Owen Gleiberman

In Die Hard With a Vengeance, McTiernan stages individual sequences with great finesse (there's a terrific bit with Willis and five thugs in an elevator), yet they don't add up to a taut, dread-ridden whole.

Since Foster plays warming-up-for-a-straitjacket panic with a clenched intensity rare to behold in a Hollywood actress, I, for one, was rooting for the radical -- that is, nuthouse -- option.

Selby’s book is considered a gutbucket classic of the post-Beat era, but its hellish vision was, in part, a reaction to the stifling postwar optimism of ’50s America. Now, it seems overdone — especially when recreated with this much hyperbolic showmanship. Last Exit to Brooklyn is so relentless it’s not of this world.

What makes all of this ''fun,'' instead of dark or threatening, is that the victim was an idiot who leered at the class teases with horny glee.

Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.

Skillfully made, yet the film would have been better if it had tapped a bit of that Walken madness.

There’s every indication that director John Carpenter (Halloween) was trying for more than another rinky-dink Chevy Chase comedy. Except for the effects, though, Memoirs of an Invisible Man comes disappointingly close to being just that.

More noteworthy for its intentions than its execution.

The boys-in-the-Italian-hood clichés were penned by "Sopranos" scribe Terence Winter, so they have snap, if not freshness.

Petersen gives us monumental images of waves and rain and wind, but the editing is so choppy that the images don't build and crest.

Most of the movie feels like Farrell's performance: deeply sincere, and more showy than convincing.

It doesn't take long for the film to devolve into a ludicrously far-fetched Celebrity Death Wish.

The trouble with Death Becomes Her isn’t that its comic vision is too dark but that it has no shadings, no acerbic glee. Zemeckis gives nastiness such a hard sell he forgets to take any delight in it.

Still, just about everything in Goldeneye, from its rote nuclear-weapon-in-space plot to the recitation of lines that sound like they're being read off stone tablets (''Shaken, not stirred!''), has been served up with a thirdhand generic competence that's more wearying than it is exhilarating.

It's a jerry-built kick-ass insult machine assembled entirely out of secondhand parts.

As Nomi, Elizabeth Berkley has exactly two emotions -- hot and bothered -- but her party-doll blowsiness works for the picture.

Winfrey's performance is full of stoic anger, and individual moments have ferocity and pull, yet you're always aware of them as moments.

The action climax just goes on and on, making The Lone Ranger the sort of movie that delivers too much too late and still manages to make it feel like too little.

Our senses may be the stuff of drama, but not when they're treated as nice and neat as this.

Such a bluntly impersonal thriller that the title might almost be describing the production honcho who greenlighted yet another Die Hard clone.

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.

There’s a real spark to Connery’s performance, but except for that Kaufman has produced a middling contradiction, a thriller too polite to hit its target.

Director Tina Gordon Chism keeps the innocuous class-meets-crass jokes bubbling, and the actors are amiable, but Peeples often seems to want to turn these characters into benignly goofy role models. Maybe that's why the basic comic collision never explodes.

The events may be accurate, but Mesrine is so episodic that it's slightly maddening to watch.

The film forgets that Bond's most dangerous actions have always been his quietest ones, in which he uses his charisma to turn his enemies against themselves.

It's a painstakingly correct update of what is, let's face it, one of the least culturally correct love stories ever to be mythologized by Hollywood.

Where Craven and his director, Alexandre Aja, may have miscalculated is in making the genetically damaged demons, with their flesh-potato foreheads and minimal verbal skills, into monster action figures who take vengeance on the world that created them. They're not scary because they're victims themselves.

Just cryptic enough to keep you guessing, and for some viewers that may qualify as a night out. But Mamet's gamesmanship was more fun when it was less eager to look important.

It hardly helps, of course, to have no characters to root for. What is it about Pierce Brosnan? He's got dimples, grace, charm; he's not a movie star, exactly -- he looks as if he should be hosting something.

Starts high, gradually bogs down, then dies.

Jumanji is cardboard Spielberg, a B-movie scrap heap of spare parts lifted from "Jurassic Park" and "Gremlins" and "Back to the Future".

Carpenter never was the filmmaker his cult claimed him to be, but in Escape From L.A., he at least has the instinct to keep his hero moving, like some leather-biker Candide.

Lust, Caution wants us to feel the erotic ping of buttoned-up people ripping open those buttons, but too often it's the film's drama that's under wraps.

