It's not art, this movie. But it's much more amusing than you'd expect.

A sort of thinking-person's cornball movie.

About as understated as a 21-gun salute... What's missing is anything of Reiner himself.

Less-than-scintillating spin on "Life Is Beautiful."

I was hooked from beginning to end.

Doesn't connect with its audience in the one place that matters most: the heart.

Hovers frustratingly somewhere between charming and only mildly amusing.

[Craven's] stroke of genius is to offer the horror movie in an ironic mode. He's winking at viewers and inviting them to share a clever conspiracy that we on the cholesterol-clogged side of 30 cannot begin to understand.

Crouse is stiff and Hutton's a bit sappy, but Lone's performance would melt an iceberg's heart. Despite a rubbery forehead and crude make-up work, Lone is convincing. With grunts, moans, howls and mime, he presents a stoic, depressed, trapped human being. [13 Apr 1984, p.21]

This often macabre comedy allows us to doff such civilized traits as taste and decency. We're free to laugh at anything, and we do. Oh, the shame -- and the good time.

On Chesil Beach can feel like observing a deli worker slice a small piece of rancid cured meat, in increasingly transparent slivers of prosciutto-like thinness, and then holding them up to the light for inspection.

It would be nice to know if the troubling images we see are a sweeping problem or just a small glimpse of a minority.

Seven Veils doesn’t crash to Earth, but it also never quite frees itself from the notebook of its ideas to become the gripping emotional thriller it seems to want to be.

Gets more and more complex until it's almost laughable; it has too many beats, too many reverses, and in the end seems unbelievable.

The ending is neither outlandish nor foreseeable, which is its own impressive accomplishment.

An American teen encounters peculiar horrors at a remote German resort in Tilman Singer’s “Cuckoo,” a kooky sci-fi genre hybrid that crackles with offbeat turns and creature scares as it unfolds against a backdrop of deceptively serene forests and cheeky Euro-kitsch.

It’s a fun movie to see with a rip-roaring midnight crowd; watched on its own, it’s a little depressing. You can only shock the monkey so many times before the shock wears off.

A blandly middling crowd pleaser.

In addition to presenting a parable about the collapse of society, Amirpour’s film is also a kind of postmodern Adam-and-Eve story.

The problem with S.O.B. is that it reveals another sort of failure on Edwards' part: his fondness for dwelling on this low point in his career. He neglects to update the scenario or liberate it from the self-pity he overindulged in at the time. In fact, it's residual self-pity that undermines S.O.B. as a promising satire of Hollywood mores and hypocrisies. Edwards' tendency to feel sorry for himself keeps intruding on the potential wackiness. [2 July 1981, p.C1]

By lovingly examining these dishes’ cultural underpinnings, Hawk serves up an insightful introduction to a food scene at the cross-section of political strife and culinary excellence — not a full meal, exactly, but an enticing appetizer.

Passionately anticipated and much ballyhooed, the film, alas, is little more than a foppish, fang de siecle costume drama. Its pulse barely registers.

How many times can we be awestruck by Day-Glo Gumbies? And why do these creatures always travel with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir?

A whodunit so bafflingly constructed that you can't even figure out what it is, so the whodun part is superfluous.

Although “As I AM” sometimes gets lost in the weeds of the club scene and Goldstein’s personal entanglements, it approaches the central irony of his life with both clarity and sadness, honoring its subject with a frankness he would have appreciated.

In The Man Without a Face, Mel Gibson reminds us that he doesn't need one-liners and explosive special effects to warrant our attention. Gibson, as actor and first-time director, is not only self-assured in these dual roles, but he seems relieved to let the drama carry him, rather than the reverse. The result is a movie that's both heartwarming and heart-wrenching.

In some ways, Contact is just like the universe: big, star-bright and seemingly endless. Not to mention that it begins with a big bang, gradually falls into a lull and finally succumbs to entropy.

Major League is shamelessly formulaic. At the beginning, when it uses Randy Newman's ironic ode to Cleveland ("City of light, city of magic"), the movie has a lovely tone, and briefly, you feel a surge of anticipation, as if the people making it might actually have an original point of view or some feel for the game. All hope is dashed, though, early on, when you realize that they are cannibalizing every other baseball movie. (Newman wrote the music for "The Natural.") This is movie-making by rip-off.