Director Matt Tyrnauer mixes lively archival footage, including a memorable news interview with an angry Italian grandmother, with testimony from passionate experts to demonstrate the importance of city design.

For all his legitimate laments and pithy documentary moments, Moore gloats too much over his treasure. Where Moore makes his mark is basically where he shuts up and, like a good documentarian ought to, lets the subjects do the talking.

The movie gradually peters out.

Despite a glut of luridness, the story line feels essentially flat, as Keitel stumbles through New York in an immoral, unchanging haze. It is only the strength of Keitel's performance that gives his personality human dimension.

Emilia Pérez is a big, bulging bag of eye candy, in other words, and like a lot of candy, it can give you a sugar high without much genuine sustenance and perhaps an attendant headache.

There’s a low-key, lackadaisical charm about Sword of Trust that might lead viewers to mistake its modesty for lack of ambition. But there’s virtuosity at work in this beguiling comedy that’s no less impressive for being improvisational, understated and refreshingly self-effacing.

Monkey Man seems hellbent on establishing itself as the latest wrinkle in post-Wickian cinema: nonstop mayhem featuring an actor previously thought of as a sweetie pie.

The movie is adapted from David Mamet's play, "Sexual Perversity in Chicago," but it bears little relation to it -- screen writers Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue nod to Mamet's structure, appropriate a couple of monologues and take off on their own. They and the director, Ed Zwick, could have done a better job of opening the play up -- outside life rarely intrudes on this foursome, as it needn't in the theater, but must in movies. [2 July 1986, p.D1]

It's no accident that the word "great" appears in the title of the new film featuring Jim Henson's felt television puppets. The Great Muppet Caper. Like its predecessor, this film is its own best fan.

Siegel's depiction of the film's supporting characters too often borders on caricature. By the movie's strained, overheated climax, it's clear that Siegel, in his directing debut, is less interested in his protagonist as a character capable of transformation than as a human petri dish of futility and pathology.

As trite as Herself is in plot and emotional beats, what makes it worthwhile are the performances, which are all stellar.

As “Guardians” and, later, “Deadpool” doubled down on the snark, “Ant-Man” kept things light, its playfulness made all the more endearing by the boyish, twinkle-eyed persona of its star, Paul Rudd.

Visually dazzling, epic in its sweep and deeply romantic in its sensibility, The House of Sand is one of those films whose images and ideas linger long after the lights come on, having been burned into the viewer's consciousness.

Moretti mostly avoids weepy melodrama, choosing instead to focus on a side meditation about the slippery nature of reality.

A highly watchable slice-of-low-life entertainment. If this isn't her best role, it's Dunaway's gutsiest.

A baggy, at times brutal conglomeration of surprisingly deep character development and aggressively percussive action, The Winter Soldier is a comic-book movie only in its provenance.

Its palette isn't primary at all: It's full of secondary shadings.

Embraces reality, humanity and compassion, as leavened by wisdom and wit.

A hip, hilarious new animated feature.

It's a celebration of young American women, finding them smarter, tougher, shrewder, more rigorous, more persistent and more honest than any movie in many a moon.

Terrific at capturing what teenage behavior would look like on a grown-up.

The creation of teen-girl culture seems almost pitch-perfect. The flaw is the flaw of most works of muckraking when they are held to artistic standards: It's a question of proportion.

For sheer inventiveness of story, language, visuals and theme, The Brand New Testament is, quite nearly, a divine comedy.

The first two-thirds of Joyeux Noel are strangely inert, but the film ends with a moving and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on the definition of moral duty.

Street Smart as a whole is flat. Director Jerry Schatzberg's major problems are lethargic pacing and a strained plot.

Happily, director Peter Medak is aware of the fundamental absurdity of his ghost story. In fact, he's taken considerable care to compensate with virtuoso displays of scenic and atmospheric suggestiveness. The Changeling has a stylistic gusto and polish that were conspicuously missing from The Fog and The Amityville Horror. [28 Mar 1980, p.F1]

As the movie progresses, it becomes less interesting. There are some striking performances from the supporting cast, particularly Steven Berkoff's rabid portrayal of a rival gang lord. The rest of the film, in fact, could have benefited from a little of his mad-dog ferocity. As heroes, the Krays are more shadow than substance; they're stuck in metaphor.

It’s one that speaks not just to Presley’s (and, arguably, America’s) fall from grace, but to the imperfections — and, yes, the lofty ambitions — of this strange, in some ways beautiful and in some ways overburdened little film.