Barrymore and Collette bring life and charm to a screenplay that needs all the life and charm it can get.

Harvey's a gifted physical mimic who demonstrates the comic waddle of the church usher with fallen arches, as well as the poor parishioner etiquette of grabbing too many communion wafers.

A story of companionship, loneliness, resilience. It's a small, artfully crafted thing, but it resonates in big ways.

An inspiring, educational, highly enjoyable documentary.

Definitely, Maybe gets too coy in spots, and Brooks is a sharper writer at this point in his career than he is a director. But for a film with a half-dozen fully-formed characters that spans 15 years and works in a swell detail about a 1943 edition of "Jane Eyre" - well, it definitely works. No maybes about it.

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

There's probably not much of an audience for Elmo in Grouchland beyond the toddler crowd.

Both the leads are scarily good, and Ozon imbues his troubling tale with jarring blasts of light and the sun-dappled beauty of the natural world.

It's the lysergic soap opera going on among Kesey, Neal Cassady, and various pals, scribes, spouses, and hangers-on piled onto the rainbow-hued school bus that's at the heart of this rollicking road pic.

What If boasts a couple of near-classic comic moments, one involving jalapeno peppers and a precipitous fall.

A loud, abrasive comedy that squanders the talents of its three stars, The Ref is the sort of project that stands or falls on its writing - it needs to be deep and deliciously dark. But as scripted by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss (he penned The Fisher King, this is her first produced screenplay) and directed by Ted Demme (Jonathan's nephew, making his feature film debut), all we get is superficial rage. [11 Mar 1994, p.03]

Nicely run through its paces by John Gatins, who also wrote the screenplay (it's his directing debut), Dreamer is, not surprisingly, about daring to dream the big dreams. It's about family, and faith, and facing hard times together.

The two generate more heart than they do heat, but that's the point. You want to see them together not just because they're adorable, but because you believe that their characters can take each other to a place neither could get to on their own.

A horror pic with a new gimmick that likely will spawn an entire subgenre of more substandard rubbish.

In short, This Is 40, in tried and true Apatowian style, mixes weighty issues about intimacy and cohabitation with astute and smart-alecky pop culture references, crude bathroom jokes, stoner riffs, boob ogling, and existential angst.

This bracing adaptation of the Nurse Matilda books by Christianna Brand is the acidic antidote to Mary Poppins sweetness.

Fiennes does this sort of inner pain thing exceedingly well, Tyler is beguiling and believable, and there is an edge of wit and grace to the proceedings.

A slick comedy that's more fun than it has any right to be.

Take "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids," throw some "Antz" on it, and you have The Ant Bully.

If all this sounds like too much whimsy to bear, be forwarned. There is whimsy everywhere.

It's as exhilarating and moving a film opening as you're likely to experience. Sadly, the rest of Follow Me doesn't live up to this overture.

Although a voice-over prologue rumbles ominously in English, most of Night Watch is in the mother tongue, but even the subtitles do weird things - flying around in different sizes and fonts, punctuating the action.

It's larky, snarky fun.

There's a playlike quality to Complete Unknown (Marston's cowriter, Julian Sheppard, has extensive credits in the theater). That's not a bad thing: The talk is smart. The actors doing the talking are easy to like.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

If the words "Gentlemen, start your engines" set your heart pounding, this is the Imax experience for you.

The film's conceit - mopey strangers meet, form a band, and take to the dance halls - has a Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let's-put-on-a-show innocence, and exuberance.

A massive compendium of youth-movie/pedal-to-the-metal cliches. But man, is it fast!

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

Filled with breathtaking shots of crazed nutballs on skis plummeting down pitched peaks at high speed, Steep is a visually exhilarating sports documentary that is also more than a little exasperating.

Like most great comedies, Hitch confects a sweetly appealing fantasy.

Startlingly original film.

Charming, emotionally resonant, yet nowhere as fresh and dramatic as its predecessor.

August: Osage County is the movie equivalent of Denny's Lumberjack Slam breakfast. If eggs, bacon, and toast aren't enough, throw in some ham, some sausage, pancakes, and hash browns. And then throw in more ham.

While I didn't love it, I enjoyed The Last Stand because it made me imagine the mutant powers I want to develop. I'm thinking along the lines of merging Rogue's suction abilities with Storm's controlled-rain skills.

They're all dressed up to kill, with no place to go.

As remakes go, Footloose is fine, serving up slightly fresher batches of cheese and corn. But why? Why?

The tradecraft is there, the film craft is there, but the craftiness of a great concept is gone. Any way Bourne can go through Treadstone again?

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Robert Altman's Kansas City is a hollow period piece, a costume melodrama that's all jazzed up without a story to tell. [16 Aug 1996, p.4]

Year of the Horse is an appropriately edgy, ragged salute to a rock-and-roll band that refuses - happily - to say die. [31 Oct 1997, p.04]

This peripatetic farce practically propels itself.

Wolf Totem has some of the most exciting, mind-blowing scenes of nature I've ever seen.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

With this film Daldry, previously the director of "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours," proves himself the screen's reigning master at showing passion thwarted or repressed.

A beautifully twisted, slow-burning psychothriller that may or may not all be taking place inside India's head.

May strain credulity, but it still leaves a memorable mark.

The good news is that this daddy/daughter reconciliation story connects with the ball. The not-so-good: It's a blooper.

Icky, incoherent thriller.

