Caine is magnificent, and the film is worth a look for his contribution alone. But Milner is a promising actor, too, and the pairing of young and old is believable and occasionally very moving.

An exercise in vanity, indulgence and a startling degree of shallowness.

Never was the case for psychotropic medication more acute than in Jovovich's performance.

You have a movie in which sharks with triple-digit IQs hunt humans with double-digit IQs. It’s no contest.

It’s a touching evocation of friendship, brotherly competition and artistic courage at the cusp of a new century.

Never gets as emotionally involving, or persuasive, as the moviemakers intend it to.

It's the sick humor that's most appealing about this odd little Danish film.

It's refreshing that in effects-happy Hollywood, Evan and Olivia only imagine their travels, rather than run a gantlet of computerized hallucinations. This may turn out to be one of the more endearing aspects of Imagine That to its younger audiences.

When all is said and done, Mike proves to be not only peripheral to the main thrust of the movie, but a drag on its momentum.

The unevenness of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and Stiller’s recessive characterization of the title character, keep it from being an all-out crowd-pleaser.

The movie by Jean-Pierre Améris milks the tears in the home stretch, making little effort to hold the melodrama at bay. The result is a story that everyone can feel great about feeling terrible about.

The movie feels forced, cliched and derivative.

The movie is gross but not unfunny as it covers the Zohan's rise through hair culture, aided by his steamy heterosexuality, his lack of inhibition and his stereotypical career aggressiveness, until the old ladies are lined up all the way to the Bronx for a few minutes of bliss in the Zohan's chair.

Truth be told, none of it is actual living, and all of it is secondhand re-spinning of such better movies as "The Year of Living Dangerously" and "Welcome to Sarajevo." To use an antiquated newsman's cliche: Get me rewrite.

Co-directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel, whose visual schemes lent a hypnotic aura to their previous collaborations -- "The Deep End" and "Suture" -- don't find the right balance of story and image this time.

The sense, in the first half of the film, that love and contentment are attainable dreams slowly gives way to the more existential notion that happiness is really just a fairy tale.

Life has cool effects, real suspense and a sweet twist. It ain’t rocket science, but it does what it does well — even, one might say, with a kind of genius.

To paraphrase the T-shirt, everyone here went to the Isle of Capri, and all we got was this lousy movie.

Hiddleston steals the show here, making wickedness and treachery look a heck of a lot more fun than virtue.

The jump scares are genuinely jumpy, but the film plays out more like a theme park ride than a family drama with teeth. It’s pulse-pounding, in other words, from a cardiac perspective, but not especially engaging as a narrative, despite the earnest efforts of the cast to breathe life into a personal story arc that feels pasted onto another one.

There's a genuinely tragic side to Stuart's character, and for the movie to work the filmmakers have to keep it in balance with the comedy so that the pathos of his life doesn't kill all the laughs. But Ramis can't keep the movie's tone under control, and, as a result, it teeters precariously between farce and wake.

The script is adroit: It doesn't force the humor, and it steadily keeps track of Jim's growing maturity.

That's the thing about this corpse pileup of an action movie. It persistently tries to drag the audience down to its mindless level.

It’s surprisingly wise, funny and affecting, thanks in part to a sensitive script, and in part to a strong ensemble cast.

The whole thing plays like some dreadful masochistic, self-pity fantasy.

The best thing about this movie? It's short.

In the translation from page to film, the life seems to have gone out of the story

Presents an America that is as much about the pathological display of imperial power -- a showmanship of arrogance and violence -- as policy.

As the wily leader of the Japanese forces, grizzled Kurata Yasuaki has more presence than Zhao, who’s bland in non-action sequences. But Zhao’s ability to deliver dialogue is less crucial than his skill at leading hundreds of extras through elegantly choreographed, sumptuously photographed chaos.

Unfortunately, the fact that these particular stories come from the likes of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen King can't overcome the direction of John Harrison and the movie's basic television-level aspirations.

In the end, its somewhat equivocal message — that nuclear power might just be the lesser of several evils — is more convincing than you’d think.

