Anthony Lane

This is a plum of a part, and McDormand gorges herself. [10 March 2003, p. 94]

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]

This Must Be the Place is dazzling to behold, not least when our hero leaves Ireland. [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]

The work of both Babluani brothers is weirdly stilled and mature, already devoid of the need to show off--serves only to thicken the horror.

Sitting through Transit is like watching an anti-“Casablanca,” so diligent is Petzold in the draining of romantic hopes, and there were times when I dreamed that Claude Rains would stroll in and order a champagne cocktail. What sustains this highly unusual film, and lends it an ominous momentum, is the figure of Rogowski, as Georg.

Given the upheavals of the past two years, along the fault line between electoral and sexual politics, Reitman could have told the sorry saga from Rice’s point of view — her brush with fame, and her demonization as a temptress, or worse, at the hands of the media. Why must the fall of man, rather than the survival of woman, still be the main event? Can’t we have the business without the monkeys?

The ideas behind Enduring Love may be fascinating, but they don’t play; they sulk.

The performances are lusty and concerted, but they remain just that - performances, of the sort that may make you feel you should stagger to your feet at the end and applaud. If so, resist.

Boyle is genial, eager, and prolific, and his effusion has ignited films like "Trainspotting" and "Slumdog Millionaire," yet for every blaze that excites us there has been another that burns itself out without leaving a mark, let alone a scar, on our emotions. So it is with Trance. [8 April 2013, p.88]

Running two hours and forty minutes, never finds the same balance: by the time he gets to the lust, it is too late to throw caution to the winds.

In previous movies, Michael Bay dabbled wearily in Homo sapiens. At last he has summoned the courage to admit that he has an exclusive crush on machines, and I congratulate him on creating, in Transformers, his first truly honest work of art.

In the end, Lower City is never quite as energetic as it wants to be, touched by the strange, milky lethargy that steeps every waterfront film.

This being an Eisenberg project—he also wrote the screenplay—the laughter comes with a wince attached as standard, and there is barely a scene, in a film constructed from social awkwardness, when your nails aren’t digging into your palms.

At last, a good big film. The legacy of the summer, thus far, has been jetsam: moribund movies that lie there, bloated and beached, gasping to break even. But here is something angry and alive: Elysium.

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.

What we glean from Belvaux’s trilogy is the reassurance (rare on film, with its terror of inattention) that people are both important and unimportant, and that heroes and leading ladies, in life as in art, can fade into extras before our eyes. [Note: From a review of the entire trilogy.] [2 February 2004, p. 94]

This is pitiful stuff, and, like the violence, it eats away at the blitheness for which Kingsman strives, leaving an aftertaste of desperation that the Connery of “Goldfinger,” say, would not have dreamed of bequeathing. The sadness is that Firth, alone in the film, does raise the spectre of those days, radiating a lightly amused reserve amid the havoc.

Birds of Prey, alas, is an unholy and sadistic mess.

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.

Anyone who has tamped down that youthful yen for excitement should stay away. But the craving for grownup glamour, however foolish, demands equal satisfaction, and Spectre, in providing it, acquires a throb of mystery that cannot be explained by mere plot.

Everybody in and around this movie is trying too hard...After half an hour, we realized that, instead of enjoying a funny film, we were being lightly bullied into finding fun where precious little exists. [5 April 2004, p. 89]

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.

What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

And here's the strangest thing of all: it works. [September 14, 2009, pg.ll4]

The drama is stuck with that ethical rigor, and we are left with a near-heretical irony: thanks to this admiring tribute, our hero gets top billing at last, but was he not more beguiling, somehow, as a legendary figure in the shadows?

A thriller stripped of thrills--or, even worse, a thriller that thinks of itself as somehow rising above the vulgar pleasures of excitement.

Allied is written by Steven Knight and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does.

Good Boys is worth catching for those rare and wrenching points at which emotional honesty breaks through.

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.

More than it knows, this movie is an engaging, and sometimes enraging, exposé of chronic insularity.

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.

So acclimatized are we to action flicks, and to onscreen conflicts teeming with soldiers, that it’s refreshing to find a film that concentrates on hanging back and reversing out of harm’s way.

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.

Not once does this ruffled sweetness seem like Hanson’s natural terrain. "Wonder Boys" took emotional risks, daring to suggest that with age comes not wisdom but confusion and crummy robes, whereas everything in the new film is designed to slot together with an optimistic click.

