Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

Bursting with joy and throbbing with music, Rize has a tragic dimension too. When you see the clown cry, you'll be with him all the way.

This screen adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s autobiographical best-seller is burdened, out of fidelity to the book, with life lessons and unneeded explanations that it dispenses, like CliffsNotes, at every opportunity.

Richly detailed -- and improbably entertaining.

It’s a piece of urban history seen through the lens of magic realism, a fragile but beguiling fantasy, tethered now and then to gritty reality, about a do-gooder doing the best he can against daunting odds.

The film is better couch fare than most of what we will see at any time of year.

What makes it such a singular experience is the convergence of fine acting, moral urgency and a willingness to linger on moments of great intensity.

“Dogs” is a beguiling recreation of one irrepressible childhood. The movie is sometimes funny, sometimes heartrending, but always invitingly candid and relatable. In its specificity it winds up being universal: As children, we really were odd little beasts, weren’t we?

Has its share of contrivances, some more successful than others, but center stage is occupied by truth, and austere beauty.

You can't take your eyes off Ms. Kidman; she has never played a role with more focused energy.

The director Penny Marshall has gone straight to the heart of this complex story and made a powerfully poignant and illuminating film. She doesn't hesitate to push for the grand sentimental moment, but balances the teary stuff with restraint and humor. To be sure, Awakenings seems calculated to induce weeping -- and it does, without making the weeper feel cheap. [20 Dec 1990, p.A14]

Birdy is refreshingly complicated: She’s obnoxious but lovable, entitled but sweet

When it comes to taking this premise in interesting directions, however, Ms. Park proves inept.

By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.

The film as a whole measures up to Forest Whitaker's performance...one of the great performances of modern movie history.

The source of all this information was a real-life KGB agent, Vladimir Vetrov, code named Farewell, and with the usual adjustments for drama his story gets a respectable retelling in this nervy French production.

You may see The Orphanage for what it is, an enjoyable contraption, without believing a bit of it.

There is simply not enough dramatic development to fill the film as a whole.

Depends on comic timing so precise that it seems weightless and all but effortless. And it depends on performers, of course, who can do a comic turn just as readily as a deft writer can turn a phrase. In that department, Ocean's Eleven is at least 11 times blessed.

Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.

It’s a strange piece of work, full of paradox — sharply analytical about the ways of love, yet sometimes plodding to the point of self-parody; intentionally distanced, yet offputtingly so, despite an exquisite performance by one of the stars, Clotilde Courau.

For all its immersion in the roar, grease and danger of Formula One, the fact-based Rush — about the sport's great rivalry of the 1970s — is also more predictable than a pit stop, something well-suited to Mr. Howard. He's made perfectly palatable pictures, but never a truly great one, partly because he has such a weakness for the commercial and a consequent gift for the obvious.

As in most movies of this sort from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "West Side Story" to last year's "Thirteen," adults are marginalized, clueless or absent. I'm with them.

The film's power is undercut by its narrow geographic focus, which seems to associate bullying with conservative or working-class areas in red states. The filmmakers could easily have found similar cases involving the children of urban sophisticates.

I don't know the Mongolian word for panache, but Mongol's got plenty of it. The battle scenes are as notable for their clarity as their intensity; we can follow the strategies, get a sense of who's losing and who's winning. The physical production is sumptuous.

If Armageddon isn’t quite what happened economically to the U.S. in the 1980s, Armageddon Time is nevertheless a sincere effort to wring meaning out of memory.

Munich is a Spielberg film for better and worse, a vivid, sometimes simplistic thriller in which action speaks louder than ideas.

Colette is not really a coming-of-age story, except as regards France itself. It’s a liberation story, one witty enough to be worthy of its subject.

The latest and best “TMNT” movie contains a little more substance than may at first be apparent, and this sci-fi reptile comedy admirably advances a message that we can and should all get along, majority and minorities alike.

The near-miracle worked by Mr. Boyle, whose exuberant style brings several saints to scruffy life, is a movie that's joyously funny and hugely inventive -- occasionally to the point of preciousness -- yet true to the spirit of the saintly little kid at its center.

Asked to define his job, Zappa gives a simple answer with convincing sincerity: “I’m an entertainer.” Simplicity gives way to intriguing complexity as the film covers other things Zappa was.

Woman of the Hour may be sensational, in the tabloid sense, but it is angry, too, and full of questions.

The tone is earnest, with dialogue that sometimes plods when you want it to fly — a running time of 127 minutes doesn’t help the pacing — and a couple of pieces of casting are infelicitous: Jim Parsons gives a flat performance as the fictional Paul Stafford, NASA’s lead engineer, and Glen Powell is years too young to play John Glenn, who looks like a gung-ho frat boy.

Both performances are appealing, but Mr. Ashe’s screenplay is not well served by the laggard pace and low energy of his direction.