Although Miller is excellent as the doomed teen, Wahlberg seems out of his league here, except in the actor’s rendering of Joe’s acute discomfort with public speaking and confrontation — which is odd in a movie that wears its heart, and its lessons, on its sleeve.

It's too long, it's too dull, it's too lame.

The humor is often over-caffeinated and anarchic — a style that suits the production — but when the film dares to slow down, it has a gift for reworking classic gags, like a wordless shot of animals stampeding through a china shop.

Springs from that childhood fantasy of being able to stop time and wander freely among the temporarily frozen. If only writer-director Sean Ellis had done more than use the conceit for a functional romance.

It's a movie by a true believer in anti-globalization, and it may win a few converts, but not among devotees of convincing, capable cinema.

Even the most ardent fans of the natural-born Bond are more apt to be shaken than stirred by the 68-year-old's implausible feats in this inert romantic adventure.

Fans of the play will be pleased. And for those that love the Four Seasons’ music but haven’t made it to the play, you can put your fear of missing out to rest. This is a much more affordable way to very nearly re-create the experience.

Laxton knows how to get the audience down but hasn’t quite mastered the art of lifting them back up.

Memoirs of a Geisha is everything you'd expect it to be: beautiful, mesmerizing, tasteful, Japanese. It's just not very hot.

It doesn't do much for the film's pacifist message that, as spacecraft zip across the screen and fire lasers into your popcorn, you may find yourself wishing that Tsirbas had replaced the movie's poorly written dialogue and implausible plot with more battle scenes. War! What is it good for? Awesome animation!

If it weren't for Sharif's extraordinary presence, there wouldn't be a cherishable moment in the movie.

Sometimes thrilling, but rarely inspired, it is thoroughly-almost perfectly-adequate.

The Paris Opera is a good representation of the struggle behind the spectacle. In movies, though, it’s sometimes best to even out those proportions — a little less absolute truth, and a little more bull.

F.I.S.T. may be given patronizing credit for reflecting some vague desire to do an important picture about the perils of corruption within the American political system. Unfortunately, it can't be given credit for realizing that desire with much skill or credibility. [26 Apr 1978, p.B1]

Fade to Black washes out by relying too heavily on assocations from older films. The excerpts from old movies are far more vivid and evocative than the host attraction. [12 Nov 1980, p.B7]

The movie is as insistently bubbly as the Bradys themselves, but it does run out of carbonation before the end. "Bunch" fans won't mind a bit, while others will be amused by the juxtaposition of the family's wholesome idyll with the harsher realities of life in the '90s, as evidenced by "Roseanne," "Married ... With Children" and "Grace Under Fire." [17 Feb 1995, p.F01]

It's mindlessly violent, profane and insultingly racist. It's also relentless, repetitious and tiresome, and leaves us feeling that a once-great director has run out of ammunition.

Enjoyable and reprises the same dyspeptic attitude that infused "Ghost World," but ultimately it lacks its predecessor's originality and humanity.

Although sweet and likable, Ricki and the Flash pulls too many punches to qualify as cathartic or even memorable. Instead, it’s a crowd-pleaser every bit as calculated and earnestly defanged as a Golden Oldies bus-and-truck tour.

Once upon a time [Brooks] was hilarious. And can still be, in interview, which is his true art form. But for some time now, his movies have not even cruised near the neighborhood of funny. And this one is the bottom of the barrel.

It doesn't help matters much that director Thomas Schlamme pays homage to great marital murder mysteries of the past, mostly because the attempts to borrow from the classics are so halfhearted.

While Sparkle doesn't give the audience a lasting memory of Houston's voice at its most soaring, it does manage to provide a lingering sense of loss, mixed with celebration and grim irony.

The movie's signal flaw -- that is, other than its degeneracy, its sloppiness, its love of dark things and pretty stains and arterial spray patterns -- is Moseley as the demonic Otis.

It's a richly appointed production that's hard to take seriously since the monks all look vaguely like Marty Feldman.

