It's hard to decide what's worse about this feral clan residing in Brighton, England: their unspecified criminal enterprises, their penchant for bloody vengeance or their twisted family dynamic.

None of these issues are fully resolved, but just enough ... and that’s what makes On Golden Pond cinema gold.

It's hard to dislike a picture with flying cows and oil trucks.

It is not what could be fairly called a bad movie, but neither is it fine enough to be a good one, with its lineup of dull characters and a limp story that functions like a conveyor belt.

It's hard not to come away in awe of a director in complete control of every frame.

Manages to be affectionate without drawing too deeply from a well of sugar and schmaltz.

It's compassionate but unblinking.

Obviously a passion project, but Ejiofor keeps his film grounded in reality and avoids histrionics. And even though the plot is predictable from the get-go, the cast in uniformly good, and it’s hard not to be moved when William’s water-pumping invention carries the day. His story is one that’s worth telling.

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

Qualifies as a mild success. It's an easy picture to like, even if it's not exactly satisfying.

A bright young actress, a movie-star actor and a potentially interesting concept gets smothered in 128 minutes of colorful, empty nonsense.

Here is more ambiguity, in a film that needs less of it.

An entertaining film, but also an uncompromising one. It is harsh and not particularly hopeful, and it presents a situation so tangled and contorted, with so many interests in collision, that a lasting peace between the Israelis and Palestinians seems a distant prospect.

Come True should be an exhilarating discovery for anyone it doesn’t put to sleep. But even if you do find yourself nodding off a little during this deliberately paced, low-humming, sci-fi horror movie, that means it’s working, too.

A Quiet Place: Day One is about a cancer patient in hospice who hopes to die with dignity. Also, there are terrible monsters threatening humanity. What an odd idea for a horror prequel.

Crime 101 is often smart, ultimately ridiculous — man, that ending! — and mostly absorbing. But as with Davis’ sleek rides, your mileage may vary.

Taken a little too seriously, My Cousin Vinny can be seen as a celebration of the breadth and richness of the American landscape. Maybe the movie isn't exactly about that, but to enjoy it is, in a small way, to celebrate that richness. [13 Mar 1992, p.D3]

The movie is overplotted, a soulless maze of special effects and relentless action.

There's no objectivity in this film -- Greenwald's goal is not to offer balanced coverage but to roil the waters.

Wonderfully giddy meditation on the nature of fame.

Strel is one strange duck, and you can only wonder that Werner Herzog, with his fondness for captivating weirdos, didn't get to him first.

Succeeds in its modest goals of building tension slowly and generating a handful of legitimate scares. A few people in the audience were laughing during the first half of the film. No one was laughing during the long walk out of the theater.

Intriguing and educational. For partisans of Bertolt Brecht, it's mandatory.

Craig leaves the series in a mammoth, 163-minute extravaganza that audiences will be enjoying for decades. It’s a lovely thing to see.

Robert Redford's sensitive, unhurried movie of A River Runs Through It is so faithful to the book that it becomes that rare thing - a beautiful celebration of the power of literature. [09 Oct 1992]

It isn't a long journey. Kisses clocks at 72 minutes, which feels something less than feature length. It's long enough to include a few cliches and nagging questions, yet it's short enough to leave you wanting more.

The subtlety is the beauty of it.

Ne Zha II surprisingly contains a sincere-feeling theme of individuality, of resisting what society commands a person to be rather than embracing their nature.

In the title role, Kikuchi is impressive, easily handling Kumiko’s comic and more somber sides and never allowing us to settle into a single or simple interpretation of the character.

At its best, Mermin -- who used an all-female crew -- conveys the sense of an entirely feminine world being created under the beauty school roof, and it's refreshing.

For the most part this is a dull, dour documentary on what ought to be a joyful or at least fascinating subject.

It is a warm, closely observed satire of lived life, and it is a charmer.

