A film of real beauty, which is surprising, since it's not a movie of beautiful sentiments or settings.

It's one of those self-consciously cute pictures, about as hard to take as a person who stands in front of a mirror and preens all day. [23 Mar 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

The narratively challenged film seems conflicted: It critiques our obsession with models and beauty and style, even as it obsesses about those very same things. There is a lot of flash, but little substance.

Far too precious and eager to please to really deserve its self-description as a fairy tale.

So there you have it, a so-so movie with a lot of good parts. In truth, The Last Full Measure has more good parts than most better movies, but everything connecting those parts feels rote, sometimes ham-fisted.

Let's start by admitting three things: that Contraband is a ridiculous movie, that it wasn't meant to be a ridiculous movie, and that it's an enjoyable movie. One of the things that makes it enjoyable is that it's so ridiculous.

Never dull and never loses its audience, but there is, inevitably, a certain sameness to the scenes, with Garfield spending a lot of time just sitting there with a goofy smile on his face.

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.

It's the cinematic equivalent of an all-dessert meal: After the initial jolt, the lack of any real nourishment is apparent, and it becomes a struggle to stay awake.

The film is always a little bit at a distance, almost involving, always good enough to make us root for it, but rarely better than average.

I would gladly see the movie again, if just to see Smith do her trademark grumpy English thing.

A genuine winner in the old-fashioned family entertainment genre.

Though the script and storytelling could have used more polish, Lapica's honesty provides the lasting impression.

The multiple-story-line family drama is too cliche-ridden to be considered a great movie. But it's still a very good one, filled with excellent performances, entertaining writing and a final few scenes that are quite moving - even if you can see most of them coming at the end of the first act.

It's a meandering and rather aimless movie that would be considered trite if made by another filmmaker, and yet it has such a family resemblance to other, better Woody Allen movies that it's easy to stick with it and enjoy it.

The comedy never really takes off because it's phony.

How to Be Single is over a half hour before it’s over.

A sappy, muddled production that misses the jarring tone of the autobiographical book by Susanna Kaysen on which it is based.

Much of Astronaut comes off as tedious and self-amused, but the musical vignettes are fun.

The Net is a scary film that could have been terrifying but for something slightly earnest and plodding in director Irwin Winkler's attack.

Action in an action comedy is supposed to be funny, too, as Jackie Chan well knows. The refitting of the crashed plane is so tedious we feel as if we're doing the work ourselves.

The Baxter is just an OK movie, but Showalter's performance is the gem to take from it.

This oddball story, written and directed by Anders Thomas Jen sen, whom Dogme followers might remember from his screenplay for the 1999 hit "Mifune," is more than a one-joke concept. Its characters are sometimes cruel, sometimes sweet, but always recognizably human.

A little more character dimension would have made these between-the-sheet sessions a lot more charged.

Mighty Joe Young is a mighty fun movie. The trick? They didn't try to out-monster those bloated King Kong and Godzilla franchises. But it's still a hoot of an adventure about an overgrown ape having trouble adjusting to life in California.

By the end, I was adding my own internal "Deadwood"-style profanities to McShane's clean dialogue. "For the sake of the (God-@#$%) kingdom, cut it (the @#$%) down!" Movies about mile-high beanstalks shouldn't require additional audience imagination.

You can get away with almost anything in a farce except failing to be funny, and that's what kills Death at a Funeral.

A movie for science fiction fans who wish every minute of “Star Wars” was the cantina scene.

The film may work best as a supplement to the underwhelming three-hour-plus extravaganza broadcast in February to celebrate “SNL’s” 40th anniversary.

In the early going "Wild Bill" looks interesting -- an audacious wallow in violence and Western legend. Then 20 minutes in, writer-director Walter Hill puts his cards on the table. It's a dead man's hand.

Mostly meets expectations.

Even the interesting parts of A Lego Brickumentary aren’t that interesting, but are rather more like the best thing you might hear while being cornered by the most boring person at a party.

The effort behind Bird Box was to make something better than a standard horror movie, but the result is dull and half-hearted. It’s not serious enough or important enough to transcend the horror genre, but neither is it visceral enough to hold up as a regulation horror movie.

This is compelling stuff, but Lilien is less successful in trying to link Pale Male's story to his own.