Tomorrowland is a bright and pliable sci-fi thriller that stiffens into a sermon. Can’t it just be fun?

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

Under its compelling influence, we are lured into feeling that these various lives, marked by vacuity and frustration, are in some way destined to end at the point of a gun — that the murderer and his victims coexist on a continuum of despair. Try telling that to the people of Aurora.

The good news is that, while "The Expendables" was the kind of product that should be shown to health inspectors rather than critics, much of Red is jovial and juvenating. [1 Nov. 2010, p.121]

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]

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.

Here’s the paradox: the closer The Aeronauts gets to peak silliness, the more beautiful it becomes.

For all its faults, has a musty charm.

The whole thing makes Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Levinson’s “Rain Man” seem like a triumph of underplaying.

That's the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it's running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying--or calculating--that some of them will fly.

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

Among the Scots, look out for James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the bellow of whose triumphal rage is at once thrilling and scarcely human. For a few seconds, we forget that we are watching a well-mounted period drama about a minor regional conflict; a blood-thirst as basic as this feels horribly timeless.

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

Toss everything you can find, starting with roughly diced plots, into the blender, press "Pulse," and pray: such appears to be the method behind Tower Heist.

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

Stroker slips down the gullet with less fuss, but there are enough blood sprays and snapped vertebrae to pacify the director's clamorous fan club -- and, for the rest of us, plenty of chances to reconsider his style. It is, unquestionably, something to behold. [8 March 2013, p.80]

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

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.

Gray would have been happiest, I guess, to make movies in the nineteen-seventies, and this one feels much closer to 1975 than to 1988; he could certainly use a seventies audience to watch his movies now--one that could be trusted not to grumble about his slow, unexcitable fades.

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

Maguire has the nerve to give her heroine a big speech on the “integrity” of proper journalism — this after Bridget Jones’s Baby has made fun of foreigners’ names, and arranged for her to put the wrong Asian guest in front of the cameras. (Do all Asians look alike to her? Is that the joke?) So reliably does she embarrass herself at every public event that the film, trudging by on automatic, becomes an embarrassment, too.

To transform a TV series into a film is to surround yourself with pitfalls, and “Absolutely Fabulous,” sad to report, nosedives into every one of them.

Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Dull for the first hour and beefy with basic thrills for most of the second.

The strength of the movie resides mainly in the work of its cameraman, Chris Menges, who delivers a barrage of images as rousing and changeable as the fortunes of Collins himself.

Such is the strenuous effort of Phoenix’s performance that it becomes exhausting to behold.

For all its technical sophistication, this movie is as blaring and unambiguous as a picture book for the very young.

Emotions are not toyed with glancingly but stretched out and blazoned forth, and the result is that the new film is nearly an hour longer than the original cartoon.

With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.

The result is that what should be most uplifting, in The Glorias, is most at risk of clunkiness.

The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.

The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll.

Greengrass is as dexterous as ever, yet the result, though abounding in thrills, seems oddly stifled by self-consciousness and, dare one say, superfluous. Come on, guys. There are so many wrongs in the world. If Bourne could tear himself away from the mirror for a moment, could he not be persuaded to go and right them?

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.

For those who think of cinema as dramatic roughage, The Reader should prove sufficiently indigestible.

Quantum of Solace is too savage for family entertainment, but, as a study in headlong desperation, it's easier to believe in than many more ponderous films.

The result is a lively bout between bio-pic and fairy tale.

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

It’s no surprise that the film should so often stumble and trip, yet I would sooner watch it again and sort through my mixed feelings about it than revisit, say, the nullity of “Joker.” There is genuine zest in the unease of Jojo Rabbit, and it’s weirdly convincing as a portrait of childhood under surreal strain.

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]

One problem with Lawless, though, is that it feels chock-full of entrances that never quite lead anywhere. [3 Sept. 2012, p.78]

Now the mush has taken over, and Columbus has slowed his pace in nervous deference to the solemnity of his plot (not to mention the opulence of his characters' lives).

"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.

They have pruned, or purged, the drama until it runs just over an hour and a half, and, in so doing, mislaid its nervous languor.

The only performer who seems at ease is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in one juicy moment spies Gemma and her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and confesses not to envy but to “a strange kind of jubilation” at seeing Flaubert’s narrative lock into place.

