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.