A good as the performances are, and as dutiful as Nolan has been in preserving the Kane legacy in Batman Begins, there's something joyless about the enterprise.

Feels like a prolonged campfire conversation, filled with weathered, measured talk about holistic thinking and finding a new perspective.

Warmhearted, wonderfully witty.

A darkly interesting distraction but not much more.

Rush is too sinfully good for the drama he's in.

Amelie is joie de vivre in a nougat.

The whole thing is so inconsistent, with intermittent slow motion and curious motivations, that you have to finally just accept things like a disappearing narrator as par for the course.

Richen makes excellent use of what remains.

Lieberman and Gordon direct this almost family affair with a touch that is paradoxically light yet broad, from a screenplay expanded from their 2020 short by the same name.

If the movie is meant to uncover any "big scandals," it's a disappointment. The investigator, in one surprising sequence, goes through a number of alleged "torture" photos and acknowledges that the vast majority of them represent "standard operating procedure." That is supposed to be the film's kicker: not what was illegal but how much was legal.

The excitement comes from Frakes's direction -- his liveliness, and his pleasure in looking at, and showing us, events and images.

After delivering scene-stealing turns in "The 40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up" Rudd claims the much-deserved spotlight in I Love You, Man, which in its own endearing way tweaks the very same male-bonding pieties that those movies made a fortune celebrating.

Through the lens of the eminence sleaze at its center, Where’s My Roy Cohn? offers as cogent a primer as any on how we got here. Meanwhile, somewhere down there, Roy Cohn is having the last, bitter laugh.

Most revelatory here is Malli, who defies the stereotype of submission and subservience and emerges as a woman of self-possession and substance. (The earthily beautiful Bat-Sheva Rand infuses the character with a generous dollop of her own zaftig sensuality.)

The Walk satisfies as an absorbing yarn of authority-flouting ad­ven­ture and as an example of stomach-flipping you-are-there-ness. The journey it offers viewers doesn’t just span 140 feet, but also an ethereal, now-vanished, world.

A movie that, in the story of one man dying, shows us all how to live.

The movie, not to mention the company, deserves praise for showing the challenges as well as the triumphs; Dior and I doesn’t shy away from conflicts when they arise. This isn’t marketing material. It’s a real look at a fascinating line of work.

Sundown is at its most engrossing as an individual portrait, even if its inscrutable subject is a person to whom virtually no (sane) viewer will relate. Roth is still a great and mesmerizing actor, even when he’s drifting, vacantly, through a hellscape.

A Complete Unknown just tells the story. But maybe that’s enough for a fresh generation to feel the joy of his apostasy at a moment when the world seems once more poised on a precipice of chicanery, treachery and disaster. If so, well, how does it feel?

It's an exhausting and exhilarating movie about the birth of "the daily miracle." Thanks to a caffeinated cast and hyperactive script, director Ron Howard delivers The Paper with a bang.

Long Way North combines thrilling ad­ven­ture with a slightly somber mood. It’s a beautiful trip, even if it’s a little chilly and sad when it finally gets to where it’s going.

Give credit to Berg for keeping Bissinger's all-too-true ending intact. It's a doozy.

To completely sabotage the work, there is an insipid affair between Manon and a young teacher, Bernard (Hippolyte Girardot). Their juvenile romance blunts the epic effect that Berri obviously is trying to create.

The point being: Even when questions of life and death loom large, someone still has to make dinner. That observation doesn’t make Ordinary Love a major motion picture event. But it does, in its own quiet, wise way, nudge it just a little bit closer to the extraordinary.

All that’s missing, really, is a story. “The Bikeriders” is almost good enough to convince us we don’t need one.

A chalice of unpretentious delight, flowing over with goodwill, a cheeky love for soccer and, uh, Buddhist humor.

Until the movie gets lost in its ultimately convoluted conceit, however, it's a superb modulation of menace, tension, mystery and eroticism.

Penn's performance is the movie's ultimate grace note. As funny and ingenious as Allen's films can get, they are rarely known for depth of character.

This is a stirring movie, if relentless intensity, handheld camera work, cover-your-eyes violence and ear-splitting yelling matches are what you're craving.

Funny without being flip.

With its exquisite depictions of suffering, The Broken Circle Breakdown is not always easy to watch. But, as in life, sometimes there’s beauty to be found in the pain.

