It also points to one of the movie's most nagging problems: Stuck somewhere between personal memoir and universal truth, Fred Won't Move Out ends up being neither.

There has been a glut of animal movies in the last few years. But, of them all, The Bear -- sympathetically imagined, meticulously organized and grandly executed -- is easily the period's epic. [25 Oct 1989, p.F1]

Saw X may not be the best one to start off with, but it’s hard to imagine a better one to end with.

This is a well-crafted chase picture that doubles as a fiery warning about the dangers of an authoritarian government that can create its own reality, with no accountability for mistakes or malevolence.

As it plays out, it’s only a hard road for these swept-up, damaged lovers, whom Klein and his actors treat with blessedly non-exploitative honesty.

Red can't stop itself from trying too hard to be hip. It's not that it doesn't have effective moments, it's that it doesn't have as many as it thinks it does. The film's inescapable air of glib self-satisfaction is not only largely unearned, it's downright irritating.

The feature debut from Irish writer-director Ciarán Foy, Citadel attempts to transform mundane anxieties into the stuff of a horror film. But the initial tension of the premise dissipates like a slow leak.

The movie has plenty of the expected fun with its parade of B-movie, VFX-created creatures — a werewolf, giant praying mantis and an army of angry garden gnomes, among them — but it also possesses a sly self-awareness.

Every scene has a delight.

While it is fun to reconnect with Big Nick and watch him try new foods, there’s just something missing in this rote “Ronin” ripoff — a danger. It seems Gudegast and his cast of characters alighted for Europe with only a few ideas in place, and the tapestry of this world is not woven as tightly as the original.

Rules Don't Apply, as its name implies, is a movie intent on going its own way. It's not without its charms, but there aren't enough of them and they don't readily cohere.

Burger knows how to shoot and this is one feature where the dingy digital imagery arguably makes sense, but it's too bad he didn't work harder at finding something more original with which to test his talent than the JFK assassination and the gimmick of the phony nonfiction film.

(Mamet) backslides to a system that has his speeches read in a stylized way. The result is language that sounds unhappily artificial and characters who behave like they are less than real.

Illuminating as it is entertaining.

Taut, corrosive and compelling, Gangster No. 1 has the galvanic appeal of "Little Caesar" and "Scarface" in its full-sized portrait of a brilliant but twisted and savage criminal.

If you're willing to suspend a barrel or two of disbelief, then Happy Accidents has its moments.

Illustrates what happens when a viable premise is spoiled by sheer preposterousness.

An easygoing and amusing romantic confection.

The difficulty is that Brassed Off operates at an emotional pitch that starts at a crescendo and never relents--rendering almost everything equally inconsequential.

At times, Happy, Happy is cutting comedy at its brutal best; at times, it slips on the black ice. Still, the love of life is exuberant, the pain exquisite.

Anubhav Sinha's exhilarating fantasy Ra.One is Bollywood at its best. It has energy, spectacle and humor, song and dance, but razzle-dazzle special effects and action stunts never overwhelm its story of enduring love that unfolds amid an intricate and inspired sci-fi odyssey.

Winds up feeling scattershot and unfocused. Rather than capturing punk brattiness maturing into wary adulthood, director Andrea Blaugrund Nevins might have been better off simply making a film solely about Lindberg.

In Ashok's reunion with the love of his life (Mary Steenburgen) — the chance to see her after many years is the true reason for his trip — the film taps into a tender wistfulness, Steenburgen making her character's every glance and hesitation resonate with emotion.

What begins as a quirky portrait of the artist as a gringo mariachi troubadour proves to be a telling study of a lost soul whose palpable passion for his music acts as a surrogate for more meaningful human contact.

There are a few chuckles to be found in Bill, but this is decidedly more "Robin Hood: Men in Tights" than "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

The film articulates a concept of universal humanity. No matter the religion or circumstances, we all have the same desires for peace and connection throughout life.

The troubling whiff of nationalist sentiment doesn’t entirely blunt the force and sweep of Ryoo’s multi-pronged narrative, even when the story generally proceeds in fits and starts.

While it scratches an admittedly reflective surface, you keep hoping the nicely photographed Maineland would have dug a bit deeper.

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

Generally leaving the weightier political stuff to others, Mitch Dickman's lively documentary functions as both a handy pot primer and a telling portrait of the volatile, adapt-or-die climate that continues to hover over the newspaper industry.

Both too unfocused and overly familiar. It has enough comic energy to generate some chuckles, but even when we laugh we're always wondering why the jokes aren't funnier. [5 Mar 1999]

Among the movie’s more disquieting pleasures is the sight of this peerless actor — known for her ability to project an air of casual, chilly mastery over any situation — wilting under the mockery of her character’s unruly students, who treat her with only slightly more contempt than her colleagues do.

