While it's too pat, Little Girl is several cuts above thrillers in the dopey, bedraggled class recently exemplified by Burnt Offerings and The Sentinel. [17 May 1977, p.B9]

In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

A wonderful movie: inspired, hilarious, visually inventive. Just don't take your kids to see it.

It’s easy to see why Cameron and Rodriguez might have been drawn to the story. At its core, however muddled, there are classic sci-fi themes of class and what it means to be human. So it’s baffling that the film goes to such lengths to show Alita’s sheer brutality.

The Book Thief has its moments of brilliance, thanks in large part to an adept cast. But the movie about a girl adopted by a German couple during World War II also crystallizes the perils of book adaptations.

It is Markus's sensitivity to nuance and to the feelings of others that characterizes every step that he - and this sure-footed if off-kilter film - takes.

A bewildering, boring assembly of rock-video-surreal nightmare sequences with more repetitive episodes than Groundhog Day.

Manages to navigate the era of cellphones and Mean Girls with retro nostalgia and wholesomeness, making it a rare girl-powered outing for tweens in an otherwise guy-centric summer.

Beyond Aline’s visual incongruities, there’s a problem with is its choice of focus.

Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the cinematic equivalent of trying on your prom suit from 1984. Maybe it still fits, but not in the places it used to, and if you try to moonwalk, you’ll probably get a hernia.

Most of the fault rests with the script, which gets to this issue late and feels only perfunctory, more interested in the jolt of the image than the jolt of the idea.

Knight of Cups may want to be understood as the portrait of a man plunging beneath the veneer of modern life, but it can just as easily be perceived as the self-portrait of a filmmaker in his own Versailles, letting himself eat cake and having it, too.

Directed by David Slade ("Hard Candy"), the action scenes are artful and terrifying; these killers move so quickly and decisively, there seems to be no hope for humanity.

Irrational Man isn’t a comedy. There are, however, moments that invite rueful chuckles of recognition, especially when Posey’s character is giving Abe the business. She strikes a welcome madcap note in what is otherwise a series of bland medium shots of people talking.

Baby Boom is an '80s fable based on a beer ad philosophy.

It's a glossified, cluttered parody of itself. Almodovar is no longer a burlesque auteur. He's a repeat offender.

It's less a movie than a delivery system for sensory pleasures, sunny romance and designer-label stuff that in real life would result in diabetic shock (or at least a ruined credit rating).

The trouble with Goal!, which -- horror of horrors -- is the first of a trilogy, is that it's neither a persuasive story nor a satisfying display of soccer.

Inside is a one-man show. Its rewards — such as they are, in this bleakly depressing thought exercise — will depend entirely on your appreciation of its star. Is it entertaining? Nemo has only art for company. We at least have Willem Dafoe.

The movie is full of invasions, assassination attempts, chases and escapes in seemingly random order, the result being completely chaotic.

Everybody wants a happy ending. But that doesn’t mean that we should always get the one we want. It’s fine, if also cliche, to be reminded that good will triumph over evil. But it would make for a deeper and more powerful lesson — one that, after nine movies, might leave a lasting dent in the heart — if the hero actually had to give up something, or someone, that didn’t feel like a tiniest bit of a cop-out.

The finale isn't quite as chillingly nerve-wracking as one would hope. Schloendorff, who also made The Tin Drum, directs with a uniform dullness that creates little sense of suspense. In replaying the Atwood novel, he and Pinter ultimately fail to create a significant timbre of their own to make the transmogrification truly effective.

The movie doesn't so much end as reach a stopping point and limp hurriedly off-screen, like a bad stand-up chased out by boo birds. But God, is it funny.

Meaty interviews with journalist Chris Hedges, for instance, lend the film needed context and a sense of intellectual detachment.

There's just too much death, it comes too quickly, it has no moral import, it becomes ultimately meaningless. It's not that hyper-violent movies are axiomatically a bad thing, it's just that this particular example is so laden with shootings that it becomes somehow tedious.

And while it's intermittently engaging, the drama's flatter than a sucker's wallet.

It's a story that can be transplanted from genre to genre, because we never grow tired of it, which is to say that it fits snugly into the paranoid drift of American movies, and the value we place on one honest man with a gun.

If it’s not quite as good as the doll’s origin story, “Creation,” it’s still way more fun than any sequel — especially one this deep into a franchise — has any right to be.