Peter Rainer

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

If you are not already familiar with Williams’s best plays and film adaptations, this musty magnolia of a movie won’t encourage you to seek them out.

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

Some of the fairy tale effects are marvelous; but the odyssey from darkness to light is unduly long and sloggy, and Stewart, with her contemporary edge, seems to be acting in the wrong era.

Strutting around for most of the film in her leather rocker duds, Streep’s Ricki Rendazzo is almost as much of a concoction as her witch in Into the Woods. She wears her uniform as a taunt and also as a way of defining herself. She’s a woman out of time – a superannuated hippie.

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 Bhutto family is often referred to as the "Pakistani Kennedys." After seeing this film, that designation doesn't sound so glib anymore.

If this film turns out to be a big success, malls everywhere may want to hire more security.

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.

It’s not really such a great achievement to have women cops in the movies acting as boorish and rowdy as their male counterparts, especially since the movie seems designed for a sequel. But then again, what movie these days – or at least this summer – isn’t?

When, at the end, we hear Cheney intone “I was the bad guy so you didn’t have to be,” the self-serving gravity of that pronouncement rings hollow because the movie is hollow, too.

Tatum muscles his way through the role with panache, while Foxx never gets a chance to break loose.

Director Robert Stromberg, making his debut as a director after supervising the visual effects for movies like “Alice in Wonderland” and “Avatar,” lacks the transcendent touch.

The casting of Jones as Ginsburg might have seemed like a good idea, but, as fine an actress as she is, she can’t quite manage to bring the future Supreme Court justice to life, perhaps because it’s tough to animate cardboard. She’s stiff and humorless.

Rocketman is a campy, overblown, self-glorifying fantasia.

Crowe is deft at keeping the various plots spinning, but there are too many of them, and they don’t intersect pleasingly.

Blomkamp overdoes even his best effects. (I would have welcomed more vistas of Elysium to break up the grungefest.) If Elysium is an example of how recession-era Hollywood intends to dramatize the rift between the haves and the have-nots, let’s hope the studios don’t also bring back Smell-O-Rama.

Nolan tries to pair the cosmic esoterica with this father-daughter tussle, but the mix doesn't jell. Visionary movies require a bigger vision.

The movie is a decidedly mixed bag, in part, because of the equally pronounced disparities between Burton and Carroll – and between Burton and Disney, for that matter.

So why is everything so thuddingly fun-free?

It's the kind of cutesy idea that doesn't ring remotely true.

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.

At times, Pride and Glory seems to be about a war between actors, not cops. Nobody comes off well.

Freeheld is certainly timely, though, given its ponderous approach, less than invigorating.

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.

As Disney animated features go, Tangled is middling.

It's enough that these two castaways are friends, but I guess friendship doesn't cut it when you're trying to create a star-driven hit. It should, though. Better a believable friendship than an unbelievable love affair.

This movie might have been better if it hadn't fashioned itself as a cross between "Citizen Kane" and "Chinatown," and instead had used Reeves's story to dramatize the transitional state of 1950s Hollywood.

It's a powerful subject, but director McG and screenwriter Jamie Linden haul out every cliché in the playbook.

Polley has a sometimes graceful understanding of emotional temperate zones and Williams, when she isn't being zombielike, is touching. But Margot comes across as such an elusive and unsympathetic twit that you wonder why we should care about her.

Even though none of these guys is ready to kick the bucket, The Big Year has an unmistakable affinity with "The Bucket List."

Too much of this movie, directed by Peter Ramsey, is more clamorous than inspired, and little kids might find parts of it too scarily intense.

Considering this musical has its roots in Depression-era American, Gluck’s contemporary take on the material is eerily lacking in observations about the rich/poor divide in this country.

Whatever the approach, there isn’t enough psychological heft to the drama to make it seem much more than generic.

This is the kind of movie where we’re not supposed to know at any time who is playing whom, but since the characterizations are glossy and paper-thin, it’s difficult to get worked up about who gets fleeced.

It’s still a bit early in the long careers of these actors, especially Kline, to be playing creaky codgers. It’s bad enough when Hollywood casts women over the age of 30 as grandmothers-in-waiting. Now we have to endure an onslaught of famous veteran actors complaining about their hips.

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.

There’s a creepy subtext to all this, especially when Tim uses his time-travel gifts to woo an American girl without her assent.