Regrettably, director Hal Ashby has allowed both the protagonist, folk-singer Woody Guthrie, played with surprising canniness and authority by David Carradine, and the Depression setting to drift away in pictorial reverie and dramatically evasive heroworship. [16 Feb 1977, p.B1]

The documentary is a compelling indictment of the way commerce drives the art market. But the movie’s methodology is hit-or-miss, jumping from one interview to another, to jarring effect.

It should be required viewing before going into a supermarket, McDonald's or your very own refrigerator.

His witty, endearing performance in the title role of Hal Needham's terrific new pick-me-up, Hooper, a rousing and sweet-tempered sentimental comedy about the professional vicissitudes and fellowship of movie stuntmen, should finally secure Reynolds a preeminent position in the affections of contemporary moviegoers.

Despite Allen's sincere face; Bridges' quirky, effective portrayal; some exquisite effects; and many funny moments, the film falters at the finish, if not a little before. Mostly it never delivers what it promises -- an alien with all the right answers. [14 Dec 1984, p.31]

Making a film about mob violence while showing restraint and humanism is a difficult procedure. Singleton and screenwriter Poirier search for some gradations within the white ranks, but for the most part, every cracker's a psycho with a short, smoking fuse.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is beautiful because Allen is now decidedly in control of this phase of his career, which blends the sharpness of his older dramas with a newly acquired expatriate hipness.

It's also a double-barreled bummer. There's no excitement in the bank-robbing, no thrill of the chase, no emotion over justice served or thwarted. Depp's Dillinger is neither charming nor despicable, nor does he occupy that delicious gray area between the two. His spree unspools dispassionately, cold as a Colt .380.

Resurrection ultimately leaves us, like Gwyn, wondering if the story that’s just been dropped in our laps — a kind of sick, surreal poetry, fashioned out of curdled blood and guts — is a new breed of monster movie or some old-fashioned metaphor of loss made flesh. Sadly, given its acting pedigree, it doesn’t really work on either level.

As Tsotsi, Chweneyagae turns his face into a living battle mask -- curved, molded and sandpapered into smooth ruthlessness. But as the story unfolds, Tsotsi's mask begins to crack, and his humanity begins to flow through.

Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman's shaky-camera, cinema-verite-style dramedy meanders in charming fashion.

Alternately edifying and alarming film about nuclear proliferation.

Rather than probe Giacometti and Lord’s curiously arms-length relationship, Final Portrait is at its best simply watching the artist work — the “artist,” in this case, meaning both Giacometti and Rush.

Mostly, this is a problem of storytelling, not acting. Moss is riveting, even if the material is not.

The film’s most profound subject matter may simply be the passage of time.

The characters in The Nice Guys often ask each other if they’re good or bad, a choice the movie doesn’t want to force the audience to make. Instead it settles for making good on the title, occupying the nice, mushy middle — perhaps unfocused and off-balance at times, but conveying a sense of buoyancy that’s as cheerfully contagious as it is freewheeling.

Robbins, who scripted and directed, creates more than enough on his own. Bob's un-hackneyed character is the prime case in point.

Sayles is no storyteller; despite the verve of its language, The Brother From Another Planet eventually sags of its own weight.

Often astonishingly beautiful, but in a way that's the problem: You wonder what visionaries such as Tim Burton or Michel Gondry might have done with the material. As it is, "Benjamin Button" is little more than "Gump" by way of "Dorian Gray." It plays too safe when it should be letting its freak flag fly.

A celebration of buddies and butts, it's an unconventionally structured, wonderfully acted group portrait of the regulars at a Brooklyn cigar store.

Kwietniowski has managed to create a surprisingly engrossing and suspenseful narrative without resorting to cosmetics, melodrama or hype.

A scrappy independent film that packs the same emotional punch as "Rocky."

The intelligence and artistry with which Cutter's Way dresses up the top few cliches of the 1980s is amazing. This is a film with brittle dialogue, complicated acting and visual subtlety in the service of a trite and unworkable story. [20 Nov 1981, p.21]

It’s an informative, if slightly unstructured, narrative, yet it plays more like a horror story.

There is a ritualistic, even tribal, quality to DaCosta’s telling that suggests a truth to the story untethered to time or place: Any woman confined like Hedda is will strive to escape, one way or another.

Diane Keaton's kooky sensibilities as a director are ideally suited to the sweet madness of Unstrung Heroes.

