David Denby

Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone.

I know there are intelligent people who are awed by this sort of deep-dish magical mystery tour, but surely something is wrong with a movie when you can't tell a live character from a dead one and you don't care which is which. [9 December 2002, p. 142]

The picture is a kind of fattened goose that's been stuffed with goose-liver pâté. It's overrich and fundamentally unsatisfying.

The Green Hornet is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project." [24 Jan. 2011, p. 82]

Bertolucci is trying hard to shock us with this stuff, but, for all the perversities and the abundant nudity, the movie has an air of inconsequence about it. [9 February 2004, p. 74]

It's not boring (given the subject, how could it be?), but almost nothing in it works.

In the movie's best moments, the misery has a comic lilt to it. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

Penn gives a strenuous, at times shrewd and acid performance, which has been embedded, unfortunately, in a clumsy and ineffective movie.

Morning Glory has a depressed, rancid air. [22 Nov. 2010, p. 141]

A shapeless mess, but at least it’s not as monotonous as “Kill Bill Vol. 1.” [19 & 26 April 2004, p. 202]

Has its satirical charms, but it repeats itself remorselessly, and it has no emotional center. We are so distant from Val that when he gets his sight back we don't feel a thing. [20 May 2002, p.114]

Thoroughly derivative, and it doesn't illuminate youth crime -- it exploits it.

The movie is derivative, flat, halfhearted, its squareness unrelieved by irony or fantasy. [3 March 2003, p. 94]

The movie is halfhearted, fragmentary, unachieved.

An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn't decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both.

Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy--the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce--but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom.

“Them” — apart from a few affecting scenes — is a hollow, high-minded folly.

The two characters are ciphers, and the script, which Sachs co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, is by turns underwritten or banal.

After the complex buildup of tensions, the last ten minutes of the movie are a comic-pathetic letdown: the subdued acting and the trash-strewn street scenes lead to nothing more striking than the kind of overexplicit clichés heard in mediocre TV dramas. Even De Niro's discipline and skill can't save lines that should never have been spoken in the first place. [9 September 2002, p.162]

The futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]

Kevin Kline does his best movie work yet as Nick Bottom...But in most other ways this "Midsummer Night" is hard to endure.

Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, Sicko.

Not meant to be realistic; it was shot by the director Steven Shainberg in a slow, dreamy neo-De Palma style and in candy colors, and Gyllenhaal has a Kewpie-doll silliness that almost makes the naughty parts of the movie fun. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]

Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded--not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.

The clichéd macho silliness of the picture gets to be infuriating after a while.

What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies.

War Horse is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work. [2 Jan. 2012, p.79]

It seems that the director, who also made "The Incredible Hulk" and "Clash of the Titans," will do anything to distract us from the emptiness to which he has devoted himself. [10 & 17 June 2013, p.110]

Unfortunately, it's also maddeningly repetitive, and dependent on the kind of strained English whimsy that leaves your throat sore from laughter that dies in the glottal region.

Much of what Oskar says in the book is amusingly beside the point. Onscreen, however, the sound of a hyper-articulate boy talking semi-nonsense becomes very hard to take.

As you watch, you don't think of the decline of American civilization; you think that these are good actors giving themselves a hell of a workout in a misbegotten movie. [6 Jan. 2014, p.72]

May have been written by a young woman, but it feels like a middle-aged man's fantasies about young people. The dialogue is actually - to retrieve an old word - vulgar. [7 Feb. 2011, p. 82]

The movie is messily ineffective. Daniels likes charged, discordant scenes, with sudden explosions of violence. He shoves the camera in people's faces, and he can't convincingly stage a scene with more than two people in it. [8 Oct. 2012, p.86]

The Canyons is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world.

The material has been turned into a trivially narcissistic product for teen-age girls who want to feel indignant about wrongs they are unlikely to suffer.

There’s a big hole in the middle of the movie: the director, Tom Tykwer, and the screenwriter, Eric Warren Singer, forgot to make their two crusaders human beings.

Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.

Prince of Persia is meant purely as light entertainment, but the way it draws on layers of junk is depressing.

The Dictator, like its predecessors, is short (eighty-three minutes), but it runs down fast, and the lewd jokes pile up. [28 May 2012, p. 76]

In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.

The movie that Josée Dayan has made about the Duras-Andréa affair is not a scandal. Unfortunately, it’s not much of anything but a solemn joke. [14 April 2003, p.88]

Never Let Me Go is in such good taste that we never feel any horror over the idea at the center of it.

One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years.

A clunky and obvious comedy.

The movie is a technological and publicity triumph, and a calamity in every other way.

Burroughs invented a primal fiction: a man winds up on another planet, and has to find his way among strange creatures. Sticking to that fable, which was central to "Avatar," might have saved John Carter, but Stanton loses its appealing simplicity in too many battles, too many creatures, too many redundant episodes. [26 March 2012, p.108]

The movie is pervaded by a cataclysmic sense of loss, but we don’t need to be chastised with the ideal of Christian love to understand that sex isn’t enough. And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough, either. Only a major filmmaker could have made To the Wonder, but nothing in it adds up.

(Lurie's) a shameless, if skilled, manipulator of easy emotions. (29 Oct 2001, p. 93)

As director, Foster, working with Kyle Killen's screenplay, treats the goofy premise with a literal earnestness-as a family drama about separation and reunion-that seems all wrong. A little wit would have helped.

