What happens is important, but more important is how it happens and whom it happens to.

Creating this kind of otherworldly mood takes exceptional talent, and this is a film worth experiencing.

Timeless.

Considering the fact that a young girl is picking her nose on the movie poster, The Croods is surprisingly evolved.

The Dark Half is another retelling of the Jekyll and Hyde story, but King and Romero fail to work out the premise of the story. [23 Apr 1993, p.C3]

A potent and troubling meditation on the state of Western society.

Though hardly anybody’s idea of a jolly time at the movies — and not nearly the equal of Florian Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” — “The Son” provides an arresting and unsettling experience. It’s an interesting movie, and different.

A film that is at its best onstage.

Written by William Gibson, who adapted his own short story, and directed by New York artist Robert Longo in his feature debut, Johnny Mnemonic is inescapably a very cool movie. Running at a fevered pace, with laser and light explosions, it introduces a fantastic yet plausible vision of a computer-dominated age.

The laughs, including the big laughs, keep coming right up to the closing seconds.

Outstanding in support roles are Alison Lohman, playing a friend of Jerry's, and John Carroll Lynch, playing a neighbor who befriends Jerry.

A film very much of its moment, in ways both good and bad. But the important thing is that its virtues are extraordinary, while its flaws are easy to forget because they’re so common.

Aladdin, the live-action remake of the 1992 Disney animation, is more than a pleasant surprise. It’s a complete delight that stands up its own and is, in many ways, an improvement on the original.

An engaging documentary attempt to probe her mystery, and it offers some answers - she was secretive and stubborn, a hoarder of epic proportions who seems to have had fits of instability. She also wasn't always nice to her young charges.

An intense and affecting report on the experiences of U.S. troops in one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan.

Not as simple as it looks, though its appeal is simple: Robert Redford goes to prison, and James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") is the warden. That's a movie worth seeing right there.

A gentle, pleasant film about people you genuinely like.

In its modestly comic way, the movie delves into the question of when it’s better to lie than tell the truth.

A solid family movie, "Fly Away Home" is a constant feast for the eyes, with rich photography by Caleb Deschanel.

Hardly a riveting experience. It has slow patches, but it has a cumulative effect, thanks equally to Hansen-Love and Huppert. We come away feeling enriched and expanded, without exactly knowing how or why.

Juice may be disjointed and at times amateurish, but its lack of sentimentality saves it. [17 Jan 1992, p.D1]

If you can stomach the projectile-sputum gags and stapled-eyelid attack scene, it's hilarious.

Ultimately, The Fighter loses its courage and betrays the terms of its own story by fashioning an interpretation designed to please the people it portrays. It does a switch on us, by changing its focus from Micky's character to Micky's career and then pretending it was really about the career all along.

Poignant and carefully observed, the Italian drama Facing Windows portrays two consuming, illicit romances: one in the present, the other kept alive in faulty memory. The long-ago relationship holds far more intrigue.

To an extent, the movie waters down its moral complexity by introducing a flat-out villainess, who begins to guide Jean’s actions, thus absolving Jean of some moral responsibility. Still, it’s hard to complain when the villainess is played by Jessica Chastain, the best person in the world to play a cool, coiffed, composed entity of evil, looking for a new planet for her displaced people.

The real joy here is the gorgeous nature cinematography.

It's smart and good-hearted and boasts an amazingly good score, but the film is limited by the very private nature of the man it portrays.

An invaluable piece of sports history, with 16mm images by de Kermadec that are succulently detailed.