Peter Rainer

By showing scenes of torture without taking any kind of moral (as opposed to tactical) stand on what we are seeing, Bigelow has made an amoral movie – which is, I would argue, an unconscionable approach to this material.

The problem is that there is very little chemistry between the actresses, and Haynes and screenwriter Phyllis Nagy are far too studied in their depiction of passion. The most impressive performance in the movie is given by Blanchett’s elaborately coiffed, cast-iron hairdo.

About the only thing I like about this movie is its shaggy, relatively apolitical stance. Instead of setting itself up as a brief for or against the Iraq war, it just moseys along without much on its mind except how to connect the dots in the plot.

At one point, Val bemoans how stupid the country is, how dumbed-down everything has become. Allen's new movie is far from dumb, but it has an air of abdication about it.

Fanboys, directed by Kyle Newman, doesn't delve into the mania of fandom, it exploits it.

This ghastly swatch of pulp horror is compelling at the most basic level, but so little is going on in it that you might as well be watching a sadistic lab experiment performed on mice.

The actresses are so expert, especially Colman, with her grievous, hardbitten woe, that you may not care, but if one is to mock this sort of historical extravaganza, I much prefer the nutbrain Monty Python approach to all this deep-dish folderol.

What he (Ball) intends as knife-edge realism instead comes across as another con job.

Jarecki shows off this footage as evidence of a truly dysfunctional family in various stages of denial. What it reveals at least as much is the modern phenomenon of reality-TV self-exposure carried to such lengths that, by comparison, the Osbournes look like the Cleavers.

I don’t get the enthusiasm for this movie, written and directed by Damien Chazelle, which is such a cooked-up piece of claptrap that I half expected Darth Vader to pick up the baton. We’re supposed to think that Terence’s tough love is more “honest” than the usual pussyfooting tutelage, but in any sane society this guy would have been brought up on charges long ago.

A movie with ambitions as high-flying as its superhero but a success rate decidedly lower to the ground.

In the Mood for Love has novelty value, I suppose, and plenty of pretty camera moves, but it's not really a movie you can warm to.

Lynch needs to renew himself with an influx of the deep feeling he has for people, for outcasts, and lay off the cretins and hobgoblins and zombies for a while. Mulholland Drive is the product of David Lynch, Inc.

It’s not that this material is, or should be, off limits in a movie. But The Diary of a Teenage Girl isn’t exactly “Lolita.” Heller must think that taking a moral stance is tantamount to selling out. Commercially, she may be right. In every other respect, she’s wrong.

More often McNamara comes across as Exhibit A in Morris's latest metaphysical creepshow.

The melancholy in this film is just as trumped up as the frenzy.

Talk to Her affects some people very deeply, while others, like me, find it high-grade kitsch.

The endangered swampland dwellers are supposed to be an indigenous pastoral community threatened by eco-unfriendly oil refineries. I kept rooting for Hushpuppy and Co. to leave behind their squalor and relocate. This is not the politically correct response.

It’s the difference between artistry and knowingness. About Schmidt doesn’t bring us deeply into the lives of its people because it’s too busy trying to feel superior to them.

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

I'd be more inclined to call this French dysfunctional family epic gabby and preeningly self-indulgent – in a word, annoying.

It’s an M. Night Shyamalan movie with a PhD. Or maybe an MA.

Depp is rather sweet in portraying Don Juan's self-delusions, but his performance is hampered by the role.

Ballast lacks ballast. Much praised by aficionados of minimalist indie cinema – hey, who needs a plot when you've got mood? – it's a wearying slog through anomie in a Mississippi Delta township.

Fuqua deliberately downplays the fantastical in King Arthur, but the gritty faux realism wears itself out quickly. You've seen one lancing, you've seen them all.

Overall, Diggers is like an Ed Burns movie -- but with fishing gear.

It seems a bit cruel to cast Garner, who exudes charm, in such a charmless role.

Hopkins has been fitted out prosthetically to resemble Hitchcock and he does a reasonably good job of impersonating him, but it's a foredoomed effort.

All this gloomy masochism is made palatable because of the performers. And yet we must ask: Is this any way to show off two of our finest actors?

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

Their 40-year marriage seems like more of a trial than this overweening, lightly likable movie acknowledges.

I don't mean to unduly target Kill Bill Vol. 2 --it's certainly no worse than most of the blam-blam fare out there. But what I crave now are movies that speak to me in a different way about violence, that acknowledge the fact that real people are harmed.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

Lanthimos doesn’t have the directorial energy to stir this thick allegorical stew. Lacking any of the conventional action-thriller movie skills, his deadpan style may be the only one available to him.

