Ann Hornaday

It evokes a warmed-over Fox TV special.

We don't need another hero, but when it comes to the man at its center, Napoleon could have used a lot more oomph.

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

Watching Thurman's character "triumph" in a context as joyless and self-referential as Tarantino's is a soul-deadening experience, one that over two hours takes on the same dreary monotone as the cheapest pornography.

It’s a movie that’s all too happy simply to go through the motions when its star is clearly capable of busting bigger, more interesting moves. Luckily, there are other films in the sea. This is one that Lopez should have left at the altar.

Even though it earns an R rating for profanity and some risque material, it’s too meek and mild-mannered to qualify as brave, or even slyly subversive.

Overblown sanctimony and sentimentalism as corny as the Fourth of July.

The movie isn't only boring; it's troubling:

If you find yourself at "The Island" I have only three words of advice: Vote yourself off.

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

There’s a ripping good story buried somewhere in The Aftermath, an intriguing but ultimately disappointing story.

Supremely idiotic.

Has all the energy and spontaneity of a bowl of waxed fruit. If watching "Dogtown and Z-Boys" was tantamount to witnessing history itself, watching "Lords of Dogtown," which Peralta wrote, feels more like watching a stiff, meticulously choreographed reenactment.

Unlike other movies about unpleasant characters, "In the Company of Men," for example, Chuck & Buck doesn't have that sharp observational edge.

A film of admirable ambition but vexingly uneven execution.

A stunningly inert piece of cinema, a movie that basically boils down to serial shots of people talking to each other.

Man on a Ledge has its diverting moments, but by the time it has reached its too-pat final twist, it turns out to be a title desperately in search of a movie.

A jagged little pill of a movie from baby boomer avatar Edward Zwick.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

A shapeless collection of encounters with Texas prison inmates and their victims, what could have been a well-aimed examination of the most troubling contradictions of capital punishment instead becomes a maudlin, unrestrained wallow.

It wants us to believe that being popular and getting the cutest guy in school really is the key to happiness. Like, how totally last century is that?

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

The good news might be that Huppert wasn't available for Alias Betty, but the bad news is that it didn't stop France from exporting yet one more cold, pretentious, thoroughly dislikable study in sociopathy.

Never manages to achieve the balance between authenticity and eccentricity.

All of it makes for a rollicking, outsize tale of overweening ambition and palace intrigue, but J. Edgar instead plays it safe in a turgid, back-and-forth series of tableaux that look as if they were filmed from behind a scrim soaked in weak tea.

Only the most committed Aster-pologists are likely to enjoy Midsommar at its fullest; others, meanwhile, may admire its handsome visual design and bravura performances without completely buying in to the alternately diseased and fuzzy fable at its core.

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

Funny Games condescends to its audience like a pretentious, preachifying graduate student in post-modernism. It would help us out of the cultural quagmire we're drowning in, if only we could understand its highly convoluted and exclusive language. [29 May 1998, p.1E]

Whether it's the sight of Reynolds squeezed painfully into a football uniform or the endless footballs-to-the-crotch and tired gay jokes, The Longest Yard has the feeling of mutton dressed as lamb.

Aimless and unfocused.

Gator never emerges as anything but a blatant and outspoken -- and virulently brutal -- jerk.

A grisly, often cynical piece of work whose joyless, aggressive spirit is made even less appealing by its soulless visual style.

The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

Little more than an electronic press kit for the band, produced for the benefit of its fans.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, Crimes of the Future is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out.

If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."

For audiences who prefer their movies to be as weird and even off-putting as possible, Annette comes fully wrapped as a pretentious, arty, occasionally breathtaking, ultimately misbegotten midsummer gift.

Most of the humor in The Pink Panther derives from Martin's silly French accent, especially when he tries to pronounce the word "hamburger." But zat joke, she ees not funny. And The Pink Panther ees, how you say, ze real dog.

In “Quantumania,” sprightly pacing and lighthearted humor have succumbed to the turgid seriousness that plagues so much of the comic book canon.

Lazily written by Stiller and three collaborators (including Justin Theroux), this is the kind of lame, warmed-over movie that gives sequels a bad name. For “Zoolander” fans, however, it resembles a betrayal of public trust.

Until the last 20 minutes or so of Rock School, the actual playing, while often startlingly good, is kind of boring.

The end result is a movie that feels oddly detached, especially considering the raw intimacy of Leigh’s previous films.

Sloppy compendium of filthy jokes and lowbrow sight gags.

Rock of Ages gets too mired in plotty cul de sacs, manufactured setbacks and numbers that are all staged as show-stoppers. In the words of the Journey song that serves as a climactic singalong, it goes on and on and on and on.

Vanessa Kirby delivers a bravura performance in Pieces of a Woman. In fact, her performance is so commanding, uncompromising and far-ranging that it often threatens to swallow this otherwise uneven and frustratingly thin movie with one voracious gulp.

Indeed, Scream is better than the average slasher film, as its advertisers insist. And, indeed, it is probably Wes Craven's best film, as they also insist. But that is a little like saying the pimple on the left side of your nose is "better" than the pimple on the right side.

The yuck factor spins off the charts in Splice, a thoroughly repulsive science fiction-horror flick that slicks up its B-movie tawdriness with high-gloss production values and two otherwise classy stars.

