Based on Lois Duncan’s gothic young adult novel, Down a Dark Hall is entry-level horror for teens. The scares might not satisfy those old enough to vote, but it should provide mild chills for its target audience.

Monster is a terrific film: a strong, absorbing, beautifully performed and crafted social drama that, unfortunately, proves even timelier today than when it was shot in 2017.

Harris, of course, is in a different league from the rest, and his depiction of the tortured writer is remarkably well-realized, considering the nonspecific yet somehow overly familiar inscrutability of the character. Despite its limitations, there's something appealing about the world Rapp has created.

While Tag doesn’t get every character beat right, it nails the energy and enduring companionship that the game has engendered among the friends. It’s the kind of frothy escapist fare that goes down easy on a hot summer day, with a big old beating heart to boot.

For all of the substantive issues underpinning the documentary, it still feels a slight film for Berlinger, and very unlike the documentary veteran's best work, found in his dogged following of the West Memphis Three case.

It wins a few, loses a few. It makes us laugh, gets mileage out of the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man.” In the end, the actors save it, especially two of the actors: star Robert Downey Jr., who may have moved into the Robin Williams-Steve Martin-Whoopi Goldberg category, and supporting actor David Paymer, who never hits a false note.

Where the documentary succeeds most plangently is in its fan testimonials of the album’s impact and Blige’s emotional recollections of the songs’ roots.

The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

Migration isn’t exactly unique, but it’s different enough. And in today’s factory filmmaking, that’s almost as unlikely as milking a duck.

Harsh Times goes down like the vinegar its protagonist chugs to try to beat a drug test. It's carefully crafted, exasperating and ugly, a festival of self-destructiveness, in all ways a reflection of its lead as brought to careening, erupting, implosive life by Christian Bale.

The Belly of an Architect has flaws, smudges and intense pleasures. Something like a clockwork orange, it’s an art machine that spurts juice and acid.

As advertised, A Knight's Tale does try to rock you. The problem is, it doesn't rock you nearly enough.

A goofball movie, in the way "Malkovich" was, but it tries too hard.

Stella may be frothy and paper-thin, but it's also another great success for star Angela Bassett, who transforms the film into an infomercial for her considerable abilities.

This raucously gritty and high-spirited film could scarcely be bluer in terms of the language, but from Waters it comes as a gust of fresh air.

A lovingly assembled cast in a brilliantly detailed production, with special notice to Vilmos Zsigmond's haunting cinematography, which seems somehow to have captured the light as it was, pre-smog. [10 Aug 1990]

Falling Down encourages a gloating sense that we the long-suffering victims are finally getting our splendid revenge. The ultimate hollowness of that kind of triumph reflects the shallowness of a film all too eager to serve it up. [26 Feb 1993, p.1]

Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.

In attempting to address its many concerns, the film’s agreeable, lightly satirical tone gives way to increasingly didactic dialogue and a stalling pace.

Though the Strick-Robinson script is solid from line to line, the film's plot is finally too implausible for anyone to rescue.

Violent and over-sexy as this movie may be, offensive as some may find it, it never loses its grinning good humor, its revisionist drive, its shoot-the-works spirit. It’s a killer entertainment--with an accent on “kill.”

There's plenty of pacing verve in Costa-Gavras' technique, and the residue from that first thrilling peek inside the hermetic world of big-time money-moving never goes away. What's lacking is most surprising from this dissident filmmaker: the emotional outrage.

Delivers a satisfying late-summer escapist treat.

You can see the stuff Million Dollar Arm throws at you from miles away, but that doesn't stop this baseball movie from being genially enjoyable.

The gimmicky structure and style is more distracting than effective, and it mostly fails to compensate for an underdeveloped plot.

The narrative is infused with chilling facts, and the filmmakers know how to build their case, but a drama demands more. We should have been immersed in Dee's wrenching journey, not just sitting it out on the sidelines.

This funny, sick twist of social satire is certainly locked and loaded, even if its aim is sometimes off.

The movie, though uneven, benefits from a strong sense of place and an exceptionally well-cast lead.

Though he claims to be a seeker, someone who "has to find out" why believers believe, Maher sets out not after answers but cheap laughs that preach, so to speak, to the converted.

This endearing picture is proof that it is still possible for a major studio release to be fun, smart and heart-tugging and devoid of numbskull violence and equally numbing special effects.

In Embattled, the human side feels explored, as if the film could have been made without the MMA scenes and still been a worthwhile watch. But it does have those adrenaline-injecting fights, so … all the better.

Even illuminated by the unsparing performances of Jack Nicholson as Francis and Meryl Streep as Helen, his companion of nine years and another soul stumbling away from grace, the film becomes becalmed and confusing; it lacks the novel's great unwavering trajectory. [18 Dec 1987, p.1]

A film that's at times as ragged and shaggy as its family unit. But as written and directed by Thomas Bezucha, its offbeat mixture of highly choreographed comic crises and the occasional bite of reality make for an unexpectedly enticing blend.