In structure and concept, the film resembles the faux-documentary “Borat,” with the distinction that the cameras here are all hidden. And that is where the film falls down and can’t get up.

A good-natured but failed experiment in meeting cute -- indie-movie style.

The drama stars Edgar Ramírez as Roberto and Robert De Niro as his legendary coach. The two are exceptionally well cast, but they can’t save an unfocused jumble of a movie that doubles as a cautionary tale about the importance of film editing.

Though Goodbye Christopher Robin has moments of delight and even profundity, and looks-PBS pretty, too often it stumbles.

A phenomenally atrocious movie—so bad, in fact, that you might actually manage to squeeze a few laughs out of it.

Moviegoers may be happy to hum along with the jaunty soundtrack — and maybe even sympathize with the movie’s unlikely couple — but it’s unlikely to hold anyone entirely in its thrall.

While it’s gratifying — and occasionally gripping — to see that story told in 12 Strong, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film contains few genuine surprises, at least from a cinematic standpoint.

Give Woody Allen credit for ambition. Failing at one movie wasn't enough. Nearly anyone can do that; it happens all the time. He's chosen to fail at two simultaneously.

What's strangest, though, about Die Mommie Die! is how material that was obviously so giddily irreverent in origin became so inert, so joyless and dull.

In his [Ice Cube's] dramatic roles, Cube's raised eyebrows usually unleashed a fearsome glare and a hint of danger; here, his expressions are more quizzical, amused or confused. He plays against type, just as the movie itself plays against hype.

The nice thing about Nice Dreams is that, if you can live with a little raunchiness, it's fun, and it's funnier than C&C's "Next Movie," their second movie after "Up in Smoke": the humor doesn't rely so completely on old jokes about the drug culture. Cheech and Chong are bawdy, they're unself-consciously irreverent, and if any idiocy can happen, it will happen to them. So naturally people enjoy watching them. [5 June 1981, p.17]

Director Caroline Link (Nowhere in Africa) brings handsome period production values and a lyrical, restrained sensibility to a narrative that might not qualify as riveting, but exerts its own unmistakable emotional pull.

The Treatment gets this year's Rip van Winkle award.

Count me among those who would be perfectly happy if they never saw another movie in which a big-city cop, fueled by the death of his partner, seeks revenge against a corrupt small-town sheriff, a wily and ruthless pillar of the Establishment, a psychotic killer or (as here) all three. While you're at it, count me among those who would be happy never to see another starring role for Gere, except maybe as Felix in a remake of "The Odd Couple."

There are no gambles in this crossbreed of sports movie and doggy drama that dutifully — and lazily — stays on course from beginning to end. Heartstrings are tugged, dogs are adored and it’s all inoffensively inspirational.

It really captures what it feels like to be a kid.

Aside from Danner and Ivey, who's also miscast, performances are steady if uninspired. Silverman is engaging but hasn't yet learned to work the camera like the crowd. But all their efforts hardly matter given the surprisingly unsteady pace set by Tony award-winning director Gene Saks, who collaborated with Simon on the successful film versions of "The Odd Couple" and "Barefoot in the Park." Caught between the strictures of stage and the freedoms of film, Saks and Simon (and producer Ray Stark) compromise with an amorphous hybrid that's stagey and forced. [26 Dec 1986]

James Earl Jones, James Caan and D.B. Sweeney turn in superior performances in "Gardens of Stone," but it's all for naught. Francis Coppola sabotages their efforts with a handsome but fragmentary film that can't decide which story to tell.

Something is missing, and you feel that its absence prevents both the characterization and movie from going decisively over the top.

Seems fatally out of tune, with every staged encounter falling as flat as the protagonist's hot-ironed bob.

The camera is more athletic than anyone on-screen, muscling between bullets and smashing through walls. Heyvaert shoots action so well that you forgive how little physical action there actually is.

There are laughs to be had here, yes, but your mileage will vary depending on your tolerance for sophomoric bathroom humor and gratuitous vulgarity.

