La Dosis harms itself by refusing lucidity. What should be a razor’s edge rivalry plays more like a hamstrung thriller.

The documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.

The film moves along at a serviceable clip, but it seems half an hour too long, thanks to the obligatory shoot-'em-up conclusion, filmed on the largest sound-stage in the world, but nevertheless the dullest sequence here.

It doesn’t always make sense tonally and intellectually, but the whole thing is energetic, handsome and stocked with enough expert, appealing performers to hold your interest through the rougher, less coherent passages.

The upshot is a whopper of an ending that is as silly as it is satisfying.

Its luxuriant, nearly three-hour running time allows lots of room for spectacular musical numbers and dramatic climaxes that are extended to the breaking point and beyond.

Like a half-empty glass of Coke that's been sitting out for a couple of days; sure, it looks like cola, but one sip tells you exactly what's missing.

The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.

Highly irritating at first, Mr. Koury's passive technique eventually begins to yield some interesting results.

Touches earnestly on heart-heavy issues of loss: loss of memory, of love and, perhaps because of the local angle, of (or rather by) the Chicago Cubs. But Mr. Kinney, a founder of the Steppenwolf Theater Company in Chicago and a familiar face from film and television, never gives his movie a sustained pulse.

This adaptation of K. L. Going's 2003 young-adult novel about a rejuvenated overweight teenager takes a humble, heartfelt approach, until sentiment loses out to message sending.

The plots are fairly basic, but the direction by John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper is droll, the effects are all a fan could ask for, and the playing is appropriately agitated. [06 Aug 1993, p.D15]

Likable, lightweight, absurdist comedy.

Cho and Isaac’s stellar performances expose the gulf between familiarity and intimacy.

In the end, like a lot of genre movies, this one pulls from different inspirations, and so weighs in, by turns, as overly predictable and satisfyingly recognizable (part of genre cinema's one-two punch).

Higher Learning culminates in facile violence instead of the assurance that this film maker, in trying to explain forces that oppress his characters, has really done his homework.

A riveting piece of work full of unpleasant characters whom you're glad you've met but never want to see again.

Passion is often sleek and enjoyable, dispensing titillation, suspense and a few laughs without taking itself too seriously.

Ambulant corpses may be tramping all over our movie and television screens these days, but Wyrmwood has enough novelty — and more than enough energy — to best its minuscule budget.

The movie should have been a steadily escalating rampage that results in outrageous property damage. Instead, it wastes too much of its time developing the cardboard characters of the hotel manager, Robert (Jason Alexander), and his two mischievous sons, Kyle (Eric Lloyd) and Brian (Graham Sack).

Magic in the Moonlight is less a movie than the dutiful recitation of themes and plot points conducted by a squad of costumed actors. The tidy narrative may advance with clockwork precision, but the clock’s most prominent feature is the snooze button.

The movie is bulky and inarticulate, leaving behind a trail of wreckage and incoherence.

The story, about a dying matriarch and her stricken adult children, paints by numbers with stock characters and cloying scenarios.

"Where do these people get their money,” I wrote in my notes as Leif and his dog set out for a long drive at the film’s fade-out. Doesn’t matter. Nor do the multiple clichés. In Ride the Eagle, the laid-back vibe is all.

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

Though Psycho II is essentially camp entertainment, Mr. Perkins plays Norman as legitimately as possible, and sometimes to real comic effect. His new Norman doesn't seem as much rehabilitated as reconstituted, but as what? That's the point of the film.

Brubaker is an earnest, right-minded, consistently unsurprising movie about a penologist named Brubaker (Robert Redford), who sets out to reform a single corrupt prison and finds himself bucking an entire system, including the state administration that appointed him to his job. It says a lot about a movie that the only mildly interesting characters in it are those who are corrupt, such as the insurance-selling member of the prison board, played by Murray Hamilton, and a smarmy building contractor, played by M. Emmet Walsh, who attempts to buy Brubaker's neighborly good feelings with a homemade chocolate cake.

Often it feels like reading a Twitter thread of ideas and hashtags, rather than watching a movie. Yet the final act, a “Purge”-like blood bath to the tune of vengeance, is aesthetically arresting.

In Volcano, the thrills are so well wrought that they eventually lose their novelty and become numbing.

In the case of Plaza Suite, I don't have the feeling that anything much has been lost, but rather that nothing much was ever there.

One of the most delightful things about To Rome With Love is how casually it blends the plausible and the surreal, and how unabashedly it revels in pure silliness.

This weirdly engaging tale of banking and bad behavior makes 19th-century China look uncomfortably like 21st-century America.

