A live-action cartoon without dramatic focus, a solid structure or discernible theme.

One problem is that the action in the film is restricted to a few basic locations; the medical supply house, a nearby cemetery and an adjoining mortuary. Romero made highly productive use of confinement. O'Bannon does not, but he does earn points with inventive gall, and there are enough lunatic thrills along the way to leave one with the giddy sensation of having been alternately scared silly and tickled even sillier. [19 Aug 1985, p.D1]

Producer-director Garry Marshall, who made a pretty penny off Pretty Woman, brings the same fizzy, dizzy feel to Frankie & Johnny. He seduces us with stars in our eyes and blinds us for 90 minutes or more to his ploys, some of them as cheap as dime-store perfume. Still, we're happy to sit back and swoon. [11 Oct 1991, p.D7]

The film ends with a plea for viewers suffering from depression and other mental health issues to reach out for help. “Steve” is a deeply compassionate drama of why they should.

A confection that is ultimately better because of its bitterness.

Most of the performances are excellent. The scripts, however, are slight and unsurprising.

A punky, futuristic effort by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, it is a tasteless variation on "Sweeney Todd" set geographically near the border of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

As with many of his films, Rudolph creates an oyster of a work. You need to jimmy a little around the edges before its delicate wonder becomes apparent - which it does, beautifully.[23 Dec 1994, p.36]

Far from lazy, it is a fairly brilliant sendup of comic-book action movies, as well as also being an excellent example of one.

Though it's not a great film, it is an entertaining and, at times, emotionally rich one.

In Puzzle, Macdonald has finally found a movie that she doesn’t need to steal, because it belongs to her completely.

If the movie isn’t always gripping, it’s nevertheless a worthwhile examination of the intricacies of undercover life.

For the most part, it works brilliantly.

Price and director Harold Becker build in enough jumps and scares and good red herrings to be satisfying -- there are a few especially heart pounding moments in which Keller's sense of helplessness in his own bedroom is palpable -- but a few logical holes may appear when you talk about it afterwards. Still, Sea of Love is leagues deeper than the average buddy movie.

I mean, homage is one thing, but this reeks less of nostalgia than sweat. There is so little tolerance for spontaneity, in a film that feels calibrated to the millimeter to be magical, that reactions like delight and surprise — when they occur at all — feel manufactured.

Like its protagonist, The Idol finds a sense of identity, hope and pride within a landscape of grim dispossession and fatalism.

Screenwriter-director Peter Hastings — who also voices Dog Man’s barks, woofs, howls and assorted canine musings — has shoehorned a streaming season’s worth of plot into this sub-90-minute enterprise, and its caffeinated tempo makes “Moana 2” feel like a Terrence Malick joint.

If you have ever loved the Downton Abbey franchise, you will most likely enjoy this one while finding it pretty weak Darjeeling.

That we almost don’t question the plausibility of this oddest of odd couples is a tribute to the sensitive direction of French Canadian filmmaker Maxime Giroux, who wrote the relatable yet keenly observant script with Alexandre Laferrière.

You know what they say: Behind every successful, self-flagellating environmental activist is a woman. And that's what saves both Beavan and the movie.

The latest genre exercise from slasher-flick prodigy Adam Wingard (“A Horrible Way to Die”) is at times bloodily entertaining. And if the central plot twist isn’t all that clever, at least the movie offers some motivation for its mayhem.

Star Trek VI surprises us only by completely satisfying our expectations, by giving us exactly what we want from a "Star Trek" picture. It's not startling or revelatory, only witty, ebulliently good-natured and close to ideal.

Its pedagogical tone perfectly suits it for viewing in classrooms.

Hope Springs is a minor miracle of a movie. Within a Hollywood tradition accustomed to treating sex as something titillating, taboo, gauzily idealized or downright pornographic, finally someone has made a movie that treats it in the riskiest way possible: as the physical expression of intimacy between two flawed but recognizable adults.

To judge from his film’s style, it also seems likely that Dewey just doesn’t have the patience for a subtle approach.

Even in an increasingly virtual world, the filmmakers suggest, keeping it real still matters.

Instead of maintaining its edgy sense of constant discomfort, the movie is compelled to make Neville as fuzzily adorable and messianic as possible.

Jim de Seve's cogent pro-gay-marriage argument appeals equally to emotion and reason.

Frenetic and uninvolving.

The skits that comprise Coffee and Cigarettes aren't fully realized short pieces as much as riffs or fragments; their appeal is mostly in their stars.

Even if you agree with the film’s argument that teenagers shouldn’t be locked up for life when there are other ways to save them, “Monsters” doesn’t offer a convincing argument that a screenwriting class is that lifeline.

Despite the movie's suffocating sense of chic Soho hipness, it touches on all the square cliches about the tragic life of the misunderstood artist.