Some of the segments are more successful than others, yet all of them have the haunting quality of a completely insignificant event that someone might remember years later. Night on Earth tries to stop the clock and cast a net over the whole mystery, and while the film never loses its humor, the wistfulness, yearning and deep affection at its heart is are unmistakable. [29 May 1992, p.D1]

It’s hard to say what McCarthy intended with “Brats,” but he ended up making a cautionary film for journalists. As such, it may have a limited audience, but if it’s seen by the right people, it might do some good.

Just Mercy isn’t the best movie that could have been made from its subject, but it’s good enough.

It comes as a bonus that this romantic comedy is one of the rare pictures of its type that actually is about something -- the double-edged sword of celebrity.

A gorgeously shot, ambitious epic.

Those of you who don't work for a newspaper may also be interested in what it's like on the inside - how stories are generated, how editors and writers interact, etc. For what it's worth, it's an accurate portrait.

A beautifully crafted, fun-filled and full-gallop action adventure. [17 Nov 1990, p.C3]

Jim Jarmusch has come up with something strange and amazing.

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

It’s all so heavy-handed that it’s hard to stay engaged with the movie.

The movie drags.

Klapisch's masterstroke was to place at the center of a movie a man, forced by circumstances, to stop and simply observe.

Superman is a mess, but it’s a colorful one. It’s either a terrible superhero movie or an OK parody, take your pick.

Ponderous, repetitive and lacking a single rousing action sequence.

What audiences want when they go to a suspense thriller.

The film is far from perfect but has enough going on to compensate for its excessive length and some sentimentality.

Some long patches in this show are surprisingly boring and unfunny. Maybe part of the problem is that the rest of the world has caught up with Waters -- nowadays everyone's a provocateur. In-your-face gay-themed material is no longer such a novelty; there are simply fewer boundaries left to transgress.

The documentary takes Tower through his much publicized recent stint as the chef at New York’s Tavern on the Green, a rather hopeless assignment for a perfectionist.

The fortunate thing about for Inequality for All is that, for all its good information and useful insight, it also has an appealing person at its center: Robert Reich, the economics expert and Berkeley professor who was also the labor secretary under Bill Clinton.

This is a filmmaker who cares less about horror cinema as a theme park ride, and more about mood.

With his caustic humor, director de la Iglesia is being billed as "the next Almodovar."

The film is fine in depicting Ellis' times, but it's mostly how he came to realize that he had a serious problem and turned his life around to become a drug-abuse counselor. He died in 2008 at age 63.

An enjoyable farce, with lots of laughs and a strong cast. At 80 minutes long, it's that rare case of a short film that should have been longer.

Taking a stand would have made the film stronger, and might even have been helpful to young Pug and his peers.

Strouse’s film is about the changes that occur in all relationships and about letting go when it’s time. It will probably not change your worldview about any people, places or things, but it’s a pleasant way to spend a couple hours.

The result, although a great idea, doesn't translate into a great movie.

A wonderful, cockeyed sex comedy.

This is pure entertainment but smart entertainment, plotted and executed with invention and humor and acted by a winning cast radiating good-movie energy.

The photography is strong, the performances sympathetic and the sex plentiful.

At first, the technique seems gimmicky, but finally it's as compelling a perspective as any to understand how these men passed through agony to some sort of peace.

Pleasing, it is. Good, solid stuff. But one wonders how much better the film would have been had von Donnersmarck honestly explored the life of his inspiration, artist Gerhard Richter, rather than the fictional “Kurt Barnert.”

One great monster movie. [11 June 1993, Daily Notebook, p.C1]

Neighbors is funny for all 96 of its minutes, not counting the credits, and it contains the single best sight gag of the year so far. (We're talking laugh-out-loud funny and then laugh again later, just thinking about it.)

Beautifully filmed.

Jude is knockout Hardy, filled with stormy visual poetry and accompanied by a gorgeous yet simple score.

Noah is no silly action blockbuster with a Biblical pretext. Rather, it's the product of writer-director Darren Aronofsky's vigorous engagement with the Biblical story and what it might mean in our time.

