As agenda-driven as Documented is, it also is a deeply engrossing self-portrait.

While the details of Nureyev’s 1961 defection in Paris are thrilling, the film falls into the trap of many historical dramas, rendering the story as surprisingly clunky, especially considering the nimbleness of its subjects.

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

Raggedy Man is starved for scenes that might fill out our scanty store of information--for example, a little more about the marriage, the love affair, her identity as a mother. Even the location needs to be filled out, since one forms the misimpression that Gregory is not so much a small town as a ghost town. Next time, the Fisks owe it to themselves to bite off enough material to chew. [03 Jul 1982, p.B3]

Like the gender-flipped “Ghostbusters” before it, this new movie neither reinvents not dishonors its inspiration, instead adding a modicum of zip — if less than turbocharged horsepower — to a vehicle that runs you through the staging of a crime by, ironically, obeying all the traffic laws.

Sometimes a movie makes a point that's been made before, but makes it so beautifully and so quietly that it feels like you're discovering it for the first time. Hideaway does that, with the obliqueness of an off-hand comment. The glancing touch makes it all the more hard-hitting.

Shines the light on a special kind of heroism -- the guts to face up to yourself and make changes. What makes this so emotionally compelling is the way Dave scrambles from this deep vale of cluelessness to something approaching moral maturity.

Respect is nominally a movie about a woman finding her voice, but more accurately it’s about her taking full possession of it.

The movie's nowhere near the inspired funniness of its predecessors. But it often displays the same spirit. It's strung end to end with sight gags. Some fall flat on their faces. But, by sheer weight of numbers, many of them work. It depends on your ability to lower yourself into -- or steer stoically clear of -- the idiocy pit.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

As with most sequels, Addams Family Values is a thinner, airier reunion. For those who enjoyed the original The Addams Family, the flavor is still there. But you feel a little undernourished.

Traitor traffics in the cliches of the terrorist chase film -- including the usual stereotypes of Muslims -- while trying not to succumb to outright bigotry.

The humor is even more wildly inappropriate, with a running joke about getting a baby stoned on pot, coke and ecstasy, and a scene inspired by the famous incident in "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole.

The movie is not for the squeamish, but for those who are unafraid to look at what is, perhaps, their own metaphorical "backyard," for those willing to stare into the long, dark night of the contemporary American soul, its bone-crunching message is worth hearing.

McDormand is the best thing about Laurel Canyon. She's also the most unfortunate victim of a film that seems unable or unwilling to give even its most intriguing and compulsively watchable character her due.

This ensemble comedy has its inventively funny moments. But ultimately, it gets a little too cute for its own good.

A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.

Too simple for its own good.

With his mop-top cut and silly grin, Chan cuts an amiable figure, but while this film may confirm his skills and appeal to those already familiar with his better work, it's not likely to convert anyone else.

Eagle flops around trying to sustain a premise that defies suspenseful elaboration from the outset. No one with his wits about him believes the conspirators will succeed in capturing or shooting Churchill. More to the point, who would want them to? We're asked to suspend disbelief for the sake of a gimmick that not only insults common sense and general knowledge but also betrays old loyalties and convictions. [26 Mar 1977, p.B5]

Exhibits the weaknesses and the strengths of what has become a nearly foolproof formula for keeping viewers engaged.

It's tough to guess who will enjoy Secretariat more -- filmgoers who remember the extraordinary events of 1973, when the chestnut 3-year-old won the first Triple Crown in 25 years, or those for whom the story is brand-new.

If you're in the right frame of mind -- a sort of anything-goes, Elmore Leonard spirit -- this thing's going to be your kind of evening.

As fascinating as it is frightful. But despite all the occult patter and tony trimmings, Angel Heart is bogus -- only the bogeyman again.

Even at its most depraved, Joe’s journey, and her confession to Seligman, are still compelling enough to propel Volume II until the story becomes hopelessly over-plotted.

Grant's unblinking but sympathetic depiction of this emotionally unhinged world makes the viewer feel like an illicit, enlightened gawker, and it has the enormous fringe benefit of fine performers, including Richardson, who puts endearing vigor into the adulterous Lauren, and Julie Walters, Ralph's aunt, who tells the boy her frequent tipsiness is a recurring case of "sunstroke."

Like its predecessors, doesn’t need CGI, 3-D glasses or even praise from film critics. It just needs to please its audience with amped-up, old-school thrills that make its target demo whoop and holler with every zoom, smash and ka-BOOM. Consider this review a declaration that it does just that.

It is, as the title suggests, sweet — but also slight.

Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").

The wittiest jokes and cameo appearances are designed to soar far over the heads of young filmgoers and into the atavistic pop consciousness of their adult companions.

Onward is ultimately a trip worth taking.

Though the film gleams with Howard's customary spit polish, there's no denying that the story is pitted with plot holes.

These actors move with the labored blocking of a high school play.

May be the most disappointing American comedy of the decade, partly because it's jokeless and joyless but mostly because it squanders an all-star cast of superb comic talent.

The animated film takes a standard story and adds so much visual beauty that it exceeds expectations.

You can probably figure out how this is all going to end, but it still has more laughs than you might think. Nobody gets more than the wonderful Jane Lynch as the ex-drug addict and director of the mentoring program.

It drags a bit and suffers from not enough Rudy.

For all the pain and loss that The Kite Runner depicts, it is still a film of exhilarating, redemptive humanity, conveying an enduring sense of hope.

The main reason to see Criminal isn't for the mental workout it might offer but simply to watch these two appealing performers act and act and act.

