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

In Amigo, a story of the Philippine-American War, veteran filmmaker John Sayles allows his political convictions to get the better of him. The movie is a heavy-handed attack on U.S. imperialism with little to compensate in the way of character interest and genuine drama.

Difficult to watch, and the film is sabotaged by an impossibly naive lead character and the repetitive auditions that become gratuitously depressing.

An ambitious attempt at cinematic poetry, and how much they have succeeded depends on how well you can sort out its surrealistic meanings.

Anderson almost brings off a picture worthy of his grandiose ambition.

Two decades after its predecessor, Disney’s “Freakier Friday” plunges back into “legacy sequel” waters — where nostalgia keeps storylines afloat and originality barely treads water.

Halfway through, the humans recede into the background, with Dr. Andrews and crew reduced to narrating monster shenanigans instead of participating in the action. Unlike “Godzilla Minus One,” humans are expendable in gargantuan Hollywood creature features.

It’s slow getting off the ground, and never completely achieves flight, at least not in the sense of transport. It remains a series of sequences, some terrific and some less so, but at least the movie keeps finding new ways for people to fall off a building while on fire. So there’s that.

A movie that has two good ideas. It needed three.

The film version is gorgeous to look at and contains amusing performances from Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett in the title roles. But it fails to get inside the minds of gamblers as Peter Carey so admirably did in his Booker Prize-winning novel.

Before it runs off track--it does have some spectacular moments.

As a sports drama -- a genre that's gotten entirely too much play lately -- "Dreamer" is singularly unexciting.

Strives for an airy, merry amorality, but it never quite achieves liftoff, though at times it comes close.

Most of the bits and performances have a hard time making the transition from stage to screen.

Somewhere in the translation from stage to screen, The History Boys has become an intelligent misfire. What's left is a literate but listless film.

The writing, by Adam Mansbach, and direction, by Vikram Gandhi, are competent without being terribly sophisticated or daring. Terrell’s performance elevates the film, though.

The movie's shift into an implausible thriller magnifies its lack of character development. But Gosling gives an impassioned performance throughout.

If we're going to be honest, we need to look inside and ask ourselves: Do we really want to see a listless movie about a woman whose dream is to move into a double-wide trailer?

Therapy for a Vampire has nothing to say. It just has stuff happening, none of it repulsive and all of it performed by competent actors, but that’s just not enough.

A film that defies lowered expectations — if not the tired adolescent mind-set and poor joke-writing — and emerges as the best in the series.

Describing this makes it sound like there’s more plot than there actually is, but “The Carpenter’s Son” isn’t a conventional story. It’s more of a mood piece, with a true run time of just barely 90 minutes. But it’s got Cage, and that’s the difference maker.

Perhaps the film's greatest strength is the performance by Kwanten, who appears in HBO's "True Blood" and may be familiar from his lead role in the big-screen Aussie thriller "Red Hill." Dermody also does well.

For all its drive and passion, Favela Rising is an uneven, spasmodic film.

The movie itself is just a routine showcase, modest in its aspiration and effective within its limits, entertaining in the moment but, in the end, faintly silly. On the plus side, it's only 86 minutes long.

For all the deadpan laughs it delivers, Careful is too self-conscious, too stoned on its own invention and technique to merit sustained attention. It's a marvelous conceit, but ultimately a thin one. [08 Oct 1993, p.C3]

Beautiful but hollow.

In the end, Venom exists in what may end up being regarded as a no-man’s land — too much like a superhero movie to appeal to people who despise the genre, and yet too deliberately silly to be taken seriously by superhero fans. There’s nothing memorable in Venom, nothing to talk about the next day. But if it happens to hit you right, its lightness is refreshing.

This is an ugly film, but with an undeniable allure.