Stone's feisty, intensely personal style of film making is well-known. With Born on the Fourth of July we are treated to a poignant, spirited and captivating - for the broken heartedness of it all - performance by Tom Cruise. [25 Dec 1989, p.E1]

If you liked Whitney Houston before, you’ll like her even more after seeing this. You’ll also admire her and feel pity for her and feel frustrated by her.

What lingers in the memory is the impression of having experienced a frolic, a ride through the park on a bright winter day.

Most important, there is an emotional undercurrent in this installment that the earlier films only aspired to. When for a brief moment, the younger Charles Xavier meets the older, there is the sense of time's mystery - and also of the long, magnificent slog of a purpose-driven life.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

That story proves paper thin, and requires believing Amanda is devoid of empathy yet devoted to Lily — concepts too at odds to be plausible together.

If they can swallow the intensity of the musical numbers, fans of the show will feel at home with this adaptation, which is just a higher-stakes version of a typical episode (with shadows).

Bring Her Back belongs in the trapped-in-a-house subgenre of horror, but it has a creepy psychological depth and is filled with disturbing but impressively composed images. It really gets under your skin.

A minimalist masterpiece.

The Lego Batman Movie is less awesome than its predecessor, but it’s a clever, well-paced, self-aware and completely satisfying kind of less awesome.

This is not one of the good Altmans. This isn't even one of the mediocre Altmans.

From its first minutes, Mid-August Lunch establishes a special tone and quality that could only be Italian. It's a mixture of warmth and gentle farce, tender observation and absurdity.

It’s a moving meditation about our unwavering need for creativity, and finding ways to express it.

It’s a nice movie, and perfectly watchable — yet it’s hard to escape the sense that it should have been more.

Baadasssss! is the portrait of a visionary with a blind spot, a man starved for kindness who can no longer recognize the responsibility to be kind, even to his kids. But it's a portrait of a visionary nonetheless.

Romantic comedies can go in all sorts of directions, but they depend on the audience’s believing that a couple should get together and stay together. But in Trainwreck, that belief is hard to come by.

This is a likable documentary that casts light on two respected but relatively unknown people, who made major contributions to film and managed to have a normal life — and in Hollywood, of all places. It’s nice to know such things are possible.

A terrific documentary.

Too contemplative to be really funny.

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

In addition to being a smart comedy and an excellent showcase for Grant, it's an honest movie about childhood that avoids sappiness and sentiment and goes in unexpected directions.

By humanizing an immigrant/refugee crisis that is not abating, Winterbottom does a cinematic service that happens to be damn interesting, too.

It’s all rather enjoyable, and O’Connor, having starred in “Mansfield Park” (1999), certainly knows her way around 19th century romance. Yet the question remains: What is the point of all this?

Extremely amusing.

It’s hard to know what to make of this, but it’s quite enough that it happens at all. The film has some longueurs — it isn’t scintillating for every second of screen time. But Marques-Mercet and his actors establish an intimacy with the audience that’s practically unique. Even if you love it only a little, not completely, you will probably remember 10,000 Km for the rest of your life.

The movie starts to fray once we realize that DuVernay is not going to make a case for Wilkerson’s ideas. Rather, she plans to serve them up as undeniable truths.

The movie is directed by Anjelica Huston, and like a lot of actors who direct, Huston shows an ability to elicit strong emotions from her actors. But Huston also demonstrates a sense of where to place the camera. [13 Dec 1996, p.C1]

This one is dazzling.