As agenda-driven as Documented is, it also is a deeply engrossing self-portrait.

While the details of Nureyev’s 1961 defection in Paris are thrilling, the film falls into the trap of many historical dramas, rendering the story as surprisingly clunky, especially considering the nimbleness of its subjects.

Structurally, Vice is a mess, zigging here and zagging there, never knowing quite when to end, and when it finally does, leaving few penetrating or genuinely illuminating ideas to ponder.

Raggedy Man is starved for scenes that might fill out our scanty store of information--for example, a little more about the marriage, the love affair, her identity as a mother. Even the location needs to be filled out, since one forms the misimpression that Gregory is not so much a small town as a ghost town. Next time, the Fisks owe it to themselves to bite off enough material to chew. [03 Jul 1982, p.B3]

Like the gender-flipped “Ghostbusters” before it, this new movie neither reinvents not dishonors its inspiration, instead adding a modicum of zip — if less than turbocharged horsepower — to a vehicle that runs you through the staging of a crime by, ironically, obeying all the traffic laws.

Sometimes a movie makes a point that's been made before, but makes it so beautifully and so quietly that it feels like you're discovering it for the first time. Hideaway does that, with the obliqueness of an off-hand comment. The glancing touch makes it all the more hard-hitting.

Shines the light on a special kind of heroism -- the guts to face up to yourself and make changes. What makes this so emotionally compelling is the way Dave scrambles from this deep vale of cluelessness to something approaching moral maturity.

Respect is nominally a movie about a woman finding her voice, but more accurately it’s about her taking full possession of it.

The movie's nowhere near the inspired funniness of its predecessors. But it often displays the same spirit. It's strung end to end with sight gags. Some fall flat on their faces. But, by sheer weight of numbers, many of them work. It depends on your ability to lower yourself into -- or steer stoically clear of -- the idiocy pit.

Blackthorn feels less like a proper sequel to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," which it purports to be, than a coattail rider.

As with most sequels, Addams Family Values is a thinner, airier reunion. For those who enjoyed the original The Addams Family, the flavor is still there. But you feel a little undernourished.

Traitor traffics in the cliches of the terrorist chase film -- including the usual stereotypes of Muslims -- while trying not to succumb to outright bigotry.

The humor is even more wildly inappropriate, with a running joke about getting a baby stoned on pot, coke and ecstasy, and a scene inspired by the famous incident in "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to a frozen flagpole.

The movie is not for the squeamish, but for those who are unafraid to look at what is, perhaps, their own metaphorical "backyard," for those willing to stare into the long, dark night of the contemporary American soul, its bone-crunching message is worth hearing.

McDormand is the best thing about Laurel Canyon. She's also the most unfortunate victim of a film that seems unable or unwilling to give even its most intriguing and compulsively watchable character her due.

This ensemble comedy has its inventively funny moments. But ultimately, it gets a little too cute for its own good.

A big, sexy, sun-splashed thrill ride, is what a summer movie ought to be: not totally mindless, but more interested in jangling your nerves than engaging your brain.

Too simple for its own good.

With his mop-top cut and silly grin, Chan cuts an amiable figure, but while this film may confirm his skills and appeal to those already familiar with his better work, it's not likely to convert anyone else.

Eagle flops around trying to sustain a premise that defies suspenseful elaboration from the outset. No one with his wits about him believes the conspirators will succeed in capturing or shooting Churchill. More to the point, who would want them to? We're asked to suspend disbelief for the sake of a gimmick that not only insults common sense and general knowledge but also betrays old loyalties and convictions. [26 Mar 1977, p.B5]

Exhibits the weaknesses and the strengths of what has become a nearly foolproof formula for keeping viewers engaged.

It's tough to guess who will enjoy Secretariat more -- filmgoers who remember the extraordinary events of 1973, when the chestnut 3-year-old won the first Triple Crown in 25 years, or those for whom the story is brand-new.

If you're in the right frame of mind -- a sort of anything-goes, Elmore Leonard spirit -- this thing's going to be your kind of evening.

As fascinating as it is frightful. But despite all the occult patter and tony trimmings, Angel Heart is bogus -- only the bogeyman again.

