Although his character might be a one-trick pony, Bateman’s directing proves he’s got skills to spare.

Its NBA all-star cast — well hidden under layers of makeup — has a winning chemistry making them easy to root for.

The premise is so surrealistically improbable that if Frankenheimer's approach weren't so straight-faced it might be preposterously entertaining. But the director's shoulders are braced for Atlas duty and he fails to exploit the loony potential in Stephen Peters and Kenneth Ross's script.

Fan or not, it's hard not to give in to Perry's endearing charms.

In a light-hearted way, it portrays the Allies as children, their leaders as collaborators, a Nazi POW camp as boys' summer camp and the conflict as color war. And what's more, the Allied team gets so excited that they would rather win the game than escape from their captors. The whole concept is so outrageous that it hardly leaves time for one to consider the details. [31 July 1981, p.17]

The Look of Love also is filled with acres and acres of naked flesh, but it’s the storytelling that keeps you engaged.

If you go to this, anticipate neither an endearing Quaid-Ryan vehicle nor a fully satisfying art film. By trying to satisfy opposing demands, Kloves misses the spirit of both and is left only with flesh and bone.

It trickles and moseys about on its old good time, punctuated by guffaws and thigh-slapping and the occasional eyeball-blasting jolt from the white lightning, but never really manages to achieve the formal status of "story."

Wildly uneven but often quite funny, The Grand allows its actors to act out, get the "E!" out of their systems and give the Christopher Guest treatment to professional gambling without Christopher Guest, with whom it would have been funnier and a lot more acerbic.

A movie that jumps between two worlds can be a powerful experience, as any fan of "The Wizard of Oz," "Back to the Future" or "The Terminator" can tell you. But this phoned-in epic is simply a celebration of the inauthentic.

Like the man himself, Albert Nobbs is a sweet, sad, sensitive little film, a haunting reminder that each of us, on some level, is impersonating someone.

Like too many Thanksgiving dinners, too much squabbling really wreaks havoc on the digestion. Football, anyone?

All in all, it's like a bachelor's apartment: a complete mess.

An engaging exercise in discreet, incisive and good-humored hokum. Although Rocky III is a vivid piece of popular filmmaking and a considerable bit of harmless fun, the star doesn't seem to derive as much pleasure from the experience as he should.

But nature is messy, and Chimpanzee doesn't shrink from that, to its credit. Fothergill and Linfield at least exercise discretion when their cameras capture disturbing turns of event.

Don’t expect more of Teen Spirit than the movie can deliver: It’s an unapologetically slight story about a girl with ambitions that many would call shallow. But even as it obeys the rules of the Cinderella story in many ways, it defies them in some others.

Southpaw may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those faults lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he’s in.

While the movie doesn’t shy away from confronting the obstacles of foster parenthood, it never fully earns its happy ending.

Ultimately, Happy Death Day 2U doesn’t live up to its aspirations. Landon’s script may be better than his direction, but he leaves a potentially resonant subplot — one that involves existential questions — flat and lifeless, as if our most important choices were of no more consequence than a joystick maneuver.

Regina King gives a lively, convincing portrayal of pioneering U.S. Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm in “Shirley,” an earnest, curiously listless biopic of a woman whose legacy suffuses modern life, even as it goes unacknowledged.

The film is less a look into the Fed’s head than a presentation of its history, going back even farther than its creation in 1913, in response to a series of early 20th-century banking panics.

Keys isn't given much to do except look as though she's posing for an album cover, but Okonedo's face is a marvel. Every thought, every emotion flickers across it like clouds obscuring the sun.

The relatable theme of the magical misfit may not be entirely original. But as brought to life by Burton, Riggs’s fictional vision of a world in which the nonconformist can flourish serves as both a self-portrait of the auteur and a “Wonderland”-like looking glass in which many in the audience will no doubt see a reflection of themselves.

Zellweger is certainly likable as Beatrix, but as an upper-class English lady of a century ago, she enunciates her words as if sucking a lemon -- you almost start to wonder if you've stumbled into a satire of "Masterpiece Theatre."

Christine does indeed suffer from the preposterous, low-octane nature of the devil-car pretext. But this satanic nonsense is saved from strictly facetious appeal by a few sensational pictorial effects, notably the sights of Christine speeding after a victim while engulfed in flames or miraculously repairing her own battered body, and by the no-nonsense performances of an excellent cast, especially Keith Gordon as the obsessed and transformed Arnie Cunningham.

Piranhas is no documentary, but it plays out with a deadpan style that is deeply unsettling.

The two teams, older and mostly fatter, train and play, and I trust I won't be ruining anything for you if I say there are no surprises. Screenwriter Ron Shelton has constructed a stand-up-and-cheer machine, and while the machine works, it doesn't make you feel any better about being run through it.

The First Monday in May isn’t a deep examination of its subjects, but at least it’s breathtaking to look at.

More stomach-churning than soul-chilling. The list of on-screen atrocities includes attacks by nail gun, electric carving knife, chain saw, shotgun, crowbar and chunk of ceramic from a broken toilet tank, used as a crude bludgeon.

In the Name of My Daughter has good intentions of taking a sensationalistic riddle and turning it into a human story. But the pendulum ultimately swings too far, leaving an explosive tale behind in favor of one that fizzles out.

By now, it must be said, the quips are beginning to wear a little thin, the vinyl-era needle drops a little less cool, the quotation marks a little more obvious among the ironic references and self-mocking bonhomie. Still, Thor: Love and Thunder is out for a good time, even if the journey doesn’t feel quite so novel or giddily buoyant.

The underwhelming, only fitfully amusing movie left me hungry for more.

A mostly smart and sexy crime drama, even if it loses steam by the time the ridiculous ending rolls around.

The story, a half-baked one about treachery and greed, meanders to an unsatisfactory ending with a punch line that, well, doesn't punch very hard.

The film should at least be wise and three-dimensional enough to see Ann's motivations as a source of mystery as much as heroic self-empowerment. This one-dimensional ennoblement doesn't sit quite right.

There's something hideously pretentious about the whole thing.

It's not every day that movies present a Teutonic character in SS uniform as an unambiguously moral hero, so enjoy this rarity. And the film.

It is not bad on its own terms, and it is certainly engrossing, but it comes nowhere near the power and sordid glory of the original.

A loud, choppily edited and surprisingly unengaging portrait of speed demons.