Joy is not all joy. There is frustration and loss and tears along the way, but it is a triumphant film about the way humans can make the world better and how a baby’s cry can be a priceless gift.

The broader history is there for those who are curious and on its own terms this is a story that will keep you engaged. Much of that has to do with Ridley.

A cerebral approach to espionage and defection, often suspenseful but sometimes dull. [26 Jan 1980]

A film like this, as authentic and raw as it is, should probably leave audiences in a puddle and not exiting the theater wondering why they’re not.

In the Burtonian spirit, let’s just say it took a long time to bake it, yes, but the director has recovered the recipe — at least enough to make us smile, chortle, even guffaw, for 104 minutes. And we can be happy with that.

Ultimately, it’s not earth shattering but it’s also perfectly pleasant for what it is and what it knows it isn’t. Red, White & Royal Blue is a beach read in movie form and one that can and should be watched with friends.

A dynamic political drama with superior acting and wide significance. The competing forces of city governance have rarely been portrayed with such immediacy and incisiveness. [17 Feb 1996]

What’s most disappointing about the film, considering its origins, is just how distant anything like real life feels. From the first moment Jamie slides on a pair of ruby red stiletto pumps, there’s not any doubt things are going to work out for him.

Written and directed by Stella Meghie, the film is a gentle and attentive inter-generational tale with a first-rate cast.

The Lesson is worth a watch as a tightly crafted film made by and for adults unafraid of some rhododendron metaphors and casual Tchaikovsky talk.

It’s a promising debut from Tøndel, nonetheless — a film that will keep you engaged if not entirely satisfied.

It’s a charming concoction of cliches cribbed from other movies, from Tron to Truman, without its own coding.

Towards the end, Holland's movie gets a little confused: the scary elements give way to too many gory effects. Still, Fright Night is a pleasant diversion. [19 Aug 1985]

Plane is as broadly sketched as its title. Puerto Rico doubles here for Philippines, and most of the story elements, too, feel like they’re stand-ins for basic plot conventions.

There are dull moments and off-putting tangents that seem to exist only to provoke, but the message at its core is a nice one about connection and empathy and occasionally uncomfortable intergenerational conversations that don’t end with someone being silenced.

It’s a movie best seen less as a historical epic and more as a metaphor for a rising young movie star coming up in a culture he aims to subvert.

If you always thought your garden-variety heist movies could do with a bit more blood-sucking vampire, have we got a flick for you.

While Destroyer can be overwrought and mechanical, it’s an often gripping, well-crafted crime drama with distinction of its own in the genre, an almost always male-dominated one.

Franco has made a briskly entertaining debut feature, a nice way to spend an escapist summer evening. Not from your Airbnb, though.

My Favorite Year probably won't be your favorite movie this year, although actor-turned-director Richard Benjamin tries hard to provide the slapstick escapism today's recession-weary audiences supposedly crave. [27 Sep 1982]

As with many horrors, the big reveals were, for this critic, a little underwhelming — a strained attempt at a unifying theory for this weird place that doesn’t add much ultimately.

Not all of it works, but it’s never uninteresting or uncreative — especially when it comes to finding inventively horrible (or horribly inventive) ways for people to die.

A Million Miles is wisely more about one man’s obsession and nicely touches on topics like racism, assimilation, deferred dreams, family guilt and dedication.

Kids deserve movies that are made on the biggest possible canvas. “How to Train Your Dragon” is one that’s worth the trip to the theater. It might just spark some young imaginations, whether it’s to go back and read the books or dream up their own worlds.

The very threat of zombies keeps things kind of interesting, perhaps because of all that’s come before, but this film seems to be suffering the same plight as its protagonist. Both are searching for closure, a bigger point, something that might give the whole thing meaning.

Vice Versa, in fact, is a nifty comedy of the supernatural variety. It benefits from a clever script by Dick Clement and Ian LaFrenais (who also produced), lively direction by Brian Gilbert and the inspired teaming of Reinhold and young Savage as the misplaced father and son. [21 Apr 1988]

For most of the film, the non-stop action is totally involving, and Stallone gives a dynamic performance that could break him out of the Rocky groove. [11 Oct 1982]

Good Fortune has its heart in the right place, but it lacks a spark and internal engine that might have made it more entertaining, and ultimately impactful.