Eventually, despite a number of Dionysian interludes, not least a drug-driven scooter ride with neither helmets nor clothes, this on-off emotional rhythm grows demoralizing, and the movie becomes a less than appealing blend of rave and rut.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter.

The last third of the movie is as bad as anything I’ve seen this year, with the laughs trailing off, and half of the supporting characters, the zestier ones, being airbrushed from the frame. (What director in his right mind would drop Tina Fey from the proceedings?)

One of the year’s more luscious releases, offering not just the sleekest car chase but the most romantic of rainstorms.

Feels at once secondhand in its eagerness and unknowing in its scorn.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

The year's most divided movie to date; everything that happens in the higher realms, vaguely derived from Nordic legend, is posturing nonsense, whereas the scenes down here are managed, for the most part, with dexterity and wit. [16 May 2011, p. 133]

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

Although the plot comes to rely on a particularly outlandish series of coincidences, it’s a credit to Kloves’s skill that you can almost put this out of your mind and enjoy his long, suspended scenes, brimming with lust or the need to lash out.

Imagine a different film on a similar theme, with Hubert moved to center stage and García replaced by Pedro Almodóvar, for whom cross-dressers in a Catholic country would be meat and drink. Poor Albert could then retreat into the shadows, where he so evidently belongs, emerging only to pour the wine and clear away the feast.

All we are left with, in essence, is an unlikely love affair, performed by two actors so remorselessly skilled that, by the end, you can't see the love for the skill. [3 November 2003, p. 104]

Miss Potter is a grave disappointment, because it never listens out for that note. It is a soft, woolly film about a smart, unsentimental woman who did constant battle with her frustrations.

Everything’s in place, and there’s not a weak link in the cast, with Debicki — lofty, playful, and unreadable — in especially beguiling form. The idea that art, like love, is something that you can make or fake, and that surprisingly few people can tell the difference, will always be ripe for exploration. And yet the movie stumbles.

To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.

As daft, outlandish, and speedy as it needs to be, and, for all its newfangled effects, touchingly old-fashioned in its reverence for the Jules Verne novel that inspired it.

They give excellent value for money, launching into song the way that normal folk go to the bathroom--regularly, politely, and because, if they didn't, well, darn it, they might just burst.

What Hawke has provided here, with plenty of grace and a minimum of fuss, is an elegy for a life that went missing, more smolder than blaze, and a chance to hear the songs of the unsung.

In short, Dark Blue suffers from a problem that, however niggling, is likely to hobble any thriller: no thrills. [17 & 24 February 2003, p.204]

Tense and firm at either end, it sags in the middle like a mattress. Also, the grownups are pretty dull and flat, their mood set to maximum glower; luckily, we have Remmy—played first by Brooklynn Prince and later, as a teen-ager, by Nell Tiger Free—to steer us through the doldrums and to energize the plot.

A thumper of a movie, full of furious souls.

I suspect that Buffalo Soldiers is not about the Army at all. Without much ado, it could have been turned into “Buffalo Management Consultants” or “Buffalo Movie Executives.” Any clenched community would suffice. [8 August 2003, p. 84]

Meanwhile, everyone in the theatre is thinking: Given that I paid good money to learn about the world’s most frightening cocaine king, why am I watching a movie about the world’s most stupid Canadian?

The best reason to stay with it is Vaughn, whose lanky wryness wards off the threat of pomposity. The worst reason is Jada Pinkett Smith, who gets stuck with a thankless role as the unwittingly lethal villain -- a newspaper journalist, of course.

Jones is as formidable as ever, and Vincent D’Onofrio gives a sombre and riveting portrayal of Jerry Falwell, the Baptist Savonarola, who doesn’t hesitate to scythe down the Bakkers for their sins. But this is Chastain’s movie, through and through.

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

What makes Valkyrie more depressing than exciting is that it forces you to ask, against your judgment, what, exactly, he achieved.

Having dreaded the prospect of Sylvia, I admired it precisely because it refuses to play along with the mythologizing that has sprung up, and vulgarized, the lives of two poets. [20 October 2003, p. 206]

The director of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Guy Ritchie, and there are hints, in the Berlin scenes, that he is tempted by the murkier option. Before long, however, as befits the maker of “Snatch” and “RocknRolla,” he drops the shadowy chic, decamps to Rome, and gets down to silliness.

