Peter Rainer

This series is in its fortieth year; it might be nice to see Bond battle a readily identifiable, real-world villain for a change. There's certainly no shortage.

Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge (who is a physician!) keep the action spurting forward, but their approach is oblique. We seem to be catching the odds and ends of scenes; it's as if the filmmakers wanted to make a movie in which all the expected high points were skimped.

A crime thriller that is strong on sultry atmosphere--you practically break into a sweat watching it--but weak on believability.

No better than the first – which means it will probably be creamed by critics and make a jillion dollars. But really, standards are standards.

It makes the same misstep that Allen's comedies often do: It assumes that the lives of these people are only about sex and love, and so that's all we ever see of them. This one-and-a-half-dimensionality wears thin.

To make us begin to understand the anguish on display here, the movie needed more emotional layers and fewer obvious signposts.

This same premise holds for the remake, and it seems more pandering (and dated) than ever.

Almost every scene is pitched for dewy sympathy. Madsen, a strong actress who might have matched Freeman, is portrayed in varying shades of blandness. Even Freeman, good as his is, is held back here. His rock bottom isn't very rocky, and far from bottomless.

It would take a filmmaker of truly astonishing versatility to harmonize all these disparate tones...But there are moments in Dreamcatcher when Kasdan gives you the giggles and the creeps at the same time, and that’s not easy to do.

Like many a Hollywood political drama, Lions for Lambs carries a full head of steam that is indistinguishable from a lot of hot air.

This monstro-budgeted sequel to The Matrix has more than twice as many special effects as the original... there is also more than twice as much philosophic bull as before--and there was plenty of that the first time around.

Joe Eszterhas's screenplay is vastly more thoughtful than his scripts for "Basic Instinct" and its ilk, but the storytelling is too spotty for the movie to become the effective moral tale it might have been.

The omnipresent Benedict Cumberbatch plays Assange, stringy white-gray hair flowing, and Daniel Brühl is Domscheit-Berg. Condon and his screenwriter Josh Singer don’t quite know what to make of this duo, perhaps because the men didn’t quite know what to make of each other, either.

I can’t imagine a world without the Beatles, but I can well imagine a world without this movie.

The Young Karl Marx disappointingly resembles for the most part a conventional biopic. It has little depth, either political or psychological.

An odd amalgam of soap opera and street-level realism, with, alas, the former trumping the latter.

Ozon has a smooth gift for scenes of unease, but ultimately Swimming Pool liquifies into a dreary puzzle movie.

Rodin, directed by Jacques Doillon and starring Vincent Lindon as the great Parisian sculptor, does not, to put it charitably, add to the very small roster of Great Artist movies (such as “Lust for Life” and “Vincent & Theo”).

Some touching moments, but too blandly inspirational.

It may not be much of a movie, but it's a terrific concert.

What is missing here is any real sense of what it must have been like for two great writers to be living together, especially in that era, with its push-pull of progressivism and parochialism. This is a movie about fireworks where nothing ignites.

Has moments of genuine emotion...but overall, the film feels like it issues from a place Burton doesn't inhabit.

Even if Zhao and her co-screenwriters were more adept at establishing the family-style togetherness of the Eternals, the emotional continuity is shattered by the incessant time tripping and globe hopping. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings in South Dakota, you suddenly find yourself in Mesopotamia.

The only performance worth watching is Costner's. Now that he seems resigned to being something less than an A-list luminary, he is often modest and affecting.

The film centers almost entirely on the faces of the townspeople, which Von Trier frames vividly. There’s nothing static about his technique, but everything else about the movie is dreary and closed off.

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.

The Catcher Was a Spy, directed by Ben Lewin and starring Paul Rudd as the Ivy-educated Berg, who was fluent in seven languages, is a much more pallid experience than this eminently juicy subject deserves.

As the murderer, Stanley Tucci is intensely creepy but, like almost everybody else in this movie, he’s more gothic figment than flesh and blood.

Levinson made a great political comedy once, "Wag the Dog," but that had a script by David Mamet. Here, Levinson seems to be torn between making a political jest and a suspense thriller. Neither works.

