Shot through with a bold, extravagant generosity of spirit, this journey behind the literal and figurative looking glass marks a gratifying return to form for Gilliam.

A bit of advice: Get to "The Naked Gun 2½" on time and plan to stay till they turn the lights back on. The opening and closing credits alone are almost worth the price of admission.

Although the film starts out with well-mounted menace, Arlington Road becomes increasingly overwrought and predictable.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

It’s a compelling, even stirring, tale.

Unexpected would have been enriched by a more generous balance between the two characters’ worlds. But Swanberg shows a sure, sensitive hand in limning the upshots and downsides of life’s most blessed events.

A soaring, sympathetic ode to the outlaws, subversives and insurgents who occupy the edges of popular culture, making them safe for everyone else's dreams.

Overall, the movie presents a worthy and historical look at the link between genius and mental illness.

The debut feature from British studio Locksmith Animation, Ron’s Gone Wrong has plenty of slapstick and potty humor for kids. But adults will also be intrigued by its frequently scathing (albeit somewhat conflicted) critique of consumerism.

[An] aimless but oddly charismatic film.

At one moment, Marilyn turns to Colin and asks, "Shall I be her?" And, instantly, she is - effortlessly bewitching a crowd with movie-queen poses. If only the movie could turn it on so reliably, My Week with Marilyn might be profound rather than simply pleasant.

In this tale of longing, loss and regret, it isn’t always possible to know who’s deluding oneself, or someone else. But then, it isn’t always possible to know that in real life either.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

It's popcorn pulp that collided -- at 100 mph, natch -- with a far more sober and crafty grown-up movie.

Most of the pleasure of Mockingjay — Part 2 comes from watching Lawrence, not the story around her. Her aim is true, even if the narrative arc of the movie traces a long, wobbly path toward its eventual, and not exactly happy, resting place.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

The documentary also reveals the sisters’ almost symbiotic closeness. They live together most of the year, cook together, do karaoke together and joke about how difficult it would be if one chose to get married.

It's also sweet, sentimental, rather funny and, as John Waters films go, surprisingly gentle.

Tucker benefits from a sweetness not found in many of its peers, which unlike "Shaun" often lean too heavily on cynicism and gore.

If it sounds wholly bleak, it isn't. Remember, this is a movie about a yard sale. Over the course of the film, Nick struggles with the idea of, as he puts it, "selling all my crap" - he means that both literally and metaphorically - and getting on with his life. That sentiment, and Ferrell's refusal to sentimentalize it, is reason enough to smile.

La Bamba is a puzzle -- a real mixed bag. Some of it, like the braying, cock-and-bull performance by Esai Morales, is just plain awful. But other bits, like the performances by Rosana De Soto and, as Ritchie's agent, Joe Pantoliano, are unexpectedly vibrant.

If Amazing Grace serves its most superficial purpose -- to educate the viewer -- it's hardly compelling viewing.

Proceeds with an episodic pace, full of narrative twists and turns that clearly are not pretested by a Hollywood committee. Things feel sort of strange and original all at once.

It's not Fellini, by any means, but it's lively. Never stops moving, even though it crashes into cliches along the way.

An end-of-the-world movie like no other.

Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.

The first of Spielberg's films to make us feel heavy in our seats, the first to leave us sitting, passive and uninvolved, on the outside. Watching it, you feel that nearly anyone could have directed it.

Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t always straddle its stories and time periods with the utmost grace. But the film — which John Lee Hancock directed from a script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith — more than makes up for its occasionally unwieldy structure in telling a fascinating and ultimately deeply affecting story.

None of Hill's dynamism will save The Warriors from impressing most neutral observers as a ghastly folly. It seems a little demented to choose gang warfare as a pretext for showing off virtuoso technique. [10 Feb 1979, p.C7]

The trouble is that the picture is far from over when suddenly we find ourselves watching another movie -- a punishing, overly complex melodrama in which the Gingerbread Man receives his comeuppance.

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.

Ivory Tower covers a lot of ground, and sometimes the focus feels diffuse.

