If anything is better about the sequel than the original, it's Leslie Nielsen, as deadpan as ever, but looking more relaxed than before, mugging and playing up his jokes with the subtlety and timing of an accomplished comedian -- which, at this point, I suppose he is. [28 June 1991, p.F1]

Ratanaruang brings us close to Tum's personality, and his rigorous filming style carefully layers the plot while allowing us to contemplate the nature of greed and the cost of simply existing.

Although it takes something of a slog to get there, this thriller finally comes through where it counts.

Truth be told, the latest Darren Aronofsky film, which Oakland native Charlie Huston adapted from his own novel, is well made and contains terrific performances. It is a true original. But it’s also depressingly soul-killing and nihilistic, with a plot twist that fairly deep-sixes it for this critic.

The film is full of low-key but telling observations, mostly about Gianni's plight but also about modern life in general.

The film's hymn of praise quickly grows cloying, thanks partly to a relentless musical soundtrack.

Although nothing really surprising happens (the film has no real plot twists), it’s natural and unforced, like real life. One can imagine that most pregnancies unfold like these, and Swanberg has crafted a universal story observed through small details.

The strength and beauty of The Runaways are that it tells the truth.

A gripping study of Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player ever.

Patrik Age 1.5 has a single drawback that can't be overlooked, at least from the standpoint of an American viewer. It's predictable.

A formidable exercise in storytelling. Even at the end, when the inevitable goodbye toast occurs, there is a twist awaiting us.

Michelle Williams doesn't just survive. Called upon to glow, she glows. Her performance doesn't solve all the riddles of that personality; none could, and it's for the best that Williams doesn't try.

Despite its general intelligence and worthy performances, Kill Your Darlings makes it difficult to see how the Beats ever caught on.

The movie moves. It has action sequences that are so enormous that they won't just wow audiences, but rock them back in their seats and make them laugh at the audacity of it all.

A fine new rock documentary.

The action scenes are imaginative and elaborate without seeming fake. Nothing is belabored, and the stakes never stop escalating.

The result is a reminder that, with weak material, it’s often worse to have a really good actor. The weaknesses just stands out in sharper relief.

A tonally confused, fitfully entertaining film about a pathologically two-faced man.

The film is never truly funny, but it's an amusing novelty, gaining strength from smart characterizations and sly cogency about the way people are exploited under the limelight of celebrity.

To their credit, To All the Boys films haven’t shied away from serious topics. They’ve been good at teasing out the way teen drama can actually harm young adults (cyberbullying, social anxiety). The films have also engaged with trauma, as the death of Lara Jean’s mother — who represents the sisters’ connection to their Korean heritage — is always part of the films’ focus. But earlier films began and ended in high school, with a smaller scope for character growth, and Always and Forever really wants us to look forward.

There's no greater meaning to any of this, and the slapstick turns won't seem particularly ambitious to anyone who grew up on Bugs Bunny cartoons.

There are too many somber interludes with nothing going on but an acoustic guitar echoing over the soundtrack, the spareness of the score suggesting the emptiness of the characters' lives.

Anyone who has ever felt morally right and completely in the minority will have a point of entry into this movie.

Goes downhill fast.

Writer and first-time director Don McKellar, also one of the film's stars, makes the plot gimmick an inventive jumping-off point for an exploration of humanity in a state of quiet panic.

The script is full of off-the-wall lines that take you by surprise but are perfect. [21 Aug 1987]

It's a beautiful machine, thought out and revved up to the last detail, with no other purpose but to delight - and it delights. [24 May 1989, Daily Notebook, p.E1]

The film is too intelligent and well-crafted to dismiss and too good to hate. Some people will love it, and at worst, most people will like it a little.

It's still a spirited look - well written, beautifully acted, full of uplift - at lovably cheeky heroines on the march for a little respect.

There's great pleasure in watching a movie in which the director has thought out everything beforehand.

Beauty and the Beast creates an air of enchantment from its first moments, one that lingers and builds and takes on qualities of warmth and generosity as it goes along.

Mesmerizing documentary.

Most interesting, to me, is what happened at New York City's Cooper Union, which has charged no tuition since its founding in 1859. Due in part to mismanagement of funds, the school has announced it will start charging tuition, prompting the students to form their own Occupy Movement. This alone deserves a 90-minute documentary.

