As a rule, the drawn and computer-animated imagery is top notch and seamlessly integrated, but the central characters' tawny complexions and the often chiaroscuro lighting sometimes obscure all but the whites of their eyes and their pearl-perfect teeth.

The problem, sadly, is that the whole amounts to less than the sum of its parts.

Having hit a sassy stride in The Great Muppet Caper (after a treacly start with The Muppet Movie) Jim Henson and Frank Oz suffer a relapse in the progressively lackluster The Muppets Take Manhattan. The weakest link in Manhattan is a scenario of incurable listlessness. [14 July 1984, p.C7]

Directed by the inventive Uruguayan horror specialist Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), the new “Alien: Romulus” was billed as a back-to-basics reboot, and to its credit, it’s a no-frills, straight-up genre piece built largely on the bones of the first two movies. All that’s missing are originality and a convincing final act, and, honestly, you could do worse for a Saturday night eek-a-thon.

This ensemble comedy, with its fine cast and clever writing, has more mass appeal than the conventional coming-of-age caper. The plot, though scattered, is tried and runs true. [8 Feb 1985, p.23]

The sequel to the 2013 animated blockbuster is much better than, say, “Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World.” But Frozen II is still a disappointing continuation of the story of Queen Elsa and Princess Anna of Arendelle.

Garca brings his finely calibrated sense of drama to the subject of adoption, which he handles with characteristic restraint and insight -- at least until the film's maudlin, too-pat finale. That sharp melodramatic turn is a shame, because so much of what has gone before in Mother and Child is of real quality.

Peculiar yet provocative film, which exerts a slow, mesmeric pull over the course of nearly 2 ½ hours.

Feels like a manufactured Asian "Chocolat," which drives the label 'art house movie' even further into mainstream banality.

If not new and significant, it's at least a funny attempt to pull off the trick of holding a mirror to our hall of mirrors. [1 June 1979, p.22]

If this strikes you as vaguely familiar, you’re right: Disconnect is a computer “Crash.”

Goat doesn’t shy from showing us monstrous behavior, which might be more than some viewers can bear. This isn’t an easy film to watch. But it’s even harder to forget.

The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.

The movie is so disturbing that it seems nearly blasphemous. I wouldn't wish it on an anthrax spore. After all, anthrax has feelings, too.

A gorgeous, if disjointed, spectacle, made endurable – if not entirely comprehensible – by its eye-popping cast.

Leads you through a miserable childhood without sentimentality or relief. The effect is torturous.

The movie, which Carion wrote with Eric Assous, has a calming quality. The story moves slowly but, given the milieu and pace of life, this seems perfectly appropriate.

You may find some of the story developments melodramatic -- I did -- but the film itself is quite powerful.

Pennies From Heaven is a rejuvenating, landmark achievement in the evolution of Hollywood musicals, and certainly the finest American movie of 1981. [18 Dec 1981, p.C1]

The romantic comedy boasts two winning leads in Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie, as well as some sweet, funny moments amid the Aaron Sorkin-esque dialogue — courtesy of writer-director Leslye Headland — that’s a little too clever for its own believability.

Through vivid archival material and voice-overs, the filmmakers create moving vignettes that, taken together, form a fascinating primer on nonviolence as a political force and discipline.

With its pounding, bloody violence, foul-mouthed language and putrid worldview, Wanted isn't comic book-y on a par with "Iron Man" or "The Incredible Hulk." Rather it's an example of revenge of the nerds at its nastiest and most vulgar.

Happily, Craven knows just how to play off expectations and twist things past predictability.

If Fighting for Life is propaganda, it's the best kind, largely avoiding editorialization and instead focusing on simple human drama.

The Goodbye Girl itself represents a satisfying step back in the right direction for the purposes of light, optimistic film romance. Its appeal isn't exactly novel, but it is ingeniously and refreshingly traditional. [21 Dec 1977, p.D1]

The complex story structure teeters between the revelatory and the absurd, depending on how much you buy the irritating-then-intriguing performance by Arsine Khanjian (Egoyan's wife, the Armenian-Canadian actor).

The performances are fine and nuanced, but the stakes seem, for some reason, more theoretical than actual.

Outbreak is an absolute hoot thanks primarily to director Wolfgang Petersen's rabid pacing and the great care he brings to setting up the story and its probability.

