Joe Morgenstern

This is moviemaking in a modular mode, an inspiration-free action adventure — with cheesy cinematography — that fills its modest running time by fitting together familiar elements into something reliably, even insistently, not new.

The movie as a whole is clever, and conspicuously overwrought. But Mr. Downey's performance is elegantly wrought; he's as quick-witted as his legendary character, and blithely funny in the lovers' spats—all right, the mystery-lovers' spats—that Holmes keeps having with Jude Law's witty Dr. Watson.

If only Brotherhood of the Wolf had the wit and grace to match its exceptional physical beauty.

The Kingdom comes down to a police procedural, and one whose procedures prove none too interesting.

Weaves a sensual spell of extraordinary delicacy, then sustains it -- up to a point.

Yet the nonsense content, being pure, is liberating, and allows us to savor all the machinery as machinery: the train, the plot, the pitch-imperfect dialogue, the huffing-puffing fights, the ridiculous stunts and, yes, the climactic train wreck. Here’s how filmmakers can fill screens when they don’t have a film to make.

Kristin Scott Thomas is the best though not the only reason to see Leaving.

What's new here is a severe deficit of style, or even craftsmanship, both in the action sequences and what passes for human interludes.

Ms. Englert's performance isn't as interesting as it might have been if the writing hadn't favored Ginger. But Ms. Fanning, a young actress of seemingly unerring instincts, is a wonder.

For all its various failures, Fever Pitch taps expertly into our nostalgia for an era when baseball really was the American pastime, unsullied by money, drugs or celebrity.

I found the film borderline bleak, and borderline predictable, at least in its resolution, yet admirable as well. Winter Passing almost always operates on the right side of the border, the full-of-life side where compelling characters live with urgency and intensity.

Tag ends up being good fun, with an unexpectedly sweet spirit that stays with you. It’s really about the persistence of friendship, a vision of adult life as the playground we would love it to be.

A Knight's Tale wasn't made for people like me. It was made for the kids of summer.

A hoot, or at least a collection of delightful hootlets hung on a short, frayed line.

The movie is grimly efficient on its own terms, a string of ever more naked calculations. But it looks like a business school opened up and all the marketing grads were allowed to start their own studio.

Earnest, mostly predictable and candidly didactic. That said, I'm glad it got made -- what's wrong with films that teach? -- and especially glad that a remarkably gifted newcomer named Nicole Beharie got to play the central role.

Jessica Chastain is the only reason, though a good one, to see The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a shrill biopic of the televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker.

For the most part Mr. Maher is an equal-opportunity denigrator, but it's worth noting that humor fails him when the subject is Muslim fundamentalism. It's hard to make light of what frightens us.

Adam succeeds at getting inside its hero's mind and, more impressively still, gives us entrée to his singular soul.

Doesn't measure up to the depth of detail, let alone the drama, of "Unzipped," the 1995 documentary about Isaac Mizrahi. Still, this new documentary conveys an ample sense of the process.

Though there's less to the film than seduces the eye, the allure of those surfaces can be hypnotic.

She is intensely, almost palpably, radiant. I call this star power, coupled with the intelligence and verve Ms. Pike always brings to her roles. She’s brilliant in this one, a plausible vision of a singular visionary in the history of science. If the film around her is unstable to the point of screwiness, it is not for lack of ambition.

For all the luster of its subject, though, this earnest biopic lacks the spark of life.

The narrative lacks a strong heartbeat; you keep wondering why the spectacle isn't as affecting as it is picturesque.

Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

Most of the film, a debut feature directed by Christophe Barratier, is quite shamelessly formulaic. The Chorus redeems itself, though, with Mr. Jugnot's astute, understated performance.

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.

Ms. Robbie, on the other hand, aces her role from the start; she’s got an unerring gift for romantic comedy. Still, the film itself comes to feel like a con, thanks to a script that’s too clever by two-thirds, and butterfingered in the ways of portraying love.

The narrative, framed as a psychological mystery, labors under more layers of significance than it can handle without falling into contrivance and argumentation. Still, the dramatic core is strong, an exceptional young man struggling to find, and become, whoever he really is.

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

Much of the fun is awfully silly. The story strains logic, as well as credulity. It's been cobbled together, often crudely, from pieces of classic predecessors. (Here snippets of Hitchcock, there stretches of "Speed," with wings on the bus.) Yet the silliness parades itself in a spirit of cheerful self-awareness, while Liam Neeson fills the thrill quotient impressively as an air marshal.

The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, Valkyrie becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson.

Watching these two intensely likable comedians work together is a special pleasure.

This coming-of-age movie, is a clumsy contraption, but it's nice to see Rupert Grint coming out from under that colorful thatch, and coming, not a moment too soon, into an appealing pre-maturity.

The movie doesn't shed much light on their famously contentious marriage. Instead, it spreads gloom all around.

The drama is repetitive rather than resonant, an over-calculated, under-ventilated studio production -- even paranoid thrillers need to breathe -- whose plot machinery grinds grim and coarse.

What Minions does have is abundant if relentless cuteness, which audiences are sure to accept in lieu of content; people love these little guys.

All of the nonsense piled on nonsense does provide some measure of pleasure. Unknown gets better by getting worse.