Forget Beautiful Girls. The title ought to be "Jerky, Messed- Up Dudes With Nowhere to Go"

Uneven, occasionally silly, true, but it's also an improvement over 2006's "X-Men: The Last Stand."

They ought to forgo the formalities and simply give Nick Nolte his Oscar right now for what is one of the great performances on screen, in this season or any other, in Prince of Tides, a sensitive, emotionally explosive jewel directed by Barbra Streisand, who also co-stars. The powerful, haunting drama opens today. [25 Dec 1991, p.E1]

The film version is gorgeous to look at and contains amusing performances from Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles. But it fails to get inside the minds of gamblers as Peter Carey so admirably did in his Booker Prize-winning novel.

Its cinematic stylishness and its attention to modern-day anxiety raise it to something out of the ordinary.

The ending takes an unfortunate detour that stretches the running time, but this is still quality Pixar work.

It's a good movie not because it says the right things but because it says those things well. [18 Sept 1992, p.C3]

As the documentary shows, while it lasted, it was really something.

This is bad, borderline garbage, but disturbing, too, in that it’s just the kind of fake-clever awfulness that might be cinema’s future.

While the documentary does a credible job of pointing out the magnitude of the problem, it skirts the issue of what can be done about it and by whom.

Sponge on the Run is very much a members-only affair. Then again, three movies and several hundred TV episodes into a 22-year-old franchise, it’s not unreasonable to think the audience for this adventure is pretty well baked into the cake.

Tom O’Connor’s script hits all the right notes, and Dominic Cooke’s direction brings out unspoken subtleties of the characters and their interactions.

It says something about this movie that Redford is at his most compelling playing opposite a nag.

Does nothing to elevate the form — and yet it doesn’t disappoint.

A compact British drama that does more with only three people and a few modest settings than most movies do with computerized bloat and a cast of hundreds.

Strives for an airy, merry amorality, but it never quite achieves liftoff, though at times it comes close.

Frankly, we are left with nothing, except with a movie that insists that we love it — or worse, assumes we will — because its subject is so worthy. Even on that score, that of convincing us of the worthiness of its subject, Maudie falls down.

As suspense thrillers go, “Dangerous Animals” is as uncompromising as it gets. It doesn’t aspire to much, but it’s well-acted and well-written, looks great and full of surprises.

The cast is uniformly good, but it’s Bardem’s sly, harried performance that powers this overlong, and more amusing than funny, comedy.

An audacious film, set in contemporary Marseille.

A breezy, occasionally funny spoof.

Carax, with Pola X, has become a parody of himself with a self-indulgent, overreaching style that many viewers will find a struggle to watch -- provided they can contain their contempt for pretentiousness.

Jodie Foster stars, and it's a pleasure, for once, to see her in something entertaining and mindless.

It’s the kind of observational humor that instills a knowing chuckle and nod of the head, as opposed to an all-out chortle.

In a blind taste test, I couldn't possibly have identified this as a Linklater movie, and he's a filmmaker I generally like. If anything, Bad News Bears shows that Linklater can get in and out of a movie like a cat burglar, without leaving his fingerprints anywhere. OK, he's proven it. He need never do that again.

This is the best disappointing movie you will see all year.

You can view the film narrowly as commentary on the soul-crushing fury of being HIV positive, or take a few steps back and see Araki's film in a more universal sense as the disintegration of human values caused by an obsessive culturewide drive for self-satisfaction and indifference to others. The Living End is much more than a time capsule, thanks to Araki's daring as a filmmaker.

Story pitches are made. Coke is snorted. There is lesbian sex. Fellatio. An earthquake. A murder. Just another day in Hollywood.

White structures the documentary as an absorbing adventure tale, and that it is.

In one sense it's aged surprisingly little -- the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same -- but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that's a good thing.

The idea is intriguing - an inflatable sex doll comes alive and experiences the world with wide-eyed innocence - but Hirokazu Kore-eda's "Air Doll" is only partly successful. The film's poignant depiction of human loneliness is undercut by saccharine notes and a drifting tone.

As a runner, the robber is dogged; as a robber, the runner is efficient, explosive and fast.

Entertaining and compelling.

Alan Rudolph's direction is active but unintrusive, highlighting some of the more chilling moments with slow-motion sequences and odd cross-cutting. [19 Apr 1991, p.E1]

The worst kind of avant-garde film, one that hides its lack of commitment to the story, the characters and the genre under cover of being experimental. It mocks form and plays with form but offers nothing in its place, just boredom, emptiness and the oldest metaphor in captivity, about grass coming up through concrete.