But when mechanical plots are a drama's main engine, we look for something else to divert us, preferably good comedy. That's in short supply, unfortunately. And it's no fun to sit through the movie's retread Woody Allenisms.

As for Hathaway, she's a revelation. Those eyes are still as big as Beamer hubcaps, but she's able to show more edge than her previous goody-goody roles have allowed.

A kind of satisfaction ultimately arrives, but it is not one for purists, or even lovers of speculative history. It feels tacked on: too little, too late, too ludicrous — the past rewritten as a form of wishful thinking.

One of the great strengths of CSNY is how skillfully it deflects criticism of "four balding hippie millionaires" taking to the stage to criticize American politics; the film is peppered with excerpts from some of the tour's earliest and nastiest critics.

The stranger and more unusual the characters, and the less they're explained, the better.

So phony it makes your gums ache.

Feels razor thin. None of the characters is particularly noteworthy. And the revelations of deep-seated conspiracy in the usual privileged, closed circles are hackneyed and tired.

The outspoken congressman is just as entertaining as his liberal fans already know him to be.

The film would be insufferable if it weren't for the total sincerity and commitment of its players.

Heckerling seems lost and distracted here -- the framing is careless, and the film moves with a stuttering pace. Why is this talented director being channeled into projects like this?

I suspect that none of these actors had as much fun bringing to life the cagey and colorful political vulgarian as his fellow Texan, Woody Harrelson, seems to be having in LBJ, crudely and rudely drawling his lines behind a wall of latex makeup, plus-size prosthetic ears and horn-rimmed glasses that obscure his own facial features.

The result is an unabashedly violent B-movie throwback, the sort director John Carpenter used to make, with moments that resonate with real life.

The picture amounts to little more than an uninspired, almost perfunctory exercise in "big game" manipulations.

When the tone goes from daffy to dour in the course of a harrowing plot point, the story becomes more forced than fierce.

Romero and his original partners apparently made no money from the original, and Romero admitted to the Wall Street Journal that the reasons for remaking the film were "purely financial." It shows...This Night of the Living Dead is resurrected, but it's never brought to life.

Compared to Escape From New York, the weapons are bigger and the violence is more extensive, although it’s toned down by today’s excessive standards. There are also greater special effects this time, involving holograms and nuclear-powered submarines. But Escape From L.A. is more enjoyable in a playful way.

Eddie the Eagle leaves viewers buoyed by satisfactions unique to classic come-from-behind stories. Even when it’s as ungainly and cravenly audience-pleasing as its protagonist, it soars.

Though creepy Jeffrey Combs and beach boy Bruce Abbott return as West and Cain, producer Brian Yusna has replaced Stuart Gordon in the director's chair, without bringing new life to the affair. Even the jokes in the Woody Keith/Rick Fry screenplay seem refried.

At 85, Ian McKellen doesn’t have many performances left in him, so any movie that lets the actor carve ham with such exuberant relish as “The Critic” is worth his time and ours.

Writer-director Gerard Johnstone and co-writer Akela Cooper, both returnees, keep the pace fast enough to paper over the incomprehensible plot and, more important, retain the first movie’s self-mocking humor. The result is enjoyably over-the-top summer junk, which, honestly, a lot of us could use right now.

Bobby, even if it suffers from a few silly scenes, gets more right than it does wrong.

The name is enough to clue you in that this is not highbrow humor. In fact, it will appeal mostly to those who can appreciate basic juvenile humor.

You know something's wrong when screen writers James Orr and Jim Cruikshank have to jury-rig a couple of chase plots, involving an over-the-hill hit man (Eli Wallach) and an aging detective (Charles Durning) just to move things along.

Arteta keeps the pace fast and frenetic and doesn’t mind spotlighting potty jokes... but even the bathroom humor is forgivable when the end result is a crowd-pleasing comedy and a surprisingly entertaining treat for the whole family.

Feels more like "Porky's" with marinara sauce than "Summer of '42."

"5" has none of the pizazz of "1" and "3" and is only marginally better than "2" and "4," the worst of the "Elms."

