Where The Pale Blue Eye succeeds best is in the way it shows how Edgar — yet to become the writer of ghoulish, moody atmosphere and delicious morbidity we remember — got some of his enduring ideas about the coexistence of depravity and beauty. The movie only stumbles when it succumbs, here and there, to the more trivial tropes and jump scares of the contemporary thriller.

Sure, there’s an undeniable pleasure from watching Pacino and Hunter work the screen, but the syrupy, symbol-heavy script by first-time feature writer Paul Logan is weighed down further by cliches and false notes.

The Man Who Knew Infinity tells a great story. It’s just that it’s a little too by-the-book to make anything other than a so-so movie.

Everything and everyone you liked in the original are there. But GB II often seems like "Ghostbusters: The Preview Reel, Extended Mix," with its rather see-through buffet of special effects, comic bits and music-video transitions.

In its second half, “Kundo” becomes robust and exhilarating. The filmmakers stage cast-of-dozens battle scenes and one-on-one showdowns with equal brio.

The Brit who brought us such violent delights as “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver” has just the right mixture of empathy and impishness to turn King’s cautionary tale into a would-be blockbuster with integrity.

My Girl may well have been intended as a tender way for parents to explain difficult subjects to their kids, but this botch of a movie explains nothing. Its fake nostalgia and cod compassion are as painfully awkward as adolescence itself and about as funny as a corpse.

Dinner for Schmucks has already raised hackles in the Yiddish-speaking community for the breathtakingly offensive epithet in its title (and it's not "dinner"). But it turns out that this comedy of humiliation, starring Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, isn't nearly as off-putting as it might have been.

It's nothing but style and noise, threadbare of content, empty of ideas. Is it anything? Not really.

The occasional big moments are stunning, and kids from the ages of, say, 6 years to 6 years and 3 days will love it. Anyone younger will be scared; anyone older, bored.

A grating and sinister comedy on the dangers of television. This mean-spirited marriage of cautionary tale and thriller-satire follows the increasingly vicious antics of a deranged cable installer who stalks a preferred customer.

In this touching story of boy toys helping boy toys, it's almost impossible to root for characters who are dead in the first place.

The Fluffy Movie’s principal weakness is that it’s not much of a movie. There’s no particular reason to watch this in a theater rather than on television.

Even Lawrence, in the end, is a letdown. As entertaining and committed as she is — and she’s easily the best thing about Joy — the actress ultimately can’t sell a souffle that’s half baked.

So why bother with this earnest but imperfect impersonation when the original artists are readily available on VHS and DVD?

Director Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter) settles for a movie of pat moralism, a pamphleteer's parable of how drugs destroy families.

An extraordinarily sensual movie with its own silly integrity.

What might have been a fascinating, intimate portrait turns into something much less compelling when Clark tries to impose a sex-and-action-packed narrative on the proceedings.

An inspired comedy title, Stir Crazy blends several inventive, high-spirited performing talents into a tangy, cheerful entertainment. [12 Dec 1980, p.E1]

The movie is an orgiastic celebration of big, sloppy emotions; it's the film equivalent of "Feelings." And what we're supposed to take from it is a renewed faith in the indomitable strength of women. But with all this big acting and all these stars elbowing for space in front of the camera, the film comes across as something quite the opposite of what was intended, not a tribute to femininity but a kind of grotesque parody -- a corn-pone variation on "The Women."

Swifter comedic timing and a clearer narrative thread might have helped center this peculiar adaptation of Jonathan Ames's 1998 novel of the same name.

Although Gameau’s film includes a fair amount of science, he and his helpers sweeten the film’s statistics, delivering them in clever, accessible ways.

Black Rain is chock-full of moments, jazzy scenery and snazzy bits of dialogue, and stuffed with steroids. It's big, maybe too big for its shallow notions and commonplace structure. But it is also beautiful and terrible in the same ways that other Scott movies have been eye-filling. With its teeming Asian landscape, its dark kaleidoscopic palette and its heavily layered composition, it's reminiscent of Blade Runner. But this is an atmosphere that needs Sam Spade, not Dirty Harry.

