Black fans may hardly recognize him, because for once he plays a person instead of a walking comedy mask atop a Buddha belly.

Movies can’t just be efficient feeling-delivery systems; they have to work on us in subtler ways. It Ends With Us makes all its points, all right, but in a way that’s more edifying than moving. And despite the prettiness of its Boston setting, it isn’t as visually alluring as it should be.

As long as one doesn't demand too much of it, Corvette Summer delivers a very pleasant two hours of escape.

For loyal Malick fans, the woozy dream-logic visuals here may be enough. But this director is hardly the perceptive student of human nature he’s cracked up to be. He understands so little about women – and even less about our shoes.

I have the anachronistic notion that romantic comedies needn't be exclusively partial to one gender; they should be critical and loving and true to both. So I'll soldier on with my mixed, distant, defiantly ignorant review of this 142-minute trifle -- which comes close to being the longest non-musical romantic comedy in Hollywood history.

Inside is essentially a one-man extravaganza for Dafoe, and he shoulders its complexities ably, with zero vanity.

This overloaded finale, directed by J.J. Abrams, is for everybody and nobody, a movie that’s sometimes reasonably entertaining but that mostly feels reverse-engineered to ensure that the feathers of the Star Wars purists remain unruffled. In its anxiety not to offend, it comes off more like fanfiction than the creation of actual professional filmmakers. A bot would be able to pull off a more surprising movie.

It's no wonder the movie is no walk in the park, even with a pretty soundtrack by Badly Drawn Boy (again, like About a Boy). It never feels inspirational - it's too gritty and dark - and there isn't a single easy solution in sight for either Nick or Jonathan.

The story never runs completely off the rails and is, in any event, just a pretext for a lot of very sharp badinage by Jason Smilovic--a screenwriter who would have been at home writing for Cary Grant--for yards of terrific movie acting and for some well-timed direction by Paul McGuigan.

Wahlberg could be the actor that action movies have been looking for since Sly, Arnold, Harrison, Bruce, Jackie and Jean-Claude -- all in their 50s or 60s -- got too old to execute the leg lifts necessary to kick bad guys in the butt.

So much wit and talent and energy crowd the screen in this lavishly filmed variant of the Oz story that it is depressing to realize that the production never had a chance.

The main problem is that Ritchie keeps playing the same old song. It's a swell tune, and we don't mind hearing it every few years, but we'd welcome another subject in a transposed key. Even the Material Girl tries out fresh material.

An intellectual and a sensualist, Cronenberg graces Crash with philosophical musings, acres of pretty flesh and even more penis talk than on some 8 o'clock sitcoms. For all that, Crash doesn't work.

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]

There's something about her (Nair) Vanity Fair that doesn't quite work. There is no depth beneath its bright surfaces, no potent emotional undercurrents.

The movie is adept at portraying aimlessness, getting at the greasy anomie that was so much a part of that time. But there is a lack of ambition, as if no one involved in creating the film wanted to cut deeper than a little double-edged nostalgia.

Franco Zeffirelli's film is plenty pretty. It almost works as a cloak-and-bodkin adventure

Dawn Treader, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened Yawn Treader. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two.

The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry.

Frantic and rote by turns, mislaying the power of the central love story and piling on the mutant adversaries. For at least this installment, Spider-Man is Amazing no more.

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

This is a film made with tenderness, more an exploration than a definitive statement, and a reminder that awkward sex isn’t necessarily bad sex: if anything, it’s the ultimate proof of our bewildering, imperfect humanness.

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.

Apparently Bachelorette has been divisive, with audiences either falling hard for it or walking away disgusted. I'd have fallen harder for it if I'd walked away more disgusted.

Bringing Gonzo to his senses gives the Muppets briskly economical opportunities to satirize government, media excesses and cult sci-fi's more tiresome tropes.

The result is a knockoff cinematic ceramic.

The film is generous to all its besotted creatures, and to the audience as well. Viewers who fall in love with Café de Flore will find that it loves them back.

Wanderlust, a comedy that looks way better than it actually is set amidst the dreck of late winter releases.

Deep Water comes dressed up as an ‘80s-style erotic thriller, a genre that I, for one, would love to see revived. But it’s so tepid, so lacking in heat or even a pulse, that it’s about as sexy as a clogged artery.