Starts busily, and soon becomes a bafflement -- such an interesting cast, such technical excellence, so many intricate details and parallel plot threads, yet so little clarity or urgency.

It’s a return to dramatic accounts of blastoffs, followed by soul-filling footage from beyond our sheltering atmosphere and implacable gravity; a portrait, by reflected light from fiery boosters, of one of Earth’s most curious (in every respect) overachievers; and a testament to failing upward—far, far upward.

In its agreeably eccentric spirit, Tommy’s Honour evokes the Scottish comedies of Bill Forsyth; here it’s oddballs among the handmade, undimpled golf balls.

Either you buy their Vaseline-lensed visions of the hereafter, or you watch in stony silence, as I did, wondering why there's no one to care about.

Exceptionally likable and affecting as well as entertaining.

Provides a reminder of the power of unadorned drama and language -- whole torrents of eloquent words -- in the service of a nifty idea.

Like so many parties, this one goes on too long.

In fairness, the movie is good for more than a few laughs, but little substance lurks beneath the antic poses and frantic shenanigans in this remake of the classic 1955 English comedy.

In Troy, and in overreaching, underachieving productions like it, digital imagery is fast becoming both a Trojan horse and Achilles' heel.

Not even she (Patricia Clarkson), however, can save a movie that suffers from terminal self-enchantment.

This icon of witchcraft can't save a production that's suffocatingly elaborate yet insufficiently bewitching.

A bizarre, overcooked broth that combines a broad sitcom style (the banter goes rat-tat-tat like a steam drill) with a preposterous succession of plot complications, plus solemn questions of identity, adoption and the nature of happiness.

Al Pacino is his own venue as yet another flamboyant, self-ironic, self-dramatizing, self-parodying, self-selfing quasi-Mephistopheles. His performance isn't very good, but it's big.

Joy is at its annoying worst when it’s clamoring to be antic, and at its brilliantly funny best when Joy and her adversaries — including one played by Bradley Cooper — are deadly serious about business as mortal combat.

Ms. Arterton gets to play a few scenes worthy of her art before the film turns into a milking machine designed to wring feelings from a link between past and present that, once again, amounts to a construct.

The biggest battle in Monsters vs. Aliens is banality vs. originality, and banality carries the day.

In spite of Josh Brolin's heroic efforts, W. is a skin-deep biopic that revels in its antic shallowness.

It's really dumb, even though it starts promisingly and continues, in a self-infatuated way, to consider itself quite bright.

In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style.

The great strength of Concussion is its star’s performance.

Edge of Darkness was one of the most enthralling, intricate and genuinely thrilling productions in the history of the small screen. The big-screen version--directed by Martin Campbell, who did the original--offers an example of why the studios' numbers often add up, and why, at the same time, so many of today's Hollywood movies leave us cool if not downright cold.

Ms. Macdonald works modest wonders within these constraints -- she's a lovely actress, and a skilled one -- but too much is asked of her; Kate's innocence finally wilts beneath the camera's fixed gaze.

Mr. Fukanaga's purpose is to evoke the immigrants' experience, which he does with such eloquence and power as to inspire awe.

I just can't hide my disappointment, though, that the movie doesn't sustain anything like the brilliance of its best scenes, or even the promise of its preface.

The result is heavy and humorless, despite a smart, skillful performance by Brooke Smith.

The Terminal is a terminally fraudulent and all-but-interminable comedy.

It's shrill in tone, awash in unexamined narcissism - kids are just pretexts for laughs, rather than objects of love - and afflicted by explosive verbal diarrhea. There's simply no base line of normal human activity, let alone intimacy, until the anticouple finally re-examines their anticommitment credo. By then everyone has been so selfish and dislikable that our commitment to the film is lost.

Quid Pro Quo, a bizarre but audacious debut feature by Carlos Brooks.

Here's one more studio extravaganza brought down by numbing action and an addiction to generic digital effects.

This sad excuse for family entertainment tries to enshrine a classic while defacing it.

The film’s energy can be relentless, but the feelings are real, and they’re wrapped in a dysfunctional-family package that’s so venerable and endearing as to seem a little bit new.

Mr. Campos and his superb cast confer such authority on the whole thing that there’s no choice but to follow the film’s three time-hopping, befuddlingly intertwined stories — for 138 minutes, no less.

This would-be epic is beautifully photographed, elegantly crafted and adventurously cast. Unfortunately, though, it plays like a gargantuan trailer for a movie still to be made.

Hitchcock rings false from start to finish.

Soon I realized that the real subject of this film, with its philosophical voice-overs by the filmmaker and its haunting shots of decayed American downtowns, is the passage of time and the toll it takes. The effect of the Super 8 is to give present moments historical weight by making them look primitive; it's a kind of instant oldening that seems to pause time if not to stop it. It's About You is an odd and touching little film. I'm glad I stuck it out.

Mr. Murray gives a fascinating performance, even though his FDR was conceived and written as a fairly small guy at the center of a small film that, for all its considerable charm, miniaturizes its hero in the process of humanizing him.

A deadly earnest and deadly dull psychological thriller.

