After a fairly good, tense opening, it keeps rolling up one preposterous scene after another.

There’s reason to celebrate that Daniel Day-Lewis has chosen, at least temporarily, to cancel his retirement, but “Anemone” as a whole strains for a greatness that its star effortlessly conveys. Amid the film’s self-conscious depiction of a brewing tempest, he remains a true force of nature.

Prisoners of the Ghostland is less a movie than an environment — not always hospitable but distinctly bizarre.

While it's full of arresting, indelible images, Mr. Lonely remains mostly on the level of abstraction. You get it but you don't always feel it.

One of the most successful, provocative and intensely contemporary of Israeli films, so much so that to watch it is to feel the country having a passionate argument with itself.

A plucky comic valentine for those who love the movies more than their own mothers.

An emotion-charged tale that's also an edgy commentary on women's destinies and how they're still so largely affected by men.

Sporadically playful, it ends up wearing as thin as any film geared to a preteen sense of humor is bound to do.

The story comes full circle in a way that might seem overly schematic did it not have the courage to wear its heart on its sleeve without losing its head.

Likely to cast its spell primarily on adolescent girls, while their elders might well find it more than a little tedious in its familiarity and artificiality.

Of the many remarks Weber makes in the course of his beautifully fashioned film, none may be more significant than his observation, "We photograph things we can never be."

The phrase "by the numbers" was invented for the way Harper crafts this script. After coming up with a good notion, opening and close, he simply fills up the middle innings with the detritus of several decades of TV sitcoms and high-concept kid movies. [07 Jul 1993, p.F1]

Like a sensational party the night before, Big Business may not bear the closest scrutiny in the cold light of day, but it gives an irresistible glow at the time. And when it gets on a roll, it's a movie with more wit to its lines and a more pungent array of them than much of the mishmash that has passed as Bette Midler's Greatest Movie Hits. [10 Jun 1988, p.1]

Wisely, Hancock has given the film as much humor as heart.

The Program pedals fast, but the end result is little more than a psychologically shallow recap reel.

That Soul Surfer rates as a giant leap for this team speaks well about the conviction the movie's actors bring to the material as well as the respect afforded the Hamiltons and their faith.

Ava's Possessions is powered by an amusing conceit that configures demonic possession as a metaphor for addiction. But the metaphor alone is not enough to sustain this minor effort, which wears thin over the course of a feature length.

For all the ways Dumplin’ does its best to avoid some clichés (no mean-girl antagonists) while embracing others (drag queens as coaches), it’s still a regrettably undercooked meal, even with those songs and the breezy magnetism of “Patti Cakes” star Macdonald.

Swallowed is slow-paced and often aggressively unpleasant — unless your idea of a good time is watching people moan in pain for minutes on end while clutching their stomachs. But it’s a memorably intense experience, with sharp points to make about how the lives of outsiders and outlaws can tip in an instant into sloppy chaos.

Its lack of originality and emotional depth may have been more forgivable had the film been legit funny. But save a few random guffaws, this whacked-out tale of a Jewish family’s Shabbat dinner that goes wildly off the rails may prompt more eye rolls and exasperated sighs than were surely on the menu.

A virtual replay of the original "Home Alone." It's darker, meaner, sillier, more scatological, and, in rare moments, funnier.

The film leans a little too heavily on Pineda's wide-eyed disbelief at his sudden turn of fortune, leaving a feeling that it could dig deeper into the history and dynamics of the band. Yet Pineda's ebullience is infectious, and Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey is a pleasant story of dreams coming true.

If you’re in the mood for a movie like “Alita,” “Alita” is the movie you’re in the mood for.

As a showcase for accomplished performers tugging heart strings in a holiday awards season, it's perfectly serviceable.

Delicacy isn't going to set anybody's psyche on fire with its insights into grieving and emotional recovery, but as a crepe-thin romantic snack, it has its moments.

I Am Not a Hipster is the kind of lovingly crafted, deeply affecting drama that gives small indie films a good name. It's also a terrific showcase for first-time feature writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton and his superb leading man, Dominic Bogart.

It’s a slight film, but it’s populated by enjoyable moments and wry observations that will appeal to fans of talky indies.

In the Mouth of Madness is a thinking person's horror picture that dares to be as cerebral as it is visceral.

The film’s higher aims never take hold. The breeziness feels at odds with implied gravitas.

Hopefully, the girls who see Nancy Drew this summer will take their cues from the smart, engaged, intellectually curious character Roberts so charmingly portrays.

Like a lush ballad that’s somehow both off-key and in total harmony, it’s unlike anything else out there, and certainly more interesting in its swings and misses than a lot of the machine-stamped celebrity biopics littering the movie landscape these days.

While it’s easy to view “Axel F” as a calculated cash grab, it’s clear that Murphy possesses an affection for the title character. From the get-go, Murphy’s portrayal hinged on Axel’s ability to warmly connect with everyone he meets.

