Rain Man's restraint is, finally, rather like Raymond's gabble. It discourages connections, keeping you out instead of drawing you in. [19 Dec 1998]

As the movie goes on, the laughs are fewer and farther between, and for the last 30 minutes, not only did I not laugh, I wanted it to end so I could get back to my own boring but less precious life.

There's a great story here, but Tucci's literate, civilized, wistful movie lacks savage impulse and refuses to show how mutual exploitation led to minor tragedy.

Twice as funny as I thought it would be but not half as funny as it could have been.

Ginger & Rosa never matches the freshness of its young star.

It is the movie's uneven writing-half funny and daring, half punishing and senseless-that proves to be Lola's biggest opponent.

Never to be mistaken for a Christmas classic - or even, strictly speaking, a good movie - H&K 3D Xmas obeys one other solid comedy rule: that after things are broken, they must be repaired and restored.

Other questions to ponder: Is The Kissing Booth 2 a good movie? Yes and no. Is the acting adequate, if not necessarily good? Yes and no. Is it a wholly accurate depiction of young love in any era, past or present? Yes and no. The Kissing Booth 2 — directed, as was the first installment, by Vince Marcello — is kind of terrible and kind of wonderful.

Once Mickey & friends get involved with Willie, the whole picture peters out and becomes as oddly off-balance and inconsequential as its title.

Still, somewhat shame-faced I have to admit that at some point in the film I began to hear a subversive voice whispering in my ear, and what it was saying was, "Could you blink a little faster, pal?"

As a character, Siegel and Shuster’s creation deserves better than Gunn’s Superman. And that’s unfortunate, because we probably need a great Superman now more than ever.

At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in "Shawshank" is often forced here.

How you feel about Morbius will probably depend on how much you have invested in the Sony-Marvel pie slice, and on your feelings about Leto, who perhaps isn’t so much a serious actor as one who takes himself very seriously. Still, his performance here has a quietly vibrating vulnerability; he seems to have made at least a small emotional investment in this film, as if to keep it from sliding into total special-effects-laden soullessness.

This agitated comedy could be called "The Big Chillin'" if it had a smidge of the 1983 film's wit and charm.

Until a vigorous climax, the action scenes have little punch.

If you’re not already familiar with the play, you may find yourself a little lost in Hedda—or perhaps just bored.

The film's blithe misogyny soon becomes wearying; it refuses to see women as more than the sum of their private parts.

A piece of dotty, slightly paranoid intrigue. Three Days of the Condor promises little and keeps its word. It is hard to get indignant about it, or enthusiastic either.

An uneven doubleheader by Walt Disney, who has combined into one film two dissimilar literary classics: Washington Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. The contrast in the handling of the two unrelated stories neatly illustrates some of Disney's outstanding vices & virtues.

Aster is obsessed with building tension to the point of losing the plot. He can’t stop at merely glancing or suggesting.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

Unfortunately, there is nothing royal about Camelot's carious screen version. It has been brought crunchingly down to earth by the churlish touch of Director Joshua Logan.

In this bad-better-best movie, the Flik story is the bad, the choir singing much better and Peters the soul-stirring best.

Though Scheider is a wry, sensitive actor, he soon gets lost in the vulgar theatrics. So does the subject of death. When Fosse attempts to put his heart on the table, he does so too literally.

The Harder They Fall is fueled by Tarantino-style energy and grim wit, and if nothing else, it’s a spectacle—those glossy, muscular horses, and the gorgeous people riding them, are almost enough to carry a movie by themselves. But this picture works so hard at entertaining us that it strips its own gears; its churning style can’t quite keep the story going.

Emmerich has turned his attention to the past. He and screenwriter John Orloff have embraced a kitchen sink's worth of 20th-century conspiracy theories about the provenance of Shakespeare's plays, each wilder than the last. Oliver Stone's "JFK" looks reasonable compared to this.

Even in the skillful hands of director Lone Scherfig, the effect is disjointed. The characters that Nicholls brought so cunningly to life in the book feel rushed through a timeline, tied to an agenda.

If you’re looking for a movie that speaks to the moment, a mindless action-thriller probably isn’t it.