Has bells and whistles, superb technical sophistication and dazzling visual effects, sound, fury and Reese Witherspoon. What it doesn't have is heart. Like so many vehicles that have popped out from the DreamWorks Animation snark tank, Monsters vs. Aliens is too clever by half.

Do you Bean? If you do Bean, rejoice. Bean is back. If you don't Bean, here's a chance to start. Bean now, or forever hold your peace.

Why this movie -- a rushed, wildly uneven, tonally jumbled caricature -- and why now?

Never makes a subatomic particle of melodramatic or psychological sense yet nevertheless provokes an overwhelming proportion of women spectators into screaming fits. [19 Aug 1981, p.C1]

This was originally rated NC-17, and somehow, I'm thinking that version will survive on DVD.

On the whole, Twilight works as both love story and vampire story, thanks mainly to the performances of its principals, Pattinson and Stewart.

Mad Max just sails off into nonsense.

As Omalu, Smith gives an emotional performance, bolstered by capable supporting players. Albert Brooks is especially good as Omalu’s wry boss and chief advocate, Cyril Wecht, lightening the film’s otherwise gloomy mood.

The movie isn't exactly full of twists and turns, but neither is it a long, hard slog.

It's too bad the filmmakers didn't take a breath, look at the rushes and see what a comedic gem they had. With just a few tweaks, The Merry Gentleman could have made a wickedly funny parody of the over-earnest, lyrically hard-edged indie movie. But it's too late for do-overs.

Though writer-director Richard Shepard (“The Matador”) knows how to spin a yarn about the vicissitudes of fate, Dom’s adventures make for a pretty thin garment in which to cloth such an outsize antihero.

Mommie Dearest, the film version of Christina Crawford's poison-pen memoir of her adoptive mother, Joan Crawford, looms as wretched excess. Considering the source, however, this ill-advised and disreputable movie could have been worse.

The director raises the question that haunts the whole film: Who should feel shame: gay Muslims or the Muslims who oppress them?

For all of its old-fashioned discretion, the movie lacks vitality. As a love story it is a complete bust, but beyond that, it is missing a reason to be.

We're talking a thriller about property ownership. This is a yuppie conceit; this is not interesting to human beings. What's the moral behind "Pacific," anyway? Always Check Your References?

Madsen may not be the most egregiously untalented of the new movie beauties, but she's close to it. As Dolly, she presents a Southern accent as ludicrous as any in captivity; she keeps trying for Blanche DuBois and coming out with Gomer Pyle.

X marks the G-spot perhaps, for this is an orgiastic comedy of terrors and errors.

Despite its plentiful and playful sexuality, this dose of Spanish fly is anything but exciting.

Unfortunately, darkness seems to have prevailed over love in a tale that falls flat.

The most damning assessment comes from animator-historian John Canemaker, who concludes that Disney's ethnically neutered South American output "gagged it up so that the American influence overwhelmed the cultural" influence of South America.

From its opening shots, the film is like an invigorating elixir, a movie pick-me-up that delivers thrills and races your pulse but keeps your head in gear too. It's divinely frivolous, nearly perfect fun.

A bodice-ripper for intellectuals.

Less a movie than an act of vandalism.

This is Disney at its live-action best and brightest.

The suspense may be fraudulently manufactured but it captivates us nevertheless, and by the end we're reduced to the bloodlusting anonymity of the true culprits in all this jaded junk, and that is the TV audience.

Hanks is great; the movie isn't.

The film’s counterintuitive success is largely due to Derbez, who demonstrates why he is beloved, both south and north of the border.

Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago may not be entirely brilliant, but it’s at the very least inspiring.