By no stretch is this a disaster on a par with Lucas’s misbegotten prequel trilogy. Still, at least until its final section, Rogue One lacks the zip, zing and exhilarating sense of return to form that “The Force Awakens” conveyed so lightly.

Still, despite some distracting contrivances, Summer of 85 transports viewers to a place, time and feeling that feel altogether real, and not nearly as far away as they initially might seem.

Although the relationship lacks a certain fire, the acting is superb.

Tremors is a delightful throwback to such '50s and '60s films as "Them," "The Deadly Mantis" and "Attacks" of both "The Giant Leeches" and "The Crab Monsters."

Katheryn's summation was meant to be the final flourish, but McGillis gives a flat-footed performance. However, Foster overcomes McGillis' inertia, as the sweet-natured Sarah, a lonely little waitress who makes her home in a trailer park. Under her tight jeans and tough talk, she proves as fragile as a ballerina on a music box. Foster creates the ultimate victim without ever becoming a wimp, mixing dignity with defenselessness. The Accused must be acquitted of its misdemeanors if not for its good intentions, for this vibrant performance.

There’s lots to like about Soho’s constituent parts, but not much time to genuinely savor any of them.

For the most part, it's a provocative one-on-one between racial opposites Wesley Snipes and Woody Harrelson. Their relationship -- or perhaps, their ongoing collision -- is the best part of the movie.

A well-made, excruciating exercise in containment and sustained suspense. It's a breakout moment for Reynolds. Is it a fun hour and a half? No. But it succeeds within its own straitened contours. It's an intriguing squirm. Now, please get me outta here.

White Girl vividly charts what is at times a violent culture clash. But it is the young lovers’ desperate attempt to bridge the gap between their worlds that makes the film so deeply moving.

An engaging romance noir, a sort of updated "The Postman Always Rings Twice" that packs its surprises into four characters, none of them predictable.

If the point of the documentary is to make clear to viewers how special Walters was and how dynamic she was and how influential she was, it also made clear how irreplaceable she was, at a time when her talent at extracting information and confessions is needed more than ever.

Despite its austere beauty, elegant triptych-like structure and faultlessly disciplined performances, Camille Claudel 1915 still raises more questions than it answers.

The movie doesn’t always feel cohesive, but the stories are unexpectedly touching.

Going in Style is cautiously conceived, but it also projects a sincere human interest and reveals a command of intimate, subtle dramatization that is likely to prove Brest's artistic and commercial fortune sooner or later. [25 Dec 1979, C1]

A soulless replica of Don Seigel's 1956 model and Philip Kaufman's 1978 update.

For interested parties, it's entertaining to hear from, and meet, the people who live and breathe the politics of America.

Whether Whishaw’s version of the famous-blue-raincoated furry Londoner returns or he doesn’t, no one can deny that “Paddington in Peru” is smarter than your average bear movie.

Unfortunately, Desplechin stuffs too many subplots into the film, diminishing the power of his central conceit — that our most persistent ghosts are the living whom we’ve failed.

Ouija: Origin of Evil is, somewhat unexpectedly, not that bad.

Even as Cecil lives his life slightly adjacent to history, building a heroic film around him requires herculean effort.

Sure, Balzac meanders at too leisurely a pace. But the actors are charming; the story sweet

The story slows to a crawl toward the end, even with a scene featuring a carjacking. But in its relentless focus on Comer’s Mother with a capital M, as she is called, and her character’s almost primal determination, it gets somewhere that feels unforced and, however uneventful, real.

Potter-philes are sure to get what they want -- if what they want is, in fact, an exacting version of J.K. Rowling's charming children's fantasy. If it's enchantment they are after, that's quite another matter.

It's Hoffman's failure, though, that sinks the picture. He is working here with his usual meticulousness, but there's no relaxation in his performance, no sense that he has ever merged with his subject, that he has found Raymond's center and is simply acting out of it.

Everything is tearful confessions, angry interrogations and breakups. But there's nothing underneath.

Edwards and his collaborators have wisely chosen to give an audience just what it wants and expects from a Pink Panther film - riotous slapstick, spectacular stunts and Sellers in a variety of accents and disguises that give him free reign and lead to inevitable uproariousness. [19 July 1978, p.E1]

Although their film resolves itself into a lurid shambles, screenwriter Gerald Ayres and director Adrian Lyne demonstrate a certain flair for foxy exploitation. [19 Apr 1980, p.C3]

As usual, it's the colorful and loquacious Joker who is most riveting. Shirley Walker's orchestral score is also quite powerful.

Haggis also appears to have no respect for his audience. At its crudest, the film settles for agitprop...it's no Hollywood guy's call, particularly as he's extrapolating from a single case that could have occurred anywhere, at any time.

A more daring script might have found ways to tell the stories in parallel, doling out just enough information to keep viewers involved. But, as it is, The Debt grasps the viewer pretty firmly, delivering thrills without trivializing the moral quandaries that set it in motion.