Raimi’s film is supposed to be about magic, but magic is in scant supply.

There’s something off-putting about this film’s optimism: After all, how many people can afford to do what Crowley did?

This latest whiffle ball from Team Apatow is a mildly amusing comedy.

Pratt brings a wry derring-do to the mayhem, and the escape from Isla Nublar has its modicum of thrills.

However you slice it, The Eagle is hokum, but modern-day Scots may get a kick out of the film's depiction of their ancestors as mud-caked hellions. Modern-day Romans will have to settle for less.

Elba is one of those actors who radiates his own force field even if he’s sitting still, or just tying his shoe. His no-nonsense performance helps to eradicate some of Sorkin’s nonsense.

My first thought in watching The Hobbit was: Do we really need this movie? It was my last thought, too.

The slapstick is often clunky, but Robinson has a sweet jester’s disposition that keeps many of the gags from collapsing.

Allow me a quick lament: Do we really want to see a great actor like Cumberbatch, not to mention Chiwetel Ejiofor and Tilda Swinton, entombed in yet another superhero franchise?

Needless to say, everybody comes equipped with their very own overweight baggage; old grudges are revived, new ones are invented; and big personal revelations – most of which you can see coming a mile away – arrive on cue.

By bringing the story into Iraq, Grant Heslov courts tastelessness. Gooniness and Gitmo don't mix.

It’s essentially a buddy-cop romp with the usual assortment pack of graphic gruesomeness.

Not infrequently the movie is as mediocre as its target. The great Steve Coogan movie has yet to be made.

Amy Adams is such a likable actress that she makes the romantic comedy Leap Year worth watching even though we’ve seen it all before.

Patrice Leconte has directed excellent serious films such as "Monsieur Hire" and "Man on the Train," but when it comes to humor he loses his bearings. His latest attempt at seriocomedy, My Best Friend, is a premise in search of a film.

The only grace note in this otherwise determinedly graceless movie is the classy way Walker’s exit is handled.

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.

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

The law of diminishing returns is no more apparent than in the movie world. A sequel, with rare exceptions, is worse than the film it follows, and sequels of sequels fare even worse. Such is the case with Shrek the Third.

Once around the block with these folks is more than enough.

He's a mishmash of cultural opposites, and his motormouth swagger is fitfully amusing. So is his backhand.

Most of it plays out as sub-medium-grade farce, but Carrey has some funny calisthenic bits where he appears to have the pliability of a rubber toy.

Compared with, say, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto," which featured this sort of stuff in practically every frame, Marshall's film is downright Disneyish.

The romantic comedy 27 Dresses will work best for people who have never seen a romantic comedy. If you have, you might find it amusing to tally up the steals – I mean, homages.

Although Steven Soderbergh's two-part Che may have an epic running time of almost 4-1/2 hours, its scope is surprisingly narrow.

The best I can say is that it’s another tour de force for Gyllenhaal, although his intensity isn’t matched by the movie itself, which sacrifices much of its power by too often settling for easy, nut-brain effects.

It’s an only-in-America success story worth recounting.

Lee is very good at creating a sense of free-floating dread, but he, and his screenwriter Mark Protosevich, don’t have a real flair for pulp.

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.

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

Safe Haven is a species of Gothic chick flick.

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

Not awful, not wonderful, Jack the Giant Slayer is a midrange fairy tale epic that’s a lot more ho-hum than fee-fi-fo-fum.

An actor making his directorial debut, Parker, who plays Turner and also co-wrote the script with Jean McGianni Celestin, has taken hold of an incendiary subject and coarsened its complexities into agitprop.

A dash – only a dash – of Tim Burton ghoulishness might have helped.

Draggy Italian epic that's big on production values but skimpy on inspiration.

If the movie accomplishes nothing else, though, I hope it inspires the curious to actually sit down and finally read “Moby-Dick.” It’s an extraordinary yarn. Really.

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.

Whatever brought Greene down was far more complex than this film allows for.

It's a showpiece for that Belgian city's medieval splendor. You may want to book vacation reservations upon leaving the theater, although the memory of this underwhelming movie may tarnish the sightseeing.

Despite its arty veneer and its ostensibly political edge, Circumstance seems more interested in titillation than revelation.

Amalric throws in flashbacks and flash-forwards between bedroom and courthouse (yes, there’s a murder), and I was reminded again why I prefer my noirs in the hardboiled American style rather than tricked up with all this faux Alain Resnais-style filigree.

