Strip away the video-game visual effects, the endless chases and zero gravity shootouts, and Total Recall comes down to this: What is reality?

With its female heroines and its uncertain, constantly shifting view of reality, The Girl on the Train is a bit like a cubist, feminist episode of "Law & Order." But not much more.

Tai Chi Zero, the first film in a planned trilogy, will leave hard-core fight enthusiasts wanting. But it's a droll, pleasant diversion all the same.

Students of sound design and horror-movie scores should see - or hear - Closer to God, which elicits more creepy scares than its transparent plot warrants, thanks to an unsettling audio mix and pulsing, percolating music from Thomas Nöla.

A whodunit, a whydunit, and an excuse for Adrien Brody to mug it up like nobody's business.

At times solid and suspenseful, at times dopily implausible and woefully familiar.

Forte and company have managed to make crude and lewd dunderheadedness laugh-out-loud funny here and there, and that, I guess, is something of an achievement.

It's larky, snarky fun.

Despite problems of tone and tempo, Steins is appealingly cast.

It touches on serious - and ridiculously complex - ideas but always cuts them down to manageable, middle-brow morsels.

McConaughey tucks into the role like a hungry man gobbling a ham sandwich.

Luckily, Statham is up to the task. Which is a surprise, because he's never, ever done anything like this before.

So powerful and tender are the scenes between Falk and Dukakis that by movie's end, I was wishing that the film had been more about the marriage of Sam and Muriel and less about the father and son.

Sure, there's a witty reference to another, vastly more momentous legal drama (To Kill a Mockingbird, Robert Duvall's film debut). And yes, Farmiga gets to call out Downey, and stay in character, for "that hyper-verbal vocabulary vomit thing that you do." Small pleasures, in a bigger mess.

A frequently amusing exercise in camp horror that misses being wholly satisfying because it has too many people to kill. [21 Apr 1973, p.8]

An inconsistent and endearing sports inspirational that aims to be "Chariots of Fire" for golf.

Picks up speed as it goes along and the finale is frenzied and, well, cartoonish.

Saraband, flat and static both visually and thematically, doesn't begin to approximate the austere beauty of the director's art-house classics.

The first family of black comedy goes at this bawdy burlesque with a broad brush. They get their laughs, but not without a lot of unsightly spillage.

Shameless in every way imaginable, Me Before You milks the pathos for all it's worth, but milks the comedy, too.

Lightweight, likable buppie romantic comedy.

Trade comes off like TV-movie sensationalism, sidetracked by distracting backstories and hard-to-swallow plot twists.

Black Nativity offers a whopping serving of Yuletide emotion. And it's a musical - with plenty of wailing and rapping on the side.

A far sight nimbler than its plodding predecessor, where the Holy Grail turns out to be a Holy Girl. The sequel is a little like CSI: Vatican City.

Elle Macpherson? Not much of an actress, but nobody who goes to see Sirens is likely to notice her thespian endowments. [3 March 1994, p.05]

An enjoyably cheesy teen melodrama with a touch of indie edge.

Chan's signature mix of screwball comedy and gymnastic derring-do landed him his own cartoon series a few years back, and The Medallion -- with its bumbling spies and bounding star -- is about as cartoonish as live action gets.

Gold never settles on a coherent point of view. Is the film supposed to be a critique of capitalism or is it a Horatio Alger story about a self-made man preyed upon by wall street?