Yi's self-regarding, ironic tone makes the whole thing feel like a setup, designed more as an indie-chic calling card than a sincere inquiry.

The film has no discipline, but that's okay because it has no suspense, either.

It’s an engrossing, if complicated and twisty, story, with plentiful sci-fi action and a provocative subtext about the nature of the human soul. At times, however, the balance between those two things feels off.

A good-looking, engrossing, true tale, superficially much like 1981 best-picture winner "Chariots of Fire," but without that Olympic drama's themes of antisemitism and faith. If The Boys in the Boat is missing something, it's substance.

The humor includes enough slapstick and gross-out gags to keep the kids entertained, but there are clever callbacks and meta-jokes for older audiences to chuckle at as well.

Greta might pretend to turn the tables by presenting the sexualized predation of a young woman at the hands of a female malefactor instead of a male one. But the fetishistic leer is just as troubling and offensive. Disturbance eventually gives way to derangement in a story that grows exponentially more irritating the more preposterous it gets. As Morton might say: When it rains, it pours.

A work of either a profoundly transgressive genius or a goofball high on Pez and patio sealant. It could come from no normal collection of brain cells.

This isn’t a sports movie so much as a procedural about backroom dealings, double-crosses and high-stakes trades.

What starts out as a moody arthouse flick rapidly becomes an uneven B-movie yukfest (sometimes intentional, sometimes not), with low-budget concessions to the Hollywood cop-versus-killer industry.

Still, there’s something about Screenlife that’s not just gimmicky — like the found-footage craze that preceded it — but numbing. All this technological terrorism should be terrifying, but it mostly just feels like eyestrain.

Yes, it’s a coming-of-age story: If Boogie were fully evolved, woke and enlightened, there would be no "Boogie." But the film is just rough and unformed enough to suggest that Huang might still have some growing up to do as a filmmaker, too.

Another sentimental mushfest disguised as a movie.

The most screamingly obvious reaction to Gerry is: what a load of pseudo-arty you-know-what.

The idea of Sean Connery and Dustin Hoffman as a father-and-son act is daft enough to make Family Business an object of curiosity. [15 Dec 1989, p.E1]

During the lulls in which characters are talking (which happens with surprising frequency considering the film’s title), Cocaine Bear goes into snoring hibernation.

Eyes is somehow too relaxing to be satisfying.

Cruel, unfunny and yet somehow perversely fascinating.

The Magnificent Seven is fine as far as it goes, but — especially when the familiar strains of the 1960 theme song begin wafting over the final scenes — one can’t help feeling that it should have gone much further.

On the big screen, and particularly in the close-ups, it's not hard to see why Murphy's the current box office champ. He may have an adult's vocabulary, but he's still got a kid's frenetic energy and a wildly elastic face that demands both laughter and attention. His material, which trades on racial and sexual stereotypes even as it skewers them, may be offensive to some, but for others he remains a hell of a good yuck.

An engrossing but uneven comedy-drama.

The shaggy but ultimately satisfying installment, set six decades before the four movies starring Jennifer Lawrence, carves out its own identity by leaning into its subtitle. If music is food for the soul, “Songbirds & Snakes” serves its tunes with a heaping side of venom.

It boasts a sterling main cast — Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto — as well as open-endedness that is simultaneously pleasurable and a bit unsettling, in both the good and bad senses of that word.

So light and airy, it almost floats away on its own breeziness.

The more the movie progresses, the more you realize how much Seinfeld's voice sounds like a droning bee -- the kind you want to swat away.

The most unlikely of undertakings: an energetic feel-good movie about sex, drugs and other rock-related depravities.

Williams has to break out of a second-rate "Tootsie" imitation, ankles clamped in pathos and face covered in latex. He pulls it off in the end, but it's not pretty.

You are left with the feeling that either Grossman hasn't done justice to the Germs or the justice they deserved was to spend eternity as a historical footnote.

The movie’s great strength is the way it captures these dancers, sometimes in slow motion, as they contort their bodies in ways that don’t seem possible. When it comes to the narrative, though, the movie struggles a bit.