Even at its most depraved, Joe’s journey, and her confession to Seligman, are still compelling enough to propel Volume II until the story becomes hopelessly over-plotted.

Grant's unblinking but sympathetic depiction of this emotionally unhinged world makes the viewer feel like an illicit, enlightened gawker, and it has the enormous fringe benefit of fine performers, including Richardson, who puts endearing vigor into the adulterous Lauren, and Julie Walters, Ralph's aunt, who tells the boy her frequent tipsiness is a recurring case of "sunstroke."

Like its predecessors, doesn’t need CGI, 3-D glasses or even praise from film critics. It just needs to please its audience with amped-up, old-school thrills that make its target demo whoop and holler with every zoom, smash and ka-BOOM. Consider this review a declaration that it does just that.

It is, as the title suggests, sweet — but also slight.

Sean Penn makes a striking screen presence in This Must Be the Place, a smart, funny and original road movie by Italian director Paolo Sorrentino ("Il Divo").

The wittiest jokes and cameo appearances are designed to soar far over the heads of young filmgoers and into the atavistic pop consciousness of their adult companions.

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.

Although this script starts off with great zest, it's ultimately a disappointment.

There’s a little too much happening in the film’s violent, frenetic conclusion, which involves the retrieval of fractured memories, the confession of betrayals and so many narrative loops within loops that the film’s big reveals never make perfect, deeply satisfying sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to.

Though Lust, Caution resounds with these disconcerting themes, it operates on the same principle that distinguishes all lasting romances, be they "Wuthering Heights," "Casablanca" or "When Harry Met Sally."

It's a wonderfully playful experience.

The Technicolor film, while still praised, was not received as well as Cukor’s version.

Lower City is sexy, but in a nice, dirty way. Everyone in it is deliciously low and sleazy, and so underdressed in the blazing heat that they are just dying to strip.

Faraway...is vaguely deflating, a film that doesn't build to a powerful climax so much as gradually run out of air.

On a grand scale, Tetris offers a window into the looming collapse of the Soviet Union, and from that vantage point, it’s actually pretty fascinating. On the smaller stage, it’s a classically heartwarming underdog story — one that involves backroom wheeling and dealing and an 11th-hour escape from thugs that’s straight out of a Cold War espionage film.

Tapping into the Zeitgeist of young black professionals starving to see themselves on film, it hits all the right cultural touchstones.

An elegantly wrought bit of nastiness.

It’s a slight and simplistic family dramedy: vividly rendered if vaguely cartoonish in its depiction of a parent and adolescent, once close, who find themselves unable to connect.

It plays like a baldfaced, brazen insult, but it is a stunningly accomplished one.

In the final scenes of Scream VI, there are a lot of deaths unfolding, including, arguably, the demise of a once-vital film franchise.

At Any Price finally hinges on tragedies, reversals and moral ambiguities of Shakespearean proportions, but they’re delivered ploddingly rather than as the intricate parts of an inevitable whole. At Any Price ultimately suffers from the very phenomenon it laments: Like Henry Whipple’s farm, it feels more mechanistic than organic.

A portrait of a mild-mannered zealot, one that seeps under the skin and unsettles the nerves.

With The Bourne Legacy, Gilroy has brought characteristic taste and skill to a nearly impossible task: embracing the past without completely erasing it, thereby creating an invitingly complicated and open-ended future.

A high-low tension runs through Elysium, not only in the narrative itself, but in Blomkamp’s own cinematic language, which can be lofty one moment and gleefully pulpy the next.

There are plenty of reasons to like the movie, such as its genuinely gentle wit, its occasional capture of the absurdities of aging and its endorsement of the permanence of lust, but one factor in particular is its brilliant cast of discarded '70s-era Hollywood stars.

Say what you will about Ken Russell, his films are usually bonkers. His latest, Lair of the White Worm, will do nothing to alter his reputation as the champion of camp thrash, but at least it's a step or two -- if only short ones -- above such recent efforts as "Salome's Last Veil" and "Gothic."

Psychological suspense at its finest.

Overall Nichols, Simon and especially Broderick find fresh threads in the old fatigues.

This film is a necessary reminder of what can happen when people preserve tradition for its own sake.

