Disney’s new live-action version is for the most part beguilingly good, even though it’s no replacement for the studio’s 1950 animated classic.

The plot has an intriguing twist, and the production, in addition to Mr. McKellen’s commanding presence, has fine work by Laura Linney as Holmes’s housekeeper, Mrs. Munro, and by Milo Parker as Roger, Mrs. Munro’s son. The boy is vividly intelligent, ferociously angry and a force to be reckoned with.

What's good in the film, which was shot superbly by Matthew Libatique, is so good - so exuberant and touching and sweet - that you want the whole thing to be perfect, but Ruby Sparks is a closed system that gradually turns in on itself. There isn't enough of someone else.

A visionary film with dramatic myopia.

A leisurely and quite lovely drama that honors the conventions of gothic ghost stories without the slightest stain of self-irony.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

A daring and unstable mélange of styles--working-class realism, deadpan fantasy, shameless buffoonery. At times it falls flat, or fails to rise. More often than not, though, it's a heartbreaker.

In Hollywood’s franchise game, sequels are seldom the best they can be. This one isn’t, but it’s pretty, perfectly pleasant and good enough.

Directed by James Adolphus (“Soul of a Nation”), the HBO documentary is almost too balanced.

As lean and effective as its thriller elements are, especially in a breakneck third act, the movie is most intriguing in its subtext—an implied clash between conceptions of masculinity and the eras with which they’re associated.

World Trade Center shows us many things we already know, though with impressive flair, then plunges underground for an unconvincing drama based on a multitude of facts. It's upbeat, all right, but badly off kilter.

The Inventor falls awkwardly between a kids’ movie and one for grown-ups.

The actress gets immeasurable help from the writing: Lisbeth's anger is matched by her intelligence and her physical prowess, which enables her to administer as well as absorb pain in megadoses. But none of it would register without Ms. Rapace's singular combination of eerie beauty and feral intensity. She's a movie star unlike any other.

As in the previous films, the pilgrims stay in the most picturesque places, and are served the most sumptuous meals, the preparation of which Mr. Winterbottom uses as a visual digestif when his two stars begin to cloy. Most often, though, they are supremely urbane and consistently hilarious.

Ms. Rice (“Mare of Easttown”) is the main attraction, and a revelation; her direct address of the camera grows less frequent as present-tense time catches up with her schemes, but she remains magnetic throughout.

How, then, does "In Good Company" turn out for the better in spite of itself? No mystery at all. Whatever the fate of old media, or new media, for that matter, winning performances are here to stay.

Seldom has a film presented such a richly ambiguous juxtaposition of modernity (among the toys showered on the boy is a really cool radio-controlled helicopter), ancient mindset and, to be sure, possible miraculousness.

The brute force of Terminator 3 is relieved, I'm happy to say, by Claire Danes's winning performance as John Connor's reluctant accomplice (whom the production notes describe, not inaccurately, as an "unsuspecting veterinarian"); by many of the special effects, which don't seem obsolete at all, and, yes, by the sinister trix of the Terminatrix.

Strangely, though, there isn't enough for one movie, and the first clue to why lurks in the title's ampersand, a sort of linguistic duct tape holding together two stories that never really function as one.

For those more concerned with what “The Avengers” movies do best — outsize spectacle and wry comedy — Age of Ultron has to be declared a victory.

Once Captain America goes off to war in his endearingly silly suit, however, the movie starts to lose its vibe.

Diane Keaton has the crucial role, and she makes the most of it.

The book’s climax has been changed, somewhat awkwardly, but the movie doesn’t go soft in the end. I prefer to think it goes tender.

Peterloo starts slowly, takes its time and sometimes tries one’s patience. Don’t expect heartwarming domestic stories. The people are vivid and the acting is superb; as always, the director and his cast have collaborated on the screenplay through improvisations that coalesce into a working script. But the search for understanding — of the massacre and the events leading up to it — is more structural than individual.

