But for sheer, go-for-broke nuttiness, The Greatest Showman stands alone in the landscape of this holiday season’s crop of movies, and I urge you to give it a chance.

The insertion of attractive Hollywood stars into a daunting landscape makes for some odd contradictions of scale as the story unfolds with white-knuckle inevitability. [28 Sept. 2015, p.61]

It's a great show for what the Disney organization has called "the under-twelve sector," and even though it runs long enough (2 hrs. 6 min.) to make the over-twelve sector squirm.

It's fun in a perverse way; the viewer gets to experience a vivid sense of what it feels like to occupy a pigeon-poop smeared piece of stone high in the sky.

Greengrass, a meticulous, thoughtful filmmaker (he also directed the second and third films in the series, The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum), clearly believes in what he’s doing. But his earnestness is at odds with the movie’s desperate, frenetic desire to keep us engaged every minute.

Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are glorious comic actresses, while Joan Plowright provides a firm, touching moral center to the film. They almost make you forget Cher's totally out-of-it work as a disapproved-of American and carry the film to its destiny, which is one of inoffensive inconsequence, prettily staged. [24 May 1999, p.88]

The picture—directed by David Yates, who also gave us the last four Harry Potter films, terrific ones—feels both sprawling and crowded, as if it were trying to pack too much mythology into one cramped crawlspace.

Finally, though, Traffic, for all its earnestness, does not work. It leaves one feeling restless and dissatisfied.

The Sitter is predicated on a belief that chunky Jonah Hill, or at least the persona he presents, is secretly supercool. While it turns out to be a wisp of a movie, on that front at least, it is persuasive.

The movie and everyone in it remain, under Ivan Reitman's determinedly casual direction, very loosely organized. They amble agreeably, but not necessarily hilariously, from one special-effects sequence to the next. These are not better, worse or even different from the original's trick work, and their lack of punctuating surprise is the film's largest problem, especially at the shamelessly repetitive climax. [26 June 1989, p.89]

Minions: The Rise of Gru is hardly the best of the Despicable Me movies or spinoffs...But the ridiculousness quotient of The Rise of Gru—directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val—is still high enough to spark at least mild rejuvenation. And whether you have one eye or two, six hairs sprouting from your pate or none at all, you could probably use a little of that right now.

If you focus on the acting alone, it’s fun to watch these two circle each other–but the movie around them doesn’t bring us any closer to the heart of this aggrieved city.

In strict filmmaking terms, Bohemian Rhapsody is a bit of a mess. Some of its scenes connect awkwardly, and it hits every beat of disaster and triumph squarely, like a gong. Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with “bad” movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek’s performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings.

The Farrellys need to remember this: Sappiness is easy, comedy is hard.

The script, by Peter Hedges from his novel, spins out a few too many eccentricities, and the direction, by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), meanders. But DiCaprio and Cates bring loopy authenticity to their roles, and Depp is, as always, a most effacing star.

Although Chappaquiddick doesn’t address Kennedy’s subsequent legislative record, it’s the silver-lining storm cloud that hangs over the movie.

Doesn't touch (Li's Hong Kong movies). But it is trying something clever.

It’s not that Armstrong is wrong about the targets of his mockery. He just doesn’t seem to have much more insight into them than the average extremely online observer who’s spent years despairing over the same headlines.

It is a tear-jerker that is consistently slick and at moments almost believable.

Operating under such handicaps of plot, but with the help of some amusing dialogue, Nightclub Comic Danny Thomas puts remarkable warmth into a portrait of Kahn.

With the ambitious home-invasion horror chiller Us, Peele goes even deeper into the conflicted territory of class and race and privilege; he also ponders the traits that make us most human. But this time, he’s got so many ideas he can barely corral them, let alone connect them. He overthinks himself into a corner, and we’re stuck there with him.

Light as a feather, the movie is at times a modest pleasure, but inconsequential.

Now that Eat, Pray, Love had lost its commas and become a movie actually starring Julia Roberts, I was no longer annoyed by how much it seemed like one; it had assumed its rightful place in the entertainment universe.

What Happens Later, directed by Meg Ryan, works so hard at trying to give us something fresh and novel that I couldn’t help wishing it were better: the cloud of dissatisfaction I felt after watching it kept trying to reshape its molecules into a better movie, albeit one that could live only in my head.

Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp.

Until The Raven almost literally loses itself during a chase in the city sewers, it nicely balances its literary gamesmanship with a R-rated thriller's mandatory gross-out tableaux.

There’s something safe and cozy about Mad About the Boy that made me long for the unruliness of the first film.

The movie looks like every other rom com, all spacious apartments and sleek, woodsy vacation homes, but it takes you through a wider range of responses to the relationships and characters than most.

This is the rough cut of a good movie, and a splendid opportunity wasted.

A hard-striving, convoluted movie, which never quite becomes the smoothly reciprocating engine Anderson ...would like it to be.

The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.

There’s almost too much going on in Honk for Jesus. The film jumps from one thematic thread to another without exploring any of them thoroughly, and even so, some sequences go on longer than they should.