For many reasons, none of them good, Old is in a class by itself. M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller-slasher-sci-fi-creep-out is peerlessly clumsy, silly and alarmed.

Amusing, in fits and spurts, and sure to make tons of money, but terribly familiar and fatigued.

The problem lies with the central role. The character may be comic, as conceived, but Mr. Landry’s performance is flat. Pierre-Paul is certainly likable in his earnestness, amusing in his confusion and touching in his innocence. Yet he isn’t very funny — there’s no sparkle, no buoyancy, no surprise — and the blame doesn’t lie only with the actor, given the underlying earnestness of the writing and direction.

This debut feature, occasionally arch but consistently affecting, shares the deadpan esthetic of "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Ghost World."

Yet most of the film's energy is generated by flamboyant cinematography and music-video cutting, and much of that energy is false.

Mr. Clooney’s prancing, dancing and clowning for the TV camera feel tame and vaguely self-conscious when measured, as they will be, against the calculated craziness of his role’s model, Mr. Cramer, who usually manages to seem simultaneously shrewd and stridently unhinged.

In this action adventure, the apotheosis of his career thus far, cheerful idiocy occasionally rises to the level of delectable lunacy. For the most part, though, it’s entertainment as punishing paradox, a high-speed slog.

Why didn't Mr. Jordan spend more time grounding his self-enchanted script in some semblance of reality? Unlike "Splash," this film finally goes plop.

Once again, though, the film is defined by the strengths and weaknesses of the source material. While Bruce is working on anger management, you may find yourself working on boredom management, and matching his rate of success.

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

So the awful truth about The Truth About Charlie is that it needed two movie stars and got one.

Glorifies its subject without quite knowing what to make of her. There's no question, though, about Ms. Blanchett in the title role. When she's on screen, the Fourth Estate flourishes.

When does banter turn to blather? In the case of this action adventure, which was directed by Baltasar Kormákur, it's when you realize that keeping track of the barely fathomable plot isn't worth the bother.

The movie reminded me of a relatively new product, the little translucent wafer that you put on your tongue to freshen your breath. One hit of intense flavor and the thing dissolves without a trace.

The film celebrates artistic freedom without preaching a sermon, and often flies when Mr. Chi is on screen. When he is on stage, spinning and leaping to the strains of magnificent music, the film soars.

There's a good subject for satire here, the extended adolescence of American kids. But satire presupposes maturity, or at least some perspective. The movie's calculation is that its subjects and audience share the same point of view. The results are truly ghastly.

The folk-wisdom level is tolerable, just as the clichés and manipulations are palatable, because the story is full of life, and free of ironic additives.

Gets to be dislikable in its glib feelgoodness. The movie's many excellent actors do too much acting with too little conviction in scenes that rush through perfunctory setups to deliver pat payoffs.

What's wrong with this picture? Nothing, as long as you don't expect more than a tossed-off goof.

There's also reason to worry when a simplistic movie like this one takes on an issue of overarching importance to the nation's future. The challenges presented by fracking are immense, and Capra-esque nostalgia isn't helpful.

Huckabees is godawful, a mirthless, bilious bore in which the vividly focused fury of "Three Kings" has become free-floating anger at the follies of human existence.

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.

The energy in Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's — what a great title! — is genuine, infectious and superabundant.

Like most other members of an excellent cast that includes James McAvoy, Kevin Kline and Tom Wilkinson, she (Robin Wright) has come under the deadening directorial hand of Robert Redford.

The stars are obviously having great fun in their roles, and we’re up for sharing it: Who doesn’t want to see a cast like this succeed? Yet the characters and situations are oversold from the opening scenes, and it’s not a problem of technique—these virtuosos can do anything that’s asked of them—but of directorial choice in a movie that still has one foot on a theater stage.

This all-too-realistic animated feature will impoverish, rather than enrich, those who watch it by asking less rather than more of their imaginations. That’s because its images have been stripped of the animator’s true art — daring, bedazzling designs that can thrill us with their surreality, and lift our emotions to hyperreal heights.

The oddest thing about this very odd movie is that it doesn't seem to know what to make of itself.

A surprising, entirely beguiling little film.

The movie is pleasant enough, in its studied way, and Mr. Hopkins does as well as anyone could in the role of a wise man with vaguely supernatural powers. Still, it's awfully amorphous and pokey.

Mr. Ritchie is back with more of the same in his second feature, a comedy called "Snatch" that's a sort of lethal pinball machine in which even more picturesque characters bounce from pillage to post.

What’s most significant, though, is the merciless nature of the cyberbullying, and the terrifying ease with which it’s inflicted. Tickled opens a smudged window on a dark alley of contemporary life.

The result is an entertainment of surprising liveliness. It’s also mindbait for Godard fans in which admiration for what the venerable filmmaker has achieved--he’s still turning out films at 87--is mixed with faintly elegiac regret for the stern, remote figure he’s become.

If you're able to take The Missing seriously, as I was not, you'll be impressed by its sweep and ambition. The most lasting impression it made on me was one of absurd overreaching.

The calculation couldn’t be clearer. Put two superb performers together — they don’t get superber than Helen Mirren and Ian McKellen — and you’re on your way to making an exceptional movie. Not so fast, though. The Good Liar is calculation from arch start to hollow finish.

