Lawrence Toppman

As a film, it's flabby and utterly predictable.

If this project is some kind of huge in-joke, I’m willing to admit I didn’t get it. But if I did get it (and I’m afraid I did), it’s a huge disappointment.

The assault is against our ears, as the soundtrack pours forth a stream of thrash and Goth music.

If they decided not to give us Camelot, did they have to leave us with so Camelittle?

I'm afraid it just stinks.

Speaking of sounding Southern, I have to admit that the accents didn't match, and half the actors couldn't even do accents. But since we all sound alike down here, that's no big deal.

A three-hour-and-10-minute exercise in slight characterization, pointlessly showy editing and vapid plotting.

Slater narrates as if reading a restaurant menu. Reid seems to have learned each long sentence in segments, so she wouldn't be overtaxed.

Sandler proves even a hardened Israeli secret service agent can be an imbecilic juvenile.

Writer Guillermo Arriaga earns most of the blame. He played similar games with narrative in the vastly better "Amores Perros" and "21 Grams," jumping back and forth in time to show relationships among subplots and characters. But "Burials" barely has one plot.

Studios can release movies even more insultingly dumb, crudely assembled and cheaply produced than this one, though such an achievement will require some effort.

Wilson brings low-wattage amiability to his part, as always. Hudson's mismatched with him but tries to set him afire.

It's ploddingly directed, indifferently acted and insufficiently frightening.

I think Baumbach and Gerwig mean Brooke to be a life-affirming free spirit who can’t find a place in our mercenary world. Instead, she comes off as selfish, rude, deluded, irresponsible and mean-spirited.

Here’s something I never expected to say, something I doubt I’d have believed if someone else had said it to me: Martin Scorsese can make a three-hour movie without one fresh perspective or compelling character from end to end. The proof, for three agonizing hours, can be found in The Wolf of Wall Street.

Everything here has been done better in other books, other movies. The lone remarkable thing is the level of violence, which exposes the cowardice and hypocrisy of the Motion Picture Association of America's ratings system.

It's the poster child for bad taste, not to mention bad construction.

As Disney-fied as "Pinocchio," barely challenging the images Americans have treasured for 150 years.

For all the talk about passion, the main feeling Youth conveys is self-pity.

The storytelling is inept and illogical.

Hamlet has audacity, intelligence, a provocative visual and musical style, virtually no poetry, a garbled story line weakened by savage cutting of the play, and a great yawning hole where a Hamlet ought to be.

Kilmer is adequate, though he's always more interesting when allowed to play a character with a dark side; Patterson's too squeaky-clean for Kilmer to exploit the most useful part of his range. [12 Oct 1996, p.4G]

Allen's laziness is startling, even in so mechanical a filmmaker. He uses a monotonous narrator to tell us what the characters think and do, though he then shows them performing the actions that have just been described.

Movies can certainly be worse than bad sitcoms, and this is one of them.

Bertino directs at a funereal pace. Speedman remains comatose, though Tyler flickers fitfully to life. The mournful look on her face suggests she's remembering the days when she was given more psychologically complex scripts, such as "Armageddon."

This movie is made by and for people who don't care about good storytelling.

Whenever the music subsides and the characters speak the Coens' lines, the film turns back into mush.

Spike Lee's films have been provocative, blunt, thoughtful, misguided, daring, sentimental, funny, honest and silly. But 25th Hour earns the director two new adjectives: irrelevant and tedious.

The problem isn't that Tarantino's in love with death; it's that he's deadly dull. Even "Natural Born Killers" made a stab at social commentary and satire of America?s celebrity-mad media. Kill Bill merely giggles through gore and asks you to smile at its style.

Should appeal to anyone who likes films as mushy and unsurprising as baby food.

It's "Braveheart" without historical significance and "Passion" without spirituality, though it dabbles in both, and it represents as brazen an act of career suicide as I can recall from a star director. If he were a first-timer, he'd never work again.

A punch-drunk lightweight. Inside the ring, it lands some forceful punches. Outside the ring, it stumbles around, swinging wildly at nothing, until it collapses.

It's a disconnected, implausible story that aims for a tone of magic realism and falls short on both counts.

It's as French as a half-smoked Gauloise and, like a half-smoked Gauloise, it stinks.

Everything about the film seems to have been done on the cheap. The music sounds like it came from a high school band.

Martin, who plays Clouseau and wrote the script with Len Blum, has completely mishandled the character.

Solaris is a film where people...often...speak... like... this, and the camera moves slowly across sterile interiors.

I don't know if the new movie is Smith's weakest. It's certainly his most disposable, a warmed-over hash of jokes that will have Mewes fans rolling with laughter and the rest of us rolling our eyes in disbelief.

The picture brims over with ideas - good ones, silly ones, maudlin ones, witty ones, absurd ones - and they bump up against each other like ingredients in a vast stewpot that never comes to a continuous boil.

Chaplin's pathos was (at its best) touched with irony. Lane's isn't. [19 Jan 1990, p.68]

If you really must see Miami Vice (and you mustn't), buy a ticket to something better, then slip into "Vice" at the 95-minute mark and watch the last third of the movie. No one involved will profit by your curiosity, and you won't miss a thing of importance.

“Star Wars” movies have been dazzling, infuriating, heartbreaking, silly, witty, convoluted, gripping and overblown. But until Rogue One: A Star Wars story, I don’t think “dull” was the most appropriate adjective.

I hope his life was less dull than the movie he's made from it.

"I didn't write this." In heaven, Graham Greene is mumbling those same words over and over right now.

