Like an Elvis Presley musical from the '60s, filled with shiny bright colors, bouncy music and happy, smiling, pretty people.

Little Pink House brings urgency to a fascinating, underexplored theme.

Once the pieces are all in their places, the deliberate set-up begins to pay some dividends to those who relish the form.

What begins as an examination of middle-class-mom exasperation — in which demanding some marital equality makes one not just a figurative "bitch" but a literal one — turns into a more commonplace bad-dad parable in Marianna Palka's off-kilter, largely off-target satire Bitch.

Once the stardust settles and the generations of "Star Trek" fans pass in judgment, this splendid production may emerge as the best movie to date inspired by the multiple-series TV phenomenon created by the late Gene Roddenberry. [15 Nov. 1994]

Perhaps fittingly given the downturn in the repetitive final act, over the long haul the joke starts getting old in every sense.

The whole thing looks as glossy as any of the filmmaker's spots for Nike, and though surf competition is not exactly suspenseful (at least for the uninitiated), the many vivid sequences on the waves are enough to justify the pic's presence on the big screen.

Bunnylovr‘s strengths are in its engaging character study of a languid young woman who came of age online. It’s not a novel portrait, but Zhu makes it wholly her own.

King of the Corner has been adapted from Gerald Shapiro's "Bad Jews and Other Stories" and suffers from an odd, disjointed quality.

A perfectly adequate family film for kids who love watching things they've seen many times before (which is to say, most kids), it offers plenty of chuckles for their parents but nothing approaching the glee of that first Lego Movie.

Scott Caan, who delivers a derivative but extremely well acted drama.

A portrait of the short-lived artist that will move fans while letting the uninitiated witness enough onstage highlights to leave them wanting more.

The Fundamentals of Caring cleaves so closely to the stereotypes of indie filmmaking, it’s as if it were created by some demonic cinematic algorithm.

Feels slight and pretty ordinary by the end, with no edge or compelling insights, just a reasonable feel for teen attitudes and banter.

The starry casting and heavy hand of director Ryan Murphy do the featherweight material few favors, with inert dramatic scenes and overblown musical numbers contributing to the general bloat. The movie's most undeniable value is in the representation it provides to LGBTQ teens via a high school dance that is every emotionally isolated queer kid's rainbow dream.

By and large, very few remakes, other than Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot reproduction of Psycho, have adhered as closely to their original versions as this one does. Everything here is so safe and tame and carefully calculated as to seem pre-digested. There's nary a surprise in the whole two hours.

It isn’t that the sequel, directed by the returning Chris Renaud and again boosted by an energetic voice cast, doesn’t deliver on the genially amusing, if disposable, fluff — it’s just that the shtick-heavy storytelling proves even more undernourished than it was for the first outing.

If "The Wizard of Oz" were reborn in the 21st century, it might look a lot like MirrorMask. A product of the Jim Henson laboratory, the film is endlessly inventive with creativity to burn.

Sachs offers many gentle pleasures in his latest film ... That said, this is definitely a second-tier entry from the director.

The Astronaut Farmer, is goofy, wholesome and, well, sweet. Despite some droll humor and on-target political jabs delivered deadpan by a uniformly strong cast, "Astronaut" often is too corny for its own good; it could have used more of those zingy lines.

The picture is deeply weird, with an entrancement factor almost entirely dependent on the performance of Michael Parks.

A committed piece of agit-prop, which benefits from the passion of its protagonists. Followers of the band will need no introduction to the subject matter, which is referenced in their musical repertoire. The film also should play well with those interested in liberal causes.

This too-sentimental drama does feature a sterling performance by Giovanna Mezzogiorno as a love-struck housewife dissatisfied with her lot, thus providing the only watchable element of an otherwise disappointing movie.

An earnest drama about spiritual redemption that is likely to strike quite a chord with certain audiences.

While visually stylish and thematically ambitious, Secret Things is ultimately more preposterous than provocative, its vague explorations of sexual and class struggle failing to coalesce in a coherent manner.