Too many mind and the story grows tedious or absurd. No mind and the spectacle suffices.

The show is redeemed by its co-stars, up to a point. They struggle womanfully, and sometimes successfully, to find truth in the script's silly symphony of false notes.

Despite Mr. Howard's best efforts in the role, though, the film rarely realizes its subject's potential.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Surviving Picasso is merely the worst movie ever made about a painter; worse movies have been made on other subjects, though none comes immediately to mind. [20 Sep 1996]

What's intractably wrong with the film is that there's no reality to heighten; it's a spectacle in search of a soul.

Every once in a while a movie grabs you, unsuspecting, and hustles its way into your heart. Jeremiah Zagar’s We the Animals does that. This exquisite debut feature, based on a poetic debut novel by Justin Torres, is a tumbling evocation of a volatile family, narrated by one of three young brothers living in upstate New York with their Puerto Rican father and white mother.

You may wonder if this screen version of the book of the same name is as unfunny and strangely mushy as it seems, but trust your instincts.

Ms. Stone is entrancing, whether Sophie is in or out of her trance state, and so is the movie as a whole.

The movie's real locus of anger must have been the director, Ang Lee, once he realized what an epic clod his computer wizards had wrought.

The movie's failures are all the more unfortunate because they detract from its central and conspicuous success, the performance of Riz Ahmed in the title role. Mr. Ahmed turns the quicksilver quality of the book's internal monologue into a tour de force of his own creation. He's a bright star in a dim constellation.

For better or worse, Woody Allen turns out a movie every year. Last year's "Midnight in Paris" was better than better; that is to say, sublime. To Rome With Love is worse than worse, as inert as its predecessor was inspired.

No one could save Is Anybody There? from its treacly self and Michael Caine doesn't, but he gives it a grand try.

The good news about Claude Lelouch's And Now Ladies and Gentlemen -- there's no bad news -- is that the man who made the sublimely superficial "A Man and a Woman" almost four decades ago has grown in wisdom and artistry, but hasn't lost his love of glossy surfaces.

Mr. Murphy rises to every occasion, not only with the crisp wit that has long been his hallmark, but with restraint and tenderness that serve him well.

Impressive landscapes, plus Kristen Wiig's appealing Cheryl, the fellow worker who inflames Walter's passion, make the movie enjoyable enough. Yet its style is a constant bafflement.

The film functions as a high-wire act that can leave you giddy with laughter.

On screen it looks crazed, but the comic energy is huge, if indiscriminate, and Mr. Sandler's performance -- think Topol doing Charles Boyer -- can be as delicate as it is gleefully vulgar or grotesque.

For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.

There's so much of so many flavors of cleverness — a surfeit of surfeits — that sensory overload causes aesthetic suffocation.

For all its flashy trappings, weighty ruminations and zero-gravity floatings aboard the International Space Station, Life turns out to be another variant of “Alien,” though without the grungy horror and grim fun. In space no one can hear you snore.

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.

The movie comes up with a couple of tender moments that could pass for human, and a mano-a-mano climax in which the superhero of yore, the glint in his eye dulled but not extinguished, functions as a weirdly touching tyrannosaurus.

For all its video-game bedazzlements, Attack of the Clones suffers from severe digital glut, periodically relieved, if you can call it that, by amateur theatrics.

Whatever the cause, the movie turns sour when the singers aren't singing. And the first-person accounts don't work at all, even though much of their substance comes from the show.

Oh, what awful voices -- clumsy words as well as cheesy accents -- come out of the actors' mouths! Though I wanted to appreciate the human story, and the lavish spectacle, I couldn't get past the clangorous echoes of Charlie Chan.

This movie needs a star performance at its center, and the director, Joe Johnston, doesn't seem to know it. His closeups dote on Mr. Mortensen's striking face, and on the actor's interesting inwardness, but he doesn't ask for, or find, the sort of zest that could turn laconic into romantic.

Seeking spontaneity and release for her character, Ms. Streep gets stuck in a laboriousness that I don’t want to belabor, since her efforts are gallant — she does her own singing and playing — and there are fleeting moments of real fun. Still, it’s hard not to wonder why so much in the movie went so wrong.

It's just a little film that strives to be likable, and is less so than it might have been.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Full of entertaining vignettes that eventually make a happy mockery, as they're meant to do, of the tragedy vs. comedy dialectic.

A curious combination of strident preachment and smartly farcical thriller; it's heavy-handed and light-footed at the same time.

Here’s the bad news: Brüno is no "Borat." Here’s the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously to genuinely awful.

Rather than the laugh a minute promised by old comedies, Get Smart generates approximately one laugh per hour, and I can't remember either one.

Ambitious, visually stunning and hugely accomplished.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

Tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.

If there’s anything more you need to know before deciding whether to watch this, I should tell you that it’s nothing like “Eighth Grade,” “Booksmart,” “Clueless” or “Election,” all astute studies of the high-school scene. The calculations of this screenplay, adapted by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer from a young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, are naked enough to qualify as nude scenes.

