Owen Gleiberman

For Woody, it's looking more and more like the end of his days of whine and neurosis.

Nothing in the two snail-paced hours of Pulse makes close to a shred of sense?

Paterson, Jarmusch’s wee dramatic curio starring Adam Driver as a New Jersey bus driver – his name is Paterson, and he lives in Paterson — is a movie that’s all too aware of how much it diverges from contemporary tempo. That’s because the entire film is a self-conscious anachronism.

The House That Jack Built, however, only rarely achieves that level of disturbing poetic awe. The film lopes along in a way that’s grimly absorbing yet, at the same time, falls short of fully immersive.

A symbol of the lost father, it looms, protects, and also wreaks havoc when a big branch collapses onto the house. Mostly, it's the expression of a movie that's content to stand still.

Red Hook Summer has some fantastic gospel numbers, but as drama it's a casserole that never comes together.

Constructing Albert remains an oddly unsatisfying movie about food that’s so tasteful you can barely imagine what it tastes like.

At once hypnotic and baffling, filled with surreal motifs and symbols, Fire Walk With Me could be the most rarefied teen horror film ever made: It's like "A Nightmare on Elm Street" directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.

The movie has won year-end attention (it made this year’s Oscar documentary short list), and once you let yourself glide onto its wavelength, it’s got a cosmically becalmed addictive quality.

A flat, heebie jeebies thriller.

The aliens aren't particularly scary or funny, and so the joke of watching Smith and Jones crack wise in their faces wears thin.

The new Arthur is a feathery screwball satire, competent on its own terms, yet as the movie went on I found it increasingly hard to separate the character's self-indulgence from that of the actor playing him.

Maddin chops it up into a feature-length antique-bloodsucker video, and the result takes hold neither as dance nor as silent horror dream.

Romeo & Juliet is a series of spectacular production designs posing as a motion picture.

The faux espionage plot, with its winks at terrorism, is really just a convoluted plea for the relevance of precious indie artistes (i.e., Hal Hartley).

20th Century Women is an endless chain of anecdotes, and though many individual moments are winning, the movie as a whole is rudderless. It never achieves an emotional power surge.

The bar for rom-coms is not high, and this one, ludicrous as it often is, inches over the bar. But I would no more call it a good movie than I’d pretend fast food is high in nutrients.

Pucci proves to be one of the most charismatic male ingenues since Johnny Depp.

Vortex doesn’t let us off the hook. Gaspar Noé never does. But if he did, he might transcend his “Behold, you will know the dark side” brand.

It is also glib, shallow, and monotonous, a movie that spends so much time sanctifying its hero that, despite his "innocence," he ends up seeming about as vulnerable as Superman.

Is it any wonder this Nightmare never coalesces? He couldn’t make up his mind about whether to be naughty or nice.

By the end, most moviegoers are liable to see it as much ado about nothing.

If random arty blood thrills are your cup of fear, perhaps you'll enjoy Let the Right One In, a Swedish head-scratcher that has a few creepy images but very little holding them together.

After an hour of inert exposition, a race through Shanghai gooses the movie alive. Then it plunges back into torpor.

Trust, the cult-movie view turns precious and smug.

Sound of Metal is two hours and 10 minutes long, and it moves at a snail’s pace, not because “nothing happens,” but because Marder hasn’t filled in the dramatic interior of what does happen. He has made a movie about deafness that’s at once experiential and too muffled to hear.

A Hero, for all that’s good in it, is a Farhadi movie that speaks to our heads (and sometimes has us scratching them) more than it does our hearts.

Second Best might have made a good stage monologue, but as a film it's overstated and barely baked.

Achieves the near-impossible: It turns the Marquis de Sade into a dullard.

Regrettably, the film's story is so busy yet flat that the effect isn't magical -- it's more like watching the tale of some very enchanted wallpaper.

It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.

The movie is trying so hard to be a crowd-pleaser, in its reach-for-the-synthetic, sitcom-meets-Hallmark heart, that it will likely end up pleasing very few. It’s the definition of a movie that Tom Hanks deserved better than.

The Hustle, fun as some of it is, is a tall fizzy drink in which the fizz never completely rises to the top of the glass.

On the Line would like to be ''Serendipity'' for the Oxy-and-Skechers set, but it feels more like the worst movie Michael J. Fox never made.

“Furiosa,” like “Beyond Thunderdome,” wants to be something loftier than an action blowout, but the movie is naggingly episodic, and though it’s got two indomitable villains, neither one quite becomes the delirious badass you want.

