Anthony Lane

No, what’s dismaying about All Is True is that it plays so slow and loose.

Even when the male of the species tries to do better, he does his worst; and the most merciless verdict in Klown is delivered not by the law, or by fate, but by the eyes of women.

The film’s attempt to portray the Queen as more politically enlightened than her courtiers is kindly but unconvincing, and many of the actors bark and behave as if participating in a spoof.

Never has a blockbuster, I would guess, required so many soliloquies. What with the mournful Molina, the hazed-over Dunst, and the puffy uncertainties of Maguire, we in the audience are the only ones who still believe, without qualification, in thrill and spill.

Here, in short, is a self-regarding drama of self-loathing: hardly the most appetizing prospect. If it proves nonetheless to be stirringly watchable, we have Brendan Fraser to thank.

At best, I Love You Phillip Morris may be hailed as a necessary step in Hollywood's fearful crawl toward sexual evenhandedness; the film upholds the constitutional right of every gay man to be as much of a liar, a crook, and a creep as the rest of us. Makes you proud.

There was always a dreaminess in his vision of the city, but now it feels as distant as the polished floors and the Deco furnishings of the Fred Astaire movies that Boris finds--of course--whenever he turns on the TV.

To be honest, del Toro has thrown too much into the mix. For no compelling reason, for instance, and to unresounding effect, the movie also happens to be a musical.

The allure of San Andreas rests entirely on the calibre of its pandemonium, savored, ideally, with a brawling audience on a Friday night. Indeed, it is the kind of movie that makes me want to campaign for the serving of alcohol in leading cinema chains — mandatory beer, I propose, with shots of Jim Beam to toast the dialogue.

Why, then, does the pulse of the narrative falter in the second half? Mainly because Van Sant has covered so much ground in the first, and there isn’t a great deal left to recount.

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

Huggins is brash and brisk, of course, with Moretti cleaving to an old-fashioned myth of the American interloper. But Turturro is slightly too broad for the occasion, relishing the outbursts of the spoiled star.

So compelling are Nighy and Burke that I will watch them in anything, yet their spree, drenched in rich and hazy colors, doesn’t quite ring true.

The ambition is laudable, but Tim Miller’s movie, far from seeming reckless and loose-limbed, comes across as pathologically calculated, measuring out its nastiness to the last drop.

Hardy gave his heroine a symphonic range, and all an actress can do is pick out certain tones and strains — the fluted whimsy by which Bathsheba is occasionally stirred, or the brassiness of her anger. Julie Christie was the more accomplished flirt, and her beauty was composed of fire and air, whereas Mulligan relies more darkly on earth and water.

There are treasures in Knight of Cups. It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball.

I saw the film in IMAX, and a week later I’m still waiting for the safe return of my optic nerves, but it was the meagre emotional charge that shocked me most. Toward the end, as in many Spielberg movies, there are tears, but, for once, they feel unearned.

The Final Year is stirring and saddening, but too well behaved by half; I wanted it to be a little less Steven Pinker and a little more Dwayne Johnson. I wanted the huge fight.

Makes a suitable staging post in Witherspoon's headlong career. She may want to forget it by Christmas, yet its cushioned slackness allows her to sharpen her grasp of a steely American type: the girl next door who will kill to get out of town. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

The movie, though a frantic treat for the retina, is also oddly inactive.

One imagined that a movie about the Crusades would be gallant and mad; one feared that it might stoke some antiquated prejudice. But who could have dreamed that it would produce this rambling, hollow show about a boy?

For all its faults, has a musty charm.

The first half of Let Them All Talk is barely there as a movie. Soderbergh seems to be sketching out ideas for a plot, and gingerly feeling his way into its moral possibilities, as if he were clinging to a rail, beside a heaving sea. And yet the Atlantic stays calm.

Buscemi is the least grass-fed of actors, meant for the rat-run of city streets, and, if I didn’t quite believe in him as a country guy, I believed even less in Chloë Sevigny as a cynical jockey with a set of broken bones. But Plummer, who recently played the kidnapped John Paul Getty III, in “All the Money in the World,” grounds and tethers the movie, as an unclaimed soul with barely a dollar to his name.

