It is in part biographical, with the young-hunk-makes-good tale of the film world and a parade of clips from the movies that he made. But the documentary’s main concern is Hudson as the ultimate closeted homosexual, the CinemaScope version of a tale gay men had been forced to live out for generations, or risk scandal, blackmail and even criminal prosecution.

Although The Good Girl is peppered with amusing small-town eccentrics in refreshingly original guises, it gets off to a long, slow start.

None of this would work, of course, without stylish performances in the leads and Mr. Clooney and Ms. Zeta-Jones do themselves and their dubious characters proud.

Mr. Luchini gives one of the best performances of the year, in one of the best movies of the year.

Like a dinner whose hors d'oeuvres are far more satisfying and well-composed than the slightly warmed-over main course. Among them are the inspired mock movie trailers and the fake ad that precede "Thunder's" opening credits.

Nothing is simple in this film, which ramifies into parallel meditations on race, the transformation of racial politics and lessons to be learned from the lives of dogs.

Koch the film makes the point without belaboring it — a mayor and a metropolis linked by tumultuous events in the worst and best of times.

Mr. Holland carries the day with unaffected charm, the good stuff is really good and improbably joyous, and the writers have found a plausible way of pushing the reset button for a new round of high-flying web-slinging. The possibilities are nothing less than multifarious.

A work of fiction, Mr. Féret's film is ardent in its inventions, modest in scale, playful in its speculations about Nannerl's influence on her brother's music, and graced by the filmmaker's daughter, Marie Féret, in the title role.

Mad Dog and Glory also seems like two movies at once, only in this case the split comes off like a case of Siamese twins. Actually, it's girls on one side and boys on the other, and the boys get all the breaks. [4 Mar 1993, p.A12]

Trumbo doesn't pretend to be tough-minded about its subject, and its failure to date the letters is an annoyance. But the substance of those letters, along with documentary footage and a touching appearance by Kirk Douglas, throws a baleful light on a bleak chapter of American history.

An unusually affecting film by Alice Winocour.

Wildcat is not a fairy tale. The rigors endured by Mr. Turner’s principal sidekick, an ocelot named Keanu (the actor should be pleased), seem very basic compared to the human subject’s process of rehabilitation. But it does reconcile its realities with the elusive nature of happiness, which for both men and cats can mean what’s within their grasp.

The direct, intimate way in which the movie is filmed and acted, however, makes it an affecting study of two people’s attempts to forge some kind of relationship despite huge psychic damage on both sides.

The film is picture-book pretty and fairly conventional, except for the 3-D, which is emerging as a convention in its own right. Still, the prettiness comes with brains, and the whole production, like those newly eye-catching models of American-made cars, bespeaks resurgent confidence.

The director’s best-known film, “BPM,” drew from his later experience as an AIDS activist, and whereas that was an insular, immediate and impassioned portrait of a movement, Red Island takes a lusher, more leisurely approach to its mix of history and memory.

They might also have called it "Groundhog Day 2," but that wouldn't have conveyed the film's martial frenzy, its fascinating intricacies or the special delights of its borderline-comic tone.

Remarkably, Hacksaw Ridge coalesces into a memorable whole.

The movie looks lovely, but it's luminous prose.

The repetitions are meant as a sort of metajoke, and it works well enough, more often than not, though heightened levels of raunch and chaos seem not so much meta as frantic.

A cockeyed comic triumph that flashes between bright and dark like a strobe light of the spirit. And Ms. Theron, as Mavis Gary, a self-styled author rather than a mere writer, succeeds sensationally at something much harder than playing ravaged.

Mr. Nichols decided to preserve the jokiness of the original material, even while shifting the emphasis to the mother-daughter conflict. There may have been a way to do this and end up with a clever movie, but Mr. Nichols seems to have had an even cleverer idea: He decided to use this movie as a way to pay back social obligations. [13 Sep 1990, p.A14]

People might have laughed at the old Jack Rebney, but they were laughing at themselves as well. And counting their blessings. Everyone has a cranky side. Unlike Mr. Rebney's, it isn't usually gawked at by 20 million people.

The problem isn't a lack of substance, and certainly not a dearth of talent, but a shortage of fun.

Lacks a crucial element of the heist subgenre: ingenuity.

Ms. Ferrera is an engaging performer; you find yourself rooting for Ana from the start, even though you know, from the predictable script by George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez, that rooting isn't required for a happy outcome.

The result is an enchanting story of love from an idealized past that endures in the mundane present.

The Man Nobody Knew is packed with knowledge of another sort. It amounts to an absorbing, sometimes appalling course in how U.S. foreign policy evolved and functioned following World War II.

Blunt, brassy and chatty, she makes for a refreshingly open host of her own life story.

This follow-up offers the solid satisfactions of suspense and intensity without the delight of discovery.

Don't miss an opportunity to see Mad Hot Ballroom, though. It will sweep you off your feet.

Has much to recommend it - high-end craftsmanship, a singular heroine, a labyrinthine mystery, an intriguing milieu - yet lacks a vital spark.