Though it drags on a bit, the film is certainly good-hearted, informative and relevant. We look through the doors of the St. Mel's classrooms and we see the whirrings of a school that can help a smart West Side kid land a spot at MIT. That, at least, is something to celebrate.

Details count in this movie, whether it’s well-executed camera work or the affecting score.

Leconte is always a deliriously clever director; his "Ridicule" and his "The Girl on the Bridge" stand out as vivid films on subjects no one in America would even consider. Possibly he's trying too hard here to be liked, just like Francois. But as long as he's merciless, he's great fun.

Unfortunately, the film rarely slows long enough for the actors to do anything more than sketch in their characters. On the other hand, the showdowns between Sarandon and Jones are choice; it's a meeting of charismatic equals.

A flat-out hilarious celebration of B-moviemaking mastery. [19 Apr 1996, p.G06]

This is a movie that will inevitably be compared to other, better movies (oh, and “Bridgerton” — expect to see a lot of “Bridgerton” comparisons). Still, it’s like a knockoff handbag: It looks real enough, until you start examining internal zippers. Yes, it does the job almost as well as the original. It’s just missing a few details that could have made it a classic.

In a bait-and-switch worthy of its title, The Good Lie may lure in viewers eager to see a Reese Witherspoon movie, but they’ll fall in love with something else entirely.

An engrossing piece of social history, a lively, astonishingly well-documented excavation of that period.

Like a faked antique that copies the physical characteristics of the original but misses the spirit, the new animated Disney film, The Fox and the Hound, looks like Bambi and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but exudes phony innocence. [10 July 1981, p.17]

It's a great family movie, if not historically perfect, and something that a lot of people are going to like.

A ripped-from-the-headlines psychological chiller that burrows under the skin with its terrifyingly local twist.

More love story than thriller, with the mystery providing only slack tension and the December-December romance that ultimately develops between Regina and Camargo crackling with drama and sexual tension aplenty.

As Polina, Shevstova delivers a performance that feels wonderfully unforced, if that’s the right word, in a role that can only be called “driven.” There’s almost an emptiness about her character. Polina’s expression of self is all on the surface — at least initially.

Fairy tales have always held the threat of darkness as punishment for misbehavior, and this Pinocchio is no exception.

For a kids' movie, the humor, at times, strays a bit too far into grown-up territory.

By the end, the outcome is still unclear, leaving viewers hanging. Such ambiguity might work for pure fiction, but given that there’s a real-life incident behind the story, the lack of closure is unsatisfying.

May lack originality but makes up for it in sheer bravado and really nice clothes

Liman knows how to keep the convoluted, almost impossibly far-fetched story on the rails, without losing our attention, and he adds many details that will bring a smile.

It is the world of man, not beast, that makes this coming-of-age movie most touching.

In writer-director David Chase's heartfelt delivery, this same old tune somehow comes out sounding fresh.

Its smallness is its strength — as is its silence. That’s the odd and evocative resonance of Hearts Beat Loud. For a movie that is so rock-and-roll, it turns out to be less about making noise than about listening to the message that can only be heard in the stillness that comes after the song.

It’s only upon reflection that viewers may realize that, despite its nominal title character, the movie never delves that deeply into who Gloria Grahame was, aside from a femme fatale slinking across a black-and-white screen.

Fails to capture the spiritual hallelujah of the novel.

Parillaud is expressive but rather mundane. She's best at playing sullen, but there are so many French actresses who specialize in this particular talent -- the French have mastered the apathetic pout -- that she seems generic.

Gustavo Dudamel’s transfixing talent is obvious throughout the documentary ¡Viva Maestro!, a compelling but incomplete look at the prodigious Venezuelan conductor.

Sometimes, the sincerest form of tribute is inferiority. Watching the Australian film Jindabyne, one soon embraces the conclusion: Robert Altman did this work better. And with fewer brush strokes.

It's particularly disappointing because Perry -- a talented director whose credits include "David and Lisa," "Diary of a Mad Housewife," "Rancho Deluxe" and "Mommie Dearest" -- has assembled a fine cast whose considerable talents go to waste, smothered by the plodding script and stale social commentary. It's also disappointing because the film opens with such promise: several wonderful scenes, some genuine laughs, snappy dialogue. Then the Novocain sets in. [3 Sept 1985, p.B11]

A movie of enormous humanity and heart.

The performers all seem to be relishing this sendup, but we're always aware that it is a vehicle better suited to the stage. In trying to open it up some for the screen, Bogdanovich and scriptwriter Marty Kaplan have presented the original play as a series of flashbacks that come upon Caine as he sweats out the play's Broadway opening. All this does is slow the opening and delay the close.

It's fast and furious, and it proves that crime doesn't pay, unless you know how to do it right.