Rodeo looks like a documentary but finally makes a reckless swerve toward the mythic.

The Friend is a better dog movie than it is a people movie, but it’s such a wonderful dog movie that you may not mind that the people are merely fine.

As a 30-something coming-of-age story, Colossal is as relatable as they come, its deadpan depiction of lost sheep recalling the Charlize Theron movie “Young Adult.” Vigalondo doesn’t evince the same cynicism and anger as that film reveled in so bitterly, but he’s also not one for easy allegorical equivalencies.

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.

It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny. It simply zigs when you expect it to zag. This is a small, simple story, free from emotional pyrotechnics and, mostly, false notes. It has something to say about the deeper meaning of alone-ness, without being pretentious.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

One of the great gifts of Far From the Tree is simple visibility, whereby viewers are given the opportunity to watch people live their lives, share their wisdom and flourish within the loving care of their family and friends.

Do these soldiers make it? We keep watching and waiting. There's not much more to Gunner Palace than that, but it's no different than the soldiers' lot.

I'll say one thing for The Skin I Live In, Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar's ambitious, crazy, even a-little-bit-infuriating new film: I did not see it coming.

Zhang Yimou's Curse of the Golden Flower is a kind of feast, an over-the-top, all-stops-pulled-out lollapalooza that means to play kitschy and grand at once.

It is as if the director had studied the comedies of Eric Rohmer and Woody Allen from top to bottom and come away with all the wrong lessons.

There is enough action and general movement to satisfy younger moviegoers and enough gentility and creative thought to please everyone else. [26 Nov 1982, p.D1]

With a tone that shifts as much as a profile picture, Who You Think I Am is a nail-biting ride through social media anxiety.

Sunshine Superman might seem like a niche story, with its focus on stunts that most people wouldn’t dream of actually doing, but the documentary feels universal. It’s simply an examination of how one man fully embraced life while charting his own path.

Winger gets a 10 on the charismometer and gives the film its warmth and innocence. Russell, a wry sensation as Marilyn Monroe in "Insignificance," plays this femme fatale for keeps.

Never intends to be deeper than a magician's hat, and its wonderfully low-tech stop-motion technique is not only a nod to Czech animator Jan Svankmajer but a tacit rebuke to computer-graphics-heavy fantasies such as "The Chronicles of Narnia" or the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.

Charming but slight comedy.

A movie that throws out the rules with audacity, assurance and admirable moral seriousness.

Yes, it's weird. But it's wild card weird, with that thrill of never knowing what's coming next or when these Parisians are going to get musical on us.

Birthright suggests that the loss of women’s bodily autonomy — via laws limiting access to abortion — is a human rights issue. But it raises the alarm in ways that are as unflashy as they are disturbing.

There are moments when Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris resembles the cinematic equivalent of nursery food: over-egged but soothing, and perhaps a much-needed respite from a world in danger of spinning off its axis.

On one hand, the movie is guilty of schematic arrangement...But at the same time, Israeli producer-director-writer Eran Riklis and Palestinian co-writer Suha Arraf use the device to reveal touching human complexity.

With its appealingly conflicted hero and generous sense of humor, Meet the Patels has the breezy touch of a scripted romantic comedy.

Just when you begin to think you know who the cat and mouse really are, in steps Viola Davis to steal not just her scene but the entire movie from Streep.

We’ve seen these poignant lessons before: Ove is destined to learn that he can’t do it all on his own and that life is still worth living. Yet the moving twists and turns of the love story and the bright comedy elevate an otherwise familiar story line.

Carrey is not only under control, but funnier than ever.

Noyce's direction moves impressively from sensual tenderness (between husband and wife) to edge-of-the-seat horror. he finds lurking dangers in quiet, peaceful waters and goes down with the good ship Dead Calm, his head held high. If you don't mind 11th-hour disappointments (including a laughable, Hollywood-kicker ending), you'll enjoy going down with it too.

Best Friends turns out to be exceptionally authentic and endearing--the most original and keenly observant romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood since the underrated All Night Long. [16 Dec 1982, p.C1]

Lighthearted and entertaining aren’t words often used to describe movies about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the characterization fits Tel Aviv on Fire to a T.

Obviously, Priscilla is a one-note pleasure: Bitches in the Desert! Queens in the Sand! Nancy boys do the Outback!