In an odd way, Predator: Badlands is a date-night movie posing as merely a sci-fi killing jamboree. All of those lovable lummoxes out there with their hyper-verbal lady friends will learn a little about cooperation.

A surfeit of spectacular images from top-of-the-line computer animation. And the love story branches out beyond a boy and his dragon into gladdening fulfillment on both sides of the species divide. That will certainly be sufficient for kids and families who’ve been waiting for the final chapter of the big-screen trilogy. Over much of the territory it covers, though, the film feels like it’s flying on empty.

Endearing, though sometimes belabored.

The performers—not just the miraculous Ms. Pugh but Ms. Cassidy; her mother, Elaine Cassidy (who plays Anna’s mother); and Tom Burke, as the journalist-love interest Will Byrne—give memorably complex portrayals in a tale where elements theological, maternal, political and pictorial are transformed alchemically into narrative gold.

What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.

Intriguing and affecting documentary.

To his latest picture, Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Disco Boy, Mr. Rogowski brings his typically deep interiority—one that tends to break out into the world in unpredictable ways. The film isn’t equal to his talents, but it gets by on style, vigor and some big ideas.

The divide between Mr. Sutherland and the rest of the cast is striking: The way Friedkin shoots him, and the nature of his portrayal, are in sharp contrast to the more stage-bound performances of his co-stars; it may have been intentional, though it doesn’t really work.

Sleepwalk With Me makes the subject palatable, funny and maybe even touching.

The intricacies here are moral and ethical, and they're fascinating.

An exhilarating examination of a leading Iranian criminal enterprise--music: More than 2,000 bands are said to operate clandestinely in the capital of Tehran, risking prison to play together in basements, bedrooms and rooftops.

As wish-fulfillments go, this is a movie lover's dream.

The result is better than smart, it’s stirring.

Ms. Plaza delivers a wide-ranging, nuanced and demanding performance as a mad woman, whose attic is the cellphone.

What makes the film valuable is its focus on Justice Ginsburg as a champion of women’s rights.

If you're willing to go along with it, as I was, then being manipulated -- or at least actively misled -- becomes a pleasure.

Hugely entertaining thriller.

There’s no glory in the pugilism of The Survivor, save for the last, exquisite shot of Haft in his Marciano fight, which is alarmingly beautiful, a catharsis for Haft and a moment of aesthetic delirium for the viewer.

Though the film is somber, it certainly commands one's attention, and for a while one's respect.

No one knew Mr. Sorkin was a good director, but he is, and his filmmaking chops come topped with intelligence and curiosity. That makes it all the more remarkable, and I don’t mean good remarkable, when the film takes a last-reel turn into slushy psycho-sappiness, enlisting someone we thought we’d seen the last of to explain what the story was really about.

Training Day can be simplistic, formulaic and absurdly melodramatic -- but Mr. Washington is flat-out great.

As you watch Blinded by the Light, don’t let its earnest trappings blind you to the beauty of its core. Gurinder Chadha ’s coming-of-age drama transmutes the raw feeling of Bruce Springsteen ’s music into another kind of feeling, no less raw but leavened by giddy excitement that culminates in joy.

It's a stirring portrait of a singular artist, a gorgeously photographed album of his buildings, and, perhaps most importantly, a film that manages to demystify the way he works without diminishing it.

Black Book is its own kind of thriller. The film is filled with the genre's conventions -- suspense, betrayal, melodrama, violence, music -- and it's hugely enjoyable from start to finish.

The movie is a pleaser, for the most part, even though the attitude it takes toward its subject is often problematic.

James Marsh’s movie, which co-stars Felicity Jones as Jane Hawking, the celebrated physicist’s wife, is a biographical love story that doesn’t depend on science to shape the plot — it’s rich in emotional intelligence.

What the film does best is document the lengths to which people are going to protect themselves -- subcutaneous microchips for identification, ever-heavier armor for fancy cars.

There’s a link between this Marcello and the Marcello played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in Bernardo Bertolucci’s seminal “The Conformist,” a functionary ripe for corruption in Mussolini’s Italy. Both men are mesmerized by power, and both movies pose, in different ways, the same question — what happens when no one stands up to tyranny? In the Dogman’s case, another question presents itself. What happens if someone finally does? The answer is surprising, and, like the whole of Mr. Garrone’s film, eerily memorable.

Movies are seldom flawless and don’t have to be. This one speaks more eloquently to how a spell can be woven rather than broken.

Through exquisite details, evocative music and bold dramatic strokes -- including a tragedy that transcends the melodrama it might have been -- Rain renders this family's life in its full dimensions.

All the more remarkably, then, this flawed but startling biopic stars another performer, Chadwick Boseman, who fills Brown's shoes with a dynamism that transcends imitation.

Mr. McQueen seems consciously to be shedding his past style—the icy minimalism of “Hunger” and “Shame” and the scarifying gauntlet of his Oscar-winning “Twelve Years a Slave”—in a bid to make a big, warm-hearted, conventional holiday-season tear-jerker. Yet the film . . . will strike many viewers as a bait-and-switch exercise.

