The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

Often, it feels conspicuously educational. The movie is far better when it focuses on its intimate story of love between family and friends in a small town.

The Blackcoat’s Daughter is a visually striking masterpiece of mood and carefully calibrated storytelling. If only its technical gifts...were in service of a better — or at least more original — story.

A sporadically funny, marginally interesting fiasco that might have evolved into a memorable romantic comedy.

Candleshoe isn't immobilized by wholesomeness, as Disney movies go, it's unsually spirited as well as pleasant. [11 Feb 1978, p.E1]

The screwball side of All of Me cries out for a latter-day Howard Hawks. Alas, there is no latter-day Howard Hawks. Reiner is only a latter-day Reiner. [21 Sep 1984, p.C1]

Braverman has a number of aces up his sleeve, including a wealth of interviews filmed in the 1990s by Kaufman’s girlfriend, the film producer Lynne Margulies, and his writer and best friend Bob Zmuda, for a project that was never completed.

Rather than taking viewers on a twisty, provocative journey through a mazelike meditation on appearance and reality, The Illusionist finally just sits there, looking like a very well-produced pilot for PBS's "Mystery!" series. It's a sophisticated snooze.

A knowing, somewhat slight, often hilarious sendup of cubicle culture.

Like the best horror movies, it doesn't beat you over the head, splatter you, or fold, spindle and mutilate you. Rather, slowly and subtly, it creeps you out. You may go home and throw out your computer and lock the doors.

Remember the peaceful atmosphere of bedtime storytelling? The kind that allows parent and child to take satisfaction in the story, not the teller? That's how "Charlotte" draws you into its web.

The movie does present solutions, including its urging of consumer demand for more accountability from restaurants and the building of marine reserves.

Despite its excesses, "The Howling" has some tricks and jokes worth howling about. The sexual undercurrents in the werewolf myth have been made playfully explicit, especially in the sultry, voluptuous form of Elisabeth Brooks, cast as a nympho werewolf named Marsha. When she ambushes a victim in the woods, they change forms in the course of coupling strategically obscured by a blazing campfire in the foreground -- a deliberate howl of a sex scene. [13 March 1981, p.C1]

Although the central match in Chuck is effective, and hits all the right beats, unlike the best of the “Rocky” movies, the drama outside the ring is less potent than drama inside. This, despite strong performances by Schreiber and — especially — Moss, a grounding presence who summons a toughness not usually seen in her work.

Things take a nasty turn in the film's bilious third act, suggesting that Guest's deepest gift -- his expansive humanism -- stops at the studio gates.

As Alice, VanCamp is exceptional, eliciting our sympathy even when the character is making maddeningly self-destructive decisions.

The result is a solid if conventional bio.

It's more of an urban fairy tale, a surprisingly charming story that -- in certain sections -- almost crystallizes into the sweetness of a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland musical.

A jaundiced view of litigation, however authentic, is not necessarily the stuff of great drama, even of the legal-thriller variety, which by definition is confined to a claustrophobic courtroom.

Oyelowo brings a thoughtful sensibility and thoroughgoing good taste to the kind of movie Hollywood doesn’t produce anymore but shouldn’t be so quick to discard.

Hauser, as Richard, is absolutely superb: nebbishy, so solicitous of authority that he barely bothers to defend himself and seeming, at times, slightly dimwitted. As Watson, Rockwell often steals the spotlight, playing his client’s most ardent defender and, when called for, his most dismayed life coach, as Richard naively finds himself playing into the hands of his enemies again and again.

It's a mannered, precious exercise that seems to have less to do with lived moral dilemmas than with the smug piety of its makers.

A little too shopworn and pokey to be more than a respectable European diversion.

Miracle works best when the players are on the ice, shot in a faux-documentary style that uses the now-customary handheld cameras, fast pans and machine-gun edits.

Despite this tale's surface sheen and propulsive momentum, it never transports one very far.

As for Damon, this may not be a performance so much as an appearance. But he cares so utterly, it works.

Warts and all, The Night House is, in the truest sense of the word, kind of haunting.

American Animals, while an entertaining version of a heist film at times, is no “Ocean’s 8.” Its signature moment occurs not during the reenactment of the inept crime, or its planning and antic aftermath. Rather, it comes in the middle of one of Lipka’s interview scenes.