The filmmaker clearly has a gift for incisive characterizations and dialogue, but the overall impact of the vignettes is muted by an overall artificiality.

Fast-paced and episodic, the film at times provides such a torrent of information that it becomes more wearisome than enlightening.

It’s perhaps too focused on the Reichsfuhrer’s personal life... while the director’s decision to add sound effects to silent images sometimes feels uncalled for.

The Disneyesque adage is unfortunately all too typical of A Ballerina's Tale, which, other than adding to the pop culture barrage that has accompanied this gifted dancer's rise to stardom, does little to provide insight into her unique story.

There is a darkness in all these “average” characters, underlined by low-key acting and the film’s sinisterly calm, measured pace.

Lopsided in its balance between sentiment and scares, it's a very peculiar genre pic that will make the most sense to those familiar with the films of two of its producers — Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson, whose trippy sci-fi outings like The Endless also balance the fantastic and the intimately human.

The high-wire tonal balancing act proves a little wobbly at times, resulting in a film that is feels less than the sum of its parts. But some of those parts work very well, providing moments of uncomfortable hilarity and genuine poignancy.

The powerhouse voice cast is another plus; besides the aforementioned, it includes Lucy Liu, Bowen Yang, comedian Jo Koy and Greta Lee (Past Lives), among others. Director Raman Hui, making his feature debut, keeps the proceedings moving at a suitably brisk pace, with the colorful CGI animation providing one diverting image after another.

Although the film manages some disarming insights into the man’s complex makeup and difficult behavior, a service enhanced by Louis Garrel’s very good lead performance, serious cinephiles will likely reject it as glib and disrespectful, while more mainstream viewers could be amused but not that interested.

This murky, thriller-tinged Western has the terrain down cold -- from the wide-open spaces to the rocky vistas -- but beneath all the requisite genre trappings there's a vast, empty gulch where the affecting dramatic element should have been found.

The sad result is a karaoke nightmare. Loud and pointlessly crude, the film takes the disintegration of a dysfunctional working-class family and gives it the song-and-dance treatment.

A coming-of-middle-age comedy running on somewhat less than a full tank, Liberal Arts possesses enough comedic moments to approach crowd-pleasing status.

For all its nasty twists and turns, its fake-outs and flashbacks and pile-up of double-crosses, this story of an elderly con man and the wealthy widow he targets feels fatally devoid of danger. Square, tame and tidy as the London-area house kept by Mirren’s primly elegant, creamy-complexioned septuagenarian, The Good Liar is a work of skill but little spark.

An admirable idea in theory proves to be a real slog to sit through in Everyday.

Hugely satisfying entertainment that will attract a broad spectrum of audiences around the world. Zwick fully exploits the star power at his disposal, pairing off Cruise and Japanese star Ken Watanabe as two larger-than-life warriors.

Baby Boom serves up plenty of smart, knowing laughs early on, but by the time it hits the third act (or would that be trimester?), it barely crawls to the finish line.

Eli Roth turns to modern-day Asian fright filmmakers as inspiration for his latest blood-soaked effort while demonstrating an intriguing, original voice of his own.

The film is focused enough on relationships not to sound preachy.

Ersatz local color aside, suffice to say that Song to Song is not designed to win back onetime admirers who felt Malick's To the Wonder and Knight of Cups drowned in their own navels. Though offering the occasional radiant moment (usually involving scenery), it is of a piece with those films.

Despite its intriguing premise, the movie is a disappointing misfire.

The shtick sticks in The Mind's Eye, which lovingly apes period details, this time with psychokinetic warriors instead of alien invaders. But where the first film was dour, this one works so hard at its ultra-grave air of menace that it eventually turns (intentionally, one hopes) comic, building to third-act violence that will leave the right kind of audience howling with delight.

Sharp performances and direction help make up for a spotty screenplay.

The New Romantic comes off as too forced and calculated.

