For Pérez Biscayart, it’s the sound equivalent of a masterful silent-film performance, and for Perelman, it’s the welcome return of an important filmmaker.

Although this leisurely tale of an aged French sculptor offers a few other small pleasures, in the end it lacks heft.

The flashy skate-level camera techniques that conceal the actors' inadequacies on ice can't compare with a full-figure view of a championship-quality long program. An ''undoable'' medal-winning move that is pivotal to the plot is never clearly explained or depicted. And movie histrionics can't approximate the drama of real competition. [27 March 1992, p.D7]

Fly to the Moon is absolutely awful. The only interesting thing about it is how long it takes for a viewer to figure out how bad it really is.

When Costner is good, as he is here, his acting has a purity to it, an unspoken moral dimension. Underneath the sensitive, stoic facade is a loquacious, intellectually alert actor with an encyclopedic understanding of the film tradition he occupies: the rugged, humble movie hero, embodied by the likes of Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda.

Coming now, today, In Time is not just satisfying. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's important, because that would overstate it, but it certainly feels like part of the national conversation. It arrives in theaters at a time when people are camped out in New York saying the same things as the people in the movie. It's weird the way films often anticipate the near future.

The attempt is to create a reality wide enough to accommodate the extremes of absurdity and hard political truth, but the pieces never cohere, and so we end up with a rattling bag of disparate elements.

It isn't elegiac, but enraged. It doesn't look back with sorrow, but forward in dread. And it's made with a clear intention - to stop the Iraq war.

An Irish drama that's a lot more sly and a lot less straightforward than it appears on the surface.

Surprisingly tepid and soapy.

An utter debacle.

These guys are very normal off stage, making them easy to like and not very exciting to watch.

At its best, the film uses fishing as a window into the internment experience. At its worst, it uses the internment story as the backdrop for a documentary on trout fishing.

The role of Arielle was originally supposed to go to Diane Kruger, whose tough-minded realism would have been interesting here. But Marlohe, earthier yet more ethereal, is ideal.

If the formula seems a little tired, it still has more sophistication and pizzazz than most action films.

Submission is not a bad film — it just feels like an early draft.

There may be better examples of cinematic art in 2013, but for a good time at the movies, it's hard to imagine anything beating this action extravaganza, from director Roland Emmerich, about a very Obama-like president.

A modestly entertaining martial arts melodrama with impressively staged fight sequences that help compensate for a stale plot and some less-than-stellar acting.

By grounding everything that went before in an earthy realism, Hardwicke earns the elevation of the nativity sequence, one of the more beautiful scenes in this year's cinema.

Throughout the film, we always feel ahead — way ahead — of the narrator, even if the movie does contain a certain sense of dread for Trump detractors, as the inevitability of the election draws closer.

Unfortunately, the thin story feels terribly stretched and often doesn’t make sense.

Isn't all bad. It isn't good, either, but it's better than it deserves to be, and if one sits and watches, the laughs do come, a few.

A first-rate thriller about arrogance at the top.

This is an unabashedly pro-democracy message movie. Judged strictly as drama, it's pretty routine.

A bad film with a great star and some truly amazing action sequences.

What sells this movie is the realistic attention to detail and the bravura direction of Fabrice Du Welz, who draws a gut-wrenching performance from Lucas, who cries, squeals and screams with the best of them.

The strength is in the performances and visual detail. The flaws are mostly in the script, which asks the youngest cast member to pull off a near-impossible transformation.

My Old Lady is affecting, even if many of the revelations and high-voltage speeches occur at predictable moments. But if you can look past this formulaic side, it's a movie worth seeing.

In his feature director debut, Grant Singer (previously a music video director who’s worked with artists from Sam Smith to Skrillex) adopts a measured pace that lends the movie a somber, mysterious aura. But he breaks that up with smart, psychologically insightful cutting.

That the would-be buddies are played by Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt ensures enough star power to keep things moving even during the sluggish early scenes that set up their relationship.

A film one watches at an emotional remove, but from that distance there are sights and moments to appreciate.

The movie is really a sexy, emotionally true portrait of a handful of people wrestling with their impulses and trying to find their way to happiness.