Most movies about rock are such dithery jobs that "BackBeat" may seem more impressive than it really is. It's lively and full of good music and it plays around with a fascinating subject -- the Fifth Beatle and his one true love. But it doesn't really illuminate that subject or those years or that music. It's a Pop treatment of Pop. [15 Apr 1994, p.F1]

It's a soggy farce that not even its top-notch cast can rescue – though not for want of trying.

Movies about political corruption generally bog down in moralistic quicksands. Few American films have the courage to take their cynicism to the limit, and True Colors is no exception. This Capra-corny reliance on the ultimate sagacity of The People doesn’t jibe with the film’s fine edge of avarice. Tim is righteousness incarnate, and Spader can’t seem to pull a performance out of all that goodness. He is uncomfortably upstanding in the role. He looks as though he would rather swap roles with Cusack.

It too has no particular reason for being (except, of course, to complete the series and cash in). It's sprightly and inoffensive, though. And, for those who care, it satisfyingly ties up the various plot strands that were flapping in the breeze from the last installment. Back to the Future futurists will feel complete. [25 May 1990, p.C1]

Black and Kyle Gass started their acoustic/heavy metal rock music comedy act back in the late 1980s. Gold albums and HBO shorts followed, now this. Still, any movie featuring Jack Black with an appearance by Sasquatch is not a total loss, and, for those who care, we learn the origin of the group's name.

Poehler is the life of the party and steals just about every scene, although there's not much to steal.

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.

As feminist polemic, She-Devil is dubious indeed.

Tsotsi never comes across as anything but a brutal cipher, and serious issues such as black-on-black crime in the townships are left unexplored.

If there is to be a sequel to this thudding slab of cacophony, why not just go all the way and make John McClane a superhero?

It's a tortuous, unsatisfying movie, but it's not like any other film I've ever seen about an artist, and it has sequences of blinding intensity.

Instead of the cat-and-mouse cogitations and psych-outs one might rightly expect from this high concept, we're fobbed off with a lot of sub-Die Hard theatrics and stinko plotting.

The violence is cartoonishly garish and the yuks are few. Crowe, looking (deliberately I presume) flabby and somnolent, is more dead than deadpan, and Gosling, who appears at times to be doing a Lou Costello impression, is, to put it mildly, not in his element.

Even in a misfire like The Happening, Shyamalan has a fine feeling for dread. He knows how to creep you out. But he has a tin ear for acting.

It’s gross, all right, but rarely funny – unless jokes about alcohol-laced breast milk is your thing.

Taking a cue from the “Batman” series, the film is dark and thudding and overlong.

The filmmakers spend so much time milking gags they should have called it Bridget Jones's Dairy.

Replete with boisterously unfunny black slapstick.

That may enough to pique your curiosity. It did mine, for a while, until it didn’t. To paraphrase what Brahms once told a young composer, what’s original in the film isn’t very good, and what’s good in it isn’t very original.

At least “Hidden Figures” was savvy enough to please its crowds. A United Kingdom, with its saintly good folk and sneering bad folk emptily exhorting, is closer to a dry historical tutorial.

Because most movies about Holocaust saviors feature Jews as victims rather than as rescuers, Walking With the Enemy, by contrast, has a special cachet. But the film is as dramatically inert as its origins are inspirational.

The movie is twinkly and antiseptic so that when tragedy hits big in the final half hour, it seems coercive. It's like a pipsqueak Terms of Endearment.

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

The film has so many moodswings that watching it induces whiplash, and just about everybody in it, from Winslet on down to Judy Davis, playing the dressmaker’s crotchety mother, flagrantly overdoes it.

Bridges redeems the clichéd role of spoiled artist-sot. He's flamboyantly entertaining, which is more than this otherwise dreary movie deserves.

And so the chief complaint one can lodge against Lyne's film is central: It's not that funny. Which is another way of saying that, for all its controversy, it's not that daring.

It’s a rote piece of work that, oddly, also feels dated even at a time when the press and the White House have rarely been more at odds.

There are worse people to be locked inside a movie with than these two, but they’re not given anything to do . You don’t want to hear about how they can’t relate to their fathers; you don’t want to hear about their fantasies of ditching the Midwest and jetting to L.A.