Yossi spends much of its 84 minutes with a passive hero. This older Yossi is a vestige of the man he once was, an overweight and hollow-eyed vestige who drags himself through his daily rounds and solitary nights. Mr. Knoller's performance is admirable, and Yossi does find new reasons to embrace life. But his rebirth comes only after a very long requiem.

It's hard to imagine spending $120 million on a film starring a computer-generated mouse -- an actor who barely demands a byte to eat -- but if that's how much it takes to provide innocent enchantment for the global hordes, so be it. This sequel beats the original paws down.

It grows repetitious, both in its account of Crane's ritual behavior and in clumsily written -- and stolidly directed -- scenes between Crane and Carpenter, two men acting out their own unacknowledged sexual drama.

The film is at its best in the way it keeps building the stakes of the character clash, thanks in large part to the virtuosity of the two lead actors.

Mr. Keaton’s performance is fascinating from beginning to end, and the movie around him is entertaining in fits and starts. Ultimately, though, it’s a tough sell, a biopic with an uncertain tone that doesn’t know what to make of its subject.

Asleep in My Palm is a virtuoso debut feature from writer-director Henry Nelson.

It’s an efficient retelling of a tale about a young Chinese woman discovering her power — affecting at times, occasionally quite lovely, but earnest, often clumsy and notably short on joy.

Ken Loach better watch out. From the start of his illustrious career his name has been synonymous with left-wing politics expressed in remarkably fine, consistently serious social-realist dramas, most of them set in England or Scotland. Now he has gone and directed a comedy from a script by his longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, and it's so delightful that his fans will be clamoring for more.

Did the film fail the actress? Or vice versa? In the case of The Last Showgirl, I’d say they failed each other.

Gets lots of mileage from a combination of high spirits, scorn for the laws of physics, readily renewable energy and an emphasis on family values-not those of the nuclear family, but of hell-raising, drag-racing outlaws who genuinely care for one another.

Art is supposed to help us see the world in novel ways. The Sound of Silence, in its quietly exhilarating manner, may make us hear it differently, too.

The gags seem fun and refreshing at first, but they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. What might have been a brilliant short subject—at, say, 15 minutes—gets stretched to its limits, and then some.

All of [Bogart's] facets are on view in a must-see documentary for fans of Golden Age Hollywood.

Without straining to make an obvious point, Mr. Tomnay uses black comedy and shocking splatters of gore to tweak the class of jaded plutocrats who are as asset-rich as they are morals-poor.

The violence wears you down. Like one of its nutso characters, Seven Psychopaths has a death wish.

Stylistic debts abound: the Coen brothers, Roger Deakins, the bleak, gothic landscapes of Terrence Malick's "Badlands" and Richard Brooks's "In Cold Blood." Through it all, though, is the original and memorable spectacle of violence expressed and repressed by the desperate hero.

The point of the film is vacuous materialism, but the way these larcenous children return the camera's impassive gaze suggests that no one is home behind their beautiful faces and dead eyes.

Guaranteed to fan antigovernment sentiments among its audiences, Dinosaur 13 is less about paleontology than it is about prosecutorial overreach, political gamesmanship, dinosaur swindlers and true crime — if in fact crimes were even committed, and/or committed by the people accused.

If the plot turns out to be a convenience, the pleasure lies in what the co-stars bring to it.

It's overextended and exhaustingly comic.

The casting is perfect in concept, and occasionally fulfills its promise, but in a notably imperfect film that’s afflicted by a benumbing score and dreary songs.

All the pieces would seem to be in place for an effective film, but the direction is zestless, the pace is more often laggardly than leisurely, and the lead performances are surprisingly lifeless, although Mr. Isaac manages to make a virtue of his scammer's deliberate vagueness.

The BFG has fizz to spare. It’s an effervescent charmer.

Details like these are delightful. So is the notion of Stonehenge as a transport hub to another temporal plane, and the spectacle of Alex and his dauntless cohorts in tin armor they’ve bought in a souvenir shop. What’s destructive, and eventually benumbing, is the kitchen-sink clutter of fantasy, reality, wish-fulfillment and glib enchantment. To say that the film lacks simplicity would be an oversimplification.

