It's more psychological than a genre movie, and that is the source of both its greatest interest and its biggest problem.

A charmer, a movie whose embrace of cinema is so passionate it could be mistaken for an embrace of life.

The film is a visual feast that combines interviews with vintage footage and reenactments danced in retro clubs, on railroad trusses and in magnificent theaters.

The Optimist could be described as a Holocaust drama, but it approaches that history in an unexpected way.

Theater Camp, a mockumentary about a summer workshop for thespian adolescents, offers plenty of theater and plenty of camp, to the point that it often plays like one, big inside joke. But the film offsets its drama class insularity with a rousing message that the stage will always be a magical place for children to dream — and to discover themselves.

Reveals one mystery, only to reveal another that it can't quite penetrate.

The fine quality of the new film is good news for anyone disappointed by "Star Trek Generations," which got the new "Star Trek" feature film series off to a shaky start two years ago.

It's a hilarious comedy made even more successful because so much of the satire seems fresh.

Cohn was a strange mix of self-aggrandizing and self-loathing, or maybe that’s a familiar mix. In any case, he emerges from the film partly sympathetic, if only because he seemed so miserable all his life, but mainly as the prime example of what Shakespeare meant when he said, “The evil that men do lives after them.”

You need not be a believer to appreciate its humor and humanity.

After two hours of The Walk, I felt as if I’d walked the wire myself. I was agitated and exhausted. During the movie, I was squirming and wincing, and a few times even had to close my eyes, just to find some relief.

The treatment of the subject isn't maudlin, thanks to a witty script and an enormously likable lead character, Remy (Remy Girard), who remains bullheaded and lusty to the finish.

For people already interested in fashion, the film’s appeal will be obvious, but Dior and I deserves to go beyond a small target audience.

It’s an inward-looking film that seems to be saying something about life. Whatever it’s saying — and it’s not clear that it’s saying anything specific — it connects. It’s not just another good movie. Somehow, it all adds up as something more important.

The strength of Fauci is its underlying theme, which is really not about Fauci at all. Hoffman and Tobias jump back and forth in time, from the AIDS to Ebola to the COVID years, and surreptitiously a portrait emerges of the uneasy relationship between the scientific community, the general public and the political establishment.

Still, as Dylan biopics go, this is probably the best imaginable.

The bad news is that The Paper, starring Michael Keaton, Glenn Close and Marisa Tomei, is unabashedly contrived, hopelessly simplistic and overly romantic about its target subject -- the frequently desperate art of putting out a big city daily newspaper. The good news is that all of the above results in a spirited if sometimes awkward big-screen entertainment.[25 March 1994, p.C1]

My Penguin Friend is what you’d expect from an animal picture, except that it’s better — lifted by a smart script, sensitive direction and a truly beautiful performance by Jean Reno.

Compelling.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

Even if you’d never in a million years want to ride with these guys, “The Bikeriders” makes you understand why they wanted to ride with each other.

The glimpses of religious life bumping into secular passion are touching and warmly comic.

Could use more background and personal detail on Rijker, but Bankowsky's tight, no- frills approach is always compelling.

Clever and unhurried mystery.

The best reason in years to reconsider (Woody Allen).

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

More than one joke or one idea. It's a thoroughly satisfying comedy --and a respectable space adventure, as well.

Muddled and endless.

It's the story of a young married couple undone by a family tragedy, but the film loses its way, at one point turning into a political harangue.

I've seen many films about Italy, but this one - possibly because it's so colorful and stylized and possibly because the songs are such economical distillations of a state of mind - feels like being there.

Neatly, and often humorously, summarizes a very unhealthy situation.

Rosewood is startling, infuriating, painful history played out as a not-very-satisfying, overly ambitious and overlong movie.

The film's freedom and control, its inspiration and focus, announce it as the work of a confident and mature artist.

If Public Enemies lacks anything, it's something audiences can't legitimately expect to find: a certain EXTRA something.

With Margaret threatening to lose it at any moment, “Resurrection” is #MeToo horror at its cringiest.

It grabs you from a symbolic opening scene of gang members rolling the dice -- the odds, it soon becomes clear, are stacked against them getting lucky -- and never lets go.

A gentle comedy.

This is a sobering piece of advocacy cinema.

To the extent Final Portrait succeeds, and it does intermittently, it’s a rather deadpan comedy about two men trying to understand each other against a cultural and generational gulf.

The movie’s one flaw, a notable one, is that the first hour is better than the second. The first is jaw-dropping. In the second half, the film slow downs somewhat, but by then, the audience is hooked into the movie’s reality, so there’s no turning away.

Angourie Rice, who plays Gosling’s intelligent and highly moral 12-year-old, deserves a special mention. The character is an unexpected presence that adds dimension to the story, and Rice plays her beautifully.

Its take on the political scene is unsophisticated, and its humor heavy- handed. Like any satire, it exaggerates, but it exaggerates the wrong things. [11 Sep 1992, p.C1]

The Little Prince is heartbreaking, beautiful and irresistible.

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

It’s an engaging product, typical of its era and elevated by Crosby’s non-singing breeziness and Astaire’s all-around brilliance, plus the appeal of Marjorie Reynolds, who has to pretend that she’s enthralled every time Crosby warbles something in her direction. Now that’s acting.

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

A showcase for Wang's greatest strengths as a film maker: a chance to explore friendships, connections and random serendipities.

A fascinating fact-based portrait of a gambling addict.

The movie belongs to Rodriguez: A gorgeous woman with a powerful body and the face of an Aztec princess, she's also a natural talent who instinctively understands the importance of economy in good acting.

