David Edelstein

There’s nothing close to the shock of seeing Blade Runner’s Tokyo-influenced futuristic dystopia — a dismal mix of high-tech and corrosion — for the first time. I thought it was okay.

Yes, I cringed at the casting, too, especially when, watching the trailer, I heard Parker deliver the narration in the same voice she used for Carrie in "Sex and the City." But Kate is funnier - less arch - than Carrie, and Parker reminds you what a dizzy, all-in, high-risk comic actress she can be when she's not too busy showing off the couture.

Although the script is based on Gauguin’s own writing, the film presents him as such a gloomy Gus that he might have swapped souls with his onetime pal Van Gogh.

The movie is well-crafted, but it doesn’t have the fullness you’d expect in a movie with so much believe-it-or-not weirdness. It feels more like a nifty anecdote.

The mournful comedy To Dust has a sicko premise, but scrupulously sicko.

The movie’s most exciting moment comes when Weldon realizes that she has been played — that in helping turn the tribes against the Dawes Act, she has won the battle and lost the war, since the U.S. would now have cause to attack. That’s the moment when Woman Walks Ahead should get really good but turns, instead, into a weeper.

For all its indirection, Meek's Cutoff is an utterly conventional film. But it's worth asking whether Reichardt's drowsy rhythms, stripped-down scenario, and female vantage add up to something illuminating. And here's where she earns at least some of those plaudits she's been getting.

Araki is trying to work from the inside out; and he captures feelings about sexual exploitation that I've never seen onscreen--not all of them negative.

A decent-enough rambunctious Southern-drive-in sort of time-waster, missing only the bare boobs that would make it the perfect socially irresponsible sexist entertainment for rednecks and uptight liberal elites who'd like to live the country-boy dream for a few hours. (Howdy, y'all!)

The movie says that the rebellious spirit that generates art can also consume and destroy -- that there's no undangerous way to ride the tiger.

Part of the film is a crackerjack courtroom drama. What’s dull is the trajectory. The Insult is so schematic that it shrinks to the level of a painfully scrupulous newspaper editorial. Which is fine — for a newspaper editorial.

Payne's movie is flat, depressed, and at times -- given this director's talent -- disappointingly curdled; it needs every quivering molecule of Nicholson's repressed rage to keep it alive and humming.

The movie should be seen with a large, responsive audience--the better to live with it in the moment instead of worrying about where it’s going.

The whole movie is a good try.

Mistress America is hit-and-miss. It’s not as burdened by blame as other Baumbach films — Gerwig leavens him. But it’s labored.

The battle scenes are loud and jangly and dissonant enough to unnerve you — they work. But I’d like to see a congressional committee grill Bay and screenwriter Chuck Hogan about what’s going on half the time.

The combination of childlike glee and grown-up precision is a wonder. The movie actually earns the right to exist, which is no mean feat.

The pretty good thriller Lockout peaks with its first shot...When the camera moves and the plot kicks in - as it must - the movie loses its witty economy. Things get cluttered.

Please Stand By is thoughtful in how it dramatizes the consequences of autism. The movie is a little stiff, though.

I also thrilled to identify with a male lead (Jon Favreau) who's as brilliant and crazy and self-absorbed as Woody Allen or Albert Brooks but whose self-absorption doesn't shape and color everything else in the movie.

The best thing about the film The Front Runner is that it gives Gary Hart, the Colorado senator and 1984 and ’88 presidential candidate, a measure of dignity, and today’s audiences a historical context in which to view his missteps.

Apart from Theron and Christina Ricci as her lover, there's nothing in Monster that rises above the level of doggedly well-meaning, although the film is worth seeing for the acting and as a sort of palate-teaser for Broomfield and Churchill's documentary.

If you can forget what it’s saying, Divergent is fairly entertaining.

Panic Room is fluidly made, and it keeps the audience quiet and unpleasantly gripped. But the only surprise is the absence of surprise; that trap is in too-plain view.

The glibness exhausts you, and the Coens are emotionally so far outside their subject that Intolerable Cruelty is finally no different from most of the other dumb slapstick spoofs that pass for screwball comedy these days.

The best scene is when Hellboy and Abe get drunk and sing out raucously, which after "Hancock" suggests a trend toward superhero alcoholism.

It would be easy to dismiss as 100 percent ersatz if it didn't rekindle at least some of the old excitement - and if the magic of Spielberg's older movies didn't filter through, like light from a distant galaxy.

Woody Allen’s philosophical thriller Irrational Man is irrationally entertaining. It shouldn’t work. It’s laughably plotted and sketchily written. Intellectually, it’s jejune — or at least high in jejunosity. But if you can manage to keep your eye-rolling in check, you might find yourself getting into it.

