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]

Sergio’s intentions are pure, and the movie is pleasingly old-school in the way it merges political drama — and tragedy — with romance. Sometimes, though, the burden of playing a dedicated servant of the people appears to be too much for Moura: the performance feels stiff and stately, as if he’s considered every breath. Moura makes us see the gleaming role model, but it’s much harder to see the man underneath — and you can’t leave a legacy without first having had a heartbeat.

Nickel Boys is a picture on the move, a work that’s traveling forward, the thing we always ask for yet often don’t know how to accept when it arrives.

Dark, detailed and only really gets going when the gunplay starts.

Anthony—whose previous documentary, Rat Film, traced the history of Baltimore via the city’s relationship to its rodent residents—has fashioned a thoughtful, if sometimes frustrating, meditation on the acts of “seeing” and “interpreting,” particularly as they apply to law enforcement and the criminal-justice system.

The Keane story is a rich parable that deserves either a wilder or a more acute telling than Burton provides here.

The Phoenician Scheme has none of the lavish, kooky excess of, say, The Grand Budapest Hotel. And the plot, with its fixation on intricate, not-quite-cricket business deals, is—let’s just come out and say it—boring. But Anderson seems to be expressing an indistinct dissatisfaction with the current world order in the best way he can: in a parade of color that’s somehow less colorful than usual.

This is a respectful movie, even a genuflecting one; there’s never a moment when Chazelle fails to let you know he’s doing important, valuable work. But that’s the problem: The movie feels too fussed-over for such a low-key hero.

By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.

There's something refreshing about its utterly unembarrassed embrace of the familiar. The director, George Tillman Jr., either doesn't notice or doesn't give a hoot about the way Scott Marshall Smith's script piles up cliches.

Brings honor to its predecessor, but it’s somehow lacking in joy.

As shot by the gifted cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, Nocturnal Animals is beautiful—or at least arresting—every minute, and it sure isn’t boring. But it’s unclear exactly what Ford is trying to say, though it’s clear he’s trying hard to say something. And that’s the most frustrating thing about this picture.

Flouting all rules of the sea but honoring every war-epic cliche about guts under pressure.

It’s big, extravagant, and at times very beautiful to look at. The story is the problem: packed with expository dialogue, it feels as if it were written to be digested in 10- or 15-minute bites.

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.

Provides the familiar cheap thrills but with a salsa tang.

Lowery stumbles, working too hard to squeeze a response from us.

This is a strange, stormy period for Ingmar Bergman.

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

As with the previous two Knives Out installments, the conclusion is almost beside the point. It’s the getting there that matters, and the twisty road of Wake Up Dead Man is dotted with offhanded jokes and one-liners that are occasionally extremely witty.

The Lady is still titled away from the churning melodrama of Suu Kyi's country and toward the intimate dilemma of a loving couple forced apart by circumstance.

It is the rare conspiracy thriller that ripens as the villains' organization and motives are gradually revealed.

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.

Inside this failed picture there’s a sicker, darker, more truthful one crying to get out. But for a while, Passengers is really going for something. The movie it might have been is lost in space, alone, never to be seen by mere mortals. All we can see from Earth are its few brightly burning scraps, but at least it’s something.

Trap isn’t the worst Shyamalan movie; no one would say it’s the best. It's suspended somewhere in the murky middle, but at the very least it has an amiable goofiness.

It’s worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

With a promising cast like that, not to mention the glittery party setting, Ocean’s 8 should be great fun. Instead, it’s a kind of noncommittal semi-fun.

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

The biggest pleasure from A Simple Favor is watching Lively, who was so searing in the taut thriller The Shallows and elevated 2016’s baffling All I See Is You. She’s a slyly versatile performer, capable of landing a killer punch line.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie – it’s hardly even a good one. But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door. Parker stars as Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful – he may be a better actor than he is a director.

The film's payoff raises more questions than it answers, which may be Shyamalan's intent in this political parable of fear.

The movie is a little gimpy. But Murray's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave; he walks like a golem tailored by Armani; he puts his silky style in the service of menace. It's a whole nother dimension to him. [8 March 1993]

Hanks has a wonderful scene, late in the film, that shows a strong man collapsing into frailty. It hints at the emotional depth the movie might have plundered. The rest of Captain Phillips must rely for its drive on the relentless mechanical agitation of Henry Jackman’s score. It can’t save an overly muscled docudrama that is more pounding that truly gripping.

Uneven but occasionally quite funny.

Horizon—while being at least somewhat culturally sensitive, handsome to look at, and reasonably engaging—still comes off as curiously undistinguished. It’s so tasteful, so careful, so eager not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk.