A political thriller with more plausibility -- and yes, more thrills -- than most.

Olin could not be more commanding. It's a powerful performance in the service of a movie that's by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

The only thing that keeps Knight of Cups from terminal artistic overreach as it follows Rick around town is the knockout cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who does superb work showing us contemporary Los Angeles in a most magical way.

The movie thus moves from truly creepy to truly inane, which is, unfortunately, all too common in films of this ilk.

The age-old search for the fountain of youth is engagingly appraised in The Immortalists, a lively documentary focusing on a pair of very different biomedical scientists who are equally obsessed with eradicating the ravages of time.

Irrational Man never does make sense of the inscrutable Abe, just as most people, Allen included, remain mysteries to themselves and others. This finally reveals the film to be neither comedy nor drama, but an all too human horror story where the monster is within.

My Art is an amusing riff on the way one’s creative work bleeds into one’s personal life, and Simmons expresses a singular voice and style, despite the missteps in storytelling.

Shyer and Meyers... are endlessly inventive. They're not afraid to be sophisticated and screwballish in the best '30s tradition, and they know just how far to exaggerate for laughs without leaving touch with reality entirely or destroying sentiment. The humor in Baby Boom is sharp without being heartless.

Kika, which has Almodovar's characteristic high gloss, may not be a vintage film but it's nevertheless indelibly idiosyncratic. Nobody but Pedro Almodovar could have made it.

Can't rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It's also emotionally realistic, even brutal.

There’s something wrong with the children, all right. The filmmakers can’t figure out what to do with them.

Katsoupis poses these probing and provocative questions about humanity but doesn’t offer any clear answers or messages. Rather, he lets his muse, Dafoe, simply inhabit this harrowing journey with his strange magnetism and sense of timelessness, in a performance that is simultaneously primitive and transcendent.

Chen's masterful, deeply perceptive direction of his superb cast is equaled by the film's luminous cinematography, rich yet spare and stylized production and costume design, and rousing score.

It may be a hard sell to the Gameboy generation, but The Basket has charms that may be more evident to adults.

The Rise of Skywalker nakedly offers itself up in the spirit of a “Last Jedi” corrective, a return to storytelling basics, a nearly 2 ½-hour compendium of everything that made you fall in love with “Star Wars” in the first place. The more accurate way to describe it, I think, is as an epic failure of nerve. This “Rise” feels more like a retreat, a return to a zone of emotional and thematic safety from a filmmaker with a gift for packaging nostalgia as subversion.

The actors give it punch, but in the grand scheme of caper comedies, The Art of the Steal is more breathlessly imitative than authentic.

No moment on this anything-but-love boat has the impact of, say, the seasickness sequence of “Triangle of Sadness,” but slaughter stans will get their butchery bellyfuls.

It's a beautifully austere piece of work -- it's rare to see a film these days that's as carefully designed as this one. But the design hasn't been given enough human contours. It's as if the film makers had forgotten the raging emotions that all that design and austerity were supposed to repress. [07 Mar 1990, p.F1]

A warm and enthusiastic documentary.

You might not "like" Perry's movie, but it's hard to deny the forensically assured sensibility at work.

It's an enjoyable snapshot that effectively explores the colliding - often complicit - worlds of fame, entertainment publicity, the public's infatuation with gossip and the dogged paparazzi at the epicenter of it all.

Regrettably, Men at Lunch obsesses over disappearing ghosts instead of the records we already have and the history we should know.

The movie has a fan's heart, a sense of loving every goofball moment, but as directed by Mike Mendez it also seems perpetually caught between being a spoof or playing it straight and winds up falling between the cracks rather than rising above.

We, unfortunately, learn very little in this Earth Day release (originally completed in 2012) that we haven't seen before in more evolved, better focused documentaries.

It's an affectionate and admiring collection of moments, but the director's wobbly choreography never locates a dramatic core for this corps' story.

Filmmaker Herbig and his team prove to be especially adept at contriving situations where anything anyone does causes fear, anxiety, stress and worry, leaving everyone, very much including the audience, existing on the knife’s edge of unremitting tension.

Not Brooks' funniest film, but it possesses his trademark wry humor and is slyly observant.

The mix of essay, history, critique, laughable spectacle, and reflection starts to feel unwieldy and steered toward easy assessments about the perils of loving money and worshiping appearance over substance.

Shame as well upon the advance marketing department for blowing the end of the movie in ads, thus exorcising any ghost of a chance Quarantine had of issuing a surprise.

Paul Weitz has dialed things down considerably for Being Flynn, writing and directing with an earnest sensitivity that at times suits, at times undermines, the complexities of the story at hand.

Lucky Number Slevin is an attempted cinematic sleight-of-hand that has its moments, but is finally just plain annoying, wearing its influences too broadly on its sleeve.

Like Malkovich's out of control Russian accent, Rounders ends up reaching a place too hard to understand and even harder to believe in.

