Joe Morgenstern

It's "My Dinner With Andre" for the relationship generation.

As a first-time feature director, though, he (Ball) seldom lets the material speak for itself. Every shot is a statement, every scene sells an attitude.

Insisting on the significance of its themes, the film dispenses one emotion at a time while it creates a pervasive atmosphere of dread. Yet there’s no air in the atmosphere, not much life in the brooding landscapes.

What do the Coen brothers want of us? More specifically, what do they want us to think of the repellent people in this pitilessly bleak movie?

I'm still left, though, with an unshakable sense of Up being rushed and sketchy, a collection of lovely storyboards that coalesced incompletely or not at all.

Watching this surrealist silliness, I would have welcomed the sight of a geezer on a riding mower.

Needlessly long, visually drab and not just a foreign-language film, with English subtitles, but a film that's ostensibly foreign to our experience. That said, there are compelling reasons to see it.

The deeper problem with Rock Star is its insistence on turning a heavy-metal fairy tale into a morality tale that's as heavy as lead.

In contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic -- oh, and sexy -- the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander.

Astonishing visually and problematic dramatically.

Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note.

The pursuit is manipulative and repetitive.

Bloated adaptation of P.D. James's thoughtful, compact novel.

If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.

For all its rich trappings, A Little Princess is impoverished at the core. [18 May 1995, p.A14]

The scenery, effects and balletic, iconic combats are perfectly wonderful, but there's an emotional black hole where the hero should be.

A good chance to see two superb actors having their way with wafer-thin material.

Visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon.

The Lego Film has a specialness all its own. There's never been a hodgepodge quite like it.

The film succeeds to the degree that it does -- partially, but honorably and sometimes affectingly -- because it was made as well as it was.

It Follows finally loses track of itself in a silly climax. All the same, it’s one more stylish reminder of how readily we the people can be creeped out.

This peculiarly predictable picture has been calculated, or miscalculated, to set up certain expectations, fulfill them, and then do the same thing again, thereby giving us a chance to see what's coming and, at least in theory, be shocked when it actually comes.

The absence of any nuance in the father's character bespeaks the filmmaker's unwillingness to trust his audience. Making the movie may have been therapeutic for him, but I can't say the same about watching it.

What's on screen, though, is a peculiar clutter of gentle sentiment, awkward dialogue, shaky contrivance — especially the resolution of Joey's feelings — and monotonous performances from a supporting cast that includes Marisa Tomei and Darren Burrows.

Mike Leigh's latest film preserves the mystery of why another marriage has flourished over decades. That's not the stated subject of Another Year, but it's at the center of this enjoyable though insistently schematic comedy.

At the center of this swirl of events, poignant recollections and utter pandemonium, Ms. Portman’s Jackie is a mesmerizing presence.

The movie comes on like a put-on--next to nothing happens for an excruciatingly long time--and ends as a fascinating dialectic between following one's conscience or following the law.

"Could be worse" isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of Pacific Rim, but my head is still ringing, and hurting, from long stretches of this aliens vs. robots extravaganza that are no better than the worst brain-pounders of the genre.

After two flat-out triumphs in a row, "All About My Mother" in 1999 and last year's breathtaking "Talk To Her," Pedro Almodóvar hasn't done it again. Yet lesser Almodóvar -- in this instance "Bad Education" -- is better than most of the movies we see.

One unwelcome surprise is how shopworn the story's components prove to be. Still, they're enhanced if not redeemed by Mr. Washington's stirring portrait of a skillful, prideful pilot hitting bottom.

Both Mr. Dano and Mr. Cusack, by contrast, find as many notes as they can in portraying their troubled character, though they’re clearly limited by the schematic writing and insistent direction.

Remaking a cherished movie is not, to borrow a fancy phrase from the dialogue, malum in se - wrong in itself - but there are always losses along with the changes and gains.

Though his movie wraps challenging ideas and ingenious visual conceits in a futurist film-noir style, it's pretentious, didactic and intentionally but mercilessly bleak in ways that classic noir never was.

Coraline is distinguished, if you can call it that, by a creepiness so deep as to seem perverse, and the film finally succumbs to terminal deficits in dramatic energy, narrative coherence and plain old heart.

Against all odds this panoply of punishment is almost thrilling, even though it's raging bull of a different kind.

Mr. Soderbergh, who directed one of my favorite films, “Out of Sight” (from Scott Frank’s brilliant screen adaptation of a terrific Elmore Leonard novel, I should add), has made a number of features, with varying success, that were partly or wholly improvised. This one, though, feels flat and slack, with scenes that drift off oddly, or aren’t there at all.