The last 15 minutes of “Twisters” are so much fun that they might easily convince viewers that they’ve seen a good movie. So this leaves you with a choice: Is it worth suffering through a boring hour and a so-so half hour, just to see an entertaining opening and a genuinely exciting finish? I know what I’d say (nope), but this is one you’ll have to decide for yourself.

But after two instant classics in “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Encanto” in 2021, “Strange World,” while pleasing, is a bit of a step down for Walt Disney Animation.

Dan in Real Life fires on so many circuits that at times it's actually shocking how good it is.

So comically fertile and yet so grounded in the reality of its characters that it's really a kind of marvel.

Oh, Canada is about not so much Fife’s artistic growth as his journey to hermetically sealed narcissism.

Clearly, great fun.

Written and directed by Riley Stearns, The Art of Self-Defense brings out a particularly skillful performance from Eisenberg, whose job is to harmonize the film’s odd shifts in tone and make something real and heartfelt of the central character’s journey.

An affable comedy (with some serious notes).

A satisfying combination of great songs and strong dramatic performances.

Connects so often and so persuasively that its shortcomings -- the movie goes slack from time to time -- really don't amount to much.

Except for an ending that's so implausible it might have derailed a less solid work, Twelve and Holding is a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of what it's like to be young and confused

Crooklyn is loud and raucous and occasionally cruel. The actors shout their dialogue, the kids trade insults and the movie has the strained, desperate-for-fun anxiety of a TV sitcom. [13 May 1994, p.C1]

The film is implicitly advocating a New Age or holistic perspective, with a dollop of Eastern religion added for good measure. (The title is Sanskrit meaning "wheel of life.")

We still have Kendrick’s performance. We still have the compelling situation. We still have the unusual subject matter. But it’s enmeshed with unreal nonsense.

Drop is the kind of film that separates the real movie lover from the conditional movie lover. It is manipulative, fundamentally ridiculous, obvious, far-fetched, gut-level in its appeal and irresistible. As such, it embodies the true soul of movies.

Together, the two actors build a rapport that goes beyond the dialogue and justifies where the story ultimately goes. Anyway, that’s the paradox in “The Good Nurse,” which potential viewers must sort out for themselves: The performances are worth seeing, but the movie isn’t.

Dawson turns out to be a necessary ingredient, propelling the emotional core of the film forward, while somehow convincing the audience that a smart, attractive woman could find a schlub like Dante desirable.

The movie is alive from beginning to end, and it's a pleasure to see at least one big-name director get out of the prison of his own reputation.

While the film raises simple but deeply puzzling questions about memory and identity, the hit-or-miss search for answers by the subject and assorted experts, family and friends is finally unsatisfying.

Directed by Livermore-raised Josh Cooley, an Oscar-winner for “Toy Story 4,” “Transformers One” is for the inner child, and unapologetically so. And for the adults in the room, you can read it as a pro-union tale as worker bots unite.

The Black Phone has better-than-average acting, an interesting period setting and well-developed characters. But it runs out of story less than halfway through, forcing the filmmakers to repeat the same kinds of actions, over and over, in order to stretch it to feature length.

Coco Chanel is not the most lovable of heroines, but it's a strength of the film that director Anne Fontaine allows Tautou to make Coco as cold and ungiving as she does.

Perhaps no director has so thoroughly explored the American concept of police work, prosecution and legal justice, and Find Me Guilty is a film that brings the 81-year-old filmmaker thematically full circle, back to his starting point, 1957's "12 Angry Men."

It's a career high mark for Bacon, whose flashy smirk and stifled grimaces flesh out a character both scary and pathetic in this intimate, nostalgic film that delves into the art of the hustle.

The only clear message to emerge here is that Kruger is a world-class talent.

Placing style above coherence, Seven glosses over plot points and shows a weakness for cheap, lurid effects.

There are some compelling performance moments, and it's sad to watch these talented and basically nice people drift apart. But overall the film seems like a collection of bits and pieces, and it's hard to see how it could have much resonance for non-fans.

Surprisingly, Potter takes what seemed like a recipe for embarrassment and excess and delivers a film that's sweet and understated and devoid of diva posturing.

Phoenix is the perfect instrument for Aster’s bleak and self-destructive view of humanity. Consider “Eddington” a warning.