Beautiful and utterly entrancing documentary.

He was so good at his job he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the British and the Iron Cross II by the Nazis. Talk about playing both sides!

Director Bernard Rose has created a committed, intelligent and fascinating piece of work with no irony about it.

Dramatic, funny, fun, silly, musical, stylish, romantic and redemptive -- a film worth telling your friends and neighbors about.

What the movie lacks -- a big lack, not a fatal lack -- is a compelling character at its center. Everyone in Garden State is fun, skewed, strange and singular.

Bite the Bullet is epic Americana, gorgeously filmed, and a candidate for most underrated film of the 1970s. [10 Jun 2012, p.20]

A narrative documentary thriller that effectively employs many elements of a John le Carré spy novel: international intrigue, arresting twists and turns, and characters with complicated motivations.

The filmmakers succeed with an unexpected ending. It's as fresh as everything in the movie, which turns out to be about so much more than one youngster's resilience.

Everything in Water Lilies is more guarded, more complex and far more interesting than it seems.

Like the best love stories, funny or otherwise, this movie also recognizes that being in love is an education, and that, if people are lucky, they choose the right teacher.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

Freaky is, dare we say, soul-sucking?

A droll, deadpan film, deliberately paced and told.

Something of an elegy to modernism.

Teixeira elicits extraordinary performances from his entire cast.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

Wondering what’s real and what’s just a carefully crafted crock doesn’t make Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood a better experience. It makes it a little pointless and frustrating.

Upgrade is a movie by Leigh Whannell, who wrote “Saw,” “Insidious” and other memorable horror movies. But other than the occasional moment of stunningly gratuitous gore, it’s nothing like those films.

So cleverly constructed that it's easy to be taken in and believe these twins really rocked.

Private Parts is witty and fast-paced and makes Stern's raunchy, breast-obsessed, lesbian-fetishizing, big-penis-envying, arrested-adolescent outlook seem like harmless fun.

It’s less about music and more about how hard it is — and how bad it feels — to be absolutely and completely on the outside. And though the movie is uncompromising on that score — and shows its heroine going through a series of humiliations that are almost as painful to watch as they would be to experience — it’s not self-pitying. It’s dead-eyed accurate, and that’s its ultimate redemption.

The humor manages to be simultaneously sophisticated, supremely silly and very dark.

It's a feel-good deal you can take the whole family to, or even better, a date. And this almost cuddly film, built on a farfetched case of mistaken identity, delivers plenty of fun.

It’s a sci-fi action movie that spoofs the form to strong comic effect, and yet it profits from every good thing about the genre it’s mocking. It tries to have it both ways, and it succeeds.

Other films about Marie Antoinette have had their moments, but Benoît Jacquot's Farewell, My Queen is the first to give a real sense of what it must have felt like to live inside that palace as the walls were caving in.

Deep Cover is a sleazy crime picture and a peculiar and twisted moral journey. It's also a terrific movie, and once you trace its lineage you begin to see why.[15 Apr 1992, p.E1]

Riveting from its first moments.

Don't expect an in-depth study or exposé in Carol Channing: Larger Than Life. But director Dori Berinstein does capture the essence of Carol as one of those creatures of the theater that when you see her onstage, you know you've seen something special.

Undergirding it all is a light but ever present tension between living up to the philosophy the men were taught as teenagers and making their way through the realities and compromises of American adulthood. Tran’s not preachy about that, but the filmmaker’s killer move is showing how his heroes’ souls can be as fragile as their aging bones, yet resilient when the situation demands.

Something about Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot keeps it from adding up to a satisfying movie experience. It has the feeling, rather, of a story you might hear about a friend of friend.

The great thing about Reality Bites is that each of the characters comes across as real, and not some glib concoction by a screenwriter who's watched them from a cloistered distance. Childress obviously knows their world inside out, and shares it with insight and a prickly, original wit. [18 Feb 1994, p.C1]

A play-it-safe, by-the-numbers kind of documentary - yet somehow it gets under your skin.

The material is ripe for black comedy, but Stewart’s screenplay, staying true to Bahari’s real-life experience, steers a middle course. It’s sometimes scary, sometimes funny, and sometimes absurd, but never any of those things fully, or effectively.

