It offers a Life-magazine view of the home front, with adultery added--but the adultery is so unimpassioned that it might have come from Life, too. [30 Apr 1984, p.87]

It skips the florid romanticism, the thick atmosphere, the grand mythmaking, opting instead for a breezy, silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent in its own right.

Saturday Night might not be factually accurate, but it feels spiritually true.

Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.

Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought.

Bad Hair surprised me, ranking as the most stunning floundering of filmmaking in 2020 — a failure of empathy, intellect, and morality that I haven’t been able to shake.

An altogether warm, sharp, and unobjectionable family holiday film.

I’ll see anything Zahler does because I was weaned on the same junk he was and find his mix of amateurism and genre smarts appealing. That’s not a sign of my integrity — a man’s gotta watch what a man’s gotta watch — but of my fundamental laziness and corruption. I hate that I can settle for Dragged Across Concrete.

Walking Tall grabs you where trash and violence invariably do, with excellent performers, shrewd plotting and pacing. [18 Feb 1974, p.74]

The Lost City isn’t terrible, just aggressively mediocre. It is the kind of movie you put on in the background after coming across it on TBS while you fold laundry on a Sunday afternoon. If anything, The Lost City makes evident not a lack of stars, but a persistent inability on the part of contemporary Hollywood to know what to do with them.

Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.

The new James Bond movie Spectre makes a satisfying final chapter to the four-film saga of Daniel Craig’s 007, even if that saga turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

It's a pure (guilty) pleasure trip. That's pleasure, De Palma–style -- twisted, dirty, voyeuristic, a vast glissando of amorality.

The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is trying for a blend of horror and humor, something close to the heart and terror that Raimi was able to bring to bear throughout his career. But here, his craft has been hemmed in, gamified, leeched of color and vivacity.

For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.

Although the film's why-can't-we-all-get-along story line and even some of its quirk-laden pit stops feel familiar, the very texture of what we're seeing seems to change from one moment to the next, resulting in an occasionally breathtaking uncertainty.

A hushed and powerful piece.

Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger made me so angry over the apparent injustice done to its journalist hero, Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), that I found it hard to remain in my seat.

It is an unabashed platform for basking in the rapport of its two leading men, who are in familiar and fine form as a pair of hypercompetent cleaners, and that makes it a consistently enjoyable watch even when the pacing gets a little slack.

Sensationally effective.

Trumbo is a film that at times can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. At its worst, it’s musty and awkward; at its best, it’s irreverent and funny. Unfortunately, it settles for the former more than the latter.

Parker "opens up" a play that was perfectly wonderful closed down. Wilde subtitled his masterpiece "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." This movie seems intent on being a trivial comedy for trivial people.

Since this is a coming-of-age movie about a poor rural kid who grapples with the big city, it would be nice if its protagonist weren’t such a lummox.

In its subtext, this movie tells us that nothing is as good as you might hope. That’s true of the era that Tony would later, wrongly, glorify. And it’s true of a movie that is fascinating to study and consider, but not nearly as good as the television series that made us wish for this movie to exist.

The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.

The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.

It’s neither a rigorous history lesson nor a particularly interesting work of drama and character, and it ends up doing the exact same things — pitting women against each other, fixating on fertility and virginity — it claims to find so oppressive for its heroine.

With Allied, Robert Zemeckis has fashioned a good old-fashioned World War II romantic espionage movie, but that wouldn’t matter a damn if the leads weren’t beautiful and didn’t look great in period clothes. They are and they do.

Dredd 3-D places you firmly in an unreal, dreamlike world and rouses you with its unexpected grace and its rhythms and its movement. The plot ceases to matter after a certain point: This is a great big beautiful music video, and there's nothing really wrong with that.

The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.

This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

While the movie feels empty and pointless overall, it’s not without its scattered interesting elements.

Despite the heavy context and historical precedent, there’s not a whole lot on Overlord’s mind, and a gestured-at “defeating the monsters makes us monstrous” philosophical thread ends symmetrically but pointlessly.

Some might want to leave the theater and file a lawsuit. I stayed and laughed. It’s funny because it’s abominable.

Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.

Once everything finally collides in The Whale, something shattering and beautiful and honest emerges.

For all of R’s allegedly humorous observations about the wasteland of the undead through which he walks, they feel tacked on — like somebody decided to turn this thing into a comedy at the last second.