While Soul Food aims to be the kind of hearty, satisfying story that sticks to your ribs, it comes across more like an appetizer or a midnight raid on the fridge. Tasty, but easily forgotten.

It’s a noir tale for contemporary audiences who have developed an appetite for sensation from comic book movies, not literature. The film doesn’t need all that spectacle, and it is at its best when it is at its simplest, relying on the power of storytelling and vivid language, not gory effects.

Even though we're caught up in his derring-do as he beguiles entire meeting rooms of jaded publishers and editors, we're kept at a dissatisfying distance from Irving and the movie.

A lot of the film is illuminating; a lot of it is pointless.

The movie, set entirely on a beautifully lit soundstage filled with musicians, dancers, mirrors and projection screens, presents some of the country's most acclaimed fadoistas, singing tributes to the art form and some of its greatest legends.

There is something disturbing about yet another iteration of what's become one of the movies' creepiest conventions, in which the developmentally disabled are portrayed with almost supernatural powers to humble, teach and ultimately redeem their mentally "superior" (read: morally inferior) friends, family and acquaintances.

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.

An enormously enjoyable gothic yarn from Mexico, transfuses the genre with wry grotesquerie, but retains respect for the old, classic films.

There's a visceral, albeit somewhat goofy, satisfaction to this stuff.

The film’s on-the nose allusions to Twain ultimately contribute to a sense of derivation, undermining the originality of the material and preventing “Falcon” from graduating from good to great.

It's an exhaustive, and exhilarating, document of an overwhelming lifestyle.

Nothing about this film feels remotely safe. Unlike the “Fifty Shades” series, Double Lover has little interest in romance, instead considering the psychological impulses that inform it.

Billed as a spoken-word musical, but only occasionally utilizing the visual idioms of song and/or dance — and only rarely harnessing the two together — the film is nevertheless an exuberant hodgepodge of everyday joy and frustration (and the occasional mild trauma).

Maybe “Materialists” marks the emergence of a new genre: the rom-con, not in the sense that it’s against the vicarious pleasures of flirting, seduction and finally finding true love, but that it’s painfully aware of the coldhearted calculation that so often lies beneath.

It's handsome, well-populated and offers beautiful scenery and settings. But "House of Flying Daggers" it ain't; maybe "House of Fallen Arches"?

There is a difference between the importance of a film's subject and the quality of a film's execution. And the execution is lacking. The film just isn't, well, very interesting.

East Side Sushi includes a number of moments that are a little too on-the-nose in their eagerness to convey the obstacles.... But Lucero compensates for such missteps with subtly persuasive visual choices and narrative restraint.

At its fleeting best — in its meditation on the transactional and the transcendent — this one feels like it’s reaching for something more than surface charm.

Along with his regular co-writer Eskil Vogt, Trier has crafted a profoundly beautiful and strange meditation on secrets, lies, dreams, memories and misunderstanding.

Like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton before him, Helms plays a lamb trotting hopefully through the abattoir, blessedly unaware of the blades hanging just above his head.

Like Sergio’s unusual modus operandi, Radical takes some time to click, its first half as unstructured as Sergio’s classroom. But at about the halfway point, when the kids discover the excitement of learning, it becomes as thrilling as any blockbuster.

What is often surprising in this entertaining and fluidly acted portrait of females in flux is the specific way things get messy.

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

Until it goes kerblooey in the last 15 minutes, “Relay” is the very model of a modern genre thriller: Taut, tight, squeezing the maximum of suspense and character detail from the minimum of gestures.

Gosling's performance is a small miracle, not only because he's so completely open as a man who's essentially shut off, but because he changes and grows so imperceptibly before our eyes.

A funny and touching coming-of-age story.

The movie alternates between cornball and ridiculous, and the frequent violence is extremely bloody if stylized. Love it or hate it, and I'm not sure which applies to me, you've never seen and never will see anything quite like Tears of the Black Tiger.

A fascinating saga, especially for fans of animation.

A gently stirring symphony about emotional transition filled with lovely musical passages and softly nuanced performances.

Somehow, for all the work that went into the film, it comes across as something that may have worked better as an audiobook.

Kicks is gritty to the core, and its commitment to verisimilitude is its undoing. All of the characters are selfish, and their sense of loyalty is purely circumstantial.

