Kenneth Turan

A wax-museum movie that is both bland and reverential despite its focus on the great man's love life, Jefferson is hampered by its disconnected protagonist.

If you're in the mood for a hip-hop film with more happy faces than "The Partridge Family," Honey will divert you.

Corpse Bride has more warmth and appeal than its title would indicate, but it is finally more grotesque than good-humored. And, even at 75 minutes, it feels longer than its content can comfortably support.

Any time you're watching a film in which the statistics in the voice-over have more intrinsic drama than the protagonists' lives, you know you're in trouble.

You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.

At once too neat and too messy, but films like this are too rare to leave it at that. Ragged but ambitious, it retains a core of genuine emotion -- this picture is doing the best it can, and although that may not be everything, it ought to count for something.

Even when Griffin has a heart of stone, Tim Robbins is lacking in the knid of ice-cold magnetism that allows a thorough bastard to hold the screen like nobody's business. [10 Apr 1992]

By having Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter play the maniacs' feisty antagonists, the filmmakers seem to believe that they've made a significant feminist statement, the movie's two hours-plus of almost continual sadistic abuse of women notwithstanding. Even in an industry known for self-delusion, that is quite a feat.

While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement - those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced.

If, as someone says in one of Brooks' trademark excellent lines, we all feel we're "one small adjustment away from making our lives work," this film is one small adjustment away as well.

Looked at now (2017), The Graduate is frankly a film you admire more than actually enjoy experiencing. Dark, pitiless and despairing, it plays stranger and more distant to me today than it did back in the day. So much so that one wonders if that was the plan from the beginning, when the fact that its mildly transgressive attitude seemed fresh and new disguised its essential nature.

Hitchcock puts major league star power at the service of its peek-behind-closed-doors premise. But whatever that relationship was like in real life, this is one cinematic portrait of a marriage we could have lived without.

The best possible face that can be put on things is that Big and Little Edie (the mother died two years after the film was released, the daughter is still living) made an unconscious, unsavory, mutually advantageous bargain with the filmmakers: Make us famous and we'll return the favor. In retrospect it's clear that both parties lived up to their parts; only the audience got shortchanged. [14 Aug 1998, p.F20]

Another traditional Japanese production, weakly plotted, woodenly acted and indifferently dubbed.

This effects-loaded extravaganza has more trouble finding its dramatic bearings than the Space Family Robinson has in figuring out where the heck in the universe they are.

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.

Director Taylor Hackford brings an appropriate level of pulpy energy to the telling, and star Kathy Bates... gives a better performance than the film deserves as the grumpy and possibly homicidal title character.

Not only is the story dreamed up by producer Ahmet Zappa even odder than the title indicates, its execution gets increasingly irritating as the film goes on.

Though the new film has some good things, it does not have enough of them to make the third time the charm.

It's a nervy, quasi-documentary scheme that's often successful, perhaps more so than you'd expect for this kind of a hybrid endeavor. But Macdonald's technique eventually turns out to be as distancing as it is involving, paradoxically undercutting the reality as often as it enhances it.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

A solid, often engrossing film that doesn't engage us overall the way Denzel Washington's work does.

Midway is so square, so old-school and old-fashioned, it almost feels avant-garde. Ambiguity is not its goal, nor is nihilism its motivating philosophy. It aims to celebrate heroism, sacrifice, determination and grit, and if you don’t like that it really does not care.

The Wrestler doesn't add up. It's constructed with great care around a lead performance that is everything it could possibly be, but the picture itself is off-putting and disappointing.

Does benefit from Gibson's charisma...Whether it is quite good enough is another question.

A one-trick pony, a movie that has a gift only for making audiences squirm.

Pohlad did not lack for ideas about how he wanted to portray Brian Wilson's life, but he is without the wherewithal to effectively put them into practice.

[Barthes'] measured, distanced style brings a certain stiffness to the proceedings and makes us miss even more than usual the Emma Bovary interior monologue that makes the book so memorable.

Though a definite improvement on the last three abortive Star Wars prequels directed by series creator George Lucas, The Force Awakens is only at its best in fits and starts, its success dependent on who of its mix of franchise veterans and first-timers is on the screen.

Above all this is a film for gluttons for punishment, for those who never ever can get enough of Sylvester Stallone. Everyone else, please leave the building.

Though it has its charms, Monsters, Inc. does not measure up. As a childhood entertainment it is certainly fine, but Pixar's celebrated lure for adults is largely absent.

A potent and unexpected mixture of authenticity and flash -- even if this is what happened on the ground, making it worth our time on screen is just beyond the contortionist abilities of even this most acrobatic of films.

What Surfwise reveals is that the dark side of the surfing doctor was that he could be a terrible tyrant, someone whose controlling, self-centered rigidity limited his children in ways large and small as much as it gave them richer lives.

Drive is a Los Angeles neo-noir, a neon-lit crime story made with lots of visual style. It's a film in love with both traditional noir mythology and ultra-modern violence, a combination that is not ideal.

