The Founder is so entertaining, it scans like a tongue-in-cheek satire. But processing it is a little like taking a watch apart — suddenly, you get a sense of how complicated the world’s inner workings are, even today. It’s all there in Keaton’s watchful, calculating eyes. The world has changed a lot in 60 years. But the art of the deal hasn’t.

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

Broccoli serves the audience a space-shuttle hijacking, a jumbo-jet explosion and a protracted wrestling match between two men who are falling from the sky without parachutes. All this happens before the opening credits. From there, it's on to gondola chases in Venice, funicular crashes in Rio and laser-gun shootouts and lovemaking in deep space. Meanwhile, beautiful women come and go, talking (ever so discreetly) about fellatio. When Broccoli lays out a feast, he makes sure that there is at least one course for every conceivable taste...The result is a film that is irresistibly entertaining as only truly mindless spectacle can be.

Other animations, such as Heinz Edelmann's Yellow Submarine, may show more audacity. The melodies in Disney's earlier efforts have been richer. But for integration of music, comedy and plot, The Aristocats has no rivals.

The picture delivers the high-octane, testosteronic goods of a warm-weather smash, and maybe the first great film of the post-human era. It's just a shame that every theater showing this nonstop auto race, this animated car-toon, can't be a drive-in.

The real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me.

The movie is finally predictable, but it has connected with a generation that believes it has been saddled with the thankless job of raising its own parents.

Small in stature but consistently entertaining, Seven Psychopaths is a vacation from consequence for the Tony- and Oscar-winning author, and an unsupervised play date for his cast of screw-loose stars.

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.

Joe Wright’s well-intentioned adaptation of Erica Schmidt’s stage musical (itself drawn from Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac) can’t survive its own petulant, self-centered love object, Roxanne (Haley Bennett).

This ambitious blend of live action and computer animation runs the risk of being overwhelming and sterile, but it turns out to be a pleasing and sweet-natured adventure thanks in large part to Spielberg’s big, friendly secret weapon: Mark Rylance, as the BFG himself.

There has never been a movie musical quite like Tommy, a weird, crazy, wonderfully excessive version of The Who's rock opera.

Along with other cast members, Penn takes ages registering his stares and scowls, until the movie is finally not about gangs but about actors' attitudes. Dressed up in '80s street slang, this is a '60s exercise in Method excess. [18 Apr 1988]

For all the film's murky misdirections, it is very enjoyable. That's because Nolan's recreation of the illusionists' backstage world is so marvelously detailed, including as it does revelations of how some of their best tricks are accomplished.

This is less a straight-up biopic than a meditation on the texture of one vibrant but troubled life; Zellweger goes just far enough into Garland’s pathology of suffering without fetishizing it.

The charm offensive that is Wonka toils way too hard for its meager pleasures. It may leave you feeling more worked over than invigorated.

Debuting director James Vanderbilt (who wrote Zodiac) has a great sense of forward motion and wrings suspense from an idea-driven story.

This is a good, serious and absorbing movie -- especially, perhaps, for a reviewer who is roughly Kepesh's age and, of course, eagerly evading the issues his story forces up.

It is as cool and distant as the planet the Strangers come from. But, Lord, is Dark City a wonder to see. [2 March 1998]

The actors are all terrific.

Most plausible explanations for the picture's success are: 1) the presence of Victor Moore, past master of creaky charm and pathos; 2) a show as generally oldfashioned, in a harmless way, as a 1910 mail-order play for amateurs; 3) the fact that now, as in 1910, a producer cannot go wrong with a mass audience if he serves up a whiff of comedy and a whirlwind of hokum.

Movies about tough subjects don’t need to be torture, and if Pieces of a Woman proves anything, it’s that too much is sometimes also not enough.

The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.

Stone's camera closes in on Bogosian's face as if it were the cratered moonscape of the American mind, and the actor / starts shouting into his megaphone mike. Finally, these two have become like Barry's listeners, shrill and unconvincing, weaving their own conspiracy theories in the bleat of the night. This is bag-lady cinema.

When in doubt, director Tony Scott ("Top Gun", "Days of Thunder") lets loose a spray of water, sparks and sweat-the signature flourish of this Helmut Newton of movie machismo.

This is moviemaking for people who don't much like movies unless they are -- you know -- "serious." It is visually inert. It appears to be taking up small-scaled, yet emotionally resonant issues, but does not actually define them sharply or bring them to firm conclusions.

It’s hard to know exactly what Baumbach is going for here, other than perhaps reminding us that the key to living is just going about your life. But you probably don’t need two hours and 16 minutes’ worth of movie to tell you that.

Derek Cianfrance’s based-on-true-life caper Roofman feels like a mainstream studio movie from 10 or 15 years ago, and that’s a good thing.