It’s a simple, wrenching story of love and loss that pries open a window onto eternity.

Italian director Roberto Andò’s film feels entirely manufactured, distancing itself from its audience and blunting its points in the process.

Tunick’s clearly budget-conscious choice to shoot largely inside the couple’s nicely appointed home compounds this routinely shot and edited film’s stagy, static quality.

Those accustomed to the sort of grandly executed, tightly paced escape/rescue sequences that tend to go with the territory will have to acclimate themselves to the film’s more subdued rhythms, but in time, the quietly unassuming, character-rich approach pays some affecting dividends.

Music documentaries are thick on the land, and political ones are numerous as well, but Mali Blues is different in that it artfully combines hypnotic music with definite societal concerns.

The cast is rounded out with likable comedians, but this fable can’t decide if it’s going to be deliciously bad or morally upstanding.

Watching the elephant work the room, so speak, interacting magisterially with all and sundry, is always a treat.

For a film about one of the fastest guns in the West, the dramatically lightweight Hickok is mighty slow on the draw.

Against considerable odds, Spider-Man: Homecoming finds its pace and rhythm by the end. Not only did figuring out how to become an effective Spider-Man require more of a learning curve than Parker anticipates, figuring out how to make a successful superhero movie mandated one for the filmmakers as well.

The movie is most interesting when addressing how important belonging in the world she covers is to Hartman as her recording it, and there’s obviously a hard-bitten, self-obsessed personality to explore, but it’s lost in the surface-skim technique.

Fukada’s take on family is genuinely bleak — what he sees is loneliness together instead of real companionship, and all the problems that arise from manufactured togetherness. But his storytelling instincts are solid, and his actors always bring humanity to their darkest impulses and saddest epiphanies.

First-time feature-director Jonathan Baker keeps the pace too slack and the tone too earnest — and sometimes fails to convey basic visual information about what’s happening.

An unfortunate melding of style and subject matter, too intent on turning the Little Tramp into an icon to be regarded with stately awe to do justice to the disturbing energy of his life.

While there’s no shortage of comedy talent on screen in The House, there’s a dire lack of actual laughs to be found in this strange shell of a movie.

A perfectly adequate action thriller that neither disappoints nor exhilarates. If it doesn't exactly crackle with energy, it lets off a good buzz now and again, and, depending on your mood, it may seem churlish to ask for more than that. [5 June 1992, p.F1]

Unfortunately, with its on-the-nose dialogue, abrupt turns and overuse of fades and dissolves, the film can feel more like a checklist of scenes than a fully plumbed and cohesive work.

A risible misfire of a contemporary war drama, the low-budget “Unfallen” stands as an epic fail on all fronts.

The Little Hours gets freaky, but it never feels truly subversive, or even that titillating.

Half visual essay, half verbal investigation, “Silence” is thoughtful and informative as well as contemplative and restorative.

Under the pretext of offering fun for the whole family, the movie winds up doing almost precisely the opposite; its attempts at grown-up sophistication and cheeky, knowing humor are clueless and hectoring enough to leave any adult in the audience wishing they’d been straight-up ignored.

This Oliver Hirschbiegel-directed German drama tells a fascinating but inevitably grim story, both more interesting and more downbeat than one might anticipate.

The Ornithologist” is both an opaque narrative and a deeply inviting one. Even as the film commences a series of radical formal and dramatic mutations, you are held rapt by the steadiness of the camera’s gaze and the sublime, sun-dappled beauty that it invariably discovers.

Persuasive rather than polemical, it's the unusual issue film that deals in counterintuitive reason rather than barely controlled hysteria.

Funny as it is for a great deal of its length, Hot Shots! does, however, have its share of dull spots, and watching it inevitably makes one yearn for the good old days of "Airplane!"

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.

Grimly unfunny comedy needs all the help that it can get. It's so bad it doesn't deserve the boost a Hanks nomination for Big may give it.

There's hardly a moment in Three Amigos that isn't silly--make that incredibly, outrageously and breathtakingly silly. Maybe that's why this tale of a trio of inept silent-movie stars turned real-life heroes is such a goofy delight. It's like a cross between a big-budget Three Stooges movie and a Hope-Crosby road picture, with dozens of old cowpoke gags thrown in to spice up the brew.

Weet tries to invest a common horror premise with some original mythology, but unlike films that risk disturbing audiences by tying ghosts to abuse, Darkness Rising treats Madison’s past more as a puzzle to be solved, which drains it of some primal power.