About halfway through you'll get an incredible hunger to see a movie.

Goes beyond interesting, though, to moderately annoying.

Blue Bayou strikes a nerve, of that there is no doubt. But then it keeps poking at it, pointlessly.

Ultimately, Jedi even backs off some of the more tantalizing possibilities suggested by the cliffhanging scenario of "Empire." This inhibition appears to grow out of consideration for the feelings of the juvenile audience, which can enjoy an abundance of thrills and close calls while resting assured that nothing catastrophic is going to be fall the heroes.

It's in these vignettes that Away We Go begins to feel less like an authentic exploration of identity than a condemnation of the very community the couple pretends to crave. No one, it turns out, is good enough for Burt and Verona.

There’s a far more interesting movie taking place alongside this more than slightly silly one.

Juvenile, disjointed and pointlessly revolting at times, although there are a few moments of disturbingly stark visual beauty.

From its sepia-toned palette to the Motown hits that drive its terrific soundtrack, Glory Road is utterly authentic. But most astonishing is an unrecognizable Jon Voight as Adolph Rupp.

The movie winks and nudges its way through a lighter, modernized variation of the classic, proud of its own cleverness every time Gemma’s life mirrors Madame B’s. But imitation for the sake of itself isn’t brilliant, especially when the elements most worthy of copying — Flaubert’s precise narration and telling details — don’t make the cut.

As derivative interplanetary clunkers go, Flash Gordon is good for a few laughs -- some of them intentional. [05 Dec 1980, p.F1]

The new facetious depressant from Colin Higgins -- the screenwriter and now director who has parlayed "Harold and Maude," "The Silver Streak" and "Foul Play" into one of the more baffling winning streaks on record -- runs a merely weak comic premise into the ground with coarse, laborious execution. [19 Dec 1980, p.E1]

Provides a welcome seasonal dash of wholesomeness and humor.

It’s appropriately melancholy, and yet there’s a sense that the movie only scratches the surface.

The script, written by Trevor De Silva and Kevin Hood, falters when farce gives way to melodrama, but the movie regains momentum with a climax in a ballroom.

Ultimately done in by two-dimensional characterizations and poor acting.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock isn't really a movie, it's a happy reunion. The Enterprise is 18 years older and the crew members look like Gray Panthers in space. It may be old stuff, but it's still the right stuff up there. [8 June 1984, p.23]

A clinically adequate, occasionally above-average art house film. In certain moments, it has all the subtlety and illumination one should ever need.

Say this about Stone: When it's good, it's very good. And this twisty, atmospheric drama is at its best when Edward Norton takes center screen as the title character.

If The Dial of Destiny takes its cast somewhere far-fetched — and boy, does it ever — it makes sure to bring us all back to where we belong, just in time for the closing credits.

Despite its packed agenda, the film can also feel meandering and directionless.

Like Gervais, the audience wants to see a struggle, which here comes down to whether unvarnished honesty or random acts of compassionate deceit will win the day. That alone makes for entertainingly high stakes.

Cute, kind of clever and oh, so topical. But also problematic.

A great director's losing battle against a goofy script.

The acting of the main cast is uniformly nuanced, and, except for some bad makeup on Mendy's father, the film never looks as low-budget as it must have been.

Movie tradition sets awfully high standards for these sorts of fatalistic, criminally compromised sibling relationships. Rourke and Roberts don't quite measure up. [23 June 1984, p.C1]

7500 is, at heart, a chamber piece. The setting, the number of characters and the setup are all constrained in an elegant yet dramatically effective way that belies the film’s low budget. There’s a taut, piano wire-like quality to its simplicity: None of the drama comes from action-movie cliches, but rather from the actors, along with the disembodied voices of an air traffic controller, a police officer and others.

Playing a mentally unhinged, almost wordless naif who finds true love with equally nutty Mary Stuart Masterson, he's supposed to invoke the silent comedian, with a little Chaplin thrown in. But he's just Edward Scissorhands without the scissors -- or the edge.

Volckman and Miance are undoubtedly superb draftsmen; what they need is a writer of comparable skill.

Myers, who created the original characters, has to make a feature film out of a teeny sketch. With cowriters Bonnie and Terry Turner, he fares better than you'd expect.

All Good Things is creepy and weird and sad, and little else.

Robert Edwards, the writer and director, explores the layers of melancholy contained within these familiar but authentically drawn characters, and he cleverly doles out virtue and vice to each while weaving in acid humor borne from regret.

Crank" is "D.O.A" on methamphetamines.

