Unwittingly, Lynch/Oz ends up demonstrating the flimsiness of comparison as a tool of film criticism.

A giddy mockumentary.

Original, winning entertainment, and well executed. No pun intended.

Frehling is excellent as a rigid do-gooder who thinks he understands everything and then comes up against crimes that shake his sense of the universe. His fresh fierceness is nicely balanced by Voss, who says little but radiates wisdom.

Delightfully comic - and the funniest moments are rich in meaning - A Man of No Importance is laced with memorable scenes.

There are six standard types of violence in film these days: Tarantino, comic book, Scorsese, martial arts, horror and stupid. For stupid, look no further than Centurion.

For the most part, good food and good cheer are the order of the day here, and the chatty, old-school Ziggy serves as a reliable — and touching — tour guide.

If you ever liked Madonna, this concert film will remind why you weren’t wrong. Madame X is somewhere between a success and a triumph.

Good story, great characters, a setting plucked from history - and a multiracial, multigenerational ensemble cast stacked with fabulous actresses. But the thing that makes The Help such a rousing crowd-pleaser is its generous helping of baked goods.

Both a memoir and a history lesson, the film looks back on their late father - a crusading civil rights lawyer who later defended a host of unsavory characters - with a combination of love, admiration and bafflement for the man he was and the career he forged.

As the camera follows four campers in a Portland, Ore., rock school for girls, the result is less a journey than a collage of random thoughts, circumstances and events. There's plenty of telling, but not enough showing.

It’s colorful and imaginative, but other than Lu, the characters don’t have much depth. Emotional, that is, not oceanographic.

Painfully sincere but tired.

There are “gotcha” jolts that definitely got me, but for each of those, there must be a half-dozen scares telegraphed in very large letters. I think Annabelle: Creation is suffering from sequelitis.

A similar blend of comedy and a grumbling skepticism about the essential goodness of human beings makes Ira & Abby feel, at times, like one of those great stage comedies of yesteryear transferred to the screen.

People take comedy for granted, but to step back and think about Stuck on You is to be impressed by the invention and sheer exuberance of the picture, which isn't great but sure is enjoyable.

The human connection the two characters make in this film would be understandable to anyone in any century, past or future. For that reason, there’s a very good chance here that Hall, Penn and Johnson have made more than a good movie with “Daddio.” They may have made a classic.

Forestier's performance is a tour de force of comic acting, maintaining astonishing alertness and energy from shot to shot and scene to scene.

By showing so many examples of his art, the film attests to Giger’s real gift for startling images. But it’s hard not to see, in addition, elements of repetitive adolescent provocation.

A wildly funny sex farce that smartly combines big-time silliness with sophisticated wit.

At its best, the movie is a collection of entertaining memories from a group of gutsy women.

A triumph for Judd and the director.

While trying to establish whether a conspiracy took place, the film attempts to solve the enigma that was Lee Harvey Oswald.

Kazan's writing in Dream Lover is spare and evocative, but here in his first film he also makes a case for himself as a talented director. It's hard ever to feel safe during Dream Love'; even during stretches when nothing bad happens you just know something will. Individual moments may be clear, yet everything in the film has an uneasy ambiguity hanging over it. Characters seem to connect, but they don't quite. [5 May 1994, p.E4]

Ellis’ story could have used a little fleshing out, no pun intended. Instead, a terrific cast is left floundering in the dark, searching for the film’s human dimension. Cursed, indeed.

It's really just old- fashioned melodrama, dressed up with lustrous cinematography and a few nods to history.

The overall mood is out-and-out misty-eyed, a feeling emphasized by the movie’s piano score. Ramen Shop has some flaws — the movie jumps jarringly back and forth in time — but voluptuous closeups of delightful dishes like chilli crab make up for a lot.

Using movie clips, animation and news footage, Ascher creates his own alternate universe in A Glitch in the Matrix and explores phenomena such as the Mandela Effect, a real-life wonder in which masses of unconnected people claim to “remember” something that is simply not true.

The only inspired part of “Abigail” is the performance of Weir, a 14-year-old Irish actress best known as the title character in Netflix’s “Matilda the Musical.” She brings verve and joy to her vampire ballerina, dancing circles around the rest of the cast.