Ultimately, Crash succeeds in spite of itself. Its color war starts to feel obvious and schematic. Its coincidences and clichés become like a pileup on the 405 freeway, but there it is -- you find yourself rubbernecking and can't manage to look away.

The film, directed by Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”) is beautifully visualized and steadfastly interesting, yet I kept wondering why I didn’t feel more involved in it.

I like Mr. Gordon-Levitt a lot as an actor, and I wish him only the best in his future work as a filmmaker. There is, however, the matter of this particular movie, an overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.

Much of the action is interesting, and surprisingly well grounded in science...Yet the script works few variations on its basic idea until the climax, which is crazily out of scale -- the urban-traffic equivalent of a nuclear holocaust.

I'm still smiling as I recall Jess, the soccer star-to-be, standing behind her straitlaced mother in the kitchen and casually bouncing a head of lettuce on her knee.

Morgan Spurlock has come up with a terrific idea-a movie about product placements that depends completely on product placements for its financing.

The movie, directed by Rupert Goold, is a conventional but perfectly serviceable showcase for its star, who sets the whole thing on fire every time she launches into a Garland classic in her own voice.

It settles for being amusing when it could have been interesting as well.

This drama, directed by Pablo Trapero, is violent, and unconcerned with easy redemption. That makes it hard to watch, though fascinating for its performances, and the bottomless corruption it portrays.

Immensely winning and visually arresting adaptation of Gaiman's 1998 fantasy.

Talladega Nights may be brash, unbridled, even unhinged, but its cornpone humor is rich in parody, and its craftsmanship is superb -- smart writing, shrewd direction, precisely calibrated performances (whether the calibration calls for delicacy or broad-gauge burlesque), inventive language, inspired silliness and all-but-flawless timing.

Set ablaze by a startling performance by Laura Dern, it's a stark, often disturbing look at the ramifications of betrayal.

Instead of creating the kind of texture and narrative flow that allows characters to reveal themselves gradually and fully, the film devotes increasing attention and lots of clumsy plotting to the question of litigation—can anything be gained by making someone pay for an irretrievable loss?

Josephine Decker’s screen version of the Jandy Nelson young-adult novel, which was adapted by the author, embraces excess as an expression of the heroine’s mercurial spirit. Sometimes the results are excessively excessive, blithely blissed-out or simply clichéd. Mostly, though, they’re funny, affecting and endearing. And daring.

The laughs, the warmth, the love and the faith-based fellowship die out in the dismal final act.

The actor and his director may be addressing the oldest subject in drama. But they manage to give it a new twist nonetheless.

It was one of the last moments when the balance between 1940s-style uplift and what became known as cinema’s American New Wave still held; within a few years, boomer culture simply subsumed all else. “Desperate Souls” does a fine job of exploring the tectonics of that shift.

Grungily stylish and often funny, at least for a while, though all of the caveats and contradictions that apply to Tarantino films apply here: One man's--or boy's--stylization is another's profane, unrelenting and tedious brutality.

Middleton and Spinney are all about the medium’s first megawatt celebrity, who is a slippery enough subject all by himself, one treated here with affection, intelligence and an unadoring tone that’s intriguing all by itself.

A high school comedy that is sharply observed and often terrifically funny, yet oddly misconceived.

This debut feature left me in a state of movie euphoria. Who could have guessed that such a discomfiting premise would blossom into a deadpan-hilarious and yet deeply affecting story about a singular glitch in the human condition?

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

A movie you can't readily get out of your head.

They have also stripped out almost all complexity, reducing the drama to a familiar match between good and evil. You've heard all the speeches before; only the nouns have been changed. [23 Dec 1993, p.A9]

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

The buddies’ adventures are dramatized delightfully, but a case could be made for the movie’s real subject being scenery, and, particularly, water.

