Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.

Directed by and co-starring Sidney Poitier, it is at least competently made and has a few, fleeting moments of genuine fun.

Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.

Alien: Covenant is reasonably entertaining. But it slips off course after that opening section, and the problem is caused by the very creatures we presumably came to see.

It’s simply a movie that makes you feel welcome.

Deadpool, intended as a spiky antidote to superhero oversaturation, ends up impaling only itself.

The movie is an act of loony generosity we shouldn’t refuse. This is ludicrous entertainment for frazzled times.

The Courier is almost two films in one: the second half is much darker and more intense than the first, but the shift is so delicately abrupt that at first you barely register it. That’s part of the movie’s edgily engaging artistry; what begins as a shadowy spy adventure ends in a place of mournful resignation.

Even if [Garland] offers no clear solutions to this crisis, he throws his full weight into exploring it. Just be warned that the path he cuts is a thorny one.

Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness.

A fairly standard exercise in claustrophobic menace. It is also an exercise in style.

This spectacle of strenuous improvising is more stunt than true experiment.

With a more elegant, purposeful structure or at least more time to explore her toughest choices, Miss Americana might have given fans a satisfying portrait of the real Taylor Swift. As is, it’s more like a sketch. And that’s a shame. After an album as bright and vivid as Lover, I can’t imagine I was the only one hoping for more color.

It's a cocktail-party movie with a Molotov-cocktail finish: a tribute to the 88-year-old auteur's artistry - and his con artistry as well.

In a brief review in Time magazine this week, I gave Dan a gentleman's B-. Let me try to remember why. Because the pressure of keeping his ardor secret turns Dan pleasingly cranky.

Shaggily amusing but familiar and way-too-long.

A thoughtful epic is both a rarity and an oxymoron. But that's what Ali is, and you can't help being drawn sympathetically into its hero's struggle for mastery of himself and his era.

Our natural sympathy for the Carmichaels is sabotaged by crude and careless moviemaking.

Actor Eastwood, the sometime star of television's Rawhide, is certainly not paid by the word. In Fistful he hardly talks at all. Doesn't shave, either. Just drawls orders. Sometimes the bad guys drawl back. Just as tersely. Trouble is, after they stop talking, their lips keep moving. That's because the picture is dubbed. Like the villains, it was shot in Spain. Pity it wasn't buried there.

Like Disney's other adaptations of children's classics, The Jungle Book is based on the Kipling original in the same way that a fox hunt is based on foxes. Nonetheless, the result is thoroughly delightful.

Jodorowsky's is perhaps a prodigious, certainly a prodigal talent. What is most bothersome is not his chaotic cosmology but his coldness. He is so obsessed with allegorical meaning that El Topo misses any kind of full human resonance. It is instead a vivid if ultimately passionless passion play.

Though it works hard to make us believe it’s really a social statement about hospitals’ lack of scruples...its garden-variety true-crime roots are painfully visible.

Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.

It is very tiresome peering through the gloom trying to catch a glimpse of something interesting, then having to avert one's eyes when it turns out to be just another brutally tormented body.

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.

These people are fools for heedless love and, perhaps, needless complication, and you can't help responding to the heat of their passion.

Sleepy Hollow may be late for Halloween, but this trick is a real treat.

It's a feast for the eyes, but we're still hungry.

You get 45 minutes of awesome encased in 90 minutes of yawnsome.

These characters don’t always behave as we want them to; they feel lived-in, not written, with flaws and attributes that chime with things we see in our family, our friends, ourselves.

Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.

How well do Bond's established conventions survive after a third of a century's hard use, the post-cold war deglamourization of espionage and the arrival of yet another actor in the central role? The short answer is, on wobbly knees.

Farrell's work as Syracuse is understated to the point that some may find it unremarkable -- but it's a beautifully confident performance, an irony given that he constructs his portrayal of Syracuse around the concept of humility.

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.

There is none of the affectionate respect for working-class life and values that marked the similar, and far superior, "Norma Rae," nor any of that film's sense of felt reality either.

Wu is a fine, supple tabula rasa; McGregor (Trainspotting) shows again that he is one of the boldest, most charming young actors.

It is also extremely well acted at every level (one especially wants to single out Bob Balaban as the Government's chief aggressor and Wilford Brimley as its belated voice of conscience), and directed by Sidney Pollack with a sort of crisp but unassuming professionalism that is rarer than it ought to be. Perhaps best of all, the script, by sometime Journalist Kurt Luedtke, who was once part of a Pulitzer-winning investigative team on the Detroit Free Press, has a marvelously entertaining intricacy, briskly and believably building, half-inch by half-inch, Michael's outrage over and Megan's entrapment in the plot to get him.

The film's blithe misogyny soon becomes wearying; it refuses to see women as more than the sum of their private parts.

Conran hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.

Earnest but costumey drama.

Its heartwarming and clear-eyed approach to first love and the challenges of coming-of-age distinguishes it from its contemporaries.

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

Seduction is more important than deduction in this chic display of star quality to the eighth power.

The summer's zazziest action movie.

Though From Russia with Love remains the liveliest Bond opera to date, Thunderball is by all odds the most spectacular. Its script hasn't a morsel of genuine wit, but Bond fans, who are preconditioned to roll in the aisles when their hero merely asks a waiter to bring some beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon '55, will probably never notice.

Van Damme has been known as a martial-arts legend, movie star and pain in the ass. But never an actor -- until now.

By the time I got to the end of Captain Marvel...I heard the voice of my own inner superhero, Peggy Lee, whispering in my ear: Is that all there is? The most heinous supervillain of all is Boredom.