It’s nice to see oldsters cavorting in kaboom movies, but a little of this stuff goes a long way.

I prefer the goofier approach, which is why, even though Hemsworth isn't going to be cast in "King Lear" anytime soon, he's the best thing about Thor.

De Niro, in what amounts to an extended cameo, is radically miscast. That's still no excuse for his nonperformance, which is beyond lackluster.

In a supporting role as Giacometti’s beleaguered wife, who endures her husband’s penchant for prostitutes, the great, undervalued French actress Sylvie Testud strikes the film’s most resonant note.

The film somehow manages to be both a turn-on and a turnoff.

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.

The trouble with pet projects is that too often they are unduly do-goody, and so it is here.

For most of the way this ecofriendly fantasy is pleasantly clunky, and Reeves, whose expressive range here is slim to none, is perfectly cast as the alien.

One dramatic ploy that doesn't work is the casting of Demi Moore as Tracy Edward, a homicide detective intent on capturing the Thumbprint Killer. Moore gave a rare good performance as the washed up diva in "Bobby," but her stridency here is grating.

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.

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

Even a subpar James Bond movie is worth seeing because, well, it’s James Bond. But if one of the most successful and long-running franchises in movie history wants to keep pumping, it’s once again time to change the formula.

Rudd is amusing enough; Segel, who towers over Rudd, is amusing, too, though the role seems to have been written for Owen Wilson. Maybe Wilson was busy. Lucky him.

If Abrams had stuck with the kids and cut way back on all the sci-fi hoo-ha, his film might have stood a fighting chance of being charming. Big is not always better, even when it comes to fantasies.

Do we really need another Hulk movie? I was one of the few critics who actually liked Ang Lee's 2003 "Hulk," but it didn't exactly ring the cash registers or clamor for a continuation.

Sometimes, oftentimes, trailers showcase only the good stuff. The actual movie is a pale substitute. Such is the case here.

Gyllenhaal is one of the most gifted actors of his generation and, along with Joaquin Phoenix, he takes more chances than just about any of them. He deserves a movie that risks as much as he does.

It’s all meant to be funnier than it is.

Actually, it's hard to have any thoughts while watching Jonah Hex – the cranium-crushing soundtrack takes care of that.

Mostly a snooze. Maybe if Buscemi himself had starred in it things would have turned out better.

True love beckons in the guise of a dingbat played by Julianne Moore and all is right with the world. As Jon’s father, a man whose lifeblood is yelling, Tony Danza is very funny. He makes you understand what his son is escaping from.

Blithely entertaining but almost completely devoid of rigor.

Jackman, sporting a distracting, Hart-like brown hairpiece, seems miscast. He doesn’t convincingly convey this politician’s swagger and slickness, and Reitman’s attempts to mimic a loose-limbed political movie in the style of, say, Robert Altman’s “Tanner '88” series or “The Candidate” are rather leaden. It’s a film that’s less interesting to watch than to discuss afterward.

One of the few open-minded Hollywood movies about Christian fundamentalism, but the mind isn't sufficiently exploratory.

Sometimes a film is best utilized as a travelogue. Such is the case with the comedy-drama The Girl From Monaco, which isn't much of a movie but offers scrumptious views.

Gandolfini, though, is a standout as the old-school father who can't abide his new-style son (but loves him anyway).

The bad guys, who specialize in funny beards, funny accents, and shaved heads, would feel right at home in an "Austin Powers" movie.

It must be said that the filmmakers, who profess to be as surprised as we are about how things play out, are being disingenuous at best and underhanded at worst.

It’s an indication of how much this film needed a bright break in all the grim oppressiveness that when Mary-Louise Parker shows up in a giddy cameo as a foul-mouthed boozer, the audience suddenly lit up with laughter.

Playing a cantankerous, beer-swigging human wreck of a man for the umpteenth time, Nolte is very good but very familiar.

This documentary about the evangelical belief in biblical prophecy is both overly ambitious and skimpy.

It's a rather lifeless re-telling of the Nativity, with greeting-card imagery and stiff performances.

It's difficult to imagine the target audience for this film. Gangbangers, perhaps?

Ultimately, forgettable, but for most of the way it's a pleasant little vacation of a movie.