The Conjuring 2 satisfies more than it disappoints.

In trying to compose a poetic love letter to a time of liberation and freedom, Haynes has merely conjured up memories of druggy excess, egotism and tight trousers. The only mementos worth saving from the experience are available on the soundtrack.

Vengeance is an arrestingly smart, funny and affecting take on a slice of the American zeitgeist, one in which both the divisions between and connections with our fellow citizens are brought into sharp relief.

Often possesses the gimlet-eyed wit of "The Player" or the mock docs of Christopher Guest.

Sneakers isn't about growing up, it's about playing games, cracking codes, inventing acronyms. It's a Twinkie for techies, an enormously entertaining time-waster.

Tate -- whose credits include Menace II Society, The Inkwell and Dead Presidents -- simply hasn’t developed the mature screen sex appeal to carry off this romantic lead.

High on melodrama. But it's emotionally engrossing, too, thanks to strong, credible performances from the whole cast.

Intriguing, inspired, flawed, misbegotten and fascinating -- all of these qualities apply to the movie, at one point or another.

Shot through with a bold, extravagant generosity of spirit, this journey behind the literal and figurative looking glass marks a gratifying return to form for Gilliam.

A bit of advice: Get to "The Naked Gun 2½" on time and plan to stay till they turn the lights back on. The opening and closing credits alone are almost worth the price of admission.

Although the film starts out with well-mounted menace, Arlington Road becomes increasingly overwrought and predictable.

Sympathetic and a little colorless, Butler makes an effective maypole for everyone else to spin around.

It’s a compelling, even stirring, tale.

Unexpected would have been enriched by a more generous balance between the two characters’ worlds. But Swanberg shows a sure, sensitive hand in limning the upshots and downsides of life’s most blessed events.

A soaring, sympathetic ode to the outlaws, subversives and insurgents who occupy the edges of popular culture, making them safe for everyone else's dreams.

Overall, the movie presents a worthy and historical look at the link between genius and mental illness.

The debut feature from British studio Locksmith Animation, Ron’s Gone Wrong has plenty of slapstick and potty humor for kids. But adults will also be intrigued by its frequently scathing (albeit somewhat conflicted) critique of consumerism.

[An] aimless but oddly charismatic film.

At one moment, Marilyn turns to Colin and asks, "Shall I be her?" And, instantly, she is - effortlessly bewitching a crowd with movie-queen poses. If only the movie could turn it on so reliably, My Week with Marilyn might be profound rather than simply pleasant.

In this tale of longing, loss and regret, it isn’t always possible to know who’s deluding oneself, or someone else. But then, it isn’t always possible to know that in real life either.

It's romantic manliness at its purest, almost but not quite schmaltz, ideally calculated to please true believers and ironic snorters at once.

It's popcorn pulp that collided -- at 100 mph, natch -- with a far more sober and crafty grown-up movie.

Most of the pleasure of Mockingjay — Part 2 comes from watching Lawrence, not the story around her. Her aim is true, even if the narrative arc of the movie traces a long, wobbly path toward its eventual, and not exactly happy, resting place.

There's plenty to scratch your head about here. Is it a drama? A comedy? And if it's a farce, what's it making fun of?

The documentary also reveals the sisters’ almost symbiotic closeness. They live together most of the year, cook together, do karaoke together and joke about how difficult it would be if one chose to get married.

It's also sweet, sentimental, rather funny and, as John Waters films go, surprisingly gentle.

Tucker benefits from a sweetness not found in many of its peers, which unlike "Shaun" often lean too heavily on cynicism and gore.

If it sounds wholly bleak, it isn't. Remember, this is a movie about a yard sale. Over the course of the film, Nick struggles with the idea of, as he puts it, "selling all my crap" - he means that both literally and metaphorically - and getting on with his life. That sentiment, and Ferrell's refusal to sentimentalize it, is reason enough to smile.

La Bamba is a puzzle -- a real mixed bag. Some of it, like the braying, cock-and-bull performance by Esai Morales, is just plain awful. But other bits, like the performances by Rosana De Soto and, as Ritchie's agent, Joe Pantoliano, are unexpectedly vibrant.

If Amazing Grace serves its most superficial purpose -- to educate the viewer -- it's hardly compelling viewing.

Proceeds with an episodic pace, full of narrative twists and turns that clearly are not pretested by a Hollywood committee. Things feel sort of strange and original all at once.

It's not Fellini, by any means, but it's lively. Never stops moving, even though it crashes into cliches along the way.

An end-of-the-world movie like no other.

Unfortunately, the idea for Dirty Dancing exceeds the execution...and the story resolves itself all too conveniently in that final scene.

The first of Spielberg's films to make us feel heavy in our seats, the first to leave us sitting, passive and uninvolved, on the outside. Watching it, you feel that nearly anyone could have directed it.

