy and style it might have been a gem.

Featuring a knockout performance by Adam Scott, The Vicious Kind upends the heavily tread dysfunctional family drama in ways that are unique, surprising and memorable.

How might Crawford have brought cinematic life to pages full of words? No clue. But the director who took up the job simply relies on people who were there to tell us how great it all was. And that keeps Creem trapped in history — a fading memory as opposed to a useful example.

You're initially jazzed by his effrontery, but Deadpool, with his relentlessly glib, nothing-sacred attitude, is not an individual who wears particularly well.

Scurlock does well to counter the more dire aspects of the film with a razor-sharp sense of humor.

This trip is filled with goofy fun, though it wanders enough to occasionally test the attention spans of those neither young enough nor high enough to be in the film’s target audience.

As with “Annihilation” before it, the more surreal Men gets, the less frightening and more melancholy it becomes; it’s as if the movie were peeling back the skin of its chosen subject to reveal the diseased, writhing and frankly pitiable mess underneath. And Garland, like a coroner performer an autopsy, surveys his specimen with clinical rigor, gallows humor and the faintest hint of sorrow.

Robert Redford, who for the first time stars in a movie he's also directed, has taken this soap opera material and treated it like something inscribed on yak vellum by the Dalai Lama.

The puns and one-liners are jauntily amusing, the gags clever and well-timed. The tone is a familiar, infectious blend of sincerity and snark — or, if you will, earnestness and cynicism, which might as well be Emmet’s and Wyldstyle’s respective nicknames.

A glum British kidnap movie in which writer-director J Blakeson manages to generate tension and some suspense, never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable.

In The Matador, a delightfully sly diversion, Pierce Brosnan breaks the mold and turns in what might be considered the performance of his career, the kind of witty, relaxed star portrayal that recalls those of Cary Grant and other Golden Era legends.

Unlike the thick directness in Maud’s work, the movie about her is almost pointillist in detailing the tiny steps that make up an enduring marriage.

Despite that juicy setup, Dangerous Animals is a disappointingly straightforward and ultimately underwhelming horror movie, offering little of the grim poetry of Byrne’s previous work and far too much of the narrative predictability that in the past he astutely sidestepped.

Intimate and human yet deeply ambitious, a powerhouse of a film made with a disturbing vision.

So sharp and funny it should appeal to all ages.

Plays out the notion of the forces of light being inexorably drawn to those of darkness, of the older generation betraying the younger and maybe even an indictment of European indifference to the Balkans' agony.

What's surprising about this traditional thriller, moderately successful but not completely satisfying, is exactly how genteel and unsurprising the execution turns out to be.

All of Loach's formidable strengths, which include a sense of humor, come together in the wrenching A Fond Kiss.

The oddly sympathetic, low-key and funny Phillips gets deft support from his limber costars, including Sarah Silverman, Jim Jeffries, Mike Judge and Mark Cohen. Amusing songs too.

The script from Rideout and co-writer Josh Epstein may follow a standard high school comedy structure, but they bring something fresh to the genre with their enjoyably geeky approach.

Although there's no suspense, it is in fact a real Hitchcock movie in that in it, his fifth picture, he already displays his unique grasp of the camera's storytelling possibilities. [13 May 1996, p.F6]

Never Grow Old isn’t a top-shelf western, but it’s thoughtfully made, with something to say about how even in a country that encourages rugged individualism, community matters.

Love in the Buff may not be one for the ages, but it is one for right now, and shows up countless lifeless Hollywood romantic comedies. Pang's nimble, incisive writing and direction and his winning leads give proof to the rom-com ideal that a film can be funny, romantic and connected to modern life.

Take Me to the River reaches its end sadder and wiser if not satisfactorily complete as a psychodrama. But Sobel thrives on the unevenness, and it gives his admirably off-putting wade into fractured-family waters its own specialized charge.

A straightforward, surprisingly faithful and definitely loving adaptation of the original.

High-Rise is a stubborn, incoherent wreck of a movie, and I mean that as fairly high praise. You won’t follow everything that happens, but you may feel weirdly at home.

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.

The entire thrust of this provocative, harrowing yet ironically exhilarating film is to make it clear that ultimately, alienated by the AIDS virus rather than by sexual orientation, Jon and Luke have only each other. [21 Aug 1992, p.F10]

A clever way of providing crucial layering and heightening a hip, satirical take on bad old Hollywood ways.

The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.

Whatever its legacy, the film remains a gripping drama. [09 Nov 2008, p.E10]

You have the feeling that Pryor had aimed for a somber, almost melancholy story, redeemed only by Jo Jo's strength of will at the very last moment. (He says as much in a recent magazine interview.) But the film has been cranked up to give it the maximum laughs and, in the process, has lost its center.