This is filmmaking as an act of devotion, and exploration — not just of the nature of faith but of faith’s obverse, abject doubt. The production is physically beautiful, and evokes the beauties of classic Japanese films, but the substance makes few concessions to conventional notions of entertainment.

At its best, Ava DuVernay’s biographical film honors Dr. King’s legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him and his colleagues to action. The director and her screenwriter, Paul Webb, are less successful — sometimes much less so — at breathing life into the private moments that define King as an inspirational figure with human flaws, and a political as well as spiritual force.

Puzzle is less puzzling than exasperating. What’s good is exceptional — a meeting of minds, and then more, between two jigsaw-puzzle prodigies — while the rest is perfunctory or lifeless.

The whole dumb movie is a baloney cake, but the enticing icing on it is Reese Witherspoon, who manages to have a few moments of spontaneous fun in this half-baked store-bought comedy.

The film feels self-obsessed, an intriguing drama that slowly devolves into a bleak meditation on the absence of dramatics.

For those who’ve lived with the series for more than a decade, this fateful pause may heighten the suspense. For a Muggle like me, the storm does gather slowly.

This, too, is a mood piece, sometimes surreal and dominated by Chow's lovelorn sadness. But it's hard to find an emotional or narrative handle to hang on to, since the filmmaker keeps reaching for dramatic energy that keeps eluding him.

You never lose interest for a moment, and the images are often striking: Javier Julia did the stylish cinematography. Yet there’s little lift from the carryings-on, not much buoyancy in the misanthropy.

The ghost story gets to be silly, and wants to have it both ways, as ghost stories often do, on the question of whether various signs from beyond the grave are real or imagined.... Yet Ms. Stewart’s portrayal has the ring of truth and the urgency of terror.

Youth may be wasted on the young in this muddled movie. But age is equally wasted on the aging.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

Mr. Coogan, lavishly talented as a comic, and a comic actor, is fairly monotonous in the mostly serious role he wrote for himself. That leaves Ms. Dench to carry the picture, which she does, up to a point, with her usual delicacy and grace.

A powerful drama, albeit a flawed one with a clumsy, didactic script.

There's no shortage of felicitous lines or interesting performances, yet the movie, like the amusement park of its title, feels constructed from familiar parts.

If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

The strengths of the first "3:10 To Yuma" were enhanced by its proportionality -- an intimate story told in 92 minutes. The story is no bigger in the new version, which goes on for 117 minutes. And it's certainly not better.

Sergio, a Netflix docudrama directed by Greg Barker from a banal screenplay by Craig Borten, catches flashes of his brilliance from time to time but scatters and dims them through a mosaic structure that’s ultimately no structure at all.

An exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.

Pablo Larraín’s film, written by Steven Knight, calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy.” It might also be called a fever dream, a surreal nightmare, a reductio ad tedium or just an inherently limiting concept that slowly but inexorably squeezes the life out of itself.

I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.

Absurdist, but also condescending and self-infatuated; The Royal Tenenbaums is at least three times too clever for its own good.

So what does the film, playing in theaters, want to make millions of moviegoers feel? Delight in graphic design? Sure, but the filmmaker’s familiar motifs, playful and inventive as they may be, operate in an emotional void.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

The film contends admiringly, and convincingly, that Ralph Nader's authentic sense of outrage is the reason he persists when he can't prevail.

The story is a shallow-draft bark with flat characters on board: Josh, in particular, is de-energized to the point of entropy. Night Moves suffers from a lack of mystery and a deficit of motion.

Mr. Field is a filmmaker with an exceptional gift for directing actors -- he's an actor himself -- and an eye for telling detail. (His cinematographer here, as in the previous film, is Antonio Calvache, and again the images are quietly sumptuous.) Yet I was put off by Little Children's satiric tone.

Amy the writer has tried to reconcile her gift for whip-smart, razor-sharp comedy sketches with the demands of a feature film. On the whole she hasn’t pulled it off — the movie veers sharply off track toward the end. Still, the sum of its most memorable parts is great fun.

Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

With all its flaws, though, The Grey Zone deserves to be respected, and to be seen.

You may see The Orphanage for what it is, an enjoyable contraption, without believing a bit of it.

There is simply not enough dramatic development to fill the film as a whole.

The Armstrong Lie wears thin before it's over; the wafer-thin nature of the cyclist's personality can't sustain a two-hour running time.

The tone is earnest, with dialogue that sometimes plods when you want it to fly — a running time of 127 minutes doesn’t help the pacing — and a couple of pieces of casting are infelicitous: Jim Parsons gives a flat performance as the fictional Paul Stafford, NASA’s lead engineer, and Glen Powell is years too young to play John Glenn, who looks like a gung-ho frat boy.

