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.