In a film that easily could have been cold or ironical, Ferrell provides the emotional thrust.

The melancholic, beautiful Cairo Time confirms two things that hardly need confirming: The Egyptian capital is a breathtaking metropolis, and Patricia Clarkson is one of the best actors in the world.

As the corpses pile up and the cocoons hatch, the spiders become more brazen and finally start invading houses. The last 45 minutes of Arachnophobia is a blast, with attack-of-the-killer-spider scenes coming nonstop. This is not great art, but it's a good time, and the climax is terrific. [18 July 1990, p.E1]

You can almost say it simulates an experience of brain injury in the audience: Nothing adheres, nothing connects. It's just nonstop cuteness, poses and emptiness - with nothing logically following from one moment to the next. It would be exaggerating to call it torture, and yet why split hairs?

The movie, directed and written by Gregory Nava ("My Family/Mi Familia"), is only so-so but Lopez, who appeared recently in "Jack'' and "Blood and Wine," is so vibrant that you almost forgive the movie's paint-by-numbers script and moldy formula.

It could be a deeply provocative tale, but the director seems reluctant to probe behind his artful facade.

As it stands, Wakanda Forever feels as lost and forlorn as the Wakandan people.

To watch Nowhere Boy is to appreciate anew both the anger that drove Lennon and the strength of character it took for him to overcome it.

The movie harks back to a time before state-of-the-art technology when writers and directors had to rely mostly on imagination.

A frustrating movie, a work of immaturity from a director who should be past the empty gestures and self-protective distance of his early work.

The Peanuts Movie delivers genuine happiness with the door left open for woe.

Ronin eventually becomes tiresome, but the pairing of De Niro and Reno never gets old.

Giamatti and Pike are backed by a strong cast, including Minnie Driver, lots of fun as Barney's Jewish princess second wife.

I don’t want to give too much away, but Amoo’s direction is strong, and his film moves in unexpected directions. Stil Williams’ cinematography is divine. Adewunmi and Ikumelo are excellent, and kudos to Pinnock, Tai Golding as young Femi, Denise Black as the foster mom, Demmy Ladipo as a gang leader and Ruthxjiah Bellenea as a potential love interest who shares Femi’s love for the Cure.

This has to be the first children's film to weave a Grand Theft Auto joke into the script -- and like most things in the movie, it's pretty amusing.

While the documentary isn't as compelling as its source material, Abbas tells an interesting story about his incarceration.

A powerful new film from British writer-director Sandra Goldbacher.

The movie is as modestly unpretentious as David O. Russell's "Spanking the Monkey."

A moody picture that's filled from start to finish with camera tricks, unexpected angles and innovative flourishes.

The first Russian musical in more than 50 years, Hipsters is appreciated best as a curiosity.

A ponderous and dreadful film.

The movie often verges on being too much; Brooks' supreme balancing act is to keep it all under control.

A tense, nail-biting thriller featuring powerhouse performances.

As good as both actors are, watching characters sitting around talking gets old. But the film perks up considerably midway through, becoming a taut beat-the-clock thriller as it covers the days just before Bundy’s 1989 execution, the tension lying in whether Ted will fulfill his 11th-hour promise to confess.

Trust never lives up to its snappy opening. Everything is tongue-in-cheek here - yet it's never remotely clear what the point is or what's getting satirized. [16 Aug 1991]

Delivers a sucker punch to the audience and then pulls the rug out from under it. It is sensational. It is also grimly funny.

Many scenes in Outrage are crisply filmed and stylish enough, as serial assassinations go. But the film doesn't add up to much.

It is, for what it’s worth, a good documentary, though I imagine its true worth and true nature can only be revealed in time. At the starting gate of 2018, we can have no idea how this film will be perceived in 10 years, and maybe we don’t want to know. Then again, maybe we do.

This is an ambitious movie that didn’t come quite together in the editing room.

Those who stuck with the troubled pop icon after his universe shifted from the charts to the tabloids probably will find equal measures of inspiration and heartbreak in the documentary. For everyone else, it's a strange offering.