[A] dreamy, entrancing and occasionally overstuffed documentary.

Overall, this is a well-crafted, carefully paced, and appropriately cerebral work -- if the intention is to ape Le Carre's writing style, that is, and like the writer, de-glamorize the spy genre. If you're a fan of the style, this film will please.

After getting off to a wretched start, the film settles down in mid-passage and grows unexpectedly appealing. Down the stretch it reverts to faltering form. The best policy might be to go about 30 minutes late and leave about 15 minutes early. [7 Aug 1981, p.C1]

Still breaks the first and only commandment of remakes: Thou shall at the very least do justice to the original, or thou shall not be made at all.

The Signal has visual style to burn. And it takes good advantage of the current state of paranoia arising from our surveillance culture and the pervasive mistrust in government. On paper, this sounds like a good formula. If handled well, it could really pay off.

Robb is remarkably assured; there isn't a false note in her performance.

Batteries is a strange kids' movie, a queer mix of violence and otherworldly benevolence. It might have been a good idea, a story of the vanishing urban neighborhood and gentrification by tycoon. But half-pint aliens to the rescue? It's time E.T. went home.

For horror fans who appreciate a bit of craft with their second-rate experiences -- Paul Haslinger's fear-mongering score is terrific for what it's worth -- this might merit a future late-night rental.

Sarah Connor may have averted one dark version of the future, but another even darker destiny may be inevitable. Even so, the film suggests, hope — just like the hearts of people who buy tickets to sequels — springs eternal. In this case, it is not misplaced.

The action is sufficiently gripping, even if the drama plays out along predictably violent lines.

Jon Amiel, who previously directed "Sommersby," delivers a taut, gripping thriller and, with the help of his accomplished leads, succeeds in camouflaging some of the mammoth holes in Ann Biderman and David Madsen's otherwise intelligent and inventive screenplay.

A surprisingly amiable romp about a zany quartet of escaped mental patients four who flew out of the cuckoo's nest.

Olivia Colman delivers an alternately delicate and ferocious performance as a cinema manager in Empire of Light, a tender, tear-soaked valentine to the ineffable joys of moviegoing.

Weber’s main point — that bullies are often victims of bullying themselves — gets lost in a tsunami of sorrow and sadism.

May be one hundred percent sap, but its spirit is anything but cloying, thanks to persuasive performances, most notably from Rachel McAdams.

It's got a subtext but not a subplot.

Something far more consequential looms in the wings. And that renders The Hunting of the President the feel of a sideshow

I'd rather sit in bumper-to-bumper hell on I-495 for two hours than get caught in Traffic again.

A soundtrack buried inside a sitcom.

In his screen version, Schumacher does a flamboyant job of staging the book without showing the slightest interest in what it's about. Granted, Grisham's original is no masterpiece; it's beach reading, but it deserves credit for addressing its subject with some conviction and integrity.

2010 is a one-man tour de fizzle, a yawnfest so plodding it seems to have been made by the famous monolith itself. [7 Dec 1984, p.D1]

The absurdism wears gratingly thin in The Dead Don’t Die, whose deadpan tone gives way to tiresome, grindingly repetitive inertia.

If parents feel like they've seen much of Shorts before, its celebration of mayhem and restless, thrill-seeking vibe will absorb young viewers, especially as the boredom of late summer begins to set in.

Director John Milius, the barbarian behind Conan, co-wrote this anti-gun-control, anti- Communist, survivalist script with Kevin Reynolds. Sick and silly as it is, the idea could have been intriguing, had it gone anywhere, which it didn't.

If it does nothing else, Music Within shows us how deeply Ron Livingston's amiable face can take us into a movie. But even likable mugs like his -- remember him in "Office Space"? -- need help from the movies around them.

The hero of Sinister is almost unaccountably dumb. So, unfortunately, is the movie.

As usual with these animated epics, much depends on the vocal performances, and it's a mixed bag.

Burton finely balances excess and restraint to create an absorbing, visually rich world of his very own.

