Twists and turns abound, but they're all smoke and mirrors that ultimately don't add up to anything.

On the upside, newcomer Summer Bishil turns in a gutsy, quietly riveting performance as Jasira.

This dark and dreary monster movie is indeed horrific, but it’s also undoubtedly a downer, for more reasons than likely intended.

This cautionary tale certainly has a chilling and timely message of how wars make monsters out of innocent people. But using reductive caricatures — complete with phlegmatic performances — to send that message is perhaps not the best way, because it turns something with modern-day implications into distant allegory.

Campy, shameless and sophisticated, Lichtenstein's debut is gutsy and original, and it makes "Juno" look positively tame by comparison.

The tone swerve into body-count humor and the nuts and bolts of violence eventually prove too much for Crano and Craig to effectively mold into a comedy of perception and privilege.

Despite this notable cast, the remake never manages to drum up much excitement for its sleepy hamlet rousing or for its characters, finally filled with purpose.

Space Jam whimsically teams basketball superstar Michael Jordan and cartoon icon Bugs Bunny in a blend of live-action and animation containing more rowdiness and broad humor than vintage Looney Tunes charm.

After an opening 10 minutes that promises something depressingly mediocre, the film takes a turn to the atmospheric and gruesome, and winds up being one of the year’s more provocative shockers.

The kind of comedy that goes down easy even as it looks at the hard stuff.

But it's essentially a tour de force for Pacino, and he sustains us through the slow passages by working with a closed-in intensity that turns each scene into a kind of mini-movie complete with its own ticking time bomb. [23Dec1992 Pg. 1]

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]

Smart, ambitious and impressive, Run This Town is the best kind of feature directing debut, a film that entertains and makes you look forward to what will come next.

Being blissed out may be an enviable state for a human being, but it is not necessary the best one for a film. [25 May 1994, p.F1]

Why aren't there more American movies like this? I mean smart, unpretentious, sophisticated, un-condescending and cheap.

The cast keeps us invested in Filly's furious resurrection.

Despite honoring noir genre conventions, Buschel also draws upon his fertile imagination in dialogue and in storytelling that allows his film gradually to accrue meaning.

Richard Ray Perez's documentary concerns the myth more than the man.

Though it hasn't the sweep to be greater than the sum of its parts, the movie offers an absorbing mix of melodrama and historical detail.

This light comedy stretches beyond sports to find emotion at its core, without sacrificing laughs.

In Disney’s hands, William eschews freak show theatrics for something much weightier.

An excellent cast and some skillful direction goes a long way toward making “The Aviary” feel genuinely revealing.

Godfrey Reggio’s Powaqqatsi, like his earlier “Koyaanisqatsi,” is a lyrical documentary that turns the instruments of technology against it. In some ways, the new film is less effective, but it’s also more visually spectacular: a mesmerizing cascade of sensuous sights and sounds.

Charming, bittersweet.

Screenwriter Tropper has also constructed some solid father and son sparring matches about the value of being a good person versus being a great artist, which Harris and Sudeikis make the most of.

Encounter has its moments, but it suffers from multiple storytelling approaches that don’t mesh.

The Boys Are Back is a bit like the parenting it portrays -- at times there is pain, mistakes will be made, but if you can get beyond that, there is pleasure to be found.

While it's possible to view this movie like a short-story collection, putting check marks beside the selections one likes best, to do so would deny the pleasure of experiencing this beautifully crafted, intricately designed story the way it was intended, as an organic whole. [11 June 1999, Calendar, p.F-8]

Tilts toward the slight and merely pleasant when it could have had much more emotional impact.

Good-looking and smooth, with a great soundtrack.

The plot hinges on Jenna's horrified realization that her adult self is a witch, but 13 Going On 30 -- works foremost as a vehicle for its rising star.

This is a splendid example of contemporary Bollywood in which a director's sophisticated style and vision have been brought to bear on the beloved conventions of popular Hindi cinema.

Sacrifice is mostly a melodrama concerned with deception, betrayal and just what makes a family. It is handsomely done and well-acted, but it lacks real energy or purpose.

The Big Fix presents a compelling array of damning testimony from EPA officials, journalists, scientists and politicians as well as emotional scenes of distraught residents.

The well-observed script touches on a number of everyday issues about the aging process — whether you're pushing 40 or passing 60 — that add a tender and enlightening layer to this engaging, leisurely paced film.

Veteran performer Schull, perhaps best known as Fay on TV’s “Wings,” gives a towering, fearless turn; the other main actors are fine as well. Still, one must yield to the film’s flat shooting style, lengthy monologues, dangling questions and awkwardly rendered, dubiously earned ending.

