David Edelstein

I've shot people for less.

It's so money! It's so fun!

An uncommonly well-crafted historical feminist tearjerker--both anti-patriarchal and a monument to motherhood.

A test of an actor is playing someone who’s split in so many ways that he moves forward while looking backwards and vice versa, and Chalamet is already a master.

Adams is lovely and tremulous, but Big Eyes would be even better if Waltz was in the same key.

Since washing out as a pretty-boy leading man, Law is what he always should have been: a high-strung character actor. In Black Sea, he’s convincingly hard, like Jason Statham with more vocal colors and without the shtick.

Its combination of lavishness and lack of imagination is the only thing memorable about it.

Mike Myers is like a rich 12-year-old who rents out F.A.O. Schwartz, upends every toy in under two hours, and brings in strippers. He can get away with this privileged romp because he grooves on what he does in a way that none of his contemporaries -- can comprehend.

It's a testament to Norton's utter immersion in the role that he can even halfway connect the dots between this fundamentally sweet, brainy kid and the magnetic, white trash monster who'll haunt our minds long after the movie's liberal pieties fade into static.

The first half of The Yellow Handkerchief is the half-movie of the year, and the rest isn’t bad--just more sentimental, more ordinary.

Given that the movie is one long chase--Neeson's motive withheld until the end, the monotony broken only by the slaying of one member of his posse after another--the film is surprisingly gripping.

What makes Alice Wu's debut so pleasurable is its easy rhythms, its sly juxtapositions, and its relaxed but funny performances.

Gives off the same vapor of impending tragedy—of a fate neither just nor unjust but ineffably, wrenchingly right.

Underwhelming.

The final scenes are wrenching. The final shot is happy and sad and strange and awful and very hopeful. As I said, it depends on your vantage.

The film is smutty-mouthed and jumpy and free-associative, and Allen does everything but hurl his feces at the audience. The result is more rambunctious--and more fun--than any movie he has made in years.

Morton is one of those tingly actresses whose skin barely covers her soul, and to watch her search for tender mercies in a crazy-hostile world is a gift. The film is appallingly good.

As messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least).

Ted runs out of invention in its last act (the bear is coveted by a chillingly deadpan sociopath, played by Giovanni Ribisi, and the villain's fat son), but I can't think of a better movie to see if you're male and want to get high and relive your idiot adolescence.

Too bad the movies collapses at the end when we find out what's really going on. Baghead is so much more vivid when it's indefinite.

There is one nice pop-up scare against a dozen or so false, ineffectual ones - a poor percentage. As the title states, she is a woman and wears black, but she might as well be a hastily decked-out script girl for all her impact.

I've never seen a movie with this mixture of fullness and desolation. Rachel Getting Married is a masterpiece.

A charming, funny, reactionary mating comedy.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard would be enough for one lifetime, but given that Sir Patrick is now living out an exuberant second adolescence as a Brooklyn hipster and throwing himself into parts like these, it’s time to proclaim him another reason to love New York.

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

The movie is a testament to compromise, and so are the Farrellys' other movies--between the freakish pain of living and the wonderfully dumb gross-out slapstick that said freakishness makes possible.

Amounts to a pantheistic love-in: "A Fish Called Wanda" for vegetarians.

What a gutsy, sad, seize-the-day, glorious life it was for the women warriors of Lipstick & Dynamite.

Has the feverish compression of live theater and the moody expansiveness of film. The mix is insanely powerful.

The King has enough in its coffers to keep you moderately engaged.

There is a long and honorable tradition of broad intermarriage comedies (from the Romans to Abie's Irish Rose to La Cage aux Folles), and this one comes at least shoulder-high to the best. It has been directed by Joel Zwick in a happy, bustling style and acted with madcap ethnic relish.

This one is a mess--a misshapen, mawkish tragicomedy bordering on self-parody. Its ambitions deserve respect, though.

Too bloated with its own significance to deliver the requisite thrills.

An outlandishly entertaining mixture of high silliness and high style.

Hoffman has wedged the play into a weirdly inapposite setting, has stupidly cut and even more stupidly embellished it, and has miscast it almost to a player. And yet the damn thing works: Shakespeare staggers through, mutilated but triumphant.

It’s ironic that Stop-Loss loses its momentum when the characters go on the road. Yet Rasuk--the star of "Raising Victor Vargas"--gives a stunning performance.

