Contemporary viewers are more likely to find Fritz the Cat a mildly amusing period piece, as dated as a Nehru jacket.

Sanders is perfectly cast as the oily, conniving family member who sends one of his relatives (Price) to jail on a trumped-up murder charge. [28 May 1998, p.F39]

More successfully silly than non-Brady fans will expect.

In its own strange way, All Is Bright pulls you in even as it frustrates. This is far from a picture-perfect Christmas story, mind you, but there is a spirit in its celebration of disappointment that is quite special.

Trespass has its bloody ups and teeth-rattling downs, but it also has a clutch of humorous in-your-face performances and a core theme that explosively carries it along: When the factory breaks down, the rats will kill each other for the gold.

If a more elegant and succinct explanation of what compels some people to go to art school has ever been filmed, I haven't seen it.

Ricki and the Flash is a sour movie masquerading as something more cheerful. In that attempted deception the film is both helped and hindered by an indispensable performance by star Meryl Streep.

It's a risky movie, and an uneven one. But the impulses behind it are darker and stronger than in most of his previous comedies. Good or bad--and Life Stinks definitely has a weak, undeveloped side--I liked it.

It's a comedy about maniacs: a tasteful murder-comedy, which isn't that laudable a goal.

Charismatic performers Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie lend the lightweight rom-com Save the Date more than its fair share of watchability. But the film is never truly interesting.

Crass, vacuous exercise in grind-house stylistics.

Yes, it is splendid that anyone would take on so formidable a project as Eco’s 500-page chambered nautilus of a novel. Yes, this certainly feels like a 14th-Century Italian abbey, bleak, drafty and forbidding. Yes, it looks like it too--the 14th-Century as cast by Federico Fellini, every face a grotesque. But no, sad to say, it isn’t a perfectly marvelous film.

It's amazing what a little story and a little substance add to a movie. It might not be a giant leap for mankind, but it is a small step for one old man.

10 Items or Less is not deep, but it's a charming enough diversion to spend a day with two likable people.

If you do see the movie, by all means surrender to its portrait of an earlier era of toxic celebrity culture, and also to the bracing nastiness of the central performances.

Alfonso Arau's romantic fable A Walk in the Clouds is so confounding a miscalculation that its every development causes your jaw to drop in sheer amazement.

The film takes liberties with certain truths about Gauguin and his time in the tropics, yet despite — or maybe because of — its concoctions manages to produce a highly compelling central character.

An enlightening, lively, perhaps not unfamiliar outing.

What makes 12 Strong objectionable — and what will also make it appealing to some — is its attempt to induce a kind of amnesia in the audience, to ask that we forget about the subsequent moral and strategic failures of America’s “war on terror” or the limits of military retaliation when it comes to the pursuit of justice.

Allen's view of what's "deeply real" feels ever more deeply bogus as the movie progresses, his trademark wit having calcified into pastiche and unintended self-parody.

With his hilarious spoof Die Mommie Die! Charles Busch takes the melodramatic woman's picture of the '40s and '50s to delirious extremes.

It's the right format for this scattershot jokefest, which at times resembles a vaudeville act crossed with the kind of goofy bludgeoning antics that sometimes make it into gangsta MTV videos. [26 Apr 1995]

The immensely likable Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is a freshly contemporary change-up on the traditional cross-cultural romantic-comedy.

Hauck, with a strong assist from Bill Fernandez's clever, well-modulated Techniscope lensing, impressively choreographs the movie's continuous takes with a nice balance of intimacy and breadth. Hauck's a talent to watch.

Odd, funny film.

All the Wilderness seems tailor-made to play to the actor's strengths — Johnson's script is as lean as Smit-McPhee, both proving adept at doing more with less.

It’s a dazzlingly filmed and acted synopsis.

The home-movie vérité style of the early scenes pays dividends when inexplicable occurrences suddenly take us by surprise.

How Norman and his gang learn the ropes, work the game and earn their fleeting, if nerve-wracking moment in the sun proves an enjoyable, well-crafted ride in the hands of writer-director John Stockwell.

Director Damien Power occasionally tilts the movie into horror territory, with some particularly grisly violence that might shock viewers who think they know where it’s going.

Its humor is broad, but most of the jokes work for the intended audience — with a few even breaking through to more resistant viewers.

Song of the South is essentially a nostalgic valentine to a past that never existed, and within those limits, it offers a pleasant, family diversion for holiday afternoons when the children get restless.

It's an unhinged, off-the-wall comedy that will try anything once, an uneven film in which the hits are so dead-on that the misses don't seem to matter.

Ends the series' winning streak, or at least slows it down to a panting, dog-day crawl.

Brighton Beach Memoirs may be one of Simon’s best plays, but the film’s heart seems to be beating in a plastic wrapper. There’s a kind of glace over everything, a sugary show-biz coat that dulls your taste buds. Everything is bigger, brighter and broader than it should be--though remnants of that simpler, more honest story often peek through.