The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on Kanigel’s book, and directed by Matthew Brown, feels sluggish and stuck, and it hits an insoluble crux.

As I took off my gray-lensed 3-D spectacles at the end of Monsters vs. Aliens, I felt not so much immersed as fuzzy with exhaustion. What I had seen struck me less as a herald of shining possibility than as a thrill ride back to the future--back, that is, to an idea of the future, and a stale one at that.

An efficient, politically inert fantasy.

In short, the pursuit of pleasure is not confined to our hero alone but extended to all comers, with a horny democratic good will, and it’s typical of Korine to suggest that, in an era as acrimonious as ours, the true provocation is to harbor no grudges, to forgive us our trespasses, and to drift along, catching the tide of contentment.

Some sign of mental reach would have been welcome, even if it extended only as far as their children. Indeed, given the title, it's remarkable how little space is granted to the offspring, who are introduced as excretory machines, sex-blocking irritants, and occasional simpering angels, but never as beings unto themselves. Any parents who see this movie should be warned about the final score: Friends 6, Kids 0.

What fun there is derives from the smart editing (Rodriguez did his own cutting, and he's quicker on the draw than most of the pistol-packers) and from Antonio Banderas, who, stepping neatly into the Mariachi's boots, lends irony and calm, and even a trace of sweetness, to a nothing role.

You may get off on this enthralling stuff, But after half an hour I'd had enough.

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.

You can’t deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character’s show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable.

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]

One has to ask: does it allow for immersion? Even as we applaud the dramatic machinery, are we being kept emotionally at bay? [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]

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.

Along with Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, Burton is one of the few magi who know what can be dredged up, even now, from the cauldron of special effects. [21 May 2012, p.80]

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

Can a director be arrested for the attempted hijack of our emotions?

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

Every Bay film is cheesy, but this one counts as high-speed cheese, grilled to the max by Danny’s thoughtful advice: “Just. Drive. Fast.”

Viewers will be split between those who wonder about this silly, trumped-up story and those who already know and love the silliness for what it was. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

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.

The movie was written and directed by Brian Helgeland, whose screenplay for “L.A. Confidential” (1997) won an Oscar — deservedly so, for the skein of plot required a steady hand. Legend, by contrast, pummels us into believing that it has a plot, where none exists.

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]

In The Conspirator, one wishes that the director had found the grace to touch upon, rather than belabor, the parallels between the conspirators of 1865 and the present-day inmates of Guantánamo.

It may well be most amenable to the completely blotto. I made the grave mistake of seeing it sober, and there were moments when I simply lost my courage and had to look away, as some people do during the tooth-drilling scene in “Marathon Man.”

I happen to find the live-action Disney reboots easy to admire but hard to warm to — supremely unlovable, indeed, and stripped of the consoling charm that we look for in their animated sources.

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.

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

The result may be the oddest film of the season. It boasts an array of sublime backdrops and a yearning score, but the climate of feeling is anxious and inward, encapsulated in Stiller’s darting gaze, and the movie itself keeps glancing backward, at the lost and the obsolete.

If only Kim had a sense of humor to match his visual wit. Instead, we get rusted gags and rubbery acting.

Thanks for Sharing is worth it, because of Pink. [30 Sept. 2013, p.85]

Sparks like that are scattered through, and yet the sad fact is that Jersey Boys is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished.

LaBute's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Restoration comedy is undercut by the fact that his dialogue is only fitfully funny, and you can't help but feel soured by the flat, ritualistic look of the action. The one enlivening performance comes, surprisingly, from Jason Patric.

The narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough.

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

A slight and rueful affair, intermittently funny.

Forget satire; this guy doesn't want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick.

The story can’t keep still, shifting from year to year and place to place, and, whereas "Mr. Jones" appalls you into wanting to know more, Wasp Network is so temperate in its political approach that you start to forget what’s at stake.

If the story of Jean Seberg is one of the more wretched footnotes in the chronicle of fame, that’s all the more reason to treasure those occasions, onscreen, when she was not a victim — when she bore herself, and whatever pains she harbored, with mastery and grace.

Yet Oblivion is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda.

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).

Cocaine Bear has a peculiar jostling quality, as the various characters shuffle onto center stage and then get elbowed aside to make way for the next contender.

