The action is stagey, but there's certainly enough going on.

The move may seem insipid to people who want something substantial, but there's a special delight about the timing of actors who make fools of themselves as personably and airily as Dudley Moore and Amy Irving do here.

Mescal’s good-humored watchfulness and contemplative calm make the character a companionable presence, even as the filmmaking ultimately succumbs to inertia and the great, defining passion of Lionel’s life recedes into the mists of memory.

What gives this trash a life, what makes it entertaining is clearly that the director, Norman Jewison, and some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly, shallow script used the chance to have a good time with it.

As the real-life Ronald Woodroof, he (Mcconaughey) does work that is pretty much astounding. [4 Nov. 2013, p.116]

What is missing from the film is wit—the deep wit that comes from playing off species and environments against each other.

In Sharp Stick, Dunham forces a flood of experience and pain into a compact vessel.

The movie has an air of momentousness, yet most of it is conventional, though well-directed, pop mayhem.

Bob Nelson wrote the script, which Payne has been mulling over for nine years, and some of it, enhanced by the deliberate pacing of his direction, is funny in a deadpan, black-comedy way. But the absurdist atmosphere feels thin: the movie is like a Beckett play without the metaphysical unease, the flickering blasphemies and revelations.

Most of the innumerable sequels were tripe, but this one has a freshness -- even a kind of wit -- mixed in with all the blood.

I wouldn't trust him (Downey) to look after my handkerchief, but I'll watch him in anything, and that is why Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang--smug as it is, and more like a day in the reptile house than a night at the movies--remains a slithery treat.

In a sense, “Flipside” is a hoarder’s tale, in which objects, by summoning the past, generate intense emotions in the present.

In The Adults, the wry and vulnerable simplicity of the musical numbers and the comedy routines suggests not just a realistic musical but an anti-spectacular one; the antics mesh with the drama not merely at the level of tone or style but at a conceptual one.

Extravagant care is taken with minutiae, and the directors, Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, whistle through the first twenty minutes of the plot with a controlled giddiness that would leave many live-action adventures staggering in their tracks. Yet what a curious plot it is.

As Mostow proved in “Breakdown” and “U-571,” he can churn out excitement at a steady pace; whether he can handle dread--altogether a more unstable material--is another matter. [14 & 21 July 2003, p. 85]

As admirable as some of the onscreen talk is, it’s mainly just delivered, along with the intentions and meanings that it contains; its precision leaves little overflow, little room for observation, little scope for imagination beyond the intimate purview of the story.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

The attraction of the movie is its friendly, light tone, its affectlessness, and its total lack of humanity. [6 Aug 1984, p.72]

A crisp, tough-minded action film about an international group of mercenaries who stage a coup in a small, decaying West African country run by an Idi Amin-Papa Doc-style despot. The casting of Christopher Walken as Shannon, the leader of the group, gives the film the fuse it needs.

In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.

Do not be fooled by the sci-fi trimmings of this film. Despite its light and amiable manner, it’s a sort of “Deliverance” for the digital age, deriding the ability of tame souls, at a supposedly advanced stage of civilization, to cope with the unknown.

Once again, a "daring" Hollywood movie exposes social tensions--touches a nerve--and then pours on the sweet nothings. But along the melodramatic way, there are some startling episodes (and one first-rate bit of racial interchange), and recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and others set quite a pace.

Unlike the youthful romance in “Liberty Heights,” which bore the gleam of a better society, the alliance of Paul and Johnny looks doomed from the start, and the movie, gazing forward, sees no cause for harmony or hope.

Timbuktu is hard to grasp, as befits the sand-blown setting and the mythical status of the name. The more you try to define the movie, the faster it sifts away.

Whereas Cruella sent me back to Dodie Smith, as a blessed escape from what Disney has done to her creations, Tove dispatched me down a rabbit hole, or through a Moomin door. I recommend the trip.

Some strains of this fearsome film, to be honest, feel overworked and arch. When Joe finds his white-haired mother sitting in front of the TV, for example, does it have to be showing “Psycho”?

While other B-budget horror producers were still using gorillas, haunted houses, and disembodied arms, Lewton and the director, Jacques Tourneur, employed suggestion, creepy sound effects, and inventive camera angles, leaving everything to the viewers' fear-filled imagination.