Sweet without being saccharine, sad without being maudlin and funny without being forced.

Yentl is Streisand. Either you like her or you don't. And if a little Streisand means a lot, then a lot is what you've got. [09 Dec 1983, p.25]

Nothing much happens here, and even less is resolved. You could make an argument that that's how life is, unresolved, but as a film, it makes for frustrating viewing, particularly when plot threads with the potential to bust open the story are left hanging.

Enola Holmes offers brisk and exuberant escape from the heaviness of modern times, with its leading actress lending her own appealing touches to the journey. When the game is afoot, she's more than capable, not just of keeping up, but winning the day.

In some ways, My Friend Dahmer is a typical coming-of-age movie about an awkward teen. What distinguishes this particular case of adolescent angst is that it’s the true story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Adler nicely harnesses the mounting volatility of this situation, which builds to an intense if tragic conclusion.

A Quiet Place: Day One, the startlingly effective prequel to the 2018 blockbuster about noise-sensitive aliens that devour anyone who’s ever annoyed a librarian, hits Manhattan with a bang, a nasty body count and a fair amount of audience suspicion.

The movie, however, is Pesci's. In that courtroom, he gets on a roll and stays rolling until the end. There's no one better with that New York-New Jersey corridor accent.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

These unfortunate innovations aside, the film, directed by Ivan Reitman, has moments when the old army joke is done well. Reason against discipline is always funny -- hero to sergeant: "I know I'm speaking for the entire platoon when I say that the run should be postponed until the platoon is better rested" -- but the kicker, that there really is a reason for the discipline, is necessary to the premise. [26 June 1981, p.17]

Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as the secret MI6 superagent James Bond is also a fittingly complicated and ultimately perversely satisfying send-off for the actor, whose character as the film gets underway isn’t even Agent 007 any more, but a retiree (as Craig is about to become, from this franchise).

The words - taken directly from the book - are beautifully cast, but they encapsulate the emotions too conveniently.

As a celebration of ephemera, the movie is a mixed bag, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome.

As lectures go, this may be the most fun one yet.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

The Double retains all of Dostoevsky’s central themes. Madness, alienation and the loss of identity swirl around the film’s edges like film-noir fog. At the same time, the filmmakers inject a much-needed dose of dark humor into the tale.

Well supplied with both raunchy humor and star appeal, particularly in the person of Burt Reynolds, the film seems certain to become a crowd-pleaser.

The film’s steady accumulation of little quirks... soon grow tedious. After a while they’re less delightfully oddball touches with a promise of more to come than dead weight with no payoff.

The most attractive and persuasive movie about ballet performers ever created for a mass audience.

As an example of the filmmaker’s house style — which she calls “Afrobubblegum” — Rafiki presents a radiant, vivacious portrait of young love that owes as much to “Romeo and Juliet” as “Bend It Like Beckham” and “Moonlight.”

The film's unforgettable stars are the beauty academy's students, women who have survived tribal warfare, Soviet invasion, Muslim tyranny, American bombs, patriarchal families and even Western good intentions with extraordinary grace and fortitude.

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.

In the judicious hands of director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton, it feels not new exactly, but fresh and urgent and more timely than ever.

So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.

What is their passion for? Not newspapers, or even a single newspaper, per se, but for journalism itself, the practice of which is nowhere stronger than at the Times. That, at least, is how Page One argues it. It's a compelling argument.

A gorgeously drawn myth made for plucky children and very brave mice.

Lethal Weapon opens with a shot of Mel Gibson in his birthday suit and just gets better. Likewise we meet costar Danny Glover in the bathtub, fêted by his family on his 50th birthday. This endearing double exposure introduces us to the vulnerabilities of these superduper heroes, an odd couple of cops who mature into friends as they quell crime.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

A smooth and agreeable entertainment, Hero is easy to enjoy while you're watching it. But ultimately it adds up to far less than you hope for at the outset. [3 Apr 1982, p.C1]

It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

As touching as Hayek’s performance is, Beatriz at Dinner too often forsakes nuance for caricature.

Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

While not significantly better or worse than the predecessor, a rather astounding object of devotion for a movie studio--an enormously expensive recreation of a moribund TV series--this sequel is perfectly presentable and harmless, a klunker as comfortable as your easy chair. [4 June 1982, p.D1]

Revenge was supposed to be the one that really socked it to us, about Anakin's almost biblical fall from grace. But the movie never rises to its powerful occasion.

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.

The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.

It is as polished as it is heavy-handed, and it leaves one under a spell.

It’s a languorous look at the ups and downs of a career gone awry, and the mysteries and confused culinary disciples left in the wake of the chef’s abrupt disappearance to Mexico for several years.

The job is not to convince us of something many Americans don’t want to believe, but to address something we all know is happening and nail down just how bad it really is. Judging from the pit left in a viewer’s stomach, it does the job pretty well.

These ghost stories, if that’s what they are, aren’t terribly original, or even especially scary — at least, not by the standards of the genre.

The first 60 minutes of this black comedy are brilliantly sustained, but then director and co-writer de la Iglesia loses his way.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

Kristin Scott Thomas delivers an unnervingly smooth performance as Auteuil's suspicious wife.

A killer concert film, an ecstatic testament to the joys of fandom and a tribute to the democratizing potential of moviemaking technology.

It is, as with any cinematic joy ride, not the destination that matters, but the rush of getting there.

The cast, all classically trained on the stage, is simply commanding.

Never Say Never Again illustrates how much sheer entertainment value can accrue when seasoned, disciplined filmmakers are encouraged to use their accumulated experience and design a classy piece of escapism to the best of their abilities.

The title of Never Look Away is deliciously ironic: This is one of the most mesmerizing, compulsively watchable films in theaters right now.

