Overall, it's pretty elementary stuff, along the lines of a Disney Channel TV movie. It's uplifting, and it's in a good cause.

More emphasis on these darker, subterranean elements might have made for a fuller experience, but Infinitely Polar Bear is really all about a father as seen from a child’s perspective. It’s better than a scrapbook item, as in a film made to be appreciated by one family. But it’s not quite a successful movie.

The result is a film that will probably please people already fascinated by Behan but leave everyone else yawning with admiration.

A peculiar little film -- grim and disturbing yet perversely riveting.

Although he misses reaching to the heart of Jim's spirit and his relationship to other people, Spielberg has clearly taken an impressive step forward in shaping his new and adult vision for the screen. [11 Dec 1987]

Director Doug Hamilton was given extraordinary access from the very beginning, so that we see Green Day composer and lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong having some of his initial meetings with Broadway director Michael Mayer, who conceived the show.

The movie's pleasures are acting pleasures, but the movie doesn't compel attention and never seems like more than the frame for a performance.

Watching this film is a little like wallowing in warm surf with soft pop music wafting in the breeze.

A charming, aimless film about the aimless. It plays like a nuanced MTV reality show (an oxymoron, perhaps, but you get the idea).

The film never settles into an assured rhythm, and instead the actors always seem to be pushing, putting the hard sell on an audience that, however distracted by the strenuousness of the sales pitch, still isn't buying.

Like practically every other animated movie meant for mass consumption, the movie gets lost in the chase — the point where story flow is interrupted so that characters get lost as they try to achieve their objective and a manufactured villain is trying to keep them from their goal.

So there’s talent on view here, but in service of a questionable proposition, with the whole thing tiptoeing toward the exploitative. It would be nice to see Mascaro try his hand at less volatile material.

The flat-out awful ending, though, deflates much of the goodwill built up by the rest of the film.

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.

Though it's only 72 minutes, by the time it's over, you'll be ready for it to end. Still, as a glimpse of the Arab world right before the Arab Spring, this documentary may be of some lasting interest.

It's a so-so film with jarring tone changes and a plot that sputters before a predictable ending. But there are moments of inspiration and authenticity.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does the most important thing, the one thing it absolutely had to do. It ends well.

Apocalypse also doesn’t excel in the teen angst department, because the characters are not fleshed out enough. The love triangle is not convincing, and except for Anna and her father, we don’t care a whole lot about what happens to the characters, perhaps because we didn’t get enough time to know them in the beginning.

Sober and dispiriting, tense and morose.

The movie's strength is that it makes us want to know more about Levitch, and we pay attention as the tidbits are dropped -- that he's from a middle-class Jewish family in upstate New York, and that he did time in prison. The movie's flaw is that, having gained our attention, it fails to tell us what we want to know.

A caper comedy with some definite problems.

Baywatch should have been a lot more fun.

Coiro, who directed and co-wrote the film with Ritter, has a firm hold on snappish humor and bookish references, but the whole thing sags under a creaky narrative structure.

Kate looks like most other productions from 87North, the company behind such cinematic cage fights as Atomic Blonde and the John Wick films. Honestly, this could have been called “Nuclear Brunette.” But with heart.

Isn’t a bad film. But it’s a little slow and a little too un-chaotic for its own good.

Seinfeld’s over-the-top, throw-in-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach makes for an uneven film, with some gags inspired, others groan-inducing. But its 1960s period detail and constant parade of familiar faces keeps things rolling.

Tender Bar is a lovely movie — so long as it stays within a half mile radius of the bar. When it drifts from the bar, it collapses. When it goes back to the bar, it lifts a little. But it stays away too often to be called a success.

The saddest thing about Maleficent: Mistress of Evil is that it’s not bad, but typical, that this emptiness — this immersion in mass numbification — is the modern style.

Salinger does what so many documentaries and biopics either fail to do or decline to attempt; it speculates convincingly on the connective tissue between the life and the work of the subject.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed.