Traces of real history are hard to spot in Fuqua’s Western, but there isn’t much evidence of a real Western, either. You sense that an entire genre, far from being revitalized, is being plundered for handy tips.

It’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

The plot would seem more ingenious if the movie itself didn't copy so many other thrillers (notably "The Silence of the Lambs"), and if it weren't so easy to spot every twist half an hour in advance.

The killings pile up, yet Jarmusch, the master of mellowdrama, would rather die than be accused of overkill. His heart isn’t really in the blood and guts. The line between the laid-back and the listless, in The Dead Don’t Die, may be too fine even for him, and most of the running gags don’t run at all, merely loping around in a circle.

Throughout Sinister, the rooms remain darker than crypts, whether at breakfast or dinnertime, and the sound design causes everything in the house to moan and groan in consort with the hero's worrisome quest. I still can't decide what creaks the most: the floors, the doors, the walls, the dialogue, the acting, or the fatal boughs outside.

If only the style of The Artist’s Wife could scald with equal intent. Alas, it opts for plangency, with a musical score applied like a gentle balm, and a plot that hungers for healing—absurdly so, given the incurable nature of Richard’s plight.

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.

Made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show.

Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids.

Lucky Number Slevin is a bag of nerves. Everything here is too much. The older the actors, the saltier the ham of their performances.

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.

This film's got EVERYTHING, although purists might quibble that it lacks any sliver of plausibility or dramatic interest.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.

Smart, saucy, and ingenious in the extreme. The trouble is that when a subtext is dragged to the fore, however splendidly, the poor old text gets lost.

The whole thing, shot in the manner of "Masterpiece Theatre," with a flaccid musical score to match, is itself hopelessly antiquated, greeting with very British giggles, and without a trace of honest curiosity, the needs of the women it seeks to honor. [21 May 2012, p.81]

Suffice to say that even he (one of our finest actors) is trapped by the miasma of unsubtlety that creeps into the film and causes all involved to lose their professional bearings. [5 May 2014, p.84]

The gist of the critical response has been that The Tender Bar follows a well-worn path. Fair enough, but is that such a sin? (You should try the new Matrix movie. Now, that’s worn.) What counts is the firmness of the tread, and Clooney sets a careful but unloitering pace.

Toward the end, Deep Water grows less ambiguous and more conventional, but the rest of it is actually well suited to Lyne’s fetishistic style, with its succulent closeups, and the bitter memory of Glenn Close’s character—depicted as a vengeful virago—in Fatal Attraction is somewhat eased by de Armas’s willful and cheerful Melinda.

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.

As a thriller, regrettably, “I.S.S.” fails to fulfill its mission. Any air of plausibility soon leaks out of the plot, and the whole thing drifts into silliness, tricked out with familiar tropes.

Glum, protracted, and needlessly nasty.

Mystery buffs will see a twist coming from afar, and connoisseurs of horror will be underscared, yet the film sits squarely in the Ricci canon. Once again, she leaves us wondering: Is her character the victim of menace and disorientation, or could she herself be the wellspring of strangeness?

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]

Love Is Strange, however, is not about gay marriage. It is about a marriage that happens to be gay. If the film grows slightly boring, even that can be construed as an advance.

What happens, though, and what lures the film into disaster, is that Hartley lets slip his sense of humor (always his strongest asset) and begins to believe his own plot.

Contriving somehow both to dawdle and to rush, Murder on the Orient Express” is handsome, undemanding, and almost wholly bereft of purpose.

Most of the innumerable sequels were tripe, but this one has a freshness -- even a kind of wit -- mixed in with all the blood.

It is this rage for authenticity, more than the leading lady, that transforms Ghost in the Shell into an American product. Here’s an irony: if anything preserves the unnerving quiddity and strangeness of the Japanese movie, it is Johansson.

It is the greatest biblio-climax of any film since "Fahrenheit 451," although Truffaut's prayer was that reading might yet survive calamity and carry the torch of the civilized. Detachment snufffs out that faith; books it warns us, are the first thing to go. [19 March 2012, p.91]

A comedy without one foot on the ground is no more than a flight of fancy, as directionless as a balloon; the master clowns of silent cinema knew that, and so does Mr. Fletcher, the gravid elder statesman of this film. As he says to Mike and Jerry, “I appreciate your creativity, but let’s be realistic for a second.” Be kind. Erase.

