One Fine Day erases any doubt that George Clooney could make the leap from the operating rooms of "ER" to stardom in films. He has it all: a slick, sardonic manner, calm assurance, commanding presence, great looks and, most importantly, a distinctive voice...Not much can be said about Michelle Pfeiffer except that she is perfection - knockout looks, without bragging about it, and a strong sense of comedy, including the roughhouse kind. [17 Dec 1996]

The film has a few odd jumps and seemingly comes to a fiery conclusion — finally some warmth, good God — but it’s a false ending. A much better one awaits, one that’s unexpected and very, very satisfying. Stay to the end — as long as you’re bundled up.

Edgar Wright’s new big-screen adaptation is fittingly but awkwardly timed. Arriving in the year of King’s imagined dystopia, its near-future has little in it that isn’t already plausible today, making this “Running Man” — while fleet of foot in action — feel a step, or two, behind.

The charms of Summerland aren’t in its plot. They’re in the sentiment, which is too good-hearted to be cynical about, and the characters.

A bizarre and transfixing carnival of vulgarity and vice.

It’s a pleasant and occasionally mesmerizing ride, thanks in no small measure to Sandler’s skillful empathy and yet another absorbing turn by Mulligan, who never disappoints. In the constellation that is Hollywood, her star continues to be one of the brightest.

It’s not a compelling environmental film or a good drama about racers. Like many of the electric cars on the track that season, it stalls.

Roland Joffe has directed an earnest and well-meaning film but the crushing inevitability of the climax makes it a less than rewarding experience. [17 Dec 1986]

Fennell clearly has so many ideas swirling around, which is fitting for a story like Wuthering Heights. And yet as a viewing experience, it is an undernourishing feast, neither dangerous nor hot enough.

Once the film — based on the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis — settles into a seedy, sunny West African setting and the nighttime heist finale, “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” proves a spirited, if grossly exaggerated diversion.

The craft and thick Gothic atmosphere of The Devil all the Time is impressive. The movie has such fine-wrought texture that it holds you in its cold grasp. But it’s also somewhat oppressive.

For older viewers, though, it may be hard to ignore some of the clunkier moments of a script that, in trying to update a story created in 1963, gets in its own way with dialogue that while sometimes funny and sweet, can be awkward and occasionally even off-key.

Of course, it all comes down to a Shyamalan-style final twist — the most entertaining part of the film, but it comes way, way too late. Listen, we’re all up for some summer fun on the beach. But by the time we’re allowed in on the secret here, we’re feeling a bit tired.

For every laugh-out-loud moment in the smartly paced first half, there’s a sigh later as to what might have been.

Ambulance pines for a visceral, breezily violent style of film that doesn’t slow down to ask too many questions. And while Bay’s film wouldn’t stand up to too much inquiry — this is a movie where a ruptured spleen is treated with a hairpin — it’s hard to deny its escapist panache.

Light of Day flounders because of Schrader's simplistic symbolism: the rebellious children, the unhearing mother, the lifeless father. The story limps from one predictable scene to the next. [17 Mar 1987]

Richardson, throughout, gives an empathetic and endearing performance, and Hardy matches her for charm, even if he doesn’t convince as a self-described “maths nerd.”

It’s so sincere that it’s hard to pick on Wendy for some wheel-spinning, or even the sullen whimsy of it all. It’s headed somewhere good and worthwhile: This ending could warm the hearts of even the most grown up grown-ups in the audience.

Megalopolis is not a disaster, but it’s far from a success. It’s a bacchanalia that’s bursting with so many ideas, so many characters, so many great lines and truly terrible ones as well that it’s nearly impossible to digest in a single, baffling viewing.

To both the movie’s benefit and detriment, the seas here are choppier than in the predictably (and sometimes boringly) smooth sailing of a Marvel movie. But the bright spots (Momoa, that octopus) can be difficult to really relish amid the oceans of exposition and a typically pulverizing, overelaborate screenplay.

It’s easy to initially dismiss it as an “SNL” digital short that got high on its own tinsel but there is a sort of perverse glee to seeing Santa suck on the tip of a candy cane until it is a sharp shard and then plunge it into a bad guy’s neck.

At one point in this 184-minute drama, I started wondering if I was seeing a bunch of disco balls trying to destroy each other. But maybe this was a moment of sensory overload.

