It's rambunctiously entertaining, a loop-de-loopy bumper car ride through a firecracker sky, all bright lights, sonic booms and impossible heroics.

Blaze is a celebration of the sporting life, as zesty as Cajun music and as tickly as a feather boa.

Pölsler’s film is quietly deliberate without ever feeling slow.

It’s a mildly engrossing if wonky exercise in what could be called a kind of selfish activism.

The movie marches so quickly past the many milestones of Welles’s career and life that it doesn’t have to time to linger — lovingly or otherwise — on any of them.

Sometimes feels like a horror movie with a contact high.

Obviously, this movie isn't for everyone. But if anyone can take a crossover audience through the gay terrain, it's Stafford. As Eric, his utter heart-stopping anticipation when he sits alone in a car with Rod, is palpable. Through his eyes, you can feel so much at stake here, not the least of which is his innocence.

This movie probably gets the Washington process better than any since Otto Preminger's underrated "Advise & Consent" in 1962. It's not about men of virtue doing the impossible, but men of flaws doing the doable, but just barely.

As the movie makes clear, none of these conditions are reversible. Music isn’t a cure for anything. But it does seem to be a key to unlocking long-closed doors and establishing connections with people who have become, through age or infirmity, imprisoned inside themselves.

Too clever for its own good.

A curiously overextended spoof of the cliche's of Hollywood's hard-boiled mystery melodramas of the 1940s. [21 May 1982, p.B4]

The film can be appreciated, if only as a showcase for its assured, emotional attuned performances, as a convincing time capsule and period piece, and as a chance to reconsider one of the more well-known and still-influential studies of its era.

As a director, Abrahamson uses that sense of the detached observer as a scalpel, whittling away at our expectations of horror films until we have no choice but to look at — and really listen to — what is happening. It’s an approach that requires patience, on his part and ours, but the rewards are worth it.

The Armstrong Lie is thorough, fair and thoughtful. It may not, however, close the book on the scandal.

The cast does its best with the material, especially supporting player Perry Mattfeld, who makes a meal out of her small role as the mistress who broke up Solène and David’s marriage.

It’s a mark of creative achievement that Zlotowski’s film manages to dwell in uncertainty — about what’s really going on, where Lilian’s marbles have gone and, for that matter, why her ex is so game to chase them around with her. Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny, low-key unsettling but far from provocative, and elbow-deep in dreams and memory but without much discernible revelation.

Bateman does an effective job directing the movie, which is based on a novel by Kevin Wilson (with a script by playwright David Lindsay-Abaire), smartly opting for understatement from his performers, so that their characters’ eccentricities have something to play against.

The trouble is, since few characters are fully developed, it's hard to care who's doing what to whom and why.

The Last Duel is an entertaining movie, even an intriguing one. But audiences might be forgiven for thinking, upon leaving the theater, that they’ve just been very nobly and very honorably mansplained.

Rosenwald isn’t just a portrait of a great, selfless American and his powerful company, but an excavation of an ugly strain of our own history, and a reminder of what one person can do to uproot it.

A mannered, gratuitous exercise in Grand Guignol dreadfulness that was made by and with unknowns. [03 June 1978, p.B6]

At its best, My Bodyguard recalls the freshness and authenticity of Breaking Away -- and for a while seems that it is going to be even better. That impression proves premature. After building up to a stirring, climactic turning point, Alan Ormsby's original screenplay falters in the stretch. [15 Aug 1980, p.C1]

There is enough "hit" material to make this fun. Delpy is such an infectiously appealing personality, she almost wills this movie to work.

Described as a “98-minute diversion” by producers at a recent screening, the romantic comedy is just that: a sweet-tart confection that, like lemon sorbet, cleanses a palate gone sour from too many cinematic servings of the heavy stuff.

The film's depicted cruelties (the rape and disembowelment of a woman, a pillow suffocation of a boy after Poelvoorde has chased the terrified tyke through the house) grossly overshadow their satiric purposes.

It's definitely NOT a conventional biopic about Kurt Cobain. (Nor, as its title oddly suggests, is it about the demise of writer-director Van Sant.) It's a tone poem, an elliptical, fictionalized meditation about the ill-fated rock 'n' roll superstar.

After viewing documentarian Stephanie Black's dour exegesis of the wrecked Jamaican economy -- only the most insensitive vacationer will want to set foot anywhere near the resorts and beaches of Montego Bay.

Although this movie shows Lin's promising moviemaking sensibilities, its point of view feels coldly amoral and dismissive.