Though Iron Man is diverting enough in the comic-book-movie mode, there is one thing it doesn't have, and that is dramatic unity. Unlike the irreducible element that is its namesake, Iron Man the movie is an alloy, a combination of several different and disconnected components that don't manage to unite to make a coherent whole.

As well done as much of Selma is, it periodically falls from grace with moments that are either emotionally flat or excessively agitprop in nature. Consistently the most ineffective scenes are those that involve powerful but obstructionist white people, especially the unhelpful trio of Johnson, Alabama Gov. George Wallace (Tim Roth) and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Dylan Baker). The deftness with acting and character that can be this film’s strength simply deserts it here.

Though Waterworld has some haunting underwater visual moments, the film's impact is weakened by flat dialogue, an overemphasis on jokeyness and a plot that, despite all those screenwriters, does not satisfactorily hold together at any number of points.

Chases, crashes and explosions are thick on the land in the second half of this movie, but though they are expertly done, their size, frequency and increasing disconnection from what was once a coherent story leave you feeling pummeled rather than exhilarated.

Becomes unfocused as it stumbles over all the points it wants to make.

Self-conscious about its heroism with portrayals that lean toward the glib and the professionally uplifting, the film milks our sympathies too readily to be emotionally convincing.

An ambitious film that aims to examine the human equations behind the abductions. But for all its good intentions, it's not as subtle as it might be, and it's finally pitched too broadly to achieve the level of emotional truth it aims for.

That bland, opaque quality is a disadvantage here; whatever else [Depp] is capable of, making audiences feel his pain is not at the top of the list.

It's a film of exceptional technical virtuosity that could have used some help in the dramatic department.

By choosing to bludgeon the audience with ever-worsening tales of woe, Once Were Warriors paradoxically blunts its power, though the truth is that people may be too shell-shocked to notice. [03 Mar 1995, p.F1]

Wading through blood is too much of a price to pay for Sugar Hill’s pluses, and it’s a shame the movie business has made it difficult for them to be experienced any other way.

A performer of formidable self-absorption, Johnston has inspired a film with the same trait, and the results are about what you might expect.

Though amusing enough to avoid absolutely drowning in schmaltz, it's sad to see a film with potential lose its way in the late innings.

If The Hudsucker Proxy is a triumph, it is a zombie one. Too cold, too elegant, too perfect, more an exhibit in a cinema museum than a flesh-and-blood film, "Proxy's" highly polished surface leaves barely any space for an audience's emotional connection. [11 Mar 1994, p.1]

A rehash of plot conventions from a slew of mismatched movies. A Perfect World will remind you of any number of previous films, but almost everything it attempts to do was done better the last time around.

A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.

A tragedy devastating to experience can feel generic when transferred to the screen, and that, despite everyone's best intentions and an outstanding performance by Nicole Kidman, is what happens with Rabbit Hole.

Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the "Royal" script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America's most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. As my mother used to say, too good is no good.

But whenever a film has hysteria as its subject, as this one does, the danger exists that it will become hysterical itself, and “The Crucible,” all its promise notwithstanding, falls into that trap with a demoralizing thud. Rife with screaming fits and wild-eyed rantings, this film is too frantic to be involving, too much an outpost of bedlam to be believable.

Comes off as convincing but never compelling. There's a ponderous quality to it, as if it's forever clearing its throat to say something of value that doesn't quite get articulated.

Though one enjoys and appreciates Rush for what it is, it does not thrill the blood the way we have the right to expect a film like this to do.

In its determination to overdo sure-fire material, Billy Elliot becomes as impossible to wholeheartedly embrace as it is to completely reject.

Rather than a fresh breeze, it's the stale air of gilded calculation, the uncomfortable feeling that things are excessively just so, that overhangs much that is genuinely appealing about this film.

The longer it goes, the more frustrating it becomes, as Bar Lev declines to come down on one side or the other.

A measured, decorous, at times pat film that manages to be quietly moving because it touches on something real.

Le Week-End is a sour and misanthropic film masquerading as an honest and sensitive romance. A painful and unremittingly bleak look at a difficult marriage, it wants us to sit through a range of domestic horrors without offering much of anything as a reward.

Whenever The Commitments threatens to get bogged down in its own problems, Parker is savvy enough to pull it back with more of that invigorating music on the soundtrack. When that band starts to sing, the screen fills with genuine life, and that is too rare a commodity for anyone to second-guess for long. [14 Aug 1991, p.F1]

Brief enough, clocking in at 83 minutes, but its story is too predictable to make an impact even in such a short space. Unlike "Toy Story," the dialogue here, written by Todd Alcott and Chris & Paul Weitz, is pro forma all the way.

Instead of pushing for tough answers to difficult questions, this film is content to mythologize Thompson's bad-boy behavior, celebrating things like his willingness to drink a bottle of bourbon a day and go hunting with a submachine gun.