For all its imperfections, this docudrama with an agitprop heart finds a surprising way into the subject of undocumented immigrants languishing in detention centers.

After countless films in which immigration plays a central role -- one of the earliest was Charlie Chaplin's 1917 silent classic "The Immigrant" while one of the best, Jan Troell's "The Emigrants," has never migrated to DVD -- you'd think the canon was essentially complete. Yet this visionary work adds to it by combining harsh realities with magic-realist fantasies.

As a thriller, The Town has what it takes and then some.

It's a tone poem, really, less concerned with conventional action than with exploring themes of love and commitment through understated performances, sumptuous images (Bradford Young did the cinematography), lovely music (Daniel Hart composed the score) and very few words, intoned elegiacally.

What makes this nominee for the best-foreign-film Oscar singular among Holocaust movies is the way it characterizes the banality of life underground.

A dulcetly crazy, certifiably hilarious and eerily mysterious little comedy.

Daughter of Mine is a triptych of vivid characters and superb performances (including that of young Sara Casu), a study in contrasting and competing passions.

It’s research of a profoundly affecting kind — a study of love and devotion, and the toll taken by machine-gun bullets on a body, a gallant spirit and a family.

Lost in Paris is nonsensical by design, a comedy of the absurd that’s always entertaining and occasionally pure.

If you're looking for an action thriller, this isn't it. The pace is deliberate, the tone is pensive, albeit punctuated by occasional violence, and the style is exceedingly lean; characters reveal themselves mainly through moral choices.

Clint Eastwood and his collaborators have made one of the best aviation movies ever, although “Apollo 13” — also starring Tom Hanks — comes very close.

Nolan’s 168-minute odyssey through the space-time continuum is stuffed with stuff of bewildering wrongness. Eager for grandeur, I went in hoping for the very best from a filmmaker with his own vision of the theatrical medium’s potential. The last thing I expected was a space adventure burdened by turgid discussions of abstruse physics, a wavering tone, visual effects of variable quality and a time-traveling structure that turns on bloodless abstractions.

Though the first-time director, Gabor Csupo, has achieved distinction as an animation artist, he lacks experience directing actors. The best adult performance in the film is that of Zooey Deschanel; she comes off -- again, agreeably -- as self-directed.

Remarkably accomplished and self-confident. In dramatic terms The Attack borrows a page from Alfred Hitchcock's playbook — an innocent in a strange land, delving into dangerous matters he doesn't understand. In political terms, though, the script is unsparing and ultimately bleak. It doesn't justify terrorism, but it does dramatize the rage and despair that dominate life in the occupied territories.

As directed with a wonderful combination of whimsy, deadpan humor and childlike exhilaration by Ms. Regan, the film is impish and full of bounce.

People can indeed live at war with themselves and not know it. Here’s a case of great things happening once peace is declared.

Apollo 11's mission was a singular chapter in the story of mankind; The Dish finds a whimsical, winning way of telling it anew.

An unusual amalgam of formulaic feel-goodism and shocking tough-mindedness, a movie that allows us to decode the inner life of its hero while he's decoding the world around him.

For all the disorder and sense of emergency, there’s also a combination of human sweetness and cosmic serenity to be found in Wuhan Wuhan.

It isn’t until the last half hour that the film finally switches tones from aggressively and charmlessly filthy to thoughtful.

The essence of the film is slapsticky, chopsocky action, rendered with great verve and accompanied by bromides having to do with the need to believe.

Bright, buoyant and hilarious, though far from flawless, this romantic comedy, directed by Jon M. Chu and based on the popular novel by Kevin Kwan, is also a cultural milestone.

There’s much amusement to be had in the film. Very little of it stupid.

One of the pleasures—even privileges—of watching a film like this is seeing what superb actors are able to do with material that doesn’t aspire to greatness. The story is charming, the performances are exceptional.

Touch is a worthy consideration of the things that matter most when the clock is running out, but it could have been more focused.

The screen, like the stage, can barely contain this marvelous play of intelligence.

The film's point of view is inevitably that of an outsider, which Danny Pearl was, and menace is the essence of this shattering story, which has been told with skill and urgent conviction. A Mighty Heart makes the terms of the terrorist threat palpable.

A fascinating and downright lovable documentary.

Dream Scenario is such an imaginatively offbeat movie that it’s a shame it isn’t better.

A win-win situation in which a mainstream feature works equally well as stirring entertainment and a history lesson about a remarkable convergence of sports and statesmanship.

Herb and Dorothy, a documentary by Megumi Sasaki, grows on you just as its subjects do.

The film flirts frequently with sentimentality, falling for it heedlessly at a couple of crucial junctures. Still, the overall style is more astringent than moist, and the hero is a little toughie of endearing tenderness.