This film, based on a true story, transcends its handsomeness to present a subtle portrait of a woman's growing consciousness.

It should make audiences happy. But then so did most of his earlier movies, and they were lame, gnat-brained pieces of demagogic doo-doo!

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

Chemical Hearts never pretends that getting through teenagerhood is easy or fun. But if Grace and Henry can survive the perils of first love, there’s got to be hope for the rest of us. Reliving all that anxiety makes adulthood in the modern age look better — at least a little.

A lot of the gags are pretty good. It's not that Star Wars is less worthy of satire than horse opera or gothic horror. It's not that Mel Brooks has lost his cunning, though he does need a freedom of speech not to be found under a PG rating. What's missing is that zany old gang of his. There is simply nobody like them on this trip. [13 July 1987, p.68]

Snyder’s new zombie entree The Army of the Dead is too scattershot, perhaps too derivative and definitely too long. But it’s definitely a movie, as well as a perfectly acceptable turn-your-brain-off entertainment.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been.

Christie has already won prizes for the knowing weariness of her performance, and Flynn Boyle probably deserves some for her ferociously stated frustrations. But their clarity can't quite cut through the thickness of the film's air or compensate for the wooziness it induces.

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too.

Dodging the twin minefields of preciousness and an exploitative 9/11 premise, Horn races away with the movie and makes it believably, genuinely sad.

Guys and gals from the first film, now thicker and with incipient crow lines, pair up in more or less the same permutations as when they were young and shiny. The movie's message is that the way to face impeding maturity is to embrace your inner teen idiot.

Unlike the original, Paranormal Activity 2's pacing is uneven; it builds slowly and effectively before rushing too quickly, and at one point not particularly coherently, through the climax. But the jolts, when they come, are bigger, causing actual physical thrills and chills, at least for me.

Triangle of Sadness definitely looks like money. But it feels like a luxury item, a picture whose payoff isn’t as grand as you might have hoped. Östlund’s gifts are dazzling. If only he knew when to stop giving.

Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year.

There is no point in retelling this tale if you are going to be stuffy about it.

Big Gold Brick may be a bit too enamored with its own quirkiness, but everything Garcia does, no matter how outlandish, feels perfectly natural.

I think Gonzo, which is wonderfully rich in historical footage, needs some skeptics, some voices suggesting that maybe, just maybe, Thompson was part of the problem, not the solution, when America flirted briefly with revolution (or was it merely anarchy?), leaving consequences that continue to resonate today -- and not always to our advantage.

Anchorman 2 is more like SNL in the sharper years (1995–2002), when McKay was a writer and Ferrell one of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Expect no more and you should be satisfied. Wine connoisseurs would call this a new Burgundy with an old bouquet.

Slick, well acted and engaging. It's also morally bankrupt--a film that makes you feel as though you've been taken for a smooth ride by the Hollywood machine and dropped somewhere very nasty.

The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas.

There's enough narrative for three fine films. But not enough for The Interpreter. The thriller pieces feel assembled rather than organic.

For all the ways in which Plan B is sometimes thunderously obvious, there’s still a lot going on beneath the surface.

The picture is a bit arty and decorous; it could do with fewer swimmy camera moves. But Young vests it with a fascinating, flinty grace.

Although Little bears some similarities to the 1988 kid fantasy "Big," it’s a thoroughly modern comedy, one that lives comfortably with the idea that women can hold power and authority–though because they’re human, they can misuse it, too.

What's going on is sort of confused. Director Stanley Donen (Indiscreet) apparently started out with a sensible idea: with Grant and Hepburn on the payroll and Paris for a setting, why not tell a love story? But somewhere along the production line, he decided to make a thriller instead. Then he turned the thriller into a sophisticated comedy of murders.

There's nothing profound going on here; the truisms don't blossom into life-enriching truths. It's more like the person you meet at a bar who, on second glance, is surprisingly attractive. Call Think Like a Man a perfectly satisfactory one-night stand at the movies.

Breezy, silly, possibly quickly forgettable—but if you need to lose yourself for an hour or two, it could be just the thing.

Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.

Once you start reckoning with Anomalisa’s obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off. A little puppet pain goes a long way.

Wakanda Forever is set in a world that many people desperately want to revisit—in the first film, Wakanda and its citizens were so vivid it’s no wonder they took a hold on us. But Wakanda Forever feels a lot like Marvel business as usual, marred by the usual muddily rendered action sequences and ungainly plot mechanics.

