It shouldn’t seem shocking, but the most interesting thing about this second Cruise-fired action film based on author Lee Child’s nomadic, ex-military hero is its action.

Glorifies its subject without quite knowing what to make of her. There's no question, though, about Ms. Blanchett in the title role. When she's on screen, the Fourth Estate flourishes.

The result is a film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart.

Who knew that one of Billie Holiday's most haunting songs was written in Budapest in the 1930s? I didn't until I saw Gloomy Sunday, a German film, shot in Hungary and directed by Rolf Schubel, that I enjoyed quite a lot, even though it's all over the map in more ways than one.

Lingua Franca is, first and foremost, a story about yearning, vulnerability and sexual awakening in which the complications of identity are revealed slowly, with a dramatist’s awareness that our perceptions will change, or undergo a succession of changes, before we come back to seeing the decreasingly calm Olivia for who she is, a passionate spirit on an uncertain journey.

A curious combination of strident preachment and smartly farcical thriller; it's heavy-handed and light-footed at the same time.

Adult Beginners presents itself less as humor than as a study in Gen-X sociology and psychology. What happens when people raised in relative ease and who expect to live an even better life than their parents are left emotionally unequipped for reality? It might be touching. It might even be important. But it’s not exactly a lot of laughs.

It lacks the redeeming warmth of a character the audience can identify with. But longtime fans of Mr. Williams will enjoy it as an example of the creepiness we always knew he was capable of.

Like the "girls," the movie is flamboyant in almost every respect - the costumes, the humor and the sentimentality. [1 Sep 1994]

The compositions and palette are occasionally stunning (the cinematographer is Scott Siracusano), and while the story lacks a certain momentum, the intention, quite successful, is to keep a viewer curious.

There’s a scary amount of stuff going on in writer-director Christopher Landon’s horror movie/murder mystery/domestic drama/deep-state thriller/coming-of-age teenage romance. It may be based on the short story “Ernest” by Geoff Manaugh. But there’s nothing short about it. At the same time, it has its charms.

Sympathetic, engaging documentary.

As a character portrait, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed is absorbing, but as an argument it fails.

What may feel like Mr. Sfar's indulgences are sometimes just that, but one could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.

Although mood often substitutes for momentum in Ms. Kalem's film, both of her stars give affecting performances, and there's growth on both sides of the unlikely romance.

The movie finally comes together into something that is genuinely -- and almost quietly -- stirring.

It is an inspiring story, no surprise, told with a great deal of warmth.

Any shortfalls in Home on the Range a conventional but perfectly pleasant entertainment, have more to do with the ABC's of storytelling than with the D's of animation.

If you’re looking for the exhaustive movie bio on Reggie Jackson, look elsewhere: He’s in this thing for one reason only. Though if you want to watch him hit ninth-inning dingers out of Yankee Stadium, there’s a lot of that. And it is certainly fun.

Mr. Ritchie is back with more of the same in his second feature, a comedy called "Snatch" that's a sort of lethal pinball machine in which even more picturesque characters bounce from pillage to post.

An attractive, intelligent film that's intractably at odds with itself.

Notwithstanding a thin script and a color-by-numbers ending, the movie is redeemed by its solid performances.

Ms. Gadot is magnetic, will probably make a delicious Evil Queen in “Snow White,” and is spinning her wheels in the snow of the Alps, the dust of the African desert and the lava sands of Iceland in an effort to place the cornerstone, so to speak, in the construction of yet another kinetic movie series.

At its best, Fahrenheit 9/11 is an impressionist burlesque of contemporary American politics that culminates in a somber lament for lives lost in Iraq. But the good stuff -- and there's some extremely good stuff -- keeps getting tainted by Mr. Moore's poison-camera penchant for drawing dark inferences from dubious evidence.

Given how early the illicit-insemination angle of Fortier’s history is revealed, viewers will suspect that even worse is to come, and they will be right. But that doesn’t mean those same viewers might not have other questions.

In several marvelously postmodern moments it recognizes its own glucose level. And the results are genuinely hilarious.

As a thriller it’s efficient, if formulaic, and technically proficient, if undistinguished.

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

Entertaining when it's really lurid, and Gerard Depardieu is something to behold as the proprietor of a broken-down hotel. He's a spectacular ruin in his own right.

If Ice Age lacks the fit and finish of top-of-the-line films from Pixar, DreamWorks or Disney, it's still an impressive piece of work for a new feature animation group, and a harbinger of cool cartoons to come.

Thus does a book of literary distinction become not-so-grand-Guignol.

At many points along the way I wanted to wash my hands of Scotland, PA., but then this sly, silly comedy got me smiling again.

The cast is superb: especially Kate Winslet, who transcends, by far, the limits of her character's narrow soul. Yet The Reader remains schematic, and ultimately reductive.

