Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.

A sincere attempt at epic filmmaking, it has been unable to translate its aspirations into believable, non-cliched cinema. What unrolls instead is approximately three hours of violent, cartoonish posturing incongruously set in the realistically evoked milieu of East Los Angeles. [30 Apr 1993, p.F1]

The unsurprising, one-note nature of The Good Son, the fact that it’s a bump-in-the-night movie where all the bumps are visible a mile ahead, sorely constricts any possibility of excitement.

Fire in the Sky, a UFO movie, doesn't fly. It claims to be based on an actual case of alien abduction but the movie is as phony as a $3 bill. [13 Mar 1993, p.F4]

Low-key indie First Love has some interesting but fleeting moments in its story of twins in crisis, but it feels like a first draft whose script could have used more fleshing out, particularly in the characterization of its leads.

De Clercq’s clear directorial talent gives the film the illusion of respectability, but it can’t remove the sweaty sheen of smarm.

Downhill is a misfire, unable to show either of its stars to their best advantage. Neither the actors nor the film can decide how to balance humor with drama and that is the heart of the problem.

The freewheeling, DIY quality of Lost Holiday works both for and against this quasi-caper comedy.

Despite the noble ambitions of writer-director Sally Potter (“Orlando, “The Party”), The Roads Not Taken proves a morose and baffling drama; a painful, snail’s-paced 85 minutes with little payoff.

While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.

While Long gives it his trademark amiable best and Klabin and longtime collaborator Patrick Lawler cook up a heady cocktail of lively though budget-conscious visual effects, at the end of the day the Carl W. Lucas script feels more like a concept pitch than a fully-plotted proposition.

With its human relations a bit dicey, the movie lives or dies by the cuteness of its CG animals. Fortunately, it probably will never stop hitting the cute button inside us simply to see rabbits scurry-hopping with earnest little faces. The cinematic technology’s growth is remarkable.

William Friedkin's shocker is supposed to be primally terrifying, but primally silly is more like it. [27 Apr 1990, p.F4]

What might have worked in theater doesn’t translate here, particularly the repetition of words and phrases that feel true to the original medium but grate here on screen.

The filmmakers seem curiously at sea over the purpose of their assignment, possessing neither the patience to plunge headlong into the story’s familiar depths nor the radicalism to reinvent it entirely.

The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”

The one-sided film’s wheels come off when covering Thomas’ fraught 1991 Senate confirmation hearings.

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]

These references, and the relentless assault of ‘70s needle drops, are fun, to a point, but the movie itself is 87 minutes of pure chaos, a hallucinatory, cacophonous fever dream of nonsensical subplots and Minion gibberish.

It degenerates into one more cliche-ridden revenge movie. [19 Sep 1987, p.9]

A probing though ponderously episodic drama that ultimately feels as stitched together as Sawchuk’s frequently unmasked mug.

Ultimately, just as the events tread a fine line between fantasy and reality, so does the film teeter precipitously between promise and pretense.

To its credit, the script, by director Sara Zandieh and Stephanie Wu, works hard at inclusivity. Unfortunately, while a lesbian couple is fun, the gay men feel like a throwback and Alex’s bisexuality, which could have provided an intriguing and credible complication, goes nowhere.

Tedious and contrived.

In a pandemic, some might call the film a beacon of hope; others might prefer science to prayer for salvation. As a piece of cinema, though, Fatima is unlikely to be canonized.

After much time with this soggy, quarrelsome clan, your sympathies may lie entirely with the bear.

One suspects Inside the Rain is a labor of love. One wishes its makers would have let us in enough to love it as well.