The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

I haven't heard this much shouting in a movie since the first hour of "Full Metal Jacket."

It's not only Phoebe whose daydreams go out of control. Daniel Barnz, the writer-director, also goes a bit flooey. There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

Even the "surprise" appearance of Keith Richards, as the scurvy father of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, has already been hyped to death in the advance press.

Even the humor is played too broadly – another notch and we'd be in "Monty Python" territory, though not half as witty.

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.

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

The film is gracefully directed around the edges, but the core story, a kind of existential murder mystery, is swallowed up by a series of increasingly outlandish plot devices involving drug runners and Tarantino-esque shootouts.

It's a moderately enjoyable escapade that isn't quite clever enough for adults and not quite imaginative enough for children.

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.

There is barely a whiff of genuine transcendence in this grand-scale extravaganza. The special effects are courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, but the magic here is largely industrial.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

It has its modicum of suspense, and Brendon Fraser, who stars as intrepid professor Trevor Anderson – who does indeed journey to the center of the Earth – is his usual heroically affable self.

Cruise gives his energetic all to the role, but he, too, doesn’t seem to be quite aware that Seal was morally compromised far beyond the shallow confines of this film.

Director and co-writer John Krokidas doesn’t have a very fluent gift for period re-creation – everything seems stagy – and most of the actors, playing divas of various stripes, overact.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

Ritchie is so adept that the film is compulsively watchable, but it’s watchable in the same way as a massive train wreck or the slow-motion demolition of a high-rise.

Despite some occasional moments of real sadness and terror, the turmoil in this movie is decidedly on the upbeat.

Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator’s trap of making the “human” characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.

It’s not just the technique of this movie that is resolutely old-fashioned. So are its attitudes. The film may feature practically wall-to-wall monster storms but undergirding it all is a cushion of straight-arrow sentimentalism. It harks back to a rosy neverland when men were men and women stood by them.

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.

The movie is a straightforward nuts-and-bolts affair of no particular consequence, except for Neeson’s performance, which rightly does not resolve the question: Was Felt acting nobly or vengefully?

This is fire-breathing melodrama masquerading as social commentary.

War Dogs ends up being no better than its protagonists at delivering the goods.

The derby sequences are just OK, and the conflict between Bliss and her uncomprehending parents, played by Marcia Gay Harden and (a fine) Daniel Stern, is so predictable that you wish someone had rolled onto the set to whip it into shape.

Too much of The Names of Love is a joke book posing as a movie.

Director Wladyslaw Pasikowski has made the mistake of going about his business as if he were fashioning a horror film.

The “what if?” aspects of this true-life drama are so tantalizing that the movie’s workmanlike execution is doubly dissatisfying.

Chen Shi-Zheng, well regarded as an opera and theater director, makes his feature film debut.

Watching actors tap out code as big buzzing screens of digital data flash on the screen just doesn’t cut it.

For all the glam and swank, the film is essentially a bright, shiny, empty puzzle. The puzzlemaking by writer-director Tony Gilroy is clever but most frequently an end in itself.

The film has a creepy allure but, as movies featuring full-bore sexual gamesmanship often do, it wears thin.

Departures is sappy and wacky – not the best combination.

The chemistry may be good, the movie isn’t.

It’s all third-rate “Pink Panther” stuff, and Brosnan, eager to play down his 007 bona fides, overcorrects.

Who can really differentiate between these films anyway? In the end, they all devolve (evolve?) into clashing, clanging bots.

Crossing Over is not a success but make no mistake: There is great drama to be found in these streets.

Most of the music is by New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, and it’s heartfelt without ever really touching the heart.

The presentation has verve. But the story is confusingly told - everything is NOT illuminated - and, as the seeker, Elijah Wood is a big blank.

Most of the time, however, we are watching pathology without benefit of insight.

When we last see a much older Moses en route to Canaan, we can at least be grateful that this film, unlike so many other movies these days, does not seem primed for a sequel.

If only there was less mush and more meat in this stew.

The movie becomes, perhaps inadvertently, a celebration of selling out.

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

A promising premise and some very good actors are smothered in goo in The Answer Man.

Adam Sandler plays a dual role in Jack and Jill, and he's a lot better as Jill than as Jack.

I suppose the relationship is Oedipal or primal or something or other, but mostly it’s just an excuse for Dolan to stage a series of gaudy shout-fests.

