Beckwith, though, rallies with some memorable moments in the third trimester and nails the climactic scene with gut-wrenching efficiency. Her movie stays afloat because of Harrison (watch out for her in the future) and Helms, who both deliver a fitting finale that’s revelatory and emotionally satisfying.

Every time it threatens to devolve into sentimentality or cynicism, someone is there to take the reins.

There are several excellent performances, including Wayne Hapi as Potini’s hardened brother. But Curtis is the most memorable part of The Dark Horse.

Harris saw this brave new world more than a decade ago - and liked what he saw. To watch We Live in Public is to wonder if the world we live in is just a reflection of one man's neurosis - if Harris's mix of emotional distance and rabid self-promotion has simply gone viral.

It's a celebration of a shady landmark, but also a lament.

A meditative state of a movie. While shorter-attention-spanned moviegoers should stick to "The Fighter," this is an interesting and enjoyable entry on the opposite side of the genre.

To the extent that it's original, The Mechanic is insane, bordering on gloriously insane.

Has some hilarious moments and still succeeds in dramatic terms.

At just under two hours, "Ultraman: Rising" is a bit longer than it needs to be, but buoyed by a strong voice cast and a unique point of view that blends elements of superhero action with heartfelt family drama, it's an effective reinvention of a franchise that's had more than its share of reboots over the last 58 years.

In the most extreme moments, Thomas hits her career pinnacle.

Here's the thing: This movie would be easy to mock as maudlin and self-important, but there's something about it that can't be dismissed. The monologues may be theatrical and presentational - director Anne Emond made this film when she was 29 and too young to be subtle.

Lowery doesn’t stray too far outside the lines — this is still a Disney movie based on a beloved family property — but he also doesn’t shy away from mining a familiar tale for meta commentary. Far from deconstruction, it’s heartfelt and introspective.

The young actresses are superb, and they make an appealing, believable group of friends.

It's a buoyant comedy with more warmth and generosity of spirit than anything else in theaters right now.

Despite some gruesome brutality, Totally Killer has a very light-on-its-feet quality. But as artificial entertainment goes, this one’s put together with ruthless care.

Lenny Cooke is humbling, as well as a cautionary tale for young people thinking they can make the big time.

For filmgoers who like dramas that are spare yet evocative, that focus on the subtleties of relationships, and that feature foreign settings completely off the beaten path, Deserted Station will be a masterpiece.

This is a solid, three-star movie, but its premise is brilliant and unforgettable. [21 May 2017, p.Q45]

As Zimbardo, Billy Crudup adopts an implacable facade, and for a while we don’t know what we’re seeing — a humanitarian on the brink of discovery, an ambitious monster who has found the winning ticket, or a young professor in way over his head.

Lower your expectations going into Volver and accept it for what it is: a ridiculously entertaining melodrama with loud echoes of "Mildred Pierce" that provides Penelope Cruz with a vehicle for her multifaceted talents.

Comic gold for anyone who is currently stoned, has been stoned in the past or spends a lot of time around stoned people.

That the film succeeds as well as it does despite a series of coincidences that strain credibility is a credit to a fine cast and a joie de vivre that pervades even the most implausible moments.

As much as anything we’ve seen in recent years, the film is confirmation that artists, not paranoid executives, continue to make the big calls at Disney. And as long as that continues, a few glitches in the plot won’t ruin anyone’s good time.

A movie that's lean, unsentimental and hard around the edges -- a gut- grabber that stays with you for days afterward.

Taking your very small child to this movie is only a slightly better idea than a trip to "The Final Destination." With that warning out of the way, this action adventure is a big treat for more mature animation and science-fiction fans and a triumph for the young director.

After devising a sturdy frame for Neeson’s special brand of sorrowful mayhem, the filmmakers expertly fill in Run All Night with a series of charged action scenes, including a rare one in which Neeson chases after a cop car, instead of the other way around.

The best part about the movie is the way it shifts focus, starting as an observation of the animal and then subtly morphing to the point of view of Nénette, who passively experiences a jumble of voices that start to run together.