You may feel safe in your bed, but be warned: even as you sleep, Earth is under threat from a vast, overheated surplus of character actors.

What Moore’s film strives toward, and touches only erratically, is an emotional claustrophobia to match its physical squeeze.

Indeed, the whole film is oddly poised between the pensive and the peevish, with a topdressing of high jinks.

For all the lunacies bared within this film, it has the tick and thrum of a solid studio machine, occasionally shocking but never surprising; it will be watched by everybody, but it feels as if it were made by nobody. [14 & 21 October 2002, p. 226]

Comes in well under the ninety-minute mark, leaving no room for bombast or overkill.

The one, transfixing virtue of Marie Antoinette is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense. The fun dies out of the film--in fact, the film itself expires--when Coppola suddenly starts dragging in discussions of the American Revolution.

If you fancy a modern "Marty," with the old warmth muffled by unfriendly snow, go right ahead. [20 Sept. 2010, p.121]

The Fighter, for all the dedication of its players, takes a heavy swing at us, and misses.

Egerton is busy and fizzy in the leading role, but there’s a curious blankness in his impersonation, and a shortage of charm. Hard to tell whether viewers will flock to him as they did to Rami Malek, who gave such electric life to “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Yet Rocketman is the better film. Not by much, but just enough.

In Insomnia, the crunch comes as the hero and his opposite number hook up on a ferry, to discuss what each of them knows about the other. This should be Nolan's big moment, his answer to that quiet, magnificent interlude in Michael Mann's "Heat," when Pacino met De Niro in a coffee shop. -- But Williams and Pacino just don't mesh. [27 May 2002, p.124]

Gunn decides to treat the quest for meaning seriously — a lethal move that not only leads to the noisy palaver of the climax but also undermines Chris Pratt, who likes to hold these movies at arm’s length, as it were, and to probe them for pomposity.

Much of Sutcliff's most charged material - the chariot scene, a wolf cub that Marcus rears - is omitted from the movie, and once he and Esca embark on their quest the sense of action grows listless, and our heroes start to seem anxious, wet, and bored. [14 & 21 Feb. 2011, p. 138]

Why, then, do we not feel bullied by the result? Partly because the camera, as I say, tells a subtler tale than the dialogue does, and lures us into a grudging respect for the bravado of Muse and his men; but mainly because of Tom Hanks. This most likable of actors deliberately presents us with a character who makes no effort to be liked.

Spurning a fruitless bid at comprehensiveness, Cooper has conjured something as restless and as headlong as his subject.

Most important, given that Onkalo will hide and bury just some of Finland's waste, what about everyone else's? [14 & 21 Feb. 2011, p. 139]

As a whole, the film lacks the courage of its own despair. The longer it goes on, the more Franco feels obliged to pack it with plot and context.

The joke is that Wiener-Dog is about as non-epic as can be, but there’s also a sleight of hand, with the dazzle of the images distracting us from the fact that the movie has run out of plot. Meanwhile, the depths of doghood remain unplumbed.

Luckily, Ferguson is fabulous in the role. She and Curran take possession of the tale and save it with sprightliness; their smiles arise without warning. I only wish that Rose had been around when Jack Torrance was on the rampage. What a lovely couple they’d have made.

As nonsense goes, this has a certain gusto and glee, and what dismayed me was that Bekmambetov felt the need to spice it with the addition of coarsely chopped violence.

The sticking point of the movie is its exorbitant length: two and three-quarter hours does seem like an awful long time to patch up a horse, and a movie that goes straight for your heart should not be allowed to fester.

It treads enjoyably over old ground, and it has a surprisingly foul mouth, though rather than cruising along with the ease of Allen's best work it tends to hobble, and it closes in a flurry of undecided endings.

"All good stories deserve embellishment," Gandalf says to Bilbo before they set off, and one has to ask whether the weight of embellishment, on this occasion, makes the journey drag, and why it leaves us more astounded than moved. And yet, on balance, honor has been done to Tolkien, not least in the famous riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum.

Another hitch, for Feig, is that, whereas the cheesiness of the effects in the earlier “Ghostbusters” was part of its rackety charm, no current audience will settle for anything less than a welter of wizardry. And so he piles it on, until whole sections of the movie collapse beneath the visual crush.

