It's an odd movie - mild in tone and circumspect, yet darkly funny, and done in a hybrid form that I don't think has been used so thoroughly before.

A horror item considerably better than most. [09 Jun 1945, p.56]

The new movie continues the "Bourne" tradition of exciting, reality-based thrillers, but when the series lost its star it lost most of is soul. [13 & 20 Aug. 2012, p.96]

A good picture, even if the theme music is "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles."

Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade.

The writer and director, Paul King, scatters the tale with handfuls of eccentric charm, first in the forest and then in the home of the Browns. At one point, borrowing freely from Wes Anderson, he frames it as a living doll’s house, with each member of the family hard at work or play in a different room.

The script goes from one formula to the next, and it reworks the pranks of generations of male service comedies, but the director, Howard Zieff, refurbishes the stale material with smart small touches, and Goldie Hawn has such infectious frothy charm that she manages to get laughs out of ancient routines about a tenderfoot going through the rigors of basic training.

When I first saw the movie, at a festival, it wavered on the brink of the precious. That changed on a second viewing. Most of Francofonia now seems tender, stirring, and imperilled.

Ewan McGregor’s bright-eyed Ian, following in the footsteps of characters in Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point,” is a study in guilt-free violence. But Colin Farrell’s Terry is something new. Terry is a decent guy with many weaknesses, and, after the crime is committed, Farrell gives him a piteous self-loathing that is very touching.

Along with Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, Burton is one of the few magi who know what can be dredged up, even now, from the cauldron of special effects. [21 May 2012, p.80]

By temperament, Abrams is more of a Spielbergian than he is a Lucasite. His visual wit may not be, as it is for Spielberg, a near-magical reflex, but nor is Abrams suckered into bombast by technological zeal, as Lucas has been, and the new movie, as an act of pure storytelling, streams by with fluency and zip. To sum up: “Star Wars” was broke, and it did need fixing. And here is the answer.

A London-set Hitchcock silent thriller that was in part reshot and in part dubbed to make it a sound film--and an unusually imaginative and innovative one.

Against all expectations, you approach Rabbit Hole with a heavy heart and leave with a lighter one.

It's very well worked out in terms of character and it has a sustained grip, but it certainly isn't as much fun as several of his other films.

As a wisecracking , intermittently violent lunatic, Michael Keaton electrifies this quirky farce. The film isn't the knockout it might have been if it had a few big wild routines. And yes, it's sentimental. But the sentimentality isn't overplayed, and Keaton's fast rap cauterizes much of it.

A genial, messy comedy of marital discord and mismatched lovers.

No stranger man - not even Nixon - has ever been at the center of an American epic.

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.

Whenever the movie strays from its hero, you feel oddly impatient to get back to him, to watch his cravings do battle with his conscience, and to wonder anew what’s burning in his blue-green gaze.

This came late in the series but it's still fairly cheerful.

It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing. [10 July 1989]

Redford’s patient earnestness — not always a virtue in his earlier work as a director — produces something honorable and absorbing.

Meanwhile, everyone in the theatre is thinking: Given that I paid good money to learn about the world’s most frightening cocaine king, why am I watching a movie about the world’s most stupid Canadian?

To point out that Priscilla is superficial, even more so than Coppola’s other films, is no derogation, because surfaces are her subject. She examines the skin of the observable world without presuming to seek the flesh beneath, and this latest work is an agglomeration of things—purchases, ornaments, and textures.

The Box turns into a kind of sacrilegious Christian fable; it’s haunted by God, but it delivers a vicious doctrine. At the risk of impoliteness, I would suggest that Kelly drop his reliance on religio-mystico-eschatological humbug and embrace, in realistic terms, the fantastic possibilities in ordinary acts of murder, fear, heroism, and death. If he pulls himself together, he could be the next Hitchcock.

It's a creditable though unadventurous film, handsomely staged in the M-G-M backlot style for classics.

Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese and director Clint Eastwood have turned out something sombre and restrained -- almost, in fact, good (though it's too long).

A lightweight retelling of Page's life, a sketch, really, which doesn't probe very deeply into Page's bizarre mixture of exhibitionism and piety. But some scenes that might have been borderline exploitation, or just corny…turn out to be ineffably beautiful.

If you fancy a fresh dose of grotesquerie, and more technical phraseology than you can shake a joystick at, I recommend “Grand Theft Hamlet.”

Of the many heists and grabs that litter the movie, none is as blatant as the deft, irrepressible manner in which Ferguson, displaying a light smile and a brisk way with a knife, steals the show. Poor Tom Cruise. He can’t even steal a kiss.

The film is like an expanded, beautifully made TV "Movie of the Week."

In short, Official Competition is nicely balanced, and the poiser-in-chief is Cruz, whose portrayal of Lola goes way beyond simple wackiness.

With special effects of a startling simplicity—the filmmakers launch the action into cosmic realms.

Martin Scorsese’s début feature has just the slightest bit of story line, but the movie is a fascinating portfolio piece: a black-and-white blueprint for “Mean Streets."