The promise of its premise is squandered all too soon in what becomes yet another tiresome exercise in the way-overworked zombie genre.

It's trivial and narcissistic and ultimately rather sordid.

Presumably, Scott is giving the audience what it wants, but purists may wonder whether simply re-watching “Alien” would have provided scarier, more genuine jolts.

For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there’s very little narrative tension in “Eddington,” a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords.

The fact that there's nothing wrong with it -- that there's nary a scenic detail or scrap of dialogue or performance that isn't utterly on the nose -- is precisely what's wrong with it.

As this sloppy, scattered, utterly synthetic piece of Hollywood widgetry unspools, it becomes increasingly clear that the romantic tension at play exists mostly between the men in question.

Maybe the easiest thing would be to skip the movie altogether. Godard has created such a hermetic, uncompromising world that only the hardiest cinematic spelunkers are likely to appreciate its depths.

With Elvis, Luhrmann matches Presley’s drive and instinctive charisma and raises him for sheer nerve, simultaneously hewing to the hoariest conventions of Hollywood rise-and-fall biopics and seeking to gleefully subvert them at every turn.

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain tells its story with sympathy, but too many quirks and try-hard flourishes. In the welter and spin of tics, voice-overs, set pieces, images, flashbacks and dream states, the man himself gets as lost as a kitten in the rain.

There's very little that's even kind of funny in It's Kind of a Funny Story, which can't accurately be described as a comedy but isn't a true drama, either.

It feels like a retread of several better movies, with a nastier, more bitter edge.

Blessed with some outstanding performances, among them Ribisi's.

An only fitfully engaging L.A. soap opera.

Not good enough to qualify as classic Gothic horror, not nearly fun enough to qualify as great B-movie camp.

Eventually MacFarlane's formula -- consisting of filthy, ethnically offensive jokes, scatological humor, tacky pop culture references and random cameos -- begins to wear thin.

Piven is so in the pocket as the smarmy, aggressive, inappropriate Ari that, when the movie he’s in does little more than double down on the bro-ing out, the whiffed opportunities become all the more obvious.

Viewers anticipating side-splitting guffaws will be disappointed: Stuck on You is a strangely lackluster, flaccid string of fitfully humorous episodes.

The question is why the time, talent and treasure of such energetic and even gifted artists have been marshaled in such a disgusting and trivial genre exercise and what viewers are supposed to get out of it. Isn't life hard enough?

Like so many recent films — “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” “Belfast,” “The Fabelmans,” “Empire of Light” — Babylon wants to pay tribute to the medium that brings us all together in the dark. But it also doesn’t miss an opportunity to alienate the audience at every turn.

Ultimately groans under the weight of its own quiet gorgeousness.

Whether or not it's crucial for the gay community to have its own "Porky's" is a question for the ages; but please, not Another Gay Movie.

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.

With a grating combination of naivete and arrogance, The Green Mile consistently overplays its melodramatic material, including a portrait of a black man that is as breathtakingly offensive as it is earnest.

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

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.

The effect isn't just frenetic, unfunny and dull. It's kind of creepy.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An overlong, visually incoherent, mean-spirited and often just plain awful Spider-Man 3.

A strange little movie. Unsure whether it wants to be a quirky, sad-eyed indie pixie or a brassy, raunchy broad, it veers uneasily between the two, never quite settling into a comfortable or recognizable groove.

Heights is nothing more than a second-rate version of several much better movies, all of which are available on DVD and video.

In Those Who Wish Me Dead, Jolie demonstrates her career-long fascination with action derring-do and physical punishment, to diminishing effect. In this pulpy, borderline laughable genre picture, not even her hair is believable.

At times, Unfriended really clicks — but ultimately, it’s a drag.

Brax’s knuckles may be perpetually bared, but his heart’s always in the right place, which “The Accountant 2” spares nothing to remind us, even while the mayhem escalates into sheer outlandishness.

Sadly, the filmmakers haven't given viewers enough context or information about their protagonist to know whether he's utterly free or utterly unmoored -– or to care very much either way.

Even amid the hit-and-miss broadsides and laugh-free longueurs that comprise most of The Dictator, Cohen's acute hypocrisy-detector keeps on ticking, if barely.

It's a bloated, shockingly tedious trudge that manages to look both overproduced and unforgivably cheesy.

An uninteresting take on a tired formula that is only occasionally funny and usually pretty gross.

It's in these vignettes that Away We Go begins to feel less like an authentic exploration of identity than a condemnation of the very community the couple pretends to crave. No one, it turns out, is good enough for Burt and Verona.

That Winterbottom has delivered a dud makes Trishna all the more disappointing, a rare unsatisfying swerve from an otherwise reliably provocative career.

Attal, who resembles a young Robert De Niro, seems as addled as a director as his character is as a husband, throwing all manner of distractions onto the screen in order to divert the audience.

It's a curio, ripe with dreamy atmospherics and intriguing mysteries, but little else.

If "Road House” were more fun, if it didn’t trot out its fight sequences with such workmanlike regularity, it might have attained the kitschy greatness of its predecessor. But it doesn’t aspire to much more than mining the intellectual property catalogue for a quick-and-dirty cash grab.