Keith Uhlich

Would that the climax lived up to the tension-filled first two thirds. Let’s just say that Non-Stop reaches for some pointed post-9/11 political commentary that almost entirely exceeds its grasp. Total brainlessness, in this case, would have been a virtue.

The film never entirely overcomes the sense that it's a calling-card vehicle.

When the monsters finally show themselves, this potent theme is lost amid a lot of proficiently staged but insubstantial scare scenes - heavy on musical stingers and weightless CGI.

The late Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play isn’t opened up so much as clinically dissected by the film, with every character an enfeebled pawn in situations they’re at a loss to resolve.

There’s no room for such soul-searching uncertainty with Gibson. After a few rapidly ticked-off minutes of gloom, the mission is clear: Get the sons of bitches, and make ’em pay.

It’s high time Pedro had a lark. The buoyant and bawdy I’m So Excited plays like a to-hell-with-it-all riff from this seminal Spanish auteur, an excuse to gather his stock company for a breezy 90-minute party.

There’s a marked sense of retreat in this tale that’s never explored--everyone goes out of the way to remember the past through rose-colored specs.

There is no depth or resonance to anything we see and hear-everything is as it seems, no more, no less, and the reactionary superficiality dulls the senses. General Orders No. 9 strains for elegiac profundity and ends up as bad, backward-looking poetry.

The unspoken theme underlying Dickens’s prose--that the money-grubbing Ebenezer is conversing with semblances of his own self--finds near-perfect cinematic expression through Carrey’s efforts.

Lee and Schamus make history blandly palatable; in the process, they rob the times and the people they’re portraying of their complications.

Do you like movies about gladiators? Well, lend me your ears: The Eagle will more than gratify your sword-and-sandal cravings.

For all of Cloud Atlas's pseudorevolutionary blather about upending the "natural order," the execution couldn't be squarer.

Too-cutesy conceits such as Hitch's imagined conversations with serial killer Ed Gein (Michael Wincott) feebly attempt to ground the story in psychological terra firma, while horribly on-the-nose dialogue flatters those viewers who prefer to keep their sense of cinema history on fan-mag frivolous levels.

Hyde Park could have been fawningly ponderous; that it's merely an airy trifle puts it a cut above the usual Oscar bait.

Hellion aims to cut deep, striking a tone that melds the hysterical moralism of Larry Clark’s Kids (1995) with the coming-of-age melancholy of Mud’s Jeff Nichols (also this film’s executive producer).

There’s little of the Church’s perspective in this doc, but you can’t really fault the filmmakers--Mormon leaders refused several overtures to participate. Read more: http://newyork.timeout.com/articles/film/86550/the-mormon-proposition-film-review#ixzz0r2j38wUF

2 Guns quickly degenerates into boilerplate Hollywood sound and fury, complete with a climactic Mexican standoff that revolves around a massive, burning pile of money. Irony, thou art lost.

In a word: Ugh.

You can't help feeling that an initially adventurous movie has had its rough edges sanded away.

It's a competent, by-the-numbers action melodrama.

Yet worst of all is the way the film ultimately reveals its humanistic setup as a lazy pretext to redeem Damon's big-business apologist through the healing power of nature. He's not the only one who should be put out to pasture.

Aside from a few witty Looney Tunes–esque sight gags, such as one hilarious image of a woolly mammoth being swallowed up by the tectonically shifting earth, the stereoscopic visuals are a busy, personality-free digital blur.

Two monologues-one in which the Hobo compares himself to a bear, the other a Travis Bickle–like screed delivered to a roomful of increasingly distressed babies-are damn near Shakespearean. It's a shame the performance is contained in a Z-movie patchwork that's a bit too knowingly repugnant.

Like so many Doors chroniclers, DiCillo can’t help but fall under the singer’s spell; it’s understandable, but frustrating.

Apart from the devastating material itself, some of Lapa’s aesthetic choices are extremely off-putting.

Shorn of its quintessentially American roots, a biting tale of adult extravagance becomes insubstantially tween-aged.

Ultimately, this feels like a hagiographic official portrait that takes the sting out of the proverbial bee.

This is truly De Palma–ville, and the filmmaker’s remake of Alain Corneau’s tale of corporate bloodletting, "Love Crime" (2010), is a welcome return to the carnal shockers that he does so well.