Sweet without being saccharine, sad without being maudlin and funny without being forced.

Yentl is Streisand. Either you like her or you don't. And if a little Streisand means a lot, then a lot is what you've got. [09 Dec 1983, p.25]

Nothing much happens here, and even less is resolved. You could make an argument that that's how life is, unresolved, but as a film, it makes for frustrating viewing, particularly when plot threads with the potential to bust open the story are left hanging.

Enola Holmes offers brisk and exuberant escape from the heaviness of modern times, with its leading actress lending her own appealing touches to the journey. When the game is afoot, she's more than capable, not just of keeping up, but winning the day.

In some ways, My Friend Dahmer is a typical coming-of-age movie about an awkward teen. What distinguishes this particular case of adolescent angst is that it’s the true story of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

Adler nicely harnesses the mounting volatility of this situation, which builds to an intense if tragic conclusion.

A Quiet Place: Day One, the startlingly effective prequel to the 2018 blockbuster about noise-sensitive aliens that devour anyone who’s ever annoyed a librarian, hits Manhattan with a bang, a nasty body count and a fair amount of audience suspicion.

The movie, however, is Pesci's. In that courtroom, he gets on a roll and stays rolling until the end. There's no one better with that New York-New Jersey corridor accent.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

These unfortunate innovations aside, the film, directed by Ivan Reitman, has moments when the old army joke is done well. Reason against discipline is always funny -- hero to sergeant: "I know I'm speaking for the entire platoon when I say that the run should be postponed until the platoon is better rested" -- but the kicker, that there really is a reason for the discipline, is necessary to the premise. [26 June 1981, p.17]

Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as the secret MI6 superagent James Bond is also a fittingly complicated and ultimately perversely satisfying send-off for the actor, whose character as the film gets underway isn’t even Agent 007 any more, but a retiree (as Craig is about to become, from this franchise).

The words - taken directly from the book - are beautifully cast, but they encapsulate the emotions too conveniently.

As a celebration of ephemera, the movie is a mixed bag, sometimes hilarious, sometimes tiresome.

As lectures go, this may be the most fun one yet.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

I’ll just say it: I was confounded from the opening moments, and only sporadically did I ever find my footing.

The Double retains all of Dostoevsky’s central themes. Madness, alienation and the loss of identity swirl around the film’s edges like film-noir fog. At the same time, the filmmakers inject a much-needed dose of dark humor into the tale.

Well supplied with both raunchy humor and star appeal, particularly in the person of Burt Reynolds, the film seems certain to become a crowd-pleaser.

The film’s steady accumulation of little quirks... soon grow tedious. After a while they’re less delightfully oddball touches with a promise of more to come than dead weight with no payoff.

The most attractive and persuasive movie about ballet performers ever created for a mass audience.

As an example of the filmmaker’s house style — which she calls “Afrobubblegum” — Rafiki presents a radiant, vivacious portrait of young love that owes as much to “Romeo and Juliet” as “Bend It Like Beckham” and “Moonlight.”

The film's unforgettable stars are the beauty academy's students, women who have survived tribal warfare, Soviet invasion, Muslim tyranny, American bombs, patriarchal families and even Western good intentions with extraordinary grace and fortitude.

It's a lovely idea, and if the individual sections of the film were more substantial, or if we sensed some connection between them, some governing principle, it might have resulted in a delicate, poetically funny movie. Unfortunately, Jarmusch's lackadaisical minimalist aesthetic and his chronic lack of energy are the only unifying elements.

The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.

In the judicious hands of director and co-writer Destin Daniel Cretton, it feels not new exactly, but fresh and urgent and more timely than ever.

So the film has this weird postmodernist taint: It has a self-aware script that cleverly plays off the reality of its own cast and their famous real-life contretemps. It's smart and knowing.

What is their passion for? Not newspapers, or even a single newspaper, per se, but for journalism itself, the practice of which is nowhere stronger than at the Times. That, at least, is how Page One argues it. It's a compelling argument.

A gorgeously drawn myth made for plucky children and very brave mice.

Lethal Weapon opens with a shot of Mel Gibson in his birthday suit and just gets better. Likewise we meet costar Danny Glover in the bathtub, fêted by his family on his 50th birthday. This endearing double exposure introduces us to the vulnerabilities of these superduper heroes, an odd couple of cops who mature into friends as they quell crime.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

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.

