The combination of a flexible, funny cast, an amusing situation and a style of movie-making that embraces every happy, nasty accident make this if not the funniest, then certainly the most uncomfortable comedy of the summer.

Watch on the Rhine, Lillian Hellman's stark and gripping play about Nazi indoctrination, was translated to film in 1943 with accuracy and depth. [26 Sep 1993, p.71]

In praising Heart and Souls, I hope I haven't oversold the film. Really, it's kind of thrown together, but it's thrown together in a fun, unpretentious way that makes it an often delightful distraction for a rainy August afternoon. And it'll probably look even better when it shows up on TV. [13 Aug 1993, p.17]

Bad Influence has a somewhat effective screenplay, provided by newcomer David Koepp. The dialogue is much sharper in Bad Influence than it was in The Bedroom Window - although the new film's plot could have used more work. [09 Mar 1990, p.5]

X-Men: First Class still sings the praises of Marvel Studios' marvelous quality control of comic book movies. It's good, clean summer movie fun where the money they spend is up on the screen - with actors and effects - so that we won't mind spending our money on it.

The situations are painstakingly set up and downright painful to sit through. So enjoy, or endure the appetizers, because with this Dinner, dessert is truly the topper.

Yelchin doesn't generate the same warmth or passion that Jones does. That is partly by design, as this whole affair was her idea, after all.

The musical comedy whimsically and often cleverly revisits the characters, their shtick and and the TV show and movies that made them most famous.

Incendies is occasionally compelling, but also overlong and vexing in the ways it draws out a "shocking" conclusion that we unravel long before the characters do.

The Descendants lets Payne show us the Other America and the Other Americans - little lives caught up in small but epic problems far away from the La La Land of Hollywood hype, sex and violence.

Zeroing in on Carr as the movie's "hero" was a smart move. He comes off as smart, confrontational and unconventional.

The better you remember 1963, the better your chances of liking Mermaids. It's not so much a movie as it is a time capsule. The fun is in seeing what gets pulled out next. [14 Dec 1990, p.8]

In a genre - the animated holiday film - already overflowing with the sentimental, the silly Arthur Christmas is a most welcome treat to find stuffed into the cinema's stockings this holiday season.

A low energy romance, a movie that rewards a filmgoer with the patience to let this affair play itself out. Sink or swim, Connie and Jack will come out of this changed. And so will we.

The first, and perhaps the best, of five Clark Gable-Jean Harlow vehicles. [08 Feb 1998, p.67]

Red Rock West is not, in any sense, groundbreaking. When you come right down to it, all Red Rock West really has going for it is its enormous entertainment value. But, hey, that's plenty. [14 Oct 1994, p.31]

In Mary, Leigh has found the polar opposite of Sally Hawkin's giggle-through-the-pain heroine of "Happy-Go-Lucky."

This compelling-acted film explains, better than any soundbite, why people have taken to the streets, "occupying" centers of finance. If their rage is unfocused, Margin Call suggests, that's with good reason. There are no real heroes or villains here, just human beings with human failings making BIG human mistakes.

Branagh and Williams are worth the price of admission, the former "wunderkind" of British stage and screen having a go at the pretentious, plummy Olivier.

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer isn't entirely successful, but it's admirable nonetheless. The film is an honest and disturbing attempt to come to grips with the sort of modern horror that we must - more urgently every day - try to understand.

The film doesn't go deeply enough into Hawking's theories to really explain them, and it doesn't go deeply enough into Hawking's life to impart anything but a sketchy understanding of the man. Still, considering the almost impenetrable subject matter, it's remarkable that Morris has gotten as far as he has.

Restless is far more precious than profound. But that takes little away from this soulful teenage exploration of love, life and death.

The leads are charmingly mismatched, but adorable enough to root for, as a couple. Forestier is a wildly uninhibited actress, sexy as all get out. She makes this girl dangerous, seemingly capable of anything.

