As a form of life-coaching, this documentary is, in fact, kind of a dud.

Somber and serious-minded, the live-action Mulan is a movie that has grown up alongside its original audience, which is presumably old enough to crave something heavier in its entertainment diet. Little girls might be better off sticking with the cartoon for now; but this opulent, ambitious production and Liu’s focused, intrepid performance at its center, gives them something to grow into.

Moonraker, the newest James Bond spectacle, is a cheerful, splashy entertainment. The curators of the Bond museum do not surpass themselves with this exhibition, the 11th in the series, but they haven't fallen down on the job either. Moonraker is a satisfying blend of familiar ingredients, from the highly polished to the barely adequate. [29 June 1979, p.C1]

Anderson is radiant playing this daffy optimist who rambles in breathy clips about past glories, as if the world around her hasn’t moved on since the days of Siegfried & Roy.

Roman Polanski's Frantic is taut, intelligent filmmaking, and highly accomplished in a way that doesn't substitute flash for coherence or the pleasures of a well-told story. In other words, it's everything that Lethal Weapon and a half dozen other recent Hollywood thrillers weren't. [26 Feb 1988, p.B1]

It delivers the most entertaining "Fast and Furious" adventure while also getting 2011's summer movie season off on the right lead foot.

Sasquatch Sunset is a goofball curio touched with genuine sadness. It’s “The Cherry Orchard” of cryptozoology.

This is dangerous, dissonant material, but writer/director David O. Russell, making his feature filmmaking debut, somehow pulls it off.

The film also begins to feel like a case of a director getting to revel in the very thing he's reviling.

In the end, Bumblebee is less a movie about giant robot aliens punching each other than it is a story about friendship.

Rather than sparkle and dance, it plods.

The movie never transcended its elaborate production work to achieve an independent reality.

There’s an appealing quaintness to the storytelling that calls to mind the Tintin books of the artist and writer Hergé, especially that series’s old-world charm.

This solo project by first-time producer/director Edward James Olmos makes itself out to be hard-hitting, social commentary. But it's too longwinded and cliched to deserve that description. [13 Mar 1992, p. N47]

The most coherent thing about the new action thriller Blue Thunder is its eagerness to succeed and its rabble-rousing spectacle of stunt flying and aerial combat. Blue Thunder, a chase melodrama with police helicopter pilots as the good guys, transposes the salty tone of The French Connection and Dirty Harry to a chopper squadron in Los Angeles. [13 May 1983, p.B1]

This movie is rarely more than merely competent, but it should stir lovers of justice as well as dog fanciers.

Like a seductively lambent hall of mirrors, The Bling Ring lays bare the venality of train-wreck celebrity culture, striving and self-deception by dramatizing a fact that’s as delicious as it is depressing.

In the taut, emotionally gripping documentary Dinosaur 13, filmmaker Todd Douglas Miller meticulously re-creates seven eventful, tense and finally heartbreaking years.

This may be the world’s first movie micro-targeted to several thousand of the people who live and/or work in Washington, and no one else.

The movie is so shabbily written (by Dennis Hackin) and unevenly directed (by Eastwood himself) that the traditional obstacles to romantic comedy consummation are overwhelmed by superfluous complications and imprecise calculations.

Delightfully melodious, high-spirited and nonsensical, the movie version of The Pirates of Penzance can be recommended with only trifling reservations. [25 Feb 1983, p.D1]

Provost’s film is, in the end, a story about attaining the wisdom that comes from forgiveness and the acceptance of those things — namely the past and the future — that none of us can control.

Unfortunately, Lumet isn't the brawny social commentator he would like to be -- he's a Jimmy Breslin manque'. His script chronicles a complex, gargantuan evil, but his insights into urban life haven't progressed beyond those of his earlier films -- the chaos of conflicting interests and cultural hatred is one that by now we're more than familiar with -- and his storytelling style isn't compelling or tightly focused enough to keep our attention from flagging.

The Trigger Effect feels half-cocked, undermined by its apparently very low budget and Koepp's flaccid directing.

With composure so out of fashion these days in the public square, Steven Soderbergh's adamantly restrained The Informant! arrives like a cleansing tonic.

The film by the stylish fantasist Guillermo del Toro looks marvelous, but has a vein of narrative muck at its core.

Cyrano, like the best art its implacable hero celebrates, is full of poetry, romance, terror and truth.

Roald Dahl’s beloved ad­ven­ture tale about a brave little girl who befriends the titular Big Friendly Giant, finds Steven Spielberg in his natural element of childlike enchantment, yet also strangely out of step, his trusted sense of narrative propulsion and pacing occasionally failing him in a saggy, draggy second act.

Still, the movie has a kind of optimism that is reflected in the new generation of English thespians in its young cast: Imrie is the son of actress Celia Imrie, and Serkis is the son of actor and filmmaker Andy Serkis.

Never quite breaks out of its talky inertia.

This is the rare American film really about something, and almost all the performances are riveting.