Leaves you feeling buoyed, but you must endure a level of overacting more suitable for the soaps.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

A self-conscious attempt at the brass ring.

At its titanium core, M3GAN is a mostly on-the-mark commentary on our tech dependence.

Monotonous.

Headland works hard to reconcile the wild and the tame; if she never quite gets the balance right, ya gotta admire her bold juxtaposition of overdose-resuscitation gags with lessons on self-loathing and bulimia.

Almost Christmas would have been less clunky if it had focused more on the family’s loss of its matriarch, and allowed the comic elements to naturally arise as the characters struggle with the new family dynamic. Instead, we get too many slapstick set pieces and extraneous subplots that bog down the proceedings.

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

Sokolov has cited notable filmmakers like Sergio Leone, Park Chan-wook and Quentin Tarantino as influences, and their inspiration can be seen in the film’s tense standoffs, corridor fights and flashing swordplay, respectively. For all that and some original flourishes, though, this mainly feels like a Radio Silence rehash.

A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.

Kinda cute, occasionally amusing and very, very slow... I just wish [it] had more momentum, more oomph. [9 Oct 1987]

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.

It’s original and idiosyncratic, but Swicord lets herself get away with things another director might not have allowed.

Something to Talk About never goes bad, though it does get corny in places, and it hits a couple of dull patches near the finish. The last half-hour contains two completely different scenes involving two completely different horseback riding contests. Yet despite the braying insistence of the sound track, the audience doesn't care about either one.

One wonders how a master of truly twisted movies — say, a David Lynch or a Brian De Palma — would have approached “The Voyeurs.” One suspects they would have a bit more fun and taken us further down the moral rabbit hole. And the sex would have been better too.

Sizemore ("Heat") and Miller, though saddled with a lot of scientific DNA jargon, are really the only lively people in this dense, gruesome film that stubbornly refuses to break out of its contrived atmosphere.

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

Gutter romance meets metaphysical thriller.

A harmless, aimless, mildly funny and thoroughly predictable comic-romantic piffle.

If there’s one thing interesting about “Spaceman,” it’s how it demonstrates how a great actress’ essence — just the essence, not even the performance — can elevate a nothing part.

Unfortunately Young Guns II is a small blaze and no glory. [01 Aug 1990, p.E1]

Almost gets its right.

The film has a good heart, but its central premise -- that ignorance is an enchanted realm -- is too sentimental.

In the end - and every story needs one - The Words is a decent, ambitious, unoriginal film about a decent, ambitious, unoriginal writer. Both aim for greatness. Both fall short.

Passenger 57 is silly but fun -- an action movie accidentally saved by its glorious stupidity. It will make people shake their heads, roll their eyes and laugh at the screen, but it will keep their attention, because the movie has a crazy kind of life. [06 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Kids will enjoy the wisecracks and foolishness, and the big musical production numbers are toe-tappers -- or would be if the veggies had feet.

The only problem with The Better Angels is that it’s not nimble enough to vary its strategy or to find ways for the character of young Abe (Braydon Denney) to grow over the course of the movie.

Aside from the disgusting parts, Spiral is a fairly decent thriller.

Abandons any pretext of sophistication for gloppy sentimentality, sugary pop songs and bawdy humor -- an approach that works about half the time.

The blinkered greed of the ruling class makes for pretty low-hanging fruit, and “Death of a Unicorn” can come off as smug and exceedingly pleased with itself. Writer/director Alex Scharfman runs out of places for his story to move as the plot fails to thicken.

Swayze's presence crosses the line from curious to bizarre and adds a heavy layer of cheese to Havana Nights.

Breaking Upwards has its amusing and touching moments, but we're left wondering just what we're supposed to make of it all. In the end, the relationship at the film's core is less absorbing than the filmmakers imagine.

Shimizu can't quite pull everything together, trying to get off easy with a bargain-bin twist ending that most of the audience will see coming by the time the pile of corpses reaches double digits.

The high school comedy/drama morphs into a slasher movie, then morphs into a time-traveling/body-switching/world's-about-to-end science fiction story. Everyone on the set must have been chugging Mountain Dew between takes. I suspect that the editor was hooked up to an IV of the beverage.