Though Spirited comes up short as a musical, it is still pretty enjoyable. Perhaps that’s because it is just so stuffed with everything else: If one part doesn’t totally work, there’s plenty else in the four-quadrant buffet to sample.

You’re always waiting for the movie to really get going. It’s shot like a political thriller without the thrills.

Rarely has a major film been so coolly designed to capture the young market. Yet for all its crass calculation, Grandview, U.S.A. has a buoyant vitality, an engaging lack of pretense and occasional bursts of humor and sentiment. The movie's prime asset is a bright, attractive cast. [07 Aug 1984]

The situation might have seemed merely a script writer's contrivance except that Howard Franklin ("The Name of the Rose") has fashioned a plot that is both convincing and affecting. Director Ridley Scott happily keeps the human situation in the foreground while exercising his remarkable visual talent. [5 Nov 1987]

The Prom works hard to be a good time, and I hope it is for many who could use one.

Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, so abundant with realistic simulations of the natural world, is curiously lifeless.

If the knock on “The Secret Life of Pets” was that it was a rip-off of “Toy Story,” then the second film better grounds itself in its own universe. Like its main three characters, it has learned to be comfortable in its own animated skin.

The Good Liar is a kind of film one wants to love. Such old-fashioned genre movies, let alone those starring actors in their 70s and 80s, are hard to find these days. But in trying to take a simple crime set-up and stretch it into a more sweeping tale of vengeance and victimhood, The Good Liar has to make some fairly preposterous moves to get there, and it doesn’t do a very good job of cloaking them.

Although “Tammy Faye” may be imperfect, it does succeed in at least one significant way: We’re not just looking at her makeup anymore.

As with all of Iñárritu’s films, “Bardo” isn’t just deeply felt but impassioned to the max, with grand designs to not just plunge into his own soul but that of Mexico, too. For a filmmaker always pushing for more — including those titles that stretch on and on — “Bardo” is his most ambitious and indulgent film yet.

Pathos and action are found in equal parts in The Adam Project, the latest attempt by Netflix to create the kind of throwback blockbuster that you might have paid to see in movie theaters.

The Package manages a degree of believability, thanks in large part to Hackman's customary professionalism. Probably no other star could convey such credibility. [24 Aug 1989]

The tonal extremes and multilayered theatricality of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s movie-mad movie are, by any measure, a lot. But I would argue such ambitious gambits are exactly the kind that a filmmaker in their sophomore outing ought to be taking. “The Bride!” feels constantly like an act of plate-spinning that’s about to collapse. That it doesn’t is a fever-dream feat, one that makes me eager to see what Gyllenhaal does next.

This is a piece about characters and Winslet gives her actors space to build people that by and large feel pretty real — the standouts are really Flynn, as the sensitive son still living at home and closest to his parents, and Spall, believably oblivious in that charmingly British way.

It’s a movie well engineered as a late-summer diversion — a big cat movie for the dog days of August — that Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur (“Adrift,” “Everest”) insures stays well within the paths of man-against-nature films before it.

"Last Rights” — part of a universe that includes “The Nun” and “Annabelle” franchises — is a decent enough final cinematic prayer for this franchise, combining the personal story of the Warrens and their daughter, Judy, with a new paranormal possession that’s created a freaked-out family.

Ultimately, Spiderhead just seems a little unsure of what it is or what it’s supposed to be.

The series’ first new installment in eight years is a reliably funny, sweet and wonderfully realized passing of the torch, with a paw in the past and another into the future — an elegant goodbye and a hello. Many other filmmakers — ahem, Marvel and DC — might learn a thing.

The film, set 183 years before the events of “The Hobbit,” is a return to Middle-earth that, despite some very earnest storytelling, never supplies much of an answer as to why, exactly, it exists.

Whether these Hollywood touches will make the film appealing to the Rambo crowd is doubtful. By all means, read the book first. [24 Sept 1986]

What separates “12 Strong” from the pack...is its ability to introduce and stay with a band of brothers worth caring about.

Maybe the movie will direct some eyes toward the existence of the Arthur Foundation, but while the movie goes down easy enough it is, on the whole, a bit unsatisfying.