If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then Pledge is for you.

These characters are fully alive. But the movie attaches them to a conventional, not to say creaky, hip-meets-square drama.

What balances the movie is Mr. Caine's exceptional portrayal of old age as the accumulation of a lifetime's experience. In his performance the child, the youthful rogue and the forgetful codger all live at once.

A low-budget horror anthology with segments both ghastly and moronic.

Though the director's jet-set fantasy world of rugged jewel thieves and sailboat races, triste cabaret singers and sybaritic pleasures may feel dated and more than a little decadent, it is a nice enough place to visit.

Though Ms. Jovovich's performance dominates the film, she remains pedestrian and underwhelming.

Imagine a cut-rate "Titanic" stripped of romance and historical resonance and fused with "Jaws," shorn of mythic symbolism and without complex characters, and you have the essence of this live-action horror comic.

The material isn't organized in any formal way but works as a mosaic that has the feel of a jam session.

Cézanne et Moi offers a pungent, demystifying portrait of the rowdy late-19th-century Parisian art world where famous painters and poets mingled and jostled for position at dinner parties and art openings filled with shoptalk, backbiting and intrigue.

Like "I Am Sam," it is a film that tests your cynicism.

A movie in search of a theme. Svend and Bjarne aren't bad or uninteresting characters, and certainly the two talented actors playing them are inherently watchable. But there's too little meat on these bones.

Notable at least in part for its fumbled potential, this health-care-industry melodrama possesses all the right ingredients: an idealistic young lawyer, a corrupt corporate villain and a sympathetic victim. It just fails to assemble them into a compelling whole.

Though it is a celebration of modesty, there is also quite a lot of vanity in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.

Though based on a remarkable true story, this clichéd tear-jerker is barely interested in Marguerite’s revolutionary teaching methods, focusing instead on the intensity of her connection to Marie.

A savvy exercise in inspirational feel-good cinema lightly seasoned with grit.

If the attention span of Charlie Bartlett didn’t wander here and there, the movie might have been a high school satire worthy of comparison with Alexander Payne’s “Election.” But as it dashes around and eventually turns soft, it loses its train of thought.

Brazenly self-confident in its refusal to pander to the imagined sensitivity of its audience. In this it differs notably from Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World," which approached some of the same topics with misplaced thoughtfulness and tact.

A misfired, misguided would-be satire.

A serious film filled with both great and awkward ideas and made as much from the heart as the head.

More begets more and then too much in Mood Indigo.

As the astronauts contend with airlocks, busted equipment and escape pods, it becomes increasingly difficult to pretend that this isn’t territory where more inventive screenwriters...and stronger visual stylists have gone before.

Another Simple Favor is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.

Where "Ringu" derived its power from the simplicity of its premise and the purity of its execution, One Missed Call staggers under the weight of its director's taste for baroque excess.

If some of the cabin’s lore is on the silly side, Maslany sells Liz’s terror so convincingly that the urge to giggle is dampened. Her lock on the film’s tone is absolute.

Kramer choreographs action through striking tableaus that follow the group’s shifting dynamics; the score, built from percussion and a chorus of girlish hoots, builds the tension.

The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.

The battle scenes are as lacking in heat and coherence as the central love story.

It has a few scattered laughs, some apparently intentional. But this is thin, unimaginative hack work, and it lacks the deranged seriousness and commitment that distinguishes a pleasurable misfire from bland dreck like this. It is, I am sorry to say, no “Gods of Egypt.”

Lone Scherfig (“An Education”), the Danish filmmaker who directed the movie from a screenplay by Ms. Wade, has coaxed wonderfully nasty performances from a young cast.

Little more than a set of intermittently funny skits strung together by a sketchy nonplot about Stuart's relatives. As directed by Harold Ramis, it's seldom better than just amiable.

The film is a disappointing send-off; more an eccentric family drama than a real chiller.

Mr. Buscemi wrote and starred in the small gem of a movie ("Trees Lounge"), which had more psychological nuance than this emotionally cauterized slice of minimalist malaise.

The South Korean director Kim Jee-woon fails to dazzle with the endless speeding-car sequences, but that 60-second flourish during a lengthy firefight is almost worth the tedium.

The movie never transcends a screenwriting formula that makes you uncomfortably aware of the machinery driving it all.

To the director Michael Fimognari’s credit, "P.S. I Still Love You” doesn’t condescend to Lara Jean’s dilemma even as her choices deserve popcorn pelted at the screen. Yet, he’s content with a product that seems beamed in from a staticky old channel.