Angelina Jolie is definitely worth her salt as an action hero, but Salt is never worth its Angelina Jolie.

The year's least necessary and most unimaginative remake slogs half-heartedly to its pre-destined conclusion without making a ripple.

Writer-director Coppola and her production team have gotten the look of the late 18th century right...But they've gotten almost everything else wrong.

Ambiguity can enrich a movie, but artists abdicate their responsibilities if they don't take a stance of any kind.

The outcome is alternately unsatisfying, meaningless, contradictory and laughable.

No movie this year will better embody Macbeth's description of life itself: "a tale ... full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Heavy-handed symbolism permeates the picture, down to the leading lady's name.

Larry Clark's documentary-like direction and Harmony Korine's undeviatingly dull screenplay make it possible to believe these useless lumps of flesh exist. [1 Sept 1995, p.3F]

The film is a saggy, oddly mean-spirited takeoff of "Walk the Line."

The hot comic du jour wants to startle us but is merely startlingly dull.

A brazen title card declares this " true story." (Wow, not even "based on.") However many facts may be accurate, the movie feels contrived, with climax piled upon climax.

Director Chris Robinson moves his camera aimlessly, cutting in and out of speeches as if he were just as bored as I.

Roberts, perhaps the nation's most fresh-faced actress five or six years ago, now seems to be a pair of tear ducts mounted atop a thousand-watt smile. Whether anything is going on behind that assembly remains to be seen, but there's not much proof here. [4 Aug 1995, p.1F]

Isn't satisfying or surprising. It doesn't even make sense from scene to scene.

Goes awry within moments and never gets on track. The scripters and director Harold Ramis have no idea whether to aim for cynical humor, film-noir romance or post-crime tension, so they miss all three targets completely.

It's almost impossible for a movie to go irrevocably wrong during the opening credits, but the ceaselessly irritating The Jane Austen Book Club does just that.

The worst thing about the picture is that the people involved all seem to realize it's generic.

At the center of the film, like a man trying to pull a donkey out of a peat bog, stands Craig: inexpressive, uninflected and obviously tired. Perhaps he’s trying to play a chap who never allows himself access to his emotions, for fear loved ones may be snatched away, but he just looks like an actor who wishes he could quit his job.

Long before this interminable film reaches its bogus finale, you'll realize that the people in it aren't real.

Mostly, you get a pain in the head from the assault on your senses and déjà vu as thick as heartburn after an anchovy pizza.

Jokes don’t pay off at all or take so long to do so that they lose their snap.

The movie that's meant to be his (Apatow) most personal turns out to be his most dully generic.

This stale, redundant story goes round in the same tight circles, revealing one piddling new secret and containing one unconvincing change of character.

Solace is especially frustrating when it moves down interesting paths, then stops.

I once said I'd watch Chiwetel Ejiofor act in any piece of disposable fluff, and now I have.

The sequel doesn't develop the characters, interject any warmth into its frenetic story or take us anywhere we haven't been.

The movie satisfies a basic need to see pageantry, pomp and pennants flying over the Cornish countryside. But if you're expecting a story that sticks to the Arthurian legend, this is Scam-a-lot. [07 Jul 1995, p.1F]

Dark Blue proves again what a remarkable actor Denzel Washington is. Too bad he's not in it.

Cowardice and cliché - not a tasty combination.

Harsh Times contains exactly 30 seconds of novelty.

Feeble, vapid picture.

The film's as chaotic and heavy-handed as "Summer of Sam" without the same sense of harsh reality.

Alas, this is one of those movies where a clever character must suddenly have an attack of doltishness for the plot to proceed, and Spader becomes the victim of bad writing. [27 Sept 1996, p.5E]

The Truth About Charlie...is that this "Charade" remake is a lumpen bore.

What's the message: that women must remain vigilant about poundage to keep husbands from chasing taut-thighed secretaries? That's a charitable Christmas thought.

If you get past the preposterous hypothesis at the start of Return to Me, you'll find a passably pleasant, utterly bland romantic comedy without a surprise to its 110 minutes.

Rarely connects with reality.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

Plotting has never been writer-director Allen’s strong point, and the story falls apart. It depends on coincidences that are unlikely individually and ridiculous together.

There's nothing more painful than watching comics tank, and Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World is a 95-minute wince.

Is Josh Hartnett attracted to cinematic bombs, or do movies merely self-destruct once he signs on as the leading man?

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.

Director David Gordon Green steers a clumsy course between crass humor and sudden drama.

Without a plausible script, crisp dialogue or rounded characters, the majority of the picture will sag gracelessly.

The plot's as thin as a debutante's cigarette case.

A frantic, heartless hodgepodge of pieces from James Bond movies, Indiana Jones adventures, "Star Wars" and half a dozen legends.

It's a fable that descends rapidly into nonsense.

To call the film “unwatchable” is to unfairly insult Josée Deshaies; his lush cinematography delights the eye when the camera roams around Saint Laurent’s workrooms. But “incomprehensible,” “interminable” and “immaterial” all apply.

The final sad joke is this: Weitz took a wonderful story about the danger of severing a soul from its otherwise empty body and did that very thing to his source.

The movie's weirdness isn't organic; it's imposed, like barber-pole stripes painted on a prison wall.

The film seems almost intentionally bad in most ways, as if Gilliam were expressing a suicide wish for his directing career.

Writers John Brancato and Michael Ferris must figure the blinking lights on Angela's screen will cloud our brains. They ask us to ignore plotholes the size of craters... Nor does director Irwin Winkler shoot scenes suspensefully. [28 July 1995, p.9F]