You can love the look of the movie and still not believe a single word of it. To be fair, the climax is surprisingly touching; somehow, the residents of this cooked-up tale manage to earn our pity and support.

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.

Not to warm to this movie would be churlish, and foodies will drool on demand.

By the end of the movie, Refn has toyed with cannibalism, lesbian necrophilia, the egestion of an eyeball, and other minor sports, all of them filmed in lavish taste. It’s enough to make you reflect longingly on the Agatha Christie drama that he made for British TV in 2007. Say what you like about Miss Marple, at least she merely questioned her suspects. She didn’t eat them for tea.

It's not the most high-concept movie of the year, or indeed of any other. Due Date is most interesting, and most fearful, when it loiters on the threshold of the homoerotic.

Much of the dialogue is scissor-sharp--you would expect no less of Marber, who wrote "Closer"--but he is up against blunt and obvious material.

The truth is that almost nobody, and certainly no nation, emerges well from this sour endeavor. [18 & 25 August 2003, p. 150]

More like the Pelican Long-and-Drawn-Out: well over two hours of plots, subplots and super-subdialogue.

Ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.

Even if you closed your eyes -- a tempting option -- you would still know that you were in the hollering presence of pain. The story is undiluted dread. [10 March 2003, p. 94]

The best parts of the new film, by a long stretch, are the flying sequences, in which Dumbo wheels around inside the tent. Sometimes he even has a jockey, in the daring shape of Colette (Eva Green), the in-house trapeze artist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged through patches of glum and listless drama.

Where’d You Go, Bernadette has to be seen, and demands to be believed, because of Cate Blanchett. Like “Blue Jasmine” (2013), which earned her a second Oscar, this new film lies at her command.

As a journey through Darwin's discoveries, Creation fails, although, given the intricacy and the patience of his working methods, it is hard to imagine how such a film might succeed.

The movie may have significant truths to impart, although I have my doubts, but it feels too inexperienced, too unworldly, to have earned the right to them.

The Gentlemen is a mongrel of a movie. There are not enough twists and tangles for a proper mystery, not enough thrills for an action flick, and not enough laughs for a comedy.

Anyone who soldiered through "The Expendables," two years ago, will be touched, and a little surprised, to learn that there is more to expend. [3 Sept. 2012, p.79]

This mania is what Marvel followers have hungered for, and it would be fruitless to deny their delight. As Loki says to a crowd of earthlings, "It is the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation." We do, Master, we do.

And so, as the solemnity of the enterprise is frittered away, you feel moved to ask: what is this film for?

You do wonder how this commanding actor (Neeson)--who carries so much more conviction than the plot--felt about delivering the line "I'll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to."

A trim thriller with an enviable lack of grandeur. [21 Jan. 2013, p.79]

The trouble with Super, as with "Kick-Ass," is that the director wants to have his cake, put a pump-action shotgun up against the frosting, blast vanilla sponge over a wide area, and THEN eat it. [4 April, 2011, p. 83]

There are times when the movie's entertainment value verges on the scandalous. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

Turtles Can Fly has little space for mawkishness, and the kids are far too cussed to be cute. It is, in every sense, the more immediate achievement: it hits and hurts the eyes (the rainy days are lousy enough, but the skies of royal blue, above such grief, feel especially insulting), and it also seems to bleed straight out of the headlines.

But by the end, the charm and delicacy of the 1961 cartoon have long been replaced by laborious gross-outs. Is this now official Disney policy?

As for Ferrell, a noted Eurovision nut, there’s no mistaking his affection for the brave hogwash of the genre, but even he is felled by the movie’s swerve into P.R.: a sing-along, say, in which genuine victors from Eurovisions past team up in a rolling medley.

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.

The most surprising aspect of the film is its suburban mildness, plus the hapless charm of its hero, Enn (Alex Sharp).

"Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness," Captain Jack says. Sir, you speak for us all.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

That is what kids will come away with, together with a dose of wishful thinking: the vague belief that, with good will and a foe from far away, all those feuding parties of the Wild West - the cowboys, the Indians, and the no-good rogues - could have settled their differences and got along just fine. Go tell it to Gary Cooper.

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

Illogical and glum. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

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.

How, then, does The Good German--adapted by Paul Attanasio from Joseph Kanon's novel--wind up so insubstantial, its impact lasting no longer than a cigarette?