Terrific performances and an array of kinetic action scenes help distinguish Fifty Dead Men Walking from the seemingly endless stream of films about Northern Ireland's infamous era of sectarian violence known as the Troubles.

Tanne, who tackled the relationship of a young Michelle Robinson and Barack Obama in “Southside With You,” also hits the physiological explanation of the pain of heartbreak (from which the book and movie draw their titles) pretty hard.

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.

A humanist parable about how to be a good person, live a good life and make gallons of lemonade when life suddenly hands you lemons, it's predictably delightful and delightfully predictable.

It’s competently made, well-acted and largely intelligent, so why isn’t the spy thriller Our Kind of Traitor more rewarding? Perhaps it’s the feeling that we’ve trod this kind of twisty treachery on screen ad infinitum since before the Cold War-era stylings of Alfred Hitchcock — and far more vividly.

The cheeky title How to Live Forever belongs to a wry, hopeful yet enigma-appreciating documentary about the perils and possibilities that come with growing old.

It's the kind of observational comedy, that'll be hard to find come summertime and should be enjoyed while there's still a chance.

For a druggie movie, Candy is surprisingly dynamic and involving.

Sarcastic, sanctimonious, salacious, sly, slight and surprisingly sweet, the black comedy of Bad Words, starring and directed by Jason Bateman, is high-minded, foul-mouthed good nonsense.

An intriguing and intelligent first effort from indie filmmaker Robbie Pickering, digs deep into the heart of Texas for its soulful tale of small town saints and sinners and a road trip to redemption.

Make no doubt about it, Uncle Drew is a very silly film, old-age makeup and all. But it's got humor, heart and a killer soul soundtrack. You'd be soulless to not find some joy in this movie that's pure summer fun.

Like its developmentally-arrested, misbehaving man-children, the long-shelved source material hasn’t aged particularly well.

The Fourth War doesn't make much sense, but it's powerfully acted and beautifully directed. [23 Mar 1990, p.F4]

The secret, which "Part of Me" captures quite nicely, was to just let her be.

Skims a host of provocative surfaces without truly dissecting the self-absorbed playboy.

This film turns out to revolve around a whole series of whopper coincidences, even one of which would be difficult to swallow. Not even a film this accomplished can work up enough suspension of disbelief to enable audiences to ingest them all, and just making the attempt is painful. [05 Nov 1993, p.F1]

Lacks any sort of urgency or inner propulsion; the actors do their little goofs, then hand them off to the next, lending the jest the frolicking but ultimately monotonous quality of a game of tag.

There's nothing really wrong with all this in theory, but the overall doofiness of the execution is finally too much to overcome. The filmmakers come off like their protagonist, wide-eyed tourists in an exotic realm. If you've been looking for a martial arts film to take granny and the kids to, this might be the one, but a Jackie Chan-Jet Li collaboration deserves better than that.

When the filmmakers move into Nobbs' isolation, though, the movie flags - a surprise given Garcia's excellent work on HBO's minimalist personality study "In Treatment," on which he wrote and directed extensively.

There is potential to say so much more about sex, love, partnership, feminism and shifting sexual mores across cultures, but Simple Passion lets the bodies do the talking, and after a while, they run out of things to say.

For so brisk and entertaining a film, sharp in its observations but light in its touch, Cooking has unexpected substance and is a formidable accomplishment in that it brings dimension to its nearly 40 principal characters.

Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.

It's too bad the filmmaker felt the need to lighten his unvarnished observations about aging with "cute" stuff. Has there ever been a worthwhile payoff from the introduction of Viagra to a plot line?

There's a dry humor underlying the absurdity of Koistinen's experience. When things cannot possibly get worse, they do.

Their film is a rarity in that Rios emerges as a vibrant, reflective woman, an individual who refuses to be defined by her transsexuality.

Writer-director Max Minghella’s U.K.-set fairy tale Teen Spirit — which takes Elle Fanning’s lonely immigrant adolescent from karaoke dreams to singing contest heights — is somewhere between feeling abbreviated and wearing out its welcome.

Southpaw is so logic-defying it takes on a Frankenstein life of its own, especially with as energetic and focused an action maestro as Fuqua ("Training Day," "The Equalizer") in charge.

If the first film seemed indicative of much of what is wrong with movies in the streaming era, feeling inessential and disposable, a cog in a machine rather than something unique, “Extraction 2” is a snapshot of a sequel in this moment, bigger, expanded and even less necessary.