For all its lack of suspense, "Gardens of Stone's" intelligence and its unsimple characters make it a notable attempt to deal with that war. [08 May 1987]

Some may find parts of Yanks slow going. The lengthy film would have benefited from additional editing. Nevertheless, it is an emotionally and visually compelling work that will not be easily forgotten.

Like a wayward love child of Lenny Bruce and the Three Stooges, Brüno is an idiot savant of penetration -- breaking through borders, boundaries and anything that resembles good taste on his way to whipping up as much cultural anarchy as he can. I would guess Brüno is holding on to an R rating for this sublimely spicy soufflé by the skin of his, well, let's just not say.

It’s a thin tapestry of lore with some interesting creative embellishments, but without any real interest in character, it feels flimsy and disposable. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better.

Despite the overt message and Manichean universe it pushes, Amu manages some memorable cinematic moments while getting the word out for its cause.

Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby's ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity.

While the material here is thin and largely predictable (aside from one great jump scare), the cast is outstanding and the dialogue is snappy, delivered at a brisk pace.

Even if viewers can’t make sense of it all, they should be able to connect to the way Van Warmerdam revisits some of his favorite themes — including the idea that we’re all actors really, struggling to remember our lines and motivations.

The swearing and gross-out humor loses its bite after a while. We’re left with an at times heartfelt and enjoyably observed story that may hold interest with more patient viewers but, due to some episodic scene work and slack pacing, leave others restless.

Bisexuality certainly increases the geometric possibilities of the romantic comedy, completing its triangles and allowing for quadrangles and other, more amorphous layers of amorous involvement.

Get Smart neglects the laughs and amps up the action, resulting in a not very funny comedy joined at the hip to a not very exciting spy movie. Talk about killing two birds with one stone.

At a certain point, it feels as if scenes are missing, and what’s left reads as unconvincing.

The film, named for "Calvin" creator Bill Watterson, offers not only an in-depth look at the comic strip's unique influence but also a concise snapshot of the dwindling state of newspapers and their "funny pages."

In Memories of Me, nothing goes unsaid; its banalities are triumphant, its maudlin flourishes build to maudlin crescendos.

Though it may be another in a long line of choir-preaching, anti-Iraq war documentaries, CSNY/Déjà Vu, Neil Young's effective hybrid of concert film and political snapshot, is one of the shrewdest and most entertaining of the bunch.

Delightfully bittersweet culture-clash comedy. If what's funny is frequently hilarious, then what's nasty truly stings, and the film is honest enough not to tie up everything with a ribbon.

A film of piercing beauty and pain.

Duchovny and Driver have distinctive good looks and they both combine attractiveness with talent and intelligence. Best of all, they possess that essential quality all screen lovers must have: terrific chemistry.

Style is content in action movies, but when all the style originates elsewhere, it's just plain lazy.

It is deeply unpleasant to see women abducted, tortured and eviscerated by a methodical and meticulous butcher.

LBJ would have benefited from a more distinctive voice.

Cox is a wonder to watch, and seeing him in this gentle, vulnerable role, also spouting folk tales and seductions in ancient Scottish Gaelic, is a treat. If only the rest of this sappy story stood up to his talents.

More satisfying than not, and it plays out credibly.

It’s not difficult to decipher where McMurray and DeMonaco’s true allegiances are, but by delivering the story within the framework of genre cinema at its most trashy and garish, the filmmakers convey any message as a bit of rough pleasure amid the kicks and thrills of a movie.

At its best, though, Blue Chips is really about the wiggy, muscle-twitch world of high-pressure college athletics. The movie is best around the edges, when it's jamming and anecdotal and not taking itself so heroically seriously.

Dunne and Wittenborn, who adapted his book, work too hard at stressing just how ruthless the unspoken standards of the stinking rich can be, leading to a story-pivoting act of brutality toward Finn that careens the movie into a tonal wilderness that it never recovers from.

Despite Almereyda's invention in approaching this tawdry Shakespearean tale, he misfires badly. All that is left is the semblance of Cymbeline.

While this "Night" hasn't the chilling, almost cinema-verite credibility of the original, it is certainly a well-sustained entertainment, with one foolish or unlucky incident triggering another. Like the original, this R-rated production is definitely not for children. [19 Oct 1990, p.F1]

Director Jason James, working off a darkly amusing, often lovely script by Jason Filiatrault, effectively juggles the film's disparate, tone-shifting parts and bits of magic realism while coaxing memorable performances from Middleditch, Weixler and Bang.

At the top of his game, Carpenter and his cohorts boldly tap into the twin strains of paranoia gripping the present-day American society, suggesting that we face one or the other of two of our worst nightmares coming true. [09 Aug 1996, p.F1]

It covers a lot of ground in a skin-deep manner that’s more useful as an intensive overview of the events — if you manage to keep track of who is working for which organization at any given time and why.