Isn't about history or war, or people and their problems, or anything of substance or meaning. It's a movie about other movies. For all its visual bravura and occasional bursts of antic inspiration, it feels trivial, the work of a kid who can't stop grabbing his favorite shiny plaything.

It's tremendous fun. The movie -- directed by Rob Cohen -- switches pleasingly from exciting fights to moments of magic playfulness. It's doubly touching to experience Bruce Lee's fleeting life and, in the brief depictions of little son Brandon, to fatefully anticipate the tragedy to come.

Epitomizes the kind of somber, aesthetically refined and morally engaged film that commands deep respect without inspiring much affection.

The film struggles to find an appropriate ending for a woman who’s itching to get back to work.

The Batblast of the summer.

As sympathetic — and therefore potentially biased — as “Prime Minister” is to its subject, former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern, it’s also one of the most arrestingly intimate political documentaries you’ll see.

Yet as sophisticated a piece of filmmaking as it is, it seems hamstrung by the banality at its center; that's why it never assembles into a satisfying whole. It's pretty -- oh, what's the word? -- stupid in its dramatization of the silly little connections that unite us, and it's somewhat selective in its choice of them.

If you can hang on for close to two hours with almost no resolution, it’s worth the ride.

For filmgoers whose tastes run to pulp genre frissons, auteurist brio and Nicolas Cage at his most luridly over-the-top, Bad Lieutenant scores a kind of freaky-deaky home run.

From the story itself to the way it's told, Unstoppable is a hymn to stylish, unpretentious competence.

The conflicts, magic spells, chase sequences and reconciliations feel strangely by-the-book for a studio so well known for throwing the book out entirely.

The story is slightly melodramatic, but director Paddy Breathnach finds ways to make it surprisingly moving at times, in the same way that he makes the Havana slums look paradoxically beautiful.

Sobering yet faintly optimistic documentary.

Some of it is funny in a Zucker brothers slapstick way. And as the Man's geeky lieutenant, Chris Kattan has some amusingly kooky business. But there's not enough to sustain the comedy. Ultimately, the movie's short running time becomes its finest quality.

Deliriously beautiful movie.

Portman, a vegan, is the main tour guide to this challenging excursion to the world of slaughterhouses and CAFOs, which one commentator likens to petri dishes for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The result is that Revolutionary Road is a hard movie to love. Plenty of people will appreciate the hopelessness, but they might wish for a little less emptiness.

At a time when the action genre has come to be dominated by sleek, matte surfaces and set-'em-and-forget-'em computerized effects, Live Free or Die Hard seeks to remind viewers of the simple, nostalgic pleasures of watching stuff get blown up and bad guys get smoked.

Palo Alto starts strong but runs out of momentum. Strangely, as aimless vignettes give way to bigger life events.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

As is, this generally excellent portrait does much to fill the void, restoring an unfortunately forgotten figure to her rightful place among broadcasting's trailblazers.

Body Double twists and turns miserably between the comic and the macabre; it's definitely not dressed to kill.

Diverting, polished chase thriller. [28 Sep 1979, p.E1]

Lion is a complex movie, with its profound themes of home and identity, and its tonally disparate halves. A smartly understated approach to Brierley’s story holds it all together. Sometimes the truth alone is enough.

It's delicious and ensnaring and easy on the eyes, but it can't give you the definitive truth about notoriously frosty Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

The film doesn’t always dig deeply, glossing over why certain trends have emerged. And some of the interviews don’t add much to the movie beyond star power. Fresh Dressed nevertheless offers an original and worthwhile look at the history of hip-hop style. And the soundtrack doesn’t hurt either.

With all that going for it, one must ask, why didn't they just tell it completely straight? In other words, why did they feel so compelled to create an utterly bogus Max Baer for the virtuous Jim to fight in the movie's admittedly compelling climactic, championship bout?

The result is a movie that may be geared to a nature film fan base but will also appeal to admirers of good storytelling.

The Irish independent feature I Went Down is an elusive leprechaun of a film that doggedly resists being pigeonholed. Once caught, however, it yields a small pot of gold in its droll performances and deadpan wit. [3 July 1998, p.N46]

The film is at its best when evoking the painful labor of adolescent self-discovery, a process — as rendered here — that is not unlike a butterfly struggling to emerge from a chrysalis.

Had The Cooler stuck to its dark guns and not turned into a treacly, love-conquers-all fairy tale, this movie might have gone somewhere. In the end, you're only watching this with a sort of mercenary interest in the actors.