Most of what's included in this unapologetically scrambled mixture of Goonies, Hardy Boys adventures, Ghostbusters and Abbott and Costello monster films is bad actors wandering around in bad makeup and rubber masks and two kinds of kids -- cute, intolerably noisy, smart-alecky kids and not-so-cute, noisy, smart-alecky kids. I don't know which kind I liked least.

A refreshing summer cocktail of action-movie staples, The Wolverine combines the bracingly adult flavor of everyone’s favorite mutant antihero — tortured, boozy X-Man Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine — with the fizzy effervescence of several mixers from the cabinet of Japanese genre cinema: noirish yakuza crime drama, samurai derring-do and ninja acrobatics.

Despite the hot-button subject matter, there is no sense of currency, or even controversy, here. The drama seems less personal or political than one calculated for shock value. One late, violent plot twist is so preposterous as to defy the level of credulity one normally reserves for a horror film.

The new Karate Kid brings fresh life and perspective to the classic tale of perseverance and cross-generational friendship, thanks to Harald Zwart's sensitive direction and two exceptionally appealing stars.

If Fennell doesn't quite stick the landing -- if her story of striving, sexual obsession, class resentment and revenge ultimately feels puny and predictable -- she certainly has fun getting there.

In this comedy, Cecile misinterprets husband Alain's furtive attempt to have himself medically tested as suspicious extramarital behavior.

A jazz piece may be improvised, sketched out in the process of creation, but a movie resists that kind of spontaneity -- or requires skills that are beyond Lee's talents at the moment.

Most gratifying — if also gruesome — are the many examples of Battaglia’s powerful photographs of Mafia victims. Although black-and-white, they are deeply disturbing, and it is easy to imagine that Battaglia found the work difficult. Imagination is necessary, because Battaglia herself doesn’t provide the deep introspection you might expect.

The challenge for any filmmaker wanting to convey the personal tales of our nation’s armed forces likely lies in finding a narrative as compelling, relatable and sentimental as the one told in Murph: The Protector.

Past Life is a family melodrama in the guise of a murder mystery. Strong performances and the shadow of the Holocaust lend the story poignancy.

Kingsman delivers on its promise of escapist fun, with a touch that alternates between Galahad’s old-school polish and Eggsy’s roguish charm. Like the rookie who knows that you have to make a few mistakes while following the master, the movie shrugs off its missteps with a wink and a smile that makes them easy to forgive.

Without a Trace provides little sustenance. It keeps serving up overprepared tidbits of torment when you'd prefer to get down to a main course. [04 Feb 1983, p.C4]

What Now? is at its best when it focuses on his comic presence. Even if his jokes don’t all land, his train of thought is all you need for an entertaining performance that is funny, angry and sometimes just weird.

Its elaborate and meticulously re-created period settings and moods prove far more interesting and diverting than the undernourished characterizations and love stories that flutter and sputter across the foregrounds. [19 Apr 1984, p.D6]

It never attains full dimension. It pursues the De Niro-DiCaprio war so singlemindedly, everything else is left high and dry.

Saturday Night is as entertaining as a movie can be that has no genuine point beyond nostalgia.

Even the most forced, artificial episodes in Funny People ring oddly true, because George's life -- the obscene wealth, the loneliness, the fame -- is odd. Perhaps not since "Sunset Boulevard" have the wages and eccentricities of celebrity been depicted with such tough, almost perverse honesty.

What's left here is not so much a movie as an assault so unpleasant, it leaves you wondering what you could have done to deserve it. [27 May 1986, p.B3]

Clocking in at two hours-plus, Glastonbury at times gives viewers the impression that they're slogging through the three-day plunge into mud, music and madness themselves. But for all the posers with light sticks and piercings, there are moments of Dada-esque beauty, not to mention some great music.

Nominally, The Light Between Oceans refers to the beacon’s location at the geographic point where the Indian and Pacific meet, but it could just as easily be a hint at the salty tears it’s been so carefully manufactured to induce. Ladies and gentlemen, let your hankies unfurl.

The odd and disturbing thing about the film is just how comfortable [Mancini] — and we — have become putting moments on camera that, once upon a time, were meant to be shared between two people.