Overall, it’s just not so good, so good.

It’s both captivating and bleak, with a series of sexual encounters that can only be described as feral — “Wuthering Heights” wishes it could have hit the ravenous peaks of Fernando and Jennifer together.

For those whose trips to Pandora have made less of an impact, “Fire and Ash” is a bit like returning to a half-remembered vacation spot, only one where the local ponytail style is a little strange and everyone seems to have the waist of a supermodel.

Triple Frontier has the good sense to take a macho, Expendables-like set-up and turn it inward. It just doesn’t go far enough.

Though it may be a chaotic shamble, Chazelle’s film makes this one point brilliantly clear: Cinema will be tamed for only so long; the parade will go on.

Ultimately it does work, but “Dog” is a movie that is trying to do quite a bit, and perhaps bites off a little more than it can reasonably handle in 90 minutes.

At times Spoiler Alert feels like an edgy, clever film that plays wittily on the main character’s lifelong obsession with TV. At others, it feels like a more formulaic, holiday-themed tearjerker — the passing years are marked in a Christmas card montage! — that wrings our tears in unsubtle ways.

The original screenplay by Stanley Weiser (based on a story by Weiser and Lasker) offers intriguing situations, and Jonathan Kaplan's direction hurries the action along. Perhaps because he has covered the same territory before, Broderick's performance is surprisingly flat. Helen Hunt fares better, especially in her scenes with Willie. [18 June 1987]

The editing is more than a little rough and the plot gets a little stretched, but just as things start to get seriously hairy, the Pierce brothers suddenly have something really interesting to say about erasure and how families can abandon their histories.

The dance sequences, in training and performance, are magnificent. Fiennes is fascinated by the athleticism of ballet, and the granular details of the flexing muscles in feet and forearms.

Vice is frenetic and fun, flippant and frustrating.

That's kind of the overall problem of Ocean's 8. It's all predicated on the fact that women are often underestimated. But in making that point, it's also somehow underestimated the audience who still should be entitled to a smart, fun heist, no matter who is pulling it off.

The script by Tracey Scott Wilson (Fosse/Verdon) is a collection of scenes that don’t add up to much, never really building and interrupted — by necessity, of course — with overly long music sequences. This film needed someone to sharpen and clarify.

Onward makes the most of its strange assemblage to tell a sweet and moving story — enough so to leave you yet again shaking your head at Pixar’s magic act.

If the plot feels truly chaotic, blending (deep breath here, please) mythology, astrology, autobiography, confessional, modern romantic comedy and Old Hollywood glamour (still with us?), it is so J.Lo — so very, very J.Lo — that it feels logical, too.

Abominable is sweet and simple enough, but its emotionality always feels thin and, like much of the film, paint by numbers.

Jittery, tense, fast-talking and always on edge, this is a Hamlet, above all, in a rush.

The Front Runner is appropriately paced like a thriller, as everyone involved gets pulled down into the drain, helplessly.

What does it say about a nearly two-and-a-half hour drama when the 80-year-old footage from inside Nazi concentration camps that was shown inside the real courtroom is the most compelling and memorable sequence?

Blue Beetle, light, lively and sincere, is a tribute to the tenacity and indomitability of Mexican-American families that have clawed their way into an often inhospitable society. Family members, usually plot points of some animating trauma in superhero movies, are here a central part of the action.

The rebelliousness of each of the strong women here — mother and daughter — somehow coalesces into understanding. Such moments can be sappy, but here, as with her lovely opening shot, Keshavarz does it well. She sticks the landing.

The Comfort of Strangers is a sinister movie, not scary in the sense of a horror film but eerie enough to haunt the deep recesses of your mind long after the operatic music and the lush Italian settings have faded. [02 Apr 1991]

Velvet Buzzsaw doesn’t lead anywhere inward; it becomes just a litany of (exquisite) death scenes for art-world caricatures. Still, what caricatures they are.