The one bright spot in this film is Modine's performance as Louden. Modine is so earnest and likable that even the oft-seen "big match" climax holds your attention. But a fine leading performance and a muscle-bound villain can't rescue this trite tale.ick. [15 Feb 1985, p.30]

Any resemblance to last year's breakout comedy hit "Bridesmaids" is purely intended in a film that seeks the same kind of liberated raunch but too often succumbs to talky, edgy-for-its-own sake glibness.

Snyder tries to up the spectacle ante with ever more explosions, crashes, thermal blasts, topological realignments, gunfire and mano-a-mano fistfights. But the result is a punishing sense of diminishing returns and a genre that has finally reached the point of mayhem-induced exhaustion.

An acceptable scene-setter, Carpenter reveals glaring inadequacies as a storyteller. [15 Feb 1980, p.C3]

The Mission is everything a movie should be -- magnificently produced, epic in scope, serious in theme -- everything, that is, but good. Hamstrung by an unworkable script, the disastrous casting of Robert De Niro and, presumably, the strain of shooting in the Colombian jungle, director Roland Joffe' has come up with an indigestible lump of sanctimony that rarely goes beyond its good intentions.

Even if a good phone-sex movie does exist, For a Good Time, Call . . . is woefully, definitively not it.

A fable that is by turns antic, scary, sweet and, in the end, slightly soulless. In other words, it's a heartwarmer that doesn't have much of a heart itself.

Desperado also has some entertaining twists, some sexy goings-on, but on the whole, watching the film is about as much fun as sitting on a cactus.

It's a bold exercise, an interesting experiment, but a movie it ain't.

A picture as secondhand and conventional as The Woman in Red can't generate much enthusiasm, but it displays more buoyancy and incidental comic appeal than one anticipates. Wilder's judgment hasn't proved especially sound, so perhaps it's commercially prudent to pin him down to an apparently reliable pretext or scenario. Still, the results would probably have been more satisfying if his nervous keepers had permitted this sometimes misguided but endearing mutt of a funnyman a slightly longer leash in a slightly roomier kennel. [16 Aug 1984, p.B2]

As much as Guy Ritchie’s uber-violent, stakes-free, World War II action comedy caper “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” milks its “based on a true story” bona fides, it’s more akin to the last decade’s glut of slick, cool-guy popcorn pictures (including his own) than any meaningful retelling of real heroism.

Is it a good movie? Not particularly. But if you’re a forgiving filmgoer in need of a smile, it’s a reasonable diversion, one that ties up its message of love — if a bit too neatly — into a holiday bow.

So I expect the Janeites who love the author will feel themselves ill-served by the film, which appears to have even less basis in fact than "Shakespeare in Love." As for the rest of us, the question is simpler: Is it worth the eight bucks?

Soccer needs this movie like Georgia needed "Deliverance."

A choppy and occasionally unsure film, one that doesn't achieve the superb tonal control of "The Ice Storm," but that certainly doesn't represent an unqualified disaster on a par with Lee's first attempt at the western, "Ride With the Devil."

I'd give this movie about half a miracle.

As written by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, The Relic deserved to be taken off the shelf; as adapted by a quartet of screenwriters and directed by Peter Hyams, it should have been left on one.

In a jovial, if superficial way, he offers some perspective on the men behind the banana hammocks.

Nothing more than an action-packed bagatelle masquerading as history.

Mary Stuart Masterson, a delicate blond, steals the show as the sensitive gal under the tomboy's leather jacket, her natural magnetism offsetting the story's predictability.

The Brothers Bloom is all about exploding forms, tropes and archetypes. But it's also a charmer, a witty sandbagging of one's resistance to fairy tale and a movie afflicted with a kind of comic Tourette's syndrome.

Karate Kid II doesn't give us any emotional movement in Daniel's character, or Miyagi's, or their relationship, either -- it just recapitulates them. The only character who changes in the story, in fact, is Sato, whom you couldn't care a fried fig about.

While Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski and Lana Wachowski haven't necessarily expanded on Mitchell's book, they've done a superlative job making it legible onscreen. Cloud Atlas deserves praise if only for not being the baggy, pretentious disaster it could have been in other hands.

The Attorney can be melodramatic, and first-time feature director Yang Woo-seok is not yet a singular filmmaker. But the movie is carried by its rousing pro- democracy message and a lively performance from the versatile leading man.

The state of uncertainty persists for the entire film, as you wait in vain for the director to tie the pieces together.

Sure, maybe Clifford doesn’t take the cinematic art form to a new level. All the same, it’s funny and sweet. This old dog may not have many new tricks, but sometimes being a good boy will do.

For all his creepy tendencies, Hitchcock is portrayed mostly sympathetically in Hitchcock, in which Sir Anthony Hopkins plays the corpulent British auteur with a combination of hauteur and playfulness.

Hardly anything feels real, but what feels even more unreal is Hartnett with a cloying, sentimental, self-pitying performance. The liveliest thing in the film is the great Jackson, slumming again in a role miles beneath him.

When it comes to writing the poetry that Kalindra recites, Murray knows how to do more with less; he needs to apply that lesson to his filmmaking, too.

The problem with Hyde Park on Hudson isn't its suggestion of FDR's dark side. That complexity, and Murray's spot-on portrayal of a man juggling myriad pressures and demands, from petty to momentous, marks one of the film's greatest strengths. It's that Daisy rarely comes into her own as more than the pliant emotional helpmeet to the Great Man.

Demon Seed might have been a genuinely witty and terrifying thriller if someone had taken advantage of the story's glaring sadomasochistic implications. Nevertheless, Cammell plays it dumb at a thematic level, ignoring the sci-fi sexual bondage satire staring him in the face. [08 Apr 1977, p.B11]

Dark Shadows doesn't know where it wants to dwell: in the eerie, subversive penumbra suggested by its title or in playful, go-for-broke camp.

Floating in an unconvincing middle ground between realism and madcap fantasy, The Fall of the American Empire is at its best when Arcand is taking his potshots from a sly side angle.

As a character study, Ip Man: The Final Fight would be more convincing if it didn’t look so distractingly like a Hollywood musical.

The movie isn't funny in any big way so much as recognizable in its patterns of dysfunction, delusion and futility. But you believe in it, because you believe in the small but decent lives of its characters, a rare experience for a hot weekend in June.

If a few decent actors play their roles and defend their turf, it doesn't matter how preposterous the whole proposition is.

An overture to the subject rather than a profound study.

It just never began to work for me, and the sub story behind the ghost story is far more interesting than the ghost story in front of the sub story.

Occasional clumsiness is easily coated over by the movie's overarching goodwill.

All the movie's treacheries, deceptions and story twists are marred by our lack of innocence. We see the big picture way before the characters do, and that pushes us right out of the movie and back into our seats -- the last place we want to be.

Money Monster, which is at its best when it’s at its most crisply realistic and timely, suffers from the kind of only-in-Hollywood plot twists and eye-rolling exaggeration that results in smarter than average pulp, but pulp nonetheless.

Eventually — perhaps inevitably — Yesterday overplays its hand, with Curtis seemingly at a loss for how to resolve a story that, after its initial premise has been mined for maximum humor and poignancy, has very few places to go.

John Landis must have entertained greater aspirations for his new movie, "An American Werewolf in London," than the dismaying results he's stuck with -- a wasted clever title and a minor fiasco destined for an obscure niche in the scrapheap of horror movies.

So much of Ambulance works like a charm, but acting-wise, it could use a deeper bench.

Even DeMonaco seems bored by the sieges, escapes and gun battles. Silly one-liners are the only saving grace, and that's because such acting veterans as Williamson know how to sell them.

An overextended, episodic disappointment.

For the most part, American movies concern the middle class, console the poor and celebrate the rich, and Schrader tried to pay blue-collar culture its due. He may have worked an honest day, but he didn't come up with an honest drama.