Adds up to a nice little gotcha! courtroom melodrama.

The confusion in For a Good Time, Call… is delightful, the phone-sex talk sweetening the vibe. Justin Long is peerlessly funny as the girls' gay pal, but the movie belongs to Graynor, who's like Sandra Bullock with a touch of Ginger Rogers–y brass.

The movie is a cunning piece of storytelling, but it’s thin.

This is the first bad movie that has ever made me call for a sequel - to get it all right.

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

The movie feels autobiographical--emotionally authentic (with a fair amount of bitterness toward women) and somewhat unshaped.

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.

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

Scene after scene rockets past dumb, past camp, past Kabuki, and into the Milky Way of Silly where laws can be made up and discarded as long as what happens gets laughs.

A veritable orgy of immorality, each scene making the same point only more and more outrageously, the action edited with Scorsese's usual manic exuberance but to oh-so-monotonous effect.

The first real Jackie Chan picture crafted for the American market, is a terrific piece of junk filmmaking.

One reason Oculus feels so talky and monotonous in spite of its tricky syntax is that the space itself isn’t charged with malignancy. And the monster doesn’t compensate — it’s dumb, blockish, inert. The mirror doesn’t have two faces. It barely has one.

God, I love Plummer's performance - the twiddling fingers, the tipsy sway of the head, the reverberating roar, as well as the pathos of a man who can't stop acting long enough to hear the cry of his own soul.

My real problem with Matchstick Men is that it didn't con me well enough: I saw every trick up its sleeve in the first 20 minutes. If everything had been what it seemed--now, that would have been a stunning twist.

It’s world away from the mystery and irrevocable tragedy that Barnes evokes in his slim novel. The climactic revelation is very sad, but it doesn’t wound you.

Star Maps reveals its larger (and less interesting) social intentions with a downbeat, slap-in-the-face finale, but along the way it has some good domestic grotesquerie and a layered, ironic attitude toward sex.

If you want rich folk-art colors, brainy spectacle, and breezy soap opera, then Frida is the biopic for you.

It’s sort of like "Pitch Perfect 2," only with better music and dancing and less trumped-up conflict.

The movie is a noble enterprise, and Downey is stupendous as usual, but Joe Wright's direction is too slick to elicit much feeling.

As impersonated by Bale, Cheney the Edifice is too impregnable for McKay to make it — psychologically speaking — past the moat, but the movie does have a firm dramatic arc.

A fine movie, beautifully acted, but it isn't easy to love--or to watch. It's a parade of miseries, made even more miserable by Gore Verbinski's direction.

That's what these sequences feel like -- a sensual uproar. They almost make this small, unresolved little movie feel mythic.

On one level: groan. On another: No one else seems about to make those arrests. The only thing that would scare Wall Street straight is the image of Michael Moore as the new sheriff in town.

The film is, in fact, a cunning exercise in subjectivity and withheld information--and once you accept those parameters, it’s riveting.

The driving in the film is a thing of beauty.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

The Afghan boys’ kite-flying contests are the emotional core of the film, and Forster and his crew bring the camera into the sky and make it dip and soar along with the kites. It’s a thrilling spectacle, although it’s also tinged with a peculiarly emasculating aggression.

Superficially respectful but ultimately cruel.

It’s worth shaking off the incongruities and getting on the movie’s wavelength. Once Transit’s bitterly ironic vision takes hold, it eats into the mind.

The Incredible Hulk is weightless--as disposable as an Xbox game. It's also fairly entertaining: swift, playful without pitching into camp, and acted with high spirits.

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.

This slender, increasingly monotonous stalker plot feels ludicrously overintellectualized-full of hot air.

A scabrous, amusing, and thoroughly predictable exercise in exposing the animalistic underbellies of grown-ups pretending to be civilized liberals.

To like Trance as much as I did, you have to revel in the senseless showmanship — in watching Boyle indulge his taste for cinematic flight, in this case teasing you with the old “Is this real or a dream?” number so artfully that you don’t care that much about the answer.

After seeing "Brokeback Mountain," with its sanctified couplings against a backdrop of purple mountain majesties, some of us felt that Ang Lee owed us a dirty movie with more bodily fluids. Lust, Caution is that movie--for maybe 10 of its 158 minutes. The rest of the film is absorbing, though.