Viewers may not agree about what they’ve seen when they come out of Noah. But there’s no doubt that Aronofsky has made an ambitious, serious, even visionary motion picture, whose super-sized popcorn-movie vernacular may occasionally submerge the story’s more reflective implications, but never drowns them entirely.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, Crimes of the Future is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out.

If this all sounds too insufferable and in-jokey, fear not: Gormican, with the help of his fabulously game ensemble cast, keeps the balloon afloat with a light touch, crisp pacing and an overarching mood that’s more goofily endearing than smugly self-amused.

As gratifying as it is that Johansson has finally gotten the movie her character has long deserved — not to mention a worthy and equally watchable foil in Pugh — “Black Widow” simultaneously feels like too much and too little. Do svidaniya, Natasha — we hardly knew ye.

Arriving on the nastier heels of the horror comedy "Jennifer's Body," Whip It plays like that movie's more wholesome twin, delivering the same jolt of anarchic guerrilla-girl empowerment, only with a far less threatening disposition.

Dick Tracy is an ambitiously vainglorious effort, expensive, beautifully appointed, but at its core empty as a spent bullet. It asks us to read these comics without a grain of salt or a pinch of irony.

The acting is strong, with Robbie and Ejiofor turning in performances that feel powerfully authentic, even in moments of ethical confusion. Maybe especially in moments of ethical confusion.

The music is electric on Beat Street, a good-natured, emotional movie, where morals are as sound as they were in the mom's-in-the-kitchen, dad's-in-insurance sitcoms of the '50s and '60s.

The story is a familiar one — a young immigrant fetches up in New York to seek his fortune, only to be buffeted by a bumptious city and cut to the quick by its competitive edge — but Torres reshapes it into something simultaneously more fantastical and far more real.

It’s not an especially profound story. But it is a movingly rendered one, made watchable by an actress whose elastic performance bookends the film with two very different people.

As a movie concept, Dragonslayer seems to have so much going for it that it could scarcely miss. Yet it does miss in crucial respects. [27 June 1981, p.C1]

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

Thomas keeps things at a simmer for the longest time, forestalling the story’s ultimate boil-over until the final minute or so of the tale.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

The movie never exactly loses sight of Bayard Rustin, but neither does it ever let us get inside his heart.

John Schlesinger, who also directed Midnight Cowboy and The Marathon Man, tries to combine the best of both earlier films by marrying male bonding and spy thrills. But his work is uninspired here, sheepish, and loaded down with obtrusive, overworked symbolism. [25 Jan 1985, p.21]

In the end, what started off as playful becomes tedious.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

The movie still holds power, mostly thanks to Leuenberger’s arresting, self-contained performance as Nora. She plays the character as an enigma, the last person you’d expect to lead a cause.

Storywise, Moon fails to live up to the promise of its premise. There's plenty of atmosphere, but little gravity.

The mystical and the mundane come together with captivating force in Last Days in the Desert, Rodrigo Garcia’s thoughtful, intriguingly layered interpretation of the Gospel stories of Jesus’s confrontation with the devil while fasting and praying in the Judean desert.

I wouldn’t call Band Aid profound, but it’s wiser and deeper than the average pop song, if not by much.

A refreshingly tender treatment of love gone wrong -- we mean, for a movie that's got enough lowdown sexual content to start its own Kinsey Report.

Gets by on quirky charm and slacker chic-but just barely.

The documentary is unwieldy, unfocused and frustrating at times... But the movie is also, somehow, dazzling.

Riveting and darkly comedic, the film nimbly conveys the tragedies of buying into the American Dream.

Even within the confines of its generic plot and sometimes stilted dialogue, Concrete Cowboy winds up being an engaging and moving family drama. Its sincerity, accomplished cast and proud Philadelphia roots manage to keep it real.

The action in “The Way of Water” is ultimately overwhelming, betraying an uncomfortable truth about Cameron: He might preach environmentalism and balance, calling on Indigenous peoples for their gentle worldviews and material culture. But at heart, he’s just as aggressive and all-commanding as the bad guys he portrays with such oorah swagger.

Despite the foibles that have affected his films, the dramatic image has always been important to Green, who has developed quite a cult following and deserves it.

If there's any moral to this sorry story, perhaps Lee's stealth-message is it: Even when it's not about race, it is.

Artful yet agonizingly unhurried at times.

The framing may use the tropes of horror, but the film’s light tone — with jump scares more often used for comedic effect — defuses the tension required to make viewers feel on the verge of snapping.

It feels studiously surrealistic, an excuse for cinematic buggery; deep in its center there's a lack of conviction.