The movie is wry, touching and fun to sit through, thanks to Rosenberg's amusing script, Ted Demme's vital direction and zesty performances from everyone.

First Class happily delivers on the escapism and rich narrative texture the best of its predecessors have promised.

One of the selling points of The Confirmation is how it steers clear of melodrama or tidy perfection in favor of a taste of life on the margins, where even living paycheck to paycheck would be a luxury.

Barbra Streisand's lovely adaptation of Pat Conroy's bestseller echoes the novel's seductive cadences, the cries of summer gulls, the slapping of the Atlantic on the South Carolina shores. An emotionally satisfying film, The Prince of Tides loses some of the stuff readers hold dear, but the pull of the sea, its saltiness too, lingers. As a story of rebirth through self-exploration, it seems ideally suited to this season of illumination.

Oscar and Lucinda seems like the perfect story for director Gillian Armstrong, that of a free-spirited proto-feminist chafing at the strictures of tight-laced colonial Australia. But in the end, she's created a beautiful but annoying Victorian-era melodrama. [30Jan1998 Pg.D.06]

Presumably, Scott is giving the audience what it wants, but purists may wonder whether simply re-watching “Alien” would have provided scarier, more genuine jolts.

Crystal, 65, and Goodman, 61, are a long time out of college, but they somehow manage to carry off the callowness of youth.

There's a dramatic imbalance to Dick Wolf and Darryl Ponicsan's screenplay. By making David a saint, they make his bigoted tormentors ultra-despicable. It's so easy to identify who's in the right that it's hard to remember this wrong may exist in us.

It’s a voraciously self-aware comedy, one that dines out on the inherent inanity of its own premise as much as it does the movies it’s competing with.

A riveting, amusing, enlightening and emotionally affecting movie by a guy you've never heard of, about -- wait for it -- the consumer debt crisis.

Still, The Courier makes a smart, stylish stand for the kind of old-fashioned period spy thriller that is increasingly being turned into bingeable series for streaming services. Its modesty and carefully managed ambitions define its strong suit at a time when such films are scarcer every day.

The most fruitful aspect of the film may be its themes, which unbraid and retwist the threads and conventions of the damsel-in-distress narrative even as they superficially follow them.

The movie is not only a better version of the book, it's a work unto itself.

While cute, enormously entertaining and stuffed with more jokes than you can count, is only a half-step up. Partly, that’s a problem that’s built into its very premise.

At first blush, there's something vicariously liberating about Brosnan strutting through a lobby dressed only in Speedos and cowboy boots. But it also feels false. The actor seems to be theatrically slumming before his return to suave form.

Hawke is good at playing bad, but Hawkins is better, rendering, in Maudie, a portrait of a woman that feels raw, real and revelatory.

The script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending.

Despite some quality craftsmanship, “The Good Boss” ultimately doesn’t pay off. Capitalism should be more fun than this.

The movie, which suggests a combination of "Wait Until Dark" and "Rear Window," not only takes your breath away on an aesthetic level, it eloquently evokes the mother's and daughter's vulnerability.

The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.

You don't watch Bad News Bears for the action out on the diamond. You hang out with that hangdog coach so you can catch every slurry, sour-mouthed retort coming out of his mouth.

The overly schematic nature of High-Rise does not entirely diminish its pleasures as a story, which include, in addition to Wheatley’s richly lurid visual sensibility, an effective metaphorical tool in Laing.

Young Sherlock Holmes delivers all the ingredients that Spielberg addicts relish: action, effects, a cute fat kid, a pretty girl and a hero who's good with swords. But, like a room at a Holiday Inn, there are no surprises. [6 Dec 1985, p.33]

Crudely made and in your face, The Living End is mostly annoying.

A brain-cramping and eye-straining experiment in digital filmmaking.

NASA aficionados and connoisseurs of space exploration are the groups most likely to get a kick out of Good Night Oppy, a warmly charming, if far from essential, documentary that takes a look back at the robotic Martian rover Opportunity.

The documentary Hockney presents such an immersive portrait of its subject — artist David Hockney — that by the end of the film it feels like we are looking at the world through his eyes.

The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities.

