Disarms with its sincerity and frankness.

Hawke is effectively brooding, which recalls his first collaboration with Almereyda, a 2000 adaptation of “Hamlet” set in modern-day New York City.

Compelling.

A frustrating film that feels cobbled together.

At its best, The Great Hack will alarm you, infuriate you, and — hopefully — activate you.

FernGully: The Last Rainforest has a creeping sweetness that sneaks up on the viewer. This musical animation gets off to a slow start, and it's just as slow in the middle. But by the end, it acquires an emotional impact, and later you really feel as though you've been somewhere new. [10 Apr 1992, p.C1]

More than just a nostalgia trip.

If the dialect is hard to comprehend, that soon becomes part of the joke. It's unlikely that even the British audiences who made Lock, Stock a big hit got it all.

A very effective primer of an underreported problem.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower hurts. It hurts because it depicts the loneliness, anxiety and all-out quivering mess of adolescence in a manner not often seen since John Hughes' heyday.

This adaptation does not allow for the energy and primal healing quality of sexuality. The movie’s grief of tone finds no antidote in the exuberance of this physical connection. The rhapsodic language of Lawrence’s text gives way to the spectacle of grinding between two average-looking mortals.

Beautiful and utterly entrancing documentary.

He was so good at his job he was awarded an honorary knighthood by the British and the Iron Cross II by the Nazis. Talk about playing both sides!

Director Bernard Rose has created a committed, intelligent and fascinating piece of work with no irony about it.

Dramatic, funny, fun, silly, musical, stylish, romantic and redemptive -- a film worth telling your friends and neighbors about.

What the movie lacks -- a big lack, not a fatal lack -- is a compelling character at its center. Everyone in Garden State is fun, skewed, strange and singular.

Bite the Bullet is epic Americana, gorgeously filmed, and a candidate for most underrated film of the 1970s. [10 Jun 2012, p.20]

A narrative documentary thriller that effectively employs many elements of a John le Carré spy novel: international intrigue, arresting twists and turns, and characters with complicated motivations.

The filmmakers succeed with an unexpected ending. It's as fresh as everything in the movie, which turns out to be about so much more than one youngster's resilience.

Everything in Water Lilies is more guarded, more complex and far more interesting than it seems.

Like the best love stories, funny or otherwise, this movie also recognizes that being in love is an education, and that, if people are lucky, they choose the right teacher.

There's some amusement in watching Michael Cera play an unalloyed jerk, but in the main this trifling film shuffles by with a few low-key jokes and observations, building to an abrupt moment of seriousness.

Freaky is, dare we say, soul-sucking?

A droll, deadpan film, deliberately paced and told.

Something of an elegy to modernism.

Teixeira elicits extraordinary performances from his entire cast.

The action comes so fast and furious in Furious 7 that, for all the explosions and overturned cars and missiles fired on downtown Los Angeles, it becomes a dull muddle. Here and there, we get the imaginative and outrageous stunts this series is famous for, but mostly the movie plods along, muscling through without much life or spirit.

Wondering what’s real and what’s just a carefully crafted crock doesn’t make Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood a better experience. It makes it a little pointless and frustrating.