It's a cautionary tale of sorts, but the story is so strange it is often not clear exactly what it's cautioning us against.

An initially clever exercise winds up feeling like the wrong kind of hackwork.

Carrying Shooter through its difficulties is, finally, not its crisp action sequences and definitely not the torture. It's Wahlberg's performance, which is the film's most old-fashioned element, and its best.

If you know the name Rezso Kasztner, you won't need any encouragement to see Killing Kasztner: The Jew Who Dealt With Nazis. If you don't, that is even more reason to see this documentary on the strange and compelling life and death of one of the most morally complex figures to come out of the Holocaust.

Caught between confrontation and compassion, the familiar but still heartrending Donkeyhead acknowledges that the hurt others inflict on us, though never excused, may indeed derive from their own unexpressed and unresolved trauma.

Husson’s film details the consequences of such free love, but it celebrates sex too — the kind based on intimacy and love. Teens and sex: it’s a tale as old as time but this take is surprising, invigorating and sharply frank.

Brother Nature has its amusing moments, providing a showcase that tends toward the formulaic and predictable.

Still, there are some things to savor. Blanchett is an actress who's always involving, and Crowe is very much in his element as an intrepid, laconic archer who lets his arrows do the talking.

Advocacy documentaries simply don't get better or more compelling than this.

Anchored by a quartet of fierce performances, “Donnybrook” is an intense, visceral tone poem, a rumination on money and drugs and bloodshed as a means of making ends meet in the heartland of modern America.

That it is a fine example of modest-budget filmmaking, boasting first-rate acting, writing and directing, is not all that surprising.

Parents and older siblings...may grow impatient with the uneven execution that weakens the genuine charm the film sporadically exhibits.

The film is not without humor or conflict, but it is a complex coming-of-age story that places a premium on independence and attacks sexual hypocrisy.

The well-intended Group is nevertheless problematic. It's relentlessly grueling, as therapy can be, and not everyone will be able to see a reason to watch it.

The movie loses some of its initial atmospheric tension as paranoid thrills give way to Rambo high jinks.

Ritchie whisks you along on a whirlwind tour, but he's not averse to putting on the brakes long enough to admire some of his favorite attractions.

The filmmaking here is so glacially paced (the final script was only 62 pages for a 100-minute film) and enervating that boredom is the most frequent result.

Script resounds throughout with astringent dialogue and stark authenticity.

If you're young enough to have missed some of the better Lemmon-Matthau pairings, like "The Fortune Cookie" or "The Odd Couple," then Grumpy Old Men won't seem so grumpy. [25 Dec 1993, p.2]

The Mauritanian is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.

It would have been nice if Harris, who casts a sardonic yet compassionate eye on the Travis family, had set his sights a little higher than the typical chronicle of a dysfunctional suburban family.

It's a bit precious in its narcissistic point of view, but still a kick to watch the hopelessly devoted astronaut wannabe fulfill his wildest dream.

Directed by Harold Ramis and starring Michael Keaton at his most satisfying, "Multiplicity" is the latest film to benefit from the unprecedented visual miracles that special effects can now produce. It is also one more example of a picture where technical inventiveness outstrips the pedestrian story line it's meant to animate. [17 July 1996, p.F1]

Solidly done if somewhat unremarkable, there is nothing particularly wrong with "Broken," nothing that needs fixing exactly, and yet it never fully comes together.

No one really needs this mostly middling, fitfully funny and never unpleasant movie. And the movie itself seems cheerfully aware of that fact as it deftly lifts lines, beats, characters and songs from its 1992 predecessor, every so often punching up the comedy, wrinkling the plot and injecting a dash of politically corrective subtext.

Weirdly clueless.

Save a bit of narrative padding (karaoke, anyone?), this is a mostly swift and lively ride as the tables turn — and turn again — in some absurdly clever ways.

Lisa isn’t ineffective. It’s shaped in the usual sadistic way that leaves some audiences howling with blood-lust by the climax. But it’s basically a nasty movie that tries to end up nicey-nice: a house-cat of a sex-thriller that wants to claw the hell out of you and then curl up to warm milk and velvety hugs.

Piranha 3D is trying so hard for the laughs and the allusions amid all the gore, and endless bloodbath of bare naked ladies, that it completely forgets to frighten anyone.

Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.

It has the potential to be culturally bridging in its way, and that makes looking for Muslim comedy in the Western world worthwhile.

DeMonaco and Gout cook up such delicious comeuppance that you can’t help but indulge in the pleasure of revenge, even if the terrors and pleasures are incredibly fraught.

The more the movie pulls away from Peter’s perspective, the more it undercuts its own tension. And even with a physically impressive production at his disposal, Fuqua’s filmmaking instincts are clumsy and prone to cliché.

Spencer succeeds much more than the movie itself does; even when the writing and the filmmaking fail her, which is annoyingly often, she’s awfully good at using her beatific smile and tough-talking charm to elicit your nervous chuckles.