The mystery posed by Oblivion as a whole is why its mysteries are posed so clumsily, and worked out so murkily.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

Ethan Hawke is appealing as a polysyllabic coward of some complexity, but Mr. Washington has been stripped of his usual verve and grace. Sometimes you can catch him going slack, like a man looking for the exit.

I owned a deep sense of discomfort (which the movie means us to feel) that gave way to increasing boredom until the search led to an appliance repair store in a seamy area of the San Fernando Valley, and to one of its employees, Albert Sparma, the suspect played by Mr. Leto.

Bee Movie isn't a B movie, it's a Z movie, as in dizmal.

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.

It's no classic, but you don't need to be a cultist to get in on the tawdry fun.

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 plot makes no sense — time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension.

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it's a love story that swings confidently between age and youth, and, like the young Tiger Woods of old, avoids every trap along the way.

The perverse fascination of Jet Lag is watching two superb actors struggle with material that doesn't suit them.

Not a pretty sight, any of it.

To enjoy what's enjoyable in The Fighting Temptations, you've got to take in the music and shut out the words -- not the lyrics of the wonderful songs, but the dialogue stuffed into actors' mouths.

The results are startlingly original, if occasionally overambitious. This is "Tsotsi" without the feel-good glow, a tale of entrepreneurship's perils and boundless pleasures.

The most surprising thing about Alice in Wonderland is its general lack of surprise.

If there’s a secret to a successful screen adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, it’s still secret. Disney’s version of the Madeleine L’Engle young-adult novel is a magical mystery tour minus the magic and mystery, and a great disappointment, since there were so many reasons to root for the film’s success.

A chance to see four terrific actresses — let’s not use the gender-neutral term in this context — having varying degrees of fun with matters of sisterhood, sex and hope in a movie that touches on mortality and holds out the prospect of later-life joy.

It's hard to stop quoting from a movie this good.

This teenage interracial romance runs hot and cold, sweet and silly, with many more fits than starts.

I loved watching this sci-fi spectacle’s moving parts. I just couldn’t get past its brain.

Ms. Stone is a consistent delight, whether thanks to or in spite of the script’s flirtations with self-parody. But Irrational Man isn’t funny either. It’s a Woody Allen film that the next one will make us forget.

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.

So absurdly overproduced that there's even a surfeit of cherry blossoms. By the end they look like litter.

It’s impossible to imagine that “The Rise of Skywalker” won’t do huge business, even though it’s merely good, not great, and though there’s a growing sense around the galaxy that Star Wars fatigue has set in.

This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn.

The movie's emotional content was manifest as an absence. What stayed with me most memorably was the father's insufferable bombast and the son's sad passivity.

Declarative sentences are as scarce as detectable feelings in this stylish, emptyish thriller -- it's Tarantino with the vital juices left out.

The result is lots of gunplay and explosions governed by little logic.

He's (Crowe) thwarted by the production's almost total, and truly absurd, absence of fun.

Everyone is touched by sadness or hobbled by self-deception, and everyone is interesting, even moving, to watch until the drama slowly suffocates beneath the weight of its revelations.

Another is how the film manages, in the absence of a coherent plot, to be so funny and engaging until, somewhere around the midpoint, it goes as flat as a stepped-on creepy-crawly.

A limited movie that can't animate its subject amid all the tricks and glitz. De-Lovely is devoid of life.

The film is far from perfect, but it’s certainly ambitious, often entertaining and, compared to the feeble competition from new American films of the moment, a singing, dancing, stomping and chomping “Citizen Kane.”

Palindromes finds him (Solondz) stuck with his single theme inside a sealed dollhouse of his own construction. He has gifts to give a larger audience, if ever he breaks out.

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

By the Grace of God is overlong, and loses dramatic momentum as the group works out a social-media strategy and debates potential clickbait. But Mr. Ozon’s film is notable for the range of its concerns — the Church’s belief in redemption versus the legal requirement of punishment; the power of forgiveness versus the need for revenge; and before and after everything else, the special pain inflicted on innocent, uncomprehending children.

The story line, a sequence of very loosely connected events, sustains a state of almost pure brainlessness with its indifference to dramatic development and the dictates of logic, even the fantasy logic of cartoons. It’s as if most of the script had been generated by algorithms.

This franchise needs more than a reset. It's ripe for retirement.

Most of the prime goofiness is given over to Vassili and Konig sharpshooting at each other while the battle rages. The movie's a red elephant.

Heart-breakingly awful -- slow, lugubrious, and misconceived to the point of baffling amateurism.

Strong acting often lends authenticity to writing that lacks it, and Mr. McConaughey is, to be sure, an exceptionally strong actor. Yet this screenplay is so arid in its didacticism, so pallid in its would-be passion, that it defeats his efforts and our involvement.

My heart was warmed by gratuitous moments when Mr. Carrey clowns for clowning's sake - in the best of them, he makes a slo-mo entrance to a press conference, even though the camera is running at normal speed.

This lively little film, a comic take on Shakespeare's tragedy, is really entertaining.

Fatigue has caught up with the Warrens, and the question about the franchise is not where it can go from here, but how much longer it can be sustained by humdrum deviltry.

So you think you've seen silly? And smarmy? And inept? Wait till you see Wanderlust, though that's just a figure of speech; I'm not suggesting that you actually lay eyes on this naked grab for box office bucks.