For all of the virtuosity of Redmayne and Vikander’s performances, and for all its sensitivity and aesthetic appeal, The Danish Girl is content simply to present the ambiguities and contradictions of Lili and Gerda’s story, rather than delve into their gnarlier corners.

Like a real-life game night, the comedy may not leave a lasting impression, but it’s plenty of fun while it lasts.

Don Jon is a disarming film that proves Gordon-Levitt’s deftness both behind the camera and in front of a computer screen, writing.

While this sort of thing may have worked in the '30s, by today's standards it's half-baked.

The movie lacks a sure sense of purpose and direction, and, watching it, you can't help but feel that Hopper, by stepping back and refusing to assert his own point of view, has on some essential level abdicated his responsibility as a director. [15 Apr 1988]

Although almost nothing about The Eye is surprising, the movie is nevertheless engrossing, as it mutates from horror movie to ghost story to psychological drama to disaster flick (a late, stunning twist). It casts a spell strong enough that viewers won't want to look away.

Fairly fascinating little documentary.

You seldom leave a theater walking on air, much less float all through a movie. But the joyous Bend It Like Beckham never lets you down.

Bale and Jackman inject their reliable charisma into two otherwise very cold fish. Okay, I'll say it: If you see only one magic-at-the-turn-of-the-century movie this year, make it this one.

Like the best ad man, he makes his point by making us laugh.

The result is a relatively straightforward slice-of-life biopic, bogged down with flashbacks and backstage histrionics, that nonetheless offers an utterly transfixing glimpse at the art of screen performance writ gloriously, glamorously large.

IQ, the new romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and Tim Robbins, is disarming piffle—frothy, sweet and nearly irresistible.

Writer Rupert Walters's episodic narrative is decidedly corny—especially the later chapters—and yes, it's as creaky as old bones. But its weaknesses are offset by the film's elaborate re-creation of plague-ridden London.

Here, Willy's pure spun sugar, with none of the complex ingredients that make a movie soar: relatability, humanity, foibles.

The Judge presents a rare Western view of the Middle East that doesn’t frame Palestinians’ lives in reference to Israel, which is barely mentioned. It also offers a robust counternarrative to stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women as powerless.

Truth would have been more compelling with less sanctimony and tougher self-examination.

Disorder is, in other words, more of a technical achievement than an artistic one. The movie is at its best when it recreates what it must feel like to be in a constant state of paranoia and pain. If only that feeling were accompanied by one or two other emotions.

Family Law never really gets to the nitty-gritty of the Perelmans' fraught relationship, instead maintaining a gently ironic distance that, while admirable in its restraint, ultimately lacks emotional fire.

Even with its collapse, Parents is remarkably accomplished for a first outing. It's good enough to make you wish desperately that it had hung together.

What line is thinner than the one between confession and narcissism? Upon that line, exactly, does Elegy dwell, before tumbling off on the bad side.

Any moviegoers possessed of funny bones will laugh their fool heads off at Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.

Ewing and Grady insert vignettes featuring a young actor playing Lear as a 9-year-old, wandering an empty theater and trying on his analog’s signature white hat. The conceit might have sounded artful on paper, but it doesn’t work on film.

Ultimately, The Hip Hop Project is all raggedy rhythm and long-winded discourse, a tuneless song in search of a hook.

Obliged to go from lost soul to demigod, Sewell's performance is as fascinating as Proyas's mystical vision.

Landline offers viewers a rueful glimpse of a vanished time and place. Along the way, it’s often unexpectedly and guffawingly funny.

Stardust has it all: sweetness, magic, lusty wenches, evil witches, tankards of mead, a gay pirate.

Comedy, of course, is a complicated dance between rhythm and timing, but Talladega Nights drags where it should be crackling and popping.

The unexpected drama captured puts I Am Trying to Break Your Heart in the good company, if not quite the league, of "Let It Be" and "Gimme Shelter."

Well acted, moodily shot and tautly written, this Tattoo may feel like you've seen some of it (or its ilk) before. Still, its haunting images get under the skin, leaving an indelible impression.

Feels like a hazy high that takes too long to shake.

Short but emotionally effective movie.

Against all odds and prejudices, Cheech and Chong seem to get better and better. Their new film is a vulgar, zany kick. Cheech and Chong's Next Movie decisively confirms the flair for movie comedy that the pair demonstrated so disarmingly in "Up in Smoke." Objectionable as their raunchy sense of humor and simple-minded, potheaded characters may be from a socially responsible standpoint, Cheech and Chong transcend the objections. [19 July 1980, p.B1]

There’s very little to say about The Road Movie. That’s because there’s very little to The Road Movie.

