Bodies Bodies Bodies is one of those movies that wins you over scene by scene, before sealing the deal with its marvelous, ludicrous ending. See it with a group of friends you love. Or even just low-key resent.

It’s that rare superhero movie that doesn’t grind you down with nonstop action or, worse yet, the usual tiresome cavalcade of smart-ass wisecracks.

Steve and the movie still fly high through plot twists and cool stunts.

This wonderfully animated movie is a little more softly pitched than its predecessor, but it still has plenty of rollicking spin on the ball.

Movies don’t have to be bigger and bolder than we ourselves are. Haley’s films are things we can reach toward – there’s an intimacy and candor about them that feels welcoming.

The film is most significantly about puzzled people trying to comprehend the cosmic reversal of fortune that was the Depression. They don't have much more than raw courage and simple virtues to rely on. Unlike most period pieces, Cinderella Man encourages us to fondly recall not songs or clothes but values we have largely mislaid.

At times the joints in the movie's carpentry are strained, at times the mood swings jarring. [16 Oct 1989, p. 82]

It has the kind of tension and energy -- maybe even a touch of delirium -- that is only a memory in most of today's big studio movies.

This Barbershop is simply a place where we can all laugh together, sometimes at ideas that veer close to being explosive.

For all its intelligence, Mank isn’t anything close to a masterpiece; it’s more a pleasurable feat of derring-do, a movie made with care and cunning and peopled by actors who know exactly what they’re doing.

This is a beguiling, somewhat grisly drama, based on something that happened to one genuinely unhappy, messed-up family.

The movie is a surprise, the good kind, an instance of a filmmaker zigging just when you’re expecting him to zag.

Split is compulsively watchable.

For those who park their sense and sensibility at the 'plex door, there's plenty to enjoy in the performances, the rowdy innocence of the whole thing, the closing sing-along of Build Me Up Buttercup--and the vision of Cameron Diaz in giggly, gangly bloom.

The movie isn’t a melodramatic tell-all, or a total downer. But it manages, even while being unapologetically entertaining, to feel like an honest reckoning with all the things we didn’t want to know about Houston at her fame’s height. It’s a film that takes our failings into consideration, rather than simply fixating on hers, a summation of all the things she tried to tell us and couldn’t.

As long as The Wizard of Oz sticks to whimsey and magic, it floats in the same rare atmosphere of enchantment that distinguished Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. When it descends to earth it collapses like a scarecrow in a cloudburst.

Gosling is such a human, and humane, actor, that he can easily mirror the humanity of a creature who’s not even human—one who doesn’t even have a face. Together, these two are unbeatable, and they also represent an old-fashioned ideal of what the movies used to mean to us.

Normal may not be groundbreaking, but it does come equipped with a wicked spirit and some great B-movie energy.

Maybe even more surprisingly, about 70% of the crazily imaginative plot hangs together. But the other 30%, sloppily thought out and superfluous, drags the movie down.

Even if you’ve never heard of the Peterloo Massacre, this picture–beautifully staged and shot, with a you-are-there urgency–will reward your patience.

The best thing you can say about the moderately entertaining, if predictably excessive, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that if you squint and concentrate really hard, you can tell it’s a Sam Raimi movie.

The movie is called A Place at the Table and it specifically addresses our country’s hunger crisis. But it also speaks to larger hungers. Hungers for independence, a dignified life, a better chance for ones children — in short, the American dream. See it and weep.

Edward Plumb's background music is expertly keyed into the production, but none of Bambi's four songs is notable. Some innovations are. For the first time, Disney has done his backgrounds in oils instead of watercolors. The result is striking. The russet reds, browns, bright yellows, make autumn look like autumn. Each season has a special color impact.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

Unfolds with a patient intelligence. The Sixth Sense might not scare you out of your wits, but it could reward them.

Maybe the film loses a little steam as it rolls along, but it is still puffing and tooting as Clooney and Zellweger ride off into the sunset -- on a comically raffish period motorcycle, free as the wind.

The production's genially tatty air enhances its anarchical mood and encourages one to go with its goofy yet often shrewd comic flow.

It's a modest little fantasy. But it's also well made, unpretentious and refreshing.

The warming, nicely played relationship of the burglar and his lawyer daughter (Laura Linney) is the source of the film's absolute power. [24 Feb 1997, p. 67]

Lowery can't always keep the movie from drifting through the mists of pretension, and the tremulous, too-precious score, by Daniel Hart, is sometimes intrusive. Still, the picture's visual imagery--the cinematographer is Andrew Droz Palermo--is so restlessly poetic that it's hard to turn away.

Ephron refreshingly stands out as the nation's foremost advocate of mind-meld. [21 Dec 1998, p. 74]

You watch these impossible stunts with fear and gratitude for the hardest-working man in show biz. To see your first Jackie Chan movie is to fall in love with what the movies once were: a comic ballet of bodies in motion.

The whole movie has a warmth about it that never slops over into sentiment: there is much more here than tall-guy, short-guy jokes. [12 Dec 1988, p.82]

With its unpredictable sexual politics and quirky little hero/heroine Albert Nobbs has the edge of quinine, a peculiar taste that won't entice everyone but worked for me.