The movie, with its numbing overload of pastels and prayer, is too tonally uncertain to yield any fun. It’s a depressing window into the worst excesses of faith racketeering that has little to offer in the way of commentary.

Audiences’ staying power for this meandering existential exploration of personal, professional and national identity — as tragicomic as it is rueful — will vary, depending on their interest in the artist or their appetite for the film’s aesthetic beauty.

Terrence Howard delivers another solid lead performance and competition swimming is a new arena for such films. Nonetheless, Pride is just plain trite.

The film will frustrate viewers who insist on knowing which interviewees are recounting real experiences and which are perpetuating fictions hatched by the game's creator, Jeff Hull. But mystery is part of the appeal.

The dark and sometimes funny The D Train is a feel-bad comedy, in that one feels bad for what happens to every character in the film and bad for sometimes being taken to places that feel more implausible than just transgressive.

The main reason the film is worth a watch is the strong performances of its two leads.

In outline, the story is pretty funny, and the film's outlandish takes on sports-movie conventions deliver some laughs. But Thurber chooses the low road to those laughs so often that he undermines his own satirical design. His actors certainly deliver amusing, spirited performances, but again, they get done in by relentless adolescent humor.

Smart and unsettling psychological thriller.

What could have been a biting black comedy taking product placement to the logical extreme instead is so obviously predictable that even a savvy cast led by David Duchovny and Demi Moore can't sell it.

The result is neither funny nor thrilling, just exhausting.

Director Tim Johnson (DreamWorks’ Antz) and writing team of Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember (Epic), keep the momentum humming and the amusing bits reasonably entertaining, but they can’t vanquish the prevailing feeling of deja vu, and that the Boov are merely Minions of a different hue.

An entertaining mess. It blends together musical styles and dances, historical periods with howling anachronisms, coy, almost childish gimmicks with R-rated sex and violence.

Green has chosen for his focus to fall on Enrique, in many ways the least interesting character in his story, rather than the son or even the mother who is surprisingly protective and understanding.

Fans will be relieved to know that this Hellraiser definitely doesn’t skimp on the gore, providing enough viscera and flayed skin to satisfy the most bloodthirsty viewers.

Director Patricia Riggen finds a rigorous and affecting visual language for The 33, but she and her international cast are hampered by a screenplay that too often gets in the way of a powerful story.

No matter how frenzied and elaborate and sometimes distracting his technique may be, Luhrmann's personal connection and commitment to the material remains palpable, which makes for a film that, most of the time, feels vibrantly alive while remaining quite faithful to the spirit, if not the letter or the tone, of its source.

A particularly nasty slice of medical-themed horror, Marc Scholermann's film is the sort of thriller in which the tenderest scene depicts an autopsy.

Tsai, who co-wrote the script with Yu, pulls out all the stops with his C-dub role, brimming with witty send-ups of Chinese-American cultural values and Asian stereotypes.

It offers a plethora of personal accounts, practically all of which are unabashedly laudatory, that provide a fuller picture of its subject's complex personality even if the results border on hagiography.

City of Tiny Lights exerts tension throughout and remains intriguing in its use of terrorism anxiety and anti-Muslim prejudice as fodder for hasty conclusions.

The picture is mildly unsettling even if its ingredients don't add up to as much as they promise to.

For those who like head-on, immersive emotional experiences at the movies, The Sky Is Pink may be a direct hit.

The very capable ensemble, all of whom have done impressive work elsewhere, mostly gets smothered by the over-conceptualized, over-intellectualized approach to the material.

Alda actually is kind of interesting as the mentally unstable uncle, but Broderick appears to be sleepwalking. Madsen has little to do, and everyone else plays things far too broadly.

A commendably restrained loser-turns-winner tale offering an unexpected second showcase for Terri star Jacob Wysocki, Matthew Lillard's Fat Kid Rules the World is less colorful than its grandeur-deluded title suggests.