The biggest disappointment in the film, however, is Piven's Adam. This film idealizes his character too much and thereby jettisons any case for serious respect.

As a blithely likable blunt instrument, Heads of State gets the job done, justifying its anesthetized mayhem with a sweet-natured message about the importance of friendship, international alliances and institutional continuity.

The joy of this movie, which features Joss Ackland as a memorably intimidating, Afrikaner-accented boss, is in the gradual revelation of intrigue.

The story starts to feel crowded, especially when each character seems instantaneously at odds with another. One set of opposing forces would probably suffice.

In the end, Daybreakers doesn't really want to make anyone think too hard. If that were to happen, they might stop to wonder why all the human survivors out there hiding in fear of their lives don't just become garlic farmers and call it a day.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

Whether it works depends less on piety than on taste. Beneath the giddy subversion, there’s a cheerless solemnity — a splash of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” as it were — that often comes close to curdling the farce.

Startlingly erotic and surprisingly moving.

Despite its bare-bones plot and minimal effects, C.H.U.D. is kept floating by thankfully underplayed acting and Parnell Hall's script. [26 Sep 1984, p.D6]

It has more complex stunts, more technical perfection, and more than a touch of genius. It's fun at both ends. But it's also mean-spirited and corrupt at its core.

The derriere-flashing, dope-smoking, potty-mouthed antics of this antisocial E.T. justify every bit of the rating that the MPAA has slapped on him.

Color Me Kubrick is like a nice, deep, clear cocktail of ammonia on the rocks: bracing, comic, astonishing, all of which hide its poison center.

Attal, who resembles a young Robert De Niro, seems as addled as a director as his character is as a husband, throwing all manner of distractions onto the screen in order to divert the audience.

There's so much wrong with this movie.

It has the big themes that obsessed Kurosawa at his greatest, and that alone makes it worthwhile.

Has its creepy moments, but also its cliches.

Should never have been released, not even on video. It should have been placed in a hazardous waste container, encased in concrete and dumped into the Farrelly brothers' septic tank.

As inventive as The Laundromat is as an information vector, though, its semi-ironic tone is at odds with the content at hand: This is a movie that often feels like it’s fighting itself, asking viewers to be charmed by Oldman and Banderas’s characters one moment, and — maybe? — outraged the next.

It’s a story that promises major suspense, which only materializes occasionally.

I regret to report that Spinal Tap has become Dad Rock.

Ip Man 3 credibly conjures the period with soundstage sets, rock-and-roll oldies and slicked-back hair. But director Winston Yip shows less concern for authenticity in Ip’s antagonists.

John Carpenter's remake of The Thing is a wretched excess. It's not that originals are too sacred to be reinterpreted. They're period pieces that would have to be tinkered with to appear contemporary. They've simply been unlucky with their tinkerers, who haven't spruced up the pretexts without laying waste to the accompanying human interest, wit and thematic suggestiveness. [25 June 1982, p.C3]

With Born in China, Disneynature continues its tradition of ascribing human traits and emotions to wild creatures in ways that flirt with artificiality. Yet the documentary does manage to elicit a viewer’s awe and touch the heart.

Whenever a sometimes-marginalized community gets the chance to tell its story on screen, expectations can be high. India Sweets and Spices, which looks at an Indian American family, takes that expectation and turns it on its head, giving us a more nuanced, complicated, and problematic look at the people it’s about.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

The new Bond movie is pure nonsense art of the dadaist school; it follows the rules of the ridiculous as it turns narrative convention, thriller formula and special-effects set pieces into a manifesto of the purest gibberish.

The shadow of its past informs the latest incarnation of “Rigby,” a deeply moving, beautifully acted and ultimately mournful meditation on the gulfs that open between people, especially when tragedy falls like a cleaver.

The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.

The Chinese film offers this important take-away: Don't attempt to remake a Coen brothers movie, especially if you plan to turn the thing into a bizarre concoction of melodrama and slapstick comedy.

The biggest travesty isn't that the movie fails to stir "Rudy"-caliber emotions. It's that there was a meaningful story hiding behind the guise of a less serious genre.

There just isn’t a whole lot to say about this deliberately lowbrow, gleefully low-budget expansion of Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp’s half-hour stage play, originally performed by the duo in 2015 under the auspices of the Upright Citizens Brigade improv and sketch comedy group.

So those seeking a softer approach to the realities of both child- and animal-rearing should search elsewhere. The rest of us, meanwhile, are free to enjoy a well-made family drama pitched to young adults that's honest, tough and surprisingly engaging.

Dracula, which also stars Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Anthony Hopkins, is an evocative visual feast. But the meal is spectral, without the dramatic equivalent of nutritional value.

