None of which would be a problem, if “Gucci” were half as much fun as I’m afraid about to make it sound. After all, who doesn’t love a good, tawdry scandal?

Imagine a 10-episode podcast about the making of a single episode of the 1950s marital sitcom “I Love Lucy” — a podcast dense with behind-the-scenes details about the show’s real-life husband-and-wife stars, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, who played wildly caricatured versions of themselves on the hit show for six seasons. Imagine a trove of inside-baseball trivia about the early days of television, as well as details about the stars’ real lives, including Ball’s 1952 pregnancy, which Arnaz — a TV pioneer who popularized the three-camera setup — wanted to weave into the show’s plot. Then imagine dumping all that material, like a box full of marbles, into a two-hour movie.

The comedy sails along, thanks to its charismatic leads.

Its exuberant, enthusiastic energy seems to belong in an entirely different movie.

Life of Crime feels like a rambling car ride through the countryside with friends. The scenery is great, and the passengers are diverting, but you keep wondering where the driver is headed.

Crafted by writer-director Jill Sprecher and co-writer sister Karen - a filmmaking duo who are sometimes jokingly referred to as the "Coen sisters" - it will erase any lingering memories of "Fargo."

One gets the uneasy feeling that Jodie Foster is trying to tell us something that has nothing essential to do with Nell's plight. The movie is a coy, condescending vanity production. [25 Dec 1994, p.D6]

Despite its noir references and evocations, this slick film, directed by Tony Scott from Quentin Tarantino's script, is a preposterously bloody mess, as is the plot.

Hateship Loveship sneaks up on the viewer, not only in the way the story takes its unlikely turns, but in Wiig’s own portrayal of a woman discovering desire and, in the most subtle way possible, acting on it.

Celeste and Jesse Forever engages in Bridget Jones-like comedy of mortification, sending its heroine down a path of self-discovery that ultimately seems more cruel than revelatory.

Thanks to the uncommonly shrewd judgment of screenwriter Ligiah Villalobos and director Patricia Riggen, both newcomers, the film never feels like rank exploitation, even as it steadily aims for the emotional jugular.

Midnight Express is an outrageously sensationalistic movie version of a non-fiction cautionary tale, Billy Hays' account of his imprisonment in Turkey after being convicted for drug smuggling. Parker has upset the book's delicate sense of balance. He uses Hays' dilemma as a springboard for sensationalism, especially sustained depictions of brutality and hysteria. Midnight Express sets a new standard in shamelessness. [28 Oct 1978, p.B6]

Hippocrates loses its nerve with a facile climax that betrays the depth of what precedes it, yet there are few things more fascinating than when competent professionals disagree, especially if we appreciate the source of their impasse.

Standing Tall is indeed tough going, yet it’s illuminating and ultimately even a bit hopeful.

Aided by co-screenwriter Anthony Frewin, Ellis takes his time in this slow-burning thriller, which often feels more like a character study.

In any event, Pugh uses her expressive eyes and ardent, intelligent sensibilities to paint a touching if underdeveloped portrait of an artist desperate to leave her mark before being rushed too soon from the show.

A mix of martial-arts and special-effects magic, the film serves its nonstop confrontations either straight up or with a twist (as when they involve Kombatants with special powers, like Sub-Zero, Reptile and Scorpion).

For all the flash and dazzle, Gunnin' for That #1 Spot never comes close to the power and intimacy of 1994's "Hoop Dreams." The comparison may be unfair, but, given the subject matter, it's inevitable.

Then as now, visually pleasant and (of course) musically wonderful but, all-in-all, a mixed bag.

The film could use a little less of the gee-whiz commentary of co-producer/narrator Roger Friedman and more storytelling from the survivors themselves.

The key to success: The audience must really like both characters and believe that they deserve a fairy-tale ending. That's definitely the case in this nicely acted love story.

Turns out he's infinitely more likable than Vin Diesel, who carries his sense of stardom through every movie like an insufferable Atlas. In fact, Dwayne Johnson is a gentleman, the kind of Rock who puts you in a very easy place.

As a movie, this is exciting stuff.

“Moonlight” is actually not about one thing, but many, and Brodsky threads her themes together nicely. The film also charts Paul Taylor’s incipient dementia, a development that “Moonlight” weaves into its other story lines by noting, poetically, that our mistakes — the metaphorical, and inevitable, false notes we play in life — can become, as Brodsky puts it, “our music.”

Private Benjamin seems coarse, sluggish and interminable as a comedy scenario.

The story works, but I wish they'd teach these avatars to act.

White Boy Rick is permeated by an atmosphere of grimy hopelessness that makes it hard to watch.

The best element of the movie is a subplot involving Noah's spiritually obsessed teacher (Rainn Wilson) and his wacky girlfriend (Kathryn Hahn), whose bumbling eccentricities give the movie an emotional liveliness it otherwise lacks.