The picture, directed by Rick Famuyiwa, becomes a juggling act, contrasting the efforts of the three grown-up buddies to get to a wedding on time, with flashbacks of their youth.

It's middling Allen, which means that fans won't be sorry to see it, while everyone else can wait until the next "Bullets Over Broadway."

A very smart, very shrewd movie, and the smartest, shrewdest thing about it is the way it masquerades as just a fluffy comedy, a diversion, a trifle.

Don't Tell often has the eerie feel of a Hitchcock film -- "Vertigo" in particular -- where you're not always sure if what you're seeing is really happening.

Does a number of sly things.

This is familiar territory for writer-director Nancy Meyers, Hollywood's queen of the chick flick. Her latest has charming moments and a hopeful message for despondent singles, but it lacks the emotional resonance of Meyers' "Something's Gotta Give" and the zaniness of "What Women Want."

A letdown despite its intriguing premise.

It can be charmingly elliptical at first (and even again toward end, when things get momentarily, gleefully weird), but the film gradually loses its power as Parthenope’s life becomes a kind of pointless merry-go-round showcasing new permutations of her seductive beauty.

Black Snake Moan' is a trip to that unfamiliar territory well worth tagging along on.

A notable, worthwhile picture.

Worth seeing just to admire how Argentine writer-director Marcos Carnevale avoids so much as a whiff of condescension.

The emotion the Zucheros are trying to express and illustrate here is a deep, fathomless, infinite loneliness, and here and there, but more than once or twice, they hit their target.

Blackhat is pretty much nonsense, which Mann directs with such misplaced energy and with such little natural instinct for the material that, for most of the running time, the movie’s problems seem entirely his fault.

The story, based on a novel by Victor Headley, is pointless and occasionally ridiculous. And the movie is hardly helped by a protagonist that we’re expected to care about, even as he does an unending series of colossally stupid, violent and self-destructive things.

Doesn't transcend the yawner template of coming-out films.

From the start, we can see where this is headed: a big fat power struggle, with Omar at the eye of the storm. But the storm is more of a drizzle than an apocalyptic downpour, just one snippy conversation after another in languorous settings.

You won't see another film like Fay Grim this year, and we should give Hartley credit for making it work on his own terms.

So restrained that viewers may start to yearn for a bogeyman to burst from the closet.

Surprisingly robust.

Amateur in the true sense of the word -- plainly, proudly homemade.

Really is just an excuse to string together some silly fake-movie clips.

Breaks the formula for teen romances. Martin Short, as the vain and zany drama teacher, does not disappoint.

Duller than first version.

By the end, “Coming 2 America” has us. It’s strange, these movies that create a warm feeling. It’s hard to say why or how. But when Murphy sits on the throne watching a bad lounge singer (also played by Murphy) perform “We Are Family,” it feels like the summation of the three decades of virtuosic silliness that Murphy has brought to the screen, and of all that has meant to us.

Insidious: Chapter 3 is simply not scary. Not a bit, not a whit. Except that the audience will be terrified of the next stabbing of their eardrums, at generally predictable intervals.

The movie's flaw is impossible to ignore, turning on the most tired of romantic comedy conventions: Someone knows something, and all that person has to do is say it, and the movie is over and everything's great.

A pleasant diversion starring the always amiable Nick Frost, with Chris O'Dowd relishing his role as a slimeball.

Gridiron Gang gives you a lot more to think about during the ride home.

From scene to scene, the tone shifts from supposed sincerity to arch and amused, until the picture begins to seem like some mad, desperate, scattershot attempt to hold an audience's attention from moment to moment, by any means.

It’s an action and suspense film, and, like Butler’s earlier 2023 flick “Plane,” a good one. Impressive set pieces include a car chase through a small-town bazaar, and a midnight shootout between Tom, outfitted with night-vision goggles, and a helicopter.

To watch Boulevard is to keep circling back, over and over, to the question: Was it merely an actor’s misguided inspiration, to take a repressed character and turn him into a grievously depressed one? Or was Williams simply unable to do it any other way?

The measure of this kind of movie is its seductiveness, not its logic, nor the ways in which it exploits the supernatural angle, and The Lake House is seductive.