Watching it is like getting a peek behind the curtain. But it's frustrating, too, because the casting of Emadeddin as a murderer-in-the-making precludes any psychological depth. And as an indictment of social inequality, which is the film's calling card, Panahi inadvertantly makes a far better case for the haves than for the have-nots.

There is one bit of good news. For all you abominable snowman fans out there, "The Mummy" is filled with yetis. And, boy, are they ever angry.

The Brothers Bloom is much more interested in showing off its own smarts, such as they are, than in challenging the audience's.

Devos is especially fine as a woman whose inner solitude carries depth charges.

There are flashes of visual grandeur in Blade Runner 2049, which was shot by the always-inventive Roger Deakins, but there’s not much reason for this film to exist outside of its fan base.

Unless there’s something truly momentous going on, I prefer my sci-fi to be a lot more weightless than weighty.

The film's time structure is splintered into shards of past and present, which is probably just as well – a strictly narrative chronology would make this wallow seem even sloggier.

For an ostensibly soul-deep movie like this to work, we need more than smirks and scowls.

Granted, this is not automatic laugh-riot material, nor should it be, but didn’t Fey recognize how hackneyed it all is? Does being a movie star mean blanding out everything that makes you special?

A bit too satisfied with its own sweet sensitivities.

This meta-biopic is more about Jackie Kennedy as perceived in the popular imagination than it is about the woman herself. And what Larraín has to offer on this score is not terribly enlightening.

The script by Bean and Tolkin is potentially more interesting than what’s been made of it.

The Kaijus make zombies look like wusses, so at least the fights in this film are battles royal. But overload sets in early, and it all turns into battle boring.

I realize that Fosse's dark sizzle might seem a bit dated today, but surely something halfway snazzy could have been devised for this movie. It's toothless.

There’s a potentially good comedy to be made about old-school guys trying to make a go of it in a youth-dominated digital marketplace, but director Shawn Levy and screenwriter Jared Stern overdose on moronic excursions.

Home of the Brave is a milestone of sorts. But it's a formulaic, overacted piece of work that rarely delves deep.

The film includes graphic omnisexual and incestuous couplings and has an air of free-floating dread but, especially given its subject matter, it's oddly vacuous – it rarely takes hold emotionally even when its people hit bottom with a resounding thud.

The Normandy locations are evocative, but director Sophie Barthes compresses Emma’s multiyear rise and fall into what seems like a month or so.

The movie is all nuance and it continually wafts away into artiness.

Hansen-Løve wants us to experience all this as a kind of amour fou, but all I kept thinking was that Sullivan was a prize jerk and Camille would be well rid of him.

I hope this won’t be his last acting job. He’s too vital to go in for such a soggy send-off.

Some first-rate animation and some second-rate storytelling.

Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.

A few of the supporting players, including Kim Dickens, as a suspicious local cop, and Carrie Coon, as Nick’s twin sister, move beyond the formulaic, which is more than can be said for the movie.

An art piece in which everything seems to be a metaphor for something else, and as pleasing as it is to watch, it's too pretentious by half.

The best addition is Austin Butler as the baron’s bald-pated, hypervicious nephew. It’s official: Butler no longer looks or sounds like Elvis Presley. Villeneuve is adept at staging grand-scale battles, but the movie’s best set piece is the climactic tooth-and-nail face-off between Paul and this grinning gargoyle.

McCarthy is so careful not to take a political stand that his film seems neutered by good intentions. In the spirit of squishy humanism, he soft-pedals a hard-hitting topic.

I suppose it's asking too much for a great actor to be matched up with a great director on a project like this. On the other hand, there's always the sequel.

What makes the film worth seeing anyway is the brazen richness of the production. It's as if the filmmakers, closed off from making even a suggestively sensual experience, threw their energies into the colors and textures of their people's lives. [06 Mar 1991, p.F7]

A love-it-or-hate-it movie. Put me in the (sort of) hate-it column. My slight qualification here is because Darren Aronofsky's movie starring Natalie Portman as an increasingly unhinged ballerina gets points for being unlike anything else that's out there.

Top Gun: Maverick is a perfectly tolerable time-killer, and I enjoy popcorn as much as anyone, but I just hope these won’t be the only kinds of movies that bring audiences back to the theaters.

It's a marvelous, resonant joke that never quite succeeds: Stretches of the film resemble a Dario Argento horrorfest crossed with a Mel Brooks spoof. But the director, E. Elias Merhige, and his screenwriter, Steven Katz, occasionally bring some rapture to the creepiness, and Dafoe's vampire, with his graceful, ritualistic death lunges, is a sinewy, skull-and-crossbones horror who seems to come less out of the German Expressionist tradition than from Kabuki.