Collapses into the most generic sort of teen movie-ville, just at the moment it's convinced you that its lightly appealing stars are capable of better.

Glazed over by its worship of Che Guevara.

Westerns, even offbeat ones, demand a lean clarity that Van Peebles, at this point, lacks the discipline to establish.

A big, dumb, crude, noisy, goose-the-audience bash and proud of it. It's not nearly as unsettling as ''28 Days Later.''

One Missed Call is so unoriginal that the movie could almost be a parody of J-horror tropes, yet Miike, for a while at least, stages it with a dread-soaked visual flair that allows you to enjoy being manipulated.

Guess Who, with its PG-13 putdowns, turns into the kind of love story that Hollywood feels most comfortable with: a buddy movie, salt-and-pepper variety. All that's missing is the cop car.

Lawrence, as always, exerts the appeal of a con man too lightweight to buy into his own con. He'd be funnier, though, if he didn't insist on being the only funny thing in the room.

It's no exaggeration to say that the actors have less personality than the pipes, nail guns, grinding gears, decaying beams, and slowly spreading oil spills that are fused, with a kind of empty-dread technical precision, into Rube Goldberg torture devices.

Proof that a thriller can be sleekly shot, expertly cast, paced with crisp professionalism...and still be a letdown if its twists and turns hold no more surprise than yesterday's weather report.

A movie in which laughter and self-exploitation merge into jolly soft-porn ''empowerment.''

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.

Strenous yet flat, The Brothers Grimm is a let's-see-what-sticks spectacle that, coming from Terry Gilliam, is more grim than "Grimm."

Turns out to be the portrait of a serial yo-yo dieter, an impression enhanced by the 60 year old Berlin, who suggests less a former depraved scenester than a calorie compulsive Martha Stewart grown bored with good taste.

Scrappy and rambling and overly earnest.

By the time Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is over, it may send more than a few viewers scurrying off to the bookstore. They'll surely want to see what all the fuss was about.

This is, after all, not just Robert Redford. It's Redford in the nobly burnished self-mythologic perfection of his late-middle-aged golden god-ness.

The movie is funny when it's nasty, as when Ron and Veronica trade insults at the anchor desk. Most of the time, though, it's not nasty enough.

As a love-jones soap opera, Brown Sugar feeds right into Dre's nostalgic crankiness.

The House of Sand's director, Andrucha Waddington, lays on the Awesome Visual Poetry and throws in a welter of story gimmicks, but it's all a bit too fancifully arid.

The film keeps throwing things at you: drunk scenes, adultery scenes, "All About Eve" rise-of-the-young-rival scenes. Yet despite the presence of some appealing actors, none of it quite adds up.

The essential spark of surprise is missing. The mechanics of ''breathless'' suspense are blanketed by an atmosphere of creeping caution.

A movie in which the easy socio-racial paradoxes have been diagrammed with more care than the relationships

Trying for a dark-toned comedy of familial mishap, Keaton dips into the sentimental fraudulence.

A melancholy romance that has the distinction of being the first film set among San Francisco dotcommers that knows it's about the end of the boom.

Native Son, after its promising first half, leaves you dispirited, because it’s a movie where hope gets snuffed by a stacked deck.

The Neon Demon is a tease. It starts off as a relatively scannable, user-friendly thriller, but it turns out to be a movie made by a macabre surrealist gross-out prankster.

After the Hunt has been made with a fair amount of craft and intrigue, but it’s also a weirdly muddled experience — a tale that’s tense and compelling at times, but dotted with contrivances and too many vague unanswered questions. That’s why, in the end, it’s a less than satisfying movie.

Kore-eda’s attitude toward what he’s showing us is so lackluster and noncommittal that it’s hard to know how to react to any of it.

This is the sort of movie in which everyone on screen is swathed in gauzy benevolence. You practically have time to say a prayer in the dead spaces between lines.

Glum and depersonalized, as if Eastwood couldn't muster the energy to guide us through this maze of improbable twists. [14 Feb 1997, p. 39]

Lacks even the good, guilty setup of "I Know What You Did Last Summer" -- the sense that the heroes are fleeing the consequences of their own crime.

The movie is "Star Wars" with martial arts, plus a touch of "The Last Emperor." Technically, it's not badly done; I enjoyed the physical clash of elements, the water balls rising like sculpture in the air.