It doesn't look particularly special - despite the visual potential of underwater scenes - but kids are going to eat this up.

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.

I wanted very much for West's new movie to evoke films like "The Others" or "The Orphanage," which made me, in the moment at least, a believer in ghosts. The Innkeeper's payoff lacked that kind of oomph, and weirdly, the pairing of Luke and Claire brought movies about work relationships, like "Clerks" and "Office Space," more to mind than ghost stories.

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.

If this movie were a big-band arrangement, it would be a duet for a sax man and a girl singer, but with the soloists in a different key from the band.

Some of the writing is sparkling. Joke for joke, there’s probably just enough to keep you laughing. But if Always Be My Maybe isn’t terrible, it’s still lackluster enough to make you feel that underserved and underrepresented audiences deserve more.

Do we care about Gardner and son? Oddly, we do, because they are so appealingly played. What more might we wish for them? A movie that's a lot less repetitive.

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.

This new Suspiria is bland, grisly, boring and silly. There is nothing poetic or erotic about it.

Enigma is not for everyone, but the thoughtful (and the historically minded) will find it an absorbing and extremely well-textured experience.

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

A mini-showcase of smart, thoughtful contemporary horror.

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."

A melodramatic journey from coast to coast shows Hitchcock at his best. It gives movement, distance and a terrifying casualness to his painful suspense.

By grafting stylistic affectations onto an otherwise naturalistic movie, Kaufman blunts the raw power that, is The Wanderers' greatest asset. Like his characters, he would have fared far better if he had stopped showing off and practiced a little self-control.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis.

But the carnage, like the sex scenes, is shot so pristinely that it becomes a nouvelle-cuisine feast; this is a splatter film Martha Stewart could love.

The real kick, however, is in the grandeur and detail of the production design, by Jim Dultz and David Rockwell.

If sometimes this loose and anecdotal film loses dramatic pace, it always rights itself. And it remains steadily in touch with its best qualities - generosity, common sense and a mature decency that is neither smug nor sentimental.

It’s sometimes boring and pretentious and often a little silly, almost to the point—almost—of parody. But even with all its flaws tallied and noted like battlefield casualties, there’s still something mildly compelling about it.

I don't want to oversell You Kill Me. It is not going to leave you breathless with laughter. But I don't want to undersell it either. For an hour and a half it exerts its own preposterous reality, making you believe it -- and like it.

Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance.

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

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.

With his charming, sympathetic picture The Lost King, Stephen Frears digs into the fairly recent rehabilitation of the misunderstood monarch’s legacy—as well as the 2012 discovery of his long-lost bones beneath a Leicester parking lot.

Brideshead Revisited is untaxing, pleasant enough to watch. But I'm still waiting to be seriously discomfited by it.

Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time.

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

So here's my second and final verdict on the movie: it's as captivating as its heroine.

Storytelling efficiency is one of Miss Sloane’s most effective calling cards — that, and Chastain.

Patient and plodding -- but as realized by John Malkovich, in his directorial debut, utterly absorbing.

The Road to Guantánamo is his (Winterbottom’s) most unsparing statement yet of war's brutalizing effect on both the prisoner and his jailer.

Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they're just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.

Though we still believe that Lawrence, who turned 25 in August, can do no wrong, she isn’t given much opportunity to do anything spectacularly right here. Her performance is a medley of sobs and gasps, in mournful or radiant closeup. This time, her Katniss is as much a prisoner of her circumstances as Peeta is. She and the movie are both victims of burnout.

Davidson’s Zeke is one of those inexplicably winning losers with coolness in his bones. He just doesn’t know how to make it work in the real world.

Without insulting modern Africa, Naked Prey writes the wild poetry of its past in raw colors.

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.

Made with a sort of tasteful vulgarity, this movie never disappoints the slack-minded audience's anticipation of the humanistically healing banality, the life-crushing behavioral cliché.

It has the slapdash air of a movie that was a little more fun to shoot than to watch. To say that Blades is a little sharper than "Kicking and Screaming," but not nearly so smart as the best parts of "Talladega," is like taste-testing a Big Mac against a Whopper and a Wendy's Classic Double.

The film's director, Kevin Macdonald, who did "The Last King of Scotland," is not a flair fellow. The chase scenes interpolated into this version have no special oomph; the encounters no residual kick. Paging Ridley Scott? Oh, sorry, too late. So there it is: another film that can't compete with a TV show.

But it IS a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.

The Man Who Sold His Skin, from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, hits some ominous and sinister notes as it tangles with serious political and social issues, among them the plight of refugees, the nature of art and exploitation, and various facets of self-loathing. But it ends on a surprisingly airy note, and that makes all the difference.

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.

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]

As a one-off, it’s a featherweight delight, like the prettiest pink-and-white cake on the tea tray.

It parades a screen chemistry rarely seen since the original Butch and Sundance.

DiCaprio, here as in "The Departed," proves himself the most watchful and watchable actor of his age. Since his teens, he has known how to make moral dilemmas seem both profound and sexy, and at 32 he just keeps getting better.

Like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.

Even if Gladiator II is essentially an unapologetic retread of its predecessor, all of these actors are fun to watch—though none stands taller, literally or figuratively, than Denzel Washington, as slave-turned-schemer Macrinus.

Kinds of Kindness is too parched and mannered to be either disturbing or funny or both—and not even its capable cast can rescue it.

This isn’t just a movie about reawakened ambitions, but about how our teenage hopes inform our grownup selves, or perhaps haunt them. It’s a lot to pack into a seemingly unassuming little movie, but Pohlad—who also directed 2014’s superb Love & Mercy—pulls it off.