A lucid, emotionally affecting portrait not just of one man but of his times.

Lethal Weapon, that BMW of buddy movies, spawns Lethal Weapon 2, a blacktop-blistering bad-guy-getter that's nearly twice as much fun.

Her approach to the material is fresh, considering her focus on the messy, muddy landscape as a metaphor for the story's unbridled relationships. But with so much attention paid to mood and imagery, emotions seem to get lost in the wind.

Only Human, a Spanish farce, has absolutely no business being as laugh-out-loud funny as it often is.

Lamarr had been blessed — or, perhaps more appropriately, cursed — with leading an interesting life, and Dean’s film seems both too conventional and too shallow for its subject, who seems as hard to pigeonhole, at times, as to understand.

It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.

When Merchants of Doubt isn’t making you mad, it makes you very simply, and overwhelmingly, sad.

There’s no denying the humor and pathos of The Lady in the Van, just as there’s no use fending off the force of nature that is Smith.

Smarter and more poignant than the average chick flick.

The performances are so monotonic that you understand depicting authentic humanity is not the writer-director's goal: Each character has been reduced to a single unpleasant primal trait from which deviation is not permitted.

Late Night turns out to be an enormously pleasing fable about liberating oneself from the need to please. Like all comedians worth their salt, Kaling sets out to kill — but with kindness.

Ridley Scott has made a triumphant directing debut by creating a film that looks beautiful but never loses sight of the capacity for animosity and conflict lurking in the human psyche. [08 Mar 1978, p.D1]

Director Ron Underwood of the big-worm thriller "Tremors" effectively contrasts the bland life of the big city with the rough-hewn joys of the Big Country. And the three leads -- neurotic, brash and bonding like flies to No Pest strips -- give energetic if obvious performances. The whole dang thing is rather too blatant, but if you take your comedy with a little branch water, you'll want a shot of this 'un.

Amateurishly acted, clumsily edited and slapped together out of what looks like surveillance camera footage, the thing bumps along not so much on talent as on audacity.

With its droll underpinnings, Robocop does for cyborgs and Detroit what "Blade Runner" did for androids and L.A.

This jokey horror movie, adapted in part from King's short stories, is composed of three brief tales, the perfect form for him. Instead of having to create characters and a story, King simply has to come up with a gimmick and a punch line -- and on to the next.

The ensemble cast, reunited from the 2018 production, is never less than mesmerizing, even in the context of what is essentially a museum piece.

It's the Hardy Boys as id busters, an entertaining though mightily flawed scalp-tingler with a few too many magic moments: shooting stars and star-splashed skies and glittery ectoplasmic motes and ghosts that fly on strings.

Unfortunately the cast members are made into symbols themselves, bereft of blood and emotion, under the direction of the great John Huston. It's like a death pageant, grueling and dismal and distant...It is a dreary process at best. And this film is a tedious and time-consuming study of decay and lost values, lost souls and lost empires. [13 July 1984, p.17]

When Layne and Theron are together, The Old Guard transcends its pulp provenance to become a soulful, emotionally grounded portrait of female mentorship and mutual respect.

Plays less like a conventional medical thriller - think "Outbreak" - than like a dramatic reading of a "Nova" episode, performed by Hollywood's elite.

What turns out to be the most moving and meaningful thing about the film isn’t the song at its center, but the work ethic of a man who might have disappeared from the public eye for years at a time but never stopped sweating every word.

Belongs, wholly and completely, to Clarkson, who delivers Joy's mordant asides and withering observations with a flawless balance of tartness and vulnerability.

Suddenly, you're looking at life in his (Thornton's) jaundiced way and laughing with a sense of vicarious liberation, even when he says the most outrageous things -- to children, no less. And I daresay you can still recover your holiday spirit when you're through laughing.

One needn't have a Stratocaster moldering in the closet at home to get a kick out of It Might Get Loud.

Places in the Heart grapples with great and important themes -- sexism, racism, grief, despair -- and in aiming high it achieves much. Not quite as much, perhaps, as its primary creator, Robert Benton, might have hoped for, but enough to make it a distinguished film that is both moving and provocative. [21 Sep 1984, p.C1]

As untidy and un-profound as “Color” may be, Stanley swings for the fences, when almost any other director-in-exile would have tried to get back in Hollywood’s good graces with an act of penance. Score one for the eccentrics of the world.

Its hackneyed themes prevent the sci-fi flick from feeling like anything more than well-directed mediocrity.