Summoning silliness Roman Polanski salutes and spoofs satanic thrillers .

In style and tone, Igor seems more like a short from the adult-oriented "Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation."

There’s authenticity in the coach’s belted khaki shorts and in the anguish Hunt brings to a moment where the coach no longer can bear being at her star player’s wake. This moment is the film’s most moving until images of the real coach, and real Caroline Found, accompany the credits.

Clearly, the goal was to make a visually opulent Christmas movie, but these visuals end up sucking up much of the film’s life and spirit. It de-emphasizes the human element, and it makes the movie too long.

How one likes Taxi has everything to do with how one responds to the hapless cop character, played by Jimmy Fallon.

This film by Alison Ellwood feels thin. Anemic. Even shortsighted. Sure, the documentary frames the band’s story with that astounding fact of their first number one record, but beyond that underscored point, “The Go-Go’s” plays like paint by numbers for music documentaries.

The pleasures of Suburbicon are in the moment, and the moments fade before the next moment. There’s no build, just flashes of virtuosity — flashes ultimately in the service of nothing.

The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy.

Like a coffee-table book, it looks inviting and teases you with sumptuous photography but leaves you cold.

Though far from memorable, it's a moderately charming number calculated to radiate a certain Father's Day glow. [17 Jun 1994, p.C3]

A tense, expertly acted Russian film clouded by its intentional ambiguity.

It's too much feel-good movie to take in one sitting, but Stroke of Genius captures just enough detail from the greatest sportsman you've never heard of to keep the historical drama interesting.

The movie is like one of those newfangled Vegas casinos, where what appears to be open sky is really painted ceiling. What's initially dazzling becomes stifling.

Divine cast keeps 'Ya-Ya Sisterhood' from falling flat

At its best, Kajillionaire provides a chance for Rodriguez to play a breezy extrovert and for Wood to play a damaged introvert, and for their characters to alter and deepen through contact with each other. They’re both excellent, but they can’t make the movie any less slow, and July’s relentless whimsicality occasionally sounds some false notes.

Yet there's no getting around one awkward fact. The picture, which turns on a cataclysmic act of terrorism within U.S. borders, was made for a different audience from the one that's about to see it.

The film does have enough visual interest and occasional revelation to allow it to limp with dignity to its conclusion.

Every now and then, an interesting character pops up: Kyra Sedgwick, almost unrecognizable, is quite good as a homeless woman who collects aluminum cans. But these moments are as fleeting as George’s grip on reality.

Fortunately, the people save Operation Dumbo Drop, and it's their determinedly good-natured performances that keep the film moving through several well-paced misadventures.

Compared with other Jane Austen movies, it isn’t much, but compared with other zombie apocalypse movies, it’s an intelligent, literate effort.

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

It's all so cute -- except that Weber wants this to be a thoughtful film.

John Lithgow and Blythe Danner make an offbeat and winning combination, with total belief that they’re in a really good movie. Unfortunately, they’re not.

None of this bears much or any resemblance to the real world, but the violence crunches, the editing snaps and the humorous one-liners pop at well-timed junctures.

What's particularly weird about Godzilla is that for long stretches, all it shows is destruction.

Pleasing but routine British comedy.

In any case, Puzzle ends strangely, in a way that’s not clear what the filmmakers intended or how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional.

Sure, some of the window dressing and plot peculiarities are different this time, but there are no real surprises.

Killing Zoe is another jolly bloodbath about disaffected young people having trouble getting in touch with their feelings, so they go on a spree, killing people, killing everything, tra-la- la-la-la.

It has an affectionate aura, a warmth to it. But at the same time, the audience is left standing on the outside, almost as though watching a home movie: Clearly, this meant something to the people who made it, but it's hard to say what or why.

How could a little story like this get stretched to 124 minutes? It's at least 30 minutes too long.

Solondz should have called this one "So-So Storytelling."

Magic Mike’s Last Dance may not be as dirty a delight as the male stripper series’ first two movies. It has other pleasures, though, especially for fans of screwball comedy, musicals and — yikes — serious dance.

Young Benny has a nice smile, and she and Jack seem like pleasant people, but in the end (and in the beginning and in the middle) it's hard to get worked up about them.

The movie is one big in-joke. It's watchable, but eventually wears you down with its over-the-top cleverness.

Oddly comforting in its inconsistent acting and bad monster makeup.

Strange Days wants to say something about faith and redemption -- about the importance of maintaining one's humanity in a darkened world. That's a worthy intent, but Bigelow is so enamored of high-tech thrills, and so mesmerized by the violence she seeks to condemn, that her efforts at 11th-hour moralizing seem limp and halfhearted.

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.

The film is engaging but also has a certain creaking familiarity.

The story has its moments, and yet there is something about this tale of a serial killer's patterning his crimes on Poe's most gruesome works that doesn't completely satisfy.

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

A schlocky thriller that might appeal to less discriminating members of the mall crowd.

Some of the elements in the film are inexplicable and some are undeveloped, but there are a handful of nicely crafted set pieces.

If this movie ever figured out what it wanted to be when it grows up, it would be a terrific one.

A Journal for Jordan...is such a sweetly, well-intentioned film — one meant to bring a Christmastime lump in the throat in a year that gave us so many lumps of coal — that it feels churlish and downright Scrooge-like to point out its flaws. But the subject matter deserves better than this overlong melodrama spiked with occasional moments of welcome humor and pathos.