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.

A bit too awed by its depiction of the healing power of love. It's minor indeed compared with "In the Bedroom," which deals with a similar subject and doesn't back away from the rawness of grief.

A great movie could be pulled from this horror but writer-director Geoffrey Wright gets taken in by all the mayhem and clobbering.

Thirteen doesn't really offer much more insight into exasperated mother-daughter relationships or twisted teens than, say, "Freaky Friday," which I much prefer. At least that film was funny and didn't try to fob itself off as a bulletin from the front lines.

Look for a cameo by a movie star whose initials are J.D.

This is one of those movies that profits from very low expectations. If you go in expecting something dreadful, be assured: It's only near dreadful.

It's a creepy and disturbing movie, but there's not a lot going on behind people's eyes. The soullessness lacks soul.

Intolerable Cruelty, while tolerable, isn't very radical--or very good, either. The Coens wrote the script eight years ago on assignment, not intending to direct it, and that may explain why the result often lacks their customary bizarro facetiousness.

What may have started out as a comedy devolves into quasi-Stephen King territory.

What makes Miami Blues unsettling, in spite of itself, is the sense that the garish ultra-violence we're witnessing is just a species of high jinks. Armitage, adapting Charles Willeford's smart, nasty 1984 novel, doesn't provide the kind of moral dimension that might make Junior's sprees cumulatively frightening. The film careens along as a blithely funky shoot-'em-up. It might have been made by a sociopathic Chuck Jones.

Park employs all manner of cinematic derring-do – shock cuts, off-kilter compositions, discontinuous storytelling – all to no great purpose other than to make us go “Wow.” A more appropriate response might be, “Huh?”

It probably won't make a jot of difference to all the screaming tweeners lining up to see this movie, but The Twilight Saga: New Moon is not wonderful.

It underscores, with ample footage from his rallying speeches and his 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, just how important it was for the antiwar movement to be represented by someone like Kerry.

A character as psychologically complex as Guerin -- whose drive may not have been fully comprehensible even to herself -- needs a lot of room to expand on screen. Schumacher and Bruckheimer box her in.

A central dictum of any mystery thriller is this: Make your protagonists, especially your villains, worth caring about. The Girl on the Train, directed by Tate Taylor from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson, falls down on the job.

Throughout the film Rudolph is working hard to put this thing over, mixing in slow-motion and shock cuts. But his heart is not really in it. His technique is both too good and not enough for this material, and it doesn't sit right. He's trying to glamorize dread. [19 Apr 1991, p.F1]

Penn is always entertaining when he's playing characters drunk with depravity. Gangster Squad could use more of him.

For all its agonizing true-life trappings, has the staying power of a grand-scale video game. Manhattan's sushi bars are in no danger of going dark.

When French New Wave directors like Truffaut and Godard paid tribute to Hollywood pulp, they poeticized it and gave it an infusion of feeling. Tarantino’s tributes are, for the most part, far less complicated: He’s a fan, and Kill Bill is his mash note.

An unconvincing talkathon that might have worked better on the stage as a two-man showpiece.

Ultimately, Ali is a far more complex creature than this movie allows for.

The whole enterprise comes across like a first draft.

Could we please declare a moratorium on funny-sad movies about dysfunctional families, especially families that come together for the holidays?

Take the Lead mixes classical dance with hip-hop gyrations and features perhaps the most scrubbed set of delinquents since "West Side Story."

Just sweet enough to avoid being negligible.

In Your Friends and Neighbors, LeBute is having a high old time giving himself the creeps. For the rest of us it's all kind of...well...nasty.

Disney's new kidpic Heavyweights plays it both ways: It says it's fine to be chubby and then goes ahead and makes all the usual chubby jokes. It's a case of having your hi-cal cake and eating it too. [17 Feb 1995, p.F4]

Director Marc Forster and screenwriter Jason Keller take the easy way out by turning Childers into a Bible-thumping Rambo. Just because the Childers of this movie is not, to put it mildly, introspective, is no reason why the filmmakers had to be equally dense.

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

The trite story has plenty of distasteful moments, but Wahlberg and Yun-Fat justify their growing reputations as capable Hollywood actors.