The Wrong Missy is a harmless dumb-meets-smart-mouth comedy that doesn’t necessarily feed your appetite for more Netflix throwaways. But it does make you want to see Lauren Lapkus’s next act.

A romantic comedy with all the confectionary value of one of those watery diet shakes; it practically evaporates while you're watching it.

In the occasionally funny but mostly facile '80s-style culture-clash comedy Parental Guidance, Billy Crystal, who now resembles a very cute puffer fish, plays Artie Decker.

It lopes along, merrily but a bit slack, always reminding you of the earlier Guest films, and then it works up a bit of a fizz in the competition.

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.

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.

There isn't much to the characters in this morose thriller.

As an animated entertainment, The Nut Job 2 lacks several key factors: memorable characters, a fun story, jokes that will appeal to adults as well as little kids. But one thing it does not lack is visual momentum.

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

This is just cut-rate, generic daughter of Indy Jones hokum.

Finding Steve McQueen is a ramshackle indie heist drama that has a little bit (but not much) to do with Steve McQueen.

This is very much a ''woman's picture,'' driven by a twin rudder of anxiety and empowerment.

But when it comes to that great puppy pilgrimage, the movie, which was written and produced by John Hughes, falls astoundingly flat.

By the end of Boss Level, you may feel a lot like Pulver. Putting “Groundhog Day” on action steroids, the film has a patina of cleverness that’s pleasing enough, but you’ve seen it before. And you’ll see it again.

Deliberately quaint and old-fashioned, a once-over-slightly exercise in nostalgic wonder directed by the British-born great-grandson of H.G. Wells, who treats the spirit of his ancestor's novel with literal-minded fealty.

There's only one place that a movie like this one can possibly be heading, and that's to a demagogic blowout of violent, femme-power payback. Enough gets there by way of far too many tedious detours.

Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver is a storytelling mediocrity, but as spectacle it has tumult and rhythm.

All The Distinguished Gentleman has is Eddie Murphy doing his best to be the life of the party. By the end of the movie you wish he would just go to another party.

The Golden Compass is a snowbound mystical-whizbang kiddie ride that hovers somewhere between the loopy and the lugubrious.

The trouble with the movie, apart from its rather monotonous dourness of tone, is that everyone in the family, especially the reformed-delinquent high school son (Penn Badgley), comes off as tougher, smarter, and quicker on the draw than the stepfather who's supposed to be outfoxing them.

What's going on is: hunks on horsies.

It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.

Wish self-consciously packs 85 years of animated magic into a portable Disney fable. Does that make it a summation or a pastiche? A movie marbled with pop history or overstuffed with Easter eggs? One that launches the next Disney century or is stuck in the last one? Maybe all of the above.

It has no twistiness or intrigue, and none of the juicy anthro-underworld detail that Koppelman and Levien brought to their screenplay for the tricky, enjoyable ''Rounders.''

As the vamps, Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson might be posing for a fashion spread with just one note to play -- gorgeous high-bitch mockery.

Overtones are about all there is to Poison Ivy. The movie isn’t smart, but it never achieves true sleaziness either.

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.

Fourth of July is a trifle, and a facile, easy-to-watch one. But what it’s offering under the surface feels, in part, like a clandestine defense of Louis C.K.’s transgressions. In about 45 minutes, the family swings from being louts to saints. That’s supposed to be a lesson to us all. It’s not a convincing one.

There's a certain breed of annoying indie movie in which a character's shyness is portrayed in a manner so coy that it becomes a reverse form of exhibitionism. Jump Tomorrow is that kind of movie.

Isn't coherent, exactly, but what dripping-ghoul horror movie is these days? The new rule is, It's not hip to make sense when you're raising hell.

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.

On some level, every “Paranormal Activity” film is about monsters caught on camera, but in this one the demons remain scariest when they’re sight unseen

What you experience isn’t the book, exactly; it’s the strenuous creative labor that went into adapting it. What cast a winding spell on the page has become an occasionally compelling but mostly labored live-action illustration.

The mood is low-key and naturalistic, yet a streak of trippy weirdness keeps intruding. And here’s the thing: The weird parts don’t add up. That’s likely by design, but that doesn’t make it good.

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.

The best thing about it is Claire Foy's performance as the seething, caged is-she-a-witch?. Foy, like a Brit Kristen Stewart, has an entrancing sparkle of disdain.

As the checkout girl everyone's got a crush on, Natalie Portman makes a winsome return to her "Garden State" gawkiness.