The story requires a greater leap of faith than I was willing or able to muster, since Eli is also a saintly pilgrim on a God-given mission to save a ruined world.

[Luhrmann's] movie is all over the map. But what a gorgeous map it is. The too-muchness, like the too-longness, befits the Northern Territory's vastness. In its heart of hearts Australia is an old-fashioned Western -- a Northern, if you will -- and all the more enjoyable for it.

It's very funny, terrifically lively and, considering how awful it might have been, surprisingly tender in its portrait of a young guy who learns sensitivity the hard way.

But Samba’s personality, intriguingly volatile for a while, turns unpredictable, with no coherent center, as suspicion grows that the film’s stylistic shifts — including a genial parody of a well-known Coke commercial — are little more than pretexts for showing what its multitalented star can do.

The failures of White Squall are dismaying as well as perplexing. Director Ridley Scott serves up some ravishing images along the way: the stark geometry of the ship's riggings against an azure sky, crew kids scampering along a verdant ridge toward a volcano's silvery crater lake. But the script is a shambles. [06 Feb 1996]

The cast is entertaining, though with an asterisk, and the special effects are often spectacular, though sometimes not.

Metroland, which is adapted from a novel by Julian Barnes, is an oddly unpleasant variation on the theme of "The Way We Were." [09 Apr 1999]

I can't say I was scared, but I wasn't bored. By way of full disclosure, Warner Bros. provided free popcorn at the screening. I gobbled up every greasy morsel.

You'd have to be made of granite to resist all the charms of a free-spirited, 100-pound Lab. Yet the production manages, against heavy odds, to make its canine star an incorrigible bore.

The film suffers, terminally, from joyless direction by Francis Lawrence — no relation — and a monotonous script by Justin Haythe.

The kind of inspirational movie that Hollywood made about the Army, Navy and Marines during World War II. Now, with inspiration in short supply, it's the Coast Guard's turn.

Andrew Niccol's In Time looks great, sounds stilted and plays like a clever videogame with too many rules.

This satire, directed by David Gordon Green from a screenplay by Peter Straughan, suffers from deficits of wit, wisdom, focus, filmmaking expertise and appropriate tone. It’s a case study, if nothing else, of starting with a dubious idea and making it downright awful.

The Americans are portrayed with varying degrees of loathsomeness, but there's not much variety in the film. It's all an awful aberration.

A seasoned director might have known when to ask Ms. Theron to do less, or nothing at all; as things stand, she acts at every single moment. But what brave and ferocious acting she does.

Certainly trashy, but, stripped of Mr. Diesel's services and directed by John Singleton, it's a no-go Yugo in muscle-car sheet metal.

To fill the downtime between commercials, there's a fitfully entertaining adventure.

Mr. Emmerich, who has often conjured with cosmic themes, sometimes wittily, achieves something new this time around — a level of indifference to the genre and its fans that amounts to a cosmic shrug. What does it matter if the absurdity is slovenly, the whimsy leaden, the extravagance squalid?

It's slapdash, crudely crafted and resolutely adolescent. And occasionally, though only occasionally, very funny.

The movie isn't terrible -- a few clever notions snap to life and pay off, at least modestly -- but it's dispirited and eventually dispiriting, a force-fed farce that falls far short of fascination.

Jeff Cronenweth did the lovely cinematography. It's the only element that improves on the original material.

In what was clearly designed to be a chick flick, the on-screen chicks work hard at being endearing, while Jude Law, as Amanda's more than conversational partner, charms everyone effortlessly and gets the best lines.

For all the preposterous clichés of the plot, which clanks as loudly as Laz's chain, and for all the inertness of Justin Timberlake's performance as Rae's brooding squeeze, Black Snake Moan finds unchained energy in its foolishness, and gives Mr. Jackson a chance to pluck a guitar and sing. He's really good at it, too. The music almost redeems the movie.

Fabrice Luchini is thwarted by an unwieldy plot.

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.

The narrative core suffers a conspicuous meltdown, though not before Mr. Mann gets to stage a few impressive action sequences, the best and loudest of which concerns a shootout in a curvilinear tunnel. As for the climax, set against a massive torchlight parade through the streets of Jakarta, it’s very elaborate, and terribly dumb.

Movies like this have been around forever too. They're a normal condition of winter's doldrums, which, in the fullness of time, will pass.

The big news in Blade II is that there's something worse than vampires, but is there something worse than Blade II?

Nothing stands up to scrutiny -- least of all the lethargic acting and the clumsy script. I was hot to trot for the exit halfway through, but a dogged sense of duty kept me stuck in an endless present.

Like Poirot’s mustache, the movie as a whole is a waxworks.

It's classic animation wedded to modern technology -- painted pictures that move in magical splendor.

The physical locations are spectacular, a surprise because most examples of the genre are shot in the augmented reality of high-tech soundstages. The spirit of Ms. Zhao’s film—and it is Ms. Zhao’s film—ranges from buoyant to playful during the downtime between generic battles to the almost death.

The film fails most importantly, almost inexplicably, at telling its story of governmental abuse and personal suffering in a coherent fashion. And the disorganization of Ms. Parks’s script is enhanced by a succession of montages that must have been put together to camouflage narrative gaps.

