Charming but slight comedy.

A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.

Yes, it's weird. But it's wild card weird, with that thrill of never knowing what's coming next or when these Parisians are going to get musical on us.

Birthright suggests that the loss of women’s bodily autonomy — via laws limiting access to abortion — is a human rights issue. But it raises the alarm in ways that are as unflashy as they are disturbing.

There are moments when Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris resembles the cinematic equivalent of nursery food: over-egged but soothing, and perhaps a much-needed respite from a world in danger of spinning off its axis.

On one hand, the movie is guilty of schematic arrangement...But at the same time, Israeli producer-director-writer Eran Riklis and Palestinian co-writer Suha Arraf use the device to reveal touching human complexity.

With its appealingly conflicted hero and generous sense of humor, Meet the Patels has the breezy touch of a scripted romantic comedy.

Just when you begin to think you know who the cat and mouse really are, in steps Viola Davis to steal not just her scene but the entire movie from Streep.

We’ve seen these poignant lessons before: Ove is destined to learn that he can’t do it all on his own and that life is still worth living. Yet the moving twists and turns of the love story and the bright comedy elevate an otherwise familiar story line.

Carrey is not only under control, but funnier than ever.

Noyce's direction moves impressively from sensual tenderness (between husband and wife) to edge-of-the-seat horror. he finds lurking dangers in quiet, peaceful waters and goes down with the good ship Dead Calm, his head held high. If you don't mind 11th-hour disappointments (including a laughable, Hollywood-kicker ending), you'll enjoy going down with it too.

Best Friends turns out to be exceptionally authentic and endearing--the most original and keenly observant romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood since the underrated All Night Long. [16 Dec 1982, p.C1]

Lighthearted and entertaining aren’t words often used to describe movies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the characterization fits Tel Aviv on Fire to a T.

Obviously, Priscilla is a one-note pleasure: Bitches in the Desert! Queens in the Sand! Nancy boys do the Outback!

While Soul Food aims to be the kind of hearty, satisfying story that sticks to your ribs, it comes across more like an appetizer or a midnight raid on the fridge. Tasty, but easily forgotten.

It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature. The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.

Even though we're caught up in his derring-do as he beguiles entire meeting rooms of jaded publishers and editors, we're kept at a dissatisfying distance from Irving and the movie.

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

The movie, set entirely on a beautifully lit soundstage filled with musicians, dancers, mirrors and projection screens, presents some of the country's most acclaimed fadoistas, singing tributes to the art form and some of its greatest legends.

There is something disturbing about yet another iteration of what's become one of the movies' creepiest conventions, in which the developmentally disabled are portrayed with almost supernatural powers to humble, teach and ultimately redeem their mentally "superior" (read: morally inferior) friends, family and acquaintances.

A lucid, emotionally affecting portrait not just of one man but of his times.

Lethal Weapon, that BMW of buddy movies, spawns Lethal Weapon 2, a blacktop-blistering bad-guy-getter that's nearly twice as much fun.

Her approach to the material is fresh, considering her focus on the messy, muddy landscape as a metaphor for the story's unbridled relationships. But with so much attention paid to mood and imagery, emotions seem to get lost in the wind.

Only Human, a Spanish farce, has absolutely no business being as laugh-out-loud funny as it often is.

Lamarr had been blessed — or, perhaps more appropriately, cursed — with leading an interesting life, and Dean’s film seems both too conventional and too shallow for its subject, who seems as hard to pigeonhole, at times, as to understand.

It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.

When Merchants of Doubt isn’t making you mad, it makes you very simply, and overwhelmingly, sad.

There’s no denying the humor and pathos of The Lady in the Van, just as there’s no use fending off the force of nature that is Smith.

Smarter and more poignant than the average chick flick.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

Late Night turns out to be an enormously pleasing fable about liberating oneself from the need to please. Like all comedians worth their salt, Kaling sets out to kill — but with kindness.

Ridley Scott has made a triumphant directing debut by creating a film that looks beautiful but never loses sight of the capacity for animosity and conflict lurking in the human psyche. [08 Mar 1978, p.D1]

Director Ron Underwood of the big-worm thriller "Tremors" effectively contrasts the bland life of the big city with the rough-hewn joys of the Big Country. And the three leads -- neurotic, brash and bonding like flies to No Pest strips -- give energetic if obvious performances. The whole dang thing is rather too blatant, but if you take your comedy with a little branch water, you'll want a shot of this 'un.

Amateurishly acted, clumsily edited and slapped together out of what looks like surveillance camera footage, the thing bumps along not so much on talent as on audacity.

With its droll underpinnings, Robocop does for cyborgs and Detroit what "Blade Runner" did for androids and L.A.

This jokey horror movie, adapted in part from King's short stories, is composed of three brief tales, the perfect form for him. Instead of having to create characters and a story, King simply has to come up with a gimmick and a punch line -- and on to the next.

The ensemble cast, reunited from the 2018 production, is never less than mesmerizing, even in the context of what is essentially a museum piece.

It's the Hardy Boys as id busters, an entertaining though mightily flawed scalp-tingler with a few too many magic moments: shooting stars and star-splashed skies and glittery ectoplasmic motes and ghosts that fly on strings.

Unfortunately the cast members are made into symbols themselves, bereft of blood and emotion, under the direction of the great John Huston. It's like a death pageant, grueling and dismal and distant...It is a dreary process at best. And this film is a tedious and time-consuming study of decay and lost values, lost souls and lost empires. [13 July 1984, p.17]

When Layne and Theron are together, The Old Guard transcends its pulp provenance to become a soulful, emotionally grounded portrait of female mentorship and mutual respect.

Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite.

What turns out to be the most moving and meaningful thing about the film isn’t the song at its center, but the work ethic of a man who might have disappeared from the public eye for years at a time but never stopped sweating every word.

Belongs, wholly and completely, to Clarkson, who delivers Joy's mordant asides and withering observations with a flawless balance of tartness and vulnerability.

Suddenly, you're looking at life in his (Thornton's) jaundiced way and laughing with a sense of vicarious liberation, even when he says the most outrageous things -- to children, no less. And I daresay you can still recover your holiday spirit when you're through laughing.

One needn't have a Stratocaster moldering in the closet at home to get a kick out of It Might Get Loud.

Places in the Heart grapples with great and important themes -- sexism, racism, grief, despair -- and in aiming high it achieves much. Not quite as much, perhaps, as its primary creator, Robert Benton, might have hoped for, but enough to make it a distinguished film that is both moving and provocative. [21 Sep 1984, p.C1]

As untidy and un-profound as “Color” may be, Stanley swings for the fences, when almost any other director-in-exile would have tried to get back in Hollywood’s good graces with an act of penance. Score one for the eccentrics of the world.

Its hackneyed themes prevent the sci-fi flick from feeling like anything more than well-directed mediocrity.

An enormously enjoyable gothic yarn from Mexico, transfuses the genre with wry grotesquerie, but retains respect for the old, classic films.

There's a visceral, albeit somewhat goofy, satisfaction to this stuff.

The film’s on-the nose allusions to Twain ultimately contribute to a sense of derivation, undermining the originality of the material and preventing “Falcon” from graduating from good to great.

It's an exhaustive, and exhilarating, document of an overwhelming lifestyle.

Nothing about this film feels remotely safe. Unlike the “Fifty Shades” series, Double Lover has little interest in romance, instead considering the psychological impulses that inform it.

Billed as a spoken-word musical, but only occasionally utilizing the visual idioms of song and/or dance — and only rarely harnessing the two together — the film is nevertheless an exuberant hodgepodge of everyday joy and frustration (and the occasional mild trauma).

Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

There is a difference between the importance of a film's subject and the quality of a film's execution. And the execution is lacking. The film just isn't, well, very interesting.

East Side Sushi includes a number of moments that are a little too on-the-nose in their eagerness to convey the obstacles.... But Lucero compensates for such missteps with subtly persuasive visual choices and narrative restraint.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.

Like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton before him, Helms plays a lamb trotting hopefully through the abattoir, blessedly unaware of the blades hanging just above his head.

Like Sergio’s unusual modus operandi, Radical takes some time to click, its first half as unstructured as Sergio’s classroom. But at about the halfway point, when the kids discover the excitement of learning, it becomes as thrilling as any blockbuster.

What is often surprising in this entertaining and fluidly acted portrait of females in flux is the specific way things get messy.

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes.

A funny and touching coming-of-age story.

The movie alternates between cornball and ridiculous, and the frequent violence is extremely bloody if stylized. Love it or hate it, and I'm not sure which applies to me, you've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

A gently stirring symphony about emotional transition filled with lovely musical passages and softly nuanced performances.

Somehow, for all the work that went into the film, it comes across as something that may have worked better as an audiobook.

Kicks is gritty to the core, and its commitment to verisimilitude is its undoing. All of the characters are selfish, and their sense of loyalty is purely circumstantial.

Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.

It's tremendous fun. The movie -- directed by Rob Cohen -- switches pleasingly from exciting fights to moments of magic playfulness. It's doubly touching to experience Bruce Lee's fleeting life and, in the brief depictions of little son Brandon, to fatefully anticipate the tragedy to come.

Epitomizes the kind of somber, aesthetically refined and morally engaged film that commands deep respect without inspiring much affection.

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

The Batblast of the summer.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it’s worth the ride.

For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, Bad Lieutenant scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.

From the story itself to the way it's told, Unstoppable is a hymn to stylish, unpretentious competence.

The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.

The story is slightly melodramatic, but director Paddy Breathnach finds ways to make it surprisingly moving at times, in the same way that he makes the Havana slums look paradoxically beautiful.

Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.

Some of it is funny in a Zucker brothers slapstick way. And as the Man's geeky lieutenant, Chris Kattan has some amusingly kooky business. But there's not enough to sustain the comedy. Ultimately, the movie's short running time becomes its finest quality.

Deliriously beautiful movie.

Portman, a vegan, is the main tour guide to this challenging excursion to the world of slaughterhouses and CAFOs, which one commentator likens to petri dishes for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

At a time when the action genre has come to be dominated by sleek, matte surfaces and set-'em-and-forget-'em computerized effects, Live Free or Die Hard seeks to remind viewers of the simple, nostalgic pleasures of watching stuff get blown up and bad guys get smoked.

Palo Alto starts strong but runs out of momentum. Strangely, as aimless vignettes give way to bigger life events.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

As is, this generally excellent portrait does much to fill the void, restoring an unfortunately forgotten figure to her rightful place among broadcasting's trailblazers.

Body Double twists and turns miserably between the comic and the macabre; it's definitely not dressed to kill.

Diverting, polished chase thriller. [28 Sep 1979, p.E1]

Lion is a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its tonally disparate halves. A smartly understated approach to Brierley’s story holds it all together. Sometimes the truth alone is enough.

It's delicious and ensnaring and easy on the eyes, but it can't give you the definitive truth about notoriously frosty Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The film doesn’t always dig deeply, glossing over why certain trends have emerged. And some of the interviews don’t add much to the movie beyond star power. Fresh Dressed nevertheless offers an original and worthwhile look at the history of hip-hop style. And the soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.