Black comedies are rare enough. Birthday Girl is a member of an even rarer species, the black romantic comedy.

A superficial diversion.

Captures the effervescence and playfulness of Johnson's novel, even as it attempts to shoehorn a tangle of characters and situations.

The real casting disaster is Mulroney. His blandness in the role makes it impossible to believe two beautiful women would fight over him.

An inspirational and cautionary film.

Mamma Mia! is fun, the music's terrific and the cast is appealing.

Though it is funny - at times, laugh-out-loud funny - this comedy is by and for adults.

Violent, gritty and probably too intense for very young children, but for anybody between the ages, say, of 10 and 10, it's certain to be a crowd pleaser with fascinating dark tones and menacing undercurrents that are quite a contrast from Saturday cartoon fare. [30 Mar 1990, p.E1]

Not the usual action movie. It's too odd for that. Based on a true story, it has the weirdness of real life, which is good. But also like real life, it has that funny way of not making much sense or being all that enjoyable.

About one idea short of being an excellent teenage romance. As it stands it's a pleasing but routine effort.

It’s slow getting off the ground, and never completely achieves flight, at least not in the sense of transport. It remains a series of sequences, some terrific and some less so, but at least the movie keeps finding new ways for people to fall off a building while on fire. So there’s that.

The movie has a sweetness and innocence that makes it near perfect entertainment for its target audience.

John Lennon once said that because he was an artist, if you gave him a tuba, he could get something out of it. The Face of Love presents us with Annette Bening and Ed Harris playing the tuba. They get something out of it - they get everything there is to get and more - but it's not enough.

Many of the individual scenes are compelling, with a gritty tension that recalls "The Wire" and other good television. But too many of the attempts at "The Sopranos"-style comic drama fail.

A strange film, because it seems designed specifically for extremely old moviegoers to see with their great-great-grandchildren.

Ting’s conceptually solid film is briskly paced, and its heart is in the right place. With a more fine-tuned screenplay, it could have been better than a serviceable movie.

Noe isn't a graceful filmmaker. He wants to traumatize his audience, barnstorm us, make us pay in anxiety and sweat and scorched nerves for the ugly truths he wants us to swallow.

Whatever your religious affiliation, you will come away thinking that if all this did actually happen, it probably happened something like this.

The fight scenes are lackluster and the plot is needlessly complicated. If you're making an action film that centers on fast cars and fast women, it's usually best to keep the rest of the story simple.

There’s a mystery at the heart of The Song of Names, but it isn’t much of a mystery, and once it’s solved, the movie loses what little interest it has. Though not exactly a Holocaust drama, the film is one in which the Holocaust figures tangentially, but crucially. Yet the movie’s overall effect is strangely inert.

Unfortunately, we've seen this before.

Glitters, but it's not pure gold.

Austin Powers sounded like a silly idea, but it turns out to be one of the best comedies of the year.

Goes Hitchcock one better by imagining what it would be like if the master had the advantage of digital technology.

North American viewers will have one advantage over their South American brethren — the capacity to be surprised. We knew how “Lincoln” was going to end, but The Liberator is a question mark all the way to the finish.

Don't fault Thirlby, who does as much as she can with the material. Krasinski is pretty good, and DeWitt and Ennenga are outstanding. The direction is decent, and the film is handsome. But it's finally frustrating, enigmatic in a way that suggests emptiness more than mystery.

Ari Gold’s The Song of Sway Lake is saturated with a kind of melancholy nostalgia, and viewers who can accept that will find other virtues as well in this flawed film. It’s a story of familial unhappiness passing down through generations, impressive before it begins to lose focus.

The entertaining work by Spacey and Pepper is a good thing because the film has problems, including an utter lack of subtlety.

This film is the equivalent of your third or fourth favorite present on any given holiday. It will entertain a few children in the moment, satisfy a few adults who are barely paying attention, then quickly be forgotten.

Is Poison Ivy a total waste of time? Not really: there's a nice surprise in Barrymore's femme fatale performance, and more than a few pleasures from the gifted Sara Gilbert. Long may they act. [30 May 1992, p.C3]

It's amusing in a trashy sort of way.

Like most films in the genre, it's sweet, sincere and predictable.

Has a wicked sense of humor.