Like most sequels, Happy Death Day 2U can’t quite replicate the feelings of joy and discovery of the original, but Landon deserves credit for varying the tune, while still playing the hits that will please the fans of its predecessor.

What's being sold here is the movie equivalent of the honey-drenched sweet potato biscuits that are forever being passed around on-screen. Their nutritional value may be nil, but they sure look comforting.

The sense of film craft here is so delicate and assured that, even at its most razzle dazzle-prone moments, the movie never seems to be straining for effect.

The movie is at once a flagrant piece of kitsch and an unexpectedly affecting story about an individual overcoming personal tragedy and brutally restrictive circumstances by talent and force of will.

There's a push-pull dynamic coursing through the late-in-life romance Lovely, Still that keeps the film intriguing even when it looks like it's going to sink into sentimentality.

Piranhas drags in moments, but it jumps from scene to scene as quickly as the boys weave through Naples on their scooters. The film races at speeds so fast that viewers won’t find themselves bored, even if they’re jarred a bit by the transitions.

It’s a story idea that seems dubious at first, but manages to flesh out wondrously--mostly because scenarist Ron Shelton has such a wickedly tight grip on the absurdities and dynamics of small American cities.

The emotional moments never land.

What you have here, essentially, is a classic "Honeymooners" episode juiced with tropes from the most recent "Rocky" movie.

If all you know about Peter Gatien going in to Limelight is that he is a nightclub owner with legal issues, that's about all you'll know coming out.

As with Rossi's acclaimed documentary "Page One: Inside the New York Times," "First Monday" covers too much ground.

It's unlikely the movie will gain the same ardent following as Raimi's debut, but it offers enough good-time gore, goofiness, scares and screams to leave an audience feeling a certain elated exhaustion.

None of it is quite satisfying, especially when old-age makeup takes center stage. But striking moments develop along the way, jolts of weird joy and melancholy as menace gathers under the Mediterranean sun.

As this latest gets under way, Thor has recovered his enviable god-bod but still has little sense of purpose. The problem with “Love and Thunder” is that it seems to reflect this identity crisis while pretending to solve it.

Madagascar is a classical gas. It's a good-humored, pleasant confection that has all kinds of relaxed fun bringing computer-animated savvy to the old-fashioned world of Looney Tunes cartoons.

The seductively photographed and well-acted production simply can’t gloss over the inconsistencies in the Scott B. Smith-credited adaptation, which pile up higher than all those discarded cigarette butts.

A thought-provoking, canny piece of filmmaking that puts flesh, blood and garish multicolored baubles on the skeleton of globalization.

Once the farce finds its stride, however, it's generally worth the wait.

A triumph of ingenuity over budget, a taut, darkly comic thriller with a dart of pathos that holds attention like Super Glue from the first frame to the last.

For all its aspirations, the film never meshes into something cohesive or substantial. Its naive earnestness has its charms, but like its title character, Defendor never takes flight.

For his atmospheric debut as a feature director, the actor Matt Dillon has cast himself as a guy in need of saving. It's a nice fit.

A splendid cast, coupled with Isabel Coixet's deeply committed writing and direction, goes a long way to make this movie affecting to watch even it if doesn't hold up well to reflection once the lights go up.

A wise and beautiful film.

More travesty than tragedy.

A handsome period production of fluidity and subtlety, intimate and large-scale.

Creepy and grotesque rather than terrifying. It's more distasteful than anything stronger, a sour bottle of a celebrated vintage that a gourmet like Lecter wouldn't hesitate to send back with the sommelier.

Neale's cameras and broadcast footage of various races place the audience in a position to experience the participants' need to go faster.

Winterbottom, who's never been a director with a gift for warmth, can't make this romance come alive. Morton and Robbins are gifted actors, but they seem straitjacketed here, and the film finds it difficult to avoid tedium as their lugubrious relationship unfolds.

Exposes director Khan's stage roots -- he has no feel for the close-up, although his use of the frame itself, and negative space, is occasionally thrilling.

As Ruscio piles it on, he gets himself further and further away from any sense of genuine emotional truth.

Burstyn gets to use her full bag of tricks to bring this crabby, hard-knocks survivor to life. Though she's aged 15 unflattering years, forced into awful old lady clothes and her character teeters on unsympathetic, the actress manages a rich, vanity-free performance, perhaps her best since "Requiem for a Dream."

Instead of depicting a boy's first steps toward manhood -- ceremony aside -- it turns into an uninvolving portrait of self-absorption.