Though he is on less certain ground during the narrative's moments of warmth than when things are grim, director Cretton manages it all successfully. With Woody Harrelson as its dependable lodestar, "The Glass Castle" never loses its sense of direction or its belief in where it’s going.

Thanks to good performances by Cutmore-Scott and Simmons — and good writing by Chirchirillo — Bad Match effectively explores the everyday horror that comes from people treating their fellow human beings as interchangeable playthings.

If Genius is a failure — and by the generally unilluminating standards of most mainstream movies about the creative process, I’m not entirely sure that it is — it succeeds in being a noble, even charming one.

The Crazies only ever amounts to genre-regimented madness.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master is by far the best of the series, a superior horror picture that balances wit and gore with imagination and intelligence. It very effectively mirrors the anxieties of the teen-age audience for which it is primarily intended. [19 Aug 1988, p.17]

It’s a heavy lift that, to do her efforts justice, required a more dimensional, broadly contextual and, for a movie about art, visually adept depiction than first-time filmmaker Rynecki has managed.

Not as slick as “Free Willy” or as sophisticated as “Searching for Bobby Fischer,” this is a throwback to the sweet and sentimental Disney family films that Walt himself loved, a live-action fairy tale about a boy, his dogs and a darn tough race.

Though the script relies on gross-out body humor more often than it needs to, it manages to be deeper and more resonant than most girls gone wild comedies. A truly enjoyable trip.

Subtlety and nuance mark both the film's dialogue and performances. It's hard to see how Dancy and Byrne could be any better.

Sweet, however, are the uses of melodrama in the skilled hands of Tornatore, for he transcends the lurid and the coincidental with range, depth and insight, and a bold, confident, suspenseful style, to create a fable of love and redemption.

Lively and suspenseful.

Rather than steep his story in dread, ideas or something, anything, fresh and different, first-time director Eli Roth just pours on the blood, along with some recycled surrealism and plenty of giddy movie allusions.

Despite his cogent finger-pointing, nifty graphs and succinct highlighting of recent climate change history, longtime followers of the hyper-partisan topic may not find much terribly new or revealing here.

Atom Egoyan's 2002 "Ararat" had been perhaps the most notable film to tackle the Armenian genocide, but it did so only anecdotally. The historical epic approach seems long overdue, and Akin does it justice.

A medieval adventure-love saga in which all the cliches have been turned inside out. Instead of chivalry, the 1985 movie focuses on swinishness and brutality. Instead of love it offers lust and lechery; instead of heroism, pillage and murder. The "instead-ofs" go on and on, leaving us no one to root for and everything and everybody finally a turn-off. [10 July 1988, p.TV2]

Granting Esther the same psychological weight he grants Juan would have helped, surely. That Reygadas refuses to do so might be interpreted as a boorish lack of curiosity — or, more charitably, as an honest self-indictment, a refusal to speak for a character he doesn’t know or understand.

An exceptionally intimate, human-scaled picture. It's also quite a special piece of work.

This film is a superior example of how flavorful dialogue, talented actors and excellent staging can make something familiar really pop.

A flavorless feast, with the movie's few mystical leaps clunkily handled.

Salles has lovingly crafted a poetic, sensitive, achingly romantic version of the Kerouac book that captures the evanescence of its characters' existence and the purity of their rebellious hunger for the essence of life.

Although overly self-involved, Penn is surprisingly focused as a director.

It all adds up to create a dicey morality tale that's as improbable as it is strangely believable.

Knights of Badassdom actually delivers everything the 2011 Danny McBride-James Franco comedy "Your Highness" purported to be but fell short on. The film is "This Is the End" festooned with Middle Ages accouterments.

At its most hopeful, the film traces a story of medical diplomacy, involving a young Gaza boy's life-saving surgery by an Israeli doctor. At its most searing, it illuminates the seeds of hatred and the depths of suffering and mistrust.

What always rings loud and clear and true is the formidable Adams. When given a red-meat role of physicality and nuance — animalized, her eyes swinging between adoration and primitive fire — she can handle whatever Nightbitch needs to be at any given moment: light and funny, dark and stormy, feral and furious, and all combinations therein.

Snyder stands revealed here as more of a beginner than a visionary in his uncertain approach to making an on-screen world come alive.

At times a little callow around the edges, Boy Culture upon reflection, displays considerable insight. It is buoyed by some incisive acting and writing and anchored by a standout portrayal from Bauchau, a versatile veteran of international cinema.

The movie’s aggressive hipness can be a turnoff at times. But once it settles down into a more typical coming-of-age story, Crush becomes disarmingly sweet and relatable.

Inspired by actual events, Saints and Soldiers benefits by being a small-scale war movie.

A runaway hit in France last year and the country's official Oscar entry, is a well-nigh irresistible film celebrating the redemptive power of music.

While it will likely amuse its target audience of geeks and the terminally online, Deadpool & Wolverine is a whole lot of hot air and not much else.

As beautifully structured as one of the Z-Boys' graceful and intricate maneuvers. It is economic yet possesses depth and is visually striking, capturing an idea of what life is like in a very fast lane.