A murky stew of sin, vengeance and expiation boils up and over in Dig Two Graves, a flawed but gripping horror-thriller, handsomely wrought on a slim budget by filmmaker Hunter Adams.

The movie has an engaging surface, but it's all surface -- it's like watching an outsize TV.

All of the actors are pitch-perfect.

Like President Kennedy, director Donaldson (who made "No Way Out," another pretty good Washington-seat-of-power thriller) has found a perfect balance of often-opposing forces: between recorded history and the demands of plain old entertainment.

You probably never dreamed a charming romantic movie could be staged against a backdrop of Scud attacks from Saddam Hussein.

There's something rather lovely about the mood and intentions of Michel Deville's French movie.

Interiors imposes a portentous formality that seems deliberately starved of sensuous appeal. It's obvious that Allen has serious intentions, but they're expressed in bloodless, superficial, derivative ways. [29 Sept 1978, p.D1]

And, yes, Kung Fu Panda 2 is a little darker and a little more intense than the first film, especially for very young viewers.

Slither purports to be a "horror comedy" but in embracing the hybrid, it falls flat, never committing full-out to mining for giggles or gasps.

An ambitious but ultimately ungraceful meditation on pop superstardom that spans decades, awkwardly weaving themes of school shootings, terrorism, obsessive fandom and post-traumatic stress into the psychological portrait of a singer whose career was born of tragedy.

Those who know McDonagh's work know a vein of darkness will run deeply through the comedy. It has seldom been darker. Or funnier. He has made a hit-man movie in which you don't know what will happen and can't wait to find out. Every movie should be so cliched.

“Brigsby” never ventures into the caustic simply for the sake of comedy. These days, that’s refreshing. There aren’t many movies that value sweetness over cynicism.

Actors here perform admirably, though they seem not to know exactly what they're supposed to be playing and so they are reduced to giving us mere moments. But playing these characters would be impossible anyway. They're like composites constructed out of cross-section surveys of baby boomers, and Lumet leaves out any notion of personal psychology or motive. It's as if his characters acted only in response to generational forces.

Over the Edge is an oafishly made movie that claims to deal with a documented case of adolescent unrest in an authentic upper-middle-class social setting, then manipulates the situation only for hypocritical suggestions of teen-age vice and picturesque sprees of teen-age violence. [04 Mar 1982, p.C13]

It’s a tale bluntly told that arouses intense, evanescent emotion and then leaves you haunted, long afterward, by provocative but arguably answerable questions.

Fluffily enjoyable.

As sprightly and determined as its fuzzy, yappy lead, the new Disney animated film Bolt works hard to be all things to all people, with mixed results.

Its virtuosity, wit, fleet performances and cool self-awareness notwithstanding, T2 doesn’t feel like a necessary film as much as a respectful and respectable exercise in fan service.

Rogen and his friends may have set out to celebrate virtue at its uneasiest, but they’re clearly still most at home with earthly delights.

Although the jokey anecdotes and animated sequences give “My Old School” buoyancy and momentum, that tone sometimes fights with content that isn’t nearly as larky as the film portrays it. Still, there’s no denying that Brandon and his exploits make for an engrossing, often witty meditation on what it means to grow and evolve.

Bridges can't be a whole movie. But he's the main reason to watch.

Does it matter that Maggie might be a charlatan if she's truly capable of helping people? That's the film's most intriguing, and open-ended, question - not the more gimmicky one that will leave you hanging, and probably disappointed, at the end.

Fatal Attraction rings the changes on your atavistic emotions. Walking out of the theater, you might have a sudden desire to club a woolly mammoth and hide your family in a dark cave -- away from people like Glenn Close.

A picnic wine, if you will -- more conversation-starter than collector's item.

And if the movie's not particularly visual -- apart from the excerpted scenes from Fellini's extremely visual films -- it's entertaining for the ears. Fellini talks and talks. And like many directors, he talks a good life.

There's visceral horror, too, including a grisly image -- a horror-in-miniature involving a fingernail -- that located an open nerve in my jaded ability to endure screen violence.

A modern epic that fuses myth with hard-edged reality, it's a one-of-a-kind, thoroughly engaging experience.

We are amused. We are not sputtering into our teacups, but we are chortling lightly.

In Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore largely stays out of the picture, and the film is the better for it. But otherwise his style hasn't changed.

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.

After an hour of brilliant, bitchy dialogue and deceit, it simply runs out of energy; or possibly the budget ran out.

A compelling if singularly sour tale.

You're expected to weep, and perhaps you will weep. But if you do, it's not likely that you'll respect yourself in the morning.