Mommy is certainly a showcase for powerful acting: Anne Dorval is the coarse but affecting Diane, Antoine-Olivier Pilon is terrifying as Diane’s teenage son, Steve.

Its title notwithstanding, the fascinating, frustrating Highest 2 Lowest ends up somewhere in the middle.

The filmmaking is fluid and electric; the acting, precise; the archetypal storytelling, seamless and brutal. What happens in “La Jaula de Oro” might enrage audiences, and probably for a variety of reasons. But there’s no getting away without it leaving a mark.

For a filmmaker who has made his reputation with such crime thrillers as "Little Odessa" and "The Yards," James Gray reveals an unexpected gift for the mysteries of romance.

Mr. Rourke's performance is quite phenomenal, a case of unquenchable talent bursting the bonds of dehumanized artifice.

Especially well-rendered is the divide that occurred between the downtown and uptown worlds -- something that many who don't live in New York will grasp here for the first time.

This film, a formidably accomplished debut feature by Michael Pearce, takes us down familiar paths into a darkness all its own.

This startlingly accomplished debut feature by Nia DaCosta has the eyes and ears of a documentary — the opioid crisis is everywhere, the nearest hospital is far away — but the heart of a drama, and a stirring one.

A beautiful film, shot by Tim Orr, that is elevated by Mr. Cage's stirring portrait of a violence-prone man who can't restrain himself from doing good.

Watching Mr. Brooks’s career roll out in a compressed form is quite a treat, though Mr. Reiner seems to race toward the finish to include everything that he needs to get in.

The Song of Sparrows becomes a parable of corruption, catastrophe and eventual redemption. Mr. Majidi's tale wasn't meant to be timely, of course, but the shoe fits, and the film wears it well.

The energy is genuine, and the level of invention is remarkable, sustained as it is by Mr. Baseman's genially garish art, Timothy Bjoerklund's direction from a script by Bill and Cherie Steinkellner, and Nathan Lane's madly passionate performance as the canine who was famously born on the wrong end of a leash.

Though the more fantastic symbolic concepts of Bird don’t take flight as they’re meant to, the film’s human portraits give it vibrancy.

In Queen’s case, this means a tiger-striped stripper dress and snake-print go-go boots, which she will wear for the rest of the movie. It makes for terrific visuals, but like the sex scene to come it’s not a dignified enough use of this actress, and makes a blaxploitation film out of something that seemed to harbor loftier ambitions.

The movie is serious, intelligent, intentionally claustrophobic and awfully somber -- you remember it in black and white, though it was shot (by the masterful Tak Fujimoto) in color. But you'll remember Mr. Cooper's performance for exactly what it is, an uncompromising study in the gradual decay of a soul.

Rarely has so scary a thriller been so well made, and never has digital video -- by the English cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle -- been put to grittier use.

Gradually, though, it wins you over with endearing performances and a clarity of purpose. If that sounds faintly patronizing, it isn’t meant to.

This remarkable piece of antiwar cinema honors its theme, and the movie medium.

The father-daughter relationship is often witty, a seduction that never ends, and sometimes exquisitely poignant, but both roles are burdened by a script that falls into disquisition on the larger subject of men and women.

From seductive start to shattering finish, the film is as stirring, entertaining and steadfastly thrilling as it is beautiful.

The Iron Claw is either a cheesy professional-wrestling hold or the unbreakable grip of a hostile fate. Or perhaps it’s how a father clutches his children. Whatever it is, it’s a resonant image for a potent tearjerker.

The immensity encompasses such variety, subtlety and intimacy that you may find yourself yearning for more.

Why are certain films less than the sum of their appealing parts?

What this film does best is offer, sometimes playfully and sometimes not, new perspectives on the central problem of our shared history.

Eye in the Sky is literally all over the map in its depiction of drone warfare, and right on target, if flagrantly contrived, in examining the ethics of killing by remote control.

For a film that moves at a deliberate pace, Frantz grows remarkably involving; Mr. Ozon is a formidable storyteller, as he has previously demonstrated in such films as “Under the Sand” and “Swimming Pool.”

The result is a documentary that keeps drawing you in, even when you think it’s keeping you at a certain distance, a one-of-a-kind portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who, through good times and dreadful ones, has remained devoted to his art.

The film also offers a portrait in unfathomable courage. It’s a horror story shackled to a hero’s journey in which a man with a surpassingly fertile mind feels himself — his deepest, essential self — coming inexorably, inexplicably undone.

What's an eight-letter word for a non-fiction feature that is witty, wise and wonderful? "Wordplay."

The overall effect is appropriately trippy, and revealing.

Like Father, Like Son has still more on its mind — a vision of a Japan in which work will be balanced with leisure and love.

It’s stylish and chilling, with a lively feminist undercurrent.