A mixture of well-researched historical fact and pure fiction, “Munich: The Edge of War” is a smart and entertaining thriller that suffers from just one thing: We all know how it ends.

Even without every flaw completely ironed out, it offers values worth celebrating across the time-space continuum.

Proves a welcome improvement on the original Conan the Barbarian, finding a tone of lighthearted preposterousness more suitable to the absurd heroic dimensions of the pretext. [03 July 1984, p.D9]

If the formulaic film ever finds its audience — and it’s all too clear that there’s a market for this kind of slickly produced, hindbrain pulp — the best that can be said for it is that the ending (devised by screenwriter Kurt Wimmer) is perfectly poised for The Beekeeper 2.

Somehow, the comic chemistry never seems to ignite in The Big Year.

It’s a film prone to tonal whiplash. Yet the script has made some sharp trims, scrapping a subplot about Ellen DeGeneres and eliminating some of Ryle’s most outlandish behavior.

It has brio, rueful humor and celebratory verve that is nearly impossible to resist.

The movie suffers from an uncertain structure, but it boasts an extraordinary naturalism, not particularly flattering. Sharon Stone has a brilliant, harsh turn as Zack's mom, and both Bruce Willis and Harry Dean Stanton have good turns as the elder generations of Trueloves. But the movie belongs to its youngsters, and it's a real eye-opener.

It is a middling gun play that asks and answers the persistent question: Whither testosterone?

This is a young filmmaker who so wants to make every shot freighted with import that he ends up robbing his film of importance.

What engages us is Korine's revolutionary way of telling stories. It's as though he's downloading his dreams directly onto the screen.

Its greatest asset...Flora Montgomery, a flash of blond, Irish fire who makes Trudy well worth Brendan's trouble.

Brendan Fraser breathes loopy new life into the swinging '60s TV cartoon icon.

Takes its cues from the musical dramas of the '70s, but this otherwise engaging young-adult romance never quite catches Saturday night fever.

Good and entertaining fun.

Rookie of the Year is a wholly benevolent but banal baseball fantasy aimed at Little Leaguers with dreams of reaching big-time fields.

This classic comedy of errors is over-structured by cousin-writers Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel and mechanically laid out by director Jim Abrahams.

Grounded in the direct, disarming truth of their experience, the movie has a straightforward lack of cheap sentiment that saves it from being either too maudlin or saccharine-sweet.

The swells of inspirational storytelling sometimes threaten to swamp the underlying inspirational story.

Stallone hasn't done himself proud in Paradise Alley. The film could still use a director, a scenario writer and someone to discourage the star from lapsing into happy-go-lucky imitations of Lee J. Cobb. Still, there's something likeable about this zany manipulator. [10 Nov 1978, p.E1]

The premise breaks down just at the point when it needs to be cleverly elaborated into a story. [05 Aug 1978, p.H1]

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.

Except for the last five minutes, Robin Hood is the story of the radicalization of some guy named Longstride. Who?

More tasteful, sensitive and original than you might imagine.

Feels more like an overblown TV special than a grand theatrical release.

Lumet and his inspired collaborators have succeeded in fabricating and navigating one majectic, rabble-rousing Mother Ship of a musical, a sublimely happy moviegoing experience. [27 Oct 1978, p.D1]

Until those final moments, Flightplan succeeds admirably, both as a sophisticated psychological thriller and as an example of, if not great art, then superb craftsmanship.

Crash doesn't extend beyond its most immediate sensationalism. When the movie does attempt to find a theme, it slams into a brick wall of mumbo-jumbo.

Has a gritty authenticity to it … captures the spectacularly crazed quality of urban violence.

In today's mouse-toting, instant-gratification world, this kind of old-fashioned, character-driven slapstick is wonderfully incompatible. It's a grumpy last hurrah.