While Williams and Faith do a fine job of capturing the frustrating powerlessness of a low-wage-earning woman in a sexist and classist society, The Power never generates much in the way of shocks or excitement.

A feature-length lampoon needs more than rubbery performances, so-so silliness and the constant thrum of meta humor to make it a consistently amusing variation on a theme.

As a curdled storybook, Bad Tales is highly watchable. The problem is that the brothers aren’t telling stories fueled by powerful characters; they’re staging awkward cruelties as if for a gallery show.

In key spots, thanks to Simmons' brilliantly wounded gruffness and Pucci's nimble toggling act between vacancy and awakened spirit, The Music Never Stopped achieves an admirable poignancy about our emotional, healing relationship to the songs we love.

Director Cordula Kablitz-Post, who scripted with Susanne Hertel, effectively presents Lou as neither heroine nor genius but as a flawed, complex, fascinating pacesetter.

It is a movie that will reward your patience.

If “lovely” is not the first word you’d think would be used to describe a movie about attempted murder, then you haven’t seen Moving On, an amusing and bittersweet little tale of love, friendship and, yes, retribution.

Isn’t It Romantic walks the line between subversive and sendup. It gleefully makes fun of the well-known tropes of romantic comedies, while also satisfying our desire to delight in said tropes.

There's no freshness here, no sense of newness or discovery. In its place, there's an earnest desire not to drop the ball, a determination to risk as little as possible in keeping this golden egg from cracking wide open.

An emotional runaway of a film that carries neither the insight nor the uplift to make the weight of its dark journey worth it.

Visually, the film is a stunner with its impossibly mobile camera work. It is also all but impossible to hold on to the story line.

If the cast is distractingly pretty, the performances are also quite fine and, in the case of Gordon-Levitt, exceptional.

Closer in texture and consistency to individually wrapped American cheese than good, tangy English cheddar. But even humble plastic-wrapped cheese has its virtues and so does this film.

Steven Soderbergh takes Gray (who appeared in his little-appreciated gem "King of the Hill") places he's never been on-screen. Motion, color and brazen stylizing enhance what is at times a genuinely hysterical work on rationalized terror.[9 May 1997, p.F12]

The film is on the lean side in matters of story and depth of characters. Its strengths are its pure, ingratiating sweetness, its insider’s view of cross-cultural romance and its eye-popping picture of a thoroughly Westernized Tokyo that has rushed to embrace every worst idea America ever exported--and added a few of its own: sing-along caraoke videos and love hotels, which are a little like the Madonna Inn on a franchise scale.

The humor is sly and not overplayed either. Typical is the English class with Mr. Angelo (Adam Goldberg) trying to prod his bored students into parsing the difference between satire and irony, which is what the filmmakers are up to as well.

When it plays to its strengths, the film, like the band, mines pure '80s gold.

The great failing of The Iceman is not in giving us a monster, but in not making us care.

A sketchy trifle that is sporadically amusing but also off-putting around the edges.

Thanks to Ifans, though, this remains a watchable film, one that, perhaps like Len himself, falls short of its potential.

The virtues of The Aeronauts are real but they are almost exclusively visual. Despite the hard work of acclaimed actors in what sounds on paper like a strong story, the drama presented is determinedly earth-bound.

This is a quietly insinuating picture with, by my estimation, one good jump scare, a lot of queasy chuckles and an overall atmosphere of slow, creeping, heavily perfumed rot.

The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.

Though definitely one of the best American movies of the year--a work of high ensemble talent and intelligence, gorgeously mounted and crafted, artistically audacious in ways that most American movies don't even attempt--it's still a disappointment… It's not the capstone we might have wanted Coppola to make. [23 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.9]

Unfortunately, this well-acted cautionary tale is hampered by a lack of visual finesse and a script in need of a narrative rethink and a dialogue polish.

This is a droll, laid-back film noir steeped in Crescent City atmosphere and music that culminates in the colliding worlds of genuine and virtual reality.

Tap World, also takes viewers around the world, and that, plus some flat out terrific performances, make this a surprisingly lovely little film.

Director Klaus Härö, working from a script by Anna Heinämaa, deftly captures the grayish gloom and day-to-day paranoia of postwar Soviet life, while infusing this absorbing tale with affecting emotion.

What director Caryn Waechter does best is artfully and lyrically capture moments of teenage abandon where the girls feel free, self-possessed and full of friendship love.

It’s like a “Fast & Furious” movie that’s been deconstructed and reassembled as a gleefully demented live-action cartoon.

The animation artistry of Madagascar 3 is at its best under the big top, all cotton candy fluff and razzle dazzle. The character development of this edition is the best of the rest as well.

Though unevenly told and at times too fanciful for its own good, Electrick Children marks an intriguing feature debut for its risk-taking writer-director, Rebecca Thomas.

Humor here, whether situational or emotionally-based, proves a smart balance of grounded and loopy.

