With a movie like this, we know what has to happen. The fun is in seeing how it happens. Ryback is an explosives expert, so there are some delightful bomb interludes. He makes a bomb for the microwave, takes a missile apart and puts it back together and comes up with original ideas, such as rigging a hand grenade to a door so it will explode when the door is opened. Under Siege is a lot like Die Hard moved to a battleship. [09 Oct 1992, p.C3]

More in the tone of the big screen "Friday Night Lights" than "Rudy" or "The Blind Side," it succeeds as mainstream entertainment without relying on a conventional storybook framework.

It’s a solid first step into the magical world of the familiar. Escapist entertainment for crowds that prefer to know their destination in advance.

There’s still plenty of laughs left over for the audience, and the aggressive randomness of the script fuels some genuinely inventive comic moments. Although the writers of this R-rated cinematic binge frequently lose their focus, they never lose their sense of humor.

No one will be bored with the feature film... but everyone who knows the show well will have a nagging feeling that something is missing.

It's the versatile Miranda Richardson (the terrorist in ''The Crying Game,'' the repressed housewife in ''Enchanted April'') who gets the juiciest scene. Shattered by the news of the affair, and by the tragedy it precipitates, she beats her face with a knotted towel, and then vents her rage on her foolish husband...It's one more triumph for an actress who has no trouble channeling a kind of supernatural intensity in her work. If anyone's looking for the perfect Lady Macbeth, they needn't look any further. [22 Jan 1993, p.D1]

It’s hard to imagine a more original movie, or a more unfiltered vision from the mind of its maker.

Very good at pointing out the social difficulties surrounding the Dickens-Ternan relationship, the power dynamics within it and the lasting effects of it.

An impressive and imaginative fantasy.

True History of the Kelly Gang may not be history as recorded by historians, but it’s history as recorded by a director with verve and vision. In this case, that’s enough.

A charming and thoughtful movie, about people making a charming and thoughtful movie.

In The Chaperone, Brooks is something of a fixed entity, a fully-formed force of nature already heading toward her peculiar form of glory. She has stuff to do all day — studying by day and partying by night, while Elizabeth McGovern as Norma has time to look inside.

The Crush is the latest in the growing ''from hell'' genre, about all the fun things that happen when a ferocious, precocious 14-year-old girl develops an intense crush on the nice-guy journalist who rents a guest house from the girl's parents. Things start innocent. Get worse. Get horrible. Get ridiculous. You know the formula. Working within that formula, The Crush isn't bad.

The High Note begins well, ends well and even has a good middle, but there’s one extra plot turn, about 15 minutes before the finish, that’s one too many. It doesn’t spoil the movie, but it adds an unwelcome touch of sentimentality into a story that is otherwise fairly tough throughout.

The Beekeeper is the purest stupid fun I’ve had in a movie theater since “F9: The Fast Saga” in 2021.

If you don’t expect it to be something it isn’t, it’s hard to see how partisans of pop music could fail to enjoy Echo in the Canyon. For rock ’n’ rollers of all ages, it’s mandatory viewing.

SubUrbia is depressing comedy -- the more so because director Richard Linklater's satirical picture of youthful alienation rings painfully true.

Whether the role is small or large, the acting across the board is utterly convincing.

Between the lines, Scoop conveys, not only what Andrew most likely did, but what led him to assume that he’d get away with it.

Ultimately, Kink has an undeniably voyeuristic quality - it's a glimpse into a mostly forbidding world, and there's value in that.

Book Club was, at best, a pleasant diversion. But Book Club: The Next Chapter is something more. It’s a movie that proves that it’s possible to make an entertaining, full-length picture with practically no story.

The acting is uniformly strong, which says something about King as a director.

Director Le-Van Kiet and screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton succeed by making the action look real, by coming up with intriguing plot twists and keeping our heroine in danger at all times.

The documentary is exclusively about Ullmann and Bergman as human beings and about how they got along.

Suffused with a golden glow, the movie looks and sounds like a fairy tale.

Angelopoulos returns to the same poetic terrain he explored in Ulysses' Gaze and Landscape in the Mist. In place of "action" and conventional narration, Eternity deals in philosophical ruminations, slippery shifts in time and long, hypnotic tracking shots that seem to whisper to us, "Slow down, observe. Listen."

Director Sameh Zoabi relies on the old adage that we have more in common than not, but it’s a lesson that bears repeating — particularly when laughs come with it.

This British film also mocks the rave culture it celebrates, and it's charming in a way that is hip but surprisingly down to earth.