The acting, the on-the-fly atmosphere (the film was shot quickly), and Leguizamo's increasingly urgent hustle are deeply evocative, but parts of the movie are almost too painful to endure.

The politics of Dogville are on par with a third-rate gangster picture: cheap, opportunistic nihilism, with no enlivening sense of humor.

The best thing in Gilroy's "Michael Clayton" was the final scene between George Clooney and Tilda Swinton, the one in which the vise tightened click by click on Tilda. This is another vice-tightening sequence, but scary instead of triumphant, and with a long and explosive punch line. Finally, a sequence we can follow! After this, Gilroy owns us.

The action is bludgeoning. When Max gets pummeled by fists and lethal objects, we get pummeled by light and noise and rock-'em-sock-'em editing. No shrimp, though. As a narrative, "District 9" wasn't particularly original, either — in the end it was a standard conversion melodrama. But everything is better with shrimp.

Slapped with the generic title The Wolverine, the fifth feature-length appearance of Hugh Jackman’s X-Man John Logan is basically "The Bad News Wolverine Goes to Japan" and is not especially world-shaking.

Sandler isn't afraid of plumbing his dark side, but Apatow fails him: Scenes of George's self-pity drag on too long, and as the character loses stature, Sandler recedes from his own vehicle. Rogen doesn't fill the vacuum.

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

I’ll see anything Zahler does because I was weaned on the same junk he was and find his mix of amateurism and genre smarts appealing. That’s not a sign of my integrity — a man’s gotta watch what a man’s gotta watch — but of my fundamental laziness and corruption. I hate that I can settle for Dragged Across Concrete.

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.

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.

But there are scenery chewers and there are Michelin-gourmet scenery chewers, and Pacino has a three-star feast.

The new James Bond movie Spectre makes a satisfying final chapter to the four-film saga of Daniel Craig’s 007, even if that saga turns out to be less than the sum of its parts.

The mixture of cartoony stylization and regional realism is completely original--and a testament to the genius eye for color of the great cinematographer Roger Deakins and the designer Dennis Gassner.

The new Ghostbusters isn’t a horror, exactly. It’s just misbegotten. It never lives.

For all the Saturday-matinee heroics, the movie is dreary and monotonous, the vision junky in more ways than one.

Michael Cuesta’s Kill the Messenger made me so angry over the apparent injustice done to its journalist hero, Gary Webb (Jeremy Renner), that I found it hard to remain in my seat.

Sensationally effective.

The camera moves with heightened sensitivity, as if on currents of emotion, and Kendrick is infinitely winning. She’s that rare thing, a movie star with a trained soprano.

The superb English stage director David Leveaux keeps the pacing taut while creating space for his actors to work their magic.

With Allied, Robert Zemeckis has fashioned a good old-fashioned World War II romantic espionage movie, but that wouldn’t matter a damn if the leads weren’t beautiful and didn’t look great in period clothes. They are and they do.

The doughy Damon and aristocratic Blunt don't match up physically, and they never get any Hepburn-Tracy rhythms going that might create some current.

Has a routine finish but up to that point is a more than decent thriller--or, given its taut self-containment, a more than decent Hitchcockian "exercise in suspense."

Juicy, revved-up, semi-satisfying biopic.

A slick, not-too-thoughtful love story.

This is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie, and frankly a lot of it is silly and sophomoric. But it’s also juicy and fun.

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

It’s so smart, so winsome, so utterly rejuvenating that you’ll have to wait until your eyes have dried and your buzz has worn off before you can begin to argue with it. And you should argue with it — even if you had a blast, as I did, and want to see it again with the kids, as I do — because it’s a major pop-culture statement with all sorts of implications, both vital and nutty.

Not every sight gag works, and there's a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we're out to sea the movie goes swimmingly--its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.

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.

Sometimes I wonder how Mamet can get out of bed, he's so paranoid, let along crank out two-thirds (at least) of a thriller this crackerjack. I hope that next time he leaves out the (booby) prize.

A thriller that isn't kinky isn't much of a thriller. And Cellular has the best kinky phone gimmick since "Sorry, Wrong Number" (1948).

It demands to be seen, for Drew Barrymore, who is at once the dizziest and most magically poised comedienne in movies today.

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.

Its structure is repetitive, but each scene begins with a joyous blast of comic energy...A hoot.

It more or less works.