The film, to its credit, never tries to pluck your heartstrings. As it follows the Geldharts around New York, they are figures in a meditative dialogue on human values that reaches no easy conclusions.

Entertaining, lightly mocking documentary.

The film's seductive lack of pretension will make a fan of you.

Not since the latest fashion layout flirted with arty desolation, has misery looked this fabulously pristine.

Because all of this looks blatantly unreal, and because the timing of the shock effects is so haphazard, Dead Alive isn't especially scary or repulsive. Nor is it very funny. Long before it's over, the half-hour-plus bloodbath that is the climax of the film has become an interminable bore. [12 Feb 1993, p.C16]

Openly polemical but also sobering documentary.

There are some laughs and the cast is talented, but the movie ultimately falls flat, missing an opportunity to delve into the insecurity, teen bravado and anger that leads to physical fighting in the first place.

Nothing about Tales From the Darkside is likely to give anyone much of a scare. But thanks to casting that is savvier than the horror norm, and to direction by John Harrison that is workmanlike and sometimes even witty, at least it's fun.

Kosinski can’t make the inane philosophizing about free will sound profound or new, and the hectic, hasty finale, lacking the nerve or chilly interiority of the original story, plays like something that blew up in the lab.

Hope isn’t manufactured. It can’t be limited to a shadow of a gesture or shouldered by one man whose extraordinary abilities are heralded in the “super” of his name. And it’s definitely not in the cinematic equivalent of a four-hour-long cut scene.

Mr. Records (the child actor in “Where the Wild Things Are”) is nimble and unsentimental in playing a character who is playing at normal, supported by a solid cast in a well-filmed indie that doesn’t let its low budget get in the way of some true chills.

Mr. Stone builds his case seamlessly but leaves no room for dissent, much less a drop of doubt.

It is not really much of a movie at all, if by movie you mean a work of visual storytelling about the dramatic actions of a group of interesting characters.

Mr. Mekas makes little attempt to smooth out his transitions between takes or scenes, which only reinforces the intensely personal, even handmade nature of the work.

Despite Mr. Maren’s own ample experience as a writer, the references to book culture don’t feel vivid enough to act as more than scene-setting, and the film’s strength lies in the family relationships.

Filmed during quarantine in 2020, Family Squares uses the communication tools of the pandemic era to deliver a film with the intimacy of a home movie, while still exploring the chaos and limitations of technology.

Once again starring Jack Black as the gullible martial arts master Po, the animated film melds together wisecracking comedy and sprightly action sequences with a message of kindness, inner peace and self-discovery.

Cashback suggests a “Malcolm in the Middle” episode directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. The hero’s pained, hilarious childhood flashbacks deserve a much better movie.

In many ways Cracks is lurid and rickety. But its gripping ensemble performances lend it an emotional intensity that outweighs its shortcomings.

A drama is only as convincing as its characters. The people awkwardly forced together in Battle in Seattle are rhetorical mouthpieces tied to the sketchy plotlines of a so-so Hollywood ensemble movie.

I Am Woman, a pleasant, yet disappointingly trite biopic of the singer Helen Reddy, has a flatness that’s difficult to ascribe to any one element.

Combine two stars of this wattage with a lot of techno-talk and elaborate heist plotting and you get plenty of good reasons to pay attention.

There's not much in the way of message here. Or wit. Or convincing sexual chemistry. You I Love' just wants to say that young Muscovites are wild and crazy guys and that they can laugh at capitalism's excesses.

Jersey Boys is a strange movie, and it’s a Clint Eastwood enterprise, both reasons to see it.

The film, directed by Gregg Bishop and released by the Chiller Films horror factory, has a few good special effects, but it’s too noisy and scattershot to be suspenseful.

Time hasn’t made it more than a cryptic curiosity. Dialogue is sparse, and it takes some time for the threesome’s dynamic to come into focus, to the extent that it ever does.

Like many other movies trailing a lone gunslinger, Sniper: The White Raven builds to a tense face-off, which for our hero comes to represent a small measure of justice.

The cinematic equivalent of a Brazilian wax, the movie omits much of the story’s most interesting material to create something that’s been smoothly denatured.

Mr. Marshall can't rescue the film from its embarrassing screenplay or its awkward Chinese-Japanese-Hollywood culture klatch, but Memoirs of a Geisha is one of those bad Hollywood films that by virtue of their production values nonetheless afford a few dividends, in this case, fabulous clothes and three eminently watchable female leads.

The movie's messages are delivered with a heavy hand, but some of the scenes are eye-popping, especially -- sorry, peace-loving Terrians -- the battle sequences.

High-spirited entertainment .