The suspense and technical wizardry are the only reason to watch Jurassic Park. In a summer movie, that's more than enough, of course. But screenwriter Michael Crichton, adapting his popular novel with David Koepp, slashes almost everything that made the book an entertaining read.

A shaggy, baggy collegiate comedy that is less a coherent movie than a loosely assembled series of lewd jokes and punishing slapstick routines.

This is documentary-making at its best, not pretending to be journalism, but still playing a crucial role in telling stories that otherwise wouldn't make the front page.

Director Michael Winterbottom languidly unspools the story; nothing seems to lead to anything.

I suppose it's also less than inspired to portray a ballet company where the codpieces of the male dancers bulge out so far that the ballerina can cover the width of the stage using them as steppingstones. Nevertheless, some dumb, obvious gags have a way of working by impudently flaunting their dumbness and obviousness, and this appears to be a textbook example. In fact, for the juvenile public that should supply its best audience, Top Secret! may serve as a veritable primer of irresistibly terrible wheezes.

Viewers may not agree about what they’ve seen when they come out of Noah. But there’s no doubt that Aronofsky has made an ambitious, serious, even visionary motion picture, whose super-sized popcorn-movie vernacular may occasionally submerge the story’s more reflective implications, but never drowns them entirely.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, Crimes of the Future is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out.

If this all sounds too insufferable and in-jokey, fear not: Gormican, with the help of his fabulously game ensemble cast, keeps the balloon afloat with a light touch, crisp pacing and an overarching mood that’s more goofily endearing than smugly self-amused.

As gratifying as it is that Johansson has finally gotten the movie her character has long deserved — not to mention a worthy and equally watchable foil in Pugh — “Black Widow” simultaneously feels like too much and too little. Do svidaniya, Natasha — we hardly knew ye.

Arriving on the nastier heels of the horror comedy "Jennifer's Body," Whip It plays like that movie's more wholesome twin, delivering the same jolt of anarchic guerrilla-girl empowerment, only with a far less threatening disposition.

Dick Tracy is an ambitiously vainglorious effort, expensive, beautifully appointed, but at its core empty as a spent bullet. It asks us to read these comics without a grain of salt or a pinch of irony.

The acting is strong, with Robbie and Ejiofor turning in performances that feel powerfully authentic, even in moments of ethical confusion. Maybe especially in moments of ethical confusion.

The music is electric on Beat Street, a good-natured, emotional movie, where morals are as sound as they were in the mom's-in-the-kitchen, dad's-in-insurance sitcoms of the '50s and '60s.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

It’s not an especially profound story. But it is a movingly rendered one, made watchable by an actress whose elastic performance bookends the film with two very different people.

As a movie concept, Dragonslayer seems to have so much going for it that it could scarcely miss. Yet it does miss in crucial respects. [27 June 1981, p.C1]

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

Thomas keeps things at a simmer for the longest time, forestalling the story’s ultimate boil-over until the final minute or so of the tale.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

John Schlesinger, who also directed Midnight Cowboy and The Marathon Man, tries to combine the best of both earlier films by marrying male bonding and spy thrills. But his work is uninspired here, sheepish, and loaded down with obtrusive, overworked symbolism. [25 Jan 1985, p.21]

In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

The movie still holds power, mostly thanks to Leuenberger’s arresting, self-contained performance as Nora. She plays the character as an enigma, the last person you’d expect to lead a cause.

Storywise, Moon fails to live up to the promise of its premise. There's plenty of atmosphere, but little gravity.

The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo Garcia’s thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.

I wouldn’t call Band Aid profound, but it’s wiser and deeper than the average pop song, if not by much.

A refreshingly tender treatment of love gone wrong -- we mean, for a movie that's got enough lowdown sexual content to start its own Kinsey Report.

Gets by on quirky charm and slacker chic-but just barely.

The documentary is unwieldy, unfocused and frustrating at times... But the movie is also, somehow, dazzling.

Riveting and darkly comedic, the film nimbly conveys the tragedies of buying into the American Dream.

Even within the confines of its generic plot and sometimes stilted dialogue, Concrete Cowboy winds up being an engaging and moving family drama. Its sincerity, accomplished cast and proud Philadelphia roots manage to keep it real.

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Despite the foibles that have affected his films, the dramatic image has always been important to Green, who has developed quite a cult following and deserves it.

If there's any moral to this sorry story, perhaps Lee's stealth-message is it: Even when it's not about race, it is.

Artful yet agonizingly unhurried at times.

The framing may use the tropes of horror, but the film’s light tone — with jump scares more often used for comedic effect — defuses the tension required to make viewers feel on the verge of snapping.

It feels studiously surrealistic, an excuse for cinematic buggery; deep in its center there's a lack of conviction.

A murky stew of sin, vengeance and expiation boils up and over in Dig Two Graves, a flawed but gripping horror-thriller, handsomely wrought on a slim budget by filmmaker Hunter Adams.

The movie has an engaging surface, but it's all surface -- it's like watching an outsize TV.

All of the actors are pitch-perfect.

Like President Kennedy, director Donaldson (who made "No Way Out," another pretty good Washington-seat-of-power thriller) has found a perfect balance of often-opposing forces: between recorded history and the demands of plain old entertainment.

You probably never dreamed a charming romantic movie could be staged against a backdrop of Scud attacks from Saddam Hussein.

There's something rather lovely about the mood and intentions of Michel Deville's French movie.

Interiors imposes a portentous formality that seems deliberately starved of sensuous appeal. It's obvious that Allen has serious intentions, but they're expressed in bloodless, superficial, derivative ways. [29 Sept 1978, p.D1]