Gibson is better in the later scenes, when Walter tries to escape the Beaver's nefarious influence. And Gibson's never bad. It's just that we know how much is missing. As a raging nutcase, he's capable of so much more.

Crudely written, rife with clichés, and leaves out anything that would transform a piece of propaganda into a work of art akin to Samuel Fuller’s "The Steel Helmet," Brian DePalma’s "Casualties of War," or Steven Spielberg’s "Saving Private Ryan."

Levinson must think he's on safe ground morally by keeping Bandits bloodless, as if the absence of carnage somehow makes kidnapping and armed robbery wholesome.

Rust Creek lets you exhale just a bit. It’s tight without being punishing, and its humor takes you happily by surprise. In this sort of film, you’re on guard for pop-up scares and sudden spasms of gore, not for moments of blessed connection. The humanism feels positively radical.

The opening of Diane is simple but packed, like the movie: The more mundane the details, the more redolent it is of time going by too fast. Someone I know called it the most depressing film she’d ever seen. I found it one of the most exhilarating, but I admit that the exhilaration is hard-won and slightly perverse.

It's like a memorial service with killer special effects.

Pacino in low doses can be fulsome, and this is 10,000 cc’s of super-concentrated Al and his patented air of electrified stuporousness — which means it’s always on the border between thrilling and insufferable.

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.

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.

At his best (Woo)'s too promiscuous with the slow motion; and once those doves start fluttering in he enters a new dimension in self-parody.

Jolie gets the dirty/ennobling job done. If the narrative is finally unsatisfying, it’s because the last vital chapter — the way in which Zamperini was able to have a life after years of unspeakable cruelty and the dashing of his Olympic hopes — is signaled in a couple of title cards before the closing credits. Unbroken proves that Zamperini could take it and make it — but make what of it?

Outlaw King has a wild card — a really wild card — in Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Lord of Douglas, whose family the English humiliated. He’s so wild that as soon as he reconquers his castle, he burns it to the ground for spite. In battle, he screams in exaltation, and just when you wonder how he’ll top that, he screams again, even louder, now drenched — sopped — in gore. That you won’t get to see that in IMAX is a war crime.

The movie improves on Koppelman’s ungainly novel but is generally dreary and light on insight. Director Adam Salky steers clear of the usual addiction-movie clichés, but he doesn’t have anything to replace them with, so it’s as if all the connective tissue is gone.

A shameless but exuberantly well-done caper comedy.

I can't think of too many actors who could bring off Jim Winters. LaPaglia manages to convey, wordlessly, the man's inner struggle.

Wasikowska drabs herself down. Her body is undefined in dowdy clothes, her hair hangs limply. But her eyes usher you into her inner world, with its battle between girlish longing and the impatience to move on and be what she really is — whatever that might be. It’s a richer performance than the movie deserves.

Has a nonsensical twist ending that almost wrecks it, but until then it has enough fast, hyperliterate venality to make it great fun.

It would be imprecise to say that the thrill is gone, because The Lost World recovers from its turgid opening and comes to life, or does so in spasms.

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.

It's too bad J. Edgar is so shapeless and turgid and ham-handed, so rich in bad lines and worse readings. Not DiCaprio, though.

The whole movie is a good try.

The problem is the enervated pacing and ludicrous depiction — after much fancy skipping back and forth in time — of the murders themselves.

The defense concedes that the Ruth Bader Ginsburg biopic On the Basis of Sex hits its marks with the subtlety of a legal brief. But that’s not fatal.

Gray knows how to sell the idea of unalterable destiny with a car chase: That’s the mark of a real action director.

Better than anyone dared hope: bigger, more inventive, and more frolicsome than its predecessor, with a grab bag of scatological gags that are almost as riotous when you think back on them.

As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Although it’s patchy and gives off an air of trying too hard, the movie is surprisingly funny.

A thoroughly charming comedy that bobs on a sea of incongruities.

I half-admire its exquisite balancing act, squeezing laughs out of its leading lady's wardrobe, vocabulary, gestures, and cretinously oblivious Beverly Hills sense of entitlement, while simultaneously demonstrating her brilliance, sturdy ethics, and unflappable egalitarianism.

It has been sexed up, opened out, and finished off with a disappointing bang-bang climax, but it's still good fun.

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.

I'm at a loss to account for how OFF this film is -- how a movie can seem so conscientiously earnest yet so creepily exploitive. It's like a Christmas stocking over a crematory.