Eisenberg, who has already proven himself to be a talented, unsparing writer, shows promise as a director. He has not made a flashy art film, but it’s a smart, biting and occasionally sweet character piece about unlikable characters that you still may want to root for, because, though it may be hard to admit, they’re not so different from us.

Despite the change of scenery, Scream VI is less a sequel and more a stutter-step, a half-movie with some very satisfying stabbings but no real progress or even movement. It’s like treading water in gore. And to fully enjoy this “sequel to the requel,” you need to have watched most of the others.

Even if the material — a haunted scarecrow, a young woman’s vengeful ghost — can feel stale off the page, Øvredal’s filmmaking is fresh and vibrant.

There’s a mean potency to the borderland noir of both Sicario films, enough that it sometimes recalls another tale of explosions and drug enforcement agents on both sides of the border: Orson Welles’ “Touch of Evil.” Day of the Soldado is too sober and grim for the sweaty heat of “Touch of Evil.” But it has taken to heart one of its best lines: “All border towns bring out the worst in a country.”

Make no mistake, the clever writing is here, as is the style, the sleek technique, and some terrific performances (Rosamund Pike is especially delicious in a supporting role). What’s missing, or muddled, is the message — and perhaps even more, the heart.

The script could certainly be sharper, the comedy more clever. But for two hours on Netflix, Coopers Chase is rather a comfy place to be, with some moments to cherish.

Ultimately it all rides on Robbie, who, along with her blond, color-dipped pigtails, brings an appealing blend of looniness and grit to the role, and a hint of something sadder and darker. Still, one gets the sense the filmmakers weren’t quite sure how far to go with the feminism thing. When she says sadly that “a harlequin’s nothing without a master,” you don’t immediately get the sense that this is a post #MeToo Harley Quinn.

As producer of Goodbye Columbus and Kramer vs. Kramer, Stanley Jaffe has proved his understanding of human relationships. As a first-time director, he seems overly attentive to everyday detail. But he handles his actors with skill, evoking a beautifully sustained performance from Kate Nelligan as the mother who would not abandon hope. [07 Feb 1983]

This “Saturday Night” may have a legacy of its own; a lot of this cast, I suspect, will be around for a long time. And, ultimately, when the show finally comes together, it’s galvanizing.

It may not be great cinema in any traditional sense, but it’s great fun and a much-needed antidote to all the bad cover versions floating around.

Is it a little glossy and sanitized with a jaunty score? Sure. But it also thoughtfully explores themes of redemption, invisibility, pride and sportsmanship without being preachy or condescending.

Raimi doesn’t take “Doctor Strange” to an entirely new tonal place, like, say Taika Waititi did with Thor. He mostly sticks to the framework established by Scott Derrickson.

The chief weakness of “Freakier Friday” — which brings Curtis and Lohan back for an amiable, often joyful and certainly chaotic reunion — is that while it hews overly closely to the structure, storyline and even dialogue of the original, it tries too hard to up the ante.

The filmmakers employ all kinds of ways to try to keep viewers interested, like split screens, some farce and a surreal dream sequence, but there’s not enough humor or grit or anything other than actors swanning around in period clothing.

Thankfully, someone has come to the not-hard-to-deduce realization that Clooney and Pitt are good together.

Let’s offer up some praise for this sequel-to-a-movie-based-on-a-smartphone-game, for finding a way to actually improve on the 2016 original in a way that’s clever but not snarky, sweet but not syrupy.

An adaptation of a Bernard MacLaverty novel of the same name, “Midwinter Break” is a delicate film that stays in a minor key, but whose impact is profound if you can get on its level.

It's all there -- the lighthearted summer romances, the intercamp rivalry with the rich kids across the lake and, of course, the nonstop practical jokes. If one or two fall flat, so what. The next probably will hit your funnybone...That gentle quality keeps "Meatballs" from being as totally off-the-wall as "Animal House," but there are plenty of laughs. [2 July 1979]

One problem here is time, something the film obviously plays with. The Many Saints of Newark arrives 14 years after The Sopranos ended and that may be too long for anyone but the most ardent fan to keep up. The brain strains trying to connect new faces with old ones.

The film, for all its prestige and edginess, its lofty goals and contemporary messages, is not a particularly engrossing experience.