Destroyer makes “Manchester By the Sea” seem like an afternoon party with clowns and balloon animals. But if there’s a reason to see Destroyer, it’s for Kidman’s performance. It’s to take that journey with her.

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

So wonderfully odd, even spiritual, that audiences won't be able to do anything but smile.

Slick, overly deliberate and brimming with hammy performances...directed by Rob Reiner with glistening, uninspired competence. [11 Dec 1992]

A merry, wistful, tear-and-a-smile romp about the Holocaust, of all things.

A little picture -- the names of the entire cast would fit on half a sheet of paper -- but it’s more heartfelt than movies with 50 times the budget.

Even the surprise ending arrives with a thud and makes us wonder why Shyamalan didn't try something new instead of recycling his "Sixth Sense" recipe.

This is a heartfelt piece, and while passion alone can't carry a movie, it sure helps. Ararat is uneven because Egoyan couldn't tell it smoothly.

It's almost a great movie. For half of its running time, Anderson maintains a distinct and arresting tone of vague absurdity, and then he loses control and the film begins to dip into silliness. Individual scenes become labored. Yet even at its worst, The Life Aquatic is always interesting -- there's really nothing else like it.

There's no other film like it. It's embarrassingly frank and self-revealing, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes both.

Though Craven satirizes horror cliches, he also knows how to cut through them and do new things. Throughout, the action comes unexpectedly and quickly.

What a waste.

As entertainment, On Chesil Beach isn’t remotely satisfying, but it does deserve credit for being weird.

It's a weighty and visually interesting movie that unfortunately doesn't have a strong message beyond its overwhelming bleakness.

Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.

Warriors of the Rainbow is Taiwan's "Braveheart," with a nod to "The Last of the Mohicans."

But the film written, directed and starring stand-up comic Hitoshi Matsumoto has, like most superheroes, a tragic flaw: It isn't funny.

A suspense thriller of rare intelligence.

It’s a line that all horror movies must walk. The characters must be stupid enough to get themselves into trouble, but not so stupid that we don’t start thinking of them in Darwinian terms. Somehow, “Cuckoo” stays on the right side of that line, but barely.

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

A rare reminder from movies that the grand emotions are not only for the young and the middle-aged. They're the sweetness and torment of life until the last light goes out.

Both Mastrantonio and Harris are terrific, never missing a beat, always convincing, even when playing the most extreme emotions. [9 Aug 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

The movie has finesse, and the actors have charm, but there are no surprises.

The Man Without a Face saves itself from sugary sweetness by presenting the friendship of McLeod and Chuck against a harsh small-town background. The screenplay takes off in some strong directions, while Gibson, in his first film as a director, keeps it honest all the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.E1]

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film.

This film doesn’t know exactly what it wants to say.

A full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence. It is both things, effectively and sincerely.

Unfortunately, despite its ready-made storyline and some likable performances, the curiously inert A Million Miles Away never achieves liftoff, even as its hero does.

Prada just feels authentic, from its glossy look to the specific and sometimes curious behavior of the secondary and tertiary characters. To watch it is like being entertained while getting an anthropological crash course.

The mind-numbingly predictable, but admittedly watchable Hello I Must Be Going needed less whine and more surprise.

Plummer gives her strangest, most uninhibited screen performance to date. Playing Eunice, a wildly psychotic killer with a working-class British accent and a mysterious past, Plummer draws a streak of white-hot rage across the screen.

It does for hit men what "Up in the Air" did for frequent-flying corporate terminators, minus the comic tang.

May be Disney's most pointedly feminist effort since "Mulan."

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.

It's probably pointless to complain when a movie sets out to be stupid and actually is. (And the people who came up with a couple of these ideas think male models are dumb.)

It's extremely funny, one of the funniest films of 2012, with a particularly winning style - far-fetched, extreme and nonstop.

The final 20 minutes are the strongest, when Harmon comes to some realizations about his behavior. Unless you’re the biggest of fans, you may find yourself wishing that the film had reached this point earlier.

A playful, sexy piece of work -- just what the Bard might have conjured up for a movie adaptation of his beloved spring-fever comedy.

[Lange's] allure is staggering. If you've never seen her in this film - if you've never seen the young Jessica Lange, except in "Tootsie" - prepare to pick your jaw up off the floor.