The film is impressive. It has a bit of the cinematic whoop-de-doo of his noxious "Natural Born Killers," in which serial killers became existential heroes, celebrated for attaining absolute freedom.

That neither tale is especially interesting doesn't matter -- the contrast alone is enough to make Sliding Doors an irresistible romantic fantasy.

Hordes of good actors evidently lined up to appear in Confidence, which wastes Weisz, Guzman, Logue, Forster, and Paul Giamatti, among others. Midway through, a grizzled Andy Garcia shambles in, chewing on a cigar, as an FBI agent; he's so fatuously hammy that his true narrative function is never in doubt.

Whatever else you say about Jurassic World, its amazing special effects — not just hurtling dinosaurs but flying killer pterodactyls — make it one of the most rousing people-running-away-from-stuff movies ever made. At its best, it’s good enough to take your mind off its worst, which is saying a lot.

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.

It walks and talks and moves very fast, but it never lives.

Our Mothers (which won the Caméra d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and is available to watch on demand beginning May 1) is the sort of movie that gets lost in the U.S. when life is normal. It’s a good one to see when you’re anxious, in pain, hypersensitized, uncertain of the ground beneath you, and thinking — maybe for the first time — that you ought to start digging.

The sequel to an influential eighties motion picture is so loaded with characters and crosscurrents that we wonder why it isn't a thirteen-hour cable mini-series instead of an impacted two-hour mess. The film is like my portfolio: full of promise, with minuscule returns.

The downside to the performance is the downside to the movie: It’s one note played louder and louder.

Unfriended really does use everything teens cherish about their technology lifestyle against them. It’s a mean, potent little movie.

A bit of a philosophical muddle, but the climactic tennis scenes are galvanically convincing, with some long, nerve-racking volleys. And the rest of the picture works as "Notting Hill" (1999) with balls--and rackets.

I've never seen a film in which what was actually onscreen seemed so irrelevant.

Sets you nearer than theater permits -- and further back than most movies dare. A magic vantage.

The movie has amusingly broad performances; good, bloodless scares (the characters die horribly — but have multiple lives); and self-empowering life lessons too bland to be specious. You could do far worse.

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.

To the Wonder feels like generalized woo-woo—and self-parody.

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

An honest tear-jerker.

In the all-star movie adaptation of August: Osage County, another play that holds the stage with fang and claw feels less momentous onscreen.

A derivative horror picture that somehow rises to the level of a primal scream. The premise is simple, by which I mean both easy to understand and feeble-minded.

The movie, without seeming to realize it, turns into a romantic parable about the joys of being absorbed by a conglomerate.

"Three Kings" is fictional, obviously, and Mendes and Broyles were bound by the facts of Swofford's life. But the violence in "Three Kings" was visceral, whereas Jarhead's never penetrates the blood-brain barrier. It's locked away in its narrator's jarhead.

As an actor, Matt Damon has too much integrity to pretend he can multitask to that advanced degree and still be, you know, a fun person. So he turns his face into a mask of stoicism and gives the dullest performance of his career.

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.

For all its relative subtlety, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 remains a cartoon: Its wit is broadsword rather than rapier, and its motives are elemental. The banter is second-tier Tarantino: a cut above his imitators, but below the standard set by "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown."

It appears that the filmmakers have taken Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" way too literally.

Benigni's movie made me want to throw up.

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.

The Keeping Room is slow and rather arty, with a chamber-music (plus harmonica and fiddle) score and cinematography that shrouds the faces in shadow. But it’s a fine piece of storytelling and earns its look and feel.

A modest but reasonably suspenseful and abidingly eerie portrait of the aged white American male trying vainly to forestall rejection and irrelevance.

The good news is that The Dictator is a loose and silly and occasionally exhilarating political farce in the tradition of Chaplin's The Great Dictator (obviously) and the Marx Brothers' antiwar masterpiece "Duck Soup." And it comes in at a fleet 83 minutes - just right.

If the staging were as witty as the plotting, Quantum of Solace might have been a corker like "Casino Royale." But when the action starts, art-house-refugee director Marc Forster (Monster’s Ball) mashes together close-ups in the manner of "The Dark Knight," and every big set piece is borderline incoherent.

This is a formula movie but Gilroy is no hack. He hits the expected beats but with more color and depth than you expect.

Impressive and heartfelt.

