Brody plays Chess as a slightly crooked but well-meaning musical cheerleader without fully emerging as a character.

It's a vivid way to contextualize Hypatia's astronomical musings, but it's kind of out there, too.

A bit of a one-joke wonder.

The fundamental problem with The Night Listener is the manner in which the boy, Pete, is depicted. Rory Culkin gets the tricky job of bringing the role to life, and he does it well, but it's still a trick. Or is it?

It's an engaging enough story, crisply told, and the lip-synced music scenes in the studio and on stage are brought off in high style.

If you’re looking for great, realistic action, it’s just the thing. Berg is a masterful action director, and his Patriots Day is every bit as engaging and exciting as "Lone Survivor" and "Deepwater Horizon."

The result is Woody Allen lite, with some deft observations about how the social media designed to bring singles together are actually coming between them.

It's a shame about Ray, because Foxx is trapped in a movie that takes the music icon's unique story and turns it into cheesy, sentimental American Dream cliches.

BMH2 is a harmless, genial outing, a comedy that is amusing without ever rising to the level of funny. You sit through the film with a smile on your face, waiting for the laughs that never come.

Rather prosy until its final third. Then it grabs you with unexpected force.

If you can accept Dennis Quaid as a post-Arthurian knight and a dragon who looks like Sean Connery as well as talking like him, there is a certain loopy charm to their adventures. But the rest of Dragonheart, with evil kings and distressed damsels, is such a warmed-over borrowing from better fantasies that it undermines the film's modest strength. [31 May 1996, p.05]

Mixing elements from documentaries, biopics, war flicks, and Hallmark romances, Ross' film is a living history tour, but with gory special effects and a smoldering smattering of sex appeal.

What's touching about Rocky Balboa, the sixth chapter in the saga of Philadelphia's lord of the ring, is the small-scale stuff. Not the spectacle of the has-been, now 60, connecting with a punch. But the sight of an actor connecting with a character.

Penn's over-the-top tirades and bullying threats are still there - it's a wild and woolly performance that isn't always as menacing as perhaps the actor intended it to be.

A very sweet, very slight family movie that scores smiles and tears of joy.

Christopher Walken has the best moments in the whole thing, portraying the wacked-out auteur of the Gwen-and-Eddie vehicle. Sadly, he's only in America's Sweethearts a few hilarious minutes.

Mulholland Falls deserves more a tip of the hat than an enthusiastic greeting. [26 Apr 1996, p.03]

Diaz gets her own voice-over monologue, as does Patric - the different points of view functioning like stanza refrains, born in shared familial anguish.

All manner of subplots weave their way through the film, which teems with "colorful" characters and saccharine cliches. But, like the first film, it's next to impossible not to find diversion in the company of such stalwarts as Dench and Nighy and Smith. And George Thorogood is, happily, never heard from again.

Despite Sigismondi's fresh eye, feminist perspective, and rapport with actors, The Runaways feels like a long-form music video, recycling every trope from the doomed-rocker handbook.

This gang of highly skilled dancers (with the guidance of debut director Scott Speer) delivers a sequence of spectacular group numbers that truly pop in 3-D.

Plot contrivances, including an ominous cowboy-hatted figure who stalks Bitsey and her tagalong intern (Gabriel Mann), undermine the story's serious political themes.

Succeeds as a do-it-yourself handbook of guerrilla filmmaking

You might be occasionally dumbfounded by The Messenger, but you won't be bored.

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.

Fans of swooping helicopter shots, alleys filled with backlit geysers of steam, and jump-cut editing that makes MTV look like Ingmar Bergman will relish the intercontinental intrigue and huggermugger that is Spy Game.

Meta and messy, Seven Psychopaths does not hang together like "In Bruges."

This film that imagines the end of the world not as a whimper but as an implosion is a preposterously diverting, instantly forgettable, big-screen video game.