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.

It's only when it takes an unfortunate wrong turn from playful wit into the dramatic and sentimental - Hallström's speciality - that the movie starts to unravel.

Cumberbatch and Colman make it all believable, their jokes pinging off one another with delightful, rancorous buoyancy.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle has a pleasant, affable spirit, and Johnson is wholly charming.

This is a test, requiring rapt concentration and acute attention, and repaying a hundredfold. For spectators dulled by the midget movies of an arrtstically timid era, the film may be a chore. For those on Malick’s rarified wavelength, it’s a wonder.

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.

The life and the lady have been slicked up and toned down, in the best tradition of such tears and tinsel sagas as The Helen Morgan Story and I'll Cry Tomorrow, in which lovers are long-suffering and steadfast, agents loyal, temptation rife and facts irrelevant. Billie Holiday, an artist, deserves a far better memorial.

The Accountant 2 is not, and is not trying to be, a movie about the realities of autism. Even so, it challenges us to think about how our brains work, why we do and say the things we do—and to recognize that even though we may think there’s a normal way to respond to social cues, not everyone is wired the same way.

It’s Roberts’ deepest, strongest, liveliest film work.

From its first shot, of a mangled car high up in the branches of a tree, this cool, handsome thriller proceeds with an elliptical elegance.

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.

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

Vapid, claustrophobic drama.

Brewer must have convinced himself that a schlocky old movie would speak eloquently to today's teens. About half of the time, he pulls it off.

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.

Director Barry Levinson and screenwriter Paul Attanasio are great guys to waste time with. The latter has a real flair for writing strong, confrontational scenes -- brisk, needling, well shaped -- and the former stages them with coolly concentrated intensity. And the cast is terrific. [19 Dec 1994, p.75]

Knightley, in a performance as crisp as the corners of an envelope, makes McLaughlin’s perseverance—and the pressures she faced as she also tried to be a good wife and mother—deeply believable.

Orchestrating the efforts of a superb production team — and of the reluctant Mr. Chayefsky — Russell has devised a film experience that will astound some viewers, outrage others and bore nobody. Laugh with it, scream at it, think about it.

Faithful both to the novel's plot and to its higher aspirations. This is not an entirely good thing. On the other hand -- and somewhat surprisingly -- it is not an entirely bad thing.

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.

Apex fails to work either as a vehicle for sick thrills or an excuse for lots of feminist butt-kicking.

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.

If the modest and moving Trouble With the Curve won't overwhelm anybody, it's still an engaging winner, like a junk-ball pitcher who stays in the bigs on grit and heart.

Defiance says that it took grit, desperation and courage under fire to say, "Not this time," and fire back. Beyond that, it's a pretty good movie -- a bold, uneasy mix of romance, political debate and vigorous action.

An American Pickle is a real movie, and it’s delightful.

The resulting adventure is once again lively and clever, although its creative underpinnings -- a sort of flea-market pastiche of antique fairy tales, vintage vaudeville and contemporary pop culture -- seem rather more shabby than chic.

The hardest movies to review are the ones you respect and admire but don't love and also - and this is the crucial part - aren't angered by. Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Biutiful is just that sort of film.

Fans of the nasty Baron Cohen may regret his being borderline nice in The Dictator. But we should welcome his decision to stop being the best at something few others dare try and instead to inhabit a more familiar comedy style--just going denser, wilder, better. He pulls it off.

Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, is a whiz at raising Quantum's temperature and gradually luring Bond out of his stolid shell.

Like most children's movies, Rise of the Guardians mimics the patterns of adult entertainment. Where is the magic in that?

McTiernan does not fall too much in love with any scene, character or gadget. He has judged his material (and our attention spans) very well. His alternation of menace and human interest, technological wizardry and action sequences is subtly calibrated, ultimately hypnotic in its effect. [5 Mar 1990, p.70]

It’s Waititi’s ability to balance unassailably goofy moments with an acknowledgment of real-life horrors that makes the movie exceptional.