When those talking heads metamorphose into familiar ranting heads, it becomes another mesmerizing right-wing horror show.

Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.

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

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

The movie makes for a good old-fashioned wide-screen wallow. Norton isn’t remotely credible, but Toby Jones is dandy as a sleazeball with a core of decency, and Watts is so open, so soulfully petulant, so transcendentally pretty, that even Maugham might reconsider the pleasures of the flesh.

The result, however clichéd, is spectacularly unnerving: hair-trigger horror.

The final illuminations (people have demons, a mind is a terrible thing to lose) are a poor return on nearly two hours of ear-buckling, eye-stabbing incoherence.

I bet that what Carrey saw from inside Kaufman's head would be more illuminating than anything in the movie.

Part goofy drug comedy, part shocking bloodbath. It’s a riot of tones and genres, but unlike that other recent hybrid, "Pineapple Express," the parts add up to something larger.

The finished product is in a different league than the whompingly terrible Men in Black II - it hits its marks. But it's not inventive enough to overcome the overarching inertia, the palpable absence of passion.

The most fluid, lyrical, and even-toned work of his (Burton's) career. It's also the most boring by a factor of 10.

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

Although it's shot in lovely, dusty shades of brown with splashes of Coca-Cola red, John Hillcoat's Lawless is dead weight: listlessly classical and then bludgeoning.

Sheridan’s actors work with their intellects fully engaged--and they engage us on levels we barely knew we had.

It’s a fun little movie, more of a giddy rom-com than a splatter-y slasher.

A brief, sad little piece that doesn’t quite hurdle the blood-brain barrier and rattle you to the core, but it does achieve a half-sublimity, thanks to coastal settings with white cliffs that inspire both awe and thoughts of flinging oneself off, and also thanks to poetry.

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

Computer-generated animated movies with wall-to-wall jokes can be excruciating, but these jokes are the funniest money can buy.

Some of the supporting actors register, especially Michael Mando as the unpretentious but quick-witted chief engineer. But the only surprise is Skarsgård. He has played wife-beaters, vampires, rapists, and mute would-be detectives, but who’d have thought he’d make a credible nerd?

Despite a few scenes that are too on the nose, The Seagull... turns out to be very fine. Above all, it’s a platform for a handful of definitive performances.

Has spasms of silliness that thaw things out delightfully. Davis plays Vartan's girlfriend as an irrepressible, sexed-up brat, and gives every line a little hop, skip, and jump.

George Clooney is all by himself among living leading men in making smarm pass triumphantly for charm. But the movie lacks momentum, clarity, a decent payoff, and a location with the personality of Vegas.

Travel--finding the self by escaping the self--is central to the novels of Eggers and Vida, but Mendes knows where he's going before he gets there. And so the subject of Away We Go turns out to be not travel but child-rearing, which is at best well-meaning and anguished and at worst downright monstrous.

What hallucinogen was Turturro on when he came up with this plot? It’s so crazy that it’s … fun.

Cameron Crowe is a romantic bordering on utopian, and his authentic family values - biological and surrogate - shine through in his enchanting We Bought a Zoo.

Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

However cheeky and blasphemous, this is, at heart, a rather sweet little fable. Which of course would mean nothing if it weren’t explosively funny.

Most haunting of all is Caan, who has never given a performance this layered.

The Lords of Salem is gloomy, lacks variety, and is not without its flat patches. Heidi is an increasingly dullish heroine, and in the first 15 minutes you’ll know what’s going to happen in the next 80.

The third and least original of the Pegg-Frost features, but it's still a lot funnier than most films of its ilk.

The movie is endless even at less than 90 minutes. You could use it, "A Clockwork Orange" style, as aversion therapy for seemingly incorrigible con artists.

The movie is meant to get into you like a virus, and it does.

A broad agitprop comedy written by Scott Z. Burns that’s labored in parts but is, as a whole, sensationally valuable.

The movie is better than you've heard, although that's not saying a lot.

Anyone who has ever ended a relationship and taken long walks in the rain will relate, at least until the characters open their mouths.

Material so utterly conventional that you can predict every plot turn after the first half-hour.

Equal parts trippy, tacky, and monumental, the blend surprisingly agreeable, a happy change from all those aggressively down-to-earth superhero flicks like "Iron Man."

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.

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?"

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.

Mr. 3000 is refreshing because it ends on a slightly sour, dissonant note: Stan wins, but not in the way he imagines. It's a nice change from the sports films that end with fists pumping and crowds going nuts.