Inventive, insightful and utterly surprising movie. It takes you places you're not prepared to go: namely, into the soul of a performer best known for flying back kicks. Who, by the way, can act.

Although the newly paunchy Stallone is credible as a weak, conflicted small-time sheriff, this suburban "Serpico" is a noble, passionless charade.

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.

Maybe the easiest thing would be to skip the movie altogether. Godard has created such a hermetic, uncompromising world that only the hardiest cinematic spelunkers are likely to appreciate its depths.

Although the dogs have surely been Disney-fied to some extent, the sequences of them trying to survive are magnificent and deeply moving. Bring the Kleenex, and hug your pups when you get home.

It’s a larky bunch of malarkey, laced with just enough moral complexity — washed down with car chases and capers — to set your own tush a-twitching.

For its part, Bombshell tells a crucial chapter of that larger tale with coolheaded style and heated indignation. Its aim might be narrow, but it hits the target.

The movie packs a lot in, and the quick pace of early scenes can feel like running on a treadmill, but Belle settles into a nice rhythm. It ends up having all the requisites of a period drama — a strings-heavy soundtrack, lavish costumes and passionate declarations of love — plus a good deal more.

It takes every resource available to a recently minted Oscar nominee — but does almost nothing with it.

The power of images — to distort, define, denigrate and celebrate — emerges with clarity and force in Through a Lens Darkly, a fascinating, visually stunning, emotionally devastating documentary by Thomas Allen Harris.

Avenue Montaigne transforms an overwhelming metropolis into a user-friendly village with quirkily appealing characters.

Swedish director Mikael Hafstrom creates a compelling ride of a movie. Every beat of the film is weighted with significance, and our mounting dread becomes almost intolerable.

A well-acted first effort written and directed by Jamie Thraves.

An absorbing and inspiring portrait of two musicians whose unerring sense of what's right -- both artistically and ethically -- has not just held them in good stead but driven their particular brand of success.

It's a long and relatively underdramatized film, but it's powerfully true.

First-class in all departments except clarity.

It's like an enema to the soul as it probes the ways of death ? some especially grotesque in a family setting. You leave slightly asquirm. You know it will linger.

Will seem a classic if you're stoned, and only slightly less funny if you're straight.

[The film] isn’t for everyone. But the story is astoundingly original. During the summer months, when theaters are occupied by superheroes and sequels, that’s something worth celebrating.

Despite Page’s excellent voiceover, “Bettie Page” suffers from embarrassingly choppy editing and a parade of stock film clips used to illustrate episodes recounted by its subject.

It stands apart from the rehash pack by accomplishing something rival remakes rarely do: It improves on the premise it has been handed, producing a modernized version of a decades-old story that's superior to its predecessor in virtually every aspect.

The dialogue is less than sparkling, and what passes for witty repartee is mainly a barrage of sarcastically delivered f-bombs and such insults as “gold-digging whore.” The style of acting would, at a sporting event, merely be called shouting.

Youth is intoxicating, I’ll admit. Had I never tasted this wine before, I could easily see myself yearning for another glass. But this time it feels like an old vintage in a new bottle, one that’s grown slightly stale rather than better with age.

Though Watt's emphasis on coincidence and fate seems strained at times, Look Both Ways is rich in dreamy summer atmosphere and deadpan wit.

The question isn't whether Toys in the Attic is any good. The question is: good for whom?

A conventional cop thriller leavened with a tablespoon of style and a quarter-cup of garbagey fun.

A refreshing fall film. [18 Sep 1981, p.19]

Ultimately, Silva’s uneven command of tone undoes whatever goodwill his actors have managed to generate. They — and we — deserve much better than this.

As the film progresses, its visual resonance with the iconic photographs of Baker feels more organic and less forced. By the final act, it’s chilling how much Hawke has transformed into the late-career musician, looking aged well beyond his years.

Albert Finney and a fine supporting cast try very hard, but they are frustrated at every turn by directionless direction and special effects that for the most part diminish the shocks and totally gut the climax. [24 July 1981, p.21]

Kermit, who takes to the role of Smollet like a grunion to running, is commanding, but it is Piggy as Smollet's castaway flame who puts much-needed wind into the movie's luffing sails. Clad in a muumuu and clamshells, she sets Kermit's timbers a-shivering as in the old days. Their love for each other—like America's love for Muppets—is simply unsinkable.