Apart from this going-postal moment, and a nice song from Frank the Pug (a resident alien from the original, played by the same dog), MIIB is pretty much a disaster -- repetitive beyond belief, and so busily inconsequential that it neuralizes your brain and leaves you with nothing to respond to. [8 July 2002, p.84]

The movie is all whoosh and whack and abrupt closeups -- jerky digital punctuation. It's alienating experience, without emotional resonance or charm. [28 March 2011, p. 116]

If the rest of the movie had been on Travolta's level of sly knowingness, it might have been a hip classic, rather than what it is -- a summertime debauch. [23 July 2012, p. 81]

Spanglish chokes on an excess of sincerity and guilt, and, in retrospect, its failure may turn out to be momentous for a sincere and guilty community--Hollywood liberals in a state of post-election dismay.

In the Cut is completely controlled and all of a piece, and yet, apart from one performance (Mark Ruffalo), it's terrible--a thriller devoid of incidental pleasures or humor, or even commonplace reality. [27 October 2003, p. 112]

In itself, XXX is not worth getting bothered about -- a half-dozen big pictures as bad as this one come out every year. At the very worst, it will kick off a pointless new movie franchise. [19 & 26 August 2002, p.174]

Feels like a pointlessly nagging play.

Overwrought and unpleasant nonsense.

The movie collapses into banality. The marriages hang together, but fear and guilt provide the glue. Perhaps the biggest insult to women here is the idea that they can't get better men than these two vacuous guys. [14 March 2011, p. 78]

Falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. John Q is a trashy, opportunistic piece of pop demagoguery. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]

The movie rages on for a hundred and fifty minutes and then just stops, pausing for the next sequel.

The kind of bad movie that makes a reviewer feel terrible. It has been put together with great sincerity, and yet, impassioned and affecting as some of it is, 21 Grams is also an arrogant failure. [24 November 2003, p. 113]

The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling. It's an embarrassment.

The only thing that Butler and Aniston have in common, however, is identical Aruba-bronze skin tones: they seem to have been sprayed with the same can.

The style of the movie veers unsuccessfully between humorless piety and opéra-bouffe clownishness.

Brown and now Ron Howard have added an incendiary element to trash--open hostility toward the Catholic Church.

The quarter-century-old disgruntled fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie company, and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.

It's a shame that Fox entrusted Luhrmann with this project, because audiences were probably ready for a big-boned realistic movie spectacle.

It’s time for this talented man (Assayas) to pull himself together. He may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he’s caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.

Kill Bill is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap...Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing--not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing. [13 October 2003, p. 113]

Pfeiffer, enormously likable in the role, almost saves the movie. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

The sensibility of the movie is naggingly adolescent -- less erotic than squeamish and giggly. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]

Maybe some of the audience should wonder if they aren't performing the Devil's work by sitting so quietly through movies that turn wonders into garbage.

The movie is like a monstrous balloon that keeps re-inflating. If Salinger were around, he would reach for a pin.

What it's really about, of course, is the very delicate marketing problem of turning a super-bland pop star into an acceptable human being onscreen. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]

At the center of the movie, in place of the ardent, emotionally pulverizing Judy Garland, there is James Franco...as he smirks and winks, his reflexive self-deprecation comes off as a gutless kind of cool, and it sinks this odd, fretful, uncertain movie like a boulder. [18 March 2013, p.86]

Pop has always drawn energy from the lower floors of respectability; this movie, in which fan-boy cultism reaches new levels of goofy chaos and sexual confusion, draws energy from the subbasement.

A classic case of Hollywood hypocrisy and ineptitude.

The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production - anything but a classic.

A clear failure, yet Lee is getting at things that mystify him, and I was touched by parts of the movie. [13 & 20 Aug. 2012, p.97]

We don’t ask for much from this kind of movie, but Knight and Day tramples on our desire for just enough plausibility to release the fun. It makes us feel like fools for wanting to be entertained by froth.

By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. [1 March 2004, p. 84]

Full Frontal is the sort of arbitrary mess that gives experimentation a bad name. The news that the movie was shot on digital video and film in eighteen days, and that the actors drove themselves to the set and applied their own makeup, would have made a nice Sunday Times story if the movie were any good. But it isn't. [5 August 2002, p. 80]

One of those hyper-articulate messes which inspire awe and a kind of nauseated pity. [3 March 2003, p. 94]

This shameless piece of sentimentality is indignantly on the side of feelings and spontaneity and against coldhearted technique, as if those were the only two choices in training doctors.

Carrey, unable to pretzel himself in this role, has to do a normal job of characterization, but he never fills in the blank spaces in Peter Appleton. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

The disgraceful script is by Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers. Directed with occasional flashes of nasty wit by Renny Harlin.

The Book of Eli combines the maximum in hollow piety with remorseless violence. [18 Jan. 2010, p.82]

The plot becomes disastrously condescending: the black man, who's crude, sexy, and a great dancer, liberates the frozen white man. The handsome Omar Sy jumps all over the place, and he's blunt and grating. Francois Cluzet acts with his eyebrows, his nose, his forehead. It's an admirable performance, but the movie is an embarrassment. [28 May 2012, p.78]

The story, devised by David Benioff and Skip Woods, is largely meaningless, and the emotions are no more than functional—they set up the next fight.

Painful to sit through, because you want to see someone like Paul Thomas Anderson take hold of the character and the actress and start again from the beginning. Bob Dolman understands Suzette, but the rest of the movie is composed of ham-handedly obvious scenes. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]

The self-confident fatuity and condescension of the movie is offensive.

In the end, Dreamcatcher is an abominable-worm picture. The movie is also an unholy mess, a miserably organized and redundant collection of arbitrary scares and thrills without a unifying visual or poetic idea. [31 March 2003, p. 106]

What Lars von Trier has achieved is avant-gardism for idiots. From beginning to end, Dogville is obtuse and dislikable, a whimsical joke wearing cement shoes. [29 March 2004, p. 103]

Has so many things wrong with it that one can only stare at the screen in disbelief. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]