There is some elemental human desire -- lately largely denied at the cinema -- to see pretty people in handsome landscapes assuaging our need for epic romance. On that level, Australia delivers with real panache.

On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet."

Levinson has ripped quite a few rock ’em-sock ’em pages from the John Cassavetes tradition, as well as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But if the couple’s fighting is amusing at times, it’s mostly lacerating and circular in a way that courts boredom rather than sympathy or any other deep, honest response.

This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction.

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

Everything in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk should work — and yet the picture falls flat. It’s a story enslaved by a director’s approach rather than served by it. His mannered placement of the camera is hard to ignore, and the actors suffer for it.

Beautiful young people, stunning scenery, and—did I mention?—unreally gorgeous tomatoes: none of these are negligible movie pleasures, and You, Me & Tuscany—directed by Kat Coiro and written by husband-and-wife team Ryan Engle and Kristin Engle—serves them up unapologetically.

The mere presence of Elba’s Luther, with his haunted gaze, his voice as plush as the finest antique Persian carpet, is enough to keep The Fallen Sun from sinking.

Why did these talented folks decide to take on Carrie when they had nothing innovative to bring to it and, by refrying the same blood sausage, risked invidious comparison to the original? To put it another way: If the most modest expectations cannot be met, indeed must be crushed, then What Is Life?

It's a great idea that Niccol can't translate into a great movie.

The best you can say for this version of Charlie's Angels is that it retains a sort of chipper, eerie good nature as it wastes the studio's money and our time.

Redacted pretty successfully sustains a dual level of hysteria (in its content) and disinterest (in its film-long framing devices). It's an amazingly vigorous work for a filmmaker who turns 67 on Sept. 11... The movie is a cry of national shame; for De Palma, it's a new badge of honor for a wily old vet.

What makes White House Down not just tolerable but frivolously entertaining is its slapstick soul; a scene where the presidential limousine does doughnuts on the South Lawn plays like an homage to the Keystone Kops.

A Mouthful of Air makes it past those potential flaws on the strength of Seyfried’s performance. To look at her face—to watch as her delight in her son shifts almost imperceptibly into a private hell—is enough.

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!

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]

Reptile just feels wayward and listless.

More important, we should take into account the fact that this is really quite a good movie--a character-driven (as opposed to whammy-driven) suspense drama--dark, fatalistic and, within its melodramatically stretched terms, emotionally plausible.

The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.

Keough is nearly worth risking life (Diane's) and limb (Martin's) for. The eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, she has a pale, dreamy lusciousness that puts as viewer in mind of Amanda Seyfried, though without the overt sexuality. Her not-quite-there appeal matches both the opacity of Martin's intentions and the entire underhanded, underwhelming experience that The Good Doctor offers.

Director Pellington's touch is light and flickering, and his actors are solid and persuasive. If you let yourself go with The Mothman Prophecies, it is -- in its lumpen, serious way -- sort of fun.

Director George Roy Hill (Butch Cassidy, The Sting) and Screenwriter Allan Burns (cocreator of TV's original Mary Tyler Moore Show) have constructed a romantic comedy that, for all its contrivances, offers an indecent amount of emotional and comic satisfaction.

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.

Deadfall, though, is a thing of pieces: splendidly efficient in its action sequences (car crash, knife fight, snowmobile chase), dawdling in dialogue scenes that should smolder with tension.

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 a pretty, high-strung story, handsomely done in traditional animation (mostly by hand) that you can take the kids to without wincing.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday may be at times unfocused, but it’s never boring. And as always, Daniels rounds up the finest performers and gives them great characters to dig into.

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.

In the end, everything about this glum and self-important adaptation of Anne Tyler's upper-cute novel is dim. [26 Dec 1988, p.83]

A movie that does little more than tick off a selection of action-movie boxes—though some of them are at least ticked off with a satisfying click.

A bad movie that a lot of people will like... Though director Jerry Zucker wants his necrophiliac romance to be sensitive, he pumps up its feelings fortissimo so the dimmest viewer will get the point. [16 July 1990, p.86]

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.