The star hasn’t lost his gift for making sadism seem impish. After a while, however, you may notice that the film’s mayhem is accomplished almost entirely through editing.

Land of the Lost has stray amusing tidbits, but overall it leaves you feeling splattered.

The film isn’t a dud — it “delivers the goods” in a certain reductive, baseline action-fanboy way. Yet Upgrade is the sort of movie that thinks it’s more ingenious than it is, starting with the premise, which is a semi-catchy, semi-stupido hoot in a way that the movie couldn’t have completely intended.

This makes for a friendly romp, and also a dull one.

Anxiety is a fair response to a midlife crisis, but that hardly means that we want to see the heroine of a movie spend scene after scene trapped in a nervous dither of indecision. That's exactly what happens in Lucia, Lucia.

The Tomorrow War is a big, dumb, sometimes tedious, sometimes fun civilization-vs.-aliens showdown.

Really, about all that unifies the movie is its inclination to turn little people's dreams into limply ''affectionate'' camp.

The Lucky One doesn't have the schlock rapture of "The Notebook" (the one Sparks adaptation that has really worked). The trouble with the movie isn't that it's too girly-swoony; it's that it tries to achieve emotion through glowy sunsets and a paint-by-numbers script.

Has the look of a great fairy tale -- all that's missing is the tale.

No matter how much you want to like the film, something is missing: a spark, a shimmer, a thrust of discovery.

As long as Norton plays Harlan as a modern-day Joe Buck, a kind of four-in-the-afternoon cowboy, we're drawn by his waltz of innocence and vagueness. But Down in the Valley turns out to be one of those films with a thick, gummy overlay of Western ''mythology.''

When someone finally make that great drama about our national addictions, it will need to be a more complex horror film. This one is a little too much “Alien Invaders,” not enough “They Came From Within.”

Has the dubious distinction of being just about the mildest porno comedy ever made. It's like something the teenage Pedro Almodóvar might have written to shock his 10th-grade creative writing teacher.

In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won’t go thud.

The best bits are incidental: Vaughn's chats with Jon Favreau as his bartender buddy, which are delightful interludes of jostling ego, and Judy Davis, looking like Anna Wintour redesigned by Tim Burton as an undead marionette, laying down the law as Aniston's boss.

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.

The umpteenth recycled shocker about a mystical dark child with an aura of disaster.

Theron is an arresting image, but, like everything else in Aeon Flux, she's stranded in a trashy and derivative glum zone of fashion-runway fascism.

The oddity of the movie — and this is baked into the way Eastwood conceived it, sticking to the facts and not over-hyping anything — is that this vision of real-life heroism is so much less charged than the Hollywood version might be that it often feels as if a dramatic spark plug is missing.

Levine, who wrote the script, knows how to stage an energized intellectual battle, but adapting “The Blue Angel” to a 21st-century setting turns out to be a distinctly musty and unrewarding idea.

A genially cruddy B movie can sometimes go places - sort of - that bigger movies won't.

The movie, make no mistake, is a genial throwaway that skitters through incidents with a G-rated innocuousness that makes it perfect for a very pint-sized demo. Yet the design of it is captivating, and so, in a minor way, is the affection with which the film’s director, Ryan Crego, embraces childhood things.

An Officer and a Spy has a this-happened-and-then-this-happened quality. And that’s why the movie, beneath the two-dimensional jauntiness of its acting and the period vividness of its sets and costumes, feels more dutiful than riveting.

The trouble with The Truth About Charlie is that it really is after the truth about Charlie, a character we could hardly give a damn about. The only charade is the illusion that we might actually be entertained.

When we finally do see what happened, it's a genuine shock, a nightmare vision of a hedonist who forged his own hell.

A feel-good movie that never stops feeling good. The film is based on a true story (it was adapted from a nonfiction best-seller by Michael Lewis), but you never feel that Hancock has honestly captured what's true about it.

It now takes more than it once did to shock us, and Back Roads wants to do just that, but the effect, in this case, is more audacious than it is convincing.

Deep Water isn’t terrible for what it is, but what it is is disaster product.

As it is, The Mechanic is ham-fisted pulp, like Robert Rodriguez's "Machete" taking itself seriously.

“Stormy” shows you what the scandal looks like from inside the sensationalist bubble of fame, and by the end of the film you may be a little bit ashamed of us all.

The film, devising events that led up to his mysterious death in 1849, is also the most gruesomely literal-minded of period detective stories.

