Wise and wondrous.

Although the documentary is ostensibly about these girls and their friendship, training and school life, a healthy chunk of it is a portrait of the two families.

A mostly fabulous, though thinly plotted, ode to the glories of hand-to-hand combat, Euro ’80s music and the good/bad old days of the Cold War.

Vitus is likable enough and definitely suitable entertainment for young people willing to read subtitles.

The film's ambitions are laudable, and it manages to be touching, funny and true to life. It seems ungrateful to ask for anything more.

Movie cliches are supposed to be bad things because they make the movie too predictable. But you know, there are times when they actually work in a film's favor.

You know there is something seriously wrong with Anna Karenina when you start rooting for the train.

Director Curtis Hanson gives the film a slow, European pace and a cold, slick look. The sound-track is made up almost entirely of internal noises -- a buzzing fluorescent bulb, music from a record player. Everything contributes to an ominous atmosphere. [09 Mar 1990, p.E1]

Given the juiciest plotline, Tamblyn goes for it, turning in a hard-boiled performance that's a needed contrast to her co-stars' tendency to go for sweet.

Now that she's past 50, can we all stop holding Michelle Pfeiffer's looks against her and just admit that she's a great actress?

The takeaway on Friends With Benefits is that mores change, styles change, the rules change, and even humor changes. (There are two jokes involving apps, of all things, that are pretty funny.) But people's emotional needs remain the same from era to era.

Embellished but triumphant.

There's poignant drama in this brash, sometimes overstated film, and Muriel's transformation is truly touching.

Satan is optional in The Last Exorcism. This is the rare horror film that would have been entertaining even if nothing scary happened.

Along the way, this funny picture does exactly what a satire should: It irritates everybody. At least it runs that risk.

Ambles along and has a feeling of randomness about it, but, in fact, it's tightly plotted. Every moment, however seemingly haphazard and casually presented, is keyed to the progress of a young man from lost to not so lost.

The Beach Boys is a breezy CliffsNotes version of the band’s ups and downs and cultural relevance and should interest established fans — even if they know it all already — and younger music enthusiasts who are looking for a window in.

The development of the GoPro camera has revolutionized extreme sports photography, but even so, the 3-D images of extreme surfing in Storm Surfers 3D feel groundbreaking.

Not sure we need to know this much about his family life.

Fortunately, there are many concert sequences to keep the film from being more than one awkward silence after another, and onstage the Pixies still sound great. But watching the movie is not as much fun as listening to the old records.

The result is a film of passion and ambition, but one whose success is intermittent at best.

It's the kind of fun and quirky film that you don't see very often in art houses this time of year.

It is an original and might give new parents a valuable reminder: Environment matters in child rearing.

Fans of Les Misérables wouldn't have minded if the movie were different, but better, or just as effective. The screen version demanded some reconception, some vision to make sense of its existence. Instead, we're left with a film that is conscientious in all its particulars and yet strangely and mysteriously dead.

Most of its screenplay is far too vulgar to recount. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy, every word is an obscenity, including "and" and "the."

Enormously satisfying and fun to watch.

Feels like an extended skit stretched and stretched, maybe not to the breaking point, but to the sagging point.

The result is schizophrenic, an uplifting film that's truly depressing, a movie about cruelty that tries to be fluffy.