Enzo Avitabile Music Life succeeds at conveying one-quarter of its title. It is full of beautiful sounds that should delight fans of Avitabile and world music in general. The life portion is a bit trickier, but you get the sense that Avitabile wanted it that way.

The Wanderers is a well-made movie that leaves a so-what impression. [27 July 1979, p.B1]

With Elvis, Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

The perceptive dramatic touches of Fonda and Redford take the stereotypical edge off the stock characters of "cowboy" and "career girl." But these serve ridiculous story making a mushy, if not disreputable, moral point. [21 Dec 1979, p.32]

This is one of the most becalming films ever made. The grasslands seem oddly serene, and to watch them is to feel your pulse rate flatten out -- yet another aspect of Mongolian Ping Pong's transcendent charm.

There's nothing beyond the bloodshed and gallows humor, just intellectually secondhand implications about materialism, conformity and misogyny.

Something fresh, clever and confident.

Very, very funny, thanks to a lively first script by Mark O'Rowe, who has a good ear for earthy dialogue and a sense of life's absurd little synchronicities.

This is all terrifically nasty and shocking stuff.

A superbly heartfelt drama for six diverse actors, it is as colorfully striated as its majestic namesake - and almost as wide. The film's depth is another matter altogether.

A reasonably diverting tale of pre-middle-aged floundering that can’t stop pointing out how unexpected everything is.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

Frank (Ben Kingsley) meets Laurel (Tea Leoni), a woman who has been around the block a time or 200, and she likes Frank's directness, while he likes her unflappability. This is one of the greatest screwball relationships in years.

What little grace there is in Living Out Loud (and there isn't much) is all in LaGravenese's script, not on the screen.

Killing Them Softly possesses a modicum of swagger and style, even as it perpetuates some of the crime genre's more tedious cliches, from slow-motion savagery to facile cynicism.

Weird and wonderful, zigging where it should zag and zagging where it should zig, this wildly imaginative flight of fancy strikes an admirably poised balance between whimsy, screwball comedy, social satire and generous meditation on the foibles and highest aspirations of human nature.

Like so many other rob-the-mob movies, the plan seems pretty far-fetched, and the ending isn't much of a surprise. But if you like your films sprinkled liberally with sex, violence and humor, then you're bound to like Bound.

With Hawkins’s alternately elfin and flinty performance at its center, The Lost King winds up being a paean to amateurism and unconventionality.

The real question is whether the film moves the "Brideshead" ball down the playing field in any meaningful way since the acclaimed miniseries. And I'd have to say that it doesn't so much advance it as it shrinks it into a golf-ball-size nugget.

Though it captures many sharp, stark details of life in poverty-stricken Kazakhstan, Schizo's momentum is so measured, it nearly lulls its audience to sleep.

What Polar Bear really lacks is hindsight. It is a little girl’s valentine to her father, without the benefit of bittersweet wisdom that comes with age.

True Believer is a thriller about moral rejuvenation, and there's not much wrong with it that another actor in the lead wouldn't cure.

Cloverfield is a relentless, I-thought-my-eyeballs-were-bleeding exercise in visual disorientation.

The story can shift from uproarious to heartbreaking in the span of a scene, but Cheadle, in his feature directorial debut, controls the tone like a veteran.

It’s engaging and watchable, even as it marches toward a seemingly suicidal climax. Yet the complex dynamic between Wardaddy and his men is far more fascinating.

In addition to all the rollicking, ribald humor, Tamara Drewe also has a couple of flashes of darkly comic violence. In a literary sense, it's poetic justice, really. Punishment meted out for bad behavior.

Nadja has some delicious qualities. Most delectable of all is Elina Lowensohn as Nadja, the brooding daughter of Count Dracula, an otherworldly being with ebony lipstick, lusciously dark eyebrows, a dark hood and a great accent to match.

You won't be disappointed, and you will be deeply, quietly moved.

Billed as a romantic comedy, the movie is certainly funny, but it's also as darkly disturbing as any this year.

A sumptuous period drama.

The Road possesses undeniable sweep and a grim kind of grandeur, but it ultimately plays like a zombie movie with literary pretensions.

