Viewers reared on The Lego Movie will find plenty to nourish them anew. The songs are still peppy. The principal voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And real, non-animated kids are still shown, now and then, sporting with their Lego creations.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

Maps to the Stars is at its most potent and beautiful by far when it becomes a ghost story — when the departed, not just Havana’s mother, return to quiz the living.

Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.

The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, and though the editing may be a little too showy and jumpy, the picture has originality and depth, and it’s full of sharp, absurdist humor.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

They are Abbott & Costello with dirty mouths--indomitable, ungovernable, and possibly immortal.

Goodbye, Lenin! is often drab--the color is washed out, the lighting flat. Yet the movie is sweetly enjoyable as a sardonic elegy for a dream that went bust. [8 March 2004, p. 92]

An effective political melodrama that induces a peculiar emotion--the bitterness generated by an old anger that has faded into dull exasperation and now flares up again. [8 Nov. 2010, p.92]

In short, those of us who pursue Mariolatry — the worship of all things Poppins — are free to delight in this film. Indeed, it shifts a little nearer than its predecessor did to the spiky, peppery briskness of Travers’s tales, and the whole enterprise exhales, as it should, an air of the politely mad.

The director is John Lee Hancock, who does what he did with “The Blind Side,” where he commandeered a true and jagged tale, tidied up the trauma, and made sure that everyone lived sappily ever after. Sandra Bullock carried the day then, and now Emma Thompson repeats the process.

The characters of the husband and wife are too simplified and their comic turns too forced, but the general giddiness and Barrymore keep the picture going.

Haroun journeys through the country and films his travels to meet with the regime’s victims. He brings a profound compassion and a controlled rage to accounts of moral obscenities, while also recording accounts of deep solidarity among the victims, even under terrifying circumstances.

In short, the last half hour or so of the movie’s nearly three-hour span is giddily intense, swoony, swashbuckling, and sensational yet superficial fun. Right after I saw the movie, I couldn’t stop talking about that ending. It makes the rest of the movie worth sitting through.

There are some good silly gags, and the animals look relaxed even in their dizziest slapstick scenes. And the picture certainly never starves the eye; the cinematography is by the celebrated Pasqualino De Santis.

Cassavetes films Rowlands, his wife, with self-deprecating adoration; the demanding man likens himself to the defenseless boy, and both are saved by this gloriously burdened woman who would kill for them.

For all its bone-crunching collisions, it's almost irresistibly good-natured and funny.

This joyously square musical succeeds in telling one of the root stories of American Life.

The movie is a daunting blend of head trip, cinéma vérité, music video, and auto-therapy.

In truth, every performance in Everything Went Fine is nicely judged—too much so, I suspect, for many filmgoers, who will be praying for someone to explode. Yet the movie is anything but bland.

Oppenheim doesn’t waste much space on the upside. He aims straight for the undergrowth, and treats the Villages as one big Carl Hiaasen novel waiting to happen.

The air of mystery here is appealing, because the secrets behind it seem to matter both a great deal and not at all--rather like love, which has been Lelouch’s subject ever since he made "A Man and a Woman."

Gable certainly doesn't have the animal magnetism he had in the earlier version, but when Gardner and Kelly bitch at each other, doing battle for him, they're vastly entertaining anyway.

Most of the plotting is ingenious, and soft-faced Mary Steenburgen, as the woman from 20th-century San Francisco who is charmed by the Victorian Wells, makes it all semi-engaging.

It's a smooth, proficient, somewhat languorous thriller, handsomely shot with some showy long takes. It's quite watchable, but the script is clever in a shallow way; the people need more dimensions.

David Mamet has adapted and directed Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, which was based on a true story, with a fidelity so profound that one doesn't know whether to be amazed or depressed by it.

Watching the movie, you feel the constriction and the disgust of the life below, but Holland, pacing the film well, knows when to come up for air. Each time she does, the daylight seems like a benediction. [13 & 20 Feb. 2012, p 120]

Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

How could Frears and his cast rise above the sins of the miniseries? One answer is the force of that cast...The other thing that rescues and refines The Queen is one of the basic bonuses of moviegoing, more familiar of late from documentaries like "Touching the Void" and "Capturing the Friedmans": you come out arguing.

Nothing here is so well defined, and the tone of the film begins to suffer. I cannot imagine returning to it as one does to "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz," hungry for fresh minutiae. [2 Sept. 2013, p.80]

The film is at the same time intensely personal and riddled with occasionally cringe-inducing clichés. No matter: Rockaway is an agonized and sharply moving film.

The movie is sheer hurtling mechanism - the entire world in motion - and it's great silly fun.

The great Bebe Neuwirth should apply for a patent on her slow and dirty smile. The scene in which she introduces her new conquest to her girlfriends over tea, and pretty well pimps him to any takers, is worth the price of a ticket. [29 July 2002, p. 92]

Heavenly, corny nonsense.

Thank You for Smoking is a nifty but slight movie. Some of the writing is obvious, and the dramatic structure is flimsy, if not downright arbitrary. But Eckhart, in a sure-handed performance, holds the picture together.