Laughter trumps political fairness, and Get Hard made me laugh at, and with, situations I hadn’t thought could tickle me. The movie has a warm heart beating under its seemingly scabrous shell.

Grace is not as tightly wound as the best of its breed, but it is a genial way to pass the time.

The highest purpose of movies is to give us more than what we think we want, and even though Three Thousand Years of Longing offers plenty of rapturous imagery, the arrow it shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should.

There's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon.

It points out what's missing in his (Oshii) approach: fluidity of character line, the subtlety of expression that brought humanity to a Warner Bros. cartoon duck or rabbit.

The Batman is a moderately well-made film, with some appealing performances, most notably from its star, Robert Pattinson, and from its cryptically glamorous Catwoman, Zoë Kravitz. And it looks like a movie, which used to be something you didn’t even have to say: The Batman may be dark, literally—its doomy, underlit ambience comes courtesy of cinematographer Greig Fraser—but at least it’s pleasurably cinematic, a picture that creeps to the edges of the big screen with an operatic flourish.

Hayward is the very best thing about Cats, a movie that, like cats themselves, is otherwise filled with contradictions. Cats is terrible, but it’s also kind of great. And, to cat-burgle a phrase from Eliot himself, there’s nothing at all to be done about that.

The world may have seen the outcome, but it’s still convincing, a story of courage without platitudes, and it features one of Antonio Banderas’ best performances in years.

Franco's performance, particularly as he portrays the post-"conversion" Michael, is hard to read: the character drifts through the later scenes as if he'd been body-snatched. And, in some ways, he was.

As an amusement designed to take the world’s mind off its problems for a few hours, Wonder Woman 1984 is perfectly suitable. But it’s also OK to wish for less noise and more wonder, especially in a world that’s filled with the former and sorely in need of the latter.

The pleasures of Ballerina are both blunt and fleeting; you’re not going to remember the plot—or any of the performances, perhaps save one—five minutes after the end credits role. But the picture’s cartoonish brutality is cathartic.

The acting ensemble is crucial. Everyone's really fine.

This is cinema reduced or distilled to its purest definition, of movies that move. If you want dewy humanity in your entertainment, watch Lifetime.

There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it.

By the time Lion has really begun, it already seems half over. That’s not to say the picture isn’t satisfying in a straight-to-the-gut way.

With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark room, the silence surrounding the threats... The film is a slow fuse with a big bang. [24 Dec 1990, p.76]

Morning Glory is a cut above most other recent light fare, but not a prime cut.

It's an efficient thriller, with scare weapons ranging from the primitive (a pitchfork) to the apocalyptic (an A bomb). The acting is only horror-film-functional, and you might wish that our trio of renegades knew a few basic laws of the genre.

At 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate. [22 Dec 1997, p.80]

There’s nothing overtly dislikable about the film, and there are a handful of scenes that are beautifully written, acted, and directed. But Jay Kelly feels more sentimental than truly thoughtful, particularly in the motif that resounds like a clanging bell in Jay’s brain: Why didn’t I spend more time with my kids?

When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is hardly full-on punishment, and in places it’s bitterly funny. But in the end, it’s an enormous relief to walk away from Linda’s problems. Our own don’t seem so bad in comparison.

There’s plenty of spectacle in Coming 2 America, and a few laughs. But its chief value may lie in reminding us how good its 1988 predecessor really is.

The best sequences are those incorporating vintage footage from the 1970s-era Chez Panisse, where Tower, as a young, rakish beauty — quite clearly gay, but also pansexual in the dashing way people were allowed to be in those days — was the crown prince of the kitchen.

Where the Red Fern Grows is quite possibly the saddest, most purposefully depressing movie (and book) we’ve ever experienced.

This well-intentioned movie is a somewhat flawed one: its pace is a little slack, and sometimes it feels too predictably prepackaged. But Jones and Hammer keep the picture moving even through its shakier phases.

This extended Streisand Special has done absolutely nothing to correct the flaws in the Broadway original.

The movie is less to be experienced than to be appreciatively studied, like an insect, a stuffed bird, or the sketch by a gifted artist in the style of an Old Master — in this case, the Master of Suspense. It’s not pure Park or pure Hitchcock but a muted, mildly mesmerizing blend of the two. You might want to take a careful stroll in this Hitchpark.

All this magical switcheroo plot nonsense is just a formality anyway: everyone who comes to Irish Wish—friend, foe or neutral observer—will have come for Lohan.

With Champions, director Bobby Farrelly returns us to the late 1990s, a time when there were fewer sorely needed guidelines, but also fewer gatekeepers just waiting to catch well-meaning people who happen to trip up.

Still, at its best Keeping Up with the Joneses riffs on something very real: the existential loneliness of living in a place that’s just too perfect. Everyone needs new friends now and then – even ones who make you eat snake.

There are a few good scenes—an intricately executed train wreck, for example—but the movie is notably slack where it should be zestful.

Haigh, perhaps driven by some misguided sense of narrative purity, refuses to loosen the screws, and it’s almost too much to bear. If you make it through Lean on Pete, you’ll feel weariness in your bones afterward. The ache may not be worth it.