Even while we’re watching it, a funny feeling sets in. Lots of things happen in American Made, but it’s as if the frenetic pace is to keep us from thinking about what we’re watching.

An intelligent movie that portrays the mighty without reverence.

An American reissue, with a fresh new soundtrack and all the dialogue dubbed.

The direction, by Ben Nott and Morgan O'Neill, is average, except for the surfing sequences, which are easily as striking as what we see in documentaries about the sport. Another positive is the soundtrack, with amusing high-energy rock tunes of the era.

Ultimately, it is Ronan who transcends the material and almost wills “The Outrun” into something more than the sum of its parts. Her Rona is tempestuous and passionate, and soon discovers that to master herself she must surrender to nature.

The second half of the film is much funnier and warmer than the first, but the movie is still difficult to recommend.

It’s straightforward, it’s pretty funny and it stars two good actors who seem to be trying really hard to leave audiences satisfied.

Miserly on food porn but not on prefab characters, it's well short of a cinematic feast.

False Confessions can be admired for its high style and distinct tone, but if you really want to enjoy it, you’ll have to force yourself.

Booty Call never quite gets tiresome, thanks to the appealing cast and its sexy-goofy spirit. The picture succeeds in finding jokes within jokes.

A workmanlike effort -- a precision piece of filmmaking that provides education for children and a refresher course that adults can benefit from as well.

Harris' impressive channeling of Ludwig is diluted by the decision of screenwriters Stephen Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson to put the copyist front and center, possibly to distinguish their feature from "Immortal Beloved."

As a woman struggling to define her own narrative, Yeo delivers a layered, heartbreaking performance. But she is ultimately ill-served by both the inertness of the story and Chen’s awkward approach to the material in the final half-hour (no spoilers here).

It sounds promising, but it doesn't work. You get the feeling that Soderbergh, so early in his directing career, has exceeded his reach -- that the com- plicated logistics of making a film on location in eastern Europe, compounded with the challenge of bringing to life such a fundamentally lonely and passive figure, had stymied him. [17 Jan. 1992, p.D1]

It's really not bad... It's a genuine vault at greatness that misses the mark -- but survives.

Nothing in the story feels specific to that California city, or emblematic of it.

As an indulgence in creative verbal abuse, the film offers some nasty fun.

Assassination Nation won’t get any points for narrative cohesion or character development, but it’s a timely, visually arresting statement about how pandemonium in this country threatens to become the new norm.

Pure escapist hokum, with action choreography by Sammo Hung, but I sure miss that old-school wire work.

If only the villains were more villainous, the plot more intriguing and the jokes funnier, The Nutcracker and the Four Realms would be one for the ages.

To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.

Within the realm of a mildly good time.

Surprisingly decent.

Some movies are in-between and inoffensive and harm absolutely no one. Prom is one of those.

Set It Off blends action and urban drama effectively, but at times isn't sure which foot to lead with.

Can't be dismissed. Yet something keeps this movie from being completely satisfying: a disconnect between the plot and the point.

For baseball fans, it delivers the high heat. For the non-fan, there may be a little too much inside baseball.

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.

The film, "suggested by" John Irving's novel "A Prayer for Owen Meany," is so unabashedly manipulative -- and implausible -- that even while crying, many viewers may also feel abused.

The main drawbacks of The Burning Plain are its intentionally coy narrative and a zero-hour revelation that's ill-thought-out and generates some pretty chintzy psychobabble. It's the wobbliest element in an admirable, complex and frustrating movie.

Ezra is an opportunity for Bobby Cannavale to show his abilities as a dramatic actor, but his performance is hampered by one thing: He plays an idiot.

The dialogue, heavy on sarcasm and puncturing insults, never captures the World War II period but sounds ridiculously anachronistic.

It has scale, spectacle and a cast of good actors who seem to believe in what they’re doing. But the movie springs to life only in spurts.

May be too convincing for its own good.

Better than a lot of teen comedies.

This is an ambitious movie that didn’t come quite together in the editing room.

No doubt this seeming effortlessness was hard-won. Movies this smooth don't happen by accident.

Oversaturated with sweetness and light.

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

The Virtuoso covers well-worn territory — the assassin story is almost a genre unto itself — and director Nick Stagliano, hampered by a predictable script, can’t bring much new to the game.

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

This 76-minute Western tall tale isn't out-and-out bad, but strictly formulaic and an underachievement from the studio that made the dazzling "Snow White."

Pleasing and occasionally very funny movie that maintains a mild but consistent hold on its audience.

Emotionally, The Brothers Bloom hasn't a trace of detachment or cynicism. Even if you don't quite comprehend the ending (there seem to be 12 of them), you'll still feel the wallop of its consequences.

The uneven, misanthropic French comedy Slack Bay, one of the weirdest period pieces in quite some time, is an odd combination of “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” Monty Python, and “Laurel and Hardy,” with some cannibalism, incest and gender identity issues thrown in.

Leap! is the kind of movie where if you see someone holding a stack of dishes, they will certainly break in the name of a lazy comedic moment.

The attempt to be clever is transparent.

Extremely bleak but occasionally compelling debut feature.

It’s a grand bogus mess passing itself off as a philosophical statement. It has its moments, but they’re few. Often, it’s a beautiful-looking film — but it’s beauty without substance.

Trouble With the Curve has a problem tipping its pitches.

Light on inner conflict and heavy on cliches.

A clever idea, but it's not quite pulled off.

An occasionally charming, sometimes amateurish film .