Tomb Raider, sloppily directed by Roar Uthaug, would not be worth watching without Vikander, who darts, leaps, and pummels her way through this mediocre escapade with a winning fierceness that makes you wish she had paired up with Indiana Jones in his heyday.

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.

Return of Living Dead 3 isn't bad for what it is but it's the genre itself that needs reanimation.

They should call this overloud, underwhelming movie "Real Steal."

It comes on strong, but in its bloody heart of hearts it’s no more resonant than one of those old Vincent Price-Edgar Allan Poe contraptions – and less entertaining, too.

Barely rates faint praise.

Disposable, sporadically amusing.

David Mamet and jujitsu come together in Redbelt, and the result is a draw.

A sad experience, but the sadness has no emotional heft because its people have none. This movie hasn't earned its funk.

A movie that has more sap than a pine forest.

The inevitable showdown between these two paragons is something of a fizzle; there's too much over/under-acting going on.

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.

At its best, it's a lively on-the-road chronicle of how to put an act together from scratch.

Some good gross-out inventiveness, but too heartfelt by half. Do we really need the Farrellys to champion inner beauty?

Best viewed as an oddball career move rather than as a successful movie.

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

Unless you are a Dante scholar, and perhaps not even then, following Inferno is a wild goose chase – without the goose.

It exploits post-9/11 anxieties as fodder for goofball gooniness. "Dr. Strangelove" it's not.

Sets out to demonstrate that life is about more than having sex. Inadvertently -- I think -- it ends up showing us just the opposite. As if we didn't already know.

Seems tailor-made for an intelligent thriller in the Graham Greene mode, but in Jewison's hands, the dragnet that closes in on Brossard is lackadaisical, and the larger political overtones--especially concerning the complicity of the Catholic church in aiding Nazis--are spelled out over and over.

The movie paints a vivid portrait of a time and place, but falls back on familiar formulas that diminish its value as both emotional drama and slice-of-life realism.

It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilirating.

What would you do if you could take a pill and suddenly access 100 percent of your brain power? This is the premise behind Limitless, a sci-fi thriller that looks as if its makers utilized around 30 percent of theirs.

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

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.

Watching it is a bit like checking out a grade-school talent show on parents’ night. The eagerness of the performers, their flat-out verve and innocence, wins you over. For a while at least...Finally, the film wears you down.

Airheads, directed by Michael Lehmann and scripted by Rich Wilkes, is far from great. But it sure is ripe. It's bursting with bad ideas, half-good ideas, good and bad actors yelling and mugging. Like a lot of youth comedies, it's frenetic where it should be inspired.

Gosling, as the Durst-like David Marks, is scarily effective before his performance turns opaque and horror-movie-ish.

Warning: If you have an allergic reaction to songs like "Take Me Home Tonight" and "I Want to Know What Love Is," do not venture within 10 miles of this movie.

The most interesting plot development – Frankie starts falling for Sam – is nipped in the bud. Some things even a soap opera won't stoop to.

All this is diverting but also borderline dull.

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.

So relentlessly giddy and hyperactive that it doesn’t really need a movie review--it needs a prescription.

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

A highly calculated attempt to recalibrate with raunch the family entertainment template and cash in.

The filmmakers are so driven to show us Mr. Jones as a harrowing free spirit that they don’t put much faith in his redemption. They’re as hooked on Jones the high-flyer as Libbie is.

Just about everything in this pea-brained epic is overscaled and overwrought – it's a cartoon trying to be a towering triptych.

Downsizing never quite goes where you think it’s going, and normally, I’d say that’s a plus. But confounding expectations only goes so far. You still have to get to a place worth getting to.

Awash in spurious sentimentality and sniping.

It’s just another example of art-house hokey-pokey. Amazingly, this film won both the Palme d’Or and Best Director Award at Cannes, beating out, among others, "Mystic River."

This is the kind of movie where a character can't just say "the fire's not out yet," they have to say "the fire still lives in these stones." It made me yearn to see "Caveman" again. At least that was INTENTIONALLY funny.

Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.

Knight of Cups isn’t quite as fancy-flimsy as “To the Wonder,” which, as I remember it, consisted mostly of Ben Affleck gazing dazedly at wave formations, but it’s close enough.