It’s a reasonably clever contrivance built around a pair of droll, skin-deep performances that are smart and entertaining, yet oddly lacking in intensity.

Endearing, though sometimes belabored.

So many movies these days are overworked or overblown: The Hammer feels genuinely tossed-off. It isn't a great movie, or even a consistently good one. Yet it gets to elusive feelings about failure and success, hope and mortality (and reveals a quietly subversive attitude toward the boxing-movie genre).

A solid high-school comedy keeps stopping dead for a series of what amount to so-so MTV videos.

Mr. Maquiling's gotta learn more about dramatic arcs, but he has an infectious interest in how the world looks and works, and he can make you laugh unexpectedly. I look forward to his next film.

Torn between Tarantino-esque genre pastiche and stilted art-film seriousness, The Settlers is at once unsettling and tonally unsettled. The result is a muddled study of brutal history.

Like Seberg, too, Ms. Stewart is able to distinguish herself when encumbered by fairly feeble material. That said, Seberg is a bit much to ask of anyone.

The Hunt occupies a special place in the chockablock landscape of movie junk. This gleeful, gross-out gorefest looks as tacky and violent as its trackdown plot would suggest, and lives up to certain parts of its bad reputation. It is also funny, genuinely topical, extremely shrewd and, heaven help us, slyly wise. I liked it quite a lot.

Despite the numerous predictable jokes about geriatric sex, the movie is very appealing for numerous surprising reasons. Many of them have to do with ice fishing in Minnesota. [9 Dec 1993, p.A14]

Yet the nonsense content, being pure, is liberating, and allows us to savor all the machinery as machinery: the train, the plot, the pitch-imperfect dialogue, the huffing-puffing fights, the ridiculous stunts and, yes, the climactic train wreck. Here’s how filmmakers can fill screens when they don’t have a film to make.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Given that the character is a literal saint, and the script never stops reminding us how brave, honorable, loving and committed Mother Cabrini is, the movie suffers from a certain steadfast tone. It’s warm with fondness but never boiling with passion, and a major star might have succeeded in making Cabrini larger than life. As it is, she comes across as so pure that it’s a little difficult to relate to her.

The film contends admiringly, and convincingly, that Ralph Nader's authentic sense of outrage is the reason he persists when he can't prevail.

Ms. Stewart, who has maintained an impressively adventurous career since her “Twilight” days concluded more than a decade ago, helps keep the film upright, beautifully blending a moody exterior with the care of a lover and the anxiety skittering beneath it all as Lou tries to keep her world from coming completely apart.

American Made is one of the many children of “Goodfellas,” a true-crime story turned first-person narrative told by a charismatic ne’er-do-well surrounded by dubious characters and tantalizing subplots. None of these offspring, including American Made, have matched the chilling grandeur of Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece, with its multifaceted characters and visual fluidity.

Watching this surrealist silliness, I would have welcomed the sight of a geezer on a riding mower.

Surprising as it may be, given an unpromising trailer, the 3D update of Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth turns out to be perfectly charming as well as predictably eye-popping.

Entertaining but highly conventional documentary.

This is silliness of such a special grade, performed with such zest, that it makes you forgive and even forget the movie's foolishness and borderline incoherence.

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

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.

This one’s pretty entertaining, although increasingly noisy and ultimately ridiculous.

A kind of blues song in its own right, Sidemen: Long Road to Glory is an affectionate attempt to showcase three major figures in the development of Chicago blues, musicians who spent their entire lives eclipsed by the oversized stars they played with.

The Boy Behind the Door is an underwritten movie and an underpopulated one, though missing people are less of a handicap to the narrative than missing information.

Mr. Reynolds can do goofily perplexed as well as anyone and is quite charming as Guy, who doesn’t know what’s going on, except that as “Blue Shirt Guy” he’s rocked the worldview of online gamers everywhere.

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.

Camp X-Ray isn’t anti-American, despite much of Ali’s rhetoric. It is about the evils of ignorance, wherever it rears its ugly head.

Mr. Bulger does a fine enough job defending his own legacy, being, at age 87, a still-charismatic figure and one who refuses to condemn his brother, or even concede that the family knew everything about its black sheep’s nefarious career.

It’s a film that demands to be watched several times to figure it out, but although I occasionally enjoyed its mordant humor, it’s so unpleasant that it’s hard to sit through once.

Mr. Thayi doesn’t tell a straightforward version of the Hwang story, because he’s after more—the story of cloning itself, which will be enlightening for those of us on the fringes of science.

Cobbling together ideas from other, better movies, Rust isn’t original enough to be a must-see, but it didn’t deserve to be canceled because of an accident, either. Mr. Baldwin has been largely absent from the screen in recent years, and this effort is a reminder that, to use a word often applied to Harland Rust himself, he remains formidable.