The geological equivalent of an albatross around the neck. It's another of those Warner Bros. productions that are heavy on star iconography and production values but AWOL on story.

It's cool but not too cool, and cute but not too cute. A neat trick considering its overexposed avian cast.

This taut political thriller, set amid the soulless office architecture of K Street, has an ostensibly liberal bent, but its antiheroine’s Machiavellian methods turn the film’s subject away from its cause, portraying lobbyists and politicians in a dark light.

Where it succeeds best is not in describing how Luzhin got broken but how love fixed him, albeit temporarily.

You don't have any idea what's going to happen next. You're not caught in a movie, so much as a narrative stratagem.

The only reason this dilemma has any import is thanks to Bardem, who almost single-handedly drags the film along.

It's a fascinating story but not so fascinatingly told.

Overall, the movie is cloddishly composed, with awkward zooms and theatrical blocking. This is one of those movies where characters speak in asides to the audience; Nunn has reinvented the proscenium arch.

The key question the film raises: Is what happened to the Tipton Three an outrage? It allows us to draw our own conclusions strictly on an eye-of-the-beholder basis.

It isn't as sad a movie as "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work," another behind-the-mask documentary. It's funnier. But it's just as illuminating.

Fortunately, the maudlin moments are offset by fine performances, flashes of humor and a visual sense that’s more astute than the script.

Like the mix tapes that obsess its main characters, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist builds into something of infectious joy.

The second half of this nearly two-hour film is a pure delight — fast-paced and funny and filled with special effects and humor as great as any recent Marvel movie, with the possible exception of “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It’s a joyless, surpassingly dour enterprise, but one that fulfills its mission with Katniss’s own eagle-eyed efficiency and unsentimental somberness.

Moore’s latest movie is funny and touching, and it has a lot to say about what we settle for as Americans citizens, and how much better our lives might be if we raised some hell.

Jensen positions Men & Chicken as a fablelike ode to humanism and tolerance, but his obsession with brutish sexuality and mean, slapstick humor makes that claim feel unearned and glib.

At a time when the country is engaged in fresh debates about the fragile relationship between privacy and national security, this particular chapter seems worth revisiting.

Unfortunately, this loosen-up-Sandy-baby allegory, full of heavyhanded sexual/mythic symbols is more of a poetic nudist's delight than a movie. Its characters (from fussy Grant to voluptuous MacPherson) are only mildly appealing. Writer/director John Duigan, maker of the charming Flirting, took a recent tumble with The Wide Sargasso Sea. He has yet to regain his footing.

It’s a sweet and savory morsel of storytelling, drowning in a puddle of special-effects sauce.

As compelling as Warner’s story is, Crown Heights never quite takes hold cinematically. It’s a procedural whose central protagonist remains necessarily passive and something of a cipher, despite the wellsprings of emotion that Stanfield manages to tap simply by gazing balefully out a cell window.

Considering how firmly the image of Popeye is fixed in the minds of all spinach-bred Americans, it's daring of the film to open by showing the character in its familiar cartoon form. But Robin Williams so utterly captures the Popeye idea as to justify this, and Shelley Duvall is such a perfect Olive Oyl that it will always be difficult to imagine her impersonating a human being. [19 Dec 1980, p.20]

It has as much of an ax to grind as the humorless and misguided bureaucrats it mocks.

I can only bestow this adaptation of Joanne Harris's bestselling novel with such faint praise as "pleasant" and "mildly disarming."

To see seemingly reg'lar guys utterly stripped of dignity and defense is cruel enough, but crueler still is the laughter that you cannot seem to stop from rupturing your lungs and aorta.

Like its protagonist’s fleeting relationships, the film never completely connects.

The Hedgehog is a treat: a movie that's smart, grown-up, wry and deeply moving. Best of all, this is accomplished with the lightest of cinematic strokes. It sneaks up on you, without grandstanding, melodrama or outright jokes.

The Fall is often an affectionate caricature itself, but one of astonishing beauty, featuring two heartfelt performances from Untaru and the tender, often mordantly funny Pace. They're perfect foils for Tarsem's gorgeous tone poem to cinema as a medium of magic and miracles, stories and lies.

Features a handsome production and terrific performances.

By turns sweet, sad, funny and poignant, We Have a Pope is the story of a man who doesn't want to be God's representative on Earth.

