At times somber, and now and then dangerously close to self-important, Code 46 is nonetheless a smart, mature film that examines who and what we can be to each other, in a world full of invention and change.

Intimacy has vanished from the relationship between Tony and Pepper, and grace has been stricken from the movie as a whole.

The intimacy of Ms. Johnson’s performance is extraordinary. She is the least assertive of movie stars, yet the courage, despair and fury she finds in Nicole will lift you up and spin you around.

Barbarians is sometimes a comedy of ill manners, sometimes an exhilarating thriller, but it’s also an amusingly clever and sometimes violent parable about venality, vulgarity and territoriality. Barbarians may be an ambiguous title, but it’s apt.

The movie has its own deficits - a lack of variety, originality, subtlety, clarity and plain old charm.

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.

The stupidity lacks smarts in the script department, and the joke, such as it is, wears thin, then turns sour.

An evil spell nearly does Snow White in, but it's lifted in the nick of time. The strangest spell afflicts Kristen Stewart; she can't seem to imbue Snow White with anything more than a semblance of feeling. That spell never lifts, but it doesn't make much difference in the end because the forces of good manage to work around it.

Among the charms of Finch is its willingness not to overexplain, trusting our patience while involving us visually.

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

A modest film about a modest man and benefits enormously from Mr. Wyman’s apparent obsessive-compulsive drive to collect, record and photograph.

The film is almost distractingly beautiful to look at, something that accentuates the tension between the film's conflicting quantities, i.e., the glories of the physical world, and the corrupted humanity it hosts.

Hell of a Summer, as written and directed by Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk, manages to mine some fresh mirth out of the mayhem while lampooning a format’s classic conceits.

None of the film's tropes — fancy camera angles, dark streets, persistent rain, psycho killers in doomy settings, Scudder trudging around the city on their trail — can hide the essential hollowness of a not-very-interesting revenge tale that takes a not-at-all-welcome turn into grisly, ugly horror.

This production is a mess for many reasons, most of them having to do with its frantic efforts to be funny.

For all of the moments of splendor and awe in The Mountain, I’d have preferred a less open-ended film.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.

Horrible Bosses has preposterousness to burn, but no finesse and no interest in having any.

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.

The story is rooted in a political past that never comes to life, and its structure is so cockeyed that we don't even get to see Nick's reaction to a climactic surprise that takes place off-screen. The film was shot by an excellent cinematographer, Adriano Goldman, though you'd never know it from the lighting, which is as flat as the writing.

This is Coupland's first screenplay, and it shows -- in a cheerfully discursive quality, but also in a reliance on gestures, contrivance and dialectic speeches rather than dramatic development and conflict.

Through it all, though, Kurt Russell gives Dark Blue a bleak integrity -- funny word, given the circumstances -- that almost serves as its redemption.

Mr. Kinnear is fine; he's an actor we always like, and he gives a skillful, heartfelt performance. The problem is the material -- dramatic in the describing but painfully predictable in the telling.

After listening to Jane and Jake talk it out in the interminable process of working it out—they explore their relationship as exhaustively, and exhaustingly, as any kids on Facebook—I found myself wishing for more shallows and fewer depths.

This new feature, though, sets up a dialectic between reason and faith and argues it insistently, with eye-rolling earnestness.

Little by little, though, he (Ledger)and those around him achieve a critical mass -- an extremely light critical mass -- and the plot pops with entertaining complications.

Mr. Fuqua, who did such a fine job directing Mr. Washington and Ethan Hawke in "Training Day," loses control of an increasingly slapdash script, and the whole movie turns into a slaughterhouse. The question isn't who wants it — box office action is assured — but who needs it?

This is moviemaking in a modular mode, an inspiration-free action adventure — with cheesy cinematography — that fills its modest running time by fitting together familiar elements into something reliably, even insistently, not new.

The movie as a whole is clever, and conspicuously overwrought. But Mr. Downey's performance is elegantly wrought; he's as quick-witted as his legendary character, and blithely funny in the lovers' spats—all right, the mystery-lovers' spats—that Holmes keeps having with Jude Law's witty Dr. Watson.

If only Brotherhood of the Wolf had the wit and grace to match its exceptional physical beauty.

The Kingdom comes down to a police procedural, and one whose procedures prove none too interesting.

The big cats of Mufasa: The Lion King take a long walk from an arid and desolate climate to one teeming with life. The movie itself represents a journey in something like the opposite direction, from the bountiful gardens of creativity to the chilly environs of the corporate brand-extension department.

Weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy, then sustains it -- up to a point.

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.