My advice to Scott and Lindelof is, Try harder - to bring the characters as well as the creatures alive; to extend the grandeur of that music-of-the-sphere scene to an entire movie; to devise new horror-film money shots; and to scare the crap out of me.

Law, sexy and crafty as ever, and here with a flinty innocence, proves again he has the star-quality goods.

The straight technical expertism is still one of the wonders of the movie world.

Theron is a superb and versatile actor, and she’s good here — it’s not that she always needs to play nice characters. But as Megyn Kelly, she’s like a Hitchcock blonde with all the allure drained from her.

The story becomes unpleasantly bitter and asks us to buy certain behaviors that don’t make much sense, and that we’re not quite sure a character would be capable of. Yet even after the movie makes that sharp zigzag, its one constant is Damon, who’s turning out to be one of those great, casual American actors we didn’t know we had anymore.

The film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life.

Unfortunately, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta-comedy of ostensibly epic proportions, is not nearly grand enough to embrace those multitudes.

Really, as "Hangover"-style dumb entertainments go, it’s certainly good enough. Which isn’t to say it’s anything close to what what women want.

Tawdry but compelling.

The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.

The glossily photographed family drama People Like Us is not without appeal, but it has a major construction flaw. It's dramatic arc is predicated on the problem of accidental incestuous attraction. Egads.

If this wigged-out modern Western doesn’t quite work, it’s at the very least a cry of vexation over what our country, messy at the best of times, has become, thanks to a virus that found its way not just into our lungs, but into our very lifeblood. Dr. Aster has listened in on America’s heartbeat; the diagnosis is that we’re basically a mess.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post may not hit as hard as it should. But it at least suggests that the only real losers in life are those who presume to read God’s mind.

What makes The Good Girl worthwhile is its performances. All the actors play their entrapment with a weirdly convicted blankness. That's especially true of Aniston.

Romantic comedies often make do on flimsy premises, but this one is thinner than Kate Moss and nuttier than an Almond Joy.

Capone is an odd little film, at times weirdly engaging but often so bizarrely muddled that you might identify a little too closely with its perpetually unglued protagonist. But Hardy is always worth watching.

For all the energetic milling, Rise of an Empire proves superior to its predecessor by making war a game both sexes can play, on nearly equal terms. In comparison, the R-rated "300" seems as innocent as Adam in the Garden before the delicious complication of Eve — or Eva.

Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness.

You know you’re really only here for the monsters, squaring off and staring one another down, first at sea and later in the streets of Hong Kong. Director Adam Wingard (Blair Witch, The Guest) makes the most of these moments, fleeting as they are: The Hong Kong fight scenes are particularly gratifying, a melee of orchestrated swiping and tail-swishing that jolt the movie out of its doldrums.

We forgive Bridget the movie its obvious flaws because of its equally inescapable charm.

There’s some comfort to be found in the predictability of its beats. But only at the end does it muster any real vitality. Any ribs it breaks along the way have healed seamlessly before you’ve even left the theater.

A Quiet Place Part II is effective, all right—Krasinski holds all the keys to turning us into nervous wrecks by the end. But just because you hold the keys doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to use them all. And a horror movie that gives us space to breathe is also more likely to hit us where we live.

Whereas Italian fashion icon Valentino was larger than life in "The Last Emperor," Matt Tyrnauer's jazzy 2009 documentary, Saint Laurent in L'Amour Fou is mostly a rather sweet and anguished ghost.

The novelty of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies wears thin in the last third: How is it that the threat of a zombie apocalypse is always more thrilling than the event itself? But Riley and James help carry the picture to the finish line.

The French Dispatch is high Andersonia, an elaborate movie contraption with a million tiny parts moving in concert, and depending on your threshold, it might all just be too much.

Agreeable but never compelling, Silverado proves it takes more than love of the western to make a good one. Maybe the dudes at K-Tell were a mite too slick for the job.

Yes, he ends up being felled by a heroic dog, but the film nonetheless creatively imagines the horrors of power in the wrong hands.

Don’t Worry Darling makes a better entertainment than it does a serious parable.

Obvious, though, is the word for Hopper's direction. It amplifies to rock-concert level every pained plosive in Bertie's speech, forces certain characters dangerously close to caricature.

With his round, ruddy face, Tighe always seems on the verge of derisive laughter or flash-fisted rage; it's enjoyable guessing which fever will surface first. The rest of the movie is less entertaining, a righteous homily without the grits.

These stories, alas, are utterly predictable. Still, Samuel L. Jackson breaks through the crust of cliches as an expert called in to verify the instrument's provenance, and violinist Joshua Bell plays and Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts John Corigliano's score ravishingly.

A movie featuring Kevin Hart is going to be a Kevin Hart movie: at this point, his personality is too big to fold up; his jackrabbit energy dominates. That doesn’t leave much oxygen for Haddish, whose loopy, billowing spirit needs lots of airspace. And still, somehow, she’s the movie’s guiding presence.

Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. [9 December 1996, p.82]