Far and Away looks like an epic, but it lacks flavor and texture. It's so predigested there's nothing left to chew on.

It’s like watching a romantic comedy while strapped to a roller-coaster with a VR headset on. Jungle Cruise is at once a love story, a made-for-4DX action movie, a “Pirates of the Caribbean”-style fairy tale featuring a ghostly conquistador (Edgar Ramirez) and his pewter-armored henchman with digital snakes slithering through them, and God knows what else.

If An Affair to Remember worked for you, Love Affair may do the same. It resurrects the earlier film’s sodden masochism with meticulous fidelity, right down to the awful final scene, which always felt — and still feels — as if another 20 minutes of movie were yet to come. Then again, what moved viewers in the ’50s seems almost luridly manipulative and unconvincing now.

Tow is a minor indie that doesn’t always make the right moves, but Byrne seizes her character and turns the question of whether you like her or not into the film’s dramatic motor.

I was touched, at moments, by O’Connor’s woeful countenance, but as written and directed by Max Walker-Silverman, Rebuilding has no motor.

The journey, however, is a hollow one, since Quaid and Stone, for all their efforts, never really do seem married. Perhaps that's because Stone, with her dry-ice charisma, does everything that an actress should except connect to whomever she happens to be facing on screen.

Mortal Kombat II, a sequel to the 2021 Mortal Kombat reboot, is still an old-school video-game trash extravaganza: all sound and fury and flying bodies and jargony world-building, propped up by a sludgy excuse for a story.

Narrow Margin, despite a sturdy turn by Gene Hackman as a cynical assistant DA, is a thinly scripted procession of train-movie clichés.

The point of the new biopic mode was to reveal totemic figures in a more complex way. “One Love” flirts with complexity but slides into the banality of hero worship.

Titan A.E. is ''Star Wars'' pulped and mashed into flavorless kiddie corn.

The trouble isn’t that Greenwald is preaching to the choir; a good documentary can increase the passion of the choir. It’s that he isn’t adding in any meaningful way to the choir’s knowledge.

One of those raucous, hyperactive kiddie flicks that knocks you upside the head from its opening frame.

This one is somberly kinetic and joyless.

A self-righteous mishmash that can't decide whether to be a tribute to the fanatical leftist passion that thrives in college towns, an indictment of that very same fanaticism, or a ghoulishly didactic snuff-video thriller.

Displays no ambition to be anything more than a synthetic sense-jolt conveyor of the week.

The movie is intelligent yet lifeless; it's all wisps and abstractions.

Spinning Man, like a film noir turned into a video game, winds up crafting a rickety atmosphere of deception out of the question of guilt or innocence. The result keeps you guessing, but it forgets to keep you caring.

What in the Buddha's name is going on in I Heart Huckabees? Russell has come up with a grab bag of ideas that don't stick with you because they don't stick together.

Mostly a mess: toothless when it should be nasty, not so much madcap as merely frantic.

At once spectacular and inert -- a mosaic impersonating a movie; an empty-shell epic.

There’s only one place for Passengers to go, and once it gets there, Jon Spaihts’s script runs out of gas. Tyldun handles the dialogue almost as if he were doing a stage play, but he turns out to be a blah director of spectacle; he doesn’t make it dramatic.

Tastefully embarrassing.

The Go-Getter travels, but it doesn't go anywhere.

Handsomely shot and small of scale, Capone ambles along without catching fire. That’s because the movie, at heart, is shaped as a pedestal for Hardy’s prankish mumbly Method showboating.

In the film's rather humdrum 3-D, the place doesn't dazzle — it droops.

Soderbergh, in essence, has come up with a plodding and far less psychologically arresting version of ''Ghost.''

Benoît Jacquot's film is shackled to a blah bourgeois leftism.

Considering that F9 is Lin’s fifth “F and F” film and his first one in eight years, it goes through the motions with more energy than intoxication.

Here's what I can say for sure about the humanoid attackers in the new version of The Crazies: They're not very interesting.

The shots of urban traffic jams have more spark than the story, which skips from a pregnancy to the filming of a musical to murder - without convincing us of any of it.

This is a high octane ride that starts to leak gas before it even gets going.

The hokey, laborious Thunderheart would be little more than a leftover 1970s conspiracy thriller were it not for the novelty of its setting: a modern Indian reservation — which, as the movie reveals, is by now a fancy word for slum.