If you like gruesome stuff and familiar faces in unfamiliar roles, you might be entertained by Body Bags. If you're a fan of these fright-meister masters, you might enjoy the wit and style. But I'm not sure many others will, given the production's graphic nature. One maybe, but a trilogy is just too much. [06 Aug 1993]

Even if The Men Who Stare at Goats is not worth comparing to "Dr. Strangelove," it should satisfy audiences with its great cast and patent absurdities, coated in quaint nostalgia for the happy hippie days of yore.

For most of its 110-minute run time, Don’t Make Me Go is a solidly likable drama, anchored by lovely, lived-in chemistry between John Cho and Mia Isaac as a father-daughter duo. But a misguided third-act choice throws off its bittersweet vibe, leaving a distinctly sour aftertaste.

The Pact demonstrates both why people respond to horror and why it's so routinely scorned.

Primarily an actors' showcase, it does at least provide the opportunity for the virtuosic John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos) to strut his stuff in a well-deserved leading role.

The impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted.

Although distinguished by some wildly staged vehicular chase sequences and genuinely witty deadpan dialogue, the film inevitably feels like a footnote to the plethora of similarly themed movies and television shows that seem to arrive on a weekly basis.

Even after 90-odd minutes, Mansfield remains something of an enigma. There's the nagging sense that Ebersole and Hughes are tossing myriad darts at a skittish moving target, trying out numerous techniques (including a couple of fifties-style animations) without ever settling into a proper rhythm.

A pulpy and fun fight flick that is better in some respects than it needs to be, Retaliation may not do for Moussi what the original Kickboxer did for Van Damme, but it won't send fans home disappointed.

Magic in the Moonlight does have a not-disagreeable expensive-vacation vibe to it. But the one-dimensional characters are mostly ones you’d want to avoid rather than spend a holiday with.

Hits on all cylinders -- a smart blend of acting, direction, editing, design, costumes and effects.

The film is lovely in the graceful way it executes its unsurprising content, and the actors make it soar even at its most predictable.

Although the prescription drug users that Klayman (Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry) profiles have some interesting things to say about how these products affect their performance and perceptions, the steady stream of talking-head experts doesn’t do much to raise the movie’s pulse.

Energetically lurid, gratuitously violent and a hell of a lot of fun, horror-satire Assassination Nation is a throwback to black-comedy teen flicks of yore, but with a bitingly timely feel.

This stranger-in-a-strange-land adventure has enough appeal to sustain its limited theatrical release.

David Brent remains an enduring comic grotesque, but this sporadically amusing big-screen resurrection is more cash-in reunion tour than killer comeback album.

Allen the writer-director has gone tone-deaf this time around, somehow not realizing that the nonstop prattling of the less-than-scintillating characters almost never rings true.

As puerile and go-nowhere as the script is, Clement and Berry are more successful than their costars at making the dialogue their own. Clement even gets a laugh or two. But be assured that the pic's big reveal is not worth the wait.

While some thriller addicts may embrace the resulting misanthropic action, others may find their minds wandering — to the many real-life cases of fraternity hazing, gang-rape and run-of-the-mill antisocial behavior that inspire deeper feelings of dread than this unconvincing outing.

While Caine and young Milner make for amusing adversaries, it's nice to see Crowley paying respect to his elders by populating the retirement home with a number of familiar faces, including those belonging to Rosemary Harris, Sylvia Syms and longtime "Coronation Street" resident Thelma Barlow.

Refreshingly, V/H/S promises no more than it delivers, always a plus with genre fare.

Thompson’s heavy-handed storytelling, along with a nonstop score of pure mush, brings this closer to telenovela territory than to the Louvre.

The mental and physical landscape would do justice to an Atom Egoyan film, but in this film, the key dramatic moments feel as forced as they are predictable.

Pitch-perfect performances bring it all home, particularly that of Danish leading man Mikkelsen.

The result is a much more playable film than recent efforts, though Murphy will have to share the applause with young Yara Shahidi.