What The Brink does best is show the missionary zeal that sustains this eccentric warrior — “this gross-looking Jabba the Hutt drunk” is how he says he was perceived during the 2016 campaign. The film lets him speak for himself, which he does with wry charm, combative zest, scary certainty, unquenchable energy that can’t be explained by all the Red Bulls he gulps, and an ego undiminished by adversity.

It’s terrific fun, and none of the things that were threatening to turn DC Entertainment into the cinematic equivalent of a black hole. Just when the world needs a superhero with a gift for silliness, here he is in a movie whose best superpower turns out to be a good heart.

It’s a film about tableaus and texture that strives, largely successfully, to re-create the experience of being an extremely small part of a vast, historic conflagration. In effect, it’s an anti-spaghetti western, eschewing all things grandiose and bold-faced in favor of the small and prosaic.

One of the wittiest comedies to come our way in a very long time.

Morgan Neville’s documentary is a joyous revelation, a group portrait of superb musicians from all over the world offering music as an emblem of what people can do in these fractious times when they live in concert with one another.

The dystopian sci-fi drama Vesper is a gallery of astounding images set in a weirdly enticing future. The new world it depicts is both primitive and advanced, full of richly detailed flora and fauna representing strange new species that came about after mankind experimented heavily with genetic engineering as society crumbled to dust.

There's a near-sacred history in Hollywood of non-U.S.- born directors providing fresh perspectives on America. Miloš Forman. Alfred Hitchcock. Ang Lee. Ernst Lubitsch. Billy Wilder. For Prisoners, a stress-inducing trip into child abduction, the director is Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who gives us an American "hero" guaranteed to push many buttons, many times, and who might not have been allowed to be quite so awful, under a different director's lens.

An endearing film, and a fascinating one.

Batman Begins summons up moments of great eloquence and power. If only its cast of characters was as fully inhabited as its turbulent city.

Ms. Richen has a problematic subject for a documentary, and the problems extend beyond the limitations of footage. She needs to sell the event, thus her lineup of marginally relevant characters gushing about it.

Entertaining but highly conventional documentary.

The film grows on you too, a later-stage version of "The Big Chill" that starts schematically and ends as a stirring celebration.

A fascinating procedural with a fitting climax.

Through no fault of Mr. Roth’s, his character isn’t interesting enough to sustain our involvement in the story. Neil’s detachment doesn’t intrigue us, it only detaches us in our turn.

It’s a knockout: arch, unpredictable, thematically hefty and told at a gallop. In one or two cases, I thought the twists didn’t really work, but for the most part Mr. Hancock keeps the audience richly entertained.

Dylan was the idol of an era; many weedy intellectuals have sought to explain why. Mr. Mangold and Mr. Chalamet don’t expound on the man’s talent; they simply, exuberantly, show it.

For all its energy, fine performances and dramatic confrontations, Friday Night Lights substitutes intensity for insight, dodging the book's harsher findings like a dazzling broken-field runner.

The film’s strength lies in the performances — two fine actors elevating their roles from the touchingly mundane to the suddenly momentous.

There’s no goal to be met or secret to be uncovered. Instead, it’s a collection of odd, wonderfully realized vignettes that plunge us into an alternative way of life that it neither glamorizes nor satirizes but simply strives to understand.

Charlotte Rampling is the best reason, though far from the only one, to see Swimming Pool, a mesmerizing mystery, plus a wonderfully sensuous fantasy.

It’s full of music that makes the case for its subject’s pre-eminence—he played with the intensity of a highest-category hurricane—and has an interesting slant on the issue of cultural appropriation; Butterfield was white, and the blues he played were, and remain, indelibly black.

The narration, aided by a terrific score, does streamline the storytelling, and adds to it a faintly sardonic top note.

Marvelously detailed and meticulously crafted, an elegant evocation of Depression-era America and its fascination with crime. What the movie lacks is any sense of elation--it’s joyless by choice.

Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.

Presley Chweneyagae's Tsotsi makes his presence deeply felt. In a world of heedless children wielding guns, his tale is a heartening one.

Strong stuff, and all the stronger for having taken itself so comically.

As odd as it may sound, it's a remarkably beautiful movie.

A consistently entertaining, frequently violent and generally slapdash action comedy.

It’s a paradox, then, as well as a pity, that the film loses its way at precisely the point when the new story starts to merge with the old one, and the Little Girl meets a character called Mr. Prince.

Jonas Carpignano’s second feature — and Italy’s entry for this year’s foreign-language Oscar — is shockingly alive, startlingly accomplished and remarkably acute. It’s a neo-realist study of a kid with special gifts for leadership, daring and friendship. And for stealing everything in sight.

Benjamin Button is all of a visionary piece, and it's a soul-filling vision.

There is no reason to adapt an existing work without doing something new, and Ms. DaCosta does plenty, though much of the updating shows how truly groundbreaking Ibsen was. And how little ground is left to break.

Unstrung Heroes is a revelation. [15 Sep 1995]

Without the fizz of wit and humor the underlying emotional scenario ends up feeling flat.