Crawl is a great example of a simple story exceedingly well-told. It’s a bloody adventure full of teeth-gnawing turns of fortune, mordant wit, vicious gator kills, and surprising tenderness — that clocks in at a blessedly fleet 87 minutes. It’s a perfect horror film for the summer, as much an ode to the cataclysmic, humbling aspects of Mother Nature as it is a love letter to father-daughter relationships.

I walked away from this picture both moved and confused. Because it’s got Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz in top form, The Mercy nails the emotion, but comes up somewhat short as a narrative.

From the script to the music to the unfinished-feeling sound edit — nothing about Sierra Burgess feels like it got past a first draft.

It comes by its emotions honestly and wins you over.

Stillwater is the new movie from director Tom McCarthy, and it feels like one he’s spent his career preparing for — an enthralling, exasperating, and, above all else, ambitious affair that doesn’t soften or demand sympathy for its difficult main character but does insist on according him his full humanity.

It’s a pleasant movie -- very pleasant, in fact -- but soft as a down quilt.

It is one of the more sadistic family films I have ever seen, a picture of the residents of a neglected childhood reckoning with the abandonment of their beloved, now grown-up human leader.

Sadly, all that glittered in the franchise’s first outing is gone in Wonder Woman 1984. The disappointing sequel highlights not only the dire state of the live-action superhero genre in film, but the dire state of Hollywood filmmaking as a whole.

This is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie, and frankly a lot of it is silly and sophomoric. But it’s also juicy and fun.

The American Meme can be fun, even informative, but there’s a bigger story here, and Marcus mostly fails to tell it.

The Heat is kind of a mess, but it’s a funny mess.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.

When superb craftsmanship, discipline, and risk-taking (toning down Diaz and MacLaine; treating Collette as a desirous leading lady) are applied to accessible, even frivolous material, the results can be deeply pleasurable. In Her Shoes isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s the best Saturday-night movie millions of people are going to go to.

It’s so smart, so winsome, so utterly rejuvenating that you’ll have to wait until your eyes have dried and your buzz has worn off before you can begin to argue with it. And you should argue with it — even if you had a blast, as I did, and want to see it again with the kids, as I do — because it’s a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty.

Not every sight gag works, and there's a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we're out to sea the movie goes swimmingly--its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is indeed a cautionary tale, but it’s a complex, beautiful one, suggesting that love, longing, and loss are all parts of a vast, wondrous life.

The cluttered story and the shifts in form might lose you from time to time, but the film conjures some genuinely powerful emotions.

Sea Fever teases out elemental anxieties that have been given fresh life by unfortunate reality, but the movie is worth seeing because, when all’s said and done, it gives us characters and circumstances we can care about.

The movie version of Goosebumps replicates that balancing act. It’s a cheerful, nasty delight.

Watching Big Nick get a little lost in a boozy dream of abandon, an ocean away from his troubles, we understand him better than we understand most of today’s movie heroes.

Beatty is trying to elevate the material while at the same time draining it of energy. The movie is so misbegotten that it’s almost poignant. But I hope Beatty has a few more left in him.

Barrymore pulls off the neatest trick of the year: She makes all this pop schlock matter.

Spartan is a character study embedded in an action-hero scenario. Neither aspect ever really breaks loose.

It's still possible to have a good time at this movie, and the primary reason is De Niro.

Taking pretty much every rom-com trope and distilling it into highly concentrated ridiculousness, Wain’s film is both a takedown and a tribute: As with his summer-camp-movie spoof "Wet Hot American Summer," you walk away with a renewed love for the genre.

Isn’t It Romantic has plenty of fun toying with various familiar elements and sensibilities, but its deconstructions also feel like resurrections.

Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.

It's an opulent, if instantly disposable, kinetic joyride.

The problem might actually be (gasp) Michael Shannon himself — shocking, because he’s one of our greatest actors — who is only half-right for this film’s portrait of Kuklinski.

Like any conspiracy theorist, you sense that landing on an actually airtight unified theory would almost spoil the fun for Mitchell.

At its best, Hobbs & Shaw offers a refreshing antidote to the bloat. I’d rather watch another one of these than sit through one more Vin Diesel speech about family.

Outside of its open and shameless heartstring tugging, Gifted at least sets up a compelling, multisided moral dilemma.

Crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s "The Steel Helmet," Brian DePalma’s "Casualties of War," or Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan."

What we're getting in this movie isn't necessarily better; it's just more.

Gaga is wildly watchable in the role, broad but unwinking, an absolute scream, and the movie only really makes sense when it’s about her.

There are moments when the movie pops and the filmmaker seems in sync with his cast, his cast seems in sync with one another, and the intended sparks fly. But they’re fleeting.

Here We Go Again ties up these two wackadoo films’ hijinks in a very sincere bow. After all, Mamma Mia is a mom movie, in every way imaginable.

If Life of Crime transcends its lightheartedness to actually make us care for what happens to its characters, it doesn’t quite transcend its own haphazard, impoverished story.

Hateship Loveship is in no way a comedy, but Wiig's enormous presence threatens to make it so. She can't disappear into the void, so the drama onscreen becomes hard to take seriously.

Rust Creek lets you exhale just a bit. It’s tight without being punishing, and its humor takes you happily by surprise. In this sort of film, you’re on guard for pop-up scares and sudden spasms of gore, not for moments of blessed connection. The humanism feels positively radical.

I never really bought the onscreen relationship in We Live in Time, in part because I could constantly feel the movie trying too hard. The love story is syrupy, and the tragedy even more syrupy.

This is no antique show: Faced with an audience, they are still amazingly vital and sometimes amazingly lewd.

By its close, Voyeur spouts some lines about how we all like to watch, and we are left with three documents of the Voyeur’s Motel and no closer to knowing why we should care.

Pacino in low doses can be fulsome, and this is 10,000 cc’s of super-concentrated Al and his patented air of electrified stuporousness — which means it’s always on the border between thrilling and insufferable.

There’s something strangely uninvolving about White Boy Rick, despite all its claims to be a sensational true story.

The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff.

Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done. If the narrative is finally unsatisfying, it’s because the last vital chapter — the way in which Zamperini was able to have a life after years of unspeakable cruelty and the dashing of his Olympic hopes — is signaled in a couple of title cards before the closing credits. Unbroken proves that Zamperini could take it and make it — but make what of it?

It’s convincing because it’s not terribly sensationalized, and the film’s conclusion is similarly smart, completely pulling the rug out from under our expectations of justice and revenge.

Cunningham's depth of feeling transformed the book's premise into something beyond sniggers or camp, and the best moments in the movie, which was directed by theater veteran Michael Mayer in his film debut and adapted by Cunningham, have a similar emotional charge.

The Best Man Holiday is an inelegant movie, but its cast is so damn likable that we’re still willing to follow them — even when they’re not going anywhere.

Outlaw King has a wild card — a really wild card — in Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Lord of Douglas, whose family the English humiliated. He’s so wild that as soon as he reconquers his castle, he burns it to the ground for spite. In battle, he screams in exaltation, and just when you wonder how he’ll top that, he screams again, even louder, now drenched — sopped — in gore. That you won’t get to see that in IMAX is a war crime.

It’s the work of a filmmaker who has been honing her own jarring, idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and character for years. As a debut feature, it feels auspicious; as a snapshot of a masculine emergency, it feels timeless.

The movie improves on Koppelman’s ungainly novel but is generally dreary and light on insight. Director Adam Salky steers clear of the usual addiction-movie clichés, but he doesn’t have anything to replace them with, so it’s as if all the connective tissue is gone.

Rarely have I seen a horror-comedy as joyless as Little Monsters. Which feels like a weird (and sad) thing to say, because rarely have I seen a horror-comedy that is also so insistent in its humor, so determined to try and entertain me, as Little Monsters. It’s fast, loud, and impossibly shrill — except when it quiets down, which is when it briefly, belatedly comes to life.

A shameless but exuberantly well-done caper comedy.

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies feels thoroughly inconsequential — a bloated, portentous mess that, in a just world, should not exist.

It’s a half-assed premise, given a half-assed treatment that makes Wayne’s World look like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The performances are loose and self-aware, the filmmaking strictly at the level of sketch comedy, the jokes amiably predictable, and the story a mess.

It has its creaky corners, but there are enough twists and shocks to keep it engaging throughout.

While it was often all over the place, it worked, because directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller ladled out the chaos with such charm.

The problem with Godzilla vs. Kong is that the filmmakers seem to think they’re delivering characters and human drama when all they’re doing is irritating the shit out of us.