Haute Cuisine provides no huge revelations or profound messages, but it is sweetly and consistently engaging — a tasty treat that’s not entirely filling but perfectly enjoyable all the same.

Its earnest, always incomplete quest haunts us in ways stock imagery cannot.

From its deceptively easygoing beginning to the heart-wrenching finale, The Green Mile keeps you wonderfully high above the cynical ground.

Everyone is given their due and dignity in this funny, sexy, humanist film that, if it is a chick flick, gives the genre a good name.

A most excellent sequel, funnier and livelier than the original.

The trail is all too familiar and pretty soon we recollect why westerns lost their appeal. [28 June 1985, p.27]

The result is a classic comic-book hero quest that, while not entirely novel, hews to its own rules and conventions with dignity and artfulness.

Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.

This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series. Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.

Like the graphics that intermittently appear as Solomonov travels (and which look like the first Google Image result for “Israel map”), the documentary proves slightly underwhelming.

Where Romero goes for the cheap, linear approach, Argento's storytelling is painfully poetic, with ever-shifting points of view and asides. It's not unusual for him to drop a Middle Ages dream sequence in the middle of things, rely on the unpredictability of a cat to advance the plot, or resort to pure shock that's no less shocking because it's expected: There's a madness in Argento's method and it's always appropriate.

Fighting isn't very good, but it will make you hope that someday, some great director will give Tatum's pecs the star vehicle they deserve.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

But this hackneyed stalker-rama, which pretends to be a call for gun control, ultimately is little more than an excuse to turn the bad guy into a human colander. The better to strain the moral pasta.

The Persian Version is an ambitious effort to suture up the rift between past and present, parent and child. But like its heroine, it also suffers from a bit of split personality. It’s a tale with too much drama for the candy-colored comedy of its telling, and too much comedy for the drama to leave much of a mark.

The music is central, so viewers without a preexisting taste for thump and thrash will probably not be converted by the Imax 3-D spectacle.

The two-hour film never feels a minute too long.

I had to beg my 8-year-old to stop laughing.

Although this script starts off with great zest, it's ultimately a disappointment.

There’s a little too much happening in the film’s violent, frenetic conclusion, which involves the retrieval of fractured memories, the confession of betrayals and so many narrative loops within loops that the film’s big reveals never make perfect, deeply satisfying sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

Though Lust, Caution resounds with these disconcerting themes, it operates on the same principle that distinguishes all lasting romances, be they "Wuthering Heights," "Casablanca" or "When Harry Met Sally."

It's a wonderfully playful experience.

The Technicolor film, while still praised, was not received as well as Cukor’s version.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

Faraway...is vaguely deflating, a film that doesn't build to a powerful climax so much as gradually run out of air.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

Tapping into the Zeitgeist of young black professionals starving to see themselves on film, it hits all the right cultural touchstones.

An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

At Any Price finally hinges on tragedies, reversals and moral ambiguities of Shakespearean proportions, but they’re delivered ploddingly rather than as the intricate parts of an inevitable whole. At Any Price ultimately suffers from the very phenomenon it laments: Like Henry Whipple’s farm, it feels more mechanistic than organic.

A portrait of a mild-mannered zealot, one that seeps under the skin and unsettles the nerves.

With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.

A high-low tension runs through Elysium, not only in the narrative itself, but in Blomkamp’s own cinematic language, which can be lofty one moment and gleefully pulpy the next.

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

Say what you will about Ken Russell, his films are usually bonkers. His latest, Lair of the White Worm, will do nothing to alter his reputation as the champion of camp thrash, but at least it's a step or two -- if only short ones -- above such recent efforts as "Salome's Last Veil" and "Gothic."

Psychological suspense at its finest.

Overall Nichols, Simon and especially Broderick find fresh threads in the old fatigues.

This film is a necessary reminder of what can happen when people preserve tradition for its own sake.

Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.

A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

The new Karate Kid brings fresh life and perspective to the classic tale of perseverance and cross-generational friendship, thanks to Harald Zwart's sensitive direction and two exceptionally appealing stars.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

In this comedy, Cecile misinterprets husband Alain's furtive attempt to have himself medically tested as suspicious extramarital behavior.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

Most gratifying — if also gruesome — are the many examples of Battaglia’s powerful photographs of Mafia victims. Although black-and-white, they are deeply disturbing, and it is easy to imagine that Battaglia found the work difficult. Imagination is necessary, because Battaglia herself doesn’t provide the deep introspection you might expect.

The challenge for any filmmaker wanting to convey the personal tales of our nation’s armed forces likely lies in finding a narrative as compelling, relatable and sentimental as the one told in Murph: The Protector.

Past Life is a family melodrama in the guise of a murder mystery. Strong performances and the shadow of the Holocaust lend the story poignancy.

Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.

Without a Trace provides little sustenance. It keeps serving up overprepared tidbits of torment when you'd prefer to get down to a main course. [04 Feb 1983, p.C4]

What Now? is at its best when it focuses on his comic presence. Even if his jokes don’t all land, his train of thought is all you need for an entertaining performance that is funny, angry and sometimes just weird.

Its elaborate and meticulously re-created period settings and moods prove far more interesting and diverting than the undernourished characterizations and love stories that flutter and sputter across the foregrounds. [19 Apr 1984, p.D6]

It never attains full dimension. It pursues the De Niro-DiCaprio war so singlemindedly, everything else is left high and dry.

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.

What's left here is not so much a movie as an assault so unpleasant, it leaves you wondering what you could have done to deserve it. [27 May 1986, p.B3]