Both performances are appealing, but Mr. Ashe’s screenplay is not well served by the laggard pace and low energy of his direction.

Nolan’s 168-minute odyssey through the space-time continuum is stuffed with stuff of bewildering wrongness. Eager for grandeur, I went in hoping for the very best from a filmmaker with his own vision of the theatrical medium’s potential. The last thing I expected was a space adventure burdened by turgid discussions of abstruse physics, a wavering tone, visual effects of variable quality and a time-traveling structure that turns on bloodless abstractions.

Though the first-time director, Gabor Csupo, has achieved distinction as an animation artist, he lacks experience directing actors. The best adult performance in the film is that of Zooey Deschanel; she comes off -- again, agreeably -- as self-directed.

Mr. Rourke's performance is quite phenomenal, a case of unquenchable talent bursting the bonds of dehumanized artifice.

Why are certain films less than the sum of their appealing parts?

What this film does best is offer, sometimes playfully and sometimes not, new perspectives on the central problem of our shared history.

The plot really is basic, so the bafflement of the movie lies in its combination of visual riches and dramatic -- as well as thematic -- impoverishment.

I wish I could say that the film gives a great actor a worthy role, but the truth is otherwise. The character is banal — Günther lavishes attention on remarkably uninteresting spycraft — and Mr. Hoffman, like everyone else, is stuck with the glum tone set by the director, Anton Corbijn ("Control," "The American").

The main — and for my money only — attraction in Le Week-End, which was directed by Roger Michell, is the marvelous Scottish actress Lindsay Duncan. She is witty, fiercely intelligent and intensely sexy in the role of Meg, a woman stuck in a failing marriage.

Mr. McKay is in his mid-30s, and doesn't conceal it, so what's the point? By taking the KIND out of WUNERKIND, the movie also removes the WUNDER.

Inside the mysterious factory, a psychedelic realm where Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka holds sway, pleasure gradually gives way to a peculiar state that I can only describe as engagement without enjoyment.

It doesn't make Cars a bad picture -- the visual inventions are worth the price of admission -- but it constitutes conduct unbecoming to a maker of magic.

If only the showmanship were equal to the scholarship. As beautiful as the film is (despite notable variations in the quality of the cinematography), it is also sluggish, underdramatized after that initial suspense, and for the most part emotionally remote.

Storytelling problems surface toward the overwrought climax, but the worst problem is the unrelenting grimness. It's hard to like a movie that leaves you with no hope.

With a running time of 147 minutes, the film not only runs low on energy toward the end — internecine battles can’t compete with the early excitement of gifted young kids making it big on a national stage — but turns ploddingly sentimental in its sudden focus on Eazy-E’s painful decline, and death, from AIDS.

The second film, in particular, grows tediously episodic, and the exploits become a blur. What never blurs is Mr. Cassel's presence. We're told that he bulked up for the part-though Mesrine was many things, lithe wasn't one of them-but it's his phenomenal zest for his checkered character that fills the screen.

This feelbad movie makes you glad when it's over.

Eye caviar that doesn't pretend to be much else.

The narrative is telegraphic rather than dramatic, with story points ticked off like bullet points, and the actors (excluding Ms. Mulligan, once again) act mainly for the camera, as if they aren’t sure their leaden emphasis is weighty enough. The intended tone is darkly comic, but the supporting cast isn’t sufficiently skillful to sustain it.

The most touching scene is the most conventional, an intimate moment between Simon and his mother, Emily (Jennifer Garner). Will she or won’t she accept him as the person he is? Love, Simon is many things, but not Greek tragedy.

This is a film that adds to our understanding of human nature. Yet its impact is lessened by a lack of factual context, and by an inspirational climax that may leave one feeling good and uneasy in equal measure.

A misshapen semi-spectacle that seems to be simulating an epic, and getting away with it only occasionally.

It's a lovely pretext for dazzling visuals, yet the production is diminished by the clumsiness of an 8-bit script.

Their homegrown spirit is so appealing, and their history so affecting, that you want to overlook the shortcomings of a dutiful, derivative script, with its several inspirational strands and dearth of essential details.

Igby has his own prickly charisma and bleak humor; he's a character you'd like very much to embrace. But he's surrounded by insufferable fools in the airless Manhattan universe of a film that's as offputtingly precocious as its preppy hero.

As I watched the minimal plot unfold at a glacial pace in claustrophobic settings, I found myself wondering where the rest of the movie was.

The best parts are the in-between ones, neither laugh-out-loud funny nor overtly heart-wrenching.

The result is a film that may stay in the mind's eye longer than it lingers in the heart.

Your reaction to the film will depend on your tolerance for scatology -- some of this stuff is very funny, although most of it is grindingly, numbingly awful -- and your interest in standup comics.