For all its bloody and violent genre trappings, Pilgrimage — directed by Brendan Muldowney and written by Jamie Hannigan — is a gorgeously shot film that carefully renders the details of this fascinating historical period.

What a relief it is to discover that Wayne's World 2 is just as hilarious as last year's original, which was one of the best, most distinctive American comedies in years. [10 Dec 1993, p.F14]

Norman Taurog's The Caddy is a sometimes subpar 1953 Martin & Lewis golfing comedy enlivened by a Dean and Jerry duet on "That's Amore" and a snatch of their great stage act. [22 Jul 1988, p.23]

Zippy, well-played, Wilder-esque farce.

No one is likely to disagree with the basic correctness of the movie’s conclusions, though you may well object to the process by which it arrives at them.

Berg, who wrote and directed, is more interested in how men deal with battle than the ideals or the politics that put them there. What the movie achieves, with a gruesome energy and a remarkable reality, is a firefight.

Although Smallfoot is formulaic and predictable, what sets it apart is its willingness to dive into the themes of questioning blind faith.

An amusing tale of larceny triumphant, Bandits is an entertainment with a rogue's imagination.

The genre's recent past has set the bar quite high, and Treasure Planet doesn't quite make it over.

There’s something fitting, even respectful, about the sheer number of movie stars that have been pressed into service here. Throwing subtlety to the wind with wild gesticulations and exaggerated Italian accents, they may flirt with and sometimes tumble headlong into stereotype, but they do so with a verve and commitment that, for the better part of 2½ hours, disarms judgment and suspends disbelief.

It’s an effective if reductive conceit, which more or less describes Being the Ricardos, one of those pleasantly tidy biographical fantasias that aim to compress something remarkable — a life, a career, a cultural phenomenon — into the space of one revealing week.

Like husbands who think that carrying in the groceries is really pitching in, Lucas and Moore have their hearts in the right place, but their efforts have little real insight or impact.

Everything old is shockingly, stirringly new again in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, the rare sequel so unexpectedly enchanting that it plays less like a rehash than a reclamation.

Life of Crime has the authentic Leonard snap, crackle and pop.

If you can get past the rough patches - a slightly sluggish start and a coda that feels like one punch line too many - there is some sinister fun to be had in watching Kinnear skating toward disaster on ice that is very thin indeed.

While not much of a detective story, Robinson's period film does provide a captivating look at the dynamics that turn Fernandez and Beck into serial killers.

The strength of Foster’s spooky performance makes Nell more effective and worthwhile than it otherwise deserves to be. And it is just because we come to care about that unusual young woman that we wish she were in a better movie, but that was not to be.

It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]

Unlike the teeming world living between the lines in Munro's story, there is not nearly enough in Hateship Loveship to keep you invested.

They may not do enough to alter the climate change film landscape, but Klein and those impassioned protesters provide something that has been in short supply in the predecessors — namely, a modicum of hope for the future.

While the movie becomes a little repetitious in the middle, it ends strongly with a succession of unforgettable scenes of gruesome body horror. Clock leans too heavily on too-obvious visual metaphors, but it’s still a vivid and visceral explication of one woman’s fears.

Too many scenes run longer than they need to, padded out with overly folksy and reflective dialogue. But McGowan makes good use of autumnal Appalachia, staging a lot of scenes outdoors in the barren, brown hills.

There are moments when the film is a little too precious, taking time to preen at just how clever it is.

If Biraben had devoted more energy to the human contours of his story, its metaphorical implications would have sorted themselves out. Instead, he herds his characters toward a foregone conclusion, reducing both their scope and his story's power.

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.

This largely Spanish-language film brings on the waterworks because its core story is undeniably affecting. The whole movie, however, would be more convincing if the elements around that vital core were more multidimensional and less contrived.

Director and co-writer Thomas Lilti's mistake, though, is thinking the bland Benjamin's coming of age concerns are worth so much screen time. The sturdier character study in Hippocrates is of soulful, beleaguered Algerian-born Abdel (Reda Kateb).

If director Emmanuelle Bercot's feature isn't always dramatically satisfying, it is fueled by the fine, flinty chemistry of Catherine Deneuve, Benoît Magimel and newcomer Rod Paradot.

Killing Ground is an effective indie creeper that unnerves the audience with its all-too-realistic violence.

The movie both embraces and questions the romance of heroism, a provocative paradox that would have had more dramatic oomph if the screenplay were less staid, the characters more fully fleshed.

The film's re-creations, some involving actors and some the girls themselves, aren't always successful, but the truths at their core are rock-solid. Illuminating and ultimately hopeful, despite the horrible circumstances depicted, Girl Rising stands as a testament to the power of information.

The result is as sugary as a fatal toothache, though it's hard to hate a film that merely wants to give the world a hug.

"Riviera" suffers from a weak story with an obvious ending.