Cameron Diaz and Jennifer Lopez provide the star power, but what's missing is script power.

Al Franken is good enough, he's certainly smart enough. So, doggone it, why is "Stuart Saves His Family" so mediocre?

The direction is fairly formulaic, the special effects are nothing special, and except for Elba and McConaughey, who square off against each other in a series of ho-hum set pieces, the cast is forgettable. So is the movie.

The "Die Hard" series was never exactly big on nuance, but this new installment relentlessly zeros in on sensation. It's almost sadistically single-minded. [19May1995 Pg.F.01]

This is a half-baked movie about a half-baked person, but it has a fine, melancholic afterglow.

Cuaron is a special talent, and, as botched as Great Expectations often is, it's the kind of failure that deserves an audience--if only to experience Cuaron's way of seeing, which is at its best in the early parts of this film.

This much can be said for Roman Polanski's carnal hoot-fest Bitter Moon -- it keeps you wondering from scene to scene if the director has gone bonkers. No doubt a lot of the lunacy is intentional, but it's still lunacy. And not terribly enjoyable lunacy either. The film plays like a dirty joke that somehow got lost in the translation.[18 Mar 1994, p.F1]

Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.

It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.

Any highfalutin interpretations of his new film only serve to camouflage what is, in essence, a scam about a scam.

Air America is far from a disgrace, but it's so rare to see a film with this much panoramic verve that you want it to deliver the real goods and not this cargo-load of tinkertoy war-is-heck ironies. [10 Aug 1990]

With all the money expended on this movie, couldn’t anybody come up with a few good lines in between all the kabooms?

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.

It's slobby, goony, and gross, also occasionally funny, but not occasionally enough.

Robert Towne's screenplay is less opportunistic than many of his efforts in recent years, although it still contains moments designed merely to shock or titillate.

This well-meaning drama was made with obvious passion.

Hamilton is played, blandly, by Anna Sophia Robb, and her devoted parents, less bland, are played by Dennis Quaid and Helen Hunt. The surfing footage, much of it shot off the coast of Kauai, is not bland at all.

The well-staged opening sequence, which depicts the riot at the 1913 Paris première of "Le Sacre du Printemps," is, alas, the film's high point.

This slick doodle of a movie is nothing so much as an advertisement for itself.

Without Davidson Stargate might seem clunky and routine, but he gives it a weirdo charge. It may be a lousy movie, but it's a more enjoyably lousy movie than most.

On the plus side, this is probably the only film ever made that credits a “Moose Unit.” There are some great shoots of moose.

Jake Gyllenhaal…the film’s only piece of believable acting.

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

At times, The Invasion comes across as a mishmash of "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Stepford Wives."

The latest entry in this dubious enterprise is “Dumbo,” a perfectly lovely 1941 animated movie that has been transformed by director Tim Burton into a cloddish fantasia that never soars.

De Niro, trying his ordinary-guy best not to be mannered, gives one of his most mannered performances.

The Jackal isn't much--it certainly isn't up to the 1973 Fred Zinnemann Day of the Jackal it loosely adapts and updates--but it does offer the fascination of watching big-ticket actors attempt to spin their images.

Cage is amusingly skanky, Molina is dependably arch, and Baruchel is engagingly down to earth. But do we really need to watch them play out this exhaustingly empty scenario?

Kingsley is amusing to watch, however, even though he overdoses on strangeness. He's like a superannuated hippie crossed with the swami he just played in "The Love Guru."

Leo, in particular, seems poleaxed with good intentions. Her Lois wins the Most Understanding Wife award.

Schlesinger doesn’t really have the low-down skills to pump up the pulp. He’s so concerned not to relinquish his credentials as a “serious” director that the film, instead of seeming serious, seems mostly silly--not scary enough to function as a crackerjack thriller and not complex enough to work as a psychological drama.

After all these years of surviving everything that has been thrown at him, James Bond is finally being undone by his own team.

Using Dickie Pilager as a stand-in for George W. Bush seems too coy a tactic for these scabrous times. For better or worse, we want the real--or at least, the "real"-deal.