As writer and director, Cronenberg devises for himself a compelling situation, but a situation is not the same as a story. Within 20 minutes, Cronenberg has written himself into a hole, one populated entirely by passive characters who do nothing but get cut up or watch other people get cut up.

Buoyed by an appealing lead performance by John Hawkes, Small Town Crime is a smart, sharply written detective story that, though not without humor, plays it straight and tough.

As a Nicolas Cage movie — not just as a movie, but as a vehicle for what a specific actor can do onscreen — this is the most interesting thing Cage has done since “Face/Off.”

Black Widow is what happens when movies abandon human values for the emotional deadness and emptiness of the superhero movie.

For all the hip checks and bloody noses, it doesn't have a mean bone in its body.

Especially terrific is Rieger, who is a 25-year-old rising star in Israel. She displays a fierce intensity and an appealing vulnerability, and here’s betting that if she chose to, she could follow Gal Gadot’s path from Israel to Hollywood stardom.

The relentlessly downbeat drama American Woman is a star vehicle that lets Sienna Miller (“American Sniper,” HBO’s “The Girl”) really show what she can do. But she does too much.

In creating his modern homage to the classic film, Im has twisted all the heated melodrama into a satiric - and in the end, surrealist - attack on the terrors of the polished upper class.

Almost satirical.

Most important, the relationship between P-Orridge and Lady Jaye comes off as heartfelt, and "Ballad" makes you feel something. Just like art.

Savagely lyrical, Vazante offers a harsh, impressionistic take on slavery in 19th century Brazil. And though the storytelling leans toward the opaque, the film has a sense of authenticity and power that keep it interesting.

Doesn't always work, but it challenges, nonetheless.

What it's really about - and this sounds so boring, and so nothing, when in fact it's really rather wonderful - is people. Just regular people, a mother and daughter, whose lives are observed with economy and precision, and with an eye for the telling detail and the tense, revealing moment.

Probably the world's first jihad terrorist comedy, Four Lions is a daring, brilliantly conceptualized film, but like the bumbling bombers of the title, the execution tends to be hit-and-miss.

Domingo, who began his career as a stage actor in San Francisco, brings velocity to all the scenes involving the march. He seems unbound, possessed by an understanding that he’s doing something bigger than himself.

In a deceptively low-key manner, Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen has beautifully crafted one of the most provocative movies of the year.

Though it ultimately recovers, too much of The Good Thief forgets about Bob, and in the process the movie loses much of its allure and vividness.

There’s much of value to be had along the way to a nicely handled ending. It would be a mistake to call it a surprise, but it’s something that few viewers are likely to expect.

At 2 1/2 hours, Gladiator is a long ride, but it doesn't drag.

Short on complexity and depth, The Divine Order gives us a parade of heroines and villains. Instead of raising questions, it seems to want to induce in viewers a sense of smugness.

Moon is boring. Agonizingly, deadeningly, coma-inducingly, they-could-bury-you-alive-accidentally boring.

Band Aid is her (Zoe Lister-Jones) first film as a director — she also wrote and stars in it — and something about her and this film is really appealing.

It’s a complicated situation despite how morally straightforward it appears. Scout’s Honor deserves some kind of merit badge for trying to untangle the knotty, awful mess.

Deserves to ride the wave of the latest, hottest micro-trend in pictures: the romantic comedy for guys.

The film itself is wretched. A grueling, numbing black hole.

This 1968 William Friedkin comedy set in 1925 New York will be appreciated by those who enjoy the corny humor and bawdy broads of burlesque.

By the end you can't help but wonder whether it was a good idea to keep the youngsters under camera scrutiny for more than 12 years.

If “Dead Man’s Wire” has a weakness it’s that it doesn’t create an intense desire to find out how it all turns out. It compensates with dark humor and with a central performance by Skarsgård that’s fascinating.

Beyond the superb acting, Concrete Cowboy gets a lot of mileage from its visually arresting riding scenes and its spot-on score, which is both haunting and inspirational.

Avatar: The Way of Water is a one-hour story rattling around in a 192-minute bag.