Everything hums along until it abruptly crashes and burns, and one can’t help but wonder if the film was picked apart to fit a PG-13 rating (the original is R) and a sub-100-minute runtime.

The movie is equal parts clever and trashy, made for people who like to see very good actors play people who are very bad.

What writer-director Michael J. Weithorn, a sitcom vet, gets right is the Long Island vibe, the New York smarts crossed with small-town insularity. If the film takes too long to reach its rather soft denouement, Fischer makes Laura's awakening convincing.

A little of this junk-drawer fusillade goes a long way.

This is an earnest and way-contrived endeavor that manages, due largely to Costner's efforts, to be genially diverting in a gee-whiz kind of way.

By boiling too much down to black and white, Camp X-Ray's ability to say something significant is diluted.

Its bygone-ness still abuzz with creativity and movement, Downtown 81 is a celluloid scrapbook that we can all be thankful for in helping capture the rumble before takeoff.

Stray falters in the narrative department but looks good and holds interest.

An involving primer on the realities of homegrown versus global industrialization.

Overly earnest and roughly constructed, the film is bearable largely thanks to the performance as the daughter by Carly Schroeder, recently seen in the girls' soccer pic, "Gracie."

A rambling, mildly entertaining performance film.

Unfortunately, style needs a little substance to keep it from careening around looking empty, and the story of Blue Steel is lofty, implausible twaddle that sinks whatever ideas Bigelow hoped to investigate.

Profile works on several levels — as a cinematic feat, dual character study, gripping thriller … and as a cautionary tale.

Boogie tries to appreciate its own contradictions, and also to complicate the audience’s expectations. It positions Boogie as an underdog of the underrepresented, a potential breakout star in an arena where the odds are stacked against him. But it also resists the temptation to turn him into an easy emblem of success, while neatly sidestepping the feel-good uplift and predictable, reconciliatory outcomes that tend to hold sway in the sports-movie genre.

A lot of heart and a lot of music. It just doesn't sing.

About as non-narrative a film as you're likely to see in commercial theaters. This makes it a curiosity and, less charitably, something of a gimmick, but mostly it makes it a challenge.

Freak Show is carried by a fully committed performance from Lawther, who quivers and swans and roars like the best of the Hollywood grand dames.

A frail little caper movie that’s overawed by its cast.

Even as the concept of crowdsourcing isn’t as novel as it was at the time of the film’s predecessor and the 90-minute running time can feel unnecessarily expansive given the repetition of those pandemic-related sequences, “Life in a Day 2020” nevertheless serves as a telling time capsule. The world has never felt so compact.

It’s hard to completely dismiss a mainstream horror-comedy that offers a nice supply of sharp and grisly, at least until it takes a disappointing turn for soft and cuddly.

Based on Jessica Knoll’s best-selling mystery novel, the Mike Barker-directed Luckiest Girl Alive — with a script by Knoll — falls into the trap of trying too hard to capture not just the book’s flashback-heavy plot but also its distinctive voice.

It heaps piles of bad, crazy stuff at our feet then walks away. There is no moral to this story, and there's not much comedy either.

Possibilities ends up as a testament to only one thing: a missed opportunity to explore one of the most visionary and influential careers in modern music.

This engaging, nicely observed look at a 30ish L.A. couple who allow each other a one-night stand to help reheat their 7-year-old marital bed moves quickly and simply.

A sense of lethargy hangs uneasily over the lumbering new version of The Magnificent Seven. Despite its sturdy plot, seasoned director and capable cast toplined by Denzel Washington, Chris Pratt and Ethan Hawke, it arrives in a comatose state, a film unlikely to arouse passions one way or another.

Gutierrez is ultimately too enamored of his quasi-feminist, visually convulsive upending of damsel myths to let his actors enjoy themselves the way De Palma or Dario Argento would.

Don't let the title of this indie gem fool you, Small Time has humor and heart big time.

Most of the jokes in Eddie Murphy Raw are the kind you regale buddies with to show off. Anyone as good as Eddie Murphy should have outgrown that years ago.

Oberli and Ziesche, who’ve divided the story into three chapters plus an epilogue (the less said about the plot the better to protect a few solid twists), attempt to lay bare the thorny issue of outsourcing care work to migrants but don’t layer in enough heft or context to make a wholly satisfying statement.

There’s so much that works about The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, it’s unfortunate that it’s all been crammed into one overly-long film.

The Little Things has a couple of hair-raising scenes and a few nifty, low-key twists in store, though little about the overall experience of watching it can really be called surprising. I don’t mean that as a knock. The pleasures and comforts of crime fiction, even with the built-in expectations of suspense and revelation, are not always dependent on novelty.

It's almost impossible not to be swept up by the exuberant fun of this singing, dancing, irony-laced ode to the repression, reeducation and resistance of Australia's indigenous tribal peoples circa 1969.

The strength of White Bird lies in its young performers, especially Glaser and Schwerdt, who deliver complex, nuanced performances of young people experiencing their part of global atrocities on an intimate scale, while also trying to navigate the complications of connecting as young teenagers. They are both excellent, and keep the film emotionally grounded.