It’s the actors’ emotional intelligence, though, that creates the movie’s true onscreen magic. This is like an Ingmar Bergman scenario directed by Sam Raimi. However you slice it, Together is a great love story. The ghastliness of it all is the chef’s kiss.

Barely 20 years old at the time of filming, Pugh has a surface poise and an inner turbulence, a capacity to command the screen with the spectacle of her watching and thinking. The last time something like Pugh happened, she was called Kate Winslet, and the movie was “Heavenly Creatures.”

For all the eyepopping splendor and in-your-face reality, this film leaves the viewer unsatisfied and feeling a little cheated out of compelling drama.

It’s giving away nothing to say that the answers here are a mix of good news and bad news.

An inventive, black comedy.

A big-hearted celebration of the we're-all-in-this- together American way.

It's as if he has been trying to express something, or to make his own particular kind of good movie, for 10 whole years. Now he has.

A powerful document of cruelty and sadism.

Eragon may not be a big Oscar contender, but in a movie season filled with blood diamonds, fascist soldiers and Idi Amin, it provides a much-needed afternoon of PG-rated family-friendly adventure.

Ross doesn’t gloss over the challenges facing the rural black county, but he finds a strong spirit there, even as the storm clouds hover.

No one else makes movies like this Spanish director.

Clever and enjoyable.

Takes its title from an early Artforum article that described the sleek aesthetic of the then-new Southern California art.

While Wilde captures its subject's singular charm, it ultimately doesn't do justice to his complexity.

The result is a warm and extremely thoughtful journey, with a deliberately bare-bones narrative.

A powerful and disturbing political drama.

The story is on the weak side, and many of the jokes are just a bit flat. And yet there are enough cute bits and special-effects surprises that it will probably be worth people's while, especially if they intended to see the movie in the first place. [22 Nov 1991, p.C1]

The real casting disaster is Mulroney. His blandness in the role makes it impossible to believe two beautiful women would fight over him.

A movie for science fiction fans who wish every minute of “Star Wars” was the cantina scene.

So much love went into Hustle & Flow that it almost glows with it.

Demonstrates, if nothing else, that there's a genuine person -- chastened by mistakes and more compassionate, perhaps, for all she's suffered -- beneath the war paint and the stardust.

Sly and very savvy.

It’s a lovely film that’s poetic, erotic and bittersweet.

An engaging, absorbing portrait of a moment in time when the Beatles were at their zenith.

Like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s stellar “The Lego Movie,” the filmmakers work with the confidence that if a joke fails, the one that follows a few seconds later will redeem the scene.

Co-directed by Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane” – which won a directing prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January and won the Golden Gate documentary award at the San Francisco International Film Festival in April – contains stunning natural beauty and painful revelations.

This is the "Godfather II" of tasteless prank films.

Curiously, the film seems to have no discernible point, and yet -- this is practically unique -- the absence of a point becomes, in itself, a form of narrative interest.

If this is an example of Australian live-and-let- live, it is very likable.

With "Flynt," Love does what Madonna has been trying to do for 12 years -- create a performance filled with humor, intelligence and soul.

Hannibal Rising isn't a classic, but it's entertaining and a surprisingly fitting addition to the franchise.

The Wanderer can turn an anxious tone to creepy and phantasmagoric. Kaufman's brilliant camera work relies on the exaggerated style of comic books, and the visual energy throughout is gritty.

Overall, it's a nice melding of sci-fi and a crime story.

The caper-movie touches and cocky self-awareness may wear thin, but you can't discount the importance, or the horror, of that footage.

Futuro Beach is part of a welcome wave of European and South American films that center on gay characters, yet deal with universal themes and offer a certain sensibility that would please any art-house enthusiast.

Biutiful exists, at its best and beautifully, in that space that's hard to define, between the outside and the interior, action and thought, body and soul.

This is a likable documentary that casts light on two respected but relatively unknown people, who made major contributions to film and managed to have a normal life — and in Hollywood, of all places. It’s nice to know such things are possible.

Goodbye First Love doesn't badger the viewer into drawing conclusions. It's interested in showing, with great compassion, how Camille comes to a fuller understanding of the world and herself, without the sort of prefab lessons more often found in films than in real life.