Bad Hair is a good idea buried within a scattershot, ultimately mediocre movie.

This picture is oddly un-charged, indistinct and even long-winded.

As the man who would inspire the character of Scrooge — first spied at night in a cemetery attending a threadbare burial for his business partner, while uttering, “Bah, humbug!” — Christopher Plummer is well chosen.

Charming but slight.

Hunter proves to be an engaging if low-key narrator, whose greatest asset is his refusal to take himself too seriously.

Dragged Across Concrete may not be the kind of movie you’d expect to emerge from such inspiration, yet the impassioned energy of those composers is echoed in Zahler’s feverish yet stubbornly patient approach to storytelling.

The two actors have charisma to burn, finely tuned comic chops and the kind of smoldering physical star power that manages to look effortless and superhuman at the same time. But even gifts as prodigious as Bullock’s and Tatum’s can’t keep “The Lost City” afloat.

The final, deeply satisfying conclusion to the trilogy of Swedish thrillers based on Stieg Larsson's bestselling novels.

The X-Files movie is really just a two-hour teaser for the series's sixth season. And little else. You will feel exactly like Mulder when he says, "How many times have we been right here before, Scully? So close to the truth?"

Roos and director Herbert Ross pave the long and grinding road to self-fulfillment with miles and miles of counterfeit poignancy.

Dyrholm, who deservedly took the prize for best actress at last year’s Berlinale for her sensitive performance as Anna, movingly captures the struggles of a middle-aged career woman who revels in the new freedoms of the 1970s, while ultimately falling victim to them.

The entire film carries a whiff of "vanity project," with several of Garlin's comedic buddies reporting for duty.

The story (adapted from Andrew Neiderman's novel by Jonathan Lemkin and Tony Gilroy) is surprisingly well-handled, given its rather crazy premise.

We don’t expect a James Bond film to be deep, but at least we should be dazzled by the seductive gloss of its surfaces. Aside from that stunning opening sequence, this installment feels overcompensating and dutiful.

A passionate film buff's valentine to the two directors he loves most: Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. The film that this worship has inspired is pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself.

Preaches most effectively to the converted.

Tin Cup works for viewers of any handicap.

Sunny, slimy and profoundly silly, the new, lady-centric reboot of Ghostbusters immediately silences the backlash and bluster that’s preceded it.

Them knows something the makers of the "Hostel" and "Saw" movies apparently don't: Subtlety and suggestion are every bit as terrifying as slashing and sawing.

There’s stuff to like in “Multiverse”: amazing effects, surprise cameos, even the unexpectedly moving scene in which Wanda realizes she has, at last, become a monster. But there’s also stuff that’s just, for lack of a better word, annoying.

Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.

Fans of Greenaway’s work — a mix of the brainy, the controversial and the grotesque — won’t necessarily be surprised by any of this. They may, however, be disappointed at how little of it actually works.

There are times when Our Idiot Brother possesses a loping, genial sweetness. But it lacks conviction, and it doesn't hold a beeswax candle to such similarly themed films as "You Can Count on Me" and "Momma's Man."

That said, what must be added is that, disappointingly, Night Falls on Manhattan doesn't quite add up.

Does 9 rival last year's "Wall E" as the best post-apocalyptic "cartoon"? The short answer is Nein. 9 is, however, a visual stunner.

An Upper West Sidey exercise in narcissism and self-congratulation disguised as a tribute.

May be morally tangled, pessimistic, lurid and foreboding, but it's also humanistic.

The oddest thing about this sweet but not entirely satisfying documentary is how little food is involved.

VIOLENT CRIME against women is not entertainment. "Star 80" was not entertainment. "Body Double" was not entertainment." And Jagged Edge is not entertainment. It is commercially packaged abuse. And we are supposed to call this anger art.

The colorful characters of Stoppard and Stalker loom large here, as detectives so often do — Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple — in such fare. But even larger is the shadow cast by Christie’s 1952 play, which provides a fun backdrop, if one rendered irreverently, for this diverting puzzle within a puzzle.

Despite the film’s heavy-handed effort at vindication, Renner manages to deliver a performance that is complex and satisfyingly contradictory.