There’s a lot to like about “Jay Kelly,” the unexpectedly sweet new film from director Noah Baumbach. It’s beautifully shot, bustles with strong performances by a roundly endearing cast and indulges in an old-Hollywood elegance well-suited to its story: the late-life crisis of its titular megastar, played — embodied, really — by George Clooney.

Bidegain and cinematographer Arnaud Potier speak multitudes with wide-angle, slow-panning shots that immerse us in a post-9/11 quagmire that’s never less than utterly personal.

One of the reasons Haywire is such a pleasure to watch is that its director, Steven Soderbergh, doesn't overplay the film's hear-me-roar subversions.

XXY is, in the best possible sense of the word, an awkward film.

Keaton and DiCaprio manage to bring several levels of emotion to their characters, but everyone else is a cardboard cut-out.

An interlocking ensemble piece in the tradition of "Crash" and "Babel," but with welcome dashes of whimsy and magical realism.

For audiences who prefer their movies to be as weird and even off-putting as possible, Annette comes fully wrapped as a pretentious, arty, occasionally breathtaking, ultimately misbegotten midsummer gift.

The Kennedy dynasty has its share of admirers and critics alike, and — to the film’s credit — director John Curran and his screenwriters do not appease either camp. The result is a challenging character study, punctuated by moments of uneasy suspense and dark humor.

What you end up with in Good Morning, Vietnam is a peculiar hybrid -- a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.

It's all expectable, it's all enjoyable: British theatrical professionalism at the highest pitch.

“Restrepo” felt like the story of how boys become men. Korengal feels like the story of how strangers become family.

Although the performances are strong and committed — especially Qualley’s — the movie is little more than a conversation between two people who are constantly, maybe even constitutionally, full of it.

An amusing enough romp through his familiar undersea universe.

Plays more like a philosophical debate than a war drama.

A bittersweet duet convincingly, if unexcitingly, performed by Baye and Lopez.

This movie is a mixed repast: good food and wine laced with enough misanthropic poison to turn any stomach.

It's a fine, old-fashioned 2 1/4 hours at the Bijou.

Perhaps the highest compliment one can pay Davidson, Apatow and their collaborators is that The King of Staten Island is probably the first movie in cinematic history to earn every single one of the audience’s tears at the sight of a disastrous back tattoo. May it be the last.

The Ides of March is cynical when, with political figures and institutions at all-time lows in public opinion, cynicism is the last thing we need; worse, that cynicism isn't spiked with any new or incisive insight.

If Shortcomings falls short in any way — hackneyed plot, halfhearted themes of assimilation and identity — it isn’t due to the two actors who carry the story across the finish line.

Affecting, gloriously acted.

This is an exceptionally assured debut, and Montiel exhibits rare care with editing and sound design. His real forte, though, is casting, to which a brief scene featuring Downey and the incandescent Rosario Dawson powerfully attests.

The dazzle doesn't make up, however, for the movie's lack of depth.

Todd Haynes's Poison is a vision of unrelenting, febrile darkness. It presents three disparate stories in three greatly varied styles, all inspired by the work of Jean Genet, and its effect, as a whole, is like that of an especially vile infection; it moves diabolically through your system, spreading fever and nausea as it goes.

An animated feature with political agenda -- a didactic cartoon. But that doesn't interfere with its being a whopping good time.

A considerable kick, though it would have helped if one of the boys had wiped off the lens of the camera once in a while.

Runaway Train isn't just bad -- it's bodaciously bad, grotesquely overblown, lurid in its emotion, big ideas on its brain. And anyone with a taste for camp will have a glorious good time. [20 Jan 1986, p.C4]

The empathy-generating performances by the charismatic young actors -- particularly the uber-confident Miller and a simultaneously punk-rock cynical and girlishly fragile Mae Whitman -- compensate for any missteps.

Many reviewers have compared the mood of In the Aisles to the stories of Raymond Carver, and it’s not a bad analogy. Stuber, who wrote the screenplay with Clemens Meyer (based on Meyer’s short story), is adept at evoking both the ache of unanswered longing and the tiny promise of redemption that flickers still within the human spirit, even when crushed under the weight of soulless drudgery.

It’s a claustrophobic drama that unfolds like a thriller, although its characters are so bizarre that sympathizing with them is difficult.

At once warmly earthbound and nobly starstruck, it should give receptive spectators a savory pick-me-up. [13 July 1984, p.E1]

In viewing the same tale retold from two mutually exclusive vantage points, we become aware of how “Him” and “Her” deepen and enrich certain aspects of the story, adding contrast and, at times, contradiction, to the whole.

