Hackman, Jones, Heard, Cassidy, Pam Grier and Dennis Franz -- in another of his greaseball cop roles -- are always interesting to watch. And Davis still suggests he might evolve into an action specialist in the Don Siegel-Phil Karlson class -- if he chooses less apocalyptic scenarios.

A nasty, naughty little film, a delightfully disagreeable horror-thriller.

Breathes fresh life into the tired, bloated sports-comedy formula -- while remaining utterly formulaic.

I Am Ali may never truly wow as the umpteenth portrait of a living legend, but it has its charms in reminding us of one fighter's singular ability to knock us all out with his talent, personality and convictions.

Audiences who care more about how a film makes them feel than if it fully works will be rewarded. But those who need more will find that Discreet lives up to its name a bit too well, never fully offering answers to all the questions it asks.

Chopra and Akhtar have great chemistry, and though the nonlinear storytelling is somewhat unnecessary, Bose deftly manages the challenging tonal shifts within this lengthy film that never drags.

Ithaka isn’t as effective an advocacy doc as it could be, sometimes feeling trapped between wanting to intellectualize with onscreen text and contextualized history and looking for observational moments that crystallize the pain and concern for the Assange family.

Whatever Gyllenhaal wants to do, she does, which becomes its own act of captivation and reckless empowerment. It helps that Buckley and Bale are terrific, as is the ensemble at large. The full force of Lawrence Sher’s cinematography, Karen Murphy’s production design and Hildur Guðnadóttir’s orchestral score is fabulous, combining to make something seedy, moody and extravagant.

The sleek, well-oiled, well-acted The Bank, while as meaty as a steak, is short on sizzle.

The disconnect between what men say and what they do makes Old School funnier than most of its gags and it also invests the movie with curious pathos.

A fascinating hybrid. A Hollywood fantasy at its most fantastic, the film is equal parts true innocence and shameless calculation. Deciding whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on which part you are willing to embrace.

All of the actors convey the ebullience of old friends convening for an on-the-cheap reunion. The shared good spirits result in a diminutive comedy with a bounty of charm and shrewd humor.

Endearingly uneven.

It's worth recalling here that Carpenter made two of the better horror films of the modern era (Halloween and the vastly underrated The Thing), but career-nadir Body Bags is best zipped up quickly and abandoned along the comeback road. [07 Aug 1993, p.F16]

Still worth watching because it provides a showcase for a group of actors who really appreciate this kind of farcical comedy.

While its issues with pacing can be overlooked in favor of its welcome sincerity and full heart, everything that Marks’ film offers us is well-trod territory.

Despite a weakness for trying to tie things up with melodramatic violence, Singleton remains a fluid filmmaker who works well with actors. He may not be there yet, but he is on the road.

Passion will only rekindle your love affair with De Palma to the extent that his luridly artisan chiller classics are readily available afterward for another viewing.

The Roache-Turners prove to have the right mix of micro-budget filmmaking ingenuity, action sass and undead splatter to make "Wyrmwood" a tastier than usual exploitation nosh.

Dunston Checks In is a delightful and funny family film of exceptional high style.

It’s not an intimate portrait of the woman, but a celebration of the sex-positive, taboo-breaking image she created for herself and the way she rocked American culture during a hugely transitional moment.

Director Dimitri Logothetis, again scripting with his Kickboxer: Vengeance co-writer James McGrath, barrels through the chockablock action with requisite energy. But dialogue and performances (including Mike Tyson as Kurt's prison mate), are often laughably subpar.

The séances are great fun, and the cast is charmingly eclectic. But as to whether "Moonlight" is magical — it is, but ever, ever so slightly.

However nifty, Lee's Cubist gambit fails to capture the graphic tension that makes great comic-book art jump off the page and great pop movies jump off the screen with pow, zap and wow!

Ultimately The Ranger promises more than it delivers.

Good intentions aside, this sluggish film never soars beyond its innate contrivances and frequently flat, knee-jerk humor.

The result inevitably pushes too hard at times and can't help but stray into melodrama, yet the film does an admirable job of transplanting the novel's thoughtful concerns into a fast-moving suspense context.

It’s a chaotic jumble of movie references, cellphone footage, emojis, trigger warnings and edgy teen content. But it’s the fumbled “feminist” commentary that is just embarrassing to watch.

But a great sense of pace is a wonderful thing, and director Jackson and his crew (who made good use of hand-held and Steadicam shots and reportedly averaged an impressive 30 to 40 camera setups a day) move so quickly from shot to shot and location to location that viewers have a limited time to dwell on the film's predictable implausibilities.

Brian Buckley’s The Pirates of Somalia, based on a memoir by Jay Bahadur, finds itself navigating some choppy tonal waters prior to emerging as an engagingly performed take on recent world events.

At nearly two hours, An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn grossly overstays its welcome, but the Hail Mary ending proves it to be a rather sweet and tender story about love lost and found in the unlikeliest of places.

Has enough going for it to make it likely worth the effort for fans of Asian cinema, but it does seem an opportunity missed.