Coleman and Thomas are unusually sympathetic embodiments of a father and son, and they have some moments that are legitimately stirring. Cloak & Dagger is never as adept or perceptive as you'd like it to be, but it's got what members of the critical fraternity traditionally characterize as a little something.

Everyone is convincingly miserable, and audiences are likely to follow suit.

Had the filmmakers resisted the temptation to politicize their material they might have made a great war movie. They might also have thought to give us some indication of the strategic significance of the hill. As it is, they've managed to create a deeply affecting, highly accomplished film.

The movie is jampacked with jokes, sight gags and set pieces guaranteed to appeal to the audience's sense of the preposterous.

As a showcase for Murray’s proven rapport with his audience, St. Vincent occasionally threatens to become a self-congratulatory victory lap. But as a celebration, it’s a chance to revel in the Murray personae — wiseacre, hipster, humble man of the street and hell of a nice guy — that has allowed him somehow to reach mass-media stardom while retaining his own idiosyncratic niche.

This anti-feminist parable is both a labor and a pain.

At times, The Man Who Sold His Skin plays like a cultural parody, but its aim is dead serious, and more sobering. The pathos and tragedy of the global refugee crisis is its target, not the pretensions of the international art market, and it, from time to time, delivers a sting.

Cradle Will Rock is left in mid-rock, as it were, its energy squandered, its sense of history confused, its sound and fury ultimately signifying nothing.

Harris and Mortensen may not have the combined star power to push Appaloosa to the level of popularity of last year's "3:10," but the film is every bit as enjoyable, and, for traditionalists, more measured.

Without a clear narrative, the story recedes in the face of the movie’s stylized violence — which is, admittedly, glorious, even brazen.

A drama about strong, giving, funny women, Fried Green Tomatoes seems plucked from the same patch as the play-turned-movie Steel Magnolias. It's not exactly a successful hybrid, but you could get a craving for it anyway.

As charming as it is instructive.

Everest gets several things right, but it fails to find a way to make the average viewer relate to the people on the mountain.

Downton Abbey is eye and ear candy of the highest order: rich and delicious, but not especially nutritious.

For its flaws, Blood Diamond is a gem, if only for being an unusually smart, engaged popcorn flick.

Vaughn can motormouth like a machine gun, spraying men, women and children with manic, rat-a-tat outbursts of toxic insincerity. It's often dirty, yes. But it's also manic and inspired.

It offers a sort of Chinese food poignancy, the kind that may seem satisfying at the time but ultimately leaves us hungering for more, for something authentic.

Isn't juvenile, it isn't even infantile. It's prenatal!

The movie, alas, is shackled somewhat by Waugh's original, pedestrian plot, which is too full of discrete incidents and slow to form an overarching story.

In the end, Stage Beauty is in over its mediocre head.

The documentary makes an effective and rather chilling case that there is an almost unbroken chain between Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein.

For the most part, The Other Guys is seriously silly stuff, in the best sense.

The movie’s focus on good vibes and high times leaves little room to contemplate the more human story. Regardless, the movie is good-natured and an enjoyable watch. If Myers really just wanted to show his appreciation, he went above and beyond.

Ironically, Call Me Lucky, a worshipful new documentary profile of Crimmins by comic-turned-filmmaker Bobcat Goldthwait, has a little too much reverence for its irreverent subject.

Take a powerful, revealing nonfiction book, sift through it for its most cliche'd elements and turn it into a terror film and you've got The Serpent and the Rainbow.

This may be catnip to a kiddie audience that, these days, would seem to know no other world. But it's hard to think much of a movie whose only point of identification with its audience is its utter superficiality. [05 Aug 1986, p.C10]

The most perfunctory and least imaginative of the recent cycle of horror melodramas, Motel Hell may be credited with a fleeting wry touch, but it wears out its welcome by running a minimum of ghoulish stunts into the ground. [25 Oct 1980, p.F4]

If The Traitor proves anything, it’s that an 80-year-old filmmaker can still pounce.

Director Robert Zemeckis has created a hodgepodge of amateurish, pie-in-the-face humor. The six young stars are untalented, unattractive and about as believable as characters from a Laverne and Shirley episode, and for a solid hour and a half they run around bumping into things. [28 Apr 1978, p.19]

At nearly 2½ hours, the movie is fun to watch until it’s not, and then it becomes a chore.