Her Smell is an uneven movie, occasionally dipping into clichés. But Moss’s performance works as a distillation of one of Love’s signature lines, from the song “Doll Parts”: Becky knows what it costs to be the girl with the most cake.

Just as the dessert topping you scoop out of a tub may contain only trace amounts of actual cream, the ninth installment in the Fast & Furious franchise, F9: The Fast Saga, isn’t so much a movie as an entertainment product. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long you know what you’re getting, and there are even some pluses.

Perhaps the sole justification for turning a fine old movie into a just passable new one can be summed up as Angie Dickinson.

Director Richard Eyre and screenwriter Patrick Marber keep forcing us past disbelief and into the perverse pleasures of nastiness. If nothing else, their film is the perfect antidote to all those warm, forgiving schoolboy dramas we've endured through the years. This corn is not green; it is rotten down to the last kernel.

Does Solondz feel remorse for libeling his own kind? He might need to if his portraits didn't have the gift of dark wit, the ring of social truth. One makes allowances for a master storyteller.

It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.

Mother! is ambitious and dorky, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting redone as swirl-art. It’s entertaining to watch, because it’s not easy to see where it’s going—though you might feel a little underwhelmed when you discover where it ends up. The main reason to keep watching is Lawrence, receptive and radiant.

Just because a movie is based on a true story doesn’t mean you have to fully buy it: The Greatest Beer Run Ever isn’t terrible, and it’s hardly great. But the worst thing you can say about it is that it’s almost as dreamily clueless as its hapless hero is.

What saves it, aside from good performances by Burt Reynolds and a thundering herd of supporting grotesques, is, of all things, a tough, tiny nut of valid social criticism.

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.

It’s a moderately effective horror movie with a much better, creepier and more nuanced one nestled invisibly alongside, the unborn twin ghost of a movie that might have been.

Magic Mike’s Last Dance only partially rekindles the spark of the earlier movie, or that of its rambunctious sequel, Magic Mike XXL.

Star Wars lore is woefully lacking in sex appeal — even Han Solo is more of a guy’s guy — but Glover has an unruly, charismatic elegance. He belongs in a better movie, but at least he perks this one up.

The real battle here is between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality.

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

Day Shift delivers everything it promises, which isn’t all that much. But Foxx goes above and beyond the call of duty, seemingly without even trying. Before you know it, his shift, and ours, is over, and the time has passed painlessly enough.

The film ends with a syrupy coda that betrays its earlier subtlety. But Ronan and Howle are the keepers of its true spirit.

Where’s the line between a sensitive work of imagination and an invasion of real-life grief in the service of arty filmmaking? There’s a lot of clever technique in Jackie, like its canny, razor-precise editing. But there’s also something arch and distant about the picture.

The Informant! may end up closer to the non-starters. Its lunacy is too deadpan, and its denouement too drawn out, to appeal to those who liked the Bourne movies, or, for that matter, the Gore. But it's worth seeing, and a salutary achievement.

The movie's vision blurs the man and, incidentally, the just war around him. Fortunately, the general is enacted by George C. Scott, who can sense a character in a gross script the way a sculptor can detect a man in a block of marble.

The film comes uncomfortably close to risible. But it also achieves moments of real power. It's worth a wary look before it attains midnight cult-movie status.

Nine out of ten gags in this crude pub crawl of a comedy are indefensible. Maybe ten out of ten. Tragically, perhaps, I laughed anyway: It’s so hard to know what to laugh at anymore, and what it’s OK to laugh at.

The Bone Temple is part satisfying triumph, part missed opportunity, and its pluses and minuses bump against one another in jangly discord.

Overall, the movie is so ambitious—so intent on reminding us, every minute, that it really is a work of Big Ideas—that it ends up subverting its own charms. The Pixar masterminds often seem to think complicated is better, or at least just deeper. But to paraphrase Thelonious Monk, they’ve been making the wrong mistakes.

Gibson is a primitive all right, but so were Cecil B. DeMille and D.W. Griffith, and somehow we survived their idiocies.

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

The Tender Bar is generally a sweet, affectionate film, it deflates whenever J.R. isn’t in Manhasset—because that means there’s no Ben Affleck.

Thunder Force drags until roughly its last third, and then something remarkable happens: its gonzo spirit kicks in. From that point on, Thunder Force feels crazily, joltingly alive, as if it were realizing, a little too late, that it ought to have been a different movie altogether.

Free Guy is a little like Ready Player One jumbled with The Truman Show, with some Sleeping Beauty and The Velveteen Rabbit mixed in. It is, admittedly, a lot of movie, probably too much. But Reynolds makes the most of Guy’s elation at finally busting out.