You end up questioning less why Smith and Lawrence are still making “Bad Boys” movies than wondering why such breezily watchable genre movie-star platforms more or less don’t exist any longer.

There’s a lot of gross, both kinda and mega, over this film’s 93-minute running time. Also a lot of poop jokes, and penis jokes, both canine and human. You get the picture.

McMurray has a deft touch juggling action sequences, humor and intimate dialogue.

Theater critic as tyrant is a juicy premise; “The Critic” just can’t live up to the promise.

Two hours later, it’s not clear if this is really an upgrade.

Fitting for a movie with an actual skeleton in a closet, “Adulthood” is about legacy and how we become our parents. It’s also about recognizing that our parents are human and complicated.

There is not much “edge” here, but Clooney and team prove that sometimes, slow and steady — or should we say, pretty and pleasing — can still win some races.

Huppert seems to be enjoying herself fully leaning into Greta’s insanity, so perhaps this one can get a pass. She helps elevate the film from its self-consciously B-movie roots to be something that’s actually pretty good.

As it races to its cool supernatural climax — and then a coda that connects it to the first film — “The Craft: Legacy” is firing on all cylinders, looking back respectfully but also showing how the same story in different hands can soar.

The filmmakers are also clearly trying their hand at satire, but ham-fistedly. Set during the Reagan-era “Just Say No” period, “Cocaine Bear” hopes to remark on the demonization of drugs and it also seems to have something to say about how humans misunderstand the balance of nature. Neither work.

Whether The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is enough to relight those embers remains to be seen, but it is a reminder how good a platform they offered young actors. It’s a ritual worth returning to.

An almost sturdy, often gripping genre exercise that ultimately doesn’t find enough fresh material in the serial killer procedural to warrant its blast from a stylish and shlocky past.

It’s a little by-the-book — exactly, perhaps, what you might expect from elevated historical fiction aimed at young adults. Being a good-hearted, straightforward film that might even have you shedding a few tears is no crime against cinema.

Despite an A-list roster of talent, including people behind the scenes who theoretically should know how to resurrect this brand and move it forward, Terminator: Dark Fate is just another bad “Terminator” movie in a string of bad “Terminator” movies (although better than “Genisys”).

Empire of Light may be a love letter to the movies, but it’s a sad one in which one of the parties, the local, independent movie theater, is fading away and possibly already gone.

While it’s a nice way to spend just short of two hours, it seems he could have sucked a little more out of those dusty old graves.

From beginning to end, his new film is packed with shootings, brutality and violence _ like one long video war game...Rarely since "Heaven's Gate" has a major movie been so painfully bad, not only in dialogue. The battle scenes are neither dramatic nor convincing, merely brutal. [21 Aug 1984]

With handsome period craft, “Munich — Edge of War” makes for a watchable, engrossing historical thriller with fictional characters situated like spies around political leaders at a profoundly tense, and ultimately woefully misjudged, moment in time.

It’s also all over the map, in every way possible. It’s visually gorgeous at times but then boring to behold at others, emotionally poignant at times but stunningly cloying at others. It’s also confusing (though to be fair, many might call the book confusing, too.) Mostly, it’s just a frustrating whole comprised of some pretty promising parts.

It can be divertingly bonkers, but ends up a rather grim and slipshod “John Wick” ripoff.

But It Ends With Us doesn’t end quickly enough — more than two hours drag — with tangents and poor editing, like sudden scene cuts that leave viewers looking for clues to where they are.

Book Club has a script that’s often so heavy on the corn — make that corn syrup — that it strains credulity and leaves you groaning. But then, darn it, suddenly it makes you tearful, with an unexpectedly genuine moment, or laugh out loud. It’s a credit to the cast, and the cast only.

The first and most important thing to say about “Anemone,” a bleak, somber, absorbing but also sometimes frustratingly opaque collaboration with his director son Ronan, is that it’s brought Day-Lewis back.

The film crams in so many plot lines that it risks being overstuffed but somehow stays true to its mesmerizing vision and emerges as a sci-fi success, if not a triumph.

“Axel F” is not exactly Murphy’s finest hour, either. But Murphy just saying “Jesus!” is funny. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another 30 years for our next Axel Foley fix. God, we’ve missed him.

For a movie predicated on satisfying fans, The Rise of Skywalker is a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion to what had been an imperfect but mostly good few films.