Kristin Scott Thomas is the best though not the only reason to see Leaving.

What God’s Time affords us, as few Hollywood movies do anymore, are performances that rely on sustained craft and emotion, an ability to mesmerize the camera and justify why it isn’t cutting away.

What's new here is a severe deficit of style, or even craftsmanship, both in the action sequences and what passes for human interludes.

For an animated feature, Scarlet is unusually ambitious: It’s a “Hamlet”-adjacent existential pacifist revenge parable. It contains lots of instances of its heroine stopping to wonder what everything means, which is another way of saying it’s ponderous and pretentious.

It’s a clever gesture, but also points out what’s ultimately wrong with director Dan Friedkin’s postwar thriller: It knows a lot about art history and presumes we know nothing.

You can consume only so much gooey romanticism before someone gets seasick, and it’s precisely the soggy love story at the center of Adrift — a survival-at-sea adventure directed by the estimable Icelandic director Baltasar Kormákur — that prevents this storm-tossed vehicle from achieving maximum upthrust.

For all its various failures, Fever Pitch taps expertly into our nostalgia for an era when baseball really was the American pastime, unsullied by money, drugs or celebrity.

I found the film borderline bleak, and borderline predictable, at least in its resolution, yet admirable as well. Winter Passing almost always operates on the right side of the border, the full-of-life side where compelling characters live with urgency and intensity.

Tag ends up being good fun, with an unexpectedly sweet spirit that stays with you. It’s really about the persistence of friendship, a vision of adult life as the playground we would love it to be.

A Knight's Tale wasn't made for people like me. It was made for the kids of summer.

A hoot, or at least a collection of delightful hootlets hung on a short, frayed line.

It's ended up a weak imitation of the original. [09 Aug 1990]

The filmmakers aren't out to make a crisp action fantasy like the vigilante movies of the 1970s. Their disaffected man has no specific enemy or at least not one that he acknowledges; modern life is his enemy. This realization hits him one day and he begins to act on it, spontaneously. He's an existential vigilante. [25 Feb 1993, p.A12]

Nonnas is directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”; the film version of “Dear Evan Hansen”) with undistilled sincerity and dollops of goo. But Mr. Vaughn’s Joe Scaravella, who seems to hew quite closely to the story’s real-life restaurateur, is free of Vaughn-ish smirk. He approaches pathos.

The movie is grimly efficient on its own terms, a string of ever more naked calculations. But it looks like a business school opened up and all the marketing grads were allowed to start their own studio.

Earnest, mostly predictable and candidly didactic. That said, I'm glad it got made -- what's wrong with films that teach? -- and especially glad that a remarkably gifted newcomer named Nicole Beharie got to play the central role.

For the most part Mr. Maher is an equal-opportunity denigrator, but it's worth noting that humor fails him when the subject is Muslim fundamentalism. It's hard to make light of what frightens us.

There’s a weariness to West of the Jordan River, both in the storytelling and the face of Amos Gitai.

The big difference between Mr. Romero's film and Mr. Eisner's--which is so intelligent you fear the fanboys will scatter--is that Mr. Eisner never gives us the military's point of view. All we know is what David and Judy and Russell know, which for a long time isn't much. And The Crazies is all the scarier for it.

Adam succeeds at getting inside its hero's mind and, more impressively still, gives us entrée to his singular soul.

Though there's less to the film than seduces the eye, the allure of those surfaces can be hypnotic.

Doesn't measure up to the depth of detail, let alone the drama, of "Unzipped," the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi. Still, this new documentary conveys an ample sense of the process.

She is intensely, almost palpably, radiant. I call this star power, coupled with the intelligence and verve Ms. Pike always brings to her roles. She’s brilliant in this one, a plausible vision of a singular visionary in the history of science. If the film around her is unstable to the point of screwiness, it is not for lack of ambition.

For all the luster of its subject, though, this earnest biopic lacks the spark of life.

The narrative lacks a strong heartbeat; you keep wondering why the spectacle isn't as affecting as it is picturesque.

The setup is fun to explore. But after establishing it, the movie essentially gets stuck delivering variations on the idea of Mother splitting into two selves, the domestic and the feral.

Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

Most of the film, a debut feature directed by Christophe Barratier, is quite shamelessly formulaic. The Chorus redeems itself, though, with Mr. Jugnot's astute, understated performance.

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

Ms. Robbie, on the other hand, aces her role from the start; she’s got an unerring gift for romantic comedy. Still, the film itself comes to feel like a con, thanks to a script that’s too clever by two-thirds, and butterfingered in the ways of portraying love.

