Salinger does what so many documentaries and biopics either fail to do or decline to attempt; it speculates convincingly on the connective tissue between the life and the work of the subject.

Roman is bad at doing good, so when he starts showing promise in the other moral direction, it hardly seems like a tragedy. It seems like a smart career move. Plus, he gets to wear decent suits and finally starts looking like Denzel Washington.

Well-intentioned but heavy-handed.

Leaves you feeling buoyed, but you must endure a level of overacting more suitable for the soaps.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

A self-conscious attempt at the brass ring.

At its titanium core, M3GAN is a mostly on-the-mark commentary on our tech dependence.

Monotonous.

Headland works hard to reconcile the wild and the tame; if she never quite gets the balance right, ya gotta admire her bold juxtaposition of overdose-resuscitation gags with lessons on self-loathing and bulimia.

Almost Christmas would have been less clunky if it had focused more on the family’s loss of its matriarch, and allowed the comic elements to naturally arise as the characters struggle with the new family dynamic. Instead, we get too many slapstick set pieces and extraneous subplots that bog down the proceedings.

Too bad the plotting is jumbled, and the characters too numerous and undifferentiated.

Sokolov has cited notable filmmakers like Sergio Leone, Park Chan-wook and Quentin Tarantino as influences, and their inspiration can be seen in the film’s tense standoffs, corridor fights and flashing swordplay, respectively. For all that and some original flourishes, though, this mainly feels like a Radio Silence rehash.

A typical vehicle for Ferrell's atypical humor.

Kinda cute, occasionally amusing and very, very slow... I just wish [it] had more momentum, more oomph. [9 Oct 1987]

Neutralizes these characters, makes them cute and one-dimensional like fluffy dolls.

Holds a lot of promise in its first hour and never completely falls apart, but it's ultimately not the movie it might have been.

It’s original and idiosyncratic, but Swicord lets herself get away with things another director might not have allowed.

Something to Talk About never goes bad, though it does get corny in places, and it hits a couple of dull patches near the finish. The last half-hour contains two completely different scenes involving two completely different horseback riding contests. Yet despite the braying insistence of the sound track, the audience doesn't care about either one.

One wonders how a master of truly twisted movies — say, a David Lynch or a Brian De Palma — would have approached “The Voyeurs.” One suspects they would have a bit more fun and taken us further down the moral rabbit hole. And the sex would have been better too.

Sizemore ("Heat") and Miller, though saddled with a lot of scientific DNA jargon, are really the only lively people in this dense, gruesome film that stubbornly refuses to break out of its contrived atmosphere.

Basketball Diaries is an earnest, botched effort to do justice to Carroll's book. Amazingly, though, even with Kalvert's lack of style and vision, the greatness of DiCaprio's performance is undiminished.

Gutter romance meets metaphysical thriller.

A harmless, aimless, mildly funny and thoroughly predictable comic-romantic piffle.

If there’s one thing interesting about “Spaceman,” it’s how it demonstrates how a great actress’ essence — just the essence, not even the performance — can elevate a nothing part.

Unfortunately Young Guns II is a small blaze and no glory. [01 Aug 1990, p.E1]

Almost gets its right.

The film has a good heart, but its central premise -- that ignorance is an enchanted realm -- is too sentimental.

In the end - and every story needs one - The Words is a decent, ambitious, unoriginal film about a decent, ambitious, unoriginal writer. Both aim for greatness. Both fall short.