A smooth and agreeable entertainment, Hero is easy to enjoy while you're watching it. But ultimately it adds up to far less than you hope for at the outset. [3 Apr 1982, p.C1]

It has elements of melodrama, of the soap opera even. But the film’s magical realism heightens its otherwise conventional contours and sharpens its otherworldly pleasures.

As touching as Hayek’s performance is, Beatriz at Dinner too often forsakes nuance for caricature.

Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

While not significantly better or worse than the predecessor, a rather astounding object of devotion for a movie studio--an enormously expensive recreation of a moribund TV series--this sequel is perfectly presentable and harmless, a klunker as comfortable as your easy chair. [4 June 1982, p.D1]

Revenge was supposed to be the one that really socked it to us, about Anakin's almost biblical fall from grace. But the movie never rises to its powerful occasion.

Paris is a funny, sad, romantic and deeply felt love letter to a great city. If you can't book a trip now, it's the next best thing.

The low-key music documentary “Anonymous Club” — ostensibly a portrait of Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett — kind of feels like a movie about someone who doesn’t really want to be in a movie.

To his credit, Gunn pushes a much-needed reset button on “Superman,” banishing shadows and pretentious self-seriousness in favor of a bright palette, brisk storytelling and occasional jolts of bracing humor.

Andrew Dominik's long and bizarre movie about the American outlaw appears to stick close enough to the facts so that historians won't be able to complain. But it languishes toward torpor.

The good part about this okay, but way less than great, thriller is that you won't notice how cheesy it is until the heartburn from the popcorn has eased. In these jaded times, that's a bargain.

It is as polished as it is heavy-handed, and it leaves one under a spell.

It’s a languorous look at the ups and downs of a career gone awry, and the mysteries and confused culinary disciples left in the wake of the chef’s abrupt disappearance to Mexico for several years.

The job is not to convince us of something many Americans don’t want to believe, but to address something we all know is happening and nail down just how bad it really is. Judging from the pit left in a viewer’s stomach, it does the job pretty well.

These ghost stories, if that’s what they are, aren’t terribly original, or even especially scary — at least, not by the standards of the genre.

The first 60 minutes of this black comedy are brilliantly sustained, but then director and co-writer de la Iglesia loses his way.

“No No” performs the valuable service of elevating Ellis’s legacy beyond one game, reminding viewers of a career during which he was almost always, as one observer notes, “a chapter ahead.”

Kristin Scott Thomas delivers an unnervingly smooth performance as Auteuil's suspicious wife.

A killer concert film, an ecstatic testament to the joys of fandom and a tribute to the democratizing potential of moviemaking technology.

It is, as with any cinematic joy ride, not the destination that matters, but the rush of getting there.

The cast, all classically trained on the stage, is simply commanding.

Never Say Never Again illustrates how much sheer entertainment value can accrue when seasoned, disciplined filmmakers are encouraged to use their accumulated experience and design a classy piece of escapism to the best of their abilities.

The title of Never Look Away is deliciously ironic: This is one of the most mesmerizing, compulsively watchable films in theaters right now.

The suspense and technical wizardry are the only reason to watch Jurassic Park. In a summer movie, that's more than enough, of course. But screenwriter Michael Crichton, adapting his popular novel with David Koepp, slashes almost everything that made the book an entertaining read.

A shaggy, baggy collegiate comedy that is less a coherent movie than a loosely assembled series of lewd jokes and punishing slapstick routines.

This is documentary-making at its best, not pretending to be journalism, but still playing a crucial role in telling stories that otherwise wouldn't make the front page.

Director Michael Winterbottom languidly unspools the story; nothing seems to lead to anything.

I suppose it's also less than inspired to portray a ballet company where the codpieces of the male dancers bulge out so far that the ballerina can cover the width of the stage using them as steppingstones. Nevertheless, some dumb, obvious gags have a way of working by impudently flaunting their dumbness and obviousness, and this appears to be a textbook example. In fact, for the juvenile public that should supply its best audience, Top Secret! may serve as a veritable primer of irresistibly terrible wheezes.