The odd and disturbing thing about the film is just how comfortable [Mancini] — and we — have become putting moments on camera that, once upon a time, were meant to be shared between two people.

Bad Hair is a good idea buried within a scattershot, ultimately mediocre movie.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

As the man who would inspire the character of Scrooge — first spied at night in a cemetery attending a threadbare burial for his business partner, while uttering, “Bah, humbug!” — Christopher Plummer is well chosen.

Charming but slight.

Hunter proves to be an engaging if low-key narrator, whose greatest asset is his refusal to take himself too seriously.

Dragged Across Concrete may not be the kind of movie you’d expect to emerge from such inspiration, yet the impassioned energy of those composers is echoed in Zahler’s feverish yet stubbornly patient approach to storytelling.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.

The X-Files movie is really just a two-hour teaser for the series's sixth season. And little else. You will feel exactly like Mulder when he says, "How many times have we been right here before, Scully? So close to the truth?"

Roos and director Herbert Ross pave the long and grinding road to self-fulfillment with miles and miles of counterfeit poignancy.

Dyrholm, who deservedly took the prize for best actress at last year’s Berlinale for her sensitive performance as Anna, movingly captures the struggles of a middle-aged career woman who revels in the new freedoms of the 1970s, while ultimately falling victim to them.

The entire film carries a whiff of "vanity project," with several of Garlin's comedic buddies reporting for duty.

The story (adapted from Andrew Neiderman's novel by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy) is surprisingly well-handled, given its rather crazy premise.

We don’t expect a James Bond film to be deep, but at least we should be dazzled by the seductive gloss of its surfaces. Aside from that stunning opening sequence, this installment feels overcompensating and dutiful.

A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.

Preaches most effectively to the converted.

Tin Cup works for viewers of any handicap.

Sunny, slimy and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash and bluster that’s preceded it.

Them knows something the makers of the "Hostel" and "Saw" movies apparently don't: Subtlety and suggestion are every bit as terrifying as slashing and sawing.

There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

Does 9 rival last year's "Wall E" as the best post-apocalyptic "cartoon"? The short answer is Nein. 9 is, however, a visual stunner.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.

The oddest thing about this sweet but not entirely satisfying documentary is how little food is involved.

VIOLENT CRIME against women is not entertainment. "Star 80" was not entertainment. "Body Double" was not entertainment." And Jagged Edge is not entertainment. It is commercially packaged abuse. And we are supposed to call this anger art.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

The documentary transmits plenty of positive vibes, but it offers nothing fresh about the Fab Four.

Even if you’re not familiar with the source material, this Chinese production provides plenty of supernatural thrills for the modern young adult.

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

All of these make for engrossing, if hardly untold, tales. But what gives the lurid, titillating — and even, at times, fun — aspects of “Scandalous” a more sober edge are the journalistic implications, best articulated by former Washington Post reporter Bernstein, who calls the Enquirer’s frontal assault on truth and integrity “as corrupt as you can be.”

So Clooney and Pitt’s first outing as scene partners since “Burn After Reading” 16 years ago turns out to be a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is not great cinema. But the animated sequel — inspired by the popular Angry Birds games, available on mobile devices and other platforms — goes above and beyond what is to be expected from such things.

Murray, though, is wonderful. He doesn't quite duplicate the manic madness of his "Saturday Night" bits, but his performance as Tripper, the camp's head counselor, almost makes the film's sophomoric humor worth sitting through. He's a master of improvisation, flitting from role to role - one minute a swaggering, would-be Lothario, the next a frenzied coach - with Morkian speed. He's also got a human side. When he's not clowning around he takes time to befriend a homesick 12-year-old camper (Christopher Makepeace), thus displaying a streak of responsibility that would curl John Belushi's hair. [13 July 1979, p.24]

You won't soon forget the therapist at Johns Hopkins who counsels recently homeless patients who've fallen into depression or substance abuse -- and then goes home to her own bitter foreclosure fight.

Dickerson's point in this passable but rather routine picture is that no one is exempt from the spidery grip of frustrations brought on by poverty and a life of depressed opportunities; that, given these circumstances, anyone can pick up a gun as the only answer to his problems.

After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.

The more you lower your expectations, the more you'll learn to laugh.

The real importance of "Earnest" is the thrill of brilliant repartee. And as we laugh, an amazing thing happens: Oscar Wilde comes alive.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.

Alternately claustrophobic and epic compositions can’t make up for the myriad story lines (including one frustrating red herring) and pacing issues that periodically lose sight of the stakes at hand.

It's powerful, gut-wrenching stuff, and it doesn't need tarting up.

It’s more than great dancing and tragic strings that elevate The Last Five Years to a very funny, deeply affecting portrait of love lost and found. Kendrick and Jordan are both Broadway performers with powerful voices.