The documentary transmits plenty of positive vibes, but it offers nothing fresh about the Fab Four.

Even if you’re not familiar with the source material, this Chinese production provides plenty of supernatural thrills for the modern young adult.

With its shambling, felicitously contrived structure and Fellini-esque climax, it's some kind of Jungian slacker fable.

Walter Hill's "Johnny Handsome" feels like a shiv jammed between your ribs in a prison-yard fight. It's clean and brutal and so ruthlessly efficient that it's opened a hole in you almost before you've realized it.

All of these make for engrossing, if hardly untold, tales. But what gives the lurid, titillating — and even, at times, fun — aspects of “Scandalous” a more sober edge are the journalistic implications, best articulated by former Washington Post reporter Bernstein, who calls the Enquirer’s frontal assault on truth and integrity “as corrupt as you can be.”

So Clooney and Pitt’s first outing as scene partners since “Burn After Reading” 16 years ago turns out to be a pleasing, if largely predictable, lupine lark.

The Angry Birds Movie 2 is not great cinema. But the animated sequel — inspired by the popular Angry Birds games, available on mobile devices and other platforms — goes above and beyond what is to be expected from such things.

Murray, though, is wonderful. He doesn't quite duplicate the manic madness of his "Saturday Night" bits, but his performance as Tripper, the camp's head counselor, almost makes the film's sophomoric humor worth sitting through. He's a master of improvisation, flitting from role to role - one minute a swaggering, would-be Lothario, the next a frenzied coach - with Morkian speed. He's also got a human side. When he's not clowning around he takes time to befriend a homesick 12-year-old camper (Christopher Makepeace), thus displaying a streak of responsibility that would curl John Belushi's hair. [13 July 1979, p.24]

You won't soon forget the therapist at Johns Hopkins who counsels recently homeless patients who've fallen into depression or substance abuse -- and then goes home to her own bitter foreclosure fight.

Dickerson's point in this passable but rather routine picture is that no one is exempt from the spidery grip of frustrations brought on by poverty and a life of depressed opportunities; that, given these circumstances, anyone can pick up a gun as the only answer to his problems.

After a somewhat tedious and overly episodic first half...Trumbo becomes a far more successful movie.

The more you lower your expectations, the more you'll learn to laugh.

The real importance of "Earnest" is the thrill of brilliant repartee. And as we laugh, an amazing thing happens: Oscar Wilde comes alive.

Torpid, syrupy melodrama from the Chinese director of 1993's "Farewell My Concubine."

It is a fascinating dance between style and substance.

Ultimately, we find ourselves looking for the wrong sort of clearing: a way out.

Alternately claustrophobic and epic compositions can’t make up for the myriad story lines (including one frustrating red herring) and pacing issues that periodically lose sight of the stakes at hand.

It's powerful, gut-wrenching stuff, and it doesn't need tarting up.

It’s more than great dancing and tragic strings that elevate The Last Five Years to a very funny, deeply affecting portrait of love lost and found. Kendrick and Jordan are both Broadway performers with powerful voices.

The film's title suggests the wry irony of hindsight: We've come a long way, baby, but we're not there yet. Any Day Now could do with a little more of that astringent humor and a little less sap.

For all its late-in-the-game silliness, The Exception is a solidly acted, well-told tale about how love of country holds up in the face of other, less nationalistic passions.

Did you find “The Favourite” just too weird, too raunchy, too . . . too? Perhaps Mary Queen of Scots will be more your cup.

Hurt's horrendous, with his goofy stilted accent. He talks as though he swallowed a bathtub. [16 Dec 1983, p.24]

For those who simply want to drink in the northern Italian countryside and Tyler's physical details, it's quite an experience. But as a story, Stealing Beauty (which Bertolucci wrote with Susan Minot) is a misbegotten, sentimental reunion with old European cinema.

As the espionage plot surges toward its nail-biting conclusion, the path it’s traveling feels less open-ended than preordained.

Everyone in the movie, from Dillane to (especially) Serbedzija down to the child actor Robbie Kay (as young Beer), is fabulous, and Podeswa has an ability to distill history into a few powerful images. The movie, however, is circular in structure and keeps reiterating points it has already made. For some, it will be a long sit.