Here, Jews are not victims of genocide, but victors in the organized resistance against it.

Nerve gives moviegoers everything they'd want from a teen romance. It's a little less successful as a critique of life in the age of Instagram.

The Keeping Room looks at the brutality of humanity.

Rogen and Efron's characters find a novel new use for automobile airbags, too. These guys are geniuses.

Sweet. The pun is unavoidable. It's the only adjective that fully captures the flavor of the romantic comedy Brown Sugar.

Mediogre at best.

Let's face it: Kids aren't a very demanding audience. If there's color, movement, and a high quotient of silliness, they're happy.

It's a sweet, funny comedy starring two of the best and brightest in the game.

Freeman and Hoskins lend the film a level of artistry it doesn't really deserve. Unleashed has a vivid concept, but savagery and sentimentality make strange costars.

Biutiful is strong stuff, it will leave you shaken. There's poetry here, and catastrophe.

Mixes its high and low comedy with surprising success.

Never less than engaging.

In short, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a charmer.

Where My Wife was offbeat and original, Happily Ever After gets bogged down in midlife-crisis cliches.

Comedy, pathos, and some schmaltzy couplets about the changing seasons follow forthwith.

The shaggy, whimsical characters have a primal familiarity, as though they were developed by a tag team of Maurice Sendak and Walt Disney.

This hotly anticipated film delivers on the premise of its celebrated title. But it offers little more in terms of suspense, originality or enjoyment. Mostly, it lays there on the screen like a big lazy boa.

Nicely filmed and acted.

I would like to be able to report that Nelson's directorial vision is grim and uncompromising. Grim it most surely is. But his movie about morally compromised figures leaves viewers feeling compromised, unable to find their way out of the fog and the ashes.

I don't think that a woman behind the camera necessarily affects the tenor of what is on screen, but never before have I seen a men-of-war film more notable for its psychology than its spectacle.

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.

While it hits some of the usual sci-fi tropes, Creative Control's center of gravity isn't tech itself, but the relationships of those who use it.

The Express eventually reaches its triumph-of-the-human-spirit climax, but it yanks too hard on the heart strings during the long journey there.

The Twilight star's line-readings have become like Edward and his bloodsucking kin: They lack a pulse.

A well-shot, gore-free psychological thriller about our elemental fear of darkness, Lights Out has a good deal in common with "The Babadook." While it can't touch Jennifer Kent's masterpiece, it does mark the arrival of a major new talent.

The film veers between cutting parody and cliche, threatening to become interesting at any moment, but never quite doing so.

Eloquently adapted from the collection of A.M. Homes stories of the same title, Troche's film derives its voltage from the way it burrows to find that the connections within -- and among -- families are very much alive.

There are three action sequences here so delightful, so hilariously deploying an old tool for a new use, that they prompt smiles long after I saw the film.

Populaire plays like a musical - you expect anyone, at any time, to break into song.

Burton's film is an American version of the Odyssey.

Chilling - and very chatty. Snowden is a seriously talky film. Yet it never feels tedious, thanks to Stone's tremendous sense of story construction, the film's razor-sharp editing - and Gordon-Levitt's masterful performance.

A story of entrepreneurship, of family, of fighting for one's rights - the right to make white lightning, and money. It's as American as apple pie.

Like many graduate students, Love and Other Catastrophes is smart, droll and doesn't always know when to stop talking. [11 Apr 1997, p.03]

A heartbreaking film that speaks to the lifelong aftershocks of war, and to the powerful bonds of family and of love.

All the elements of Eggers' story are there; the emotional and psychological resonance is not.

The borrowings from other movies, going all the way back to the car chase in 1968's Bullitt, are heavy. But Bay has three leads to lend weight and dimension to characters who are hardly original and flatly written.

There is one scene in The Legend of 1900 that is easily worth the price of admission. It finds the ship heeling in an Atlantic storm. In the ballroom Roth plays the piano as it moves and slides in an eerie waltz around the floor.

Flavorful and fun. "Muy sabroso y divertido," as Martin might say.

Its portrait of an artist hungry for experience is as timely today as when it was written.

Licence to Kill continues the salvage operation begun in The Living Daylights and rescues a series that was in danger of shooting itself in the foot.

A haunting neo-noir about a man told by a palmist that his karma is about to run over his dogma.

This is not about a reluctant hero drawing courage from some deep personal well. It's not about dread and danger. It's about visual effects.

Shrek the Third isn't a movie, it's the extension of a brand.

Despite the potential for some supernatural grandiosity, the tone here remains understated and quiet, and Gainsbourg's performance feels lived-in, and deep, and right.

All the running, the hiding, the escaping (from giant moles, from giant Murray) are decidedly less exciting, and compelling, than City of Ember wants to be.

A muscular, no-nonsense genre pic (well, two genres: prisons and boxing), Undisputed isn't going to score points for originality, and the climactic bout is a bit of a letdown. But Rhames, as the cocksure millionaire pugilist, seethes brute force.

Kiss of the Dragon is a straight-ahead star vehicle for the trim and terse Li, whose steady gaze and fist-flying ways are tempered by a gentlemanly mien.

Exceptionally funny, unexpectedly tender, and lewder than a teenage boy's dreams.

As soon as it's over, and you find yourself back in the harsh light of the workaday world, you'll be hard-pressed to remember what happened. Except that you'll remember enjoying yourself - immensely.