Rich with physical and psychological texture, and boosted by Thomas Newman's muted score, Unstrung Heroes is that rare mainstream film that doesn't shout in our ear to make its points. It draws us in, subtly and gracefully, and casts a lingering charm.

It’s still a relief that the love story here is between a kind woman and a creature far nobler than his onetime owner.

It doesn’t ascend to the sky. It’s not profound or great. But Vigalondo takes Colossal to all sorts of unexpected places and then brings it home, intact.

Mainly Blank City shows a succession of engaging, intelligent, middle-aged people showing some very bad home movies that they once hoped were something more.

It’s a complicated tale, and at 92 minutes, the film is a very brief summary.

There's a zippety-doo-dah bounce and brashness to Roger & Me, but it's not the definitive word on what ailed Flint, Mich., when assembly lines stopped rolling. [12 Jan 1990, p.E3]

May provide a service by making gay issues innocuous and funny and more acceptable to a broader audience, but Rudnick's play-it-safe script and Frank Oz's antiseptic direction manage instead to trivialize the subject.

Not only more crazy than “Reservoir Dogs,'' but it also feels more real. [1 Jan 1993, Daily Notebook, p.D1]

The film doesn't leave the audience with a moral. It just leaves a sense of having been in the stimulating company of passionate people -- all of them in the arts or on the fringes of that world, all of them struggling to make something intense and amazing out of their lives.

The main pleasure of Sword of Trust is in watching an ensemble of expert comic actors play off of each other. The movie was improvised, based on a tightly constructed story, and every scene has some comic jewel in it, some unexpected touch or moment.

It’s hard to believe that the likable British star of “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Lion” and “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” could be the next actor to become a hard-charging action director. But Patel’s filmmaking debut, “Monkey Man,” makes a bone-breaking case for just that.

This film is always pleasant to watch. It shows us that life has little detours, all the way to the end.

Sad, funny and painfully honest.

Escape means a roller-coaster finish, and with this delightful sequence achieved without the aid of computer effects, this “Ant-Man” entry stakes its own corner of the Marvel Universe sandbox as a throwback to ’80s-style childlike adventure.

Most viewers will have no more fun watching this story than the characters do living it.

Grease isn't a four-star musical. It's fluffy and unimportant, and it gets tedious toward the end with the car-racing sequence that Kleiser staged in the paved-in-concrete Los Angeles River. The friskiness of the performers, the choreography by Patricia Birch and most of all Travolta's phenomenal charm give it its value.

It has plenty of emotionally satisfying scenes and its share of humorous moments, but the drama and comedy mix like oil and water.

A rambling documentary that freely moves back and forth through time but maintains interest and cohesion by virtue of its subject. The more you watch Lewis, the more fascinating he gets.

The film's editing and pacing are appealingly straightforward, not to say blunt, and the humor runs from dry to bone-dry to parched.

Has the usual overlong running time, the half-hearted feints in the direction of human feeling and the obligatory action sequences that are big without being either exciting or particularly legible.

An intelligent movie that portrays the mighty without reverence.

It's the content that makes this documentary fly. The documentary's only stumbling point is its dearth of historical context.

A hit-and-miss affair, or, to be more precise, a miss (story one), hit (story two) and break even (story three) affair.

There isn't a film filled with richer, more colorfully imaginative images currently playing in theaters.

Slowly unfolding but liberating film, which is also a rare look inside a circumscribed community.

This oddball comedy may be one of the brightest, funniest pieces of entertainment of the season.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

This is Curtis' film. Looking a little like a combination of Carol Burnett and Annie Lennox, Curtis has this character down.

Wood is superb at delineating Tracy's slide into desperate incoherence, but equally impressive is Reed, who has to conceal her writer's intelligence in playing a character who's entirely instinctive and unreflective.

This comic film from Belgium, in which God is shown as a cantankerous slob, is more mischievous than malevolent, likely to offend only the humor-impaired.

It takes an extraordinary film on the order of Joyeux Noel to make it all suddenly vital, immediate and human.

Intends to inspire outrage, and to an extent it succeeds.

Its virtues of crisp, uncluttered photography and striking performances are frustratingly undermined by the muddled pretensions of Hungarian director Peter Medak. [09 Nov 1990, p.E7]

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.

Right now, his (Dolan) work is fun to watch. Before long, it may very well be mandatory for anyone who values great filmmaking.

Leigh is perfectly cast as the game-pod goddess.

There is much to think about in Far From the Tree, a worthy and at times tender film.

The best glimpse yet of what it's like to be in Iraq.

Pedro Almodóvar is one of the few filmmakers with the ability to infuse the screen with his own consciousness, and to see The Skin I Live In is to enter into his nightmare.

Like a soap opera, but most of what glitters is gold.

An engaging romantic comedy that's deeper, smarter and more pessimistic than it appears at first glance, a film with shrewd insight into the mysteries of human attraction.

The title is all that's boring about director Michel Gondry's latest mind bender, as trippy as LSD.

A charming 2001 Oscar nominee for best foreign-language film.

A haunting elegy on the unpredictability of life. Never knowing what the next minute might bring is the elephant in all our lives.

A surprisingly joyous musical.

This world of entirely nice people seems like a trite fantasy — trite because the movie never makes you believe it. But it does makes you want to believe it, and so, like a lot of these movies, it takes you halfway there.

By focusing on one family's dilemma, the movie brings home the messy Middle Eastern situation in a way easier to relate to than the headlines and opinion pieces.

A clever hybrid of documentary and romantic comedy.

There seems to be something about the story itself that's better suited to the stage than the screen.