There's no real jeopardy. The stakes are low. It's a bee movie about nothing.

A genial look at what happens when a wannabe becomes a headliner, Rock Star only stumbles when it decides it has to deliver a lesson about What's Really Important.

Anyone looking for the kind of comic brio that Dustin Hoffman and company brought to "Tootsie" will not find it here. [24 Nov 1993 Pg. F1]

Grossman bangs out a visceral, energized biopic that captures the vibrant idiocy of punked-out youth and a tortured soul gaining his wish of cult status.

For all its poignancy, Spork never loses sight of its goal to be zesty, sharp-witted fun.

Fans, go be with your people. Others, approach cautiously.

The relentlessness of corporate might is disturbing but no surprise; "Big Boys" is, however, an eye-opening look at the way the U.S. media fell lockstep behind Dole's claims.

In the film based on her memoir Mulberry Child, Jian Ping speaks of her family's ordeal during the Cultural Revolution with searing detail and not an ounce of sentimentality. The same can't be said of director Susan Morgan Cooper's heavy-handed approach to the material.

With admirable economy, writer-director Billy Senese has crafted an eerie piece that's as much an effective cautionary tale as it is a stirring film of ideas — and ideals.

The results, although emotional, intriguing and a bit surprising, lack the journalistic urgency, heft and deeper danger often connected to these sorts of cinematic unravelings.

This capably acted, if unevenly paced film often lacks focus and depth.

Allure is powered by Wood's intense charisma. Laura deploys her magnetic gaze as a weapon, though the destruction she wreaks is most often directed at herself. The character's situation is always untenable, and as it collides with inevitability, the co-writer-director Sanchez brothers lose the tight grip of control they've maintained over the story.

A largely inspiring and transporting portrait.

When it's just roaring along through a kaleidoscope of Los Angeles locations, the camera perched behind, above or below the skateboarding heroes and villains, the movie can be fun. It's shot in an extravagant, try-anything, music-video style. It's rattlingly paced, vibrant and splashy. Then we get to the story. Stop me if you've heard this one: Boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy gets girl. Sound familiar? Try this for extra spice. Two warring teen-age gangs clash--the free-and-breezy Valley Guy "Ramp Locals" and the swaggering, black leather, bone-in-the-nose "Daggers."

An appealing, bittersweet backwoods saga laced with plenty of country and western music. [22 June 1986, p.4]

The film’s exploration of crime-fighting’s gray areas is familiar; but strong performances, some stylistic flair and a matter-of-fact tone give The Policeman’s Lineage the ring of truth.

Horror hounds should appreciate all the inside jokes and references — while also wishing the movie itself were as consistently good as its influences.

More often, the weirdness and affectations seem gratuitous. Even for a movie meant to be offbeat, the rhythm is jarringly askew.

Knox Goes Away should be noirishly enjoyable hokum. But instead, screenwriter Gregory Poirier’s tribute to an earlier era’s taciturn machismo is more muddled and ludicrous than fleet and clever.

Smart, satisfying action entertainment that is also a perceptive work of considerable artistry.

Eubank's fizzy mix of self-conscious, set-piece image-making and small-scale human detail is admirable.

Never quite works as a film. The failure to create appropriate cinematic metaphors reduces it to "happiness is a warm puppy" superficiality.

Aided by its deft performances, the film manages its tricky emotional territory with aplomb, rarely dipping into sentimentality or easy conciliations.

Not surprisingly, considering that it is a Spielberg production, Batteries Not Included is a handsome film, impeccably (and ingeniously) designed by Ted Haworth and enriched by a superb James Horner score that brings a melancholy tinge to its brassy big band sound. Batteries Not Included is in the best Hollywood tradition of raising serious questions in a thoroughly entertaining way.

A ruthlessly efficient stalk-and-slash machine.

Miller, like most directors, isn’t remotely in Cameron’s league as a maestro of action technique. But he gives the visual-effects-encrusted combat scenes a nicely visceral intensity, with just the right ratio of spatial coherence to logistical chaos.

With so much conversation these days about the effects of rape culture, Felt, with its atmospheric DIY aesthetics, enters the discussion as a corrective chiller that can best be described as compassionately perverse about one type of pushback.

By having Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter play the maniacs' feisty antagonists, the filmmakers seem to believe that they've made a significant feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding. Even in an industry known for self-delusion, that is quite a feat.

An art-versus-commerce drama that consists of one beautifully aching performance surrounded by a whole lotta twee.

Although the sentiment threatens to flatten out an intriguingly nervy vibe, Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best has plenty of rhythmic charm about its responsibility-challenged strivers.

So clearly derived from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that you might begin to wonder when Jack Nicholson will show up. The Dream Team isn't unusual, but it's funnier than, say, Twins or Fletch Lives. It can't really hit any classic highs, perhaps because it regards rebellion as cute and paranoia as a running gag. The jokes, to stick, need grittier, sawtooth edges.

