This is a movie squarely directed at adolescents in all their untamed desire, outsize emotion and near-bottomless self-obsession. The filmmakers have crafted a canny delivery system for their life lessons, by way of a movie that balances escapism, candor and ethics with admirable aplomb.

Life in a Day is, without exaggeration, a profound achievement.

The gentle pacing of the film is too laid-back at times, particularly in a few overlong underwater swimming scenes that start out lovely but conclude as apparent filler material. But that’s a small quibble with a movie that’s this sweet and cheesy.

The film feels claustrophobic at times, and stagy. It helps that the supporting cast is uniformly good.

The movie is like a game of musical chairs that runs too long. And since Muschietti has few scare tactics at his disposal, the film loses its capacity to frighten.

Amateurish, emotionally fraudulent. [28 Jan 1986, p.C4]

More political allegory than horror movie.

If F9’s repetitive stunts-and-speeches structure begins to pall, this is a movie that knows its lane and stays in it, however recklessly.

Ratner makes a hash of the story and characters his predecessor brought to such complex, sympathetic life, delivering a pumped-up exercise in mayhem, carnage and blunt-force trauma.

Made me feel like a Christmas goose being fattened for slaughter. Its force-fed diet of whimsy cloyed long before the eagerly anticipated romantic payoff arrived to put me out of my misery.

What's so good about the movie is Gyllenhaal's refusal to show off; he doesn't seem jealous of the camera's attention when it goes to others and is content, for long stretches, to serve simply as a prism though which other young men can be observed.

It feels like each and every moment bursts forth with urgent dialogue, and yet what does anyone actually say?

Grounded in a good cause but never puffed up or preachy, the father-daughter drama transcends the issues.

Footloose never needed to be dragged into the 21st century, but Brewer has made it look and sound a little bit more like the real world.

Jason Bourne belongs to Damon and Greengrass, whose admirable — and entirely appropriate — goal of playing it for kicks comes across, this time around, as an oddly joyless chore.

Sadly, the filmmakers haven't given viewers enough context or information about their protagonist to know whether he's utterly free or utterly unmoored -– or to care very much either way.

Kansas City is basically a head-scratcher.

Jarmusch documented the group's 1996 tour and includes interviews as well as concert footage from 10 and 20 years ago. An admirer, he lets the songs go on and on into those trademark endless, nearly hallucinatory codas. The music is good. But the film Horse goes a little lame.

In his zeal to break the book down into bite-size, cutting-edge nuggets, adapter Paul Attanasio has squandered—and arbitrarily altered—many of those details.

It’s not especially new to see a story about a guy who pulls himself up by his bootstraps, even one this hyperbolic. One might say that Flamin’ Hot is just another serving of cinematic junk food: corn chips sprinkled liberally with the moviemaking equivalent of maltodextrin.

Victoria and Abdul might have aimed for poignancy — and at times it almost strikes that tone — but for the most part, it plays like broadly clownish comedy, treating crusty British prejudice with all the subtlety of “The Benny Hill Show.”

Whimsical, fantastical and self-consciously charming, it slinks around viewers’ ankles like an affectionate cat, purring ever more loudly until the audience can’t help but succumb.

Ultimately, La Scorta is a tight, competent but rather inconsequential thriller. It's diverting, but thin. (Review of Original Release)

Annaud and his crew, including wolf trainer Andrew Simpson, nicely illustrate the animals’ cunning and coordination.... The human drama is more perfunctory.

A tale so raucous, raunchy and punch-drunk with love for the rebellious spirit of rawk -- and so disdainful of those who have tried to squelch it -- that it pretty much negates any claims to objectivity, let alone factuality. In other words, it's not a documentary.

Bernhard Schlink's highly regarded novel "The Reader" receives a graceful, absorbing screen adaptation by director Stephen Daldry.

Cimino's instincts are right -- the movie is outsized, and it needs baroque dialogue; you get the sense that he'd recognize the right dialogue if he heard it. But when he actually has to come up with it, the result is a series of outrageous hooters: "I've got scar tissue on my soul"; "I carried the cross with you, in Brooklyn and in Queens."

The mystery is why a movie so hell-bent on having fun feels so formulaic.

While it celebrates the triumph of humor, invention and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful is not the transporting experience it might have been. Benigni knows how to make us laugh, but he has not yet figured out how to make us cry.

Following up his auspicious debut with Fright Night, director Tom Holland keeps things moving without rushing them.

Pollack makes a solid job of it, as does Cruise. But solid isn't enough when it comes to thrillers -- or courtroom dramas, for that matter. Solid is great when it comes to office furniture.

Stoker plays out like a Kabuki “Macbeth”: gallons of style slathered on a story you already know by heart.

Director and co-writer James Marsh clearly thinks he has made a grim and telling satire about fundamentalist hypocrisy. But he and co-writer Milo Addica display such contempt for their characters and religious conviction in general, they reduce everything to one-note banality.

Trouble With the Curve presents viewers with a frustrating change-up: What promised to be a modest, refreshingly unforced little comedy turns out to be low energy to a fault.

Though Hard Candy clearly believes pedophiles should be chopped into little pieces and buried in an unmarked grave, its only purpose is exploitative. Sure, it's a cautionary tale for all those sicko wolves out there, but it's nothing more than an unabashed lurk-and-dread fest.

A warmly spirited travel diary of a movie.

Perhaps the shrewdest thing the filmmakers have done is call the film The Object of Beauty instead of A Thing of Beauty, which would make much more sense. By doing so they've removed what they must have known was a far-too-tempting opening for reviewers -- of saying A Thing of Beauty is not a joy forever. Even with the change, though, the sentiment fits.

It's impossible to watch Defiance without experiencing a vicarious thrill of resistance and revenge.

An entertaining splasher film, Under Siege pits Casey Ryback (Seagal) against psycho terrorists Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones) and Krill (Gary Busey). As with most action films, viewers guessing the ending won't disappoint themselves, though the setting is certainly different from the usual urban decay of Seagal dramas. Everything is played out on the Missouri, which is actually the cleverly reconstructed USS Alabama. Would that such cleverness had been applied to the script, which has holes big enough to drive a submarine through.

Nerve is exciting, topical and potentially prescient, but it scores no points for character development, and the plot holes are so big that you could, well, drive a speeding motorcycle through them.

Eternity might start out strong, but its plot eventually runs out of steam.

The Keeping Room raises difficult moral questions, yet it wallows so relentlessly in gloom that it is a challenge to care about what happens to its characters.