The film is energized by the naturalness of its characters and the way in which it plays a game of mixed signals and double illusions.

Mystery skillfully evokes Victorian London's dark depths.

It's hokey, implausible and packed with red herrings, and yet it's a lot of fun.

Charismatic to a fault, he had the look of a prince, with a genuine smile; long, feminine eyelashes; and a forbiddingly shaved cranium.

"Hornet's Nest" isn't the best of the three (that would be the first film, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), but it's the most challenging.

Fake It So Real isn't just for wrestling fans. It will appeal to anyone compelled by the documentary medium's ability to tell stories.

For those interested in this rich period in American literature, it’s a treat.

As prim and dreamily romantic as an old Doris Day movie -- and a genuine eye-pleaser photographically -- the new romantic comedy I.Q. is one pokey little film that refuses to get up and dance. Or sing. Or do much of anything but be mildly pleasant. [23 Dec 1994, p.D1]

A documentary that is often told in adages, riddles and poetry.

By being more than a superhero movie, it reminds us of what it’s worse than. Its greatest virtue isn’t that it’s a superior comic book movie, but rather that it comes close to not being that at all. Close, and yet not close enough.

Fans have cause to cheer.

Directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, the team behind the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary, RBG, the film makes the case for Child as an instinctive feminist and a profound cultural influence, who transformed how and what Americans ate in the second half of the twentieth century.

It's an art-direction, Dolby-sound, special-effects extravaganza, a grand-scale effort that's more awe-inspiring than completely successful as entertainment.

Entertaining and compelling.

Moving On is effortlessly intelligent in depicting the experience of being old. Even if you’re not there yet, you know intuitively that old age has very little to do with sitting in a rocking chair in perfect equanimity. It’s about living with the accumulation of things you did and things you didn’t do.

About halfway through Red 2, in the midst of all the laughs and action, suddenly Anthony Hopkins shows up, and he doesn't care one bit that nobody is going to notice his acting in a movie like this. He's going for the Oscar anyway.

Clockers has the strengths of Lee's best work (passion, humor, terrific acting) without the preachiness, self-importance and gimmicky camera moves of his weakest.

What sticks with us in the end is something beyond the black humor and even Khaled’s sorrows — it’s the touching relationship between the two principals, and the Finnish man’s quiet commitment to doing what’s right.

The Good Dinosaur has an original concept, disarming emotional heft and features the most impressive visuals in animated cinema to date.

Impossible to describe, impossible to forget, The Triplets of Belleville sends audiences tottering out of the theater, dazed and delighted, and wondering what it is they have just experienced.

Ali has done such a masterful job laying out his tableau that we’re not only enamored with the characters, we want to know where they end up.

It's a highly entertaining, big-budget, kick-butt kung fu movie, the best of its kind since Jet Li's "Fearless" in 2006.

Sure, not everything is great. Here and there, the movie goes out of its way to be sentimental. But The Lovebirds is a pleasing comedy, funny from beginning to end. That should be enough for anybody.

Thought-provoking, insightful and entertaining.

Contrived and overly schematic, but De Niro and Hoffman are such good actors that it never slips into pat sentiment.

The movie's mixture of romance and noir, its air of menace and a certain occasional playfulness suggest the filmmakers have been thinking about Polanski and Hitchcock.

In Mimic, director Guillermo Del Toro has created a dark, grotesque world that's hard to look at, and impossible to stop looking at.

Charming and witty, it's also somewhat clumsy.

What The Thomas Crown Affair has to sell audiences is a fantasy of the life of the super-rich who jet off to Martinique on the spur of the moment, and the super-smart who operate outside the rules.

It's so wonderfully silly, coarse and down-to-Earth that its radiance sneaks up only over time.

Berlin is still a subject very much worth exploring on film, and his observations as an aged man are even more fascinating than the statements he made as an artist in his prime.

Men will watch Crazy, Stupid, Love thinking they're finding out things about women, but if anything, this movie works the other way. Women will get a glimpse into the male mind.

This is one of those rare films nowadays that might have been helped with a few extra minutes. Yet at the same time, that’s a clear sign that Hill has created a world and a set of characters that have kept us engaged throughout.