The X-Files isn't so much a bad movie as it is a crackerjack piece of television. It's crisply made--not sodden like many of the "Star Trek" pictures. But it's as annoyingly open-ended as the rest of the series' episodes.

Bello is an excellent actress and makes Sophie’s anguish credible, although she can’t rise above the material.

Ant-Man isn’t much more than pleasant (Peyton Reed directs limply), but anything Marvel that doesn’t feel Marvel-ish makes me smile.

A more down-to-earth actor would sentimentalize Breakfast on Pluto and make for an awkward fit with its peculiar mix of tones. Murphy's strangeness--his chill estrangement--makes his campy "Kitten" persona more poignant.

It’s absorbing for a long while, at least half its two-hour running time — an evocatively photographed soap opera with actors who are impossibly gorgeous and yet human-looking — but it goes on and on, piling on twists, adding devices so clunky they’d have embarrassed most nineteenth-century problem-dramatists, refusing to jell despite the actors’ prodigious suffering.

As a director, Coen commits comedy’s most cardinal sin: He gets between us and the performers.

I prefer the Farrellys when they're disreputable and push the boundaries of taste, because they're otherwise a tad sentimental.

A frightening, infuriating, yet profoundly compassionate documentary about the indoctrination of children by the Evangelical right.

The more subversive Instinct gets in proclaiming free will an illusion fostered by a rigidly repressive society, the more captive it seems to a rigidly repressive studio marketing department.

There is nothing wrong with the action sequences beyond their sheer length and number. They're in the "Road Warrior" mode: hyper-fast and vicious.

The jumping around is as deft as a hippo in a tutu, and the director, Gavin Hood, never finds a rhythm.

Frances Ha is an irritant when it lingers. When Baumbach’s touch is more glancing — when he cuts before the humiliation — it sings.

It’s not a great movie, but it’s haunting, a sort of one-stop shop for a range of cultural anxieties — plague, environmental catastrophe, big government threatening the sanctity of home and family.

Watching Spike Lee’s decent but unmemorable remake of Park Chan-wook’s 2003 revenge picture "Oldboy," I kept trying to figure out why he’d done it.

It's an entertainingly cynical small movie. Aaron Sorkin's dialogue tumbles out so fast it's as if the characters want their brains to keep pace with their processors; they talk like they keyboard, like Fincher directs, with no time for niceties.

The most ambitious horror blurs the line between the psychological and the mythic, between ordinary human emotions and symbol-laden Blakean nightmares, and Aster is very ambitious and very blurry.

Birdman is the very definition of a tour de force, and Iñárritu’s overheated technique meshes perfectly with the (enjoyable) overacting—the performers know this is a theatrical exercise and obviously relish the chance to Do It Big. But what comes out of the characters’ mouths is not so fresh.

Lindholm finds a unique balance between social and individual responsibility. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

The tasteless bombardment that is Les Misérables would, under most circumstances, send audiences screaming from the theater, but the film is going to be a monster hit and award winner, and not entirely unjustly.

The movie does get under your skin (the tremulous misfit girl, Hannah, might be a breakout role model), but the way it has been put together reminds me of those animal shows where the crew nudges the gazelles in the direction of the lions with multiple cameras standing by.

The action-thriller The Accountant is laughable, but when you’re not laughing at it, you’re laughing with it. It’s enjoyable enough.

A Joyful Noise overcomes. The big numbers are a gospel-pop-funk fusion that made me think, Hmmm, this seems very processed - before I noticed my feet were tapping of their own accord. How can you resist that wah-wah funk guitar?

The key to a good B-mystery is that all the actors should be a little stilted. You should never know the difference between an actor acting badly and an actor doing a masterful acting job of someone acting badly. In Non-Stop, there is much excellent bad acting.

The movie goes soft. But it has the unpretentious energy and charm of a good YA girls' novel.

At its best, 22 Jump Street is less an action comedy than a loosely plotted revue, and though it’s not as witty as either Joe Dante’s "Gremlins 2: The New Batch" or Edgar Wright’s "Hot Fuzz" (in which the directors evinced genuine love for their chosen genres), it’s sure as hell better than a straight buddy-cop sequel.

Hanks and those scenes in the cockpit make the movie worth seeing, in spite of the dumb melodramatics. But only just.

High Flying Bird is an unshapely piece of storytelling — there are gaps in the plot, and it never locks into a rhythm — but that mournfulness and resentment seep into you.