Mother Mary, arty and self-conscious, is just a slog. It works hard to impress us with its slinky weirdness, which isn’t the same as simply being weird.

Certainly it's the lightest and brightest -- everyone is still chaste, but the movie is actually sexy in parts. It appears to have embraced its own sense of camp and is consistently funny in an intentional way. For the first time, I found myself curious to see what comes next.

So little wit is expended on the dialogue and so much on the imagination of disaster that you may as well sit back and enjoy the jolting ride.

The story is almost embarrassingly simple. But the picture slides by pleasantly enough like a stream in a Budd Boetticher movie, a calm place to take off your boots and set a spell as you reflect on the true meaning of manhood, the necessity of overcoming hidden heartache and the pleasures of finally, in your sunset years, succumbing to the love of a good woman.

It may have been conceived as the kind of classy-but-ribald entertainment that might lure older moviegoers back to theaters. But insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to go.

Just gives us Andy, the pop postmodernist, and permits us to make what we will of him, which is a fascinating activity.

So creaky and out of touch it inspires pity. Its opening sequences are a near marvel of confusion, mayhem and embarrassments for its actors. If it was a person, you'd worry it had dementia.

The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well.

Lawless tries to be flawless; as a movie, it's often listless - lifeless.

Doesn’t always have the dramatic force it should, and unanswered questions linger.

Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama -- about a family at war with itself.

A pretty but utterly misleading picture in which cheap sentiment is used to supply easy, false resolutions to agonizing issues.

Slick, brutal and almost human, this is the team-spirit action movie Mission: Impossible should have been.

Everything that made the original picture so sly, funny, and affecting is gone. Musical numbers spell out the obvious, and loudly.

Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life.

The Bond women are pallid mannequins, and so is the misused Dalton -- a moving target in a Savile Row suit. For every plausible reason, he looks as bored in his second Bond film as Sean Connery did in his sixth.

The movie lacks majesty. Grand in parts, the movie is too often grandiose or grandiloquent; and the running time is indefensible.

As Pine’s Webber navigates that seemingly helpless little boat, squinting into the driving snow and more than once nearly falling victim to the ocean’s mighty maw, he’s the movie’s finest special effect — not because he’s mindlessly brave, but because he lets us see how scared he is.

In his first big Hollywood film, French superstar Gerard Depardieu cheerfully goes slumming with sex, lies, and videotape's Andie MacDowell. Peter Weir's comedy offers a little charm, less story and virtually no movie.

It is not as exciting as Star Wars itself, which had the advantage of novelty. But it is better and more satisfying than The Empire Strikes Back, which suffered from a hectic, muddled pace, together with the classic problems of being the second act in a three-act play.

Documentaries don't fly on figures, or even controversial arguments; they come to life with real, engaging people. And when this freakumentary hooks up with Urail King, it gets an A.

A bloated, criminally judgmental borderline-comedy.

Crowe has made a meretricious weepie that rouges the facts and defeats the attempts of Matt Damon, with his considerable charm and skill, to breathe some emotional truth into it. There's a word for the strenuous, shameless plucking of an audience's emotions that this movie traffics in: cornography.

Audiences whose expectations do not exceed their grasp will find it a much more comfortable vehicle for escape than any that McQueen & Co. discover on location.

It features as ghastly a group of interstellar pirates, the Klingons, as ever entered the star log, plus a spectacularly self-destructive planet and plenty of technically adroit and sometimes witty special effects. These are classic directorial occasions, and Nimoy rises to them with fervor, in effect beaming his film up onto a higher pictorial plane than either of its predecessors.

With the exception of Zohra Lampert's subtle and knowledgeable performance, no one in the cast has enough substance even to be considered humanoid. And after the first reel, the vampires seem to have lost their bite.

This often vivid movie, though it doesn't quite attain its highest intentions, is well worth seeing. And thinking about.