Thanks to Lane, Hollywoodland, no great shakes as a thriller, becomes a quiet horror story about the monstrosity of time.

It’s a gutsy piece of work, not only in the reach of its ambition but also in its willingness to show us actual guts.

Clooney gives it everything, but what does he get in return? A void where the story is meant to be.

Meirelles's picture is so keen to brandish its social wrath, and its spirits are so rampagingly high, that the bruises it inflicts barely last a night. [20 January 2003, p. 94]

What’s discomforting about The Card Counter is that Schrader builds this strong moral backdrop for his characters and then allows them to drift about in front of it.

As you’d imagine, the entire shebang is so naggingly self-referential, and so noisy with in-jokes, that it should, by rights, disappear up its own trombone. But there’s a saving grace: this is a funny movie.

You can't help feeling that what this enterprise required was Louis B. Mayer, or, though one has no wish to be cruel, Harry Cohn. [3 February 2003, p.98]

If you lack a taste for such hokum, Greta is still worth seeing, for the sake of Isabelle Huppert: an A-grade performer, by any standard, as shown in the rigors of “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and the vengeful perversity of “Elle” (2016).

There are gags and scraps of action that give the movie fits of buoyancy, and these tend to come not so much from the younger, eager performers as from the old hands.

Biosphere, though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself.

Far too long, but thanks to Depp--and to Bill Nighy, properly mean beneath his suckers and blubber--it swerves away from the errors committed by the other big movies this summer.

Even if you regard the latest movie as a box of tricks, you have to admire the nerve with which Johansson, as Midge, delves into that box and plucks out scraps of coolly agonized wit.

This is the fifth movie to be written and directed by David Mamet, and it's his most bizarre one yet; people speak in that dreamy, lockjawed manner we first heard in "House of Games," and their entire lives appear to be lived under the spell of some nameless paranoia.

The film is based on the novel by Helen Schulman, who co-wrote the script with Kidd, and it suffers from the same hobbling that bedevils so many literary adaptations; namely, that what strikes a reader as a conceit of some delicacy will strike a moviegoer as clunking whimsy.

What is most disappointing about Big Fish is the nervousness of its fantasizing--a strange unwillingness, new in Burton's work, to trust the wit of the audience. [15 December 2003, p. 119]

The Nichols of 1971 was bold and speedy, keeping pace with Jack Nicholson's contempt, whereas the more civilized Nichols of 2004 seems a beat behind the lines, waiting for peace or charity to break out. They never do.

Mister Foe flirts too often with the unlikely and the foolish, yet there is something to admire in the nerve of its reckless characters, so uneasy in their skins.

Budreau’s movie, entertaining as it is, leaves us little the wiser. Maybe it was a job for Bergman, after all.

Yet the movie, less stirring than it ought to be, is peculiarly cramped, lacking the emotional latitude of Bridge of Spies. Spielberg dramatized a clash of moral principles, under the cover story of a thriller, but The Courier is all that it appears to be and not much more.

If he had told the story straight, without such hedging, and at half the length, it would have borne far more conviction.

As actors of undiminished allure, they deserve the best, and Our Souls at Night left me with an austere fantasy. If only Michael Haneke, say, had got hold of the screenplay; if only he had shorn it of its folksiness, its relaxing guitar score, and its subplot about Addie’s grumpy grandson (Iain Armitage), whom Louis persuades to lay down his iPhone in favor of toy trains and fishing.

On the other hand, we have Brie Larson, who is by far the best reason to see the movie. If we ignore “Elektra” (2005), which isn’t hard to do, this is the first film to be fronted by a woman in the male-infested galaxy of Marvel—quite a burden for Larson, who shoulders it with ease, executing her duties, not to mention her opponents, with resourcefulness and wit.

Personally, I reckon that Portman tips Vox Lux off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp.

Owen has made immense progress, to which Life, Animated is a stirring tribute, yet it leaves a trail of questions unanswered or unasked.

Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

Once you admit that the Jane Austen depicted onscreen bears scant relation to any person named Jane Austen, living or dead, the film fulfills its purpose.

Having been twisted into bewildered bits by the convolutions of Park’s narrative, I was astonished, toward the end, to find it brushing against the tragic.