For a movie that lasts longer than two hours and is made up solely of talking, it’s impressive that the story never seems to drag. But with all of the possibilities of movie magic, it’s a shame that the characters keep us at arm’s length.

Is it a great film? Not quite. It flits from idea to idea too promiscuously and relies too much on the visually deadening use of people talking on camera. But among the dull passages there are moving stories, and a very loving sympathy for the people it profiles.

Garden State features some wonderful performances, chief among them an engaging, even courageous turn from Natalie Portman.

Sometimes a great story is enough to overcome mediocre storytelling, and that’s the case with the documentary The Green Prince.

What The Year My Parents Went on Vacation seems to be about, in the end, is big-time sport as the opiate of the masses.

It's a world where every emotion feels like the earth moving, and where the shifting tectonics of young lust and friendship, along with the lifelong lessons of a broken heart, have never felt more real.

This makes for an entertaining, if familiar ride.

You don’t have to suspend disbelief to enjoy Long Shot. You have to jettison it entirely, along with any sentimental attachments to archaic fundamentals such as sparkling dialogue, organic structure and genuine sexual chemistry.

Part drug comedy, part psychological drama, the movie is slight, but only superficially so. As the closing credits role, we’re left not with a sense of a day at the beach, but of what might be swimming out there, in the dark of the abyss.

Don’t think about it too hard. Freaky isn’t AP Bio. It’s a shop class project: a couple of mismatched planks cobbled together well enough to get a passing grade.

If you’re up for a film that tells its own tale, rather than the one it thinks you want to hear, this one has a touch of madness to it, and it seems fashioned from love and old parts for people who genuinely don’t want to know what’s going to happen next.

Schorr's endearing little movie gets under your skin much like the music it celebrates.

Even though it sounds awfully depressing, there's something moving about watching people go at their lives with everything they have -- or don't have.

Girl Asleep isn’t easy to categorize. It’s a wild curiosity that shifts on a whim. In that sense, there couldn’t be a better metaphor for the inner workings of a teenage girl’s mind.

The movie stands simply as an artful adaptation, and not an altogether engaging one. The repeated scenes of the rallying mob, chanting and howling at Big Brother on the screen, soon grow tiresome; like everything about 1984, they seem redundant.

Yes, the whole movie feels overstuffed and overlong, and the non-action scenes are often dragged down by stilted dialogue. But Furious 7 buzzes with a frenetic energy so contagious, there’s no sense in resisting it.

If Bowers’s present-day life has slowed down considerably, his memories haven’t, and the subject of Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood exerts his luridly voyeuristic pull, as he shares name after name of his most shocking exploits.

If this vaguely cyberpunk, occasionally comic Australian flick were named after its own qualities, it would have been called “Knockoff.”

The best reason to see The Rose is to be in a position to relish the inevitable parody on "Saturday Night Live." Here's a sitting turkey that virtually sits up and begs to be plucked. [8 Nov 1979, p.F1]

It's funny and sad and a little surreal, the kind of movie that makes you willingly suspend your disbelief. You don't have to be a kid to enjoy it, but you'll feel like one again when it's over.

Ultimately, Brothers is a flashy, stylistic show of emptiness, intended to protest emptiness. But that's clear almost from the outset.

Private Parts, lifted from Stern's best-selling autobiography, is a choppy amalgam of "Revenge of the Nerds," "Father Knows Best" and "Network."

Patti Cake$ winds up being a celebration of art, enterprise and self-invention that’s as tough as it is touching. At the risk of mixing metaphors, not to mention musical genres, it rocks.

Shows us how funny farce can be -- even with the hokiest of premises -- in the hands of the British.

The Surfer feels overthought and underwritten, a cacophony that builds to an undeserved power chord of acceptance, transcendence and retribution.

For the first 40 or 50 minutes of Paul Mazursky's Moscow on the Hudson, I was convinced it was going to emerge as a great human interest comedy. But it takes such a nose dive in the final hour that bailing out early may be the only way to protect a favorable impression.

Its attitude seems to be: You met her and liked her in "Speed," now get to know her better. But while it's easy to like her, liking the movie is another matter.

Wild Life is at its best when it focuses on Kris’s path toward renewed purpose after an unspeakable loss. By committing that journey to film, Vasarhelyi and Chin show off an invaluable skill: knowing when a story is worthy of preservation.