A fine copy.

The nerve of these people, recycling that story. No, the shrewdness of these people. For Days of Thunder offers adolescent males the possibility of a high-speed crash almost every minute. It offers their dates the possibility of a shy, winning Tom Cruise smile on an equal-opportunity basis. The boys get some sober, silly chat about the nature of courage. The girls get to see one of their sex (Nicole Kidman) play doctor with Cruise. [16 July 1990, p.87]

A Late Quartet serves as an acting showcase, particularly for Walken and Hoffman, and makes for an interesting study in artistic ego.

It is a talkative film, rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into lower-class life.

The Neon Demon isn’t much of movie, at least if you’re looking for an actual story. Nor is it a moralistic fable about the emptiness of Hollywood—if anything, it’s a winking mockery of that sort of thing. But whatever the heck it is, it throws off a chilly, pleasurable sheen. This is visual hard candy.

Some of the numbers are dazzling, some are exhausting, and many are a mix of both—and still, somehow they work.

This is a story about following one’s dreams and then learning there’s a lesson attached to those dreams—you might catch more than a perfume whiff of sanctimoniousness here. But it’s rare to find movies that value the mere idea of beauty, and this one—directed by Anthony Fabian—does so unapologetically.

Here’s the oddest element in this tale of Hollywood fine-tuning run rampant: the movie is pretty good — the summer’s most urgent, highest-IQ action picture.

This cheeky movie does not impose heavy-duty meaning on Page's life and times. It just lets us draw our own ambiguous conclusions about what she did. It is the better, the more enticing, for so doing.

A more sensitive Ferrell in a script that plays like Charlie Kaufman Lite: that should send up breakthrough and Oscar signals. It doesn't quite, though. The movie is clever, but a little too pleased with its own clockwork intricacy.

There are scenes in the new movie that seem like stretching exercises at a retirement home; there are garrulous stretches, and even the title seems a few words too long. But once it gets going, Crystal Skull delivers smart, robust, familiar entertainment.

The results, while occasionally forced, are consistently amusing.

American Fiction isn’t nearly as cutting, or as ultimately moving, as its source material—but that doesn’t make it dismissible.

The modest pleasures of The Nice Guys lie not in following the wiggy story twists but in watching Gosling and Crowe mix it up and mess everything up.

Astute and painfully relevant political comedy.

This series will survive as well, until 2016 — when, you can bet, there will be a third Star Trek to celebrate the TV show’s 50th anniversary. Here’s hoping that those three years will bestow a measure of maturity on all concerned: Kirk and his bright curators too.

A lively, nutty film, one full of clumsy, clanging battles filmed by the gifted, eccentric Besson with bloody brio.

It's good to spend time with a movie that takes its time. Granted, Harris doesn't advance the genre; instead he burrows into it, finds a home there, as one might retreat to musty library stacks, where old pleasures and treasures await.

Being fortunate enough to survive a catastrophic event doesn’t necessarily protect you from future heartbreak. Rebuilding Paradise recognizes that, though it also offers some cautious optimism. This is a movie about how life goes on, in defiance of whatever may have been burned away.

A shrewd portrait, sly, casual yet palpably authentic, of the principal ways members of any minority try to respond to an uncomprehending world. [29 Jun 1998, p. 69]

You can, if you will, think of All the King's Men as a purely political parable, but that is to miss its blackest, bleakest meanings.

Williams, who has comparatively little screen time, has come to act, not to cut comic riffs, and he does so with forceful, ultimately compelling, simplicity. [June 5, 1989]

It's a feel-good frolic, which is fine for anyone who prefers their Hitchcock history tidied up, absent the megalomania, the condescending cruelty and tendency to sexual harassment that caused his post-Psycho blonde discovery Tippi Hedren to declare him "a mean, mean man."

Stowaway pulls plenty of pages from the generic space-movie handbook, but it still builds a mood of dread and contemplative ennui, finding its resolution in a final, somber shot.

It's an enjoyably old-fashioned shoot-out, if you can shake off the current headlines and sink in to a fantasy of hyper-violence that plays like an NRA vision of America the Beautiful.

The picture is enjoyable not so much for its twisty plot—which, even if you haven’t already read the book, is essentially pretty guessable—as for its artful dedication to its own highly theatrical, drapes-drawn somberness.

God’s Creatures is a story about women doing the best they can by one another in a place where the odds are stacked against them. It’s a chilly film but not a heartless one; sometimes the nature of forgiveness is captured best in a small sliver of light.

As to the chief complaint about Clash of the Titans -- that the movie stinks -- what can I say? I liked it. This is a full-throttle action-adventure, played unapologetically straight.

It's like a giant sculpture that is so strange and off-putting, it's instantly, intriguingly post-modern. Swept up in the film's pile-driving self-assurance, even Bay-haters may absorb the pain to enjoy the gain.

The battle skirmishes here mix sudden violence with slow-motion artistry. The attractive cast can sell an obsession or articulate a conundrum with equal fervor.