It’s remarkable how Bae’s commitment to the physical mechanics of a trickily metaphoric role in no way interferes with the heart she needs to show, and vice versa.

They use dialogue sparingly, powerfully; a talky detective sounds like a visitor from another planet. The world he has encroached upon is defined by the ability to run and the adrenaline-rush threat of capture. Freedom's just another word in this gripping existential portrait.

Hockney is less interested in providing a conventional top-to-bottom narrative than in capturing a sense of who Hockney is and what is important to him.

Throughout the film Rudolph is working hard to put this thing over, mixing in slow-motion and shock cuts. But his heart is not really in it. His technique is both too good and not enough for this material, and it doesn't sit right. He's trying to glamorize dread. [19 Apr 1991, p.F1]

There's a chic emptiness to Entertainment, undoubtedly, and anti-comedy constructs that may rub the wrong way, but there's also a spiky intelligence at work too, one that engages through the artifice of disengagement and the illusion of "performance."

Even if Chung does leave us wanting just a little bit more romance, he delivers a supremely entertaining summer blockbuster in Twisters, one with a thematic heft that makes it even better than expected, and better than the first.

One of Strange World’s triumphs is the vibrant, weird, visually stunning subterranean world that the film’s heroes stumble upon during their quest to save their way of life. From its lush palette to its cute and deadly flora and fauna, this strange, mysterious world is very much deserving of its status as the film’s title character.

Dan offers the most pleasing kind of unforced charm as it uses a terrific plot device to examine the conflicts between family and romance as well as the joy and pain of being in love.

The seriously out-of-control hard R dude is writer-director Nicholas Stoller, who apparently has major trust issues with his odd-couple stars, women and the audience. Did I forget anybody?

I’ll give Schrader the benefit of the doubt that his dialogue is stilted by design, even though the female characters are particularly prone to clunkers. . . But it’s still irritating to sit through, and once we start questioning everything we see — would young Leonard really order a bran muffin at an ice cream parlor? — it gets harder to hand over our trust when the movie wants to get emotional.

Has the right mix of sugar and spice for a satisfying rush.

The more the shape of the story comes into focus in the final stretch, the less intriguing it becomes, although Eisenberg’s verbally and physically adroit performance never loses its unpredictable edge. Like any good martial artist, he knows just how to keep you off-balance.

Alice Wu's debut film is so deft, natural and exquisitely specific, it feels fresh.

Whatever the reason, the energy and hold-onto-your-seat excitement that Muhammad Ali brought to the sports world is oddly absent from this quite accomplished but finally distant film.

Smart, compassionate filmmaking that captures both the intricacies and the tragedy of contemporary adolescence.

With characters this alive, it's a pity that no one was able to build a more convincing film around them, instead of leaving everyone more or less out there on their own. [13 May 1994, p.1]

The film is very much like a home movie in trying to tell its story of families and feuds complete with the bad lighting, bad camera angles and meandering observations. Though you will wish for more polish and insight, its unruly action is hard to resist.

Samsara is as frustrating as it is beautiful, which is saying a lot because this is a film laced with exquisite images.

The elder Makhmalbaf, who wrote and directed, puts many spins on this ethereal mood piece — it is by turns poetic, impressionistic, metaphorical and even a bit trippy — without satisfying such genre basics as structure, depth and resolution.

Revolutionary zealots who did not necessarily get along with each other, the temperamental creators of land art took themselves very seriously. But as "Troublemakers" convincingly demonstrates, the work they produced justified their attitude.

Bold and brutal in shocking spurts, the indie horror drama from writer-director O’Shea is a startling debut that leaves a fresh mark on the genre while celebrating its forbears.

Unfortunately, Jodorowsky is no Bunuel -- nor a Leone, for that matter -- and El Topo’s bloody odyssey, involving endless heavily symbolic encounters with the bizarre and fantastic, expresses the eternal tug of war between the savage and the spiritual in human nature on the most obvious level and in the most ponderous fashion.

Ultimately, it’s about the bonds of sisterhood and how those who know you best and love you most can help you heal, or at least start you on that path. Its vagueness serves almost as a Rorschach test. How effective it is as a drama may depend on your perspective.

So far I’ve yet to see any movie figure out how to integrate the dull activity of staring at a small black rectangle into something worthy of the screen. Landon’s approach looks a bit too much like a billboard or a meme, but I think he’s on the right track to be trying something expressionistic that circles back around to silent-movie aesthetics.

What it isn’t is especially insightful or memorable. Just because evil is banal doesn’t mean a movie has to be.

This downbeat drama is as overwrought as Killian’s muscles — it’s a steroidal portrait of a man in distress.

In Tetro, nearly every time Coppola should have clung to intimacy, he opts for excess. Especially tedious are the meta excerpts from staged productions -- overcompensation trying to masquerade as illumination. Regrettable since there is such fine work being done in the smaller moments.