Perhaps a filmmaker whose powers were less orderly, less morally driven to soothe and pacify, could have pushed Fabienne—and Deneuve—to tragic and stylistic extremes that would have rendered the film’s reconciliations as mighty as its conflicts. Instead, he offers half a film of magnificent fragments.

As for the title, well, it made me think of Thomas Carlyle's wife, who read Browning's long poem "Sordello," enjoyed it, but still couldn't work out whether Sordello was a man, a city, or a book. So it is with 2046. A place? A date? A hotel room? A bar tab? You tell me.

William Shatner's Kirk is less stoic here than in III--he's pleasantly daffy. The others in the crew also have an easy, parodistic tone. But the picture doesn't have much beyond the interplay among them and the jokey scenes in San Francisco.

Has some of the wittiest writing Sayles has ever done for the movies and some of the best acting he's ever coaxed out of his performers, and the picture is a pleasant, if unexciting, experience. [8 July 2002, p.84]

No, what’s dismaying about All Is True is that it plays so slow and loose.

The jokes get rather desperate, but there are enough wildly sophomoric ones to keep this pop stunt fairly amusing until about midway. It would have made a terrific short.

Even when the male of the species tries to do better, he does his worst; and the most merciless verdict in Klown is delivered not by the law, or by fate, but by the eyes of women.

Harmless, but it gave me a pain. Why make such a fuss over middle-aged bodies anyway? [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]

Filmworker amounts to yet another rite of devotion in the ongoing cult of Kubrick—a cult that worked its power not just on Vitali but on all of modern cinema.

The other Grant, the irresistible but slippery Cary, was called to account by such strenuous and willful mates as Irene Dunne, Katharine Hepburn, and Ingrid Bergman. But Hugh Grant has never been matched with a woman who directly challenged his oddly recessive charm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]

The Theory of Everything makes a pass at the complexities of love, but what’s onscreen requires a bit more investigation.

The Oscar Wilde story has its compelling gimmick and its cheap thrills, and despite the failings of Albert Lewin as writer and director, he has an appetite for decadence and plushy decor.

The film’s attempt to portray the Queen as more politically enlightened than her courtiers is kindly but unconvincing, and many of the actors bark and behave as if participating in a spoof.

Ragged when it tries for philosophical importance, but it's fun to see so many stars at an early stage in their careers.

The film is paced like a breezy sixties romp and there are some good gags, but the plot's a bit creaky and lacks the clever zing of a good scam.

Never has a blockbuster, I would guess, required so many soliloquies. What with the mournful Molina, the hazed-over Dunst, and the puffy uncertainties of Maguire, we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill.

The French creators of the dance numbers take their work very seriously; they speak of it in terms that would have shamed George Balanchine. That they are sincere in their ideas, however, doesn't mean that they aren't provincial in their own way and long out of date; nor does it mean, to our astonishment, that their show isn't repetitive, solemn, and slightly boring.

Here, in short, is a self-regarding drama of self-loathing: hardly the most appetizing prospect. If it proves nonetheless to be stirringly watchable, we have Brendan Fraser to thank.

The movie is disjointed and, at times, unintentionally funny, but its ineptitude is so good-natured that it makes a charming alternative to the mind-numbing professionalism of American action movies. [23 Feb 1996]

At best, I Love You Phillip Morris may be hailed as a necessary step in Hollywood's fearful crawl toward sexual evenhandedness; the film upholds the constitutional right of every gay man to be as much of a liar, a crook, and a creep as the rest of us. Makes you proud.

There was always a dreaminess in his vision of the city, but now it feels as distant as the polished floors and the Deco furnishings of the Fred Astaire movies that Boris finds--of course--whenever he turns on the TV.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical.

The allure of San Andreas rests entirely on the calibre of its pandemonium, savored, ideally, with a brawling audience on a Friday night. Indeed, it is the kind of movie that makes me want to campaign for the serving of alcohol in leading cinema chains — mandatory beer, I propose, with shots of Jim Beam to toast the dialogue.

Why, then, does the pulse of the narrative falter in the second half? Mainly because Van Sant has covered so much ground in the first, and there isn’t a great deal left to recount.

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

This one is really only for Trekkies; others are likely to find it tolerable but yawny.

Huggins is brash and brisk, of course, with Moretti cleaving to an old-fashioned myth of the American interloper. But Turturro is slightly too broad for the occasion, relishing the outbursts of the spoiled star.

Directed by Bob Clark, this handsome Anglo-Canadian production features fine Whistler-like dockside scenes and many beautiful, ghoulish gothic-movie touches, but the modern political attitudes expressed by the writer, John Hopkins, misshape the picture.

Oppenheimer sacrifices much of its dramatic force to the importance of its subject, and to Nolan’s pride at having tackled it—which is to say, to his own self-importance.

So compelling are Nighy and Burke that I will watch them in anything, yet their spree, drenched in rich and hazy colors, doesn’t quite ring true.

The ambition is laudable, but Tim Miller’s movie, far from seeming reckless and loose-limbed, comes across as pathologically calculated, measuring out its nastiness to the last drop.