Blunt and Friend strike a few flinty sparks, and Julian Fellowes’s script has its share of dry-as-dust witticisms. Most of the time, though, it’s a stiff pageant.

By the end, 10 Items Or Less has the obnoxiousness of a vanity project. Freeman is having a better time than we are.

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.

A little of this movie's preppy, whiny expostulation goes a long way.

Cary Grant, to take the premier example, was a great screwball comic who was, at the same time, intensely romantic. With Grant, funniness and sexiness were twinned. This is an exceedingly difficult combo to bring off, and Duris, though it would be unfair to compare him with Grant, doesn't come close.

As generic as its title.

What Looking For Eric demonstrates is that drama, not comedy, is how Loach makes sense of things. On the other hand, I often find his dramas unremittingly bleak. I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not a big fan of Ken Loach.

It’s not just Frankie who is putting on a show here. Berry is also overemphatically showing off her chops.

Has some vitality, but it sinks into cliché just the same.

Some of the franchise stalwarts, such as Jennifer Lawrence’s Mystique, are given too little to do. Most are given too much.

Shriner's direction has an Afterschool Special blandness, but those mechanical owls are quite realistic. While the film was in production Hiaasen said that he had "nightmare visions of the gopher in 'Caddyshack.' " He needn't have worried.

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

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

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.

Channing's formidably good -- a career woman in extremis -- but the movie, which was written and directed by Patrick Stettner, otherwise unfortunately resembles a product of the Neil LaBute Finishing School.

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

The movie is moderately enjoyable, but it also makes you feel conned: It offers up a disturbing protagonist and then substitutes cuteness for character.

Quaid and Church are funny, but too much of this film is not half as smart as it thinks it is.

For most of this movie, things are exactly what they seem--mediocre.

Despite his sorcerer bona fides and voluminous cape, Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange isn’t strange enough, and trying to parse the convolutions of the Marvel multiverse is more exhausting than engaging.

There is something sneakily gratifying about all this: Not since the days of "Earthquake" have Hollywood producers so indulged their fantasies of trashing the town.

As speculative storytelling goes, Mozart's Sister is ingenious but as moviemaking it's plodding.

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.

Nobody in it seems to possess a nervous system.

From a psychological standpoint, this is murky territory but Jacobs presents it as the height of enlightenment – a confluence of two damaged souls. At least "Good Will Hunting," another movie that played this game, wasn't blah.

The best you can say about This Means War is that it would make a good date movie for couples in the witness protection program.

There is a dearth of good children's films right now, at least of the nonanimated variety, and undoubtedly The Last Mimzy will fill a vacuum for some families. But it's a default choice, not a prime pick.

Predictable, not so much from his (Zhang Yimou) previous movies as from the work of the many sentimentalists who have already plowed this well-tilled turf.

A frustrating blend of the sharply funny and the ploddingly generic. Although he does them well enough, we don’t really need Ron Shelton to give us the same old skidding-U-turn cop-thriller theatrics. He’s a much more distinctive talent than this crass spree allows for.

Having written a book about being fired, Annabelle Gurwitch has now made a documentary as well, and it's something of a mess.

There are a lot of funny ideas in Encino Man that don't come off because the director, Les Mayfield, and his screenwriter, Shawn Schepps, don't seem to have made up their minds how smart they want to be. A scene like Link freaking out during a visit to the La Brea tar pits museum should count for a lot more than it does here.

The performances, especially by Hugh Dancy as a sexually confused rich kid, are overwrought, and the script, which Michael Cunningham ("The Hours") wrote in collaboration with Minot, is slack.

The film may have its roots in reminiscence, but it doesn't feel like it comes from the heart: Zeffirelli's, as usual, is swathed in tinsel. Still, the villas on display are gorgeous, and watching those dowager martinets intimidate the Fascisti is fine sport.

It downplays the effects of George's drug trafficking, not so much on himself and his cronies as on the wrecked lives of the generation of customers we never get to see.

Barely engaging spy thriller.

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

There is a germ of a good idea in the notion that an imaginary suitor can be more powerful than a real one. But director Alejandro Agresti isn't the man to pull it off.

The result is maddening, exasperating, occasionally exhilarating – and mostly boring.

I wish I could say it's a resurrected classic but, alas, it's mostly a mess – a 2-1/2-hour mess no less.