An unexpectedly emotional, continually disconcerting film.

Cooley’s film remains very much a mainstream product entrenched in the build-it-as-we-go mythology of these sentient machines, but there’s an attention to the motivations and desires of its characters missing in many Hollywood cash grabs. Animation can be a transformative, liberating force, even for stories that have been told ad nauseam.

Thames delivers a searingly authentic performance as the young Finney, and when he’s all alone in the basement with ghosts, “The Black Phone” is at its best: suspenseful, emotional and filled with jump scares.

A superior filmed biography that brings intelligence, restraint and style to what could have been a more standard treatment.

This well-paced film's realistic style and authentic locales are a perfect fit for the characters and their story.

The hyper-dramatic touches help disguise that this is essentially a film about paperwork. The rest of the weight is carried by Fan, who’s funny and heartbreaking. She’s a hero for our times: a stubborn woman, willing to inconvenience the powerful to get a fair hearing.

The film is also strengthened by a pair of adroit lead performances by Brad Renfro and Kevin Bacon, actors who completely understand their characters and know how to make the most of them on screen.

An increasingly disturbing film, it offers no relief for its central character, or for its audiences for that matter. Akin was inspired to tell the story by real-life political events in Germany, and his skills as a filmmaker are such that escape from this unsettling film is not in the cards.

“The AI Doc” is a well-intentioned but aggravating soup of information and opinion that wants to move at the speed of machine thought.

Noticeable skill has gone into the making of Seven, but it's hard to take much pleasure in that.

The Swell Season emerges as an incisive cut at fame's effect on the real-life music and romance of Hansard and Irglova. It's an accomplished piece of filmmaking from the trio, who are making their feature-length documentary debut.

Once We Are Still Here unsticks itself from hommage mode, it finds something cathartically funny inside the fearsome.

There’s a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can’t abide imperfection in herself or others.

Ari Aster’s Eddington is such a superb social satire about contemporary America that I want to bury it in the desert for 20 years. More distance will make it easier to laugh.

Physical beauty and fearless adventure, silly comedy and sensitive emotions, filmmaker Hiroyuki Okiura brings a facility for all of them to the table.

As admirable as it is that “Klaus” in the overall isn’t a sugar-rush cartoon fix of wisecracks and mayhem, it’s also too lazily reliant on insults and insolence as its go-to mode for comedy. But what does work is the snowy, hilly luster of this bygone-era fairy tale environment, and the seasonal soul the filmmakers have tucked inside their invented history about children’s yearly haul.

The new Israeli film Walk on Water is complex and paradoxical, at times frustrating but always involving. Something like the country that produced it.

It is the kind of film that leaves you limp, exhausted and feeling battered by the end. But its wrenching performances make the beating worth weathering.

Some of the stylistic fillips feel excessive, and at the end of the day, this is just a tawdry, gory B-picture, with little to say about human behavior. But it’s often funny and generally suspenseful — a fine afternoon on the water, all things considered.

The film’s initial non-judgmental perspective eventually sounds more like a public service announcement for Louisiana’s nutria control program.

Oppenheimer is after something that drives right at the heart of what a musical is. To harmonize means to agree. It’s a public display of solidarity — a pact to parrot the same delusions.

The film doubtless works better for those able to accept it unquestioningly as a charming fable of the redemptive, healing power of love that it means to be.

Medem is one of the few directors who understands sensuality and knows how to make it happen on screen. Sex and Lucia specializes in pleasant eroticism, using nudity, Koko de la Rica's dreamy cinematography and Alberto Iglesias' Goya-winning score to create episodes of voluptuous lovemaking.

More creepy and flesh-crawling than overwhelmingly gory, it nevertheless takes pride in characters who get splattered with blood as often as take-out fries get doused with catsup.

Jessica Lange plays the scrappy '60s singer with sweet ferocity.

Chrystal unravels a bit toward the end as it becomes more fable-like, but the performances make it worthwhile.

The smart premise is muddled with far too many tangents — bumbling romances, rivalries with old classmates, troubled cats, precocious teens, angry dance sequences. When focusing on the central relationship, the film is at its best.

A Brilliant Young Mind doesn't fit into any familiar inspirational box. Many of its characters are complex, contrary individuals who are not even close to being comfortable in their own skins, and this film refuses to shortchange how frustratingly edgy and difficult they are to interact with.

What many American movies do well these days -- action, violence, hell-for-leather street spectacle -- Darkman does better. That may be praise enough. [24 Aug. 1990, p.F10]

It's a tortuous, unsatisfying movie, but it's not like any other film I've ever seen about an artist, and it has sequences of blinding intensity.

The Rose Maker is a slender but engaging tale about competition, cooperation and creativity.