The new film is more expansive, more beautiful, funnier, nuttier and — this is the most difficult trick for any comic-book movie to pull off — more touching than the first film.

The foreboding and chaos contrast neatly with the lavish costumes and sets. Versailles takes on the feel of a gilded fortress, behind which the serving class hopes to hide. But money can't buy everything, including, in this case, security.

While Fishburne is generally riveting -- his facial disguise is basically hardness layered onto strength -- and Goldblum is intriguing -- his wannabe urges are quite curious -- the film itself is only occasionally visceral.

Director Cédric Jimenez, who wrote the movie with Audrey Diwan, has created a slow burn of a movie. The action is intermittent, but a steady tension keeps things interesting.

Adapted by Flanagan from King’s 2020 novella, this meditation on the bittersweet beauty of the human condition is sweeping in sentiment and surgical in intent.

Jealousy is less cynical than it sounds. While certainly no love story, this dry-eyed tale feels achingly, maybe even exhilaratingly alive.

Uplift winds up getting the better of “Don’t Worry,” in which Phoenix delivers an impressively committed performance that nonetheless can’t overcome the movie’s worship of Callahan’s most immature, solipsistic and self-dramatizing foibles. A movie that’s supposed to inspire winds up being irritating instead.

Reality Bites principally turns on the romantic tension between Ryder, wonderfully radiant and not all that literate for the class valedictorian her character is purported to be, and Hawke, who does the alienated-poet thing better than anybody since Matt Dillon's greaser in "The Outsiders."

Rosewater doesn’t hector, nor does it giggle about the issue of press freedom. It’s an impressive and important piece of storytelling.

There's a problem: This romance isn't developed enough to be truly satisfying -- it's fat-free SnackWell's when you want Godiva. It's not the original story we signed up for -- or thought we did.

This is Disney's idea of a fright fest -- about as threatening as Jaws with Flipper in the title role.

A movie sure to reward the filmmaker's most die-hard fans, while doing little to quiet critics who found his work self-conscious to the point of insufferability.

The film's many musical scenes can be riveting. But Selena is less concert film than family drama, particularly focusing on Selena's struggles with her father after she falls in love with, and eventually marries, her guitarist Chris Perez (heartthrob Jon Seda).

The Final Reckoning stays true to those core tenets, even if it too often feels baggy and redundant. It’s a nesting doll of life-and-death deadlines within life-and-death deadlines, with one wildly improbable stunt leading to another, even more wildly improbable stunt.

At its best, The Gospel According to Andre gives viewers the rare chance to get to know someone who, until now, has mostly been known as that impeccably turned-out gentleman who seems to know everybody at the annual Costume Institute gala.

"Wakanda Forever” winds up feeling hopelessly stalled, covering up an inability to move on by resorting to repetitive, over-familiar action sequences, maudlin emotional beats and an uninvolving, occasionally incoherent story.

On some level, Chevalier understands that the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette was the bad old days. Yet it just can’t help but make them look really good.

Even with all this talent and earnestness, though, Nowhere Boy still feels indulgent, slight and almost instantly forgettable.

Given the low budget, there was no money for transitions or fancy wideshots, so the look is strangled, stranded and somehow like stagework. All the same, if you are a woman who loves women, you will no doubt love Desert Hearts. But it doesn't seem a good bet to cross over. [18 Apr 1986, p.27]

This handmade feel gives Zathura an appealing, childlike sense of wonder, an element too often forgotten in movies with many times the budget and technological resources.

The Darjeeling Limited"has its charms, chief of which is watching three terrific actors evince with unforced ease the rewards and resentments of brotherhood.

An entertaining combination of humor and tenderness, The Peanuts Movie isn’t just an all-ages crowd-pleaser. It’s the perfect first feature film for a preschooler.

Although laced with adrenaline and flavored with noirish seasoning, John Frankenheimer's Ronin is a disappointingly conventional thriller.

If Richard J. Lewis's film can't re-create the novel's complex stew of grievances, dirty jokes and misremembered anecdotes, it's still a warm tribute.

Hedge is built for laughter rather than artistry; jokes are packed into every pixel. But despite the movie's entertaining qualities, there is something a little unsettling.

It is a film rich in detail, the kind that simply never emerges in the nightly news accounts of the war.

It's too short, and it doesn't delve deep enough. But it's thoroughly enjoyable.

Michelle Williams turns in a performance that is seamless, canny and artistically mature.

Thoughtful documentary.

It's nothing less than a spiritual journey set in New Jersey.