How you feel about Paul Haggis's new film may depend on your contrivance threshold.

Mr. Luchini has a touching way of opening up the repressed heroes he often plays, and Ms. Verbeke's droll manipulations - and genuine sweetness - are more than enough to justify the transformation that María and the other maids work on Jean-Louis's life.

The current cast is cursed with the director’s lust for gravitas. Searching for emotional truth in Agatha Christie, Mr. Branagh succeeds only in killing her playfulness.

This children's entertainment-grownups beware!-is preoccupied by squishy stuff that includes mud and poop, as well as by syrup that oozes from cabinet drawers.

This flamboyantly operatic anti-war film takes getting used to, though it leaves you with memorable images of madness, both poetic and military.

Serendipity is "Sliding Doors" with no alternate versions; it's willed enchantment all the way.

The film isn’t funny at all. It’s so didactic and dislikable that it took me a while to realize humor wasn’t its main goal.

The new version is out of scale with the basic premise -- too much rain, too much water, too much doom, gloom and intricate eccentricity.

Once again, Queen Latifah survives some remarkably clumsy filmmaking. More than survives; she manages to prevail.

Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher is the main reason to see The Iron Lady, which was directed by Phyllida Lloyd - not just the main reason but the raison d'être of an otherwise misconceived movie.

For all of the care and imagination that have been lavished on the production, which was designed by Arthur Max and photographed by Dariusz Wolski, the film’s impact is best expressed by frequent aerial shots that are visually impressive and emotionally remote.

This film is what it is, a particularly generic genre piece that the bean counters at a once-great studio must have had reason to believe would turn a profit, mostly in the foreign market. Very possibly it will.

The movie isn't deep, or particularly intricate; it doesn't play all that much with the potential for mistaken identities, and the cruelty it depicts becomes repetitive or, worse still, desensitizing. But The Devil's Double does give us indelible images of Uday's decadence - the filmmakers say they're understated - and a double dip of dazzling acting.

Qualifies as a pleasant time-killer, but it's 20,000 leagues beneath what it might have been.

Dopamine could do with a bit more of whatever hormone governs pacing, but Mr. Decena is a director with a future. He knows how to connect with his actors.

Mr. McCanlies's style lurches between the lyrical, the fantastical (flashbacks to the uncles' youth) and the clumsily antic, and Mr. Osment's performance is woefully stiff and inexpressive.

300 presents a dual clash of civilizations. An action adventure that pits thousands of Persians against 300 brave Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, it also pits millions of fans of brainless violence against a gallant band, or so I choose to think of us, who still expect movies to contain detectable traces of humanity.

This is filmmaking by the numbers meant to succeed by the numbers.

A deeper problem in The King Is Alive is an almost total absence of spontaneity.

One of the many stylistic distinctions of this outwardly modest production is the complex voice that the filmmaker has found for his young hero.

How do I count the ways this movie goes wrong?

The previous episode, “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” was as fresh and enjoyable as this one is semicoherent and dispiriting.

The movie's tone is at war with its subject, and sometimes with its wavering self.

Motion is in copious supply -- a frenzied shootout at Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum grows interminable -- but the workings of the abstract plot are unfathomable, the characters are unpleasant and a couple of assassinations leave us as cold as the corpses.

The Producers is nightmarish, in its febrile way, a head-bangingly primitive version of an overrated Broadway show that grew out of a clumsy 1968 movie with an inflated reputation.

Once Nacho gets the wrestling bug, though, it's all about Jack Black the irrepressible clown, and the comedy dies a slow death for lack of fresh ideas.

The brightest touch in the whole tale is a transvestite hooker’s little papillon, decked out in a DayGlo pink vest, but even the pooch seems glum, pricked-up ears notwithstanding.

This ripoff, directed by Jerry Zucker, has a few funny moments, but it's a sad sad sad sad example of what Hollywood is currently serving up -- and what audiences are swallowing -- as summer entertainment.

The great lesson of the film is that humor, honest feelings and genuine exuberance trump technique.

A textbook case of a film that's befuddled by its subject.

Unforeseeably bad things can happen to good performers.

Labor Day, adapted from a novel by Joyce Maynard, is the kind of movie that turns clarity into stultification; everything is perfectly clear and almost everything — pie-making excepted — is perfectly lifeless.

In the real world, a debate has been raging over what does and doesn’t constitute torture. In the movie world, there’s no debate; watching The Interview is torture from almost start to finish.

The result is fitfully interesting, and Mr. Kinnaman, best known for "The Killing" on television, compels our empathy with a kind of macho melancholia. Still, the whole thing comes down to an action adventure that's graphics-rich, logic-poor, coherence-challenged and pleasure-impaired.

What a peculiar production this is. Up to a certain point, it really does promise to be romantic.

The vision of office work that's offered up by Haiku Tunnel is as chilling as it is funny.

This clumsy comedy, written and directed by Nancy Meyers, turns an implausible but intriguing premise into a tale of generational collision that reflects dimly on old and young alike.

Looks magical, seethes with elusive profundities and makes remarkably little sense, though the murkiness makes perfect sense on a shallower level.