It’s not so much bad as dismayingly bland. It’s WTF for all the wrong reasons.

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.

The Grand is a seesaw, but the setting--the high-stakes poker subculture--is remarkably fertile and the actors are a treat.

Once past the clunky prologue, the film is great fun, with a good balance between computer effects and athleticism.

The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.

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?"

I veered between being awed and appalled, though mostly the latter. The trouble with Gyllenhaal is that he shows little range, not from role to role but within roles.

Stalk-and-kill movies bear some resemblance to classic farces, but no horror movies have taken the similarities as far as Happy Death Day and its busier, just-as-fun sequel, Happy Death 2 U. The new film repeats some of the original material but with even more madcap permutations.

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.

A haunting duet for two great actors who haven't lost a step and have gained the most exquisite lyricism.

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

The passing of the torch from Raimi to Alvarez is not a momentous occasion. In the end, who really cares? Five years from now, will you want to watch this bloody $14 million extravaganza or Raimi’s shoestring original, which was Amateur Hour elevated to pop art?

The movie is repetitious, crudely dramatized, and awkwardly acted -- in English, which seems to be the second or third language of everyone involved -- Yet the movie, heavy-handed as it is, serves as a powerful rejoinder to “Blind Spot.”

"The Silence of the Lambs," was morbid but also a rich and satisfying serial-killer thriller—a cunning weave of the fairy tale, the forensic, and the fetishistic. Hannibal, on the other hand, is simply a fat slab of sadism.

It's about unruly passion, but it's icy and cerebral, and Robbins has become a disappointingly tentative actor, playing emotionally straitjacketed men in a self-imposed straitjacket.

It doesn’t come close to the emotional heft of those two rare 2s that outclassed their ones: Superman 2 and Spider-Man 2. But Iron Man 2 hums along quite nicely.

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

A social worker’s take on a lost soul can be valuable, but in a drama it’s too orienting. You want to see how a person could surrender herself — her self — to something so diabolical, which demands a higher level of insanity than the filmmakers can muster.

The movie's revisionist tone is startlingly enough to carry you along.

Somehow, Assisted Living jells. Maggie Riley is astoundingly convincing, and she and Bonsignore's Todd have an unforced chemistry that catches you off guard.

The talented writer-director Scott Frank comes awfully close in his adaptation of one of Block’s better novels, A Walk Among the Tombstones. I’d be way more enthusiastic if Frank hadn’t swapped out the book’s horrific, unforgettable ending for something so conventional, I can barely remember it a few days later.

Blaze’s best scene features Kris Kristofferson as Foley’s once-abusive, now near-senile father and Alynda Segarra as his sister, who escaped the old man’s malevolent influence by finding Jesus.

The plotting isn't fresh, and the politics are a tad reactionary, but the movie is also shapely, rounded, satisfying - a classical ghost story.

This is ultimately a conversion melodrama, and a clumsy one. But until it goes to hell, it's thrillingly good, a fervid answer to the spate of cop movies that glorify brutality and sanction ends over means.

The director's knee-jerk anti-capitalism often sticks in my (white, well-fed) craw.

Isn't a disaster, but after an entertaining start it congeals into something icky and fake, and it leaves you thinking that Spielberg and his team of screenwriters (Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson, from a story by Andrew Niccol and Gervasi) missed the real story.

This is a two-hour-and-six-minute snuff movie -- The Jesus Chainsaw Massacre -- that thinks it's an act of faith.

The arty but suspenseful drama The Strange Ones is a perfect demonstration of how the craft of storytelling is also the craft of withholding — of revealing as little as possible in carefully parceled-out amounts.

I Origins really loses its oomph when Ian travels to India in search of a particular pair of eyeballs, and the movie closes on a note that would make even M. Night Shyamalan roll his own.

There’s a special kind of hell for artists who array vigilante revenge-porn in saintly garb, and Denzel Washington and director Antoine Fuqua should go to the front of that damnable line after The Equalizer.

The movie itself isn’t dull. It’s moderately stylish, moderately suspenseful, fun in patches. It hits its marks. But the setup lacks urgency.

By now we’ve seen so many good, bad, and indifferent Sherlocks that it’s almost a relief to get something different, however wrongheaded. And there’s no such thing as too much Downey.