Despite a super-dark noir plot and respectable cast, Deadfall is a thriller that never quite delivers on its promise.

Overacting and silly lines sometimes distract, and the latter sound sillier in Branagh’s forced French accent (“Ah love, it is not safe”). Still, Branagh’s direction and screenwriter Michael Green, who also scripted “Orient,” add diversity and convincing emotions to the mystery mechanics.

Some of the middle section of Bean sags, but most of the film zips along with a series of comic setups, played like skits, that emphasize Bean's klutziness, his feeble mentality, his childlike, me-too urges.

Light and innocuous.

Acted with almost maniacal force by Jaffrey, Mary is at once fascinating and despicable.

The result is a mishmash that is sometimes moving, sometimes absurd and most of the time just oddly off balance.

Although it holds some of the same contrivances as the original, Hulu’s new remake also maintains tension and features a masterful performance, this time by Mary Elizabeth Winstead as the mother.

Eternals is like a movie about a horse race that concentrates all its attention on characters that neither own a horse nor like to gamble.

This flick is a summer diversion, pure and simple, so don’t expect a deep message.

So The United States vs. Billie Holiday is a misfire, and what a shame, because Andra Day had it in her to be great in this. The movie just didn’t let her bring it out.

If The Next Three Days were just a little more mindless, it might have been more joyful.

The few bright moments in Housesitter are supplied by Martin, who works himself into a sweat trying to make this movie work -- he even squeezes laughs out of a wedding reception scene, when he warbles an Irish melody to his dad -- and by Moffat and Harris, who give their Norman Rockwell stick figures a bumbling, simple charm. [12 June 1992, p.D1]

It's a ho-hum-er, almost a complete bummer. [6 Jan 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

G20 is standard-issue improbable action that’s lifted by EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) award winner Davis, who makes everything better, and the Mexican-born Riggen’s direction.

Abigail Breslin (“Little Miss Sunshine”) plays the infected daughter. Her performance seems unsettled at first, but it doesn’t take long for Breslin to sink into Maggie’s (rotting) skin, aided by some fine makeup work. Her most effective moments come when the teen faces the inescapability of her death.

Fabrice Luchini is one of the delights of world cinema, and in The Women on the 6th Floor he finds a role ideally suited to his odd mix of fussiness and sensitivity.

The first half of My Worst Nightmare contains some of the best comedy and the biggest laughs of the season, and the second half ... eh.

If studios insist on remaking classic horror films, this is definitely the way to do it.

The by-the-numbers film is not hard to sit through and won’t offend anybody, but its lofty, worthwhile message doesn’t feel earned.

One doesn’t expect that kind of intensity in a sedate British murder mystery, but Pfeiffer brings it. On her own, she helps Branagh make the case for his remake over the original.

Has a lighter spirit than its predecessor, but it arrives at the same warm and touching place.

A wonderful movie, sincere and inspired, with four terrific performances and a story that doesn't let up. The picture has the gentle, nourishing quality of a fairy tale that you want to believe, and the unsoftened impact of gut-level entertainment. [13 July 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

Although the script takes some unfortunate shortcuts, “Eleanor the Great” is a moving study of grief, loneliness and aging. But each of the main characters has something missing in their lives, a hole to fill inside of them, and Johansson gives her actors the space to explore.

A passable follow-up - more ludicrous, less taut, still creepy - that picks up exactly where the original left off.

An ill-conceived comedy.

Huppert shows everything to us, and it's fascinating.

An intelligent literary mystery story that holds interest and is intermittently affecting, but it never soars.

The strained romantic plot is a slow fizzle.

Not a routine cut-and-paste horror but a full-fledged revenge fantasy -- and a completely satisfying one.

Competent but uninspired thriller.

Serendipity is a throwback to a more innocent era in American life, 25 days ago.

Jumbled and stupid plot, bad acting and a few predictable gags that fall flat.

The spectacular scenery and compelling message counterbalance the somewhat plodding pace and wooden performances.

As a movie, Charlie’s Angels has serious problems, but the new Angels trio is promising and shows there’s life yet in the old formula. There’s something going on here. It’s just not quite there yet.