Personal and private almost to the point of self-absorption, the film is ultimately saved from neurotic narcissism by the director's self-deprecating humor and unapologetic honesty about his own dysfunction.

The movie proves a curiously harmless pet of a black comedy: It barks and snaps at you in fitfully funny ways, but it's essentially tame, pipsqueaky and more than a trifle antiquated. [05 Nov 1982, p.D1]

Sometimes art imitates life; sometimes it is life. If the market gets any worse, Days and Clouds could kill realism outright.

The Little Hours seldom rises above a clever but lightweight one-liner.

In Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary, documentarian John Scheinfeld shows that the music of one of jazz’s most experimental saxophone players still speaks to audiences today.

It's smart, it's for grown-ups and it lets Julia Roberts laugh, if just once.

The result is a movie that feels weirdly disconnected from reality.

In short, it’s a well-done studio horror movie stepping into the oversize shoes of its indie predecessors. It’s not a perfect fit, but by following in the footsteps of the earlier films, it gets the job done.

If it doesn’t rewrite the rules of horror, it calls attention to them, in a manner that is not just flamboyant, but also baroque.

Digging for Fire is a pleasant escape — an attractively shot, gracefully edited and, finally, emotionally satisfying mystery about the nature of marriage itself.

Beautifully shot and edited with swift efficiency, Black Gold joins a cadre of recent films that shine a welcome light on how the stuff we buy gets to us and, more to the point, how the price of that stuff often has little to do with its real cost.

If not always coherent, at least compelling.

The comedy that Feldstein and the filmmakers find in Johanna’s often disastrous attempts to become herself keeps the movie afloat; what keeps it tethered to reality is the universal drama of a young woman finding her voice without losing her soul.

An amusing debut for both the writer and director, who benefit from Caine's tongue and cheeky turn as the unbuttoned-down Graham.

At its intermittent best, “Tuesday” pulls a rough and breathtaking beauty from the cataclysm. At its worst, it’s for the birds.

The film's climax was only one of several moments that left me utterly verklempt, without ever knowing that my buttons were being pushed.

The documentary I Am Jane Doe is the kind of film that lifts up a rock that’s been sitting in plain sight year after year, with only a heroic few bothering to see the slithering reality underneath.

Luckily, Morris caught up with Harcourt-Smith before she left for the next stop: She’s the best thing about My Psychedelic Love Story, and a far more sympathetic and compelling character than the man she almost risked her life for.

Seemingly unable to engage in self-reflection, let alone self-criticism, Rumsfeld is given virtually full rein to control the narrative by Morris, who is far more interested in letting the audience dwell inside his subject’s strangely attenuated moral imagination, rather than challenge it.

A movie that grows better by the minute.

Diverting and provides a satisfying alternative to teen-oriented summer comedy.

In its quiet way, Ride With the Devil is terrific.

The movie's stroke of sheer genius is its wondrous ending.

The documentary mostly steers clear of Vreeland's home life. Little attention is paid to her husband or her children, and that may be partly because Vreeland didn't seem to have much time for them, according to interviews with her two sons.

It’s great fun to watch people who knew and loved her reminisce, but mostly it’s a pleasure to spend a little time in the company of the woman who saved America from Jell-O salad.

The film is not just about a very specific and difficult conversation. Ultimately, it is also about the failure of conversation itself.

Blockers suffers from ungainly, choppy pacing. It feels like a slapdash collection of scenes rather than a balloon sent smoothly aloft, with jokes often falling as flat as Cena’s buzz cut (a running gag centers on his tough-guy character’s propensity for crying, a go-to bit that ages fast).

Most winningly, Green Book puts two of the finest screen actors working today in a sexy turquoise Cadillac, letting them loose on a funny, swiftly-moving chamber piece bursting with heart, art and soul.

Anton conveys a deep well of unrequited longing that is so powerful, it doesn’t really need storytelling gimmicks.

Africa might have been another Gone With the Wind, blown by passion and buffeted by social upheaval. But in the end it's like a trip to a game park called Extinction. [20 Dec 1985, p.C1]

Boy Erased is a showcase for Hedges, who played a closeted boy in “Lady Bird” and who plays a teen with a different sort of burden in the upcoming drama “Ben Is Back.” In each of those roles, the boy-next-door actor finds just the right combination of ordinary and anomalous.