I don’t think Russell has ever directed a scene as phony as the one in Joy’s office where she shows her abiding beneficence to a sweet young African-American couple. Equilibrium makes Russell a dull boy.

The Slums of Beverly Hills never gels, but it has a likable spirit, and it's exceedingly easy on the eye, with lots of pretty girls and wry evocations of '70s fashions and decor.

It would be barely passable under normal circumstances, but in 3-D it's a circus of excellent FX.

It's a rich idea -- a Hartley-esque variation on the theme of American Innocents Abroad. And it works superbly until -- well, Grim's the word.

I think The Revenant is, on the whole, pain without gain, but it’s certainly a tour ​de force — literally, a feat of strength.

To work onscreen, Thank You for Smoking needed to be fast, scruffy, and offhand. But even the good lines here last a self-congratulatory beat too long. Aaron Eckhart is likable, but he's too hangdog and naturalistic for a part that could have used a brisk young Jack Lemmon type.

The cancer-buddy movie Paddleton (which premieres today on Netflix) is embarrassingly bad until 20 minutes from the end, when it’s suddenly very good — quiet, tightly focused, stunning. It’s a pity that the first hour needs to be endured, but it does set the stage as well as soften you up for the indelible scene to come.

Kill Bill is about nothing more (or less) than its director's passion for the mindless action pictures that got him through adolescence. It isn't sex without love: It's an orgy with just enough love.

It’s fast, rousing, and blessedly brief.

Despite the clunkiness, Estevez's commitment to his father's generation’s idealism (and its murder) commands respect.

As cheap as the whole set-up is, the actors make wonderful music together - even if there's not much left of Eastwood's vocal cords except a handful of dust.

A thriller of serpentine excitement all the way up to that dud of a climax.

She lip-syncs convincingly to Piaf's songs. Even when she overacts like mad, she makes you think she’s Piaf overacting like mad--the little sparrow with the foghorn pipes.

Full Throttle is full-throttle camp: It's like a third-rate Austin Powers picture cut to the whacking, attention-deficit-disorder tempo of "Moulin Rouge."

Parts of The Brothers Grimsby are very funny.

The best part is Jemaine Clement as Benjamin’s grandiose genre hero, Dr. Ronald Chevalier. Even if you love him on "Flight of the Conchords," you’ll be unprepared for his genius--and charisma.

A too-pat but very funny comedy.

The film is seamlessly made, its mood balanced dreamily between sexy-funny and sexy-scary.

Blockers, for all its high-velocity raunch and drug abuse, is fundamentally positive.

The farcical revelations — with their attendant puking and pounding on bathroom doors — work better than the grimly sincere ones. But only one bit goes clunk — the rest is deftly staged and acted.

Genius does a pretty good job of capturing the peculiar drama of the relationship between editors and writers, in this case some of the most revered in American letters.

The movie isn't a dud: It has exuberant bits and breathtaking (money money money) effects. But it's supposed to be fun and inspirational, and it's too leaden for liftoff.

But even with bits that are crazily inspired, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is depressing. The Apatow Factory is too comfy with its workers’ arrested development to move the boundary posts. If they could find scripts by female writers that dramatize the other side of the Great Sexual Divide, it might be a place of joy--and embarrassed recognition--for everyone.

Like most good superhero movies, Dark Phoenix operates on two levels, comic-book fantastical and psychological. Like most not-so-good ones, it doesn’t do justice to either aspect. The results here are middling, but the director, Simon Kinberg, throws a lot of ideas at you. It’s not boring.

The first truly countercultural apocalypse fantasy.

It’s not cinematic enough to make you forget you’re watching something conceived for another, more spatially constricted medium, but it’s too cinematic to capture the intensity, the concentration, of a great theatrical event.

The film is no masterpiece — again, George can’t illuminate why a million people were murdered by their own countrymen. But as we focus on Rusesabagina’s almost farcically desperate attempts to forestall tragedy, we have a vision of genocide as a virus with its own terrible momentum.

Pure misery.

In the end, you’re left with a movie that doesn’t quite jell but expands in the mind. It’s an excellent Book Club movie — it demands to be discussed, debated, embraced, or (perhaps) rejected.

Fascinating for the issues--ethical, aesthetic, psychoanalytic--it raises. But it doesn't fully come together.

It’s the writer, Diablo Cody, and the director, Jason Reitman, who have screws loose. Or maybe they’re just desperate to make their film a chick "Rushmore" or "Garden State."

The Circle is a tonal mess: part satire, part moralistic melodrama. Some of it is broadly acted, some of it subtle, much of it overheated. It has great moments, though.

For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

Let me add something in the movie’s favor. Although I don’t love Jojo Rabbit, I love that it exists.