Belushi mines quick charm out of his surly role. And Arnold, starched tongue in cheek, is a doll: G.I. Joe in Soviet mufti. He could beat the stuffing out of a toy Rambo. [20 June 1988, p.88]

Any sentient viewer will be able to predict every lumpy twist of this ludicrous, fitfully enjoyable movie.

Hardly unforgettable, but it is an amiable diversion, kept afloat by some comic moments of the raunchy, silly variety, and by something that does feel rather retro: a kindness to its youthful characters.

Rare among the recent fairy tale adaptions (from "Mirror Mirror" to the dreadful "Red Riding Hood") the invigorating Snow White and the Huntsman actually breathes new life into an old story.

It ends up being surprisingly touching, despite the fact that you start rooting for the cloyingly cute Celeste and Jesse to break up almost from the first frame.

Our Idiot Brother is both daffier and more amiable than a Woody Allen film, but the sibling filmmakers (Jesse Peretz directed and his sister Evgenia Peretz co-wrote the screenplay) have concocted sort of a "Ned and His Sisters."

Queen & Slim is a movie made of equal parts sorrow and glamour, all tempered by the grim reality that during the course of their odyssey Queen and Slim do some things they’re not proud of.

Curiously intense, alertly principled, refreshingly uncynical movie.

Men is a little too neat structurally, its moral and human issues a little too clear-cut: at heart it is old-fashioned melodrama. But Sorkin's dialogue is spit-shined, and the energy and conviction with which it is staged and played is more than a compensation; it's transformative. And hugely entertaining. [14 Dec 1992]

It's Mescal who gives the movie’s surprise stealth performance.

Gaudily entertaining, occasionally wearying sequel.

Mostly, though, it’s an enjoyable portrait of a prickly friendship between two men of vastly different temperaments.

Despite its star's heroic efforts, The Aviator is a gorgeous jet, flying on automatic pilot.

For its first hour or so, this upscale heart tugger motors along familiar trails. So ennobling -- and predictable -- in director Penny Marshall's fidgety rendering of a case study by Oliver Sacks. [24 Dec 1990, p.77]

A decent entertainment -- not up there with the "Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings" sagas, but a notch above "The Golden Compass" and "Narnia."

The Wachowskis have the predilection for loopy camera setups common to first-time directors, but their hearts are in the right transgressive place, and their film will tide some of us over until Quentin gets...well...unbound.

Another little nugget mined by Walt Disney, one of Hollywood's most successful prospectors. It comes from Disney's thoroughly proved mother lode: movies for the kids that adults will stay to enjoy themselves.

Witness, which is one of the most originally conceived and gracefully made suspense dramas of recent years, to work into edgy juxtaposition the representatives of two subcultures that are ordinarily mutually exclusive.

This movie does not fully separate itself from our admittedly low -- even slightly shameful -- expectations, does not become the pure documentary it might perhaps better have been.

Sometimes an actor can help minimize a director’s shortcomings, and that’s what Fraser does here.

The movie unfolds with novelistic pacing for a leisurely but engaging two hours.

This good-natured movie is very much in the spirit of those ancient comedies from Ealing Film Studios in which nice, silly people defend some enclave of old-fashioned sanity against the forces of brute modernism. [27 January 1997, p. 68]

Can't touch the 1972 film's austere poignancy, and McElhone lacks the bewitching beauty of Natalya Bondarchuk in the original Solaris. But the project's gravity and ambition can't be denied.

Though the picture doesn't deserve to appear on any critic's 10-best list, it observes the minimum standards of modern action films, which is to say it looks smarter, talks sassier and moves faster than almost anything else on the market.

Take this Shower and feel refreshed; it's a cool dip on a hot day.

Somehow it works, in part because of the way director Howard keeps his crowded frames abustle with activity, in part because of the sheer indomitability with which his leading characters are endowed by the actors and by writer Dolman, but mostly because the movie takes enlivening chances with its material.

Joyous and funny even as it strikes the occasional melancholy chord, Blinded by the Light is a testament to the small miracle of how the right music manages to find us at just the right time, even when it has to travel from New Jersey all the way to that four-letter word, Luton.

Metroland finally makes a good, subtle case for the bearable weightiness of middle-class being, for the higher morality of muddling through.

The Photograph, both thoughtful and entertaining, with a pleasurably laid-back vibe, belongs to a class of movie that barely exists anymore on the big screen. It’s also a reminder that appealing actors are sometimes the best spectacle of all.

In Rapace, it has an actress who brings a memorable literary character to indelible movie life, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett O'Hara.

Most plausible explanations for the picture's success are: 1) the presence of Victor Moore, past master of creaky charm and pathos; 2) a show as generally oldfashioned, in a harmless way, as a 1910 mail-order play for amateurs; 3) the fact that now, as in 1910, a producer cannot go wrong with a mass audience if he serves up a whiff of comedy and a whirlwind of hokum.

Quick, capable, thoroughly bloody action film.

This isn't "2001," by a long shot, but for 2000, it'll do nicely.

Director Jack (Room at the Top) Clayton, sensitively seconded by Cameraman Freddie Frances, has filled every coign and corridor with a dangerous, intelligent darkness. Moreover, the main performances are most capably carried off.