This, finally, is the Dredd movie comic book readers have been anticipating.

A documentary that knows to sit back and listen as [Dobson] expounds on a variety of subjects.

Equal parts playful, sophisticated and engrossing, The Adjustment Bureau is like the first songbird of spring, signaling that the winter of our collective brain-freeze is over and it's safe to go back to the multiplex.

There is such a thing as toxic fandom, to borrow the term used by one of this movie’s young protagonists, and “Scream,” which is filled with endless conversation about the difference between a sequel and a “requel” and more rules than a penitentiary, suffers from it, fatally.

Despite its brilliant evocation of this great city at this most provocative time in history, the movie just gets sillier and sillier.

If the film is aspirational, showing Andy what it means to be a dependable ally, then MacLane sacrifices pure entertainment for a loftier purpose. A more straightforward clash between good and evil might have touched on the same themes, without sacrificing the action kids could mimic with toys.

Hits all the expected marks for raunch and vulgarity, with the bonus that it is actually also kind of sweet.

Cloyingly, Biggie narrates his tale from the grave. It's a device that feels irksome and condescending.

Norton, who wrote and directed Motherless Brooklyn, does his best to imitate the genre’s snappy dialogue and clever red herrings; but what starts out as a mystery as intelligent as it is intriguing winds up being over-plotted didactic.

Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of Samuel D. Hunter’s play is a murky-looking, claustrophobic exercise in emotionalism at its most trite and ostentatiously maudlin.

Thrillingly told, compellingly acted and beautifully shot.

Cute without being especially clever, Warm Bodies is almost as pallid and as brain-dead as its zombie antihero.

May be the most ruggedly decent film to come along in a couple of decades.

Misses almost every opportunity to break new ground on the issue.

A new sport doesn’t equate to new ground, but there is pleasure to be had in a formula that works.

Lovely scenery and historical context elevate the sentimental story lines above the soap opera domain.

It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.

As in life, what drives most of the drama in this overstuffed but often thought-provoking movie is a failure to communicate.

Adam Sandler is surprisingly likable as Robbie, a struggling musician who is left at the altar early in this modest romantic comedy.

Yaphet Kotto, as L.A.P.D. Detective Harry Lowes, and Larry Hankin, as his partner, pull the bench out from under the rest of the players. Show-stealing is their only crime -- they add the necessary guts and good humor to bring the Star Chamber down to earth. [5 Aug 1983, p.17]

A wholesome, engaging, frequently hilarious, ultimately inspirational film.

The blarney and bohunkery builds to a shaky apex of nothingness, then ends with a slaughter in slo-motion, a romantic ode of blood, bullets and body parts.

Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.

To reference yet another cultural touchstone, Aporia comes across like an expanded, indie-film version of “The Twilight Zone.” It’s never going to set the world on a new and unfamiliar course, but it does its job well enough.

The film is pretty conventional Disney fare: silly, slapsticky, all-too-neatly wrapped up and punctuated by a surfeit of poignant moments.

Romero has some fun with cackling frat-style boors in the background, all of whom get their comeuppance. But by and large, the acting is extremely flat and strident, and shot in a much more conventional style than Romero's other movies. Romero, in other words, seems bored by the whole enterprise, less interested in the story than in sausage-making. [23 July 1985, p.E2]

The overall effect is like wading through hospital waste. Verhoeven, who also directed the maliciously stylistic "Robocop," disappoints with this appalling onslaught of blood and boredom.

For the first hour and a half, WW84 is a delightful flight of escapist fancy, with Diana and Steve's love story ensconcing itself comfortably, if a bit talkily, within the confines of an action adventure. Then, at the 90 minute mark, it’s as if Jenkins remembers her other deliverables, in the form of special effects, epic global crises and a plotty, ever-more-muddled story line that metastasizes into something much darker and more violent.

There's never any mistaking the film's politics. If they were any different, it would be a surprise, given that the co-director and executive producer is the onetime talk-show god and lifelong liberal Donahue. But it is a film (as opposed to a collection of talking heads, Michael Moore-style ambushes or Robert Greenwaldian shorthand).

