Everybody wants a happy ending. But that doesn’t mean that we should always get the one we want. It’s fine, if also cliche, to be reminded that good will triumph over evil. But it would make for a deeper and more powerful lesson — one that, after nine movies, might leave a lasting dent in the heart — if the hero actually had to give up something, or someone, that didn’t feel like a tiniest bit of a cop-out.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

The movie doesn't so much end as reach a stopping point and limp hurriedly off-screen, like a bad stand-up chased out by boo birds. But God, is it funny.

Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

And while it's intermittently engaging, the drama's flatter than a sucker's wallet.

It's a story that can be transplanted from genre to genre, because we never grow tired of it, which is to say that it fits snugly into the paranoid drift of American movies, and the value we place on one honest man with a gun.

If it’s not quite as good as the doll’s origin story, “Creation,” it’s still way more fun than any sequel — especially one this deep into a franchise — has any right to be.

Except for the last five minutes, Robin Hood is the story of the radicalization of some guy named Longstride. Who?

More tasteful, sensitive and original than you might imagine.

Feels more like an overblown TV special than a grand theatrical release.

Lumet and his inspired collaborators have succeeded in fabricating and navigating one majectic, rabble-rousing Mother Ship of a musical, a sublimely happy moviegoing experience. [27 Oct 1978, p.D1]

Until those final moments, Flightplan succeeds admirably, both as a sophisticated psychological thriller and as an example of, if not great art, then superb craftsmanship.

Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

In today's mouse-toting, instant-gratification world, this kind of old-fashioned, character-driven slapstick is wonderfully incompatible. It's a grumpy last hurrah.

Despite a powerful performance by Tahar Rahim in the title role, and despite such marquee names as Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in the supporting roles of Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and Stu Couch, the Marine lawyer assigned to prosecute him — despite scenes of grotesque abuse that inflame the conscience — the movie lands, through no fault of its own other than timing, with a whiff of been-there, done-that.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

Director Harold Ramis, who managed to stop time in the sunny comic masterpiece "Groundhog Day," tries a different tack in this lesser though nonetheless hilarious caper.

Trolls Band Together is a glitter-encrusted variety pack of a movie. Packed with millennial boy-band humor, sibling love and snippets of pop songs, the third film in the Trolls franchise is an explosion of color tailored to a new generation of parents and their Gen Alpha kids.

The movie is colorful and pretty, and Smith brings a fresh, more street-wise approach to his character, while still honoring the motor-mouthed spirit of Williams’s scene-stealing performance.

A British black comedy, saves its best for last -- and God bless Maggie Smith for, well, being Maggie Smith -- but that requires sitting through a frustrating, uneven hour of sluggish preamble.

There’s a nugget of . . . maybe not wisdom, but something gristly worth chewing on here, if you have the stomach to stick your hand into gaping intestines, pull it out and wipe off the blood. I wouldn’t call it food for thought, but it gives “Forever” a slightly higher nutritional value than some of its predecessors.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.

Ma is, at heart, an overly familiar story of terrorized teens, albeit one that manages to find a few new twists to that tired trope.

The trick is to make the already ridiculous completely outrageous. Sometimes the family succeeds, like in Keenen Ivory Wayans's 1988 spoof of '70s films I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Sometimes they fail, like in the waning days of the Fox television series In Living Color. In this movie, they succeed, for the most part.

Equally earnest and unconvincing.

Unfortunately, Nair's film doesn't so much end as fall off a cliff, the ultimate victim of viewers' heightened expectations that this briskly paced story will take them someplace -- other than around the block in a horse-drawn carriage.

Tea With Mussolini is really about the first women in the Italian director's life. It's drawn from a single chapter of his book but suffers from a lack of focus. None of these great ladies is willing to give up center stage; nor, for that matter, are the grande dames who bring them so vividly to life.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

The story is as stale as prison air and so is the star. [25 Mar 1983, p.18]

Mischiefin other words, is echt teen sex comedy, hitting its marks in the way a skilled carpenter drives home his millionth nail. Even the deviations from the formula, like the movie's sweet, naive tone, are only predictable extensions of the formula.

Monster Hunt has visual appeal to spare, but the allure ends there.

As a director, Solondz seems to have his own locked-in fate -- to favor caricature over compassion -- and his movies are the worse for it.

It’s both a success and a shortcoming of Britt-Marie Was Here that the flashbacks to her younger years, and the discovery of what happened to her more free-spirited sister, represent the film at its fullest emotional capacity.

Despite a snoozer of a pat ending that strains to bring its themes full circle, the live-action iteration at least proves that the franchise, with its notion of ohana and several films, spin-off series and countless plushies sold to date, hasn’t lost all its heft — just its original spark.

In Lost Highway, David Lynch dabbles in spooky, chilly implication and a sort of hip incoherence.

She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

There isn't much to the movie, and you can see where it's going from kilometers away. But [Daniel] Auteuil gives the silliness a surprising heft.

As a director, Penn knows how to create arresting tableaus that draw the eye and spark the viewer’s own sensory past. As an actor, no one is better at finding honesty in the moment. Like the antihero at its center, the essence of Flag Day remains tantalizingly elusive, potently evoked but never fully realized.