Undone by a deadly twofer: lack of trust in characterization coupled with single-minded faith in spelled-out messages.

While Colman peels back Hilary’s layers of grief and rage with all the ferocity and subtlety you’d expect from an actor of her caliber, even she can’t sell the joyfully beaming pivot required of her in an interminable sequence in which Empire of Light essentially becomes the ’80s equivalent of Nicole Kidman’s AMC commercial.

Though handsomely photographed and featuring a compelling cast, the Ireland-set memory piece — adapted by John Banville from his Man Booker Prize-winning novel — will leave audiences wondering how much more satisfying the muted drama might be on the page.

Good Dick carries its messed-up, highly improbable premise so lightly and gracefully that it ultimately comes off as a sweet, plausible and curiously grounded love story -- and touchingly old-fashioned.

So grimly determined to be even-handed that it never generates tension.

Despite an awkwardly jokey title, Now, Forager has charm, intelligence and a cool passion for its principled characters - an appealing off-menu slice for hungry indie admirers.

Although the storytelling technique may feel innovative, the story itself is not.

Hotel Transylvania 3 may lack the indelibility of the medium’s best offerings for kids, but hopefully its clear theme of acceptance lingers long after the inoffensive odor of its fart jokes dissipates.

Cassavetes isn't much of a director and he never settles on a mood, which he seems intent on ruining with hiccups of goofiness. But there's an underlying humanity to his scenes, a sense that movies are made by people for other people.

Minor whimsy of a film.

It's not often that you see talented, well-meaning people joined together like cultists in the snare of a group delusion, but that's what makes this film fascinating, the proverbial accident you can't take your eyes off.

Worthy of being seen as more than a potential double-bill partner for "Fahrenheit 9/11."

There's an underlying emptiness to Human Traffic and it's difficult to say for sure whether Kerrigan fully acknowledges it.

A rousing, warmhearted comedy, as infectious as the gospel music it celebrates.

Oblivious to niceties like subtlety, plausibility and discretion, it rushes heedlessly toward its destination of audience arousal. Like a flood, the impact is undeniable but it's not something everyone will want to get in the way of. [24Jul1996 Pg. F.01]

Woo is capable of bigger and better.

The film charts no new territory but is terrifically cast and, like its source novel, long on atmosphere.

More of the same, for all the good and acceptably routine that that implies.

You can share Jarmusch’s despair — I certainly do — and still find its expression here too tired, bloodless and self-satisfied by half.

Adopt a Highway is a small film but mighty, thanks to Hawke’s reserved yet touching performance as a broken man learning to test his wings again, and Marshall-Green’s willingness to take Russell down unexpected paths.

The problem with Shorts is in the execution. The blown-up plot line at times derails even the little ones, the many fine comedic grown-ups are mostly squandered, and the "message" part of the movie feels like it was thrown together during detention, resulting in a wrap-up that is rushed and cloyingly PC.

The whole effort is undermined by an abundance of mob-movie cliches.

Make no mistake about it: Streetwalkin’ (a very hard R) is first and foremost a blood bath.

The result is that they never truly find the innate drama in Pimentel's story, instead simply recounting four or five decades' worth of events that shaped the man.

Rather than another drearily workaday horror picture, Sinister uses the supernatural to underline its examination of the all-too-human foibles of insecurity and myopic self-centeredness. As the best horror stories so often do, Sinister makes clear that we are our own boogeymen, the worst monsters of all.

A rare creature, not only for the handmade look and subtlety of its computer-generated imagery but also for its irony-free embrace of once-upon-a-time storytelling.

It has its successful moments but it's surprisingly inert overall, more like a Burton derivative than something he actually did himself.

It wants to be a high-toned nail-biter, an important history lesson and a roiling friendship drama. But because Schwochow and screenwriter Ben Powers would rather jam the components together than braid them into a cohesive whole, the movie fails at all three, straining logic (especially the poorly handled spycraft) and flattening out the emotion at every turn.

By turns gorgeous, propulsive and feverishly overwrought, A Wrinkle in Time is an otherworldly glitter explosion of a movie, the kind of picture that wears its heart on its tie-dyed sleeve.

If you're in the mood for some feathery fluff of the happy-sappy-and-not-wholly-unpleasant sort and need a break from snark, there is The Big Year.

In the film, Lily is delusional about her relationship and the movie blurs the lines of the abuse for too long to a frustrating degree that essentially robs our hero of her agency, and elides some of Ryle’s obvious manipulation.

This movie is either in your wheelhouse or it's not, but for those looking forward to Book Club, it delivers. For what it is — a breezy bit of Nancy Meyers-like fantasy, featuring four beloved actresses talking about sex, baby — it's exceedingly enjoyable.

This movie’s a reminder that even abstract concepts can have a dark, persuasive power.

While the result may be scattershot at times, the achievements of these badass professionals are worth a look — especially if, like this writer, you believe an Oscar category for stunt performers is long overdue.