Is it scary? Not especially. But there are enough gory surprises around every bend to keep you laughing/screaming/cringing.

You can be of two minds about the movie’s climax without shame. It’s galvanizing and, after all the accumulated tension, longed-for. And it’s too easy. And it’s rousingly well done. And it’s cheap. And that’s what makes the vigilante myth so vexing.

Shallow but satisfying, largely because of Meryl Streep and her big fake English teeth and gift for using mimicry as a means of achieving empathy.

The plotting isn't fresh, and the politics are a tad reactionary, but the movie is also shapely, rounded, satisfying - a classical ghost story.

The Salvation is visually beautiful, morally down and dirty, and simplistic. But it’s marked by two haunted, quiet performances from stars Mads Mikkelsen and Eva Green, who make this otherwise predictable slog worthwhile.

Ineffably sad - yet there's almost no loitering. The film is crisp, evenly paced, its colors bright, as sharp as the winter cold.

Practitioners of Cajun, Creole, and zydeco music strut their stuff. So do the players of a style new to me but instantly beloved: I'm speaking of swamp pop.

The quiet poignancy of the film’s previous vignettes are almost overshadowed by the goofiness of Weerasethakul’s final explanation. And though that doesn’t ruin the film, it doesn’t quite match Memoria’s other layers of curiosity and complexity, either.

What’s truly striking about the film is the storybook quality that Anderson has given every single scene.

This film is one of those exhilarating instances when Sorkin finds a context in which all of his well-established impulses that can be so annoying elsewhere — the self-righteousness, the straw men, the great men, the men who aren’t onstage but are nevertheless digging deep in their diaphragms to deliver their lines to the back row — actually work.

A pungent delight.

The captain narrates in a punchy, journalistic style that gives Elite Squad an air of sociological realism--it bears a resemblance to viscerally exciting seventies urban thrillers like "The French Connection."

It doesn’t quite work, but Lee’s fight choreography is so riveting it doesn’t matter.

It is a movie that's alive in its own way, and a welcome surprise in a genre sorely lacking in them of late.

The upshot is a shoot-‘em-up with a lean palette and relatively streamlined carnage, wet but not sloppy. It can almost pass for “classical.”

The film seems content to be the class clown of the Marvel Universe, which is all well and good. But like most class clowns, sometimes you wish it would apply itself — because it seems capable of being so much more.

Fire Island is, in other words, a reluctant romantic comedy that’s willing to acknowledge the genre’s shopworn pleasures while only begrudgingly indulging them itself. All of its best parts — and there are plenty — exist outside of that framing, which raises the question of why it’s there at all except as a means of wrestling with its author’s ambivalence about the conventional wisdom that a happy ending is the result of a pairing off.

The reason to see An American Affair is Gretchen Mol. She has a mild, natural way of holding herself that's likably unactressy--in every film, she seems both smart and grounded.

It's simply an astringent action flick that uses the wounded sensitivity of Ethan Hawke and Fishburne's witty hauteur to give the shoot-'em-up scenes some juice.

It's a fast and enjoyable B-movie, though, and Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine brings some good stormy drama to the proceedings.

All Penguins of Madagascar wants to do is make you laugh at its silliness. It succeeds.

It’s an odd fable: Viktor is the mysterious visitor who shows us what the American Dream is all about--in the movie’s terms, compassion for others--without ever wanting to become an American himself. He's a spiritual twin to E.T., who also had trouble phoning home.

Is the movie good? It’s hard to be objective. The plotting is clunky and nonsensical, but Abrams and crew bombarded me into happiness. More than that, they made me feel so special for getting the in-jokes.

Thank You for Your Service is a more critical film than most in this milieu, and it’s refreshingly honest about mental-health issues.

Rivette has aged into one of cinema’s most ingenious minimalists. In The Duchess of Langeais he uses intertitles--bits of literary exposition--with cheeky understatement.

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

If the bad guys in the real world were all this obvious, life would be a whole lot easier.

Perhaps only Pixar could give us such a rare beast: a delightful disappointment.