Turns into a film that is too ostentatiously pleased with itself, so in love with its own cleverness it doesn't notice it's darn near worn you out.

Life, however, cannot be lived entirely on stage, and once the characters have to take off their thongs and return to their real lives, the film goes nowhere that is either interesting, involving or surprising.

Alternately riveting and wearying, up-to-the-minute relevant as well as self-mythologizingly self-indulgent — as much of a heroic origins story as anything out of the Marvel factory — Straight Outta Compton ends up juggling more story lines and moods than it can handle.

Mulan has its accomplishments, but unlike the best of Disney's output, it comes off as more manufactured than magical.

Keeps its filmmakers behind the camera and does without the personality-driven "Fahrenheit's" sarcastic sense of humor.

It would be nice to say that One Fine Day lives happily ever after, but it's difficult to take as much pleasure in the finished product as the casting anticipates. Directed by Michael Hoffman, this film does not care to be original, falling back on cookie-cutter plot elements that give the finished product an unbecoming mechanical sheen. [20 Dec 1996, p.F1]

Star Routh's presence and the joys of flight keep Superman Returns alive, but all those missteps dog its heels, holding it back like little touches of Kryptonite in the night.

Though this story couldn't mean more to Jolie, she hasn't been able to make it mean as much to us. Scrupulous and perhaps constrained at the thought of overdoing things, Jolie has allowed the enormity of the story to get the best of her, creating a film that is more disturbing than moving.

But bearing witness can be a complex thing and in its concern to illuminate Sarajevo is prone to overkill, to trying too hard to squeeze in every troubling wartime incident.

This melding of two cinematic sensibilities, though effective at moments, is finally not as exciting or involving as it we'd like it to be.

Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.

There is more to admire in A Beautiful Mind than you might suspect, but less than its creators believe. When the film does succeed, it almost seems to do so despite itself.

Dances on the edge of flat-lining just like the DOAs that are Frank's stock-in-trade.

Without real dialogue and believable connections between actors, Evita is limited in its effectiveness, and all the crying for Argentina in the world can't change that.

The film throws so much ersatz cleverness and overdone emotion at the audience that we end up more worn out than entertained.

As frigid as its name. Burdened with a story of some of the world's least interesting people going through a holiday crisis, director Ang Lee and screenwriter James Schamus get as close as any creative team could to making matters involving, but the task is finally too much for them.

It finally can't transcend the limitations inherent in being no more than a way station in an epic journey, a journey whose cinematic conclusion is several years away.

Director Paul Anderson, whose last film was "Mortal Kombat," well knows how to build suspense and increase tension. But counterbalancing all of that is Event Horizon's position as a sci-fi splatter film, intent on drenching the screen in blood and gore whenever possible. [15Aug1997 Pg 16]

This film feels completely haphazard, thrown together without much concern for organizing intelligence.

This largely Spanish-language film brings on the waterworks because its core story is undeniably affecting. The whole movie, however, would be more convincing if the elements around that vital core were more multidimensional and less contrived.

Not without its funny moments, much of Birdcage seems pro forma and predictable. What felt original in 1978 is no longer half so inspired.

A forced march toward certain disaster, a scenario only passionate believers in predestination are likely to savor.

This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.

It's an interesting take, and it always holds our interest, but it's finally too ham-fisted to be a completely winning one.

It shows promise but finally hits things so hard, both literally and metaphorically, that it's hard not to feel pummeled yourself by the time it's over.

Ross' missive is earnest and well-intentioned, but it's difficult not to feel that his film both runs on too long and overreaches its dramatic resources in its attempt to deliver it.

When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he's been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.

Clever and amusing though it often is, “Murder” is also Allen’s whiniest film to date, and your appreciation of its pleasures will fluctuate according to your tolerance for his Angst .

Despite the linked advantages of generous helpings of the man's high octane music and a star performance by Chadwick Boseman that's little short of heroic, Get on Up is more frustrating than fulfilling, a disjointed film that suffers from having a more ambitious plan than it's got the ability to execute.

Cinéma vérité all the way, a classic fly-on-the-wall documentary that follows Bannon for about a year as he flies hither and yon on private jets, taking meetings, bolstering supporters and attempting to turn his brand of fervent nationalism into a global movement.

Features an aggressive, in-your-face romanticism that's noticeably lacking in genuine warmth. While its story of lonely misfits searching for love has appealing moments, more often it turns into an overbearing fable overburdened with fake joie de vivre.

It starts out like a house afire, but by the time it's over we're the ones feeling burned. A slick heist tale with more twists than sense, this is one movie that ends up outsmarting itself.

"I am epic, hear me roar" is what the lion-centered The Ghost and the Darkness would have you believe. The reality is more like an acceptably loud noise than a true roar, but so few films venture into the old-fashioned world of historical action adventures that even a loud noise is a welcome sound. [11 Oct 1996, p.F16]