In the end, Crash lacks a cumulative impact. It takes audiences to new places, but we've all been to similar places, and we walk out knowing no more than we did walking in.

Has a certain B-movie integrity -- a muscular commitment to grabbing the viewer's eye and keeping things moving. It won't win any awards, but it holds interest.

For all this, there is one unalloyed good thing to be said for High Tension. When all is said and done, it really does live up to its title. In every other way it's trash, but that truth-in-advertising aspect is a major weight to throw into the mix.

A supernatural thriller that keeps your attention while failing to hold you in its grip.

This film is mainly for “Night at the Museum” diehards.

The movie doesn't have three brain cells to rub together, but the premise carries it a long way.

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over — not the world, but the movie.

This Statham exercise, like most, is mainly about body count. While that seems to be what his faithful fans want, it just gets kind of tedious for the rest of us.

Hawke is half-assed throughout, showing passion only when he's screaming like a little girl when something scary happens. The visuals have a dingy, unfocused quality, especially in the muddy visual-effects-enhanced backdrops. And some of the plot turns are awful. The vampire "cure" is so stupid, you'll want to walk out of the theater, even if you normally like this kind of movie.

An awkward script, a mannered style and the selection of hill-and-dale Petaluma as a stand-in for an Illinois small town all undermine the film.

The real problem with True Story is contained in its title. The story isn’t too good to be true, but rather too true to be good.

Alas, the main thing that comes through in Heaven Knows What is that a junkie’s life is really, really monotonous.

It's troubling to watch it stray and ramble as first-time director Antonio Banderas struggles to pull disparate elements together.

Leaves an impression, while its specifics fade almost immediately.

Broken English doesn't break any code or offer original insights on the subject. But there's a spark whenever Posey and Poupaud are together.

It makes you wonder when Araki is going to find something else to think about.

Rylance is always good, but director Craig Roberts, to use a golf term, lays up instead of going for the pin. In other words, he plays it safe.

The movie isn’t really bad, just tepid, and it’s partly redeemed by a good lead performance.

Either a go-for-broke action movie or a sick, sick movie for a sick, sick public.

Piccoli gives the film a depth it perhaps doesn't deserve.

There are a lot of little things wrong with Where’d You Go, Bernadette, but one big thing right: Cate Blanchett. She takes the title role and has a party with it. The little things wrong can’t be summed up in a sentence, but they linger in the mind and intrude on the memory of the movie, once the bedazzlement of Blanchett’s performance starts to wear off.

Cliche piles on top of cliche to make a nearly two-hour film feel twice as long, simply because we see so many things coming that we feel as though we’re watching each section twice.

If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie proves that raunchy comedies about horny teens aren't just an American quirk.

Maybe the film works best as nostalgia for Baby Boomers who recall the picture from their childhood.

The story of an elaborate con game and the wholesale betrayal of an innocent man, it's also an unusually cold film that ends with a feeling of hollow soullessness.

For art lovers, though, there is plenty to savor.

Will serve mainly to reassure his countless admirers that Ai has recovered his defiance and ingenuity: a heartening message, but one that may be lost on those still unacquainted with his true case against the Chinese state.

If they handed out a best actor Oscar for documentaries this year, the striking Vikram Gandhi of Kumare would be a shoo-in. His performance of a guru is so spot-on that it fools every one of his new followers into believing he's the real deal, not someone out to prove that their faith in him is nothing more than a sham.

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.")

There are fun distractions, but it's easy to focus on the flaws.

[Harris's] craft is shaky, and the actors she's assembled, with the exception of Johnson and Ebony Jerido as Chantel's best friend, are one step above Amateur Hour. Just Another Girl looks and feels like a first-time effort. [02 Apr 1993, p.C5]

If Hoffa is supposed to be an intimate portrait of the labor leader, it never gets much beyond painting a murky picture of a one-note Johnny who seems more like a stock Jack Nicholson character. [25 Dec 1992]