A stirring account of the submarine Copperfin's daring mission to penetrate Tokyo Bay to help set up the raid. The film was convincing enough to be used as a Navy instructional film. [31 May 2001, p.F1]

A simple equation, perhaps, but when it comes to comedy, simpler is frequently funnier. This formula has already worked beautifully in France, where the movie has broken all box-office records and has won three Cesars (the French equivalent of the Oscar) including one for best picture.

The film is a slugger that keeps hitting you with one obvious image after another. Funny thing, though: Obviousness is sometimes effective. If Rocky IV doesn't kill you, it'll conquer you.

This is dizzy diverting fun, from it's first Carell one-liner to the 3D gimmick gags stuffed into the closing credits.

For the most part, you can't go wrong praising the exceptional ensemble cast, either. [28 Aug 1992, p.19]

In Sister Act 2, these energized musical numbers and the sparkling comedy work together in ways that are very hard to resist. And considering how terribly resistible (to me, at least) last year's Sister Act was, the sequel seems like a movie miracle. [10 Dec 1993]

It is a well-acted and vivid re-creation of a dark, downbeat era when "girls don't play electric guitar," and you had to be someone pretty tough and pretty special to try it.

Ever since Charles Durning played the governor of Texas in Best Little Whorehouse and danced around the rotunda in a tutu, I've thought he might be my kinda guy. Now he's proved it in Stand Alone, or "Death Wish for Grandpas," the best movie ever made about Medicare patients that decide to bayonet all the South American cocaine dealers in town.

Working from a script she wrote with producer Andy Ruben, director Katt Shea gets some sexy vibes going, and the atmospherically lit production has an unexpected visual distinction.

Bertolucci's latest effort probably won't create much commotion of any kind. But on balance, it isn't a bad little picture. [27 May 1994, p.22]

Under the sweet, gooey surface of Avalon there's a more impressive movie yearning to break free - a finely textured movie about how an immigrant man's love of the performing arts produced a grandson who became an important American filmmaker. [22 Oct 1990, p.C1]

An often moving and always disturbing film. Little is explained, motivations aren't explored. We miss them, at times. It's still a film of power, wit and thought-provoking ideas, one well worth seeing.

Director Lesli Linka Glatter (NYPD Blue, Twin Peaks) gets nice performances from her young cast, which includes some of the best little actresses working today. Their adult counterparts are fine too. [20 Oct 1995, p.22]

Best taken as the perfect film to transition your kids from animation to live action fare – short, sweet, and educational.

Wonderland is equal parts Lewis Carroll and Grace Slick. It’s inspired by Carroll’s "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass," but also, apparently, by Slick’s psychedelic ‘60s anthem, “White Rabbit.” It’s a trip, man.

A film taut with cold-war tensions and cloak-and-dagger secrecy. [23 May 2004, p.8]

It's not the smoothest thriller. But All Good Things is thoroughly engrossing, a roman a clef that chillingly ponders a puzzle and suggests solutions outlandish enough to be stranger than anything Hollywood, on its own, could make up.

Green Pastures, told with gentle humor, gives more meaning to biblical stories than most holier-than-thou entries. [23 Feb 2003, p.9]

If it's explosions, gunplay and wartime treachery that you're looking for, then director Brian Hutton's Where Eagles Dare is right up your alley. [12 Mar 1995, p.51]

The Big Country is a sprawling western that is handsomely photographed by Franz Planer and meticulously directed by William Wyler. [02 Oct 1994, p.51]

At its best, Fried Green Tomatoes is a pleasantly nostalgic tale wrapped around a murder mystery (which, frankly, isn't all that mysterious). The filmmakers do a decent job of weaving the texture of the thoroughly racist and sexist society within which Idgie, Ruth and the movie's major black characters (played by Cicely Tyson and Stan Shaw) must struggle to preserve their self-respect and, at critical times, their lives. At its worst, the film is unexciting and rambles too much.

After watching this hot-and-heavy costume drama, I had to wonder why there are not a lot more like it. Not that I necessarily wish there were, you understand. But this sort of picture has so much going for it from a "date-night" perspective that I'm surprised there are so few of them. [13 Mar 1998, p.20]

You'd better watch out. You'd better not swear. Have a gun handy, loaded for bear. Santa Claus is coming…to Finland.

