Onward is ultimately a trip worth taking.

Though the film gleams with Howard's customary spit polish, there's no denying that the story is pitted with plot holes.

These actors move with the labored blocking of a high school play.

May be the most disappointing American comedy of the decade, partly because it's jokeless and joyless but mostly because it squanders an all-star cast of superb comic talent.

The animated film takes a standard story and adds so much visual beauty that it exceeds expectations.

You can probably figure out how this is all going to end, but it still has more laughs than you might think. Nobody gets more than the wonderful Jane Lynch as the ex-drug addict and director of the mentoring program.

It drags a bit and suffers from not enough Rudy.

For all the pain and loss that The Kite Runner depicts, it is still a film of exhilarating, redemptive humanity, conveying an enduring sense of hope.

The main reason to see Criminal isn't for the mental workout it might offer but simply to watch these two appealing performers act and act and act.

Haute Cuisine provides no huge revelations or profound messages, but it is sweetly and consistently engaging — a tasty treat that’s not entirely filling but perfectly enjoyable all the same.

Its earnest, always incomplete quest haunts us in ways stock imagery cannot.

From its deceptively easygoing beginning to the heart-wrenching finale, The Green Mile keeps you wonderfully high above the cynical ground.

Everyone is given their due and dignity in this funny, sexy, humanist film that, if it is a chick flick, gives the genre a good name.

A most excellent sequel, funnier and livelier than the original.

The trail is all too familiar and pretty soon we recollect why westerns lost their appeal. [28 June 1985, p.27]

The result is a classic comic-book hero quest that, while not entirely novel, hews to its own rules and conventions with dignity and artfulness.

Most confoundingly, it sheds no light on Hart himself: a man who steadfastly insisted on maintaining his privacy, whose impressive intellect was couched within an aloof, withholding persona, remains a cipher, the missing core of a movie that’s nominally about him, but can’t seem to get a bead on its own protagonist.

This movie would have done better two-thirds as long but focused more tightly, or four times longer and airing on Netflix as a limited series. Still: The human and the historian in me feels compelled to recommend it. Because movies about atrocities are necessary.

Like the graphics that intermittently appear as Solomonov travels (and which look like the first Google Image result for “Israel map”), the documentary proves slightly underwhelming.

Where Romero goes for the cheap, linear approach, Argento's storytelling is painfully poetic, with ever-shifting points of view and asides. It's not unusual for him to drop a Middle Ages dream sequence in the middle of things, rely on the unpredictability of a cat to advance the plot, or resort to pure shock that's no less shocking because it's expected: There's a madness in Argento's method and it's always appropriate.

Fighting isn't very good, but it will make you hope that someday, some great director will give Tatum's pecs the star vehicle they deserve.

Director Leonard Nimoy does not use his ears for comedy -- nor his eyes, even. His three leads recite their lines as though they wanted to take their jumbo-sized salaries and run -- which, given this movie, maybe isn't such a dumb idea.

Blue Beetle, the next chapter in the DC Comics-inspired universe that tells the origin story of a not particularly well-known character, is in several ways refreshingly new. It is also, for a few other reasons, tediously familiar.

But this hackneyed stalker-rama, which pretends to be a call for gun control, ultimately is little more than an excuse to turn the bad guy into a human colander. The better to strain the moral pasta.

The Persian Version is an ambitious effort to suture up the rift between past and present, parent and child. But like its heroine, it also suffers from a bit of split personality. It’s a tale with too much drama for the candy-colored comedy of its telling, and too much comedy for the drama to leave much of a mark.

The music is central, so viewers without a preexisting taste for thump and thrash will probably not be converted by the Imax 3-D spectacle.

The two-hour film never feels a minute too long.

I had to beg my 8-year-old to stop laughing.