After the first bit of fish bait is consumed, actually even before, this one-trick movie is a tough slog.

Considering the gravity of the subject, and its immense potential, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is not just a letdown, but something more like an insult. The film will do less damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation than to those of Mr. Assayas, Mr. Law and Mr. Dano.

There's a jaunty score by Randy Newman, and Clooney, as always, has charm to burn, but here, he's off his game.

What’s increasingly bewildering and perversely curious is how unpleasant Spinster is, in almost every regard: The lighting is atrocious, the framing is erratic and Ms. Peretti’s comedy, which is generally about demolishing the banalities that constitute most human interaction, may well have the audience saying, “Well, of course Gaby’s alone. She’s intolerable.”

The visuals are kinetic, the pacing frenetic; the violence, or at least its aftermath, doesn’t just border on the excessive, it makes major incursions. But given the criminal milieu at hand, nothing less would have seemed plausible, or equal to the heightened, sordid sensibility Mr. Johnson creates in the film’s opening moments and maintains right up to an ending that is among the more perverse in recent memory.

Percy Vs Goliath has a solid sense of place—the Canadian prairie—and Mr. Walken gives us a solid sense of Percy, a man whose instincts are so contrarian he sometimes seems unsure whom to disagree with, or what to refuse to do.

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

Mr. Murray and his co-director, Howard Franklin, who adapted Jay Cronley's novel for the screen, succeed mainly in illuminating what made them want to direct the material. At least this picture struggles to emit a few gasps of fresh air as it goes down. [19 Jul 1990, p.A8]

Much of the fun is awfully silly. The story strains logic, as well as credulity. It's been cobbled together, often crudely, from pieces of classic predecessors. (Here snippets of Hitchcock, there stretches of "Speed," with wings on the bus.) Yet the silliness parades itself in a spirit of cheerful self-awareness, while Liam Neeson fills the thrill quotient impressively as an air marshal.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, Valkyrie becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson.

Mr. Nixey is doing an Alfred Hitchcock homage within a movie lacking anything as subversive, or skilled, as Hitchcock.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

Watching these two intensely likable comedians work together is a special pleasure.

This coming-of-age movie, is a clumsy contraption, but it's nice to see Rupert Grint coming out from under that colorful thatch, and coming, not a moment too soon, into an appealing pre-maturity.

The movie doesn't shed much light on their famously contentious marriage. Instead, it spreads gloom all around.

The drama is repetitive rather than resonant, an over-calculated, under-ventilated studio production -- even paranoid thrillers need to breathe -- whose plot machinery grinds grim and coarse.

What Minions does have is abundant if relentless cuteness, which audiences are sure to accept in lieu of content; people love these little guys.

Wall Street is a silly, pretentious melodrama that panders to the current fascination with insider trading. [10 Dec 1987, p.1]

War Machine, with a screenplay and direction by David Michod (of 2010’s ferocious “Animal Kingdom”), is a comedy because, as per the old Angela Carter line, it’s tragedy happening to other people. But it’s also a highly accessible examination of why the Afghanistan war couldn’t be won the way we—in the person of Gen. McChrystal—were fighting it.

All of the nonsense piled on nonsense does provide some measure of pleasure. Unknown gets better by getting worse.

Starts busily, and soon becomes a bafflement -- such an interesting cast, such technical excellence, so many intricate details and parallel plot threads, yet so little clarity or urgency.

It’s a return to dramatic accounts of blastoffs, followed by soul-filling footage from beyond our sheltering atmosphere and implacable gravity; a portrait, by reflected light from fiery boosters, of one of Earth’s most curious (in every respect) overachievers; and a testament to failing upward—far, far upward.

In its agreeably eccentric spirit, Tommy’s Honour evokes the Scottish comedies of Bill Forsyth; here it’s oddballs among the handmade, undimpled golf balls.

Either you buy their Vaseline-lensed visions of the hereafter, or you watch in stony silence, as I did, wondering why there's no one to care about.

Exceptionally likable and affecting as well as entertaining.

Like so many parties, this one goes on too long.

Provides a reminder of the power of unadorned drama and language -- whole torrents of eloquent words -- in the service of a nifty idea.

In fairness, the movie is good for more than a few laughs, but little substance lurks beneath the antic poses and frantic shenanigans in this remake of the classic 1955 English comedy.

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

Not even she (Patricia Clarkson), however, can save a movie that suffers from terminal self-enchantment.

Hiring France’s Louis Leterrier to direct was a bit like managing the pandemonium at a toddler’s birthday party by bringing in a soda machine.