Clearly, Peirce's motives are pure. She's not using the "stop-loss" issue as a wedge to make the government or the administration look bad. She's using it to dramatize an injustice and to advocate on behalf of the soldiers.

Fortunately, director Thor Freudenthal (“Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) eventually finds some truth, thanks to an exceptional cast headlined by two rising dynamic young actors, Charlie Plummer and Taylor Russell.

André Øvredal's dry horror-comedy Trollhunter is successful on multiple levels, with a brisk pace, excellent location work and a strong lead performance by Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen.

The new version excels because it makes its teenage protagonist deeper and more mature — and its monsters extra frightening.

Falls victim to some surfing cliches.

Even when the movie is bad -- it's addictively so.

A courtroom drama with a compelling story and something peculiar about it, too: For most of its running time, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of a rooting interest. The audience isn't quite sure who it's for or against.

The results are mixed. Many of the films are too long, and even worse, the collection as a whole doesn't come to grips with the human scale of the tragedy.

Stolen owes its persuasiveness less to its substance than to the visual craft of Dreyfus and her celebrated cinematographer, Albert Maysles. In telling the story of an unsolved crime, they use every trick available to awaken and prolong suspense before a payoff that never comes.

Big Miracle is not the most sophisticated adventure film, but compared with most family movies, it's practically something out of Noel Coward.

The film is likely to attract new readers to the book — and remind longtime fans why they were attracted to the writings in the first place.

A half hour before the finish, Margaret loses altitude and starts looking for a place, any place, to land. Instead it crashes, in slow motion. But up until then, Margaret is committed and unusual.

We’re supposed to be taking a fun thrill ride here, with a little existentialism to boot, but Copshop can’t escape its arrested development.

The surprise is that Kindergarten Cop is delightful and entertaining, a cop movie with suspense, no blood and a lot of genuine warmth. The script is intelligent and plays to the unique strengths of Schwarzenegger as a star. [21 Dec 1990, p.E1]

There's an Impressionistic feeling to all this, and sometimes it plays like a travelogue -- Bush is trying to do an awful lot at once. But the material is so compelling that we keep watching.

Comes closer than any other recent animated film to the Looney Tunes ideal. Just as Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny entertained without either condescending to kids or lobbing adult jokes over their heads.

In many ways a beautiful movie, and yet in other ways it’s not very good at all. As an achievement in stop-motion animation, it’s stunning — seamless and detailed, so perfectly done that it’s easy to forget that you’re witnessing skill and not magic.

A lot of what takes place in Roadie feels overly familiar, and the film could have been a wallow in pathos except for the performances, especially that of Eldard.

It’s impressive how many hot button issues Ansari, making his directorial debut, packs into 98 minutes, especially while keeping the laughs coming.

Aniara has an intriguing premise, and it’s even fascinating at times, but despite an excellent production design, it never gets off the ground even as it speeds through the cosmos. The characters are not fully formed, so we’re not invested in their futures.

He Named Me Malala gets good marks as a laudatory piece about a genuinely valiant young woman, but it could use a modest dose of objectivity.

Between the talking heads, Rothstein also uses kinetic imagery and spry cutting to keep the potentially eye-glazing subject matter as gripping as a true crime mystery, which it kind of was.

Frenetically paced but mostly pointless computer-animated film that will satisfy children but may give parents a headache.

Wright is perfect, and Edee is an interesting character for her to play, but it’s fair to say that when Bichir first appears he livens up the film considerably. They work well together, and there is an economy of words between the characters that tests both actors’ ability to communicate visually.

At its best, Gordon's work is bracing and pointed, though it's not for the queasy.

Straddles the line between dark comedy and deep drama.

That Sunshine Cleaning was made by women is best revealed in the filmmakers' willingness to let the story breathe on its own terms, without bringing in anything extraneous, unwelcome and exciting.

A gentle fable, full of wit and charm.

Remembering Gene Wilder is a pleasant retro journey for fans and an efficient introduction to a comic genius for cineasts who might not know his work. It could have been so much more.

A thoroughly entertaining and hilarious look at a board game that's an occasional amusement for some -- and a serious obsession (or disturbing addiction) for others.