Bullock and McCarthy and the chemistry they generate are far more compelling than the movie they’re in. Too often the sketches go on too long, and the coarse, abrasive tone quickly begins to feel repetitive and off-putting.

Not all of its surprises are pleasant ones, but there is a certain satisfaction in experiencing a yarn that is so obstinately un-anticipatable.

Directed by Britain's Beeban Kidron, To Wong Foo has a split personality—it feels like three separate spliced-together movies with the same characters. Part I is the most fun, as we watch Swayze and Snipes undergo their transformation, a la Torch Song Trilogy.

Despite broad satire about racism and border fences that will appeal to some liberals, the movie doesn't line up neatly along party lines -- except in that other sense of the word "party." It's a movie that just wants to have fun.

There'd be nothing wrong with this if the film 'fessed up to its kitschy soul. Instead, it pretends to be the high-minded drama it's not.

Unfortunately, the actors seem overqualified for their parts, delivering earnest monologues that come across as clumsy transplants from the proscenium stage.

Makes a virtue of its own simplicity. But don't be fooled. That simplicity is mere cover. You're kept wondering about the outcome until the very end.

The slogging melodrama that emerged still more closely resembles the daily musings of an infatuated teenager than a well-crafted, thoughtful story. [14 Aug 1998]

Maybe the ultimate goal of Tomorrowland remains obscure because once you know where the story is headed, you realize it’s a familiar tale. The movie can conjure up futuristic images, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen before.

A lot of what Bigelow puts up on the screen bypasses the brain altogether, plugging directly into our viscera, our gut. The surfing scenes in particular are majestically powerful, even awe-inspiring. Bigelow's picture is a feast for the eyes, but we watch movies with more than our eyes. She seduces us, then asks us to be bimbos.

If "Top Gun" was a stylish bimbo of a movie, all cleavage, white teeth and aerodynamic flash, then Days of Thunder is its paradoxical twin -- a bimbo with brains.

Must-see viewing for anyone who thinks of Christmas as just a mall and its night visitors.

Bercot’s sense of atmospherics is more successful than her editing and camera work. Some pieces of the plot seem like they would make a bigger impact with a bit more backstory... But these series of vignettes still leave an impression, thanks in no small part to Deneuve.

What should be a cinematic journey into amazement and otherworldly adventure instead becomes a tedious, word-heavy slog — all the more disappointing considering the director in charge is George Miller.

The movie goes off the rails only when the filmmaker inadvertently legitimizes the Protocols' loony philosophical heirs by interviewing a New York medical examiner and a widow about the remains of one of 9/11's Jewish victims.

It’s a thoughtful and workmanlike portrait, but a less than profoundly moving one.

It can feel, at times, both overlong and oversimplified, but the story propels itself along while awakening in viewers some profound emotions.

There are much better Iraq documentaries than this one, but Brothers at War distinguishes itself by peering out over the emotional chasm between soldiers and their families.

It's certainly harrowing to sit through. Talk about your grizzly misadventures.

Unlike "Wild Hogs" or last summer's "The Expendables," this adaptation of the "Red" graphic novel series gets into a cool, sophisticated swing.

It’s occasionally funny and sometimes suspenseful, but it isn’t particularly imaginative. Then again, neither are Stine’s popular novellas.

If Beatty was not trying to make a movie about Hughes, he utterly failed, because the love story of Frank and Marla is more like a framing device — a gateway drug to get the audience into the theater so that Beatty can chew some scenery. Even so, he chews it quite well.

It's just a gimmick, right down to its Washington release date.

Is Spartan a perfect, or even a great, movie? Probably not. But in its prickly irascibility and deeply unsettling intelligence, it makes for a very, very good one.

It is also, despite the all-too-rare focus on the Filipino American community, a creakily familiar take on an age-old family dynamic.

The actors make a good team in this film, and they're playing well-defined characters, but the script is so repetitive that we get mighty impatient for the mystery to be resolved.

Its adroit use of suspense makes you overlook the silliness.

Predictable, slightly painful and as embarrassing as all get-out.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

First-time director Anne Sewitsky may intend Happy, Happy as a Chekhovian chamber piece or romantic bagatelle, but her smugness about racism - and her glib symbolic resolution of the conflicts she raises - suggests an ambition that far outstrips her ability, at least for now.