Wild Grass might be the strangest film I've seen all year. Maybe all millennium. Is it any good? Quite frankly, I have no idea.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

Maybe Strange World only seems to falter because it can’t handle the weight of its own expectations. Nah. It’s just not very good.

Filmgoers haven't seen a family this neurotically enmeshed since the last Diane Keaton movie.

Unlike its forebears, "Greek" lacks a truly sympathetic central character to hold things together when it's time to get sappy.

Offers cleverness and charm that are hard to come by in the summertime multiplex.

At times, the movie struggles to maintain the critical balance between detachment from and engagement with the thing it’s making fun of.

A sweet, true and, at times, universal love story it is.

It's a rousing, fast-paced tale, told with a modicum of verve and packed with colorfully flawed, occasionally heroic and even tragic characters. It also feels disappointingly bloated and too fast-paced by half.

Watching Ali, you can be sure of experiencing two opposing things: a sterling performance from Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and a bewilderingly punch-drunk movie from Michael Mann.

Follows the youngsters over the course of a tumultuous year, during which time Cuesta and screenwriter Anthony Cipriano succeed in making the audience care desperately whether they're okay and whether the adults in their lives do the right thing. The lingering question is why that should be so improbable.

Modulating from heavy to light, from angry to lyrical, and so on, the movie's an enjoyable, emotional symphony.

Although it has beguiling and funny interludes, The Jungle Book lacks the narrative suspense and excitement that propel the best of the Disney animated features from the pioneering Snow White and Pinnochio to last year's The Rescuers. It seems to reflect the Disney tradition in repose, still expert and pleasing but also a trifle stuffy. [29 June 1978, p.B7]

O’Shea follows his twisted premise to its inexorable conclusion, so his film is ultimately more unnerving than sad.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

Clerks II finds Smith up to the profane, raunchy, profoundly humanist mischief of which he alone is the master. This is a lewd, lascivious, exhilaratingly life-affirming celebration of misfits and the misfits who love them.

Tetro has no internal tension and should have been a comedy.

Fake or not, Unknown White Male doesn't live up to its tantalizing potential.

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels.

There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.

This refreshing alternative to the usual potted biopic provides an absorbing look at a singular, steely determination as it was forged and annealed, long before it made itself known to the world.

Though we were wooed by Diesel -- notwithstanding that rug -- we were less enamored with the film's scraggly script. Find Me Guilty is a courtroom drama (much of the dialogue is culled from court transcripts) without a whole lot of drama going on.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.

Telling Lies in America may not be terrible. But it flickers inconclusively between ordinary and not-so-good. [24 Oct 1997]

Although much about In the Fade is compelling, there’s a tonal imbalance to the three-act structure. The gritty early events are followed by a courtroom procedural that drags somewhat, with the film shifting into a devastating climax in the thrillerlike third act.

A decidedly medieval enterprise, darker in text and tone than a Gothic cathedral by the light of the moon.

Most vividly, The Swell Season captures the insistent, borderline-disturbing energy of fandom at its most rabid and psychically intrusive.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

A Letter to Momo is unquestionably lovely to look at, but viewers may not be able to shake the feeling that they’ve seen much of it before, and done better.

Fox's film seems to say that the kind of saintly purity that would enable one to walk on water -- or to kill with impunity and without repercussions -- doesn't exist.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

Its long-winded denouement, in which Grazia runs away rather than be sent to an institution, doesn't bring the story full circle. It just extends it.

It's still pretty darn good, despite its smarty-pants aura.

In Burton's hands, Washington Irving's spooky classic is reincarnated as an overripe, grisly Goth cartoon.

SWEET DREAMS is like "Coal Miner's Daughter," but without the grit. It's a slow, insensate musical biography, with the unfortunate Jessica Lange miscast as country singer Patsy Cline. The physical and emotional opposite of the coarse Cline, Lange looks like a refugee from a dude ranch in her western gear, her delicate features overwhelmed by a raggedy black wig and a rhinestone cowgirl's hat. She croons into the smokey, liquor-soaked night of a honky- tonk saloon, "I Fall to Piecessss . . . ." [11 Oct 1985, p.29]