Though some of the chase sequences aren't bad, it's pretty silly. [27 Jun 2002, p.22]

The characters and premise of Pledge are over-the-top, but the movie understands that — whether comedy or horror — all these stories are really about a desperate yearning for belonging.

It is also hard not to see remnants of a younger Michael Caine -- beautifully seductive and enigmatic all those years ago in "Alfie." He has said his wife cried when she saw the performance; you understand why.

Had V/H/S been a nasty jolt of three, it might have been memorable, but at nearly two hours, the gimmick punctures a hole in itself, causing ambience bleed-out. Recommended cure: a tripod

The perfect summer tonic for mature audiences looking for sophisticated escape. It's filled with beautiful people in gorgeous, exotic locales.

Blends great cinematic energy with an awkwardly mixed multinational cast and aggressively over-modernized dialogue.

An example of how expert action filmmaking and up-to-the-minute visual effects can transcend a workmanlike script and bring excitement to conventional genre material.

Ever-present is the mild dissonance of fiery pioneers of expression inspiring charmingly pretty if standard art house fare.

Modest but well wrought and witty, Snow Cake is full of unexpected moments and clever observations.

Mikkelsen and Kaas are up to the demands of their roles, revealing impressive range and skill.

The picture benefits from its performances, notably Evans' roguish appeal as a guy simultaneously driven and destructive.

Stiller's sensibility creates a movie that's smarter than you think it will be.

At its most provocative, it suggests a tension between spirit and flesh in the nun's maternal feelings. Rather than examine that friction, Améris pushes the narrative in predictable directions.

Veteran director Roger Spottiswoode, whose output has been spotty in recent years, returns to form with a perfectly weighted redemptive story that engages the heart without shying away from the darker aspects of Bowen’s recovery.

For the most part, it's an uneven if amiable and occasionally inspired comedy about getting through adolescence that hits some false notes along the way.

As another run-of-the-mill Sandler movie, it is better than most. At this point it seems a little foolish to want, let alone expect, "more" from the guy. If he can't be bothered to put more effort into his films, why should anybody else?

Black comedy becomes funnier as the action becomes darker and more perilous, but The Hunting Party fails to locate the absurdity in the central situations and goes for midget jokes instead. In the end, you're not sure if you're supposed to be watching "The Three Amigos" or "Hotel Rwanda."

With the help of clear direction and some excellent acting, especially from Flora Cross in a memorable debut as Eliza, Bee Season is affecting in ways that movies have all but given up trying to be.

With its indefinable, almost indescribable combination of whimsy, sentiment and strangeness, "Mood Indigo" (co-written by Gondry and Luc Bossi) will not be to all tastes at all times. But frame for frame, the amount of invention going on here can't be believed unless it's seen.

Life is efficiently constructed to unsettle audiences. It demonstrates both the pleasures and the limitations of doing a skillful job with familiar genre material.

Kavanagh and Matichak do a remarkable job of capturing an amped-up version of everyday parental paranoia. This is ultimately a movie about a woman who loves her child so intensely that she becomes irrational — and dangerous.

Ultimately, one suspects Perkins views Liz’s dilemma as little more than an excuse to construct a fun exercise in nightmare inducement that possesses the same craftsmanship that Malcolm clearly put into his swanky cabin. Each is a sight to see and neither is worth visiting for too long.

While “Mean Girls Apocalypse” sounds like a winning premise, and an incredible thought experiment, the result is something narratively slack and intensely off-putting, which no amount of excellent acting can save.

As his camera prowls the rugged terrain in precisely choreographed movements, director Baltasar Kormákur (working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot) achieves a physical groundedness that makes even a digitally engineered predator seem palpably real.

The movie is less successful at making its plot feel genuinely meaningful, rather than a simple delivery device for chases and shootouts. Still, for those who could use a break from real explosions on the news, the fake ones in “Black Crab” are well-crafted, exciting and mostly harmless.

Although the performances are uniformly on point and the dialogue is tartly British, the film ultimately fails to earn its riotous stripes.

Al Franken is good enough, he's certainly smart enough. So, doggone it, why is "Stuart Saves His Family" so mediocre?

If Lonesome Jim feels like it's perpetually on the verge of evaporating, Buscemi brings to the material the boundless empathy for misfits and screw-ups he displayed in "Trees Lounge."

Johnny Knoxville offers comic relief as the goofball proprietor of a back-road gun museum, which conveniently allows for an odd assortment of weapons to be used in the climactic battle. It's that kind of movie.

Thanks for Sharing is a bit like the recovery scene it digs into — filled with intoxicating highs and dispiriting lows.

The real draw to the “To All The Boys” cinematic universe is the connection between Condor and Centineo, who have intoxicating chemistry, keeping things interesting as “P.S. I Still Love You” ambles to its inevitable conclusion. They bring the charm, but one wishes it had a more exciting movie to support it.

But as Isaac, Rifkin is simply transcendent, giving what is the most accomplished performance of the year. He does not, however, have a completely successful movie around him.