Malle's most forcefull dramatic element is the feeling of rivalry and resentment that exists between mother and child without the characters being conscious of it. The script is eloquently supplied with scenes illustration this fundamental conflict and bond. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

Rolling Thunder certainly has enough to recommend it to Walking Tall fans with strong stomachs. But moviegoers yearning for a sensitive attempt to graft the nation's most recent scar tissue onto the screen will have to wait. [04 Nov 1977, p.11]

The plot - obviously derived from Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" - has the customary quantum of Disney cuteness as the story unravels predictably...But it takes advantage of the situation for some funny lines. [11 Aug 1979, p.B4]

When Dandelion is wholly inside her music — performing or composing or even idly picking out melodies while sitting beneath a city bridge — she carries her own magic hour inside her, and the refusal of the rest of the world to see it is what’s wearing her down. “Dandelion” is the story of how she gets her groove back, and only the star’s gift of presence keeps it from floating off on the breeze.

Like the bad fight that ends the bad marriage: ugly, messy, loud, sometimes incoherent, but ultimately necessary. You're glad when either of them -- the marriage or the movie -- is over.

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

The movie is shot as if Bigelow wanted to take her audience to the very edge of sensory overload. Her pulsing, super-psychedelic images are edgy and invasive. They burn as they hit your retina. After a while, however, Bigelow's careening camera, the heavy-metal music and the flash cutting begin to make you feel hammered and abused. Though the movie is jammed with plot, nothing seems to happen. [13 Oct 1995, p.F01]

What makes Nanette Burstein's movie so powerful is its uncanny sense of familiarity.

About halfway through, the overwhelming fact that the movie is a complete nothing becomes too much to ignore.

The joke seems to be that in 2013, it’s hard to teach an old bloodsucker new tricks. Still, Byzantium has a few moves that might surprise you. They have nothing to do with blood, but everything to do with the heart.

The Dark Crystal leaves no doubt that Jim Henson and his colleagues have reached a point where they can create and sustain a powerfully enchanting form of cinematic fantasy. [21 Dec 1982, p.C1]

The performers understand the simple integrity of a slapstick gag, and they're prepared to suffer for its entertainment value. This is what the Jackassers do for fun -- and their fans, already well versed in such previous shows as the original MTV series and the 2002 "Jackass: The Movie," understand that perfectly. And is there any significant moral difference between these performers and dedicated ballerinas who damage their feet in the highfalutin interests of art, or Daytona drivers risking their lives on the track?

Talk Radio, despite its collective intensity, is itself just another unenlightening late-night call-in session.

Watching Kidman, Leigh and -- in his nutty, damn-the-torpedoes way -- Black as they torment, confound and torture one another amounts to a vicarious thrill ride in human behavior.

Most egregiously, the filmmakers set up a classic struggle between right and wrong and then, in a coy coda, refuse to take a stand.

The fate of these birds, which, the film tells us, could live into their 40s, becomes as engrossing as many a human drama.

This internal struggle transforms “Roofman” from what could have been a run-of-the-mill heist movie into an intriguing character study, even if it falls just short of success.

The most compelling thing about Winter in Wartime, the Netherlands' official entry for Best Foreign Language Film at this year's Oscars, is not the story. And the story is pretty darn compelling.

But the movie has a great deal of zest and charm, and Yakusho gets so exactly that crest of melancholy that is a man’s early 40s, until he decides to go for another kind of life, that the movie is infinitely touching.

Deftly mixes irony, self-reference and wry social commentary with chills and blood spills.

As a fairly soggy, two-hankie melodrama, “Swan Song” is effective. But I wouldn’t recommend thinking about it for too long.

Obliquely but evocatively, “Desperate Souls” ponders the many roles of the cowboy: gay icon, cinematic hero and symbol of American manifest destiny from the Rockies to the Mekong. Yet the documentary acknowledges that neither Schlesinger’s film nor its era could change everything.

Sensual, funny and, in the end, very touching.

Kick-Ass should delight fans of the original comics and garden-variety action junkies as well. Suggested subtitle: "Iron Man, You Just Got Served."

[Abel Ferrara's] specialty is a kind of hallucinatory tawdriness, and here, he's made a hepped-up film about drugs that plays as if the filmmakers themselves kept a healthy supply of the stuff at hand.

The events of the movie are filament-thin and insubstantial but, like fine silk threads, they weave together a fabric of surpassing warmth and texture. [25 Sep 1998, Pg.N.63]

Smart, funny, well-acted and visually lively.

If Tucker's road map often feels a little too confining and the screwball comedy too contrived, he can take credit for introducing viewers to a character they have almost certainly never met before.

A raunchy and frequently hilarious follow-up to the gifted Korean American stand-up's "I'm the One That I Want."

The rhythms excite expectations that go unanswered.

McGregor, the movie's most engaging performer, is convincing enough to sell the mutual attraction. The "Trainspotting" star is usually playing some kind of freak, and this is a nice stretch for him.

Directed by Jonathan Demme, and starring Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, this AIDS courtroom drama is so pumped full of nitrous oxide, you could get your teeth drilled on it.

Lane's comic bits are sodden, and as a result, the film is listless and fatiguing.

As a feel-good fact-based fable of financial comeuppance, Dumb Money is funny enough. But as its name suggests, it isn’t especially smart. Unlike its protagonists, it isn’t interested in making a quick buck, just an easy laugh.