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

The story is hell to follow--the flashbacks aren’t in chronological order--and the nonacting variable.

Sensationally directed by Peter Berg, it’s a combination forensics detective movie (car bomb blows up secure American compound in Saudi Arabia--who dunnit and how can we stop him from doing it again?) and red-meat waste-the-terrorists action picture.

He thrilled me, then betrayed me in the end.

A lot more fun than "Blair Witch," and it's more relaxed and goofy than its two predecessors -- a farcical bloodbath.

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

Simply a jolly good (k)night out.

The characters are much less finely tuned and the climax is a botch, but the French-financed film is often a riot, and the sensibility is all there.

Return to Paradise doesn't boast many surprises. It's straight-on, morally uncomplicated. Emotionally, though, it's dense and twisty -- and smashingly potent.

If you're in the mood for a liberal message movie in which the only surprise is no surprise, American Violet is the ticket.

As he delivered his climactic sermon in the Israeli desert, I murmured, "Amen, brother." Religulous is a religious experience.

The performances are delightful, and the picture comes together.

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.

This kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed.

The whole movie is like that: showy stunts, explosions, over-the-top acting, fiesta colors, lurid angles, and a sense of nothing--nada--at stake.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Frustratingly anemic, the filmmakers hiding behind their good taste and sensitivity. They might as well have gone for broke, since Plath and Hughes' daughter accused them of monstrous exploitation anyway.

It turns out to be absolutely delightful.

Foster’s feminist victimization complex seems to be looping around to meet Nixon and Agnew. Next she’ll be hunting Commies for the FBI.

The Rum Diary has no mighty gonzo wind. Even with a push from its Thompson-worshipping star, Johnny Depp, it leaves our freak flag limp.

This is an ambitious midlife-crisis movie that valiantly weaves together big themes, among them the nagging guilt of the successful, wealthy artist.

One of the least entertaining satires ever made.

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

The sheer novelty of the enterprise is probably why Once Upon a Time in the Midlands has gotten so many rave reviews when it's actually sort of … middling.

The premise is admittedly a killer--fun to think about, fun to see realized, not so fun to see screwed up in the last half-hour.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

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

Zalla, a graduate of Columbia's film school, is talented and single-minded. He needs to lighten up, literally. He frames his characters to bring out all their sweaty desperation, and his palette is dark with splashes of muddy brown; even the street scenes look as if they were shot in a dungeon.

The Recruit is like vaudeville night at Bellevue.

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

Most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second-rate. A minute or so of David Lynch’s latest Twin Peaks series has more irrational menace. For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.

W. isn't gripping enough as drama or witty enough as satire. It's neutered.

It's written and directed by Kevin Smith--and hats off to him for being savvy enough to go for a piece of the Apatow action! Too bad he doesn't rise to the occasion.

The movie is one dead, overcomposed scene after another.

The best thing in the movie is Stewart. She was the leggy hobo-camp teen in love with Emile Hirsch in "Into the Wild," and she's better at conveying physical longing than any of the actors playing vampires.

As a ravishingly photographed, high-minded meditation on the potential of art and therapy to exorcise the vilest sort of psychological poison, it is positively riotous -- an Everest of idiocy.

A meathead revenge picture, but it’s very satisfying. Director Martin Campbell, coming off "Casino Royale," has a style that’s blunt and bruising.

I can’t tell if Korine is a true dramatist or a simpleminded provocateur who lives to mess with our heads. Both, probably. To him, the joke is that it’s all movie fodder. Moondog is an existential hero for a weightless universe.

That makes Brosnan the more interesting protagonist, Chan the wild card — and changes The Foreigner from a standard revenge melodrama into something weightier and less predictable. It’s an awkward weave, but it has gravitas.

A tender, even-tempered elegy to a writer who at his peak could ingest staggering (literally) amounts of drugs and alcohol and transform, like Popeye after a can of spinach, into a superhuman version of himself--more trenchant, more cutting, more hilarious than any political journalist before or since.

It's only fitting that we emerge from Series 7 feeling both entertained and implicated.

Westfeldt, now 42, belongs to a generation (and class) of people for whom nothing about having kids is easy. Her intensity feels just right - better than in any film I've seen in years - for How We Breed Now.

The first half of Quid Pro Quo is among the most jaw-dropping things I"ve ever seen: Who knew there was a closeted subculture of people pretending to be paraplegics?