A Quiet Place Part II is filled with striking, clever details; it displays no sense whatsoever of the big picture. That failure is the difference between directing and just making a movie.

Hardy gave his heroine a symphonic range, and all an actress can do is pick out certain tones and strains — the fluted whimsy by which Bathsheba is occasionally stirred, or the brassiness of her anger. Julie Christie was the more accomplished flirt, and her beauty was composed of fire and air, whereas Mulligan relies more darkly on earth and water.

There are treasures in Knight of Cups. It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball.

The film loses its imaginative energy once it moves out of the ripe, sleazy carny milieu, and from the start the technique of the director, Edmund Goulding, is conventional, even a little stodgy. Still, the material, adapted from William Gresham's novel by Jules Furthman, is unusual and the cast first-rate.

Meryl Streep gives an immaculate, technically accomplished performance as Sarah Woodruff, the romantic mystery woman of John Fowles' novel, but she isn't mysterious. We're not fascinated by Sarah; she's so distanced from us that all we can do is observe how meticulous Streep -- and everything else about the movie -- is.

We are not not entertained.

Slamming different kinds of experience together, Lee tries to do with montage what he cannot do with dramatic logic.

I saw the film in IMAX, and a week later I’m still waiting for the safe return of my optic nerves, but it was the meagre emotional charge that shocked me most. Toward the end, as in many Spielberg movies, there are tears, but, for once, they feel unearned.

Poky but often charming.

Near the end, though, “Wicked” does surge to a kind of life.

The Final Year is stirring and saddening, but too well behaved by half; I wanted it to be a little less Steven Pinker and a little more Dwayne Johnson. I wanted the huge fight.

Makes a suitable staging post in Witherspoon's headlong career. She may want to forget it by Christmas, yet its cushioned slackness allows her to sharpen her grasp of a steely American type: the girl next door who will kill to get out of town. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

The movie, though a frantic treat for the retina, is also oddly inactive.

Ultimately, the true genre of “Love Lies Bleeding” is a Kristen Stewart movie. That genre, too, is one that the director neither expands nor reinvents.

The movie is fairly entertaining; it's too bad the guest of honor is such a drag.

The emotion got to many viewers, even though the manipulated suspense and the sentimental softening prevent the film from doing anything like justice to its subject.

Fiennes and Tucci, in particular, spin dialogue with athletic deftness, but they and the rest of the cast are burdened with embodying stock characters who exist only through a salient trait or two. Instead of rising to the awe-inspiring heights of their settings, the refinement of the performances is narrowed to monotony.

One imagined that a movie about the Crusades would be gallant and mad; one feared that it might stoke some antiquated prejudice. But who could have dreamed that it would produce this rambling, hollow show about a boy?

For all its faults, has a musty charm.

The first half of Let Them All Talk is barely there as a movie. Soderbergh seems to be sketching out ideas for a plot, and gingerly feeling his way into its moral possibilities, as if he were clinging to a rail, beside a heaving sea. And yet the Atlantic stays calm.

The memoir is strongly written, and I wish that the movie, directed by John Curran (Marion Nelson did the adaptation), had more excitement to it.

Buscemi is the least grass-fed of actors, meant for the rat-run of city streets, and, if I didn’t quite believe in him as a country guy, I believed even less in Chloë Sevigny as a cynical jockey with a set of broken bones. But Plummer, who recently played the kidnapped John Paul Getty III, in “All the Money in the World,” grounds and tethers the movie, as an unclaimed soul with barely a dollar to his name.

You may feel safe in your bed, but be warned: even as you sleep, Earth is under threat from a vast, overheated surplus of character actors.

What Moore’s film strives toward, and touches only erratically, is an emotional claustrophobia to match its physical squeeze.

As an example of the "woman's picture" this doesn't have any of the grubbiness or conviction of the Barbara Stanwyck Stella Dallas, but de Havilland works hard confecting cold cream.

As Octopussy, the beautiful amazon Maud Adams is disappointingly warm and maternal - she's rather mooshy.

In its B-picture way, it has a fascinating crumminess.

Smart, willful, and perverse, this Frida is nobody's servant, and the tiny Hayek plays her with head held high. You may want to laugh now and then, but you won't look away. [11 November 2002, p. 195]

Indeed, the whole film is oddly poised between the pensive and the peevish, with a topdressing of high jinks.

The director, John Badham, does a glamorous, showy job, and, what with all the stunt flying and the hair-trigger editing, this is the sort of action film that can make you fell sick with excitement, yet it's all technique -- suspense in a void.

Wenders' unsettling compositions are neurotically beautiful visions of a disordered world, but the film doesn't have the nasty, pleasurable cleverness of a good thriller; dramatically, it's stagnant -- inverted Wagnerism.

The characters don’t seem to exist outside the stilted drama of their individual scenes; the ambiguities of Balagov’s detached approach yield a sentimental tale of pride and reverence.

Ousmane Sembene's approach is thoughtful and almost reticent; the viewer contemplates a series of tragic dilemmas. Yet for all its intelligence, the movie isn't memorable--partly because the last section is unsatisfying.