This is a strange, stormy period for Ingmar Bergman.

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

As with the previous two Knives Out installments, the conclusion is almost beside the point. It’s the getting there that matters, and the twisty road of Wake Up Dead Man is dotted with offhanded jokes and one-liners that are occasionally extremely witty.

The Lady is still titled away from the churning melodrama of Suu Kyi's country and toward the intimate dilemma of a loving couple forced apart by circumstance.

It is the rare conspiracy thriller that ripens as the villains' organization and motives are gradually revealed.

It is very tiresome peering through the gloom trying to catch a glimpse of something interesting, then having to avert one's eyes when it turns out to be just another brutally tormented body.

Inside this failed picture there’s a sicker, darker, more truthful one crying to get out. But for a while, Passengers is really going for something. The movie it might have been is lost in space, alone, never to be seen by mere mortals. All we can see from Earth are its few brightly burning scraps, but at least it’s something.

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 worth seeing A Different Man for the two performances at its heart, given by Adam Pearson and Sebastian Stan.

With a promising cast like that, not to mention the glittery party setting, Ocean’s 8 should be great fun. Instead, it’s a kind of noncommittal semi-fun.

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

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.

Last Night in Soho soars at the beginning, only to crash in the end. It’s a broken promise.

The Birth of a Nation isn’t a great movie – it’s hardly even a good one. But it’s bluntly effective, less a monumental piece of filmmaking than an open door. Parker stars as Turner, and his performance is grounded and thoughtful – he may be a better actor than he is a director.

The film's payoff raises more questions than it answers, which may be Shyamalan's intent in this political parable of fear.

The movie is a little gimpy. But Murray's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave; he walks like a golem tailored by Armani; he puts his silky style in the service of menace. It's a whole nother dimension to him. [8 March 1993]

Hanks has a wonderful scene, late in the film, that shows a strong man collapsing into frailty. It hints at the emotional depth the movie might have plundered. The rest of Captain Phillips must rely for its drive on the relentless mechanical agitation of Henry Jackman’s score. It can’t save an overly muscled docudrama that is more pounding that truly gripping.

Uneven but occasionally quite funny.

Horizon—while being at least somewhat culturally sensitive, handsome to look at, and reasonably engaging—still comes off as curiously undistinguished. It’s so tasteful, so careful, so eager not to upset or offend, that it reflects little sense of risk.

This film, based on a true story, transcends its handsomeness to present a subtle portrait of a woman's growing consciousness.

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!

This material is either underdeveloped or crudely put by a director whose style is so conventional that he makes James Ivory look, by comparison, like Jean-Luc Godard.

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.

A lot of the gags are pretty good. It's not that Star Wars is less worthy of satire than horse opera or gothic horror. It's not that Mel Brooks has lost his cunning, though he does need a freedom of speech not to be found under a PG rating. What's missing is that zany old gang of his. There is simply nobody like them on this trip. [13 July 1987, p.68]

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.

We know relatively little about the woman who wrote Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person she might have been.

Christie has already won prizes for the knowing weariness of her performance, and Flynn Boyle probably deserves some for her ferociously stated frustrations. But their clarity can't quite cut through the thickness of the film's air or compensate for the wooziness it induces.

It’s true that Barbie does many of the things we’ve been promised: there is much mocking and loving of Barbie, and plenty of skewering of the suits. But none of those things make it subversive. Instead, it’s a movie that’s enormously pleased with itself, one that has cut a big slice of perfectly molded plastic cake and eaten it—or pretend-eaten it—too.