The screenplay is fiendish, clever and airtight: Like a magician, Coimbra uses sleight-of-hand, but he never cheats, and the film is even more engaging on second viewing, when you really know what’s going on before your eyes.

Nowhere Boy is great at depicting the birth of Lennon's love for his art.

Desert Hearts offers its central romance virtually free of moral clutter. Deitch tries neither to justify her characters' actions nor to place them in the context of the "forbidden"; she deals instead with intimacy, pieces of their lives. [18 Apr 1986, p.D5]

A wild buckle-up-and-blast-off adventure that plunges every corner of kids' favorite subject.

The latest Christmas-tree movie from director Wes Anderson, who makes pictures so carefully appointed and decorated, they sometimes feel like they're made to be looked at instead of watched.

Driver's over-the-top Jewish Canadian Princess performance is so stereotypical it's downright embarrassing in a film that otherwise treats its imperfect characters with respect even when they're at their worst.

Kids will eat it up, while solid voice work from William Shatner and Wanda Sykes should keep this borderline-feral toon from pushing adults over the edge.

For the story of a man who made his mark on pop culture by being a likable buffoon, the irritatingly arch Confessions of a Dangerous Mind takes itself way too seriously.

Being allowed to film in Russia was a blessing and a curse -- Schepisi weighs down the film with endless pans and traveling shots of neoclassical and Russian baroque architecture. All those buildings, monuments and squares. [21 Dec 1990, p.G5]

If Soderbergh set out to make a galvanizing conversation piece, he has certainly succeeded. But this cold, occasionally dull movie practically defies you to embrace it.

Fierce, profane and hilarious comedy.

As a piece of storytelling, Fight Club is a bit of a dud: It's a good 15 minutes too long, and the tension doesn't build the way you wish it would.

It doesn't ask much of anything except that you come along for the ride. Riding with Byrne is pretty much a hoot. [09 Nov 1986, p.K1]

Reveals little about the personal aspects of the deeply troubled man behind the sunglasses -- it naturally deals with none of the darker aspects of Jackson's life -- but it deftly underlines his commitment to showmanship.

This is an intentionally fanciful, gossamer movie, extremely personal and heartfelt, influenced in equal parts by Michelangelo Antonioni (although never so elusive) and Gus Van Sant (just not quite so self-conscious).

A very complicated movie. It is also pretty wonderful.

Blanchett manages to project the idea that there’s more to this woman than mere banal evil. Cinderella may well be the heroine of this story, but if you wanted someone to have a few drinks with, you’d pick her stepmother in a heartbeat.

Alice is certainly handsome to look at, and as usual Allen's camera is placed impeccably -- if he's overrated as a screenwriter, Woody Allen has yet to receive his due as a director. Still, what's wrong with Alice is in the script, and Allen wrote that, too. [25 Jan 1991, p.G5]

Condon and screenwriter Jeffrey Hatcher reward your patience by bringing the threads together in a beautiful, stirring manner that celebrates the genius of the literary icon while also honoring the man McKellen is playing.

The best stuff comes early in Ruby Sparks, which was written by Kazan (granddaughter of Elia) and directed by the husband and wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine).

The Witches of Eastwick is a diverting, impeccably polished and excellently cast movie. But its charms fade fast, about as fast as it takes to leave the theater. [12 June 1987, p.D1]

Director Kim Jee-woon's astonishing story of a serial killer who picks the wrong man's fiancée to murder, is so extreme and intense that it had to be trimmed down in its native country before it was released to theaters. We lucky westerners get to see it in all its hair-raising, stomach-churning glory, and that's a wonderful thing.

One of the scariest films I've seen in ages, although I cannot in all honesty explain exactly what the movie is about.

Tupac Amaru Shakur is riveting in Tupac: Resurrection. The rapper is a compelling, charismatic hero: articulate, well-read, politically radical, and movie-star handsome to boot (he in fact starred in Poetic Justice and Juice). Make that, was riveting.

The Journey of Natty Gann is one of those dead earnest, richly satisfying "family adventures" with which the Disney name has long been associated, despite the fact that the studio has made very few successful ones. It's the kind of film we think Disney is supposed to make, regardless of whether the studio actually does. [25 Oct 1985, p.C1]

A straightforward, earnest, sentimental picture: It's all the things you'd think a Sept. 11 movie directed by Oliver Stone would never be.

It's a fine ensemble, and one mark of how well it works is that The Breakfast Club leaves the confines of the library only three times, and yet we never feel claustrophobic. We just feel trapped, like the kids. For much of the film, one or the other is speaking of parents as the alien life form they represent -- "When you grow up, your heart dies" is the bitter slogan -- and that feeling of being trapped by youth and yet terrified to leave it informs the movie even at its most raucous. For getting that one element, Hughes deserves a great deal of credit; for getting it into a "grown-up" movie, Hughes deserves more work. [19 Feb 1985, p.C4]

Innerspace suffers from a problem afflicting many of this summer's movies: excess. First, it's too long. Then director Joe Dante (Gremlins) piles on the gadgetry and the inside-the-body special effects, and the movie buckles. [1 July 1987, p.D1]