Robinson’s brand of middle-class psycho surrealism works perfectly in bite-size sketch-comedy doses. Stretched out to feature length, a character like Craig simply stops making sense.

The new movie, for all its huffing and puffing, explores very little, even if some of it is sexy in a Howard Stern-meets-"9 1?2Weeks" way.

A preposterous erotic thriller from the Basic Instinct fingernails-ripped-my-flesh school, Body of Evidence is shamelessly — and, on occasion, amusingly — unadulterated trash.

That’s the most poetic thing in the movie. The rest of the time, The Last Voyage of the Demeter is too explicit, too dawdling yet rapid-fire, too much like other horror films.

The movie could have used a brain transplant. It doesn't explore injustice -- it just exploits it.

The movie is altogether too infatuated with its ramshackle spirit. Most of the gags take after the characters -- they just sit there.

You could wander into this poetic documentary willing to be sympathetic toward its subject -- men who have sex with horses -- and still find Zoo cryptic and borderline bogus.

In Wilson, Daniel Clowes’ voice, which was once acerbically hip, sounds dated.

In The Dreamers, Bertolucci wants to take us back to a more revolutionary time, but mostly he ends up recalling the faded revolution of his own glory days.

The movie, with all that combat, is staged on an impressively grand scale by the returning director, James Wan, but at the same time there’s something glumly standard about it.

The movie, despite its electrifying subject, is a conventional, middle-of-the-road, cut-and-dried, play-it-safe, rather fuddy-duddy old-school biopic, a movie that skitters through events instead of sinking into them.

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

Schwarzenegger’s willingness to flirt with femininity, to become truly radiant, is the most engaging aspect of Junior. Unfortunately, the script doesn’t portray his transformation to starry-eyed pregnant bliss with much comic ingenuity.

What lies beneath Things Heard & Seen are clichés.

Project Power has propulsion, little detonations of visual magic, the resonant setting of a still desperate New Orleans, and a better cast than a movie like this one tends to have. Yet watching it, you may find yourself aware of how patched together the whole thing is.

Viewers hooked on the spectacle of demonic possession tend to like their satanic tropes served neat. The Possession of Hannah Grace serves them sloppy, if not without a certain random soupçon of grisly style.

If there’s any shock value left to seeing a couple of matinee idols dressed up in women’s clothing, the drag-queen comedy To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar gets it out of the way fast.

We're just watching a film try to pass off misanthropic blunt-wittedness as "edge."

Inland Empire is so locked up in David Lynch's brain that it never burrows its way into ours.

Ralph Bakshi's first feature in nearly a decade would like to be a down-and-dirty "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," but Bakshi isn't up to the task.

The first thing to say about The Bucket List is that Rob Reiner is the rare director who can take all the wonder out of one of the seven wonders of the world.

It's so shameless, so psychotically nervous about keeping you ''thrilled,'' that the phrase over the top won't do it justice. It's like a drug designed for people who've done every drug and now want to be jet-propelled into numbness.

At this point, there's something almost masochistic about the way animators in Japan use cheesy ''Westernized'' heroes to fuel their fantasies.

Of course, the hollow drama of The Lover might not matter so much if these two actually did something interesting in bed. As it is, they barely get out of the missionary position. With far more explicit (and inventive) erotic films available at almost any video store, one has to wonder: How much point is there to portraying sexual passion as serious and ”adult” if you only end up taking all the fun out of it?

Linklater, as brilliant a filmmaker as he is, is a kind of Zen rationalist; his shot language and essential humanity invite us to look at Bernadette and think, “You need help.” But that stops the character, even in her baroquely witty lashing out, from becoming a projection of a larger passion.

Studded with Lampoon/John Hughes anachronisms.

Knightley's Elizabeth becomes a pirate captain this time. You know a franchise has run its course when it has a buccaneer heroine who looks as if she'd hate to get her face smudged.

There are two sparks of light amid the trifling dialogue and bad faux-'80s love-on-the-beach montages in Havana Nights, and they are the film's costars.

It’s little more than a schlock replay of “Ex Machina.” It toys around with some of the same situations, but it doesn’t know where to take them. Instead of developing its themes, it uses them as grist for an overload of “commercial” action.

The whole movie is pat -- very pleased with itself for being so up front about the ways of a 21st-century man-whore.

It's all very sub-Tarantino showy and empty - at least, until the head-scratching climax, which tries to be "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Wicker Man," and "The Twilight Zone" all at once, but only makes you wish that you were watching one of them instead.