Lee (who directed episodes of “Broad City”) and Glazer swerve from comedy to horror, using the genre as a vehicle for social commentary about modern motherhood, misogyny and manipulation. False Positive is Glazer’s “Get Out,” which is a phrase you want to scream at her character, Lucy, over and over again.

Director Dexter Fletcher ("Sunshine on Leith") keeps things enjoyably hurtling forward, even when the otherwise engaging script by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton overworks a cliché, shorthands certain practical and financial matters, or proves a bit one-note.

Director Charlie McDowell, who co-wrote the film with Justin Lader, sidesteps the material’s more intriguing ideas, ultimately settling for a conventional story about love, loss and second chances. The disappointment comes not in the lack of answers but in the relative absence of audacity in tackling such a trippy concept.

The sequel is every bit as amusing as the original, though probably grislier. [08 Mar 1991, p.F16]

It’s a magpie movie that’s happy to give audiences the tinselly things they want — i.e., two robots clobbering the Wi-Fi out of each other. But Johnstone creates openings for his own shaggy sense of humor. I’m excited to keep tabs on the promising New Zealander.

It's an ambitious film drenched in sincerity and oozing with nostalgia that, despite the energy provided by its title icon via archival footage, falls flat dramatically in nearly every other way.

The film drifts from grown-up to kid problems with mostly anecdotal evidence but very little science to back it up. It tries to cover too much ground in 71 minutes without going deeply into any of the areas it lightly explores.

It's not that the movie is never funny. It's just that you don't feel very good when it is.

For all its energy and charm, this overlong film contains its share of undermining missteps.

Stewart is enough of a force to give Seberg’s darkest moments their due, but it’s too little, too late for the superficial soup that is the movie that bears her name.

As convolutedly scripted by Ma Yingli, and pushed around by the restless camerawork, it’s primarily a spotty fusion of spy-story contrivances and diffuse themes of truth and artifice, although the playground is plenty evocative.

The duo carry automatic glamour and nobility and the movie is an elaborate star turn, a chance to see them strutting their stuff one more time.

At the moment, modestly amusing does not stave off that desire for a really great live-action family film after years of watching the terrain land-grabbed by animation.

The film -- buoyed by its cast of excellent actors -- loses its momentum in the final half-hour when it starts to take itself too seriously.

In Captive State aliens have taken over the world (as they will), but it’s the viewers stuck watching this messy, lugubrious sci-fi thriller who may feel like the ones being held captive.

May be a period piece but there's nothing antiquated about it except an overly populated, initially hard-to-follow plot.

Malena the film is as beautiful and seductive as its heroine, with its ravishing Lajos Koltai cinematography and sweepingly romantic Ennio Morricone score.

A dynamic, fully visually realized experience. It's every bit as gory as "Batman" but more cohesive and its struggle between good and evil more tightly integrated. [11 Aug 1989, p.C6]

Decidedly uneven yet intriguing.

At best, they entertain in a "people say the darndest things" kind of way. But they do support the notion that people still fall in love and find a way to make it work for a lifetime, which is about as happy an ending as you could wish for.

The film lacks the comedic charm of "American Pie," but with its dark, hyper-sexualization of teens, it offers an engrossing if not soap opera-esque tale of self-discovery.

[An] engrossing, propulsive film.

How to Please a Woman is overlong; and it runs out of plot well before it gets to its climax (so to speak). But while its premise is at times iffy, the movie as a whole has a refreshing randiness about it.

The latest in an unending series of bleakly comic, nihilistic neo-noirs to reach the screen, U-Turn's story of a bad day in an Arizona hell invests a lot of skill and style in a trifling tale. So it manages to sporadically amuse even while it's wasting your time.

A lovely performance by Ethiopian supermodel-actress Liya Kebede as supermodel-activist Waris Dirie works wonders to elevate this uneven, occasionally awkward but often absorbing film.

Oblivion has the ability to haunt you visually and, with an unanticipated love story, even emotionally.

There are moving moments as Cornish channels the slow self-enlightenment necessary for Ashley's character arc. And the actress is particularly good in the scenes with the promising young Hernandez.

While its ramshackle editing could be unintentionally humorous, and the obvious dialogue almost veers toward the inadvertently enjoyable, it’s the movie’s insistence on punching down that renders it more of a nightmare than a fever dream.

In addition to its terrifically bratty performance by the epically bratty Posey, House of Yes contains some of the smarter (and smarter-assed) writing of the year.

Directed by the gifted but erratic Irish filmmaker Neil Jordan, the movie is thin, rote and silly but, Huppert being Huppert, it’s good for a diabolical chuckle or two.

There is something sharp, exciting and more original tucked within The Berlin File — and it is in moments a sleek, crackling film — but it all feels somehow misshapen.

Through a first-person narration, Bialis makes much of the film about herself. Her account certainly turns the daily travails of living in Sderot into something tangible for viewers. But at the same time, her life-experience narrative proves a distraction and a disservice to the promise of the film's title.