The movie is engineered to be seen as “powerful.” Right now, though, I’d say that he’s an ace director who’s still being undercut by the holes in his screenplays.

The surreal thing is, Zac Efron can't do despair.

The director, Benjamin Kasulke, is a veteran cinematographer who brings the L.A. settings a spangly glow, but he stages too many scenes with generic “punch.” I wish he’d played against the comedy instead of italicizing it, and that he’d come up with some pop-music epiphanies and ditched the film’s cloying synthesizer score.

The trouble with The Flash is that as the film moves forward, it exudes less of that “Back to the Future” playfulness and more of that mythological but arbitrary blockbuster self-importance.

A Jekyll-and-Hyde teen comedy that sounds like a Pauly Shore reject, but Qualls moves his marionette body around with a true clown's effervescence, and he does rubber-faced parodies of youth cool that are just what youth cool deserves.

An amiable time-killer of an espionage comedy.

Feels like an attempt to rebottle the postmodern fizz of Wes Anderson's "Bottle Rocket." I wish instead they'd put a stopper in it.

If you're going to get on the wavelength of Little Miss Sunshine, you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots.

Schrader, in Auto Focus, displayed a devious sense of sin, but in Dominion the Calvinist schoolboy in him insists on trumping sin with guilt.

A celebration of the theater that tends to drag the moment it's out of drag.

There are funny bits in Amy Heckerling's high school sat-ire, but the characters are teen-movie zombies with no discernible personality apart from their trendoid obsessions.

The Peoples Temple congregation was sizably African-American. But when it comes to how those followers turned into a zombie Kool-Aid death cult, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple leaves you with more questions than you went in with.

As an actress, Roberts has more than a great smile. She’s alive on screen — you can practically feel her pulse. But someone should have realized that audiences would be on her side even if every single moment of a movie weren’t calculated to put them there.

The stab at sublimity-by-proxy doesn't take.

Watching MacLaine’s Harriet embrace her life, after spending too much time rejecting it, leads The Last Word to a touching finish. MacLaine has something that shines through and elevates a film like this one. The movie is prefab indie whimsy, but she gives it an afterglow.

Fences has passages of fierce and moving power, but on screen the play comes off as episodic and more than a bit unwieldy.

Another Round is the kind of movie that’s so into its cool concept that it doesn’t sweat the details. Yet the film’s sloppy broadness ends up fighting the Dogme style, which keeps telling us that these people are authentic.

It’s not just a quirky, morose downer of a movie — it’s didactically morose.

You'd have to be a stone not to be affected by My Flesh and Blood, but the director, Jonathan Karsh, merges compassion with voyeurism until you can't tell the difference.

Designed to be "inspirational," yet it shortchanges the complex reality of the lives it makes such a show of saving.

The director has dressed up a classic tale in mesmerizing visual overkill without coming close to its dark heart. [13 Nov 1992, p. 56]

Everything’s Going to Be Great is a ramble, an unconvincing grab bag, a domestic tall tale with too much stuffed into it.

It’s a heady, engrossing, indulgently sprawling profile of a modern athlete in all his glory and contradiction, but it’s also a film that leaves you with more questions than it should.

After Dark, My Sweet is cool and compelling for about 45 minutes, but it has a clinical, hothouse garishness that grows oppressive.

It sounds churlish to argue that a movie can have too much integrity for its own good, but that's exactly the problem with La Ciénaga.

The movie is a feminist lesson instead of what it should have been (and once was): a tough, synthetic, high-gloss entertainment that wears its heart on its lacquered fingernails.

Lee Marvin, it must be said, is terrific as the platoon commander, and Fuller deserves props for the film's one sustained sequence: the D-Day attack, in which the platoon gets pinned on the beach for a hellish eternity.

Will Smith, taking a break from summer sci-fi smashfests, certainly shows a gift for modulation. Far from coasting, he plays a world expert at romance by ratcheting his charm up and down in supple, exacting degrees.

Nope doesn’t have a plot so much as a series of happenings that spill out in an impressionistic and arbitrary way. Logic often takes a back seat, and that has the unfortunate effect of lessening our involvement.

Kutcher is the wrong actor to anchor a psychological freak-out.

Obvious in its comedy, at once overblown and undernourished in its fantasy, Disenchanted, at times, is like a kiddified “Don’t Worry Darling” crossed with “Cinderella Strikes Back.” At others, it’s a light show in search of a movie. The visual effects are all swirling sparkles and sprouting vines, but the real problem is that the film has a pandering impersonality, along with the busy skewed logic of a metaverse.