What makes Annabelle Comes Home rise above its well-trod narrative are the actresses and Dauberman’s sensitive attention to each of them.

Luckily, The Mauritanian, directed by Kevin Macdonald, gets one thing very right: Tahar Rahim’s masterful central performance. The French actor achieves something his big-name costars — Jodie Foster, Benedict Cumberbatch and Shailene Woodley — do not, presenting a multi-layered, subtly shaded and deeply moving portrayal that proves hard to forget.

It’s pretty clear after watching the new live-action Aladdin that doubts about Will Smith’s casting as the Genie are overblown. It’s the guy behind the camera who should be doubted. And stuffed into a small lamp forever.

Here DeMonaco finds richness in flipping the script on traditional right-wing notions of the border and immigration.

Fuqua’s film is often harrowing and gripping but also less nuanced and too narrowly confined in genre conventions than its real-life protagonist deserves.

This very American fable has been blessed with three remarkable performances.

Compelling performances make Palmer watchable and fairly affecting despite the fact that we’ve seen this kind of thing so many times before.

Disney should have left the original alone.

The film does a good job balancing the drama with the comedy however, and is helped by a strong supporting cast, including Lil Rel Howery and Anthony Carrigan as Matt’s best friends.

The dog is, as ever, irresistibly winning.

Renfield never lets Cage really sink his teeth into the movie, leaving us still hungry for more.

The Tender Bar is a gentle, oddly crafted but loving look at men, fueled by a soundtrack of classics like Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” and Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” It’s a valentine to guys who step up.

Actually, Muppets From Space doesn't offer much for adults, either. The normally smart, endearing characters can't save this movie, which begins with a flimsy premise. [12 July 1999]

While the franchise soldiers on unironically, the films may fail to keep up with the real world, where fears have metastasized.

Deep Water, despite an all-star team behind it, barely makes a splash. Although it is being billed as an erotic thriller, it’s tedious and clunky. Trips to the supermarket are more exciting.

You’ve played Pokémon Go, right? Call this one Pokémon Don’t Go.

As cinematography, Malcolm & Marie (shot by Marcell Rév) is great. As cinema, not so much.

It is mainly the characters who have suffered in Jewel of the Nile. The bouncy relationship between Turner and Douglas has been lost; she appears mindlessly headstrong, he devotes his time to extricating her from trouble. A superior comic, DeVito has a one-note role of constant choler. [16 Dec 1985]

A movie as frothy and insubstantial as the foam on a nice cappuccino. It’s also about as believable as some of the woefully stereotypical Italian characters here.

You needn’t have watched all five seasons of “Luther” to take a chance on Luther: The Fallen Sun. But there’s also a chance that you may find yourself wanting to afterwards.

It’s an intriguing premise that “I.S.S.” can’t translate into a coherent thriller.

This dark, meandering and cliche-ridden bummer starring a trying-hard Jennifer Lawrence tries to reach for a cool and stylish look at contemporary spycraft but often falls victim to cartoon violence and a muddled story. The creators may call it erotic but it’s as erotic as a visit to the dentist.

The jokes aren’t often Sandler’s best material but Hubie Halloween is as sweet and easily digestible as a Milky Way.

Fly Me to the Moon is best when it’s not taking itself too seriously. And the most worthwhile concept it sold is the idea of Johansson and Tatum (which, by the way, is a great reminder to rewatch “Hail, Caesar!”) as a modern Day and Hudson. They have the charm. They just need material that does it justice.

Some have argued that the film glorifies its subject. It doesn’t, really. But it doesn’t explain him, either. And that leads to another question, which is, if there’s nothing really new to say about Ted Bundy, need we be saying anything?

It is such a rare pleasure to watch three superior actresses practicing their art that the filmgoer almost forgives "Agnes of God" for its imperfections. Almost. [7 Oct 1985]

Again, it all feels like a 30th reunion — maybe because it IS one — where the liquor flows, old stories are rehashed, the men haven’t aged quite as well as the women, the kids steal the show, and by the end you’re happy to have gone but feel no need to be at the next one.

Clara's Heart is a warm movie with many lessons to tell, if one is willing to listen. Its force is aided by Goldberg's performance and a noteworthy movie debut of Neil Patrick Harris as David. [17 Oct 1988]