All in all, though, A Five Star Life (which was a hit in Italy) remains a hard film to dislike, and many will savor the fabulous locations where Irene arrives as a "mystery guest."

Finding Amanda is a minor movie for Broderick, but considering where it takes him, it's understandable why he took the role.

It’s a lovely children’s movie, which isn’t to say that every moment of it is splendid and enchanted, because that’s not the case. The experience of watching Dumbo is more like, “This is OK, this is all very pleasant” — and then suddenly, there are tears in your eyes, and not from allergy season.

It’s summer, weed is legal in California now and laughs are a scarce resource. You could do worse than Rough Night.

Cleaner is a good-not-great thriller in the “Die Hard” mold that gets an extra lift from Campbell’s skillful direction and from Ridley, who is slowly but surely showing herself to be a performer of wide range and appeal.

Yes, the two-minute trailers were an atrocious affront. But it turns out the other 91 minutes include thoughtful characters and some clever humor in between the pratfalls.

As presented in "What Just Happened?" the world of Hollywood looks like a very expensive, lethal version of high school, not fun to live in, but lots of fun from a safe distance.

A funny comedy, and sometimes an even better drama.

Tense and compelling, with the added charm of a mischievous spirit.

By playing the boob so brilliantly, Atkinson allows us the catharsis of recognizing our own incompetencies and lack of poise.

The result is a movie that one watches with the sense of pushing it up a hill.

There are just so many ways Carine Roitfeld can say she loves fashion in Mademoiselle C, a somewhat interesting documentary that brings us into the inner workings of a magazine, but harps a bit too much on her ideas of fashion and style.

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.

Unfortunately, “Operation Fortune” doesn’t consist entirely of scenes between Grant and Plaza. There are pockets of genuine life onscreen, followed by long, dull stretches. The movie always gets better, but then it always gets worse. Then gets better again. It’s that kind of experience.

Isn't quite as boring as it sounds, thanks to writer/director Steve Conrad's strong script and decent performances by John C. Reilly and Seann William Scott.

An unbroken flow of sad or nasty incidents.

It helps that most of Creation is about the relationships - Darwin's with his wife and with his daughter. Even if we resist it, even if we don't want to be dragged in, the story of Annie becomes quite moving, almost unbearable.

One of the nicest things about Father of the Bride is that it's not ashamed to be old-fashioned and sweet. It's also not ashamed to get sappy and drippy and gooey, but you have to take the good with the bad. [20 Dec 1991, p.C1]

Look Who's Talking plays baby-picture cute almost beyond the limits of the tolerable, but it has enough spark and intelligence to be a very likable, occasionally riotous romantic comedy. [13 Oct 1989, p.E1]

A Man Called Otto is a formula movie, and no matter the nuances, this formula is not that satisfying.

Me Before You is just a little better than it had to be. It’s not so much better that it escapes being what it is, a sort-of romance, liberally sprinkled with moments of corniness and emotional dishonesty. But ultimately, when it matters, it’s truthful — about the people depicted, and who they are, and what they face.

The Fountain' never comes together. Like the time traveler at its center, it's all over the map.

The three films are watchable but resolutely minor works, though each has something to recommend it.

The fighting in the “Karate Kid” movies and its Netflix series offshoot, “Cobra Kai,” has always been quality, but in “Legends” it’s too quick-cutting and chaotic, hard to follow and over much too quickly.

Enlivens the classic premise of innocent-in-the-city by moving its archetypal characters in unexpected directions.

In addition to being his filthiest, this is his most free-associative movie. In spite of and because of its homemade look, it's also his funniest.

Barbarella is a pure goof -- Vadim called it a kind of sexual Alice in Wonderland of the future -- and Fonda seems to have reveled in every sexy, campy moment.

This film is the closest we're going to get to anything new by Williams, and it's a respectable effort.

It's worth seeing the movie just to observe [Grodin's] delicious blend of unctuous manipulation and anti-Communist sanctimoniousness. [15 May 1987]

Much of it is enjoyable and has the aura of a superior action film, but it collapses into a laughable wreck and ultimately reveals itself as a mild waste of two hours.

A movie with the power to freeze the mind and make anyone watching just want to stagger away mumbling nothing but “This is awful,” over and over, until the pain goes away.