It's the set pieces that mark the film as something special: swirling crowds at a casino in the opening sequence, Trudy's ordeal by trailer trash, a climactic firefight that puts lightning in the shade. Very impure, and very impressive.

Films about race too often take the easy way out, which tends to yield schematic characters, grandstanding dialogue and thematic stridency; filmmakers seem more interested in emphasizing that they’re on the side of the angels than in confronting the messiness of reality. Breaking doesn’t patronize the audience with such oversimplifications.

The film is long and sometimes harrowing, but also enthralling.

My advice to "Hobbit" fans is not only to see this one, but to see it as I did, in 3-D projected at the normal rate of 24 frames per second. The film will also be shown in what's called High Frame Rate 3-D, at 48 frames a second, but that made the last installment look more like video than a regular movie. Smaug is scary enough without a turbo boost.

This small-scale film has more outsize ideas than it could possibly manage. Yet Mike Cahill's debut feature exerts a gravitational pull out of proportion to its size through powerful performances, a lyrical spirit, a succession of arresting images and a depth of conviction that sweeps logic aside.

It is marvelously funny - a screwball comedy with more layers than a pearl - and visually sumptuous.

This hugely elaborate production is supposed to be the reboot of a foundering franchise, but rebooting a computer wipes the silicon slate clean. In the movie, what's old is old again.

Since Mr. Stone is a prisoner of his penchant for pop-psychologizing on a cosmic scale, his movie has the astounding effect of absolving President Nixon of personal guilt for his crimes and misdeeds without bothering to explain what he did wrong. [21 Dec 1995, p.A12]

Marshall — a terrific performance by Chadwick Boseman — comes off at the outset as full of himself to overflowing. In other words, here’s an irreverent movie with a quirky ring of truth.

The film takes itself frivolously when that's appropriate--some of it is charmingly silly--and seriously when, as is often the case, all sorts of good surprises are unleashed.

If you stick with it through the somewhat plodding first half of this overly long retelling, you’ll be rewarded with a rousing final hour.

The worst part of Ms. Zellweger's plight is that she, along with others in the cast, has fallen victim to a first-time feature director whose vocabulary doesn't seem to include the word "simplicity."

Why, in our drum-thumping, ritually trumpeting time, did so little fanfare precede the opening of a movie with so much to recommend it? This is grand entertainment.

An exciting caper, though sometimes a trying one, with great dollops of self-parodying dialogue that will test your loyalty to Mr. Mamet's way with words.

Attempting to keep so many stories aloft, the film ends up making them all seem superficial.

Most of those hardships are familiar to movie lovers; that's a reductionist view of a serious and ambitious production, but it is, after all, a movie on a screen. (And a movie with a dreadfully clumsy ending.)

The music is shamelessly entertaining, and the warmth of Morgan Freeman's narration conveys the possibility that, for all the imminent peril, the lemurs of this enchanted forest still have a fighting chance.

The second half, in particular, exemplifies science fiction at its best: thoughtful, exciting, provocative and pointed. It’s fantasy wrapped around ideological substance, making “Kingdom” the best of the franchise films to make it to theaters so far this year.

We can all use more magic in our lives, and that promise is fulfilled quite delightfully at first. But extravagant creatures of digital descent can’t sustain a story that does little more than set the scene for a long string of sequels.

Though the movie is consistently fun and has some clever ideas to go with its marvelous look, its story is thin and episodic, without much in the way of momentum.

Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.

The summer's first action epic does exactly what it's supposed to do, more clearly than "M:i:I," and more likeably than "M:i:II."

The filmmakers may have refashioned the book to make it a vehicle for Mr. Murphy, and done so successfully. But they were right about the POV: Witnessing the turmoil of these very troubled youths through the frustrations of their teachers makes for more convincing drama than would a delinquent’s-eye view of the same situation.

With his co-writer, Randy Sue Coburn, and composer Mark Isham, director Alan Rudolph has created a sense of time and place that authentically conveys what it might have been like when writers were celebrities and special effects came from words. [10 Jan 1995, p.A18]