The film is superbly acted (especially by Macdissi, who makes the father a borderline hysteric), but it's hard to know what to feel except, "How can any girl navigate this oversexualized culture?"

Baldwin is so good in the coming-of-age gangster drama Brooklyn Rules that it's like watching a voodoo priest.

The movie is sweet but deeply suspect: It's like "Lost Horizon" re-imagined by a realtor.

The Sitter feels slapdash and quick, but you might not want to have it any other way.

A simple, chronological history, narrated with melancholy gravitas by Morgan Freeman.

It's a daring and original effort, yet so noncommittal--so purposely vague--that it's apt to leave you flummoxed: at once stricken and etherized.

I’m not sure Morris clinches his case, but I’m not sure he wants to: His aim is to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our perception.

Fearless as these racers are, it's hard to muster enthusiasm for a movie that plays chicken and then swerves about a mile before the collision.

I must admit that I find those motifs -- and the Farrellys' universe in general -- more sweet than offensive, and I liked Say It Isn't So just so. So there.

Rambling and conflicted as it is, it's one of the most entertaining African-American comedies of manners ever made.

Garry Shandling is poignant and hilarious as an alien stud.

I think of Waitress as an overstuffed, overcooked pie--too ungainly to eat all of, too generous to pass up, too heartbreaking to contemplate for long.

Attains a level of quiet grace. It's too bad that I can barely remember the movie after only a week. Nothing lasts, indeed.

At least the movie never bogs down. But you only get a taste of what made the Clash for a brief period the most exciting band on that side of the Atlantic.

Better approached as an “oooooh” and “awww” fest.

Most of the movie works because the blonde Weixler has a darling-daffy face (a pinch of Alicia Silverstone, a dollop of Drew Barrymore) and a should-I-or-shouldn’t-I ambivalence about sex that’s part realism, part screwball.

Miss Potter hardly deserves ridicule. It's sweet with lovely Lake District vistas and a heartfelt endorsement of land conservation. It will certainly play well with older audiences and the kind of adolescent girls who draw faces in their O's.

The film has one indelible asset: Mark Strong, who plays the Jordanian spymaster Hani. He's sleek and lounge-lizard sharp like a young Andy Garcia, and he could be bigger than Garcia. The Jordanian holds all the cards, and opposite two superstars, Strong is the only actor who holds the camera.

There's no wonder or elation or even dopy sincerity here - just a high level of proficiency and, yes, a lot of expensive CGI.

It’s another in a long, honorable line of films that chart the poisonous effects of colonialism on indigenous populations and their ecosystems, but with an unusually invigorating perspective, like a reverse-angle "Heart of Darkness."

The best way to think of Captain America: Civil War is as a toy box in which the sheer quantity of toys partly makes up for the lack of anything new. But the big takeaway is worrisome. Marvel has created a universe teeming with superheroes who simply don’t have enough to do. They’re all suited up with nowhere to go.

It's almost criminal the way the central relationship of High Fidelity has been left such a void.

Duplicity is deeply shallow--cheap reversals all the way down. But it's a passably amusing brainteaser.

It's a tough, beautifully judged performance (Davis) - it gives this too-soft movie a spine.

The only grace note in the generally clunky Wonder Woman is its star, the five-foot-ten-inch Israeli actress and model Gal Gadot, who is somehow the perfect blend of superbabe-in-the-woods innocence and mouthiness.

I like — as always — what Chandor attempts: not just to denounce capitalism but to explain in detail how people go wrong. But the overcomposed, sedate A Most Violent Year lacks the one thing it most needs: violence.

Stone is so intent on making Snowden an icon that he scrubs him of his nuances, his individuality.

Only a corporate entity could deliver an ending like this one. But only humans could devise and enact the often delightful scenario that precedes it.

Even with her stinko lines, Weaver has never been as flabbergastingly gorgeous and charismatic. She's tall and lean and meteor-hard, and you can almost believe there's really acid in her blood, and that no alien in its right mind would mess with her.

Apart from those nutty camera angles and lenses, which throw you out of the action, The Current War is absorbing.... It never quite snaps into focus, though.

If The Theory of Everything cut as deeply as Redmayne's performance, it might be on the level of "My Left Foot." But there are so damn many problems, easy to ignore at first in the elation of watching Redmayne and the gossamer Felicity Jones as his future wife, Jane, but impossible to shake off in the last third.

Selick has a great fantasy filmmaker's artistry, but he lacks that overflowing Geppetto-esque love that brings puppets to life. In Coraline, he's woozy with his own lyricism.