For most of the movie, we feel as trapped as she does, and the lurching narrative seems anything but novelistic.

Biopics about civil rights icons are usually staid affairs. Cesar Chavez, directed by Diego Luna, is no exception.

Winkler is so interested in making Merrill admirable that he neglects to make him interesting. That's true of the movie too. In the ethics department, it's commendable. In the drama department, it's bland. [15 Mar 1991, p.F1]

Ostensibly it’s a tradition versus progress fable. In actuality, it’s a movie furiously, perhaps intentionally, at odds with itself.

Dusted off and brought up to date, it's still the same old Capracorn – minus the populist pizzazz he might have provided.

There’s a ravishing aliveness to the spacious imagery; at least the clichés have room to roam free.

The real gold chasers are the filmmakers, who keep pilfering moments from the first film to garland the sequel in order to repeat their success.

Fear of a Black Hat is designed to be a rap version of the classic mock rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap, and the idea is so funny that for a long time the film coasts on our good will. But it should be funnier than it is. [03 Jun 1994, p.F4]

Disney studios, director Randall Wallace, and his screenwriter Mike Rich, obviously targeting a "faith-based" audience à la "The Blind Side," lard the soundtrack with "Oh Happy Day" and readings from the Book of Job.

Medusa, at least, is fun to watch, and, as a bonus, we in the audience don’t have to worry about turning to stone (although, watching this film, your eyelids do get awfully heavy).

The Muslim women in “SATC2” are props in the froth. Come to think of it, so are Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha, and Miranda.

The movie isn't boring, exactly. It's too nutty for that.

This “Field of Dreams” field has been plowed so many times that the land is no longer arable. Isn’t it time to cultivate a few new cliches?

In an effort to keep the thrills coming the screenwriters scatter about too many loose ends; they don’t provide the precise cat-and-mouse plotting that used to be the hallmark of the well-made thriller but is now virtually nonexistent.

A wee Boy Scout would have done far better in the wilds. It’s tough to think "Waiting for Godot" when what you’re watching is closer to "Dumb & Dumber."

Peregrym is a fresh-faced beauty and Bridges is enjoyably cranky, but the film is as bland as an Afterschool Special.

As the corrupt, populist Louisiana governor Willie Stark, Crawford was such a swaggering behemoth that it would take Godzilla to upstage him. Sean Penn isn't quite that.

One of those movies designed as an Oscar make-over for its star. It didn’t work in this case. Aniston was not nominated for Best Actress, perhaps because the film is so obvious about what it’s up to.

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.

There's a great movie to be made about the survivors of Woodstock Nation and their children. But in order to make that movie, you first have to respect the ideals of that generation enough to at least give them their due.

Another charmless Hollywood thriller.

The philosophic notions in I Love Huckabees are ultimately not much more than window dressing for some fancy slapstick.

Neither terrible nor excellent; Hayek, who also co-produced, may have obsessed for years about this project, but the result is a fairly standard this-happened-and-that-happened biopic.

Just because Cole Porter's biography was botched and airbrushed in "Night and Day," starring Cary Grant, doesn't mean De-Lovely, which is up-front about Porter's homosexuality, is a whole lot better.

Halfway through the movie, I decided a better title for this weepie contraption would be “The Hurt Letter.”

Too eager to please to be truly dislikable, and Roberts and Cusack have a fine rapport.

Iñárritu does the actor no favors by putting him through the existential wringer every step of the way. Uxbal suffers for all our sins.

There has to be a good reason to put yourself through yet another junkie odyssey and Candy flunks the test.

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 Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has an undeservedly high reputation as a master stylist. He's more like a master window dresser.

What begins as a twisted sex romp turns film noir-ish. Guthe is so anxious to show us what a larcenous tramp Mini is that he never shows us any other sides to her.

A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make. 

It’s the sort of poetic conceit that needs a filmmaker far more rapt and intuitive than Haynes, whose jeweler’s precision keeps everything at an emotional remove.

Roth's deep-dish introspection would be difficult for any movie to achieve, but with the right cast and more passion, we might have been pulled right into Coleman's psychic prison. The Human Stain isn't a movie of ideas, and it's too inert to be a probing character study. No stain is left behind, just a wan watermark.

What we're getting in this movie isn't necessarily better; it's just more.