Your affection for Serendipity may depend on how fascinated you are by a movie that is apparently going after the all-time record for delayed consummation.

A shaggy, listless action movie that’s too messy to be fun.

If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.

The new Superfly isn’t a great work of artistry or of cheap thrills — it’s so in between it’s practically bourgeois — but in the swagger department, it just squeaks by.

Perhaps they don't create quite enough deeply funny earthlings to go around, but a thoroughly meanspirited big-budget movie is always a treasurable rarity. And those little guys from far away are a hoot. [30 Dec 1996]

The genius of Ghost in the Shell is that you don’t have to care about cyborg-anything to enjoy it. In fact, you’ll probably enjoy it more that way.

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

I didn't believe a word of the film and found myself feeling nothing but (I'm sure this wasn't Kaye's point) detachment.

The Iron Lady is a clever and oddly touching entertainment.

[Guadagnino] has made some gorgeous, stirring movies—I Am Love and Queer among them—but After the Hunt feels more like an artistic thesis, and despite its needling provocations, it offers fewer cerebral pleasures than he thinks.

If the premise sounds tired, what’s surprising—or perhaps not—about The Contractor is how well Pine carries it.

Maybe the filmmakers are so lost in their slambang visual effects that they don't give a hoot about the movie's scariest implications. [10 Nov 1997, p.102]

80 for Brady is brassy, ridiculous, and shameless. It’s also irresistible, maybe because watching older ladies having fun is almost embarrassingly seductive.

It is good to see the Disney craftsmen doing what they do best on such a grand and risky scale. If one has time for only one space opera this season, this is the one to choose.

A well-meaning handspring of a movie that doesn’t necessarily land on its feet.

in a larger sense Be Kind Rewind declares that the riches of cinema history touch each of us personally. Films become so deep a part of us that we own them that our memories of them, whether faithful or fanciful, become their meanings. As a movie critic and, even before and above that, a movie lover, how can I disagree with that?

The first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent... What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. [20 Aug 1990, p.63]

Casa de mi Padre is flawed in that it wouldn't be particularly enticing in any language.

Ends up less than the sum of its many, often interesting parts.

Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness.

Existing in a self-contained universe, Scream 4 is its own remake (Screamake), sequel (shriekquel), parody and critique. Thus it taunts and pleases audiences, mocks and justifies itself and makes any review redundant.

The proceedings get so slow and saccharine that viewers will relishes the film's moments of redeeming idiocy. In one of them, Marlena whispers to Jacob, "Bring Rosie to my tent and don't tell anyone" - as if the roustabouts wouldn't notice a 12-ft.-tall, 10,000-lb. creature striding down the midway.

The movie’s top-flight cast is left in ridiculous positions.

Rather than juicing each element to blockbuster volume, Clooney has delivered it in the tone of a memorial lecture, warm and ambling, given by one of the distinguished academics he put in his movie.

If you take Tykwer's film even half-seriously, it will be like one of those horror movies that you leave, suspecting that the crazy, ingenious super-killer is waiting for you outside. A warning, then, to the susceptible: After seeing The International, don't dare go to an ATM.

There's no attempt to address the show's endemic weak spots--a slow start and a contrived end. Mostly Stroman just lets it rip. But in some respects the movie is an improvement on the show.

On the Come Up is a thoughtful and generous-spirited entertainment, and a reminder of how hard it can be, when you’re young, to figure out who you really are.

There is no sadder genre than the tedious thriller, a movie that works hard to entice us with suspense, rough and tumble action, maybe even alluring locales, only to fizzle out far from the finish line.

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

Blow works for a scene or two, then stalls.

It's a fine madness, full of jaunty desperation, survivable disasters and the kind of ferocious concentration on a really stupid idea that once propelled Wile E. Coyote.

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

The joke barrage becomes hit-or-miss, as if the creators — including screenwriter Dan Stewart, working from a story by Rogen and Greenberg — don’t know or care which is which.

Beautiful Creatures is good fun and I want to know what happens next for Lena the teenaged witch.

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.

It relies almost exclusively on the celebrated eyes, ears, nose and throat of Streisand. Her musicianship remains irreproachable. But her mannerisms are so arch and calculated that one half expects to find a key implanted in her back.

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.