Although Sollima’s film is unbothered, for the most part, by the plight of refugees, it gets one thing dismayingly right: our most significant witness, on the fault line where Mexico and America grate against each other, is a child.

Whether the film cuts it as a fully functioning weepie is another matter. I was in pieces after “Blue Valentine,” and had to be swept up from the floor of the cinema by the guy who retrieves the spilled popcorn, but the The Light Between Oceans left me disappointingly intact.

All this leaves The Zero Theorem looking both disorderly and stuck. And yet, to my surprise, on returning for a second viewing I found myself moved by the film — by the very doggedness with which it both hunts for and despairs of meaning.

As for Paul, you can’t help feeling that, ground down as he was, he didn’t need to get shrunk in the first place. He needed a shrink.

No Time to Die has a heavy heart, and right now, more than ever, we could use a light one.

I can't help wishing that Chabrol would, just once, cast off his own good narrative manners--do away with the irritations of a film like A Girl Cut in Two, which is never more than semi-plausible, and arrange his passions, as the elderly Buñuel did in "That Obscure Object of Desire," into shameless, surreal anagrams of wit and lust.

Skip the coda to this movie, with its tiny upswing of hope, and remember the days at the tables, as dim and endless as nights, and the click of the dialogue.

From the opening shot of Ophelia adrift in a river, in mimicry of Millais’s famous painting, the film seems to splash around in search of a suitable style. The drama is no longer a tragedy but a fairy tale — almost, at times, a farce.

Then, there is Thomas the Tank Engine, who gives the most thoughtful performance in the movie. He is part of a train set in the bedroom of Scott’s young daughter, and, as such, he is perfectly adapted to the dimensions of Ant-Man’s world.

It's all very well to satirize perfect white females, but if you're sick of their attitudes why single them out as protagonists in the first place? What happened to the Asian Nerds? Or the Unfriendly Black Hotties? Or the tired teachers? Why can't we see a movie about them? [10 May 2004, p. 108]

Both of them (Zellweger and McGregor) are set adrift by the movie's discomforting demands, and only in the closing credits (this really is a top-and-tail movie) do they get to do what people do most fruitfully instead of sex, which is to make a song and dance about it. Who needs love? [26 May 2003, p. 102]

For Your Consideration feels weirdly meek and mild, an unmighty wind that quickly blows itself out.

A showdown of blood and fire, and the one point, I’d argue, at which Let Him Go takes a seriously false step. It is George who girds himself for the final reckoning, but it ought to be Margaret. Her grief has driven this fable. She should be the one to end it.

Marling is the star, and the core of the film's concern. She also co-wrote it with the director, Mike Cahill, yet the result comes across not as a vanity project but as a sobering study of the thoroughly dazed and confused, with a mind-ripping final shot.

Oldboy has the fatal air of wanting so desperately to be a cult movie that it forgets to present itself as a coherent one.

To judge by the fashions, In Fabric is set in the nineteen-seventies. And, to judge by its visual and aural manners, it might as well have been made then, so reverent is Strickland’s thirst for the period, with its soft-core-porno tropes and its throbbing horror flicks. If anything, this antiquated air makes the film a little too arch and over-concocted for its own good.

At times, the cutting shifts from the hasty to the impatient to the borderline epileptic, and, while never doubting Scorsese’s ardor for the Stones, I got the distinct impression of a style in search of a subject.

We get one lovely, cheering sequence of a trashed room putting itself in order, like the untidy nursery in "Mary Poppins," but the rest of the magic here feels randomly grabbed at.

The movie is often absorbing, and skillfully played, but, along with its snarling hero, it doesn’t have much time for ordinary folk. By the end, like Marianne, we are left gasping for air.

The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non-sad.

There are simply too many characters to get a handle on, and the sheer proliferation of special effects offers Singer a license so unfettered that most of the mutants act not according to their natures but purely on the ground of what, at that juncture, looks most groovy. [12 May 2003, p. 82]

The Interpreter is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness--about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls--is at once laudable and vaporous.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.

Diesel, of course, slots into the Fast and Furious films as neatly as a dip-stick. Not only does his name remind you of the stuff you pump into a car; when he opens his mouth, he actually sounds like a car. [3 June 2013, p.74]