Saving Mr. Banks doesn’t always straddle its stories and time periods with the utmost grace. But the film — which John Lee Hancock directed from a script by Kelly Marcel and Sue Smith — more than makes up for its occasionally unwieldy structure in telling a fascinating and ultimately deeply affecting story.

None of Hill's dynamism will save The Warriors from impressing most neutral observers as a ghastly folly. It seems a little demented to choose gang warfare as a pretext for showing off virtuoso technique. [10 Feb 1979, p.C7]

The trouble is that the picture is far from over when suddenly we find ourselves watching another movie -- a punishing, overly complex melodrama in which the Gingerbread Man receives his comeuppance.

This Beauty and the Beast isn’t predicated on starry-eyed romance or animal attraction, but the solace of mutual loss and understanding, which makes it all the sweeter.

Ivory Tower covers a lot of ground, and sometimes the focus feels diffuse.

The movie is wry, touching and fun to sit through, thanks to Rosenberg's amusing script, Ted Demme's vital direction and zesty performances from everyone.

First Class happily delivers on the escapism and rich narrative texture the best of its predecessors have promised.

One of the selling points of The Confirmation is how it steers clear of melodrama or tidy perfection in favor of a taste of life on the margins, where even living paycheck to paycheck would be a luxury.

Barbra Streisand's lovely adaptation of Pat Conroy's bestseller echoes the novel's seductive cadences, the cries of summer gulls, the slapping of the Atlantic on the South Carolina shores. An emotionally satisfying film, The Prince of Tides loses some of the stuff readers hold dear, but the pull of the sea, its saltiness too, lingers. As a story of rebirth through self-exploration, it seems ideally suited to this season of illumination.

Oscar and Lucinda seems like the perfect story for director Gillian Armstrong, that of a free-spirited proto-feminist chafing at the strictures of tight-laced colonial Australia. But in the end, she's created a beautiful but annoying Victorian-era melodrama. [30Jan1998 Pg.D.06]

Presumably, Scott is giving the audience what it wants, but purists may wonder whether simply re-watching “Alien” would have provided scarier, more genuine jolts.

Crystal, 65, and Goodman, 61, are a long time out of college, but they somehow manage to carry off the callowness of youth.

There's a dramatic imbalance to Dick Wolf and Darryl Ponicsan's screenplay. By making David a saint, they make his bigoted tormentors ultra-despicable. It's so easy to identify who's in the right that it's hard to remember this wrong may exist in us.

It’s a voraciously self-aware comedy, one that dines out on the inherent inanity of its own premise as much as it does the movies it’s competing with.

A riveting, amusing, enlightening and emotionally affecting movie by a guy you've never heard of, about -- wait for it -- the consumer debt crisis.

Still, The Courier makes a smart, stylish stand for the kind of old-fashioned period spy thriller that is increasingly being turned into bingeable series for streaming services. Its modesty and carefully managed ambitions define its strong suit at a time when such films are scarcer every day.

The most fruitful aspect of the film may be its themes, which unbraid and retwist the threads and conventions of the damsel-in-distress narrative even as they superficially follow them.

The movie is not only a better version of the book, it's a work unto itself.

While cute, enormously entertaining and stuffed with more jokes than you can count, is only a half-step up. Partly, that’s a problem that’s built into its very premise.

At first blush, there's something vicariously liberating about Brosnan strutting through a lobby dressed only in Speedos and cowboy boots. But it also feels false. The actor seems to be theatrically slumming before his return to suave form.

Hawke is good at playing bad, but Hawkins is better, rendering, in Maudie, a portrait of a woman that feels raw, real and revelatory.

The script by Nick Lepard never quite figures out how to fill its 98-minute run time with new cat-and-mouse (or shark-and-marlin, as Tucker dubs her) twists, and “Dangerous Animals” loses steam treading familiar trope-filled waters en route to an oddly mawkish ending.

Despite some quality craftsmanship, “The Good Boss” ultimately doesn’t pay off. Capitalism should be more fun than this.

The movie, which suggests a combination of "Wait Until Dark" and "Rear Window," not only takes your breath away on an aesthetic level, it eloquently evokes the mother's and daughter's vulnerability.

The menace never becomes palpable, whether because of illogical plot lines or questionable casting. The stakes are so high, but the suspense never rises to the occasion.

You don't watch Bad News Bears for the action out on the diamond. You hang out with that hangdog coach so you can catch every slurry, sour-mouthed retort coming out of his mouth.

The overly schematic nature of High-Rise does not entirely diminish its pleasures as a story, which include, in addition to Wheatley’s richly lurid visual sensibility, an effective metaphorical tool in Laing.

Young Sherlock Holmes delivers all the ingredients that Spielberg addicts relish: action, effects, a cute fat kid, a pretty girl and a hero who's good with swords. But, like a room at a Holiday Inn, there are no surprises. [6 Dec 1985, p.33]

Crudely made and in your face, The Living End is mostly annoying.