Daybreakers turns?into a ponderous apocalyptic chase film -- it's like "Children of Men" with exploding-plasma shock effects.

The trouble with Newness — and the reason it’s shot in such a clinical vérité fashion — is that it’s a thesis movie, heady and ambitious yet overly thought out.

The movie is stiff-jointed and dull.

Whenever a few of the Young Guns get together and have to behave like soulful cowboys, the movie stops dead in its tracks. The trouble with so many of today’s young actors is that there’s no deep-seated yearning or fury in their performances. They just seem like well-adjusted California kids putting on a show for a few hours.

Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie - a depressed epic.

The trouble with Giuliani Time is that Keating, as a filmmaker, wants to give power to the people but in his every perception he takes it away from them.

Father Stu is not your everyday Hollywood religious odyssey — it’s closer to “Diary of a Country Cutup.” It’s a surprisingly sincere movie about religious feeling, but it is also, too often, a dramatically undernourished one.

On its own terms, the film is watchable enough, but it’s blunt and stolid and under-characterized, and at 130 minutes it plods.

The role of a former star of the "golden age" of porn sounds perfect for Kim Cattrall, and she handles it nicely - at least, in the rare moments when this indie comedy isn't terminally contrived.

In ”Son-In-Law,” Pauly Shore is like MTV’s missing Marx Brother; call him Sleazo. For once, he makes being utterly shameless seem halfway likable.

Laura Poitras’s 2017 documentary “Risk” was a close-up portrait of Assange, shot during his early years of infamy and as fascinating, in a squirmy way, as Assange himself. “Ithaka” is less about the man than the cause — how the continued prosecution of Assange fits into the issue of free speech. It’s a more morally clean-cut watch. But it’s a lot less dramatic.

Denzel Washington, by now, could do this sort of role in his sleep.

To call Lukas Moodysson's A Hole in My Heart the feel-bad movie of the year would be an understatement -- it's the feel-sick movie of the millennium.

Jolie, in this movie at least, has exactly two expressions: blank wistfulness and blank dismay. She reduces the tides of history to one more raided tomb.

The movie has the structure of a madcap romantic chase without the wiggy, busting-out freedom.

Permanent Midnight never shows us who Jerry Stahl was before he began shooting junk, and so we have no real stake in what the drugs did to him. He’s a case study in search of a movie.

These people all look and sound so important that the message that blankets every moment of The Age of Disclosure is: They’re official. And what they have to say is official.

Bay doesn't stage scenes, exactly -- he stages moments.

A ''fun trash'' movie that's more trash than fun.

In general le cinéma de Falcone is not a pretty (or hilarious) thing. Thunder Force is, at best, more a light chuckler than a laugher.

A Lot Like Love is a lot like a romantic comedy, except that all that's keeping these two kids apart is the trivially insufferable movie they're in.

A thriller that wheezes along on bits and pieces of ''character.''

It’s a serviceably energized and routine action crime movie, with a few slammin’ fistfights and gun battles, and it proves once again that Liam Neeson is an actor who will take a paycheck gig without treating it like one.

Henson is the right actress to play a contract killer grown weary, but as a thriller Proud Mary doesn’t quite do her justice. It’s a connect-the-dots underworld trifle, watchable and minimal...though Henson holds it together and, at moments, comes close to convincing you that you’re watching a better movie.

Catherine Breillat, the French director of "Fat Girl", blends victim feminism with the threat of slasher violence in this arid ''deconstruction'' of Bluebeard, the wife killer of legend.

It delivers — on some basic, giddy, turn-off-your-frontal-lobes level. It’s an action-comedy utensil, like “Rush Hour” crossed with an old Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-’em-up, with a few goofy added sprinkles of “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion.”

The result is an ''action film'' mired in stasis. The ending piles on the potboiler mayhem, but it's telling that Schwarzenegger's climactic catchphrase is down to one measly word. This time, he's the luggage.

Too scattershot to take hold.

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

The movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.

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.

If you're not at the bull's-eye center of the target audience, a movie like this one can suck the life out of you.

Divided into chapters, the film jumps around in time, which means that we get to observe Shimizu's utter failure to develop his characters from endless narrative angles.