There's something too refined and emotionally neutral about Nowhere in Africa, as if Link had directed with white gloves. Maybe she knew how loaded this African-Jewish subject was and didn't want it push it too hard. Maybe that's why she won an Oscar.

The agreeable looseness edges into a less agreeable limpness.

What a shock when George Lucas finds his footing and the saga once again takes hold.

A labor of love that sometimes wears its love too laboriously, but a surfeit of rapture isn’t the worst thing in a movie.

It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element.

The movie is charming even when it’s stilted, and it’s often stilted.

It’s Aronofsky’s least personal work. So you get a fat dose of conventional melodrama with your Old Testament: It’s the antediluvian "Gladiator."

When the film shifts to Shanghai and the club Casablanca, there's too much lustrous-hued loitering and too few martial­-arts set pieces.

City of Men is clunky and often contrived, but there’s something haunting about fatherless boys in a blighted place fumbling to teach themselves what it means to be a man.

Movies are the lesser medium for Fey and Carell. They’re the stars of two relatively sophisticated, media-savvy network sitcoms, yet their big-screen comedies are retro.

Occasionally dissonant, but it's remarkably cleareyed.

This seesaw of shame and self-justification might not speak for the most murderous segment of the German populace, but it's a peculiarly eloquent representation of the silent, obedient majority.

The Goldfinch is too artful to deserve that kind of rejection, but too arty to keep you from saying, “What did I just see?”

This could be the premise of a zany comedy, but the mood of The Future is, from the outset, defeatist - annoyingly defeatist, to be frank.

The idea is that vulnerable women will give up their autonomy — their very identities — to such an entitled being, which I found a stretch but which certainly has historical precedents. It’s best to view The Other Lamb as a rite-of-passage fantasia with a gossamer heroine.

It's true that the movie, arrested between documentary and drama, doesn't quite do justice to either medium: The actors playing Joe and Simon don't have anything like "lines" to simulate "drama," or even just "conversation," while the real guys often fall back on bland English understatement.

Elektra isn't half-bad--only maybe two-fifths.

Sutton finds the lyrical tension in torpor; he shows how Willis’s artistic vacuum isn’t a passive thing, how it eats into him, how it even permeates the natural world.

Once Affleck’s Joe gets to Florida, Live by Night loses its pulse and you’re left with a lot of pale characters, secondhand plotting, and maybe second thoughts about the daffy idea of a liberal-humanist gang boss.

After an electrifyingly feral opening, the movie settles down into a cogent courtroom drama, with no real cinematic highs but no jaw-dropping lows, either.

Brokeback Mountain could use a little more of it--by which I mean more sweat and other bodily fluids. Ang Lee's formalism is so extreme that it's often laughable, and the sex is depicted as a holy union: Gay love has never been so sacred.

Spike Lee is a virtuoso filmmaker, a wizard at selling a sequence, but he'll never make an entirely coherent movie until he learns to go deeper into his subjects instead of wider with them.

Hanks and Zemeckis (and writer William Broyles Jr.) are so intent on making an epic of the spirit that they can't bring themselves to acknowledge the comic, narcissistic side of their desert island fantasy. And so on simple, human terms, the picture gets all gummed up.

There are times when Dafoe's accent strays into Billy Crystal Yiddish, but the notion of Vlad the Impaler aging into a finicky old Jew has its own kind of piquancy.

Blue Ruin is more artful and evocative than any recent revenge picture, but it’s still drivel.

The thing is scary as hell when it's all creaks and thumps and doors swinging open. Then come the explanations, the special effects, and the inevitable feeling of been-there-been-­bombarded-by-that.

In patches it's agreeably lurid, but it's otherwise ho-hum.

Beatty is trying to elevate the material while at the same time draining it of energy. The movie is so misbegotten that it’s almost poignant. But I hope Beatty has a few more left in him.

Bier dramatizes our ambivalence so earnestly that it's tempting to give her awards rather than admit that the movie is a crushing bore.

The film is based on a novel by Susan Minot--one of those books where the author doesn't deign to put dialogue in quotation marks for fear of dispelling the dreamlike mood. It works on paper, but Minot, who shares credit for the adaptation with fellow novelist Michael Cunningham, doesn't understand that screenwriting is the art of taking away.

The (elderly) Burt Reynolds vehicle The Last Movie Star strikes a note of banality in its first sequence from which it rarely deviates.

It's hard to get past the primitiveness of Allen’s fantasies.

Spiderwick. There’s nothing wrong with it that passion and personality couldn’t fix.

The film is sometimes gentle to the point of blandness, but it's never flimsy.