Some viewers will miss the warmth and boisterous family dynamics of its predecessors.

The lens through which the The Intouchables was filmed may be too rose-colored for some people's taste, but the window that these talented performers throw open -- a window onto the strange and touching friendship between two very different men -- is crystal clear.

The effects are effective. The humor is humorous and just self-referential enough to let you know the film doesn't take itself too seriously.

Screenwriter David Veloz makes his debut behind the camera with this stale and stodgily paced depiction of Stahl's highs and lows. The story, which Veloz also wrote, unfolds via a series of momentum-draining flashbacks. [18 Sep 1998, p.C07]

Though the setting is a retreat from the world, where not terribly much happens, within its confines Lorenzo gets an eye-opener about both human frailty and interconnectedness, courtesy of someone even more troubled than he is.

A surprisingly effective satire on heavy metal, on horror films and on those forces who see both of those as immoral and destructive to American society. [29 Oct 1986, p.D15]

With its urgent post-9/11 context and often brutal violence, it seems off-key to describe Body of Lies as a nifty political thriller, but that's what it is.

It’s a while before we learn anything, even a name, about the title character in The Wedding Guest. Played by Dev Patel, who delivers an unexpectedly stoic — yet predictably appealing — lead performance, he is a man of deep professionalism and equally deep mystery.

It's clever and original with an excellent cast. Ball's script catches a lot of the novel's pop, often word for word. I laughed a lot.

Antlers obeys the rules of horror — many of which are familiar, even at times cliche — while also bending them. It’s a creature feature at heart, yes, but its footing is grounded in the tragedies we hear about in the news every day.

This adaptation of Agota Kristof’s 1986 novel is impossible to take literally, yet too obscure to read between the lines.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.

Even with the odd misgiving or two, The Grand Seduction will effortlessly charm anyone susceptible to an endearing story told with modesty, wit and unprepossessing sweetness.

Though Warner Bros. boasts this is their most expensive animated project ever, it's hard to see where all that money went in terms of artistry or technical craftsmanship.

There’s never any question where this is all headed: a huge blowup argument and a tidy resolution. That being said, the cast is excellent.

In the end, however, when all Pacino's demons are bared, they don't add up to the poignant punchline you were set up for. The movie seems to have two or three finales too many -- a disturbing trend in all too many films of late.

What is surprising is the beguiling, unpretentious result: "Little Buddha," a modern fable about a Seattle boy believed to be a reincarnated Buddhist teacher, endears the audience to the Tibetan doctrine with a glowing, almost Disneyesque panache.

The acting in this ensemble is of such a high order that the movie simply takes you in and makes you feel these lives as real.

Watching it, you feel as if you were being forced at gunpoint to flip through hundreds and hundreds of back issues of National Geographic.

Unfortunately, Up In Smoke winds up as a hapless attempt to wrap a few very funny Cheech and Chong routines around a tired plot of counter-culture cliches. [6 Oct 1978, p.19]

Fortunately, Ahmed (an Oscar nominee for last year’s Sound of Metal and more recently seen in the niche Mogul Mowgli) delivers another one of his reliably watchable performances.

What power the movie has comes from its stars, especially the two boys, who give very different but very convincing performances.

Unromantic, nonsexual and hellaciously dull.

The script is much like a nine-inning sitcom that uses an obvious formula to tell a familiar story while garnering cheap laughs.

A film whose far-fetched foundation is overshadowed by the endearing story.

A perplexing conundrum of a film: a potentially profound concept buried beneath layers of amateurishness.

True to its title, as well as its flawed but sympathetic protagonist, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is more confused than cynical or opportunistic. Its bewilderment is contagious, and ultimately endearing.

The route of the film, like Lucy’s drive home, is preordained — a Google Maps version of a plot, with absolutely no surprises.

The domestic drama, like the heist story line, fizzles out in the end.

Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “State of Play”) does a passable job of evoking post-apocalyptic atmosphere in How I Live Now, although the film suffers from uneven tone — is it a teen romance or wartime adventure? — and, ultimately, a regrettable lack of focus.

Ejiofor was a revelation in "Dirty Pretty Things" as a Nigerian doctor forced to live illegally in London. Though he's charismatic as the husky-voiced Simon, he never transcends the movie's pandering agenda.

There’s little of the poetry that Perry teaches in the script, but the story’s mechanics are solid.

Brainstorm is like being caught in a Novocaine hurricane -- if you're not a numbskull when you walk in, you will be by the time you walk out. Talk about your brain drain. [30 Sept 1983, p.19]