Above all, the movie relies and thrives on Harboe, who is scrutinized, in closeup, with a vigilance that even Bergman might applaud, and who has the blessed knack of seeming like a perfectly capable adult in one sequence and then, in the next, like a vulnerable child.

Improbable and, at times, sadistic, but, considered as a piece of direction, this Western, set in New Mexico in 1885, is as confident as anything that Ron Howard has done. [8 December 2003, p. 139]

What Kore-eda doles out are not revelatory surprises so much as gradual enlightenments, and our attitude toward the characters is forbidden to settle or to stick.

Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.

The fact that characters are provided with statutory secrets, to be disclosed at nicely timed intervals—as happens with Hunham, Angus, and Mary—does not guarantee any intensity in the revelation. The leading players here, however, bring force and grace to the task.

Despite situations aching for parody, Assayas is anything but satirical: as his characters give the book business, the Internet, and infidelity a vigorous but empty dialectical workout, he comes down squarely on the side of business as usual, which the film itself embodies. Yet Macaigne, quizzical and impulsive, invests a rote role with brilliant turns.

You emerge from the film with a divided heart: thrilled to hear of a woman who, ignoring the dictates of the age, filled her days to overflowing, yet ashamed to measure your own days and to find them, by comparison, hollow and bare. Is it too late to follow Gertrude Bell’s example? First, hire your camel

Cronenberg made a movie called “The Dead Zone,” and I sometimes wonder whether, for all his formal brilliance, he has ever torn himself away from that locked-in, airless state of mind. You walk out of Eastern Promises feeling spooked and sullied, as if waking from a noisome dream.

The romantic star chemistry of Redford and Streisand turns a half-terrible movie into hit entertainment -- maybe even memorable entertainment.

Allen has suggested that “Coup de Chance,” his fiftieth feature, may be his last; if so, he goes out with a self-excoriating bang.

The best reason to watch Little Men is Michael Barbieri, who musters a blend of soulfulness and aggression that would be remarkable at any age.

Cedar Rapids is certainly a guys' movie, yet it leaves us with the unmistakable impression that men are simple engines. [28 Feb. 2011, p. 80]

Quantum of Solace is too savage for family entertainment, but, as a study in headlong desperation, it's easier to believe in than many more ponderous films.

An absorbing and impressive piece of work.

It’s good-natured and raucous, with many scenes that are just sketched but a few that are truly funny.

In contrast to the typical stoic masculinity of fifties Hollywood, this is “A Doll’s House” for the sensitive, passionate married man.

The film has a resigned bitterness, hard to shake off, that feels right for the experience of tough guys, from whatever period of history, who find themselves at the tattered edge of what they take to be civilization.

Nothing that happens in this movie is in the least surprising, but it's all quite pleasant and even, at times, moving.

Like most porn, even art porn, Nymphomaniac falls apart at the end. Von trier even seems to be pranking the audience. But the director has at last created a genuine scandal -- a provocation worth talking about. [24 March 2014, p.84]

Cukor's work is too arch, too consciously, commercially clever, but it's also spirited, confident.

Nobody could leave The Life Aquatic without the impression of having nearly drowned in some secret and melancholy game.

The movie simmers with a longing for revenge, frequently boiling over, and the foe is not just Hawkins but the colonialist order for which he stands: barbarism, thinly disguised as civilization. Many scenes feel punishingly hard to watch.

It's an accomplished, stately movie -- unimpassioned but pleasing. [28 July 2014, p.78]

It's pure nostalgia--the past sweetened and trivialized. The mood is soft regret: he treats the old songs as a value that we've lost.

Is it art? Not remotely. But, up to the final scenes, it’s a tremendous piece of engineering. After all, the narratives have to synch up visually, which can’t be easy to manage. And the hurtling force of Vantage Point is fun to watch.

The intricate baseball knowledge that gets passed back and forth among the characters in Trouble with the Curve is much more interesting than the moral simplicities that the movie offers. [8 Oct. 2012, p.87]

Above all, Pryor emphasizes (with deft compositions involving mirrors and effects) Jo Jo’s elusive selfhood—the fundamental problem of what performers who feel fully alive only while onstage or on camera do with the rest of their time.

Lone Survivor will not please people exasperated by an endless war, but it's an achievement nonetheless. [6 Jan. 2014, p. 73]

Denis delves into the group psychology of a beleaguered crew, housed in an interplanetary rust bucket. Her devotees will claim, correctly, that her movie blooms with provocative ideas.

The film is pretty fair Hitchcock, though not as sexy or as witty as the 39 Steps.

Smart, saucy, and ingenious in the extreme. The trouble is that when a subtext is dragged to the fore, however splendidly, the poor old text gets lost.

Good summer fun, but it’s only about two-thirds the picture it could have been. Since Edward Norton has nothing to play against, the rivalry at the heart of the movie never heats up. [16 & 23 June 2003, p. 200]

For all its scruffiness, the lurching strike-rate of its gags, and the unmistakable smell of amateur dramatics given off by its repertory of rotating players with their stick-on Ted Nugent beards, Life of Brian jitters with good will. [3 May 2004, p. 110]

The picture is just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy about smart misfits trying to do things their own way in the Army. But it has a lot of snappy lines (the script is by Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, and Ramis), the director, Ivan Reitman, keeps things hopping (it's untidy but it doesn't lag), and the performers are a wily bunch of professional flakes.