A brain-cramping and eye-straining experiment in digital filmmaking.

NASA aficionados and connoisseurs of space exploration are the groups most likely to get a kick out of Good Night Oppy, a warmly charming, if far from essential, documentary that takes a look back at the robotic Martian rover Opportunity.

The documentary Hockney presents such an immersive portrait of its subject — artist David Hockney — that by the end of the film it feels like we are looking at the world through his eyes.

The moviemakers have set out to interpret the inner workings of abusive relationships in their boundless variety. Alas, their ambitions are far grander than their abilities.

Wild Grass might be the strangest film I've seen all year. Maybe all millennium. Is it any good? Quite frankly, I have no idea.

Twisters isn’t art and doesn’t want to be. Like “Twister,” it’ll never be held up as a classic but will instead be reliably watched for the next 28 years until someone gives us “Twister 3: Maximum Vorticity.”

Maybe Strange World only seems to falter because it can’t handle the weight of its own expectations. Nah. It’s just not very good.

Filmgoers haven't seen a family this neurotically enmeshed since the last Diane Keaton movie.

Unlike its forebears, "Greek" lacks a truly sympathetic central character to hold things together when it's time to get sappy.

Offers cleverness and charm that are hard to come by in the summertime multiplex.

At times, the movie struggles to maintain the critical balance between detachment from and engagement with the thing it’s making fun of.

A sweet, true and, at times, universal love story it is.

It's a rousing, fast-paced tale, told with a modicum of verve and packed with colorfully flawed, occasionally heroic and even tragic characters. It also feels disappointingly bloated and too fast-paced by half.

Watching Ali, you can be sure of experiencing two opposing things: a sterling performance from Will Smith as Muhammad Ali and a bewilderingly punch-drunk movie from Michael Mann.

Follows the youngsters over the course of a tumultuous year, during which time Cuesta and screenwriter Anthony Cipriano succeed in making the audience care desperately whether they're okay and whether the adults in their lives do the right thing. The lingering question is why that should be so improbable.

Modulating from heavy to light, from angry to lyrical, and so on, the movie's an enjoyable, emotional symphony.

Although it has beguiling and funny interludes, The Jungle Book lacks the narrative suspense and excitement that propel the best of the Disney animated features from the pioneering Snow White and Pinnochio to last year's The Rescuers. It seems to reflect the Disney tradition in repose, still expert and pleasing but also a trifle stuffy. [29 June 1978, p.B7]

O’Shea follows his twisted premise to its inexorable conclusion, so his film is ultimately more unnerving than sad.

Alice, Darling deserves praise for emotional verisimilitude and shading. It’s just a shame that, in some of its packaging, it oversells a story worth hearing.

Drop is the sort of unpretentious suspense exercise that takes a single absurd premise and works every variation it can within a streamlined 100 minutes. Your brain is not required, but a certain amount of suspension of disbelief is the price of admission.

Redmayne ultimately fails to crack the secret of what made this man — er, this monster — tick. But that’s not really the biggest mystery that hangs over “Nurse.” Rather, it is the question of why all these power players thought something this slight, this weightless, this forgettable was ever worth their time.

The movie stands as a statement of a gifted, troubled actor’s intense commitment to his craft. Beyond that, it is a punishment.

Clerks II finds Smith up to the profane, raunchy, profoundly humanist mischief of which he alone is the master. This is a lewd, lascivious, exhilaratingly life-affirming celebration of misfits and the misfits who love them.

Tetro has no internal tension and should have been a comedy.

Fake or not, Unknown White Male doesn't live up to its tantalizing potential.

It’s not hard to imagine “Transformers One” connecting with preteens whose pubescent bodies can be as unwieldy as Orion’s first, clumsy transformation, with wheels where he expects legs and arms where he expects wheels.

There’s nothing unheard of here: a bad guy, a haunted house, a hero. But it’s what The Black Phone does with those simple parts that sparks a spooky connection.

This refreshing alternative to the usual potted biopic provides an absorbing look at a singular, steely determination as it was forged and annealed, long before it made itself known to the world.

Though we were wooed by Diesel -- notwithstanding that rug -- we were less enamored with the film's scraggly script. Find Me Guilty is a courtroom drama (much of the dialogue is culled from court transcripts) without a whole lot of drama going on.

Although it’s intended as a satire, director Feng Xiaogang’s movie has a literary tone, a leisurely pace and relatively few laugh-out-loud moments. It captures not only Lian’s frustration, but also the exasperation of the authorities who must deal with the demanding woman during her 11-year quest for justice.

Telling Lies in America may not be terrible. But it flickers inconclusively between ordinary and not-so-good. [24 Oct 1997]

Although much about In the Fade is compelling, there’s a tonal imbalance to the three-act structure. The gritty early events are followed by a courtroom procedural that drags somewhat, with the film shifting into a devastating climax in the thrillerlike third act.