Sugar Hill wants to tear up our insides, but I’m afraid the movie leaves us hooting with disbelief instead.

The director, Robert Lorenz, stages the action with a convincing ebb and flow, but thanks to an undercooked script what happens in between is mostly boilerplate.

The plot feels less like a realistic dilemma than it does a willed exercise in neorealist catharsis — a way of inviting Western audiences to bask in their materialist ”empathy.”

You want the movie to add up to something, but what it adds up to is another half-diverting, half-satisfying Soderbergh bauble, only this time he’s the ghost in the machine.

From its jokey, one-note characters to its endless baseball montages, A League of Their Own is all flash, all surface.

Project Hail Mary will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.

For all its technical bravado, The Hudsucker Proxy is an unsettling contradiction, a ''whimsical'' fable made by acerbic control freaks. It's a balloon that won't fly.

Coppola, in attempting to elevate the material, doesn’t seem to realize that The Beguiled is, and always was, a pulp psychodrama. Now it’s pulp with the juice squeezed out of it.

An unabashed descendant of "Bring Me the Head." This time, though, it's an entire corpse that gets hauled through the desert, and that's not all that's being toted. So is a hefty parcel of racial correctness.

The movie is merciless sending up "Juno's" self-satisfied hipster gobbledygook, and it's quite funny to see Hannah Montana still promoting her tie-in products as she lies crushed and dying under a meteor.

Its dread has no resonance; it’s a hermetically sealed creep-out that turns into a fake-trippy experience. By all means, go to mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you’re hoping to see a movie that’s as honestly disquieting as it is showy.

The movie takes the form of a lackluster women's-prison picture.

Unfortunately, most of the two-hour documentary is devoted to annotating what the Nazis stole for both their state and personal collections. The movie doesn't dramatize this crime -- it catalogs it. With deadening monotony.

To see this much austere vérité atmosphere propping up this much schlock romanticism is like biting into a blue-cheese canapé that turns out to be a fluffernutter.

The trouble with Eastwood’s attempt to make a thriller with heart is that, in retreating from his darker impulses, he muffles his own voice as a moviemaker.

Goofy, pompous, annoyingly boomer-myopic Fab Four musical.

For two and a half hours, Edel lays out the bombings, kidnappings, and murders committed by the Baader-Meinhof group, which mutated into the RAF. He catches the violently delusional self-righteousness of their antifascist fervor, but as individuals these cultish guerrillas remain opaque.

The movie could have been a lot scarier.

The movie, which should have been 90 minutes long (it’s 116), is lumpy and inflated, it’s sketchy yet a touch grandiose, and it’s full of tersely dramatized scenes that somehow feel overly broad.

In Occupied City, you don’t feel history evolving. You feel it withering, becoming smaller and more abstract, almost bureaucratic in its detachment, until it feels as if the life had been drained out of it.

The Hand of God has some good scenes, but it’s the kind of portrait-of-an-artist drama where you watch the insults, the clashes, the assaultive attitude of it all and you think: Is this what it was actually like for the young Sorrentino growing up in Naples? Or does he simply have an aversion to scenes that don’t hit you over the head

No Sudden Move, for all its pleasures, doesn’t quite make the old seem new again.

Her setups here are so witless and pedestrian that there's no imagination to the crude slapstick punchlines; we're just watching a bland jester pantomime sensory overload.

Asteroid City looks smashing, but as a movie it’s for Anderson die-hards only, and maybe not even too many of them.

The film is so self-conscious it seems to be dictating your every reaction.

It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in The Amateur seems…arbitrary.

Reptile comes on as “smart,” but the movie, for all its sinister-ominous-music atmosphere, is opportunistic enough — or maybe just enough of a consumer product — to swallow its own premise, if not its own tail.

Instead of a full-bodied comic portrait of the coming-out-party set, Metropolitan offers a thin, cartoon version. Then it uses that cartoonishness to make everyone on-screen seem irresistibly cute.

it's a synthetic, rather drab movie, one that seems linked less to experience, or even to fantasy, than to other movies - "Big," of course, and also "E.T.," "Mask," and "Phenomenon."

The animation in Lilo & Stitch has an engaging retro-simple vivacity, and it's nice to see a movie for tots make use of Elvis Presley, but the story is witless and oddly defanged.

As drama, the movie is sustained yet hopeless — it coasts along on the kind of schoolbook-simple, this-is-good-and-this-is-bad pieties Vietnam made obsolete.

It's a tease of a satire that never really follows through on its audacious premise.