Silly is endangered these days, and normal has come under withering fire from stupendous, yet tedious, visual effects. Busting ghosts used to be a lot more fun.

The film is a sort of pocket epic, one that travels a great length of time and distance in order to create space for people to find themselves. The changes in appearance of the two lead actors over the course of events are as startling as China’s full-throttled economic development. Yet Mr. Jia is subtle to a fault.

The butler, Cecil Gaines, is a fictional creation, an African-American Forrest Gump who bears special witness to the civil-rights movement while serving on the White House staff under seven presidents. The contrivance is stretched to its breaking point over a running time of 132 minutes; some of the episodes cross a different line from almost plausible to downright silly. That's not the whole story, though.

This is less a film in the lustrous Pixar tradition than a Disney fairy tale told with Pixar's virtuosity. As such, it's enjoyable, consistently beautiful, fairly conventional, occasionally surprising and ultimately disappointing.

With all its flaws, though, The Grey Zone deserves to be respected, and to be seen.

Affecting but formulaic.

Mama itself is above average as a piece of filmmaking, even if its scare quotient is middling or below. That's OK with me. I was content to be impressed by the skill of the first-time director, Andrés Muschietti; absorbed by the performances and smitten by some startling images.

Ms. Kawase’s sweet, slow film — very slow, I’m obliged to say — becomes a meditation on solitary lives lived at the margins of society; on old age, and on the urgency of telling our stories, which may sometimes include recipes.

Mountainhead teeters on a precipice of dramatic irony and intentions.

Mike Leigh's latest film preserves the mystery of why another marriage has flourished over decades. That's not the stated subject of Another Year, but it's at the center of this enjoyable though insistently schematic comedy.

Eventually, though, Ghost Town buckles beneath the weight of contrivance -- so many ghosts to dispel, so many lessons to learn.

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.

A smart entertainment that trades on Mr. Jackson's forceful presence, a cast of extremely likable young actors and lots of basketball action.

The new version is out of scale with the basic premise -- too much rain, too much water, too much doom, gloom and intricate eccentricity.

This English heart-warmer isn't all that kinky. It's actually quite sweet-spirited, as well as unswervingly formulaic.

On a scene-to-scene basis, it’s an impressively taut film, but it left me wishing for a more compelling conclusion than “people are nasty to one another.”

Directed by E. Elias Merhige, the film is never less than entertaining, but Sir Ben's portrayal of a sympathetic psychopath gives it a special zing.

Ms. Polley, a longtime actress who got started in movies as a child, does an admirable job of keeping the dramatic temperature at a high level despite the strictures of the format, and Ms. Mara, Ms. Foy and Ms. Buckley all make a vivid impression. Yet no one in the movie seems to have a grasp of the practical realities.

It's a diverting mess, sometimes even a delightful mess.

It is a very personal documentary, a designation that can connote the good, the not-so-bad and the distinctly uncomfortable. My Mom Jayne has it all, including a puzzle that Ms. Hargitay pursues throughout.

Its ironic complexities tease the brain without pleasing the heart.

With a screenplay by Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee from his 1980 novel, Waiting for the Barbarians is a parable of depressingly timeless relevance, which means it’s faithful to its source material.

Will the extremely extravagant special effects prove sufficient to sustain the picture? Surely they will, this time. Still, there's a sense of fatigue in the scenes that don't involve high-tensile webs and high-tension suspense.

The documentary becomes a reasonably engaging if unpolished account of a legendary filmmaker’s most quixotic pursuit.

It’s a marvelous story about science and humanity, plus a great performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, plus first-rate filmmaking and cinematography, minus a script that muddles its source material to the point of betraying it. Those strengths make the movie worth seeing, but the writing keeps eating away at the narrative’s clarity — and integrity — until it’s impossible to separate the glib fictions from the remarkable facts.

At the center of this swirl of events, poignant recollections and utter pandemonium, Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence.

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

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]

Though Hannibal the movie is unresolved in ways the book is not, that isn't Mr. Hopkins's fault. He's still a star for all seasons, and seasonings.

I know this sounds like great fun, and some of it is, but there's nowhere near enough good stuff to fill the 114-minute running time.

Having simplified matters, Ms. Fennell sloughs off the psychological depth of the novel and instead lavishes attention on the heavy breathing and the decor, exhibiting much interest in the ornate mansion in which the Linton family lives (one room is set aside for ribbons only) and the costumes and accessories with which Ms. Robbie is gloriously draped.

What the film does sustain, and quite remarkably, considering its serious theme, is a delicately comic tone. That’s due in large measure to the screenplay by Frank Cottrell Boyce.

A movie you want to like, and a movie you can enjoy if you cut its slackness some slack.

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