There is much to savor here, especially the unforced performance of Judah Lewis — one more recruit to the terrific roster of younger actors who are streaming into the movies. Yet the film lacks the courage of its affliction.

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.

McKay has a point, though his frame of reference hardly stretches beyond the United States, and the stink of localized political contempt all but overpowers the plot.

The over-all effect is bizarre, daring you to be amused by something both brilliant and bristling with offense; if you sidle out at the end, feeling half guilty at what you just conspired in, then Stiller has trapped you precisely where he wants you.

Put the evidence together, and it’s no surprise that this poor little movie fires blanks. It never wanted to be a Western at all.

A confused, humorless grind.

The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody.

It would be a shock if Antichrist had turned out to be anything but shocking.

In truth, the only soul to emerge with any credit from “Bullet Train” is Brad Pitt, who drifts through the tumult in a haze of unbothered charm.

Amsterdam is, or is meant to be, a caper: an easygoing endeavor, you might think. But capering is as tricky on the silver screen as it is on the dance floor, and the tone of the tale keeps losing its footing.

And that's it, really: two hours of loneliness, interleaved with havoc. The dialogue has been distilled to expletives and grunts. [16 Sept. 2013, p.74]

One is forced to ask: who wants to make, or watch, a major Hollywood musical about mental block?

The film that results is at once panicky and abstruse, and we are left with little more than the delirious shine of McConaughey’s eyes and the preacherly rapture in his voice.

This movie is a smooch-free zone, and the arc described by its leading lady, proud and nerveless, is an elegant one: she starts by taking a punch to the face, without malice, from another woman, and, at the climax, delivers one herself—unmanning her male opponent with a decisive thump to the groin. If Lara Croft weren’t already a role model, she is now.

This is not a question of a movie selling its soul. The soul is in the selling.

Does it matter that the plot is so full of holes that you could use it to drain spaghetti?

In short, this popular love story isn't much of a story, and falls badly short on love.

Why do people keep making films about writers?

The result is remarkable, yet it’s still a hairbreadth away from credible.

Don’t Worry Darling is about the development of regressive materials—about forcing women back into boxy lives and striving to convince them that they like it there. The problem is not that this is a cautionary tale but that the caution comes as no surprise.

Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

It may have the melody, visage and basics of a Bollywood biggie, but truth be told, The Guru, despite it’s zest and lure, gives the far-off genus a bad wrap. [3 February 2003, p.98]

If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, In the Heart of the Sea, sadly, is not the place to start. Try “Splash.”

It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling.

Even by the standards of disaster movies, The Day After Tomorrow is irretrievably poor: a shambles of dud writing and dramatic inconsequence which left me determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels. [7 June 2004, p. 102]

To be fair, Irresistible picks up in the final quarter, with the aid of a clever twist that whistles in from nowhere. We get an assortment of different endings, each undercutting the last. It’s as if this dozy film has woken up, belatedly, to its comic responsibilities and opportunities.

Dave’s dread of his brother hooks The Ardennes onto a long chain of fraternal crime dramas, from “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) to “We Own the Night” (2007). Pront can hardly be blamed if his actors lack the sinew of Cagney or Brando.

Why, as a patron of Rock of Ages, do I wish I had taken the precaution of entering the theater drunk? [25 June 2012, p.84]

It's a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness. The plot is compromised, not resolved, by the pulling of a gun.

All movie adaptations of Nabokov fall short, by definition, but this one is the most graceful failure so far.

In truth, von Trier is not so much a filmmaker as a misanthropic mesmerist, who uses movies to bend the viewer to his humorless will.

Bad movie!

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

And there you have the problem with this film. It is gray with good taste — shade upon shade of muted naughtiness, daubed within the limits of the R rating. Think of it as the “Downton Abbey” of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination. You get dirtier talk in most action movies, and more genitalia in a TED talk on Renaissance sculpture.

The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith.

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.

The Last of Robin Hood, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, is often pallid and thin.

There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue.

If The Son lacks the grip of Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” (2020), it’s because the fable of Nicholas and Peter has the brittle feel of a setup.

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.