White Hunter, Black Heart is no African Queen (or even, really, an especially good movie), but it does manage to stay afloat. [12 Oct 1990, p.6]

A quietly compelling if not particularly emotional and sober-minded treatment of an infamous incident.

An engaging Israeli film about the days when the people throwing rocks, assassinating soldiers and setting off bombs were Jews out to carve a state for themselves out of the British "mandate" in Palestine.

The filmmaker's dreamy style has a quiet strength: The bright, rich cinematography is a treat for the eyes and the hypnotic musical score is lulling. [10 Sept 1992, p.E1]

A deadpan, darkly funny Korean murder mystery.

Crisp, compact and cryptic, The American is a standard-issue hit-man thriller tailor made for George Clooney.

The entire production is vaguely unsettling. That, in fact, is one of the most engaging things about Babe: Pig in the City. The imaginative art direction, economical editing and sculptural cinematography combine to make this movie one of the year's most distinctive-looking productions.

In Eat Drink Man Woman, Lee's ingredients are wholesome enough and correctly prepared, and the finished product is attractively presented. There's also some inspiration here - enough, perhaps, for a fine meal but not quite enough for an entirely satisfying motion picture. [16 Sep 1994, p.20]

A daft pitch-black dark comedy about family dysfunction that plays out over painfully ugly family Christmas celebration.

Two very good looking people play two offbeat and abrasively charming lovers in Love & Other Drugs. And when your screen romance is as sexual as this one, it helps if your stars are about as good looking with their clothes off as human beings get.

The wildly improbable set-up is merely the jumping off point for an exploration of grief, guilt and redemption.

"The Debt," a very good 2007 Israeli thriller with Cold War and Holocaust connections, earns a nerve-wracking and entertaining Hollywood remake.

For an hour or so The Rookie really cooks, and Clint Eastwood is the main reason why. [07 Dec 1990, p.6]

One of the most entertaining history lessons you could ever hope to sit through.

If the Muppets sometime seem at sea in Muppet Treasure Island, the film still has more wit and irony than most kid-oriented productions. Fozzie, in fact, has more in that index finger of his than Barney has in his whole purple carcass. [16 Feb 1996, p.30]

Odds are you'll find something of substance, a few life lessons in between the laughs in 50/50.

Yet Kids does stay with you - which is more than can be said for a picture like Showgirls, most of which vanished from my consciousness 10 minutes after it ended. Nearly a month has elapsed since I've seen Kids and, tedious though much of it is, the experience lingers. [29 Sept 1995, p.19]

This mismatched "couple" - have made, over the course of three long subtitled Swedish thrillers, the most dynamic duo of recent cinema history.

Obviously, the premise is pretty implausible, but the moviemakers do a decent job of addressing (if not entirely satifying) our questions about the implausibilities. And the stars, especially Belushi, bring an amazing amount of conviction to this formulaic material. [17 Aug 1990, p.8]

Warrior is a straight genre picture, a fight movie of the old school. But it's a mixed martial arts tale, and as such, it's the best MMA movie ever.

What's especially encouraging about Just Another Girl is that in it Leslie Harris demonstrates a genuine knack for capturing on film the sounds and rhythms of adolescence. [10 Apr 1993, p.E1]

Not only is House Party breezy fun, but its dialogue often sounds as authentic to its black-teen setting as The Breakfast Club did to its white-teen one. And authentic or not, much of it is funny. [27 April 1990, p.4]

Like many other Disney-produced movies, this one requires you to give yourself up to the fantastic elements of the story in order to enjoy it fully. If you dwell on the improbabilities, you'll miss the good parts. [09 Oct 1992, p.22]

Senna himself gives it its heart. I just wish I'd gotten a better handle on who he was before the film's checkered flag falls.

A sequel that delivers more heart than laughs, and is, if anything, more visually dazzling than the 2008 original film.

Whatever the grownups say, Manyaka's Chanda is the one person in this village who understands how simple things really are, that it really does come down to Life, Above All.