Lathan, who was such a live wire as the aspiring basketballer in 2000's "Love & Basketball," gives this movie an alert, glamorous presence.

For anyone with a taste for the stylized violence and self-aware cartoonishness of the John Wick films — a taste for blood and mayhem that comes closer to corn syrup than most cinematic carnage — Nobody is a brutal treat.

The main problem with Patriot Games, though, is that the inevitable confrontation between Ryan and Miller takes forever to materialize. In the interim, Noyce gets bogged down in the mass of technical detail -- the inside-CIA baseball -- that is such an integral aspect of Clancy's books. On the page, Clancy's research is impressively exhaustive, and if by chance you become bored, you can always skip ahead. But a movie doesn't afford us this luxury. Some of what we're shown about the inner working of the intelligence network is fascinating, but sometimes it can become an irritating distraction. You just want to cut to the chase.

[A] captivating and meticulous new film by Alex Gibney.

A lovely, amazing, wonderfully provocative film.

Much of Greenland features chaotic crowd scenes. The real disaster is how quickly mankind descends into dismaying depravity.

The Mountain is what it is, and any attempt to recapitulate its meaning in some other form (like — ahem — a movie review) is a fool’s errand. With that in mind, it is probably best to set this thought down, and leave it with you: The Mountain is not for everyone, but it is, most emphatically, something else.

Lanthimos and his company still dare to find a bracing, disconsolate farce in our brief and helpless thrashing through life. For that, most people will never forgive them.

For all its awkwardness and mawkishness, Santini deserves the shot. It has an authentic core of family drama and humor that could stir a large public. [03 Oct 1980, p.C1]

If Ready Player One is tedious at times, it’s also oodles of fun at others.

In the end, It Could Happen to You is a lot like the cop and the waitress: sweet, naive, not too smart, but likable. In this pyrotechnic summer of "Speed," "Blown Away" and "True Lies," that's got to count for something.

Paltrow is pretty commanding, even if Madden pushes things toward airlessness by keeping the camera so tight.

Although the movie is moving and even funny in many places, it's also overextended. And composer John Williams's syrupy score practically oozes from your ears on the drive home.

All in all, Jack Goes Boating is an auspicious -- if slightly ostentatious -- debut by Hoffman, one of today's greatest actors. Maybe next time his performance in front of his camera will be as subtle as his performance behind it.

A sadly dull and unimaginative outing.

You don’t have to understand the lyrics — or even like the music — to find We Are X entertaining, even, at times, moving.

The Lodge isn’t a perfect treat. But for those who like their movies dark and disturbing, it does the trick.

Barely adequate as a pictorial rendering of the book, the movie still thrives on the rousing nature of this unlikely but enthralling epic. [08 Nov 1978, p.C1]

Its arresting visual design aside, Cafe Society is upper-middle-late-period Allen, a modestly diverting ditty that will never go down as one of his greats. (But, as most can agree, Allen at his most middling is still better than many hacks at their best.)

Needs more than happy thoughts to get off the ground.

It’s impossible to dismiss von Trier as merely a hype-monger. He’s too damnably good a filmmaker for that. Watching Nymphomaniac is to be reminded of his superb skills in creating vivid worlds and characters on screen.

Gattaca may be all done up in new-fangled notions, but underneath all the guff about designer babies, it rests on a notion that was a staple of the original "Star Trek" series.

The story fails to really engage on any level save the kinetic.

In filmmaker Mehta's deft hands, the outcome is handled with power and sensitivity. [22 Aug1 997, pg.N40]

As a lucid, emotionally involving portrait of the looming crisis surrounding water - supplies of which are dwindling as contamination rises - Jessica Yu's smartly constructed argument works less as a tutorial than as an infectiously impassioned call to arms.

There's no doubt about Burt Reynolds' skill. Starting Over finds Reynolds at a level of proficiency that approaches the awesome. [05 Oct 1979, p.B1]

Donner never quite gets the tone right, and the pace is positively stuporous. The horses gallop, but the film barely canters. [15 Apr 1985, p.B2]

It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.

A soft-focused, wistful big-screen art film.