An unusually powerful mess, a broad satire of suburban self-indulgence with little in the way of a consistent style, and with a character who's serious business: a convicted child molester.

The film is repetitive, top-heavy: Wright blows his wad too early. But a different lead might have kept you laughing and engaged.

I was all revved up to have a whale of a fascist good time, and S.W.A.T. left me let down and pissed-off.

Am I the only one who finds the substance of this movie repulsive?

Life After Beth is a reasonably fun, medium-gory horror comedy that’s better before the innards hit the fan.

Law gives a doozy of a performance: He's fond of bulging his eyes, curling his head like a gargoyle, and displaying a set of rotten yellow teeth. This is some of the most flamboyantly bad acting since Brad Pitt in "Twelve Monkeys" (1995). An Oscar nomination would appear inevitable.

The middling romantic comedy Smart People, which centers on a hyperintellectual dysfunctional family, is of interest chiefly for the first post-Juno role of Ellen Page.

Like a lot of Gilliam's movies it's too overloaded--antic, indulgent, overdesigned--to get off the ground for more than a minute or two at a stretch.

The most charitable way to view it is as a Dadaist experiment, in which two tonally disparate movies were hacked down and their remaining strands woven together to bizarre effect.

Love it or laugh at it, you will gaze on Southland Tales with awe.

It's fascinating trying to separate the thirties material from the mostly maladroit additions.

If you can stay awake, you'll see a performance by ­Keaton that is radiant in its simplicity, all ditheriness shaken off. She's still ­peaking - ­someone give her a great role.

What saves Zatoichi is that it ends -- for no clear reason -- with a foot-stomping ensemble dance number that is both delightful and unhinging: It sends you home with spasmodic giggles, convinced this Japanese imp has discovered a new path to your unconscious.

Except for a screamingly funny climax in which he attempts to kidnap Pamela Anderson (who reportedly wasn't in on the joke), I found the Borat feature (directed by Larry Charles, who does similar duties on "Curb Your Enthusiasm") depressing; and the paroxysms of the audience reinforced the feeling that I was watching a bearbaiting or pigsticking.

Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool isn’t visually drab, only conceptually. As a critic who often complains about biopics diverging too radically from the facts, I’m chagrined to find myself wishing the filmmakers had taken more liberties with Turner’s brief memoir.

He does gorgeous work, but in Mission to Mars he's only going through the motions.

Pacific Rim made me marvel at the technology of movies, but never the magic of them.

The film has no spirit of inquiry -- no spirit at all, really.

The Recruit is like vaudeville night at Bellevue.

McKellen's actions are queerly unpredictable (pun intended), but every plot other twist is portentously foreshadowed.

Bad Times at the El Royale isn’t an event. But I was never too bored.

It muddles what might have been a fascinating alternate — i.e., downbeat — take on one of Israel’s most-acclaimed military operations.

I think Levinson missed a chance to get something unique and audacious on screen.

A routine, stereotype-stuffed sitcom with pretensions.

Weds an epic, sometimes visionary, depiction of the afterlife to a script and story with fewer psychological layers than the average Hallmark card.

To be fair, some of it is good, very good. Jersey Boys has an easy, likable gait. It’s Eastwood’s most fluid film: He gets the swing of the music without fancy editing.

Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.

The visuals have so much intrinsic motion that it's too bad Robots is oppressively rollercoasterish.

Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. In the words of the CIA superior, it’s "no biggie."

Hong Kong action fans hoping for spontaneous combustion from the American debut of superstar Chow Yun-Fat might want to turn their weapons on the producers.

The movie has grand (and Grand Guignol) bits and pieces, but despite the hype it’s no big deal. By horror standards, the premise isn’t especially outlandish.

About Time is like a sermon that starts with a few good jokes and ends with tremulous exhortations to live, live.

It has a gritty feel and a tight, methodical, one-thing-after-another tempo.

Directed by Bryan Singer in a break from his gayish superhero movies, it's a low-key procedural with a dollop of suspense--although perhaps not enough to make up for the foregone conclusion.

If "Psycho" and "Peeping Tom" are the seminal killer-as-voyeur movies, Vacancy is the nasty little runt offspring with no other purpose in life but to gnaw on you.

It starts off with a flourish and winds up limp, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat that turns out to be dead.

The chief — though hardly the only — problem with Victoria & Abdul is that too much political correctness proves to be as bad for drama as too little.

Things speed up too quickly, meaning just when the movie’s rhythms should become loopier and the action more eccentric, The Cloverfield Paradox becomes one more formulaic ticking-clock series of chases and shootings with a moral dilemma for pathos and then uplift.