There are so many chase sequences in Dial of Destiny that the movie seems held together with slender bits of plot, rather than the other way around. Worse yet, they’re so heavily CGI’ed that they come off as grimly dutiful rather than thrilling or delightful.

Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.

So muted it disappears from your view even before it recedes from your memory.

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

With a two-fisted script by John Milius (who later wrote Apocalypse Now and Red Dawn), Huston and Newman created a raucous, Rabelaisian, revisionist western of the sort popular at the time.

In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director.

Pet Sematary is creepy for a time, before it becomes stupid. Then it’s creepy again: The final image will make you want your mommy.

The new film is more an embellishment than an improvement on the snazzy Raiders.

Not bad, but certainly not good; classify the movie as lazy fun.

An edgy, watchable film, but one that makes you feel more squeamish than screamish.

Much of the movie is bitterly funny; some of it just amusingly droll. But the finale, a rallying cry that’s both galvanizing and wistful, is a wrap-up worth waiting for.

But deeply earnest pictures aren't always great ones, and this movie's plot mechanics sometimes grind it down. The actors, at least, keep it breathing.

Even when the story falters, or becomes astonishingly silly, there’s still plenty to keep you gazing at the surface.

Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.

The good news is that Spinal Tap II mostly builds on the legacy of the earlier film, instead of just recycling its best jokes for nostalgia’s sake.

Accepting Pawlikowski's mood of poetic seriousness may be a chore for some. Others will find this creepy little sonata a dream or nightmare worth succumbing to, and believing in.

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

Dicks is so in love with itself and its own overworked kooky world that it treats the audience like the outsider in a threesome. Sometimes the self is the least interesting part of self-expression.

Coppola brings the old spook story alive -- well, undead -- as a luscious, infernal romance.

Its visual thrills are chilly and wearying compared with the other films' quirky humanity. It's not a megamovie; it's a Sega movie.

Not a great film but a warm one that pushes the viewer's emotional buttons so deftly it feels like a massage. My guess is that you will laugh and cry at all appropriate moments. Resistance is futile.

At its best moments, Thor weaves a spot of magic from the complex science of $150-million fantasy-film technology.

In all, Body of Lies is a mixed bag of treats and trials, but it should be seen by audiences, and emulated and improved upon by other top directors.

This new Road House appears at a time when so much of our entertainment has been shrunk down to a manageable size. Even on the small screen, may its unruly spirit prevail.

The movie could have been a gleaming showcase for cartoon wit. Instead it's an 87-minute commercial peddling sainthood for Michael Jordan.

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.

Boldly entertaining.

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.

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.

There's nothing world shattering about Smart People. No one is ever going to call it a "must see" movie. But it is a trim, intelligent, reasonably amusing little movie. Call it a "could see."

Bad Words seems to be heading into the creepy realm of a sociopath’s case study, yet it’s presented as a breezy satire about a rebel against the system. It must be the Dictionary-Industrious Complex.

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.

Elegant, thoughtful film.

It has plenty of charm and is filled with astonishingly intimate footage worth seeing on the big screen but is sketchy on details and dumbed down by cutsy, anthropomorphizing narration.

Southpaw is a foreshadowing machine, but it works, movingly, because Fuqua (Training Day) tempers the melodrama inherent in screenwriter Kurt Sutter’s (Sons of Anarchy) script with a muted tone and clear confidence in his cast.

The Secret Life of Bees may not be a "To Kill a Mockingbird" on page or screen, but Fanning is the center of its soul and intelligence. It's Hollywood's job to find strong parts for this precocious genius as she matures into womanhood.

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could have been a return to form for Burton, but he loses his sense of direction halfway through. If only he could find his way back to his wild bread-crumb trail, the one that guided him so ably for years.

The director, Chris Noonan, doesn't play to our sentiments, he just lets them naturally evolve--even the animation of a few of her (Potter's) drawings doesn't feel especially forced. The result is an honorable and curiously winning film.