A Blackboard Jungle, a To Sir, with Love, for the Nineties. Which means something nearer a music video than a bona fide movie, driven by a persistent rackety background beat, and speeded through five-minute class periods forever interrupted by the clangorous bell at peaks of tension and unsettlement. The innate …

A highly competitive movie, at least insofar as its subject matter. That it deals with the World Chess Championship ensures it a degree of the dramatic tension inherent in any sports event, and that the competitors are an aging, ailing Soviet Jew and a temperamental, somewhat paranoid Soviet defector ensures …

Character sketch, in fussy fine-point, of the town nutball, a repressed, ridiculed, Coke-bottle-lens-wearing, Fig-Newton-loving spinster. A psychological "label" is expressly withheld, but with Debra Winger doing her up large, she's more a performance than a person, a trick-bag of tics and quirks, an oddity for public exhibition. With Gabriel Byrne, …

Annual family gathering (parlor games, touch football, talent show), complicated by romantic rivalry: two brothers, a widower with three girls and a reformed womanizer, both smitten by a worldly Frenchwoman. A showcase for Steve Carell's self-consciousness, somewhat more sympathetic than Dane Cook's luggishness. Juliette Binoche looks as if she could …

The story of Gerda, a struggling portrait painter (Alicia Vikander) who loses a husband but gains a compelling subject — there’s nothing like a broken heart for inspiration! Of course, the losing and gaining are all of a piece, born from her man Einar’s (Eddie Redmayne) conclusion that while nature …

Al Pacino makes the worst of the biggest disaster his name’s been attached to since sickening audiences with the contemptibly cuddlesome Author! Author! Pacino is all struts and scarves as the drugged and disillusioned rock star boilerplate who has an It’s a Wonderful Life moment after receiving a long-lost letter …

This privileged peek inside the Paris Opera Ballet — more than a peek, a thorough probe — ought to be catnip to anyone interested in classical and modern dance, or for that matter in artistic creation in any form, the process of bringing execution in line with conception. Veteran documentarian …

Formula disaster film, with only the tiniest ingredient of human interest and (like Independence Day, like Daylight) an overriding dash of canine interest. Because the agent of disaster is a volcano ("She's just clearing her throat. She hasn't even started to sing yet"), there is considerable delay before the big …

Andrzej Wajda's French-Polish co-production is quite a triumph of mise-en-scène. There is quite a lot to triumph over, too. The history lesson chewed over here has that dutiful and drudgy quality of a freshman fixture on the college curriculum, with none of the imaginative liberties taken in, say, La Nuit …

Unassuming, unassertive little feminist comedy about a Mexico City phone operator (by day) and competitive ballroom dancer (by night) whose Platonic dance partner of six years vanishes without a word. She goes hunting for him in Veracruz, finds new friends and a romantic fling instead. Maria Rojo is a winning …

For this Irish fantasy from the Disney studio, they've shown the good sense to hire John Ford's cameraman (on The Quiet Man, among others), Winton Hoch; but they've asked him to shoot hardly anything more picturesque than the grizzled mug and decaying lower teeth of Albert Sharpe. The movie is …

Pretty flimsy even for a comic book. The gotta-have-a-gimmick superhero has been blinded in a childhood run-in with some biohazardous substance (in a quarter-hour prologue), and his handicap causes him to develop his remaining senses to the point where he can swing around the skyscrapers like Spider-Man, dodge projectiles of …