Anthony Lane

Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only Doubt had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled "Spawn of the Devil Witch" or "Blood Wimple," all would have been forgiven

This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a "Dirty Dozen" knockoff with one eye on "Schindler’s List."

The first film scored a few palpable hits, but the new one barely makes the effort.

Glum, protracted, and needlessly nasty.

Emmerich’s main achievement is to take a bunch of excellent actors, including Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Woody Harrelson, and to prevent all of them--with the exception of Oliver Platt and a pair of giraffes--from giving a decent performance.

We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.

The tale begins and ends in a flurry of joke violence; Cameron has decided to spoof what he used to take seriously, and the result, though bright and deafening, feels oddly slack -- he loosens the screws, and our interest drops away.

The whole thing does seem preternaturally stained with Weltschmerz.

This is the first occasion on which Moodysson has lost his balance, allowing his wrath to outweigh the charity that he used to extend to even the most boorish of his characters.

The whole thing appears to have been designed by some crazed Oedipal wing of the N.R.A. And what are the aliens known as? The Others. I rest my case.

Reese Witherspoon is a woman, aged thirty-five, with a bundle of grownup roles behind her. Yet in order to retain her slot in romantic comedy, it appears, she must reverse into her teens. What makes the transition yet more depressing is the memory of Tracy Flick. [27 Feb. 2012, p.86]

Although Premonition is not a frightening movie, it is aimed squarely at an audience of frightened souls.

To say that the movie loses the plot would not be strictly accurate, for that would imply that there was a plot to lose, and that Ayer, in a forgetful moment, left it in the glove compartment of his car on the way to the studio.

Quite an achievement: the American director Todd Haynes revisits the world of London glam rock and manages to make it look dull.

The film is alive with bad rock bands and dizzying bit parts, the standout being Kieran Culkin, in the role of Scott's gay roommate, but we feel them gyrating around a hollow core.

Compare 88 Minutes with "Sea of Love," another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation.

This picture ain't funny. I winced three times, and gave a couple of short laughs, but that was it.

Bedazzling, overlong, and unjust, “Blonde” does a grave disservice to the woman whom it purports to honor.

Ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.

The only player to conquer Chicago is Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is no Charisse in her motions but who gets by on a full tank of unleaded oomph. [6 January 2003, p. 90]

The first ten or fifteen minutes of Michael Bay's movie tremble, unaccountably, on the verge of being fun. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.101]

The movie--directed by Atom Egoyan, who should know better--is closely adapted from “Nathalie,” a French film of 2004, with Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart, but what seemed like standard practice for Parisians comes across here as unsmiling porno-farce.

What is this “fun” of which Selina speaks? It’s certainly not a concept that The Batman, dropsical with self-importance, and setting a bold new standard in joylessness, has much use for.

All is dour and dun. We are a long way from Errol Flynn marching in with a deer slung over his shoulder, or from the Fairbanks who didn’t merely scamper and swing from one errand of justice to the next. He SKIPPED.

One mark of the Godzilla franchise is the ingenuity with which each director manages to waste the talents of an excellent cast.

What Rachel McAdams is doing in this nonsense is anyone's guess, but she must realize that the long journey from "Mean Girls" to Mary, with her mousy bangs and her timid pleas counts as a serious descent. [11 Nov. 2013, p.90]

Road to Nowhere is a dead end. Most of the performances are carved from balsa wood. [13 & 20 June 2011, p. 129]

A long, lumbering brute of a movie, no easier to maneuver than the vessel itself. [29 July 2002, p. 92]