After a quarter-century the franchise may be terminally long in the teeth; much of this fifth iteration is absurd, both intentionally and un. Yet it’s also funny, intriguingly dark and visually sumptuous.

The Navajos must have sent much more crucial messages at much higher levels during the war, but you'd never know it from this movie. Windtalkers is practically all action and no talk.

I paid steadfast attention, both to the actress, a performer of unusual versatility, and to the character she plays, a caged -- and cagey -- bird who sings because she's too stubborn to cry.

A lot of talent to lavish on a single movie, but the result is uncommonly smart for the genre, and not just smart but tremendously enjoyable.

Mammoth manages to be as affecting as it is heartfelt.

Who knew this German-born Turkish filmmaker could perpetrate a delirious farce-in German and Greek with good English subtitles-that doesn't flag for a single one of its 99 minutes?

The film, which was written and directed by Todd Robinson, begins with those dreaded words “Based on a True Story,” meaning in this instance concocted from certain established facts, lots of unconvincing fiction and large dollops of sentiment into a disjointed tale that means to inspire us, yet manages against steep odds to be dull and emotionally remote.

It's a genre film, not great art, though there's a good joke about art - a pricey piece of action painting, appropriately enough - but it's a thoroughly satisfying entertainment, and, in this season of lowered expectations, a nice surprise.

Even the Bollywood ending, a pleasant echo of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is intercut with darker reminders of dwindling days. Much of this sequel is clumsy, and awfully silly, but consistently shallow it is not.

What passes for the movie's reality is interlocking episodes of ersatz ecstasy and angst -- a Cupid-governed "Crash" -- plus snippets of wisdom dispensed by Mr. Freeman's character.

Good and very pleasurable provided you know what you're getting into, which is a comic roundelay of amorous ambitions and delusions-punctuated by wistful old ballads like "If I Had You"-that lead mostly but not entirely to disaster.

The basic problem is the script, which is credited to three writers plus the director - seldom a good sign. Never mind that it's a retread of "Planes, Trains & Automobiles" minus the trains, and minus John Candy.

Jack's problem is that he's a commoner, but the movie's problem is that its script is commoner still, an enchantment-free pretext for animated action, straight-ahead storytelling and ersatz romance.

Seldom has such a glittering wagon been hitched to such dull stars.

There's nothing wrong with beguiling star turns, but I wish this one had been surrounded by more of a movie. Birthday Girl is a harmless trifle that makes 93 minutes go by as if they were hardly more than an hour and a half.

A generally mirthless comedy of manners.

Yes, of course this is fairly old-fashioned entertainment, but it's really, really entertaining.

She's All That isn't mindless, just techniqueless...What's on the screen says they aren't yet up to speed on making feature films. Most of the actors mumble while the script lurches from one sketchy notion to the next. All the same, She's All That offers insights into life as it is lived, or at least filmed, in Southern California. [29 Jan 1999, p. W1]

Skyscraper is a tribute to duct tape, and to Dwayne Johnson’s enduring appeal. The movie is great, outlandish fun because the star makes it so; he’s a soft soul in an action-hard body.

The director, Arie Posin, and his co-writer, Matthew McDuffie, have tried to do with their film — fill a bare-bones version of the Hitchcock film with an illusion of life. They do succeed sporadically.

To get to the beginning, one must first get through the end, which is almost literally unendurable.

This dramatically, thematically and artistically bankrupt comic fantasy cost something in the neighborhood of $100 million to make and isn't worth the celluloid it's printed on.

Disney’s new Dumbo is one ponderous pachyderm, a live-action remake of the 1941 animated classic with a grim tone and a dead soul. It’s astounding that Tim Burton and his colleagues could have created such a downer from a long-beloved source of delight.

This “Peter Rabbit” has certain charms, chief among them the bond of fondness between Peter and Bea, and the cinematography by Peter Menzies Jr. (whose father shot 63 episodes of “Skippy,” a once-beloved Australian TV series about a boy and his kangaroo).

Like many dreams that enliven filmmakers' nights, this one derives from other, better films, though it does have a few clever twists.

It's impossible to say who's more unhinged: Darwin, caught between faith and reason, or the filmmakers.

I feel for the marketing person charged with devising a tagline for Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, a fantasy whose turgid pretensions defy the very notion of marketing.

It's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process.

An odd little thriller that celebrates, in order of importance, Mr. Duvall, tango and his real-life significant other, Luciana Pedraza, who makes her attractive debut as a screen actress and, yes, tango dancer.

Not only does Ender's Game have many scenes in zero gravity, but this zero-sum fiasco has zero drama, zero suspense, zero humor, zero charm and zero appeal.

I'm sorry to report that Biyi Bandele's would-be saga, based on the celebrated novel by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, is disappointing, a romance pastiche that muddles the politics of the period beyond comprehension.

The screenplay, by Antonio Macia, is earnest and unsurprising--not a good combination--and neither the director nor the star quite knows what to make of the quirky character inside the traditional garments that signal otherworldly innocence to customs agents.

The result is a sequence of events that’s both intriguing and gossamer-thin. You enjoy the challenge of figuring out who’s doing what to whom and for what devious reasons, but it all goes out of your head once the story ends and the lights come up.