Allen's sensibility is so engaging, his perspective so intelligent and his cast so resourceful that the sum of the movie's parts is greater than its whole. You might say that Alice is like Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters crossed with Gremlins - or like a lesser version of the filmmaker's wonderful comic fantasy of 1985, The Purple Rose of Cairo. [25 Jan 1991, p.4]

Animated musicals are only as good as their songs, and this one isn't on a par with "Beauty and the Beast" or even "The Princess and the Frog."

Director Walter Hill and screenwriter Ken Friedman invite you to anticipate everything that happens in their story. As each event takes place as expected, you experience the grim satisfaction of seeing fate fulfilled. [13 Apr 1990, p.10]

Bad politics sometimes makes for good movies, and the harsh, politically incorrect truth about Basic Instinct is that it's a tantalizing, suspensefully correct thriller.

The film may be a collection of little moments that don't add up, but on a moment-by-moment basis, it isn't hard to take. [22 Jun 1990, p.6]

Even lacking the laughs and romance, he (Emmerich) has delivered an entertaining eye-roller of alternative history.

If anything saves Untamed Heart from itself, it's Tomei's performance which, if nothing else, proves that her terrific turn in My Cousin Vinny was no fluke. She's a star on the rise, and even in a formula flick that is something to see. [12 Feb 1993, p.20]

Singles - a seriocomedy about the twentysomething singles scene in Seattle - doesn't do a whole lot to locate this lost generation on the socio-cultural map. But it's fairly enjoyable most of the time, anyway. [21 Sept 1992, p.D2]

Doc Hollywood is the rare film that actually improves as it develops. What begins as an all-too-standard fish-out-of-water comedy eventually grows into something more. [02 Aug 1991, p.4]

We get little sense of his interior life, what was going on in his head as school, girlfriends and music were competing for his attention and music was winning out. His drive is suggested, but never really felt in the performance.

The film is more overwhelming than uplifting.

Caine is magnificent. This is not some laughable Stallone-boxing-at-60 exercise in vanity. He's an old man playing an old man, but one who lived through experiences that both scarred him for life and prepared him for his final test.

Perhaps the best thing about this movie isn't any individual performance or scene but the mere fact of its existence. At a time when so many films strain to be either tragically hip on the one hand or distressingly saccharine on the other, a movie like Down in the Delta is a genuine rarity. [25 Dec 1998, p.19]

One reason that this movie works as well as it does is that everyone takes everything completely seriously. The world of the Addams family may be amusing to us, but to them it's just life. [22 Nov 1991, p.16]

Witty, warm, well-cast and often wickedly funny.

It's a gritty, almost ugly to look at film, and Cianfrance isn't shy about including a random blast of unwarranted shaky footage.

It’s a darned entertaining way to get a handle on a sport that can seem like a bunch of cars doing circles for a crowd that seems most interested in seeing that next epic wreck.

Its chilling third act suggests that sooner or later, even these riders on the Islamic short bus are going to get one right. And that won't be funny at all.

A dark and brawny version of the Robin Hood legend that anchors itself in English history and loses some of the merriment in the process.

The ending smacks of Hollywood rewriting of history. But The Devil's Double shows the political consequences of Uday's misdeeds, the delicate negotiations that keep the people with grievances in line. And Dominic Cooper delivers a career-making performance.

There is a sweet, simple tale at the center of this overstuffed epic. And sometimes, its romanticism manages to shine through all the picture-book pomp. [07 Jul 1995, p.17]

In Hero, Frears and Peoples send up the press and the public, but they stop short of debunking the notion of heroism itself. [02 Oct 1992, p.17]

True to the intent of the Christian apologist Lewis' novels, there are lessons to be learned, many of them delivered by the chivalrous mouse, Reepicheep, voiced with a plummy verve by Simon Pegg.

Sweet and sunny (Lots of English language pop tunes) and laugh-out-loud silly and well worth seeing before Hollywood remakes it with somebody like Matthew McConaughey in the title role.

It's a farce with sexual come-ons and actual sex - the Boy Scout Tim's first encounter with a hooker and a crack pipe - but Cedar Rapids never loses track of the humanity of its characters.