And, though the 1953 “Invaders” was an effective movie, it’s not really the classic that people remember. Except for Menzies’ superb production designs, everything in the remake is better: the acting, the camera work, definitely the Martians. It may not grip audiences in the same way, but that’s because Hooper is trying something harder, a conscious campiness that’s tough to bring off.

The film is breezy from start to finish.

[The movie has] considerable charm and humor....Adam Holender's fresh, airy camera work and a vibrant electric score also add vitality to an all-talk film. [13 Oct 1999, p.F8]

The flesh-and-blood protagonists are powerful, driven people caught in a riptide.

Logan Sandler’s Live Cargo is stuffed with arty close-ups and stunning backdrops, but the emotions to connect them are missing.

Leatherheads proceeds agreeably, hitting occasional high notes when it isn't getting bogged down in forced slapstick hi-jinks.

Like a good prom date, a good high school movie just needs to keep you entertained and out of trouble for a couple hours. A great high school movie — "The Breakfast Club," "Rebel Without a Cause," "Boyz n the Hood" — will linger in your mind well into adulthood. Paper Towns...is only a good high school movie.

Tom of Finland entertainingly recounts an intriguing and vital chapter of 20th-century gay history with style and deference.

An exquisite performance by Charlotte Rampling, whose work as Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, the matriarch of the great estate the cherry orchard sits on, is the film's dazzling centerpiece.

An elegant, deliberate film about loneliness and hope, connection and loss.

A drama of extraordinary power and insight with dazzling performances from not only Spacey but also Danny DeVito (who may well be at his best ever) and from newcomer Peter Facinelli.

An extraordinarily intimate, deeply affecting and revelatory documentary on how pain and passion can come together in a creative artist.

Depp's performance reminds us that, yeah, it's only a movie -- just not a good one.

Had the movie been just a little more thought through, it could have been a new classic. Antibirth is still quite good, though, with memorably surreal imagery and an abrasive texture that enhances Perez’s overall vision. As a portrait of a middle America full of forgotten people and ruined civilizations, this is one of the year’s scariest movies.

The movie is a thin but painless retread, cloaking its derivative storytelling in a familiar cloak of fan gratification.

Writer-director Gerard Johnson resists all impulses to please the crowd. The graphic sex and violence never feel gratuitous, and there's something interesting in the way he deliberately denies his characters and the viewers any reprieve.

Pastor and Naharro have written a great part for Dueñas and direct her with great care. In fact, her delicately nuanced portrayal is crucial to why this lovely film works so well.

Although it contains its share of diverting shootouts, car crashes and explosions, this self-serious film mostly evokes a forgettable TV police procedural.

The story suffers diminishing returns as it unwinds with increasing violence and absurdity. Or maybe it’s just that “68 Kill” puts the best material upfront.

While not especially distinctive, the film is pleasant and amusing. It has a brisk, well-turned-out quality that augurs well for Harris, the son of Richard Harris.

The series seems to have at last entered its frustrating, decadent, spinning-its-wheels phase.

Grounded by a gutsy, over-the-edge-and-back performance by Paul Kaye as Frankie, It's All Gone Pete Tong takes the long way around before finally redeeming itself.

The comedy of Quick Change is city-dweller humor, honed to a fine edge and site-specific to New York because the Big Apple is more or less on its knees, civility-wise. All it needs is a lethally funny comedy like this to give it the coup de grace. [13 Jul 1990, p.1]

Non-Stop is a crisp, efficient thriller that benefits greatly from the intangibles Neeson can be counted on to supply.

The forced hybrid of a preposterous potboiler plot with genuine questions of medical ethics, Extreme Measures is weakened, not strengthened, by its strange bedfellows shenanigans. And the fact that director Michael Apted is able to put considerable realism and skill into his filmmaking merely emphasizes how out to lunch this picture’s story is.

For fans of Nunez's previous work, it's almost as if he put in all the clichés he would normally avoid and left out the wonderfully textured internal moments that made "Ruby" and "Ulee's Gold" unique.

Listless, disjointed and disconnected, this meandering two-hour, 32-minute exercise in futility will fascinate no one who doesn't have a blood relation among the cast or crew.

The look helps provide a little subtext, but not enough. For such an emotional piece, the dialogue stays too close to the surface. More problematic, the trio's encounters feel contrived; you can see the filmmaker's hand staging each one.

While the plot following Krypto finding his pack and saving the day is exceedingly formulaic and slightly tiresome with its predictable turns, Stern and Whittington fill the space around the structure with a plethora of absurdist humor and sharply written jokes, as well as the teasing self-awareness.

The division between the personal and scientific stories is not a clean one. It gives the film an uneven rhythm as it at times lurches between the two women's very separate lives.

Like any pleasant surprise, this funny, frenetic, cheerfully nonsensical movie makes its own rules and gives you a few things that you weren’t, well, expecting.

A perfectly acceptable motion picture. The only thing that keeps it from even greater accomplishments may be inherent in the story itself.

This underdeveloped, lackluster glance at brotherhood practically demands a response of "Is that all there is?" at its 70-minute fadeout.