Michael Apted's direction keeps the tension high most of the time, and Dennis Potter's screenplay ably wends through the very complex plot that has but a few loose ends. [13 Dec 1983]

It’s a basic format that’s been trotted out for plenty of reboots before. But aside from its frequent stabs at self-referential comedy, “Scream” proceeds with a dull repetitiveness.

A dead-end wrong turn in the usually boundless Pixar universe. Buzz, himself, is a bit of a bore, too.

It’s not as funny as it thinks it is and tiresome in its overly familiar redemption arc.

Good Boys mines that gulf between childhood and adolescence like few films have before.

Motherless Brooklyn is done well enough that you wish it had struck out on its own path, rather than crib from Robert Towne and Roman Polanski. It’s hard to forget it, but that’s “Chinatown.”

This is a film that stays with you and changes you. It is heavy, indeed.

Bill is a hard part to pull off, but Damon does, creating a flawed but compassionate character, made doubly hard since he outwardly reveals little emotion.

It all fits together a little too well, too predictably and, well, too Disney. Pooh and company have always been a wonderfully neurotic bunch, but in Forster’s polished film, they’re a little suffocated, a little lifeless. Any semblance of authentic childlike glee remains purely theoretical.

The ambitions of Wonder Woman 1984 may be just outside its grasp, but it seldom feels predestined or predictable — a preciously rare commodity in the genre.

Goddard’s film looks terrific and has all of the — as Hamm’s character would say with exaggerated Southern flare — “accoutrements” of an intoxicating slow-burn thriller, but none of the payoff.

Miller gets to play in a wide array of cultures as the djinn skips through time, all with their own shimmering palettes and fairy tale hyperrealism.

The transition — from hyperreal cooked crabs that glisten in a bowl in the first 30 minutes of the film to amorphous, gooey Candyland critters 30 minutes later — is jarring. The sequences on the moon grow tiresome, despite huge toads that fly and squeaky-voiced critters.

Moving On is certainly not perfect, but it’s sincerely trying to be something more than your standard octogenarian farce. You might even be surprised by your own emotional investment in this rather trim film.

Isn’t It Romantic stays pretty surface level, which makes for a fine and pleasurable viewing experience, but doesn’t exactly do anything to show that rom-coms would be better if the best friends had more of an inner life, for example. In fact, it just kind of redeems the formula in some ways.

It’s Jones who dominates the film

A sort of high-gloss, nicely crafted daydream with a good score and generous references to LA noir films.

Usually, it’s pleasingly aware of its own silliness. But there are blind spots.

And in spite of the absurdity, it is stupidly watchable. If you don’t know or remember the details of what went down, save the search for after. Just wear your gaudiest designer logo, order a martini at the bar and give in to the easy pleasures of House of Gucci.

Sorkin bites off a lot here — he wants this film to be about everything. And the dialogue is so typically snappy that he basically gets away with it.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about this whole sequined bell-bottomed experience is you might even find yourself getting a little emotional. But not too much, this is vacation after all.

It is charming and silly and sometimes cringey — other people’s relationships always are— and in the end it works exceedingly well because of them and their wonderful chemistry.

It’s sluggish at times and too withdrawn for such a vibrant tale. But it stays nevertheless in tune with the spirit of Burnett’s book, and by the time it reaches its late crescendo, this “Secret Garden” blooms nevertheless.

Stunningly stupid! Amazingly bad! Incredibly awful! Just downright terrible! [17 Feb 1993]

Godzilla vs. Kong, the only creature feature to dare wide release in some time, is a rock ‘em-sock ’em monster-movie revival with all the requisite explosions, inane plot twists and skyscraper smashing to satisfy most lovers of gigantic amphibians. Vive le cinéma!

Within a conventional rom-com package, the ending of which isn’t the slightest of mysteries, tropes are subverted, big questions are asked about marriage and love, and a warm spotlight is shined on Pakistani culture.

While No Hard Feelings finally gives Lawrence (also an executive producer) a platform for some of the slapstick humor she’s so good at, it also feels like she’s been inserted into the framework of a quite male coming-of-age rom-com/fantasy.