Scrupulously unpreachy, it resists all attempts to distill a moral or message, seeking truth in the honesty of its characters and their process of self-discovery.

As shaky and unfocused as Captain Marvel often seems, it manages to reach its destination with confidence. In the end, Larson sticks the landing, albeit with something more muted than absolute triumph. The final takeaway is clear. Mission accomplished: More movies ahead.

It's a whale of a tale, made more special by being predominantly true.

With such classics as "El Norte" and, more recently, "Sin Nombre" and "Under the Same Moon" having addressed the subject matter already and so well, viewers might be forgiven for asking just how many immigration movies we need. As A Better Life proves, as many as there are stories to tell.

Bawdy, bratty and burp-riddled, it's a predictably idiotic follow-up...God help me, I laughed and slapped my thighs.

Director Mary Harron may have more courage than talent -- and she's got a lot of talent. It's too bad Bettie's story isn't more dramatic.

In the end, “Rental Family” is a movie that gives viewers a lot to ponder — about loneliness and family, about the importance of truth and the comfort of white lies — even if the delivery mechanism proves imperfect.

Between its verisimilitude-killing caricatures and hand-waving montages, “Unstoppable” is all too easy to pin down as a by-the-numbers misfire.

May leave you longing for a story to make you care.

It Works.

It's not going to shake up the fright-flick world one bit, but The Innkeepers may earn affection from genre-lovers whose memory reaches back to before "The Blair Witch Project."

It's just too lost in its own presumed self-enchantment.

Intense and absorbing experience.

Here was my question for most of this movie: Wha-? I was clueless. Did not understand. Count me among the stupid.

Takes the spirit of their late night TV show and flies with it.

Smoothly navigating the perilous line between insufferably twee and heartbreakingly grim, Quartet is a subtle, sure-footed delight.

All the God-talk and philosophical musings about morality and "meeting our makers" aside, Prometheus is primarily about delivering those visceral, terrifying jolts. That it does so without generating the taut suspense and moody atmosphere of its antecedents qualifies as one of its greatest failings.

An overwhelmingly friendly climate of opinion awaited "New York, New York." Scorsese has squandered it by backing off from the very challenge of rationalizing and sustaining a musical romantic drama.

Pacing notwithstanding, Fast Color succeeds on the strength of its ideas.

A surprisingly sweet and sassy rom-com about childhood best friends.

At its best, “The Lost Bus” offers a testament to people’s courage, solo or in groups, when faced with nature’s deadly chaos (albeit a chaos intensified by human-caused climate change). At its worst, it reduces the biggest fire-related calamity in recent memory — 85 deaths, about $16 billion in damage and an area five times the size of San Francisco burned to the ground — to an effective but impersonal disaster movie.

A rather poetic costume drama jarringly interrupted by bits of modern banality. [02 Oct 1981, p.17]

Wolf — who wrote Teenage with Jon Savage, author of “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture 1875-1945” — deftly weaves together various media in a way that breathes its own youthful, stream-of-conscious life into the documentary genre.

Farahani’s performance is outstanding. She comes across as both delicate and fierce, and her sad-eyed anguish is palpable.

Written by former deejay Audrey Wells, the observant and funny script includes some wonderful scenes for the leading ladies.

This story has explosive screen possibilities. What it seems to lack is an incendiary star. [22 Mar 1978, p.D9]

Think of this movie as a glorified home video rather than a bitingly insightful documentary. But for Garcia and Grisman, this soft-shoe approach couldn't be more appropriate.

The movie is almost devised like a rat-in-maze experiment at the Yale psychology department. Each few minutes some new obstacle comes up for Chris, threatening to obliterate his dreams, at which point the film stands back and watches him improvise brilliantly on the run.