Whatever the intention, Somewhere, in its odd, detached way, is compelling viewing.

Smile 2, filmmaker Parker Finn’s audacious follow-up to his 2022 breakout hit, “Smile,” delivers all the jump scares, gore and supernaturally plastered-on grins a horror fan can take while also commenting, thoughtfully yet also disgustingly, on the perils of fame.

A fairly wonderful movie about fathers and sons and the mystery of time.

There's a lot of bad hair and incoherent, drug-addled remarks, but inside a minute we get the joke, and it isn't much.

May be the most magnetic, most beautiful and bravest Carmen ever to grace a stage or film set.

Whatever the film's faults, though, it's safe to say that you may never view childbirth in the same way.

A funny movie, but also a serious movie, and — who knows? — maybe an important one.

There are no great surprises, no shocking reveals (except to the characters themselves). But there’s so much to appreciate along the way that it’s a real page-turner.

A big fizzle.

Underneath the seeming blandness of its presentation -- the sparse dialogue, the affectless characters -- there's a ferocious and caustic view of humanity.

July also narrates the film, in voiceover, as the cat, and every time she does, it's a white-knuckle thing. You have to hold on until she stops.

A straightforward, wickedly suspenseful man-versus-nature saga of the type that rarely gets made anymore.

This documentary about men and women performing brutal work tasks for next to no money is full of arresting and eloquent images. It has little dialogue, and little is needed.

The curious thing about this new Cinderella is that every old and familiar element is done beautifully.

This is lesser Woody Allen -- nothing horrible, but nothing to recommend except to his particular fans. [25 Jan 1991, p.C1]

What fun this documentary is.

Smart, sedate and well acted.

A movie about the power of the imagination really becomes a movie about a certain element of surrender - about the release of power - that is practically a requirement for loving somebody.

Occasionally thoughtful and very entertaining.

How much you enjoy You Will Be My Son depends on how much you can take an unbearable, arrogant jerk as your lead character.

Well-scripted, well-acted and occasionally sexy, but just isn't all that interesting.

After dipping its toe into thriller cliche, Simple Favor dives in, with crosses, double crosses and “twists” one can anticipate a mile away. Yet, there’s always just enough of a wink apparent that the film remains highly involving throughout.

Not up to Ozon's standards.

An artfully depraved piece of South Korean torture porn directed by Kim Ji-woon, is a skillful serial-killer thriller in keeping with the likes of "Saw."

With apologies to George A. Romero and the impending zombie apocalypse, The Eclipse may be the most realistic film where something dead comes to life and tries to feast on human flesh. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/15/MVST1CTGJ4.DTL#ixzz0lDuetYGS

Kill List has a slow build, but don't be lulled into complacency. This is one of the most violent and disturbing films you'll see in an art house.

The good news is that the pace picks up — Giant Little Ones actually gets better as it goes along. And despite its lapses into self-consciousness, the movie presents us with a set of characters that we end up believing and caring about – not tremendously, but enough to keep watching to see how they all turn out.

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

Object to the picture on ideological grounds, if you like, but that's no way to watch movies. Better to appreciate the rare spectacle of a filmmaker leading from his gut.

Along the way, Looking for Eric emerges as a portrait of a world and a way of life. You will probably not want to live in Manchester after seeing this film, but you'll like and respect the people.

Kung Fu Panda 3 has a moment or two for everyone, but no chance develop any character beyond a single dimension.

This is a movie that has lots of magic, in more ways than one.

Moore’s admirers made this biography an homage, and if you’re not already a fan, you may tire of the valentine.

See No Evil directed by James Watkins (“The Woman in Black”), is not that interesting. Nor is it much of a horror movie or psychological thriller, despite carrying the Blumhouse imprimatur. For more than half of its nearly two-hour length, it plays more like the James McAvoy variety hour — which can be highly enjoyable if you do not mind one actor being the entire show.

Stone does everything he can to do justice to the real-life people he's depicting, and yet nothing he does can cover up the film's single but overarching weakness: The personal story he uses to portray the larger event is limited in scope and impact.