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

This Barbershop is simply a place where we can all laugh together, sometimes at ideas that veer close to being explosive.

Save Yourselves! was completed well before the pandemic hit—it played at Sundance in January — but it’s one of those works that has magically landed at the right time. It takes itself just seriously enough, but not too seriously.

Nearly a century after that black-and-white cartoon short, and 65 years after a “classic” animated feature that missed the mark, Disney finally got Cinderella right — for now and, happily, ever after.

Ruby Sparks tries its damnedest to make a picture that seduces moviegoers into accepting it as their best imaginary friend forever. But the sweat shows more than the sparkle.

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.

The qualities that have kept the Broadway Fiddler running these seven years are in scant supply onscreen. Gone with barely a trace are warmth, joy, insight and even the most elementary kind of entertainment.

This fine, persuasive movie will have to serve as his testament, and it's a fitting one. How many men can say they wrote their own epitaphs in their own blood?

Mostly, Kung Fu Panda 3 is just fun.

Very simply, World Trade Center is a powerful movie experience, a hymn in plainsong that glorifies that which is best in the American spirit.

[Filmmaker John] Hughes must refer to this as his ‘”Bergman film”: lots of deep talk and ripping off of psychic scabs. But this film maker is, spookily, inside kids. He knows how the ordinary teenagers, the ones who don’t get movies made about them, think and feel: why the nerd would carry a fake ID (”So I can vote”), and why the deb would finally be nice to the strange girl (” ‘Cause you’re letting me”). He has learned their dialect and decoded it for sympathetic adults. With a minimum of genre pandering—only one Footloose dance imitation—and with the help of his gifted young ensemble, Hughes shows there is a life form after teenpix. It is called goodpix.

In Rapace, it has an actress who brings a memorable literary character to indelible movie life, as Vivien Leigh did for Scarlett O'Hara.

Winterbottom is a gifted and extraordinarily versatile director. In the Trip projects, he may have found something of a meal ticket, but he still goes beyond the call of duty in making them cinematic.

Neither the authentic political atmosphere nor canny performances by Redford, Boyle and Porter go far to cut through the basic glibness of the film. Ritchie incorporates numerous television political commercials and makes a point of their smooth dishonesty and wily distortion. None, however have less substance than The Candidate.

Leaves a quiz show's quantity of unanswered questions. But it has the optimism and determination of a corporate whistle-blower. It makes us believe, for a moment, that it's possible to end-run the spirit of Enron.

At its metallic heart, T3 is another chase movie -- one figure relentlessly tracking three others, mostly in cars, at high speed through implausibly underpopulated Los Angeles streets.

It is impressive enough that Paltrow holds your eye as a parade of lovelies and virtuoso actresses (Greta Scacchi, Polly Walker, Juliet Stevenson) march past. But her finest trick is to provide a comic subtext to Emma.

If anything, Whedon’s writing is almost too sharp. The characters are so finely drawn and verbally quick (they name-check Banksy and Eugene O’Neill) that they seem to belong to a different universe than the cartoonish one they find themselves in.

On its own, Captain America is a modestly engaging little-big movie in the median range: well below the first "Iron Man," somewhat above "X-Men: First Class."

Murphy exudes the kind of cheeky, cocky charm that has been missing from the screen since Cagney was a pup, snarling his way out of the ghetto. But as befits a manchild of the soft-spoken '80s, there is an insinuating sweetness about the heart that is always visible on the sleeve of Murphy's habitual sweatshirt.

Anthology inspired by Dr. David Reuben’s book of the same title. Allen’s version is far less educational than Reuben’s; it takes the form of several unrelated sketches, each of which purports to answer a question posed in Reuben’s book. The funniest bits are the first and last.

The surprises of The Life Ahead are the gentle kind: There are no wild revelations or transformations, no hyper-dramatic turnabouts. But the movie has a quietly enjoyable power.

Even if you’ve never heard of the Peterloo Massacre, this picture–beautifully staged and shot, with a you-are-there urgency–will reward your patience.

The Coens are artists too, and their cool dazzler is an elegy to a day when Hollywood could locate moral gravity in a genre film for grownups. [24 Sept 1990, p.83]

Schrader's objectification of sad and stupid material is neither tragic nor transgressive. It is just undramatic and uninvolving.

Solondz's most waywardly endearing film - his gentlest triumph.

Yet despite all that boring talk, Dead Again is a hit, the late-blooming rose of a movie summer that was mostly mulch. [23 Sept 1991, p.73]