Despite a powerful performance by Tahar Rahim in the title role, and despite such marquee names as Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch in the supporting roles of Slahi’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and Stu Couch, the Marine lawyer assigned to prosecute him — despite scenes of grotesque abuse that inflame the conscience — the movie lands, through no fault of its own other than timing, with a whiff of been-there, done-that.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

Director Harold Ramis, who managed to stop time in the sunny comic masterpiece "Groundhog Day," tries a different tack in this lesser though nonetheless hilarious caper.

Trolls Band Together is a glitter-encrusted variety pack of a movie. Packed with millennial boy-band humor, sibling love and snippets of pop songs, the third film in the Trolls franchise is an explosion of color tailored to a new generation of parents and their Gen Alpha kids.

The movie is colorful and pretty, and Smith brings a fresh, more street-wise approach to his character, while still honoring the motor-mouthed spirit of Williams’s scene-stealing performance.

A British black comedy, saves its best for last -- and God bless Maggie Smith for, well, being Maggie Smith -- but that requires sitting through a frustrating, uneven hour of sluggish preamble.

There’s a nugget of . . . maybe not wisdom, but something gristly worth chewing on here, if you have the stomach to stick your hand into gaping intestines, pull it out and wipe off the blood. I wouldn’t call it food for thought, but it gives “Forever” a slightly higher nutritional value than some of its predecessors.

Directed by Antoine Fuqua with an occasionally puzzling combination of restraint and stylization, Emancipation turns a potent image into a pageant of spectacle and suffering.

Ma is, at heart, an overly familiar story of terrorized teens, albeit one that manages to find a few new twists to that tired trope.

The trick is to make the already ridiculous completely outrageous. Sometimes the family succeeds, like in Keenen Ivory Wayans's 1988 spoof of '70s films I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Sometimes they fail, like in the waning days of the Fox television series In Living Color. In this movie, they succeed, for the most part.

Equally earnest and unconvincing.

Unfortunately, Nair's film doesn't so much end as fall off a cliff, the ultimate victim of viewers' heightened expectations that this briskly paced story will take them someplace -- other than around the block in a horse-drawn carriage.

Tea With Mussolini is really about the first women in the Italian director's life. It's drawn from a single chapter of his book but suffers from a lack of focus. None of these great ladies is willing to give up center stage; nor, for that matter, are the grande dames who bring them so vividly to life.

The movie drains Cole and Linda Porter of blood and fills them with embalming fluid.

The story is as stale as prison air and so is the star. [25 Mar 1983, p.18]

Mischiefin other words, is echt teen sex comedy, hitting its marks in the way a skilled carpenter drives home his millionth nail. Even the deviations from the formula, like the movie's sweet, naive tone, are only predictable extensions of the formula.

Monster Hunt has visual appeal to spare, but the allure ends there.

As a director, Solondz seems to have his own locked-in fate -- to favor caricature over compassion -- and his movies are the worse for it.

It’s both a success and a shortcoming of Britt-Marie Was Here that the flashbacks to her younger years, and the discovery of what happened to her more free-spirited sister, represent the film at its fullest emotional capacity.

Despite a snoozer of a pat ending that strains to bring its themes full circle, the live-action iteration at least proves that the franchise, with its notion of ohana and several films, spin-off series and countless plushies sold to date, hasn’t lost all its heft — just its original spark.

In Lost Highway, David Lynch dabbles in spooky, chilly implication and a sort of hip incoherence.

She Came to Me exists in between things: airy romance and psychological depth; operatic fantasy and gritty reality; farce and fatalism. Writer-director Rebecca Miller executes that balancing act with lighthearted audacity in a film that aspires, with fitful success, to resurrect the lost art of screwball comedy — with some literal opera thrown in for musical measure.

It manages to keep you going until the end and delivers the appropriate payoffs as a generic-brand thriller.

There isn't much to the movie, and you can see where it's going from kilometers away. But [Daniel] Auteuil gives the silliness a surprising heft.

As a director, Penn knows how to create arresting tableaus that draw the eye and spark the viewer’s own sensory past. As an actor, no one is better at finding honesty in the moment. Like the antihero at its center, the essence of Flag Day remains tantalizingly elusive, potently evoked but never fully realized.