The movie is a polished muddle, fitfully amusing but with no spine.

The 61-year-old Stallone would deserve a measure of respect for pulling Rambo off, appalling as it is, but this Fangoria-worthy circus of horrors also features footage of actual Burmese atrocities.

The film is overnarrated and in spots overwritten, but Brooks, who's primarily a screenwriter, does well with actors, and he has coaxed an extraordinary performance out of the young Jordana Brewster.

Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story.

Roach is too stiff a director to give Ferrell room to romp. Bits like the one in which he's challenged to recite "The Lord's Prayer" needed extra zigs and zags instead of variations on the same joke. A looser director like Adam McKay (Step Brothers) might have created a happier climate for improv.

Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.

Often plays like what it is: a clunky toga-and-sandals picture, with Hollywood compromises abounding.

Coarse and chaotic remake.

Doesn't really work but has a good cast and great craggy ocean-framed scenery.

I'd have a lot more respect for Scott if he were actually the virtuoso he pretends to be. "Gladiator" had lousy, disjunctive action, and Kingdom of Heaven is even more maladroit.

The film becomes an aria of agony--but with a rousingly yucko finish!

This is not to say that it is bad writing, shooting, or acting: It would need to be more ambitious to be bad. It is simply the most mundane sort of behavior presented in the most mundane sort of way.

The tit-for-tat scenario ought to be wildly entertaining, but the magic is crude, the characters flyweight, and the story protracted and unpleasant.

Early in The Rachel Divide, a commentator describes Dolezal as a Rorschach blot, and the movie is one, too. Some people think it’s a hatchet job, others that it gives its subject’s commitment to social justice too much credence. I found it pretty much down the middle.

Denzel Washington is so powerfully earnest an actor that you never want to laugh at him -- even when you ought to be in stitches.

In LaBute's movies, people are either clueless dupes or psychotic manipulators, while art is meant to rub your face in unpleasant "truths." And I think he takes a little too much pleasure in that nose-rubbing.

Thoroughly second-rate -- which is to say that it waddles when it ought to whiz, clanks when it strives for cornball poetry, and transforms its august stars into something akin to a manic dinner-theater troupe.

A climactic twist that's among the stupidest I've ever seen-almost up there with another Costner movie, "No Way Out," and "The Life of David Gale."

The grandeur of the Lord of the Rings trilogy [has] been replaced by something that resembles tatty summer-stock theater.

I hope that in Part 2, Yates and screenwriter Steve Kloves give Fiennes a better send-off than Dame J.K. did in her less-than-wizardly climactic wandathon. Having made us sit through two and a half hours with no payoff, they'd better not go all Muggle on us. Next time, we want magic, people.

It more or less works.

No mainstream filmmaker since Orson Welles can touch Steven Spielberg when it comes to camera movement and composition--or, more precisely, to composition that gets more vivid as the camera moves...It's the work of a man with film storytelling in his blood. What a bummer when the story he has to tell is a cosmic nothing.

I enjoyed this piece of southern-fried screwball Gothic whimsy (with jolts of CGI spell-casting for the multiplex crowd) so much that I’m sad to admit that it’s nowhere near as potent as "Twilight."

A brisk feminist melodrama that is, historically speaking, a load of wank. It has the feel of a game of “telephone,” in which information is progressively mangled.

Swinton is good enough to take your mind off the not-too-compelling ambiguities.

At times, you could actually mistake Tears of the Sun for a blunt modern parable instead of an opportunistic mixture of up-to-the-minute atrocities and old-fashioned corn.

I wish the movie had more of a tragic undercurrent — the tone is wobbly.

The fleeting good moments in Operation Finale come from a few of the actors.

If there’s a sure thing in movies, it’s that if you cast Nicolas Cage in a role in which he goes crazy, he’ll rise to the occasion and keep on rising until he seems even loonier than his character.

The first hour is evocative and creepy...But once the trajectory is clear and the squeamish New York intellectual Quaid has to stand up and fight for his homestead, the boringness seeps into you like the damp.

This is ho-hum, straight-to-video material. And yet, even at its most crawlingly linear, Jackie Brown is diverting. If nothing else, I was diverted by the director's gall at stretching out those vacuous scenes.

Brutally exciting and sometimes brutally inept.

In Last Man Standing, we don’t much care; Hill is too busy crafting a classic to pull us in. Apart from those high-impact action scenes, he leeches the movie of immediacy.

The parents are the casualties of Mills' misplaced sincerity, which makes Thumbsucker the quintessential misadapted head-scratcher.

You have to admire a movie that endeavors to moosh together every successful cross-cultural action picture ever made.

