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.