The most inventive aspect of the film, aside from a lovely, daffy romantic duet between hypernerds played by Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig, are the promotional tie-ins with which we’ve been inundated -- Ron hawking Dodge Durango trucks, accepting journalism school awards, etc.

By making Nacho a do-gooder, Hess defuses Black's subversive energy. You could argue that Black also played a do-gooder in "School of Rock," but the kids in that film were a lot spunkier, and Black wasn't constantly playing for sympathy as he does here.

In a movie with so much graphic suffering by innocent Africans, it’s a bit disconcerting that so much loving attention is paid to Bruce Willis’s anguished mug. There’s an uncomfortable Great White Father (and Mother) aspect to this movie.

In much the same way that Godard used heroines like Anna Karina or Bardot, Toback showcases Campbell's face as a placard of unknowability--a quality he recognizes as inherently feminine. The (inadvertent) question we are left with is, How much is there to know about her anyway?

The only genuine moments of emotion come not from the lead actresses but from that great trouper Blythe Danner.

Directed by Allen Hughes and written by Brian Tucker, the film is a collection of crime noir oddments that don't add up to a full meal.

Good contributes very little to a conundrum that has occupied historians and psychologists for half a century.

As the princess’s handmaiden, Nasim Pedrad at least has the comic timing that the rest of the cast, including, surprisingly, Will Smith, conspicuously lack. Smith understandably didn’t want to compete with Williams, but as the big, blue, top-knotted Genie, he’s uncharacteristically bland. Even the magic carpet in this movie looks bummed out.

Contact sure is pretentious. It doesn't deliver on the deepthink, and it lacks the charge of good, honest pulp. It's schlock without the schlock.

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.

“Twilight” is essentially an adolescent female fantasia about coming to terms with one’s sexuality. There I’ve said it. And I’m sure no one else has ever said it.

Over time, though, with films such as "Lost Highway" and, to a lesser extent, "Mulholland Drive," Lynch's movies became less personal and more private. Whatever he is working out in his new film, Inland Empire, it's beyond the reach of all but his idolators.

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.

Sometimes a movie thinks it's one thing (charming) when it's really something else (creepy). Such is the case with writer-director Stephen Belber's Management.

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

Stay home.

As Lucas’s girlfriend April, Isild Le Besco brings a sprig of sunshine into the film’s fetid hollows.

This farce set mostly aboard a transatlantic flight stuck in midair never launches.

Cloying as much of this stuff is, it's not cynical. Curtis seems genuinely convinced that love is all around. Far be it from me to say otherwise. We don’t speak the same language.

At times, Bullock seems as confused by the plot as we are. Even if you cut the writer Bill Kelly and the director Mennan Yapo a lot of slack, there are plot holes galore. May I suggest that it's time to declare a moratorium on movies about time?

We’re still essentially in the Land of Retread: An outer space voyage turns grisly-ghastly as gloppy, befanged creatures invade the crew’s innards and pop out – gotcha! – right on cue.

But the erotic potential of animation has never been realized and Cool World doesn't even try. [11 Jul 1992]

It’s all terribly cliché-ridden and predictable, and the best I can say for it is that Shannon and Gugino do their best to convince us otherwise.

As it is, “Mockingjay,” a big bore, suffers from being the transitional event before the big showdown.

The more moralistic 21 gets, the less enjoyable it is.

In The Game, Fincher pulls back from the total gross-out but sustains a tone of aggravated anxiety. Hitchcock could have done this material and still made its perversities pleasurable.

The bloom is decidedly off the pinkish rose. Martin has a few inspired moments but in order to get to them you have to wade through a mosh pit of unfunny gags.

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.

Goony, so-so comedy.

Doc Hollywood draws its energy almost exclusively from cliche. The cornball rowdiness is partially redeemed by the good cast.

Frances McDormand deserves much better than Lisa Cholodenko’s flat-footed Laurel Canyon...McDormand alone makes the picture worth seeing: Her character is a rash combo of steel and dissolution and regret.

The only performances worth discussing are delivered by the always excellent Michael Shannon, the Texas detective who tries to set things right, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the scurviest of the marauders.

Undeniably powerful, but also rather numbing.

Described in the film's production notes as a "classic French comedy" – although I've never heard of it – and perhaps this is the core problem. French farce doesn't mix well with English gooniness.

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.

Divided We Fall is intended to be restorative, but its wish fulfillments, while charming, are also a bit too gaga for that.