A decidedly medieval enterprise, darker in text and tone than a Gothic cathedral by the light of the moon.

Most vividly, The Swell Season captures the insistent, borderline-disturbing energy of fandom at its most rabid and psychically intrusive.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

A Letter to Momo is unquestionably lovely to look at, but viewers may not be able to shake the feeling that they’ve seen much of it before, and done better.

Fox's film seems to say that the kind of saintly purity that would enable one to walk on water -- or to kill with impunity and without repercussions -- doesn't exist.

Oppenheimer has made a chamber play of and for the damned, and while it never fully escapes the laboratory of ideas, it shows a daring and lethally sharp creative mind at work. More, please.

Its long-winded denouement, in which Grazia runs away rather than be sent to an institution, doesn't bring the story full circle. It just extends it.

It's still pretty darn good, despite its smarty-pants aura.

In Burton's hands, Washington Irving's spooky classic is reincarnated as an overripe, grisly Goth cartoon.

SWEET DREAMS is like "Coal Miner's Daughter," but without the grit. It's a slow, insensate musical biography, with the unfortunate Jessica Lange miscast as country singer Patsy Cline. The physical and emotional opposite of the coarse Cline, Lange looks like a refugee from a dude ranch in her western gear, her delicate features overwhelmed by a raggedy black wig and a rhinestone cowgirl's hat. She croons into the smokey, liquor-soaked night of a honky- tonk saloon, "I Fall to Piecessss . . . ." [11 Oct 1985, p.29]

A Brilliant Young Mind is less stuffy than the usual cinematic ode to British smarts and schooling. But that still can’t save this tale of eccentric genius from being profoundly conventional.

Darkman, as unnerving as a gargoyle, is a classic nightmare, elegant and sumptuous, everything "Batman" should have been. But we're numbed after a while, as we are by the grotesquerie of the nightly news. Then again, maybe that's Raimi's intention. His work is beautiful in its scary way, and never only skin deep.

Vincent & Theo is more than art appreciation, it is a treasure in its own right, unframed and arcing in the projector's light.

Top it off with Pinaud’s final dedication, and The Rose Maker turns into a film that wears its emotions lightly but generously, like dew on a blush-colored petal.

The fact that there's nothing wrong with it -- that there's nary a scenic detail or scrap of dialogue or performance that isn't utterly on the nose -- is precisely what's wrong with it.

With his hard-bitten squint and studied air of scowling detachment, Bale seems to be channeling Clint Eastwood at his most enigmatic and reserved; like Eastwood and his characters, Bale allows both the camera and his fellow characters to come to him, rather than proving his bona fides through more obvious and eager means.

Thorpe doesn’t flinch from whatever awkward or controversial findings his subjects offer up, especially when they concern himself. The filmmaker’s curiosity as a reporter is tempered by an unapologetically subjective perspective.

In the case of Sharper, we’re treated to puzzle boxes within puzzle boxes, each one delivered in sequential chapters — titled after the film’s main characters, Tom, Sandra, Max and Madeline — and unpacked, initially in reverse chronological order, with satisfying, if somewhat predictable, style and suspense. If you’re seeking substance, look elsewhere.

The question that looms large here, lingering long after the closing credits, is whether, despite our human need for forgiveness, absolution is ever truly possible.

Despite its light subject matter, “Phantom” is about something more than an obscure British folk hero (although it is also that). It’s a story about following your passion, not because of the heights this path will take you to, but because it makes you happy.

In a departure from the sexually active teens of most slasher movies, The Hallow plays on more grown-up fears: keeping your family safe and steering clear of a vengeful Mother Nature.

In a way, The Overnight ends just as it’s beginning. But for a brief time, even in the midst of preposterous digressions and full (and not so full) Montys, it offers a compassionate glimpse of people at their most naked, honest and undefended.

In Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., Ariyan Johnson seizes the camera's attention like no other performer since John Travolta strutted into "Saturday Night Fever."

The single most compelling reason to see Hanna is Hanna herself. As played by Saoirse Ronan, who made her first big splash as another morally challenged youngster in Wright's 2007 "Atonement," the character is a fascinating and frustrating cipher.

A big, lumbering, rock ’em, sock ’em mash-up of metallic heft and hyperbole, a noisy, overproduced disaster flick that sucks its characters and the audience down a vortex of garish visual effects and risibly cartoonish action. And you know what? It’s not bad!

The movie stands as evidence that Benny Safdie is not just half of a stellar brother act (and a fine actor, as attested to by his Edward Teller in “Oppenheimer”) but an intriguing directing talent in his own right.

Bennett claims her own form of autonomy with the movie itself, which could be read as an actress’s decision to stop hoping for good scripts to arrive over the transom and make her own luck.