The countdown-to-Armageddon structure generates almost no tension, but Olympus Has Fallen does have lots of squalidly bloody hand-to-hand action, all of which is so pulpy and standardthat the film actually makes you grateful for the presence of Gerard Butler, gnashing his teeth in the Bruce Willis role.

In The Bounty Hunter, the couple that foils a bunch of tiresome grade-C thriller goons together stays together. Whether or not that's a recipe for love, it's certainly not a formula for romantic-comedy magic.

The Quick and the Dead is too light to pack the dramatic punch of a true Western and too flat to pass as cheeky revisionism. It ends up in its own amiable, slowpoke limbo.

You miss the knockabout edge of "Bend It Like Beckham" -- though the ending, in its Pavlovian sports-flick way, pumps you up.

For a while, The Watchers is a reasonably well-made lost-in-the-woods horror movie, one that draws you in like a puzzle whose rules you need to learn (just as the characters do).

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.

Val Kilmer, as a polite horn-rimmed sociopath with a heart of gold, keeps showing up to drop Nietzschean pensées.

Bits and pieces of the movie are funny.

If the characters, apart from Salvatore, had been more developed, there might be more drama to it, but Comandante, in its honorable and slightly gloomy way, has been conceived as the delivery system for a humanitarian message.

Brolin and Gosling are both supposed to be playing World War II veterans who bring their knowledge of battle into the tough turf of the streets, but that's just a concept that the sketchy, half-baked script tosses out there.

As The Commitments goes on, you begin to weary of the one-note characters, who don’t so much converse as exchange arch put-downs.

You'd better deliver the goods. And Them, despite some moody imagery out of the "Blair Witch" school, never does.

I.Q. is easy enough to sit through, but it’s all surface come-on-the romantic-comedy equivalent of a shallow young Hollywood star who puts on fake glasses so that it will look like he, too, has brains.

The film oscillates, rather awkwardly, between grandiose cartoon heroics and a kind of dutiful flatness.

There’s one funny bit in Another Stakeout — a dysfunctional dinner party — but director John Badham puts more energy into high-tech chase sequences featuring the neighborhood pets than he does into refining the comic chemistry of his stars.

Mostly hot air.

Generation Startup is too blurry about the grass-roots wheeling and dealing it shows.

Watchable in a facile, trashy way. Unfortunately, most of the movie is mired in sludge, slime, mud, blood, and studiously dank cinematography.

The role requires Clooney to dial down his charm to nearly zero, and frankly, he looks twitchy and uncomfortable without it.

A sign of how desperate the series' producers have become is that the big twist here is that Leatherface, the slobby butcher-boy demon in his mask of human skin, is now...the good guy. (That's a ''jump the chainsaw'' concept if ever there was one.)

The First Purge is a slipshod B-movie comic book rooted in gangbanger clichés. It’s a threadbare “Boyz N the Hood” meets “Lord of the Flies.”

Obsessed has little plausibility, but at moments it's an entertaining bad movie, and the performers are vivid.

The movie is a true throwaway: By the end, it seems to have disposed of itself.

Joker: Folie à Deux may be ambitious and superficially outrageous, but in a basic way it’s an overly cautious sequel.

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

It's less a tale of religious rebirth than a faith-based Hallmark card.

As an actress, Bynes is wholesome to a fault. She impersonates a teenage boy yet never gives him one good dirty thought.

It’s not that the two parts of the movie don’t go together. It’s that the last hour of it, the cheeky dystopian alien-tech horror farce, simply isn’t very good.

Never tickles your nasty bone, perhaps because, in an era when the gossip pages are dotted with news of celebrity prenups, the prospect of marriage as a route to instant fortune seems less scandalous than it does like business as usual.

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

Parades itself as an ''honest'' message movie, a call for troubled kids to choose life over street nihilism, but the picture is so earnest that it leaves out the easy, old-school pleasure conjured by the last few years of Disney sports flicks (Invincible, Miracle, The Rookie).

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."

Freddie Prinze Jr. has a look in his eye that is equal parts self-infatuation and boyish flash of fear.

Moretti makes this ''study'' in despair a naggingly neutral, at times borderline coy experience.

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.”

For all the pitfalls it scrupulously avoids, Dogfight isn’t finally very interesting. It’s not just the movie’s plot that’s diminutive. The emotions seem small too.

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.

Kiss the Girls is a fake psychological thriller that turns into a garishly schlocky and implausible bogeyman hunt.

In The Quarry, sin has its wages, but that’s all it has. It’s too dry to offer anything like temptation.