Only Rebecca Hall comes through with a genuineness that rises above Holofcener’s doodlings. Her scenes with Guilbert resonate because, in the end, Rebecca is the only character in the movie who seems to care about anything other than his or her own – take your pick – bank account, complexion, weight, guilt. In this company, she’s practically a saint.

Though worth seeing, should be better than it is.

Were it not for Anne Hathaway's Catwoman-ish Selina Kyle, there wouldn't be a single character in "Rises" who cracks a smile. I'm not arguing that "Rises" should be "Singin' in the Rain." But its Wagnerian ambitions are not matched by its material. It hasn't earned its darkness.

Slaboshpytskiy doesn’t attempt to get inside the psychology of these people, or expand the meanings, political or otherwise, of their descent. There’s a stolidity to the filmmaking, with lots of overlong takes, that is meant to be ruminative but often just seems negligent.

Normally I'd watch Helen Mirren in anything, even if she was just putting out the laundry or reading the phone book. But, given the roteness of her line readings here, it might have been better if the phone book rather than Shakespeare was her text.

The Emily of this movie seems to survive primarily to take everyone in her orbit to task. Davies is holding her up as the indomitable spirit of genius – a woman who suffers fools not at all.

A lovely minor achievement. It would have been major if Breillat had been more expansive with respect to Anaïs instead of contentedly letting her go on about her lumpish ways.

Directed by Cooper, who also co-wrote the script with Josh Singer, the film serves up so much Sturm und Drang about the great man’s messed-up private life that it barely bothers to explore his creative genius.

Jarecki's thesis is that law enforcement targets minority communities, but his analysis is far too simplistic. Since when did pushers become victims?

A few of the performances, especially Nicole Kidman’s, as the lady in charge, and Kirsten Dunst’s, as the teacher pining to flee with the corporal, have some bite, but not enough to make much of an imprint in this brittle, vaporous chamber piece.

This may sound like an Oprah episode, but the outcome is far from predictable and carries the force of a tragedy in which everyone, and no one, is to blame.

Nobody in it seems to possess a nervous system.

Fortunately, there are more than enough moments when the heavy-handedness gives way to the sheer bliss of ordinary magic.

The latest cinematic adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's novel, is like "Masterpiece Theater" without the masterpiece.

There is in The Mother a rich understanding of where old age takes you. Along with the myth that seniors don't have sex drives, the film dispels a larger one: that the years bring wisdom.

See the film, if you must, for Mara, who will be starring in the upcoming Hollywood remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." She's a sharp, vigilant actress whose career bears watching.

Anderson is something of a prodigy himself, and he's riddled with talent, but he hasn't figured out how to be askew and heartfelt at the same time. When he does, he'll probably make the movie The Royal Tenenbaums was meant to be, and it'll be a sight to see.

Life imitates art, except there’s precious little of either here.

By turning the loner Louis into a nutcase – if he blinked at all during the movie, I missed it – the movie becomes a species of horror film.

Demme’s Manchurian Candidate is far from a disgrace, but it's not freewheeling enough, not strange enough to make sense of our gathering dread.

Director Azazel Jacobs knows what he has in Winger, but her intensity is too much for this goofy grab bag of a movie.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

The film is almost three hours long and precious little of it feels new – not from Scorsese or from anybody else.

As compelling as Misery often is, I can't say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It's too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn't provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. [30 Nov 1990, p.F1]

My favorite moment in the movie: Astrophysicist Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard) insisting on wearing only his underwear because he says he thinks better that way. Hey, whatever works.

The filmmakers betray the essentially childlike appeal of Shrek by piling up all these too-hip Hollywood references aimed at adults. It's not just kids who will feel cheated.

By turns jokey, portentous, and pretentious, the movie immediately sizes up each of its protagonists and never budges from that assessment.

There's something a bit condescending about how the movie devolves into a falling-out-between-friends scenario, as if the only way our attention could be held by this subculture were if it was presented to us sentimentally.

As murderous amusements go, the film is mildly diverting, but it's like a faint facsimile of a Claude Chabrol film.

It's a movie for people who really dig Cronenberg's mulchy fixations-and probably for no one else. [27 Dec 1991]

The overlong Trainwreck would have been better if it had derailed more often.

From a purely pictorial standpoint, this new Dune is indeed often overwhelming. The sheer monumentality of it all is impressive. Alas, the film’s emotional power underwhelms.