It's an exhilarating, funny, very sweet movie.

Gibson may get top billing, but it's Sam Elliott who steals all the scenes. As Sgt. Maj. Basil Plumley, a man who fires with his own .45 revolver rather than the standard M-16 rifles, he's full of hilariously colorful comments.

There are two Cocoons. One was directed by Ron Howard, and it has all the warmth of his comic touch, his respect for his characters, his way of plugging into the humanity of a situation. The other, a bloated special-effects extravaganza, seems to have been directed by a particularly slavish camp follower of Steven Spielberg. The two movies mix like sugar and sludge; the result is a terrific little movie ankle-chained to a gorilla. [21 June 1985, p.D1]

Rather than a meditation on desire, Ma Belle, My Beauty becomes a portrait of how people simultaneously crave intimacy and keep each other at bay. Viewers may wish there were more to it, but what’s there is teasingly intriguing.

It's half of a really good movie, full of the enchantment, emotion and incident for which the Potter series has become so fanatically cherished.

New Bond man Brosnan can't be faulted for much. He's always been generically sexy, a sort of programmed cover boy. In this new venture, he's appropriately handsome, British-accented and suave.

Buoyant, bracing and, most shocking of all, brief, “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” represents a quantum leap of ship-righting.

As Paltrow (Gwyneth’s brother), who directed the film and co-wrote the screenplay with Tom Shoval, makes his own case that history is built of small, individual actions that tend to be overlooked, he allows himself a bit of gallows humor.

“Lovers” suggests that any film — even this one — can have the manipulative power of propaganda.

Down in the Valley is exactly what we don't have enough of: It's singular, unusual, unexpected, fresh and familiar at once.

In the end Monsieur N. could use a little less cloak-and-dagger and more of what made "The Emperor's New Clothes" work, i.e., heart.

Parker, a director of breadth, not depth, never supplies the big answers, but he does powerfully depict the climate of the Confederacy in the "Freedom Summer" of 1964.

This meditation on violence explores the toxic knock-on effect of powerlessness and overcompensation, delivering a potent essay on the roots of society's most primal evils.

VanDyke might have set out to give himself a crash course in manhood, but Point and Shoot gives us a crash course in the myriad and contradictory things the word has come to mean.

Photograph goes a little too far in implementing Batra’s favored style of storytelling. Sometimes, less isn’t more, but — as in this case — not quite enough.

Much like its characters, “Last Breath” simply goes about getting the job done, without fuss or fanfare. Maybe no higher praise is necessary.

It's hard to say exactly what the point is to this sour tale.

A crisp, efficient, sometimes petty but often infuriating documentary about alleged gay politicians who actively campaign and vote against gay rights.

The story, which includes a prolonged display of McGregor’s no-longer private parts, is simplistic and banal rather than exacting and mannered.

Funny, moving, hip and transcendent all at the same time, The Way is both deeply thoughtful and enormous fun to watch.

What makes The Rover more watchable than the average self-conscious genre exercise is Pearce, who exudes such weary authority and palpable vulnerability that he’s sympathetic even in the film’s most brutalizing moments.

Absence of Malice was directed with earnest, straightforward proficiency by Sydney Pollack, and there are crucial public issues involved in the premise. Still, excessively generous allowance must be made if one is to overlook the defects and confuse Absence of Malice with a pertinent, lucid melodrama on a hot topic. A remarkable number of journalists seem to be overcompensating for the film's mildness by treating it as something hard-hitting and usefully purgative. More power to the souls considerate enough to do the filmmakers' work for them, but look out for frustration if you're only prepared to meet them halfway. [18 Dec 1981, p.C9]

Coppola brilliantly conjures the young queen's insular world, in which she was both isolated and claustrophobically scrutinized.

Though it's allegedly a comedy, there is nothing funny about this tasteless, shallow and mean-spirited slam.

Like so many technological marvels, at the human level it's not only merely dead, it's really most sincerely dead.

I laughed. And I laughed primarily over Heder's hilarious performance. You ain't seen nothing till you've seen Napoleon attack that tether ball.

Suffragette is an absorbing, ultimately moving portrait of thwarted ideals that rings all too true today.

It's not a new subject, it's not a subject that requires a lot of moral deliberation -- we know who the bad guys are -- and Winkler has nothing new to say about it. Undeniably, his need to share his feelings on this topic is urgent; unfortunately, it is much more urgent than our need to hear them.

Unfortunately, Buscemi's film conveys the spirit of its source material but doesn't make a satisfying transmogrification out of its homage.

Though the movie, made for $7,000, can claim the romantic mantle of "guerrilla filmmaking," its herky-jerky camcorder style, jump-cut editing and sustained takes soon wear out their welcome. And dramatically, it's not always convincing.

The movie provides a vivid sense of the period, as well as an intriguing backstage look at the making of improbable pop classics.