It's not inaccurate to call Porn Star a puff piece.

There's not enough sustained musical momentum to simulate the energy of an actual rave; the characters are likable but unremarkable.

If this beautifully made if flawed film sends people back to his book, it will have done good work for sure.

Contends that doctrines, including promoting unilateralism, increasing military spending and protecting "access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil," can be traced from right-wing think tanks into U.S. foreign policy.

Chan maintains his dexterous footing whether choreographing the colorful large-scale battle sequences or the stripped-down, hand-to-hand matchups that boil the conflict down to its most basic — and personal — essence.

As a horror show, it's a cut--or a slash or a bloody whack--above most movies of this type: cleverly written, cleverly cast.

An intelligent, sometimes moving, sometimes funny sci-fi examination of emotional autonomy amid futuristic pharmaceuticals, until an awkward shift into thriller territory dilutes its purity.

What Snyder has contrived here feels less like a vital re-energization of the form than a ponderous guided tour through a museum’s worth of familiar superhero-movie tropes and conventions: Look at this, look at that, try not to look at your watch. Like the Flash himself, Snyder wants to slow time to a crawl, to deconstruct every gesture, to make his obsessions your own. He wants the movie to go on forever. Mission accomplished.

The film meanders, and the climax descends into campy fantasy worthy of any ’80s B-movie, but Records is quietly winning.

A challenge to eco-orthodoxy, Pandora's Promise subscribes to its own dogma. The lack of opposing voices diminishes the film, even as Stone raises issues that shouldn't be discounted out of hand.

Only a teenage boy could find this kind of stuff continually diverting, and only a teenage boy would not notice flimsy emotions and underdeveloped acting. It seems George Lucas, like Peter Pan, has never really grown up.

Much like Po himself, Kung Fu Panda 4 just wants to vibe out, riding the wave of previous successes. For little kids, it will be a fun diversion, but for anyone expecting the excellence of the previous films, this dumpling is a little too light on the filling.

Writer-director Sean Ellis more-or-less successfully expands his Academy Award-nominated 18-minute short to full length, showcasing his talented young cast to good effect.

The ensuing abundant gore is simultaneously gleeful and nonsensical as the filmmakers rope in so many monsters — from seductive vampires to routine zombies to killer clowns — the entire movie becomes literal overkill.

Atmosphere is about all Cracks has going for it. Although it's nominally set between the wars, the movie feels rootless and adrift, less a fable than a story only half told.

Townsend's sincerity, his admiration for the idealism of the people behind the anti-WTO protests, is never in doubt, but combining drama with historical re-creation is frankly a challenge his filmmaking skills are not up to.

While the film glistens a bit now and again, a closer look reveals you've been diverted not by a diamond but by a genuine synthetic zircon.

Comedy is ever an effective weapon against hypocrisy and oppression, but to be effective it has to cut a lot sharper and deeper than it does in You I Love.

Eastwood, as always, has simply done things his own way, and the result is a leisurely old-school entertainment with a bit more edge than you may be expecting.

For the most part this is a clever and confident expansion of a terrific short. It stings less but packs plenty of poison.

Bushan employs different styles throughout the film, revealing a knack for dynamic action that his more low-key first half-hour doesn’t suggest. He delivers the goods for anyone looking for an intense war movie — but he doesn’t let the shooting start until everyone understands the stakes.

Effie Gray is fortunate to have enough strong performances by Fanning, Thompson and top-flight costars (including cameos by James Fox, Robbie Coltrane, Derek Jacobi and even Claudia Cardinale) to eventually overcome the doldrums of decorum and create the feeling we've been needing.

Spanning two decades and a momentous war, Memoirs of a Geisha displays all the pomp and grandeur of an epic, but you wouldn't call it sweeping.

Director/co-writer Aristomenis Tsirbas, expanding his own short film, unveils a classically devised invasion yarn à la H.G. Wells, but with the twist that humans are the aggressors.

Mindless escape. [12 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-4]

Hokey though it is, with a horse-hugger ending thrown in to boot, Hidalgo has a sweet-natured appeal that welcomes sentiment without overdoing it.

Working as much like a circus ringmaster as a director, Joel Schumacher has brought several critical qualities to the mix, starting with much more of a pop culture sensibility and a sense of fun than Tim Burton, who directed the first two pictures, and he has a stylish visual sensibility as well.

High-spirited and good-natured, Crying Ladies never loses touch with reality.

Dafoe, who also starred in Ferrara's woefully underseen "Go Go Tales," brings a quiet grace to his role, while Leigh has a rough-hewn emotional directness.

The overall effect here is of parallel biographies juiced to feel important whenever they intersect, and an undercooked paean to lost masculinity.

Busy, but not exactly invigorating.

Love Beats Rhymes lacks its own ambition to be something different.

Some legs of the journey are detours, and the film can feel overlong and diffuse, but as a capsule history it offers revelatory insights, particularly in its emphasis on the role of distance running in the women’s movement.

Deftly balancing humor and grief, The Bachelors is fueled by wonderfully human performances and fully realized characters.