The only inspired part of “Abigail” is the performance of Weir, a 14-year-old Irish actress best known as the title character in Netflix’s “Matilda the Musical.” She brings verve and joy to her vampire ballerina, dancing circles around the rest of the cast.

Destroyer makes “Manchester By the Sea” seem like an afternoon party with clowns and balloon animals. But if there’s a reason to see Destroyer, it’s for Kidman’s performance. It’s to take that journey with her.

It's a buoyant comedy with more warmth and generosity of spirit than anything else in theaters right now.

So wonderfully odd, even spiritual, that audiences won't be able to do anything but smile.

Slick, overly deliberate and brimming with hammy performances...directed by Rob Reiner with glistening, uninspired competence. [11 Dec 1992]

A merry, wistful, tear-and-a-smile romp about the Holocaust, of all things.

A little picture -- the names of the entire cast would fit on half a sheet of paper -- but it’s more heartfelt than movies with 50 times the budget.

Even the surprise ending arrives with a thud and makes us wonder why Shyamalan didn't try something new instead of recycling his "Sixth Sense" recipe.

This is a heartfelt piece, and while passion alone can't carry a movie, it sure helps. Ararat is uneven because Egoyan couldn't tell it smoothly.

It's almost a great movie. For half of its running time, Anderson maintains a distinct and arresting tone of vague absurdity, and then he loses control and the film begins to dip into silliness. Individual scenes become labored. Yet even at its worst, The Life Aquatic is always interesting -- there's really nothing else like it.

There's no other film like it. It's embarrassingly frank and self-revealing, sometimes funny, sometimes creepy, sometimes both.

Though Craven satirizes horror cliches, he also knows how to cut through them and do new things. Throughout, the action comes unexpectedly and quickly.

What a waste.

As entertainment, On Chesil Beach isn’t remotely satisfying, but it does deserve credit for being weird.

It's a weighty and visually interesting movie that unfortunately doesn't have a strong message beyond its overwhelming bleakness.

Instead of slavishly appending cliched horror tropes onto his otherwise worthy script, Franco should have at least taken the horror genre seriously enough to investigate how he might stretch it and make it better. That was within his reach, if only he’d reached for it. Maybe next time he will.

Warriors of the Rainbow is Taiwan's "Braveheart," with a nod to "The Last of the Mohicans."

But the film written, directed and starring stand-up comic Hitoshi Matsumoto has, like most superheroes, a tragic flaw: It isn't funny.

A suspense thriller of rare intelligence.

It’s a line that all horror movies must walk. The characters must be stupid enough to get themselves into trouble, but not so stupid that we don’t start thinking of them in Darwinian terms. Somehow, “Cuckoo” stays on the right side of that line, but barely.

All this could work, but Perkins never finds the proper tone in what is almost a spoof of the horror genre.

A rare reminder from movies that the grand emotions are not only for the young and the middle-aged. They're the sweetness and torment of life until the last light goes out.

Both Mastrantonio and Harris are terrific, never missing a beat, always convincing, even when playing the most extreme emotions. [9 Aug 1989, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

The movie has finesse, and the actors have charm, but there are no surprises.

The Man Without a Face saves itself from sugary sweetness by presenting the friendship of McLeod and Chuck against a harsh small-town background. The screenplay takes off in some strong directions, while Gibson, in his first film as a director, keeps it honest all the way. [25 Aug 1993, p.E1]

Contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, may be too long, too self-important and too "Gump"-like to be completely satisfying. But it contains elements that are so striking they pretty much redeem the film.

This film doesn’t know exactly what it wants to say.

A full-out action movie - and a sober rumination on the nature of existence. It is both things, effectively and sincerely.