Although "Pluto" has a rollicky, endearing air, it's cooler than Jordan's other films.

An overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.

Such a feast of outlandish pleasures it'll send you home steam-cleaned and shrink-wrapped.

Despite a glorious performance by Nicolas Cage as a vicious father, this vivid satire of a world turned upside down is marred by writer-director Brian Taylor’s sloppy filmmaking.

Unbroken may not exactly be mired in sanctimony, but it’s standing, almost up to its ankles, in an unhealthy sense that its subject — about whose simple humanity the film otherwise goes to great lengths to illuminate — is a candidate for sainthood.

Most important, the film has a terrific supporting character in St. Marie herself, portrayed by the real Canadian island of Harrington Harbour (pop. 300).

007's latest, The Living Daylights, a snazzy spy thriller, is all the more alluring for its new conservatism. It's right up there with the early Bonds, though not in the league with Goldfinger. But oh, what a difference.

Is The Shallows a thriller for the ages? No, but it’s decent popcorn fare. It’s about as deep as the titular lagoon on which it’s set, but the breakers promise a short and heart-pounding ride, with no wipeout.

The film's hysterically pitched action overshadows its more subtle psychological points.

This wonderfully acted romance brings the touching fantasy "Truly, Madly, Deeply" to mind.

The film's first half is easily the best and brightest. As the movie moves into the more saddening sections, however, it loses most of its power.

You don’t go to The Best Man Holiday to deconstruct its flaws. You go for its myriad, adamantly un-cerebral pleasures.

The movie is completely beguiling, and it delivers joy, the beautiful spark of the gods.

This tedious slog through the highland muck should win no Oscars, only groans and raspberries. Even the much-buzzed-about glimpse of a nude Pine, as his character emerges from a lake, doesn’t make this worth watching.

You'd think indie filmmakers would have learned by now that people tend to put on a sober face when addressed from the pulpit.

Although the plot is painfully familiar — and not particularly edifying, compared with similar narratives that have gone before — the novelty here is Silverman, who doesn’t exactly erase her comic persona so much as bring to the surface an inherent darkness that has always lurked in the shadows.

An improbably satisfying action comedy.

The romantic fable Untamed Heart is hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.

A movingly told tale of tragedy and its consequences, not just for the players in the original tragedy but also for those touched by their actions, in an ever-widening circle of aftershocks.

Jackson’s storytelling at this point is so driven by green-screen trickery and digital legerdemain that he seems to have forgotten about human emotion.

The Silent Twins doesn’t try to explain its protagonists’ affliction, but the movie does express its crushing sadness.

A syrupy Italian power ballad along the lines of the ones on the movie's soundtrack. Its tune is mawkish, bombastic but, in the end, not especially resonant.

Few American directors would dare to show as much over-the-top glee in their chosen craft as Sam Raimi does in Army of Darkness. [19 Feb 1993, Style, p.c7]

An intriguing speculative drama.

Sternfeld has created a garden on film that opens up its blooms for us, not in the dark of the movie house, but long after we've left the theater.

So closely observed, so funny and so true to the junk that is everybody's real--as opposed to movie--life that it comes to feel like some kind of a miracle.

Utterly delightful fable of romantic destiny.

For all their sass, brass and bewitchery, the starring troika can't breathe life into these characters, much less transform them from women scorned into hellbent furies.

It is a predictable, undernourished love story. We never quite learn why Margueritte feels so close to Germain or why he bothers with her. Characters appear and disappear, without much difference.

Kids will chuckle, for sure. But parents who were pleasantly surprised by the original film’s intelligence will miss Lord and Miller’s guiding hands, as what once felt so funny now leaves a stale taste.

If there's such a thing as freedom for everyone, Rory's determined to give the prospect its most grueling road test.

One half of Godzilla vs. Kong wants to tell a human story. Believe it or not, it partly succeeds. The other half just wants to break stuff.

Attenborough's aims are more academic and political than dramatic. By following an initially wrongheaded white character, he clearly wants to reach out to similar audiences. Cry could have reached further.

Often seems less like a fully realized film than an illustrated story, its paragraphs reduced to neatly contrived set pieces.

Go For Sisters is worth the time if only to witness the terrific chemistry between Hamilton and Ross, the latter of whom delivers a break-through performance as a woman of uncommon, almost regal, composure, even as she struggles to stay on the righteous path.

By turns giddily coy and disarmingly frank, the movie doesn’t know if it wants to be a kinder, gentler Apatow or go full Farrelly.

It is also very much a Mike Flanagan film, for better and for worse. Part homage to Kubrick’s moody atmospherics, and part hyper-literal superhero story, Doctor Sleep is stylish, engrossing, at times frustratingly illogical and, ultimately less than profoundly unsettling.

