Calum Marsh

The result is a 103-minute vanity project I found utterly exhausting.

Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.

Just as it seems on the verge of yielding a nuanced view of the Holocaust’s emotional and psychological fallout, Anita B. recedes into platitudes and cliché.

Koyaanisqatsi was a marvel of smeared and kaleidoscopic light; Visitors is a dull etch of digital blacks and grays.

Mancini, who served as an executive producer, is glorified and exonerated, yet it's his inability to render either process interesting that ultimately sinks the picture.

This is a guy who seeks to mock idiocy? Physician, heal thyself.

Mostly it made me want to watch the original, which, as always, remains well worth revisiting.

The solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism.

We all have childhoods to remember. Art needs to do more than just remind us.

Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.

"Lyle” has a brisk, whimsical momentum that is utterly infectious in the early going. Then it stops dead.

Alaimo seems to have an unusually high tolerance for shopworn ideas, and Chlorine boasts no shortage of them.

It's a particularly risible nothing whose premise alone betrays the paucity of Franco's imagination and wit.

Of course, these logistical problems would be excusable if the romance at the center of the movie were remotely compelling or if the jokes were actually funny.

Ebony & Ivory, in its unrelenting aggression, is particularly exhausting, though I suppose you have to admire the integrity of its vision. Irritating as Hosking’s humor is, you can’t deny his commitment to the bit.

Has an elegance roughly on par with a Goosebumps novel, refusing to follow its own contradictory rules and barely sustaining a pretense of internal logic.

In any given moment, the movie is either overstating the importance of its subject or trivializing it.

While the details are meticulous, the attitude is all wrong, trading the simple, unaffected charm that has served the character so well since his introduction in 1981 for a snarky and fatuous air that leans hard on winking humor and bland, hackneyed irony.

The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”

An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.

Poetry refracts life; this film can only reflect it, and tritely at that.

The most charitable thing you can say about This Is Where I Leave You is that it is resolutely innocuous — a nothing of a movie, neutered and sanitary.

While it’s true that a certain tepid aspect is common to most B westerns, those of the ’30s and ’40s were made with a baseline competence that The Old Way is woefully lacking.

Resoundingly terrible.

If this is the standard we’re dealing with, I’d rather have amnesia.

It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.

Its story of high school freshmen navigating a libertine house party follows exactly the trajectory you would expect, with few laughs and even fewer surprises.

This tedious, unfunny, screamingly unoriginal romantic adventure film is so flimsy and so insubstantial that it’s practically vaporous.