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.