The film's title suggests the wry irony of hindsight: We've come a long way, baby, but we're not there yet. Any Day Now could do with a little more of that astringent humor and a little less sap.

For all its late-in-the-game silliness, The Exception is a solidly acted, well-told tale about how love of country holds up in the face of other, less nationalistic passions.

Did you find “The Favourite” just too weird, too raunchy, too . . . too? Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots will be more your cup.

Hurt's horrendous, with his goofy stilted accent. He talks as though he swallowed a bathtub. [16 Dec 1983, p.24]

For those who simply want to drink in the northern Italian countryside and Tyler's physical details, it's quite an experience. But as a story, Stealing Beauty (which Bertolucci wrote with Susan Minot) is a misbegotten, sentimental reunion with old European cinema.

As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.

This, finally, is the Dredd movie comic book readers have been anticipating.

A documentary that knows to sit back and listen as [Dobson] expounds on a variety of subjects.

Equal parts playful, sophisticated and engrossing, The Adjustment Bureau is like the first songbird of spring, signaling that the winter of our collective brain-freeze is over and it's safe to go back to the multiplex.

There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

If the film is aspirational, showing Andy what it means to be a dependable ally, then MacLane sacrifices pure entertainment for a loftier purpose. A more straightforward clash between good and evil might have touched on the same themes, without sacrificing the action kids could mimic with toys.

Hits all the expected marks for raunch and vulgarity, with the bonus that it is actually also kind of sweet.

Cloyingly, Biggie narrates his tale from the grave. It's a device that feels irksome and condescending.

Norton, who wrote and directed Motherless Brooklyn, does his best to imitate the genre’s snappy dialogue and clever red herrings; but what starts out as a mystery as intelligent as it is intriguing winds up being over-plotted didactic.

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

Thrillingly told, compellingly acted and beautifully shot.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

Misses almost every opportunity to break new ground on the issue.

A new sport doesn’t equate to new ground, but there is pleasure to be had in a formula that works.

Lovely scenery and historical context elevate the sentimental story lines above the soap opera domain.

It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.

As in life, what drives most of the drama in this overstuffed but often thought-provoking movie is a failure to communicate.

Adam Sandler is surprisingly likable as Robbie, a struggling musician who is left at the altar early in this modest romantic comedy.

Yaphet Kotto, as L.A.P.D. Detective Harry Lowes, and Larry Hankin, as his partner, pull the bench out from under the rest of the players. Show-stealing is their only crime -- they add the necessary guts and good humor to bring the Star Chamber down to earth. [5 Aug 1983, p.17]

A wholesome, engaging, frequently hilarious, ultimately inspirational film.

The blarney and bohunkery builds to a shaky apex of nothingness, then ends with a slaughter in slo-motion, a romantic ode of blood, bullets and body parts.

Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.

To reference yet another cultural touchstone, Aporia comes across like an expanded, indie-film version of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s never going to set the world on a new and unfamiliar course, but it does its job well enough.

The film is pretty conventional Disney fare: silly, slapsticky, all-too-neatly wrapped up and punctuated by a surfeit of poignant moments.

Romero has some fun with cackling frat-style boors in the background, all of whom get their comeuppance. But by and large, the acting is extremely flat and strident, and shot in a much more conventional style than Romero's other movies. Romero, in other words, seems bored by the whole enterprise, less interested in the story than in sausage-making. [23 July 1985, p.E2]

The overall effect is like wading through hospital waste. Verhoeven, who also directed the maliciously stylistic "Robocop," disappoints with this appalling onslaught of blood and boredom.

For the first hour and a half, WW84 is a delightful flight of escapist fancy, with Diana and Steve's love story ensconcing itself comfortably, if a bit talkily, within the confines of an action adventure. Then, at the 90 minute mark, it’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.

There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.

Directed by Britain's Beeban Kidron, To Wong Foo has a split personality—it feels like three separate spliced-together movies with the same characters. Part I is the most fun, as we watch Swayze and Snipes undergo their transformation, a la Torch Song Trilogy.

Despite broad satire about racism and border fences that will appeal to some liberals, the movie doesn't line up neatly along party lines -- except in that other sense of the word "party." It's a movie that just wants to have fun.

There'd be nothing wrong with this if the film 'fessed up to its kitschy soul. Instead, it pretends to be the high-minded drama it's not.

Unfortunately, the actors seem overqualified for their parts, delivering earnest monologues that come across as clumsy transplants from the proscenium stage.

Makes a virtue of its own simplicity. But don't be fooled. That simplicity is mere cover. You're kept wondering about the outcome until the very end.

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]

Maybe the ultimate goal of Tomorrowland remains obscure because once you know where the story is headed, you realize it’s a familiar tale. The movie can conjure up futuristic images, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen before.

A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.