Ironically, the stars didn't get it together either. The Blues Brothers offers the melancholy spectacle of them sinking deeper and deeper into a comic grave.

Between Two Worlds is freshest when it emphasizes its documentary-like qualities, such as the brief inserts of everyday scenes and locales shot by Philippe Lagnier without any guidance from the director. Less effective are traditional movie elements like Mathieu Lamboley’s score, which flirts too openly with Philip Glass’s style.

Despite slick production values, this look at the intersection of two potentially fascinating subcultures — journalists and stoners — yields only half-baked results.

A pretty woeful affair...a sitcom disguised as a movie.

Larky, witty and sometimes even wise, this spoof on every rom-com ever made is less a fully realized film than an extended skit, a series of set pieces that poke gentle and sometimes transgressively crude fun at the tropes of girl-meets-boy that have enchanted and addled audiences for generations.

It’s an emotionally stagnant affair, whether it’s going for laughter or tears.

A visually and verbally ingenious sendup of romantic comedies that wears its candy heart on its sleeve.

Unfortunately, The Columnist doesn’t live up to its initial promise: What might have been a trenchant cultural critique couched within poisonously playful genre exercise becomes an indulgence in undifferentiated rage for its own graphic sake.

From the opening shot, an endless, unmotivated dolly move up a corridor that conveys no information, establishes neither theme nor setting and serves no other purpose, you know that you are in the presence of true film ineptitude, which only deepens as The Decline of the American Empire continues.

Red Dragon is merely the distant echoes of what we liked about "Lambs."

In a triumph of cinema over celebrity gossip, The Beaver mostly makes us forget about Gibson's madman persona and simply draws us into the story that he and director Jodie Foster, who also plays Walter's wife, Meredith, want to tell.

The result is a cross between a hurricane and a tornado as run through a movieola dialed all the way up to 10.

It's without posturing or phony outrage, and offers instead something far more affecting: a deep sense of melancholy. This is the way it is, it says, and not much can be done about it.

When Gray brings things to a narrative conclusion, the movie feels perfectly structured. If it were any longer, it would tip the overindulgence scale, and lose its effectiveness. But at 80 minutes, the film feels compact and pithily observed. And you're quite prepared to meet Gray on his next flight of self-absorbed fancy. [30 May 1997, p.N41]

In this loser-and-the-whore story line, Allen's sensibilities have taken a turn for the nasty.

The Aeronauts is the second film this year by Harper to get a U.S. release, after “Wild Rose.” That film was excellent, with strong music and an effervescent star turn from newcomer Jessie Buckley. This one is, at moments, exhilarating — but not much else.

If Little Joe’s message is never less than apparent, it avoids hitting you over the head with it. It’s a movie that grows on you, planting a seed that only comes to flower long after the closing credits.

The Godfather Part III isn't just a disappointment, it's a failure of heartbreaking proportions... It makes you wish it had never been made.

The movie is at its best when Hargrove shows rather than tells. Anyone can appreciate these artists in motion, all of whom prove the infectious appeal of a dance that doesn’t just respond to rhythm but creates its own.

Finnish Director Klaus Haro has a sharp eye, and his shots deftly juxtapose the delicate beauty of the Estonian lowlands with the harsh reality of life under Soviet rule. But the script, written by Anna Heinamaa, gives him little more than an aesthetic landscape to work with.

Bill Murray and Richard Dreyfuss star in this hilarious brain-teaser about a patient who suffers acute separation anxiety when his psychiatrist goes on vacation.

The film is far from prestige fare, yet more often than not, it hits that summer sweet spot between the silly and the satisfying.

It's a kid's Cirque de Soleil, for a lot less money.

Carvey is such a lovable doofus and Myers such a well-intentioned naif that it's hard to get down on them, especially considering that the heirs to their niche in pop iconography are Beavis and Butt-head.

It is redeemed by an appealing cast, tart dialogue and the preponderance of genuine emotion over the manufactured variety.

What’s missing here is something, or rather, someone, to care about.

This entertaining fantasy has intellectual ballast, but it’s cleverly disguised.