Has its funny moments, but all too often it's a corny, lackluster film in which humans pretend (not always convincingly) to interact with cartoons.

Feels like a song you may have heard before, but one whose aching beauty makes it endlessly listenable.

It's always nice to see Clint, and especially nice to see him play someone whose humanity -- no, whose mortality -- is all too apparent.

An absorbing, intelligent and suspense-filled film... It's streamlined and rich at the same time -- like the best of the James Bond films, but serious.

Murphy owes much of his success to the amazing special-effects makeup by Rick Baker ("An American Werewolf in London"), but he brings a tenderness and dignity to the performance that he has never shown before.

Despite some scenes that have the feel of an acting or writing workshop, these are believable, complex characters. Their story has a full measure of Judd Apatow raunch, with a dash of "Swingers" emotional sweetness.

Directed by first-timer Derick Martini and produced by Martin Scorsese, balances grimness and levity with relative success. It stops short of quirk. It only flirts with "American Beauty"-style hyperbole. It falls somewhere in between, thanks to Martini's steady hand and a bunch of reliable actors working in good form.

Oldman is the least inhibited actor of his generation, and as this deranged detective, he keeps absolutely nothing in reserve.

The premise -- a roundelay of New Yorkers looking for connection, or to escape it -- feels tired, and Mitchell's portrayal of sex as the ultimate vehicle for transcendence, self-knowledge and healing, while conveyed with authentic sweetness, seems shockingly naive.

The setting and fatalistic musings of The Grey invite comparison to Sean Penn's stirring 2007 ad­ven­ture "Into the Wild"; in its more metaphysical moments, told in impressionistic flashbacks, it recalls last year's "The Tree of Life."

Works far better as journalism than as drama. One weakness is that poor Linklater has to keep bringing in guest explainers, who lay out one policy or another but have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

It’s a heist film with heart and humor, and where’s the crime in that?

The real world has caught up with him, and [Waters'] off-kilter comedy seems disappointingly mundane and mainstream.

The Tin Drum is likely to be remembered as another conspicuous example of why the urge to film certain books ought to be resisted. [25 Apr 1980, p.C1]

There’s no dazzling CGI in “Words of War” — no stalwart, spandexed action figures flying through the air to land nuclear uppercuts on the villain of the hour. There’s just one woman: Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who went up against the villain of our age and paid the ultimate price for it.

Sure, there may be a nugget or two of gold in “Lost City.” But it mostly stays lost, in this convoluted drag of a script. “Dora” should have picked a path and stayed on it. Instead, it’s a movie that is muy aburrido — boring.

Tokyo, if anything, becomes more of a mystery after Tokyo! than it was before. That's the strength and curse of the film. If you can't find real connections between its disparate stories, you can always make them up yourself. But if that kind of film frustrates you, think twice before booking a ticket to Tokyo!

Brooks-the-performer embodies the movie's spirit with superb modulation. 

David Zucker and Segal seem to thrive on the formulaic tomfoolery that propels these rapid-fire spoofs. Naked Gun 33 1/3, as pointlessly plotted as ever, manages to be not only still funny but energetically slapped together and occasionally inventive.

While the young cast does its best to sell the gleeful music, its delirious premise eventually loses steam, as do the songs, which are stronger in the first part of the film. Yet despite this doomsday setting, Anna and the Apocalypse ultimately delivers an uplifting message.

You may leave this movie exhilarated by its no-holds-barred boldness or annoyed and bewildered at the unpredictable course it takes.

Although Knightley’s Gun often seems to be a passive figure, buffeted by the machinations of those around her, the film’s honesty about the enormous personal costs of whistleblowing is a welcome relief from more romanticized heroics.

It’s too bad, then, that the comedy spends so much more time mimicking the familiar than trusting in its own fresh perspective.

It seems such a waste to go onto the actual streets of Lower Manhattan and shoot a movie this stupid. Think of the money, the logistics, the interruptions in the city's life -- all that trouble for what? For this? For shame.

Checks in somewhere between a delight and a diversion.

Provides a fascinating glimpse of how the human spirit struggles.

May be too much Yves Saint Laurent even for those connoisseurs who can differentiate the YSL line from Dior's or Chanel's.

Admirably restrained melodrama.

The haunting beauty of the music, and the people who produce it – that's the chapter and verse of this story.