The decor and effects in Roger Vadim's erotic comic strip are disappointing, but Jane Fonda has the skittish naughtiness of a teen-age voluptuary. She's the fresh, bouncy American girl triumphing by her innocence over a lewd, sadistic world of the future.

A wider range of interview subjects might have broadened the perspective, yet before criticizing a tradition, it’s useful to define it, and Jones (a superb critic who now heads the New York Film Festival) offers deep insight into the watershed moment and the enduring forms of Hitchcock’s canonization.

There is honor, boldness, and grip in the new movie, but other directors can deliver those. Werner Herzog is the last great hallucinator in cinema, so why break the spell?

The project gave me pause. Although Oppenheimer has called it “a documentary of the imagination,” whatever that means, would a measure of investigation have spoiled it? We hear that Congo personally exterminated a thousand people. Does that figure stand up, and does it not matter more than his dawning remorse? There is no disputing that we are right at the heart of darkness, but around it is a larger body of evidence, which awaits another explorer.

Lincoln, written by Tony Kushner, directed by Steven Spielberg, and derived in part from Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," is a curious beast. The title suggests a monolith, as if going to this movie were tantamount to visiting Mt. Rushmore, and the running time, of two and a half hours, prepares you for an epic. Yet the film is a cramped and ornery affair, with Spielberg going into lockdown mode even more thoroughly than he did in "The Terminal."

Much of the writing is good, and the acting is superb, but the constant wrangling wore me out at times.

It suggests not just a subversion but a putrefaction of the Ruddy-comedy genre—a portrait of male loneliness so totalizing, and so scarily close to the bone, that laughs and screams all but bleed together.

Buoyant and observant, 50/50 is a small winner; the director, Jonathan Levine ("The Wackness"), has a great touch, mordant but light-handed.

Singer honors a child's desire not only for adventure but for noble deeds, for loyalty and friendship. [18 March 2013, p.87]

The problem for Detroit is that, when contrivance is required, it tends to jut out... Where the movie scores, by contrast, is in those casual deeds that reveal the shape into which lives have been bent.

Ad Astra is Gray’s most formidable paradox to date, liable to leave you awed, confused, and sad. It is a work of calculated grandeur, and, if you get the chance to catch it in IMAX, and thus to revel in the breadth of its beauty, do so. But there’s something small at the movie’s core.

A major film without being a great film. It's a strange movie, and a stunningly pessimistic one, and the strangeness and pessimism connect it to other recent American films in ways that suggest that something unhappy in the national mood has crept into the movies.

It’s worth seeing precisely for the heat of the arguments that you can enjoy after the screening and, above all, for Emma Thompson.

Among the Scots, look out for James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the bellow of whose triumphal rage is at once thrilling and scarcely human. For a few seconds, we forget that we are watching a well-mounted period drama about a minor regional conflict; a blood-thirst as basic as this feels horribly timeless.

What makes the movie memorable is the over-all excellence of the performers.

The movie has a hard forties snap to it -- lust is a weapon and love is a letdown.

The Halloween of today is slick and sick, but little is left of that sleep-destroying dread. Still, not all is lost, because the Bogeyman, bless him, has not forgotten his manners. For old times’ sake, he gets to sit up straight.

Though it has few dimensions it has pace and "entertainment value."

The latest showpiece for computer animation, with all the contoured, suspiciously gleaming perfection that this entails.

Bonnie Bedelia, who plays Shirley from 16 to 40, gives a tightly controlled starring performance; she's compelling and she brings the role a dry and precise irony.

The story fits together too neatly and the characters remain ciphers, but scenes of news reports of the high-profile deals—in which the protagonists see themselves—evoke an eerie air of plausibility and alienation.

Michael Pertwee, who wrote such English comedies as Laughter in Paradise and Your Past Is Showing for the director Mario Zampi, had a good idea here, too.

Murray’s linking up with Jim Jarmusch is a case of Mr. Cool meeting Mr. Cool, and the result is intriguing and elegant, but not quite satisfying.

The film has the tawdry simplicities of many of the 30s movies that were built out of headline stories, but it also has more impact than most of the melodramas played out in more elevated surroundings.

You want to go to the town; you want to go back to the movie. It has a mellow, dotty charm.

The entire construction of The Souvenir: Part II, the connection between its drama and Julie’s student film, reflects an earnest and principled, if simplistic, didacticism about the pain and the privilege that allow aesthetic pleasure to be created.

Like Ken Loach, Arteta is clearly confident of preaching to the converted, and of whipping up indignation at those who mean us harm. Thanks to his leading players, however, the movie grows limber, ambiguous, and twice as interesting, and the sermon goes astray.

The movie is over before you know it, and is not one to linger in the mind, or indeed pass through the mind at all; but it's a good-humored ride for the senses, never too sickly, and who can say no to that?

The 25-year-old Errol Flynn has the smile and dash to shout "All right my hearties, follow me!" as he leaps from his pirate ship to an enemy vessel.