Last Flag Flying lacks the casual, lived-in realism you usually find in a Linklater film. You don’t buy the men as long-separated pals, and so you don’t really buy the premise — the connection that caused Doc to seek out these men is not visible on screen.

Love jones may be the first to show black 20somethings simply going about their lives - searching for love, falling in love and messing up love without their ethnicity being an issue. [14 Mar 1997, p.54]

Hawkins — small and mighty as usual — draws her energy from the quiet courage in Maud’s drive to create, to modify and adorn her bleak world with the images that express the contentment she knew as a child.

What Kruger does is remarkable — showing Katja paralyzed with grief, but doing so in a way that does not paralyze the story.

What is Cooper after here? He seems to want us to gasp at the naturalistic horror of it all, drawn from history and accompanied with the sober denunciation of actual frontier massacres (Blocker is a veteran of Wounded Knee), but the parade of grotesque violence (murders, rapes, suicides) suggests something more surreal, less literal.

Developments give Erskine a chance to play hurt and wounded, and she handles this as beautifully as she does the light comedy. She’s the plus in Plus One.

Years from now, chances are that when people sit around and talk enthusiastically about that movie with Brie Larson and Samuel L. Jackson, the subject is most likely to be Kong: Skull Island.

Clockwatchers is an updated 9 to 5, and as such, replaces that movie's straightfoward story of liberation from male oppression with something more Generation X-ish - liberation from a kind of self-imposed malaise. [12 Jun 1998, p.F7]

While I learned a lot about Westwood, it just didn’t feel like enough.

Fast Color is disciplined and restrained, yet feels a few tweaks away from being the rousing origin story it aspires to be.

The movie seems even longer – replacing Argento's splashy colors with dull, chilly greys, and lengthening the story (Argento clocked in at 96 minutes) with layers that feel over overwrought and overthought.

Although the sci-fi trappings of Downsizing make it seem like a big departure from Payne’s previous work — The Descendants, Sideways, About Schmidt — it is the same in important ways. It’s a movie about a man suddenly separated from people he’s loved, trying to learn how to live again.

It finds the right harmonized note of melancholy and humor in its closing moments.

It’s a quietly inspiring portrait of selflessness, although not always a stirring one. The movie has a muted tone that tamps down emotions, and the acting is intentionally low-key throughout.

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is competent, occasionally rousing entertainment that nonetheless left me a little bummed.

A Man of His Word...is not a lecture. It conveys the pope’s concerns, certainly, but it also conveys his charm — his gentle, personal manner, his sense of humor (he quotes from the St. Thomas More joke book), his “charisma.”

Atomic Blonde is what fans of the Clash used to call a poser.

Damsel is designed to be a deliberately out-of-joint comedy about a woman forced to endure an exasperating ordeal. After two hours, I could relate.

Bacon is menacing enough, but his character, as written, lacks the shading and substance that made the villains of past Hanson films so interesting. Without the complexities, The River Wild is a so-so waterborne melodrama that compares unfavorably to Deliverance and even Cape Fear. [30 Sep 1994, p.47]

Foy is quite good in this role.

The movie will play in IMAX theaters and 3-D, which is the best way of seeing it. Director Albert Hughes (yep, the same guy who along with brother Allen did Menace II Society and Dead Presidents) and cinematographer Martin Gschlacht (the recent creep-out Goodnight Mommy) capture and construct some compelling images.

Hotel Mumbai sometimes surrenders to melodrama and action-genre imperatives, and it mixes actual people like Oberoi with fictional composites in a way that strays from the stringent just-the-facts discipline of a docudrama like United 93. But there is value, too, in its subjective approach.

Solo eventually finds its feet, and the movie gets better as it goes, but we feel throughout the tension between conflicting visions of Howard and original directors Lord and Miller.

With a tighter script, Set It Off could have been a good film. Instead, it's just a mediocre one. [06 Nov 1996, p.49]

Based on a novel by Ian McEwan, The Children Act wanders into the tricky space created when what is moral and what is legal diverge, and law is made to suffice.

City Hall also gives us a political drama with engaging moral and ethical dimensions. The movie is a welcome change from the fluff of "The American President" and the self-indulgent freak show that was "Nixon." [16 Feb 1996, p.44]

Something to Talk About goes wrong when it allows its agenda to interfere with the integrity of its characters. Duvall, Roberts and Quaid strive to humanize their characters, only to be undone with narrative detours that strain credibility. Kyra Sedgwick has a more rewarding, better defined role as Grace's smart-aleck sister. The movie also falters when it turns away from relationships and toward a limp subplot about a show-jumping contest. It ain't exactly "Rocky," but it does introduce us to the movie's only sympathetic male character. A gelding. [4 Aug 1995, p.37]

The story circles cleverly back on itself, putting an original spin on the familiar tale of the burned-out investigator reckoning with the defining event in a checkered career.