I can recommend the first two-thirds of this movie with great enthusiasm.

The conflicts are, at best, formulaic. (Tim is married, but unhappy; Charlie is from a different class.) And the filmmakers provide nothing to rescue us from the clichés. You get the general sense that the are better than their material [22 Oct 1988]

It suffers from a dreary middle section. Great movie, mediocre script.

A spectacular concert documentary that also gives some fascinating insights into the making of "The Black Album."

For the first half-hour, the movie is pretty crummy. Even Spielberg appears bored with the script's lame setup, its quick evocation of the first movie and its wan establishment of human villains and heroes. Like any 50-year-old adolescent, he can't wait for the dinosaurs. And when he gets to them, the movie ceases to bear any relationship to conceits of narrative and becomes a sheer adrenalin spike to the brain stem.

Love! Valour! Compassion!, an adaptation of Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play, which has piano music and exclamation points to spare, is excruciatingly predictable, creatively inane and almost offensive in its depiction of gay characters.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

The disappointing thing about Streets of Fire is that it can't deliver on the promise of a tangy, sexy evening of stimulation. The failure is aggravated by the exorbitant scale of the production, which seems much too lavish for an atmosphere of B-movie squalor. [01 June 1984, p.B4]

By visual standards alone, the characters, rendered in eye-popping 3-D, resemble nothing so much as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade floats. They’re just as lifeless and inexpressive, too.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

Ironically, Alien is not a bad movie. In fact -- here's the rub -- it's too interesting to make an exciting summer flick.

The film is less deeply affecting than merely admirable. It’s a good, slick and well-intentioned film that wants so hard to be an important one that the slight feeling of letdown it leaves is magnified.

The scenario (written by Carl Binder, Susannah Grant and Philip Lazebnik) is disappointingly wan and obsequious.

This first film from Sesame Street is this summer's sweetest surprise, a wholly good-natured children's comedy with enough wit and whimsy left over to win parents' hearts, too. Like the TV series, it's not violent, not threatening and not to be missed. [02 Aug 1985, p.23]

Sing ends, predictably and without straining, on a high note, with everybody’s problems resolved. If only real life could so easily be realigned, by a singing pig.

After 9/11, few of us look at terrorist acts casually. It's insulting to watch this grandiloquent pornography, using shock value and Hollywood cliche to evoke poignancy.

The sexual backstory is a new twist, one the filmmakers handle with less finesse than is healthy for the argument that they ultimately make.

There is little in the film that offers insight into what makes him tick as a person.

Cocaine is the most aggressively edited film in years: It pounds, it churns, it spurts, it spray-paints.

Mike Werb's screenplay -- just a rickety framework for Carrey's consummate clowning -- lacks a propelling plot and has zip in terms of secondary character development.

Helmed by James Madigan, a second-unit director moving up to the big chair, from a screenplay by Brooks McLaren and D.J. Cotrona, “Fight or Flight” is high-spirited junk, too full of itself at times but mostly content to work out every last variation on a theme: How do you kill someone on an airplane?

Most of the time Creepshow works.

As the years flash by, Mr. Holland ultimately discovers that he has given the world something much more valuable than a symphony; he has touched thousands of lives with the gift of music . . . blah, blah, blah. It almost makes you wanna hurl.

While it’s not exactly a sequel to “RBG,” the hit documentary from earlier this year, the film does seem designed primarily for viewers who just can’t get enough Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Viewed through that lens, On the Basis of Sex sort of works. As filmmaking, it’s clunky, but as fan service, it’s more effective.

Despite some cool camera work and the kind of noir-lite moral ambiguity that barely gets your shoes dirty (courtesy of a shallow script by Brad “Out of the Furnace” Ingelsby), the movie is the cinematic equivalent of junk food. It satisfies the craving for the sensation of nihilism, without its substance.

Technically brilliant though short on narrative, The Black Cauldron is a painless, old-fashioned way to take out the kids, and a triumph for the animation department at the Disney studio, where it has been in development for almost a dozen years.

Phoenix is an arresting presence on screen, but don't expect any "Departed"-esque fast talk from Wahlberg, who is oddly inert in a role that should crackle with brotherly ambivalence.

A profoundly disturbing -- and depressing -- look at the New Anti-Semitism of the post-9/11 world. Produced by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the film is remarkably restrained, given the outrages it documents.

The animation is first-rate...But the story needs to catch up to the magic. Otherwise, what's the point?

Consistently absorbing -- thanks in large part to strong performances from the actors -- but not particularly rewarding.

With its outrageous double-entendre, gonzo performances and appalling lack of restraint, the sequel is more than a guilty pleasure.

Is it scintillating, nutty, madly inspired or ecstatically preposterous? Ginsberg himself is all these things, but this movie is not. (Review of Original Release)

Touching, funny, unflinching and true.