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

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

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]

It is the first film to be directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, and what it shares with other coruscating débuts, from “The Four Hundred Blows” to “Badlands,” is a sense that it HAD to be made. There is a controlled wildness at the heart of such movies, whose narratives ask to be handled as delicately as explosives. [15 March 2004, p. 154]

This awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek.

As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter.

The movie is hardly in a position to chastise Gage for his empty soul when its own style is one of numbing, desolate slickness.

The Expendables is savage yet inert, and breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination.

Most of Burger’s film, in truth, is either numb or dumb.

The new movie wears an air of old hat. I would absolutely defend Haneke’s right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he’s not keeping up with the times; he’s behind them.

A perplexing compound of the silly and the glum.

The winner, on points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who crashes the party and leaves them both dumbfounded, not least because she has the wit, and the wherewithal, to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier.

Shyamalan remains as coolly unstirred by sex as he was in his previous movies--an astounding indifference, given the historical entwining of eros and fright. Even more bizarre is the gradual draining of humor from his work; the anatomy of horror demands a tongue in the cheek to go with the baring of teeth, but much of The Village is a proud and sullen affair.

Deep and Morton are really flying here (the scene in which the hero instructs the heroine in the passionate possibilities of her art), and they leave the rest of the film looking heavy on its feet. The second half, especially, grows dour and maundering, and by the end the movie seems to flail in desperation, more like a work in progress than like a finished piece.

The first third of Aftermath is stripped to emotional basics (one man seized up with grief, another with guilt), and it delivers quite a jolt. Sadly, as the characters converge, the rest of the movie loses force; it slackens and then rushes, and the time frames feel out of joint.

Some people make films in homage to Ingmar Bergman, others nod to the French New Wave, but only the Wilsons would think to follow in the footsteps of Burt Reynolds.

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.

So heavily does the movie strain for offbeat detail—a killer who watches cartoons at full blast; Jay equipped with a neck brace and a leaf blower—that it refreshes one’s respect for Wes Anderson, whose eye for oddities remains clear and bright.

There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972. But what “Last Tango in Paris” proved was that our skin-grazing view of a body makes us more, not less, enthusiastic to grasp the shape of the soul that it enshrines.

We are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. [6 October 2003, p. 138]

There are many unanswered questions here (why, for instance, does Pitt's Grim Reaper seem semi-retarded?), not to mention unintended spasms of comedy; in the end, however, they all get swallowed up in the mush.

The Iron Orchard, though geographically confined, is all over the place. We flit past the patches of Jim’s life that matter (what happened during those two years, as the dollars poured in?) and linger on those that don’t. Random flashbacks alert us to his youth. The musical score is overcooked, the cast underpowered, and the dialogue something of a mishmash.

You have to admire Shyamalan’s efforts to deconstruct a genre that he evidently loves, yet there is just so little to haunt or to fool us in the result, and a few sharp laughs might have helped his cause.

The hero's restlessness infects the rest of the movie; the story feels febrile and unhappy, and Allen seems to take his dissatisfaction out on his helpless characters--especially the women.

So lazy is the characterization, so hamstrung the plot, and so chronically broad the overacting that the main interest lies in deciding which to block first, your eyes or your ears. [2 Sept. 2013, p.81]

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]

So repelled is Clooney by the response of white suburbia to African-Americans, and so keen is he to insure that we share his outrage at what they endured, that he quite forgets to be interested in them.

Larry Crowne is worryingly light on laughs, yet it never dares to worry too much about the plight of its central figure. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.100]

The movie takes time to warm up, it weakens into soppiness at the end, and the game itself, if you think it through, makes very little sense.

As it is, the movie's lethal climax, with its vague protest against corporate control--and hence in favor of art, music, drugs, or whatever--feels like a poor theft from a more conventional film.

The over-all result is a misstep for Fleischer. [21 Jan. 2013, p. 78]

In short, it’s up to Curtis to rescue the film. She’s meant to be the villain, but her lines, even the motley ones (“The stars aligned, we slayed the dragon, and we won”), are delivered with such a delectable thwack that I kept forgetting to boo.

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.

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.

You have to applaud for sheer folly. This doesn't just reprise another film. It reprises a French film.

The happy couple (Farrell/Dawson) do enjoy one great scene together, and it's the high point of the movie-a naked tussle, in which she puts a knife to his throat. The whole sequence is quick, funny, and arousing, in sharp contrast to the rest of Alexander, which is sluggish, unsmiling.