Here, the material is already melodramatic — the characters are at the mercy of seismic forces — and Cianfrance’s direction comes off as wildly overwrought.

Figuring out whether someone is a double, triple, or quadruple agent isn’t a brain-teaser, it’s a brain-irritant, especially when the script is so convoluted. The novel by Jason Matthews is cleaner, without so much jumping around between the two main characters.

The movie becomes more and more lugubrious, finally ending on a note of high-tragic operatic bathos.

This is a bleak, unresolved film, with no release. What keeps it from being a mortal bummer is the music-exquisite sacred choral works, plus Mozart.

The film is too metronomically paced for Kilmer's routines to develop any rhythm. The direction by Phillip Noyce is fluid but impersonal. Endless studio tinkering seems to have dissolved its spine.

Fifty Shades of Grey is nowhere near as laughable as you might have feared (or perversely hoped for): It’s elegantly made, and Dakota Johnson is so good at navigating the heroine’s emotional zigs and zags that you want to buy into the whole cobwebbed premise.

In their last collaboration, "21 Grams," the director Alejandro González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga did syntactical acrobatics to disguise what a dreary and exploitive little soap opera they’d made. Their new movie, Babel, is more mysterious and less coherent.

The only moments of conviction come from an Asian-American dominatrix called Pearl (Lucy Liu), who brings far more glee to the task of beating people up than the picture's star or director. If the audience could have half as much fun as Pearl is having, Payback would be a kick.

Johnson rips off a lot of "Batman," especially in the cathedral climax, but that's not so bad: The movie looks best when it looks like other, better movies.

Sporadically funny but uneasily revisionist screwball comedy.

Jenkins is so desperate to give his love story a social and economic context that he stops the movie cold for a bunch of unrelated white people to articulate their grievances over gentrification--it's as if "Annie Hall" had paused for a seminar on agrarian reform.

The movie coalesces into nothing: It's one of those films that makes you say, "That was powerful. Now what the hell was it about?"

What's left is a wan and impersonal whodunnit -- a movie that never gets into your blood.

The tall, cool Kidman works hard to impersonate a woman possessed, but she's not the type of actress to fill in a role that hasn't been filled in on paper.

In The Judge, a legal drama that builds to the requisite Hollywood Dark Night of the Soul, Robert Downey Jr. has a role so far inside his comfort zone that the movie has no drive, no urgency.

Cameron has never been known for his dialogue, but Titanic carries some stinkers that wouldn't make the final draft of a "Days of Our Lives" script.

If Luz had been a play, I’d probably have walked out halfway through, but as a film I found it eerie enough to stay rooted.

It's a great metaphor - but not a great movie. Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris direct in a drably naturalistic style, and the script is thin.

Coogan's mopiness is oddly riveting.

Neeson's gravity elevates the action, and there's a fine, prickly performance by an actor new to me, Frank Grillo, as the asshole of the group. But The Grey, despite moments of sublimity, is as predictable as a funeral. When Ottway angrily calls out to God, the nonanswer is sadly redundant.

There are no comic highs, as in a Mike Myers parody, but no action highs, either.

War for the Planet of the Apes manages to be both alienating and sappy, and the biblical finale seems to come from a different universe altogether. It’s an awesome, dull movie.

The film is slick when it needs to be raw, tidy when it needs to sprawl, and amorphous when it needs to focus.

The funniest things in Be Kind Rewind are not the many moments in which Mike and Jerry look like Ed Wood’s worst nightmare, but when the pair finds expedient ways to do for pennies what would take Brett Ratner millions and be less expressive to boot.

Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.

There are things in San Andreas that no one would have dreamed of seeing 40 years ago, when "Earthquake" (with its tacky, plaster-cracking “Sensurround”) represented the state of the art. But nothing means anything. The spectacle feels less earned than Dwayne Johnson’s biceps, which are ludicrous but not hollow.

The villain comes back more times than Wile E. Coyote. I found it tiresome and witless and numbingly repetitive, but action mavens won't feel cheated.

The gut-whomping, high-concept romantic thriller This Means War is not a distinguished addition to director McG's oeuvre.

A bearable period chick flick with a self-congratulatory “realistic” conceit.

The film is intense and features a performance by Chloë Grace Moretz that’s more committed than this swill deserves.

A passably diverting entry in the Tarantino genre of splatter and yuks and soulfully bumbling hit men.

Jackman has musical-theater chops and knows how to sell material this ham-handed; Kidman isn't quite as deft. I've always admired her gumption in working so hard to overcome a certain temperamental tightness--but that tightness has now spread to her skin.