Somewhere along the way -- 'round about the Ghost of Christmas Past stuff -- the magic has fallen out of the story. The treacly score by Miles Goodman, with songs by Paul Williams, doesn't help. The Muppets are at their best when they're anarchic, without all this soggy whimsy. [11 Dec 1992, p.F12]

I've never understood why filmmakers construct romances in which the leads hardly spend any time together.

Eddie Murphy is one of the most alarmingly gifted comic actors America has ever produced but he persists in making comedies that are beneath him.

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

It’s unfortunate, if predictable, that Hollywood found it necessary to almost entirely eliminate deep think in favor of deep action. As for Johansson, I have no big problem with cross-racial casting, but she’s so glum and seemingly uncomfortable here that you wonder if maybe she didn’t harbor the same misgivings as her detractors.

Spurlock's movie is an attack on our eating habits, but it's also a prime example of an all-American sport--making a spectacle of oneself for fun and profit. Spurlock, you'll be surprised to learn, is developing a TV spinoff, with himself as host.

Isn't terrible exactly, but it's bland, and in some ways that's worse. It's a romance posing as a detective story in which the solution is obvious and not worth the fuss.

This is romanticism of a rather low order.

This story is powerful enough without our being heavily coaxed all the time how to feel.

Director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Christopher Kyle (no, not the man depicted in “American Sniper”) aim for a tragic monumentality but hit very wide of the mark.

Gene Hackman is excellent when he isn't overdoing his patented nice-guy routine.

The pulpiness is less homage than rip-off. There are no tricks up this film's frayed sleeve… Fatalism plus a lot of heavy breathing, and a flash of skin--it's a winning formula, all right. These movies are like Harlequin Romances for slumming highbrows [12 Oct 1990]

Alexandre Aja directs in full glop mode and the cast includes a few performers, including Ted Levine (from "Monk"), Robert Joy, and Kathleen Quinlan, who probably wish they were elsewhere.

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?

I doubt The Gunman will do much to advance Penn’s foray into action-hero bankability, and that’s probably a good thing. He’s too fine an actor to be mired in nonstop shootouts while flashing his pecs and looking scowly.

The cast is terrific, the movie isn't... It all plays like the pilot for a series that wasn't picked up.

My worst fears were confirmed almost from the start. In order to inject some pep into the proceedings, Law has been encouraged to play Wolfe as a motormouthed rhapsodist who seems less inspired than unhinged. He’s exhaustingly exuberant.

Loach has gotten hold of a marvelous subject -- the invisibility of the working poor in the environs of the rich -- that keeps you watching despite all the banner-waving.

Nastiness in a movie can sometimes be liberating and fun, but the nastiness in RoboCop 2 is no more authentic than its heart.

Paris Hilton also turns up, still trying to be famous for more than being famous. She has a ways to go.

There's good bad taste and then there's just plain bad bad, which is what describes most of Brüno.

I enjoyed this movie more than the last two films from the Wachowskis, the interminable "Cloud Atlas" and "Speed Racer." On the other hand, "The Matrix" it's not.

The film is a so-so slog through a torrent of tired jokes.

Von Trier is undeniably talented, but Zentropa, which won the 1991 Jury Prize at Cannes, comes across mostly as an exercise in pseudo-profundity. It’s got more metaphors than it knows what to do with.

For all its hipness, the movie serves up some awfully old chestnuts.

The funny sequences and dumb jokes in City Slickers are so much more entertaining than the male-bonding blather that you wonder what the filmmakers had in mind. Did they think they would cheat audiences if they didn't also throw in the tears and the hugs? In comedy, the only cheat for audiences is not being funny. [7 June 1991, p.F-1]

I don't mean to imply that this film is any good or that it contains an ounce of genuine insight. But as a template for the big-baby genre, it's invaluable.

Based flimsily on a minor F. Scott Fitzgerald story, it's an anecdote stretched to would-be epic proportions.

I know we’re supposed to think that Besson’s daffy cinematic calisthenics are entertaining because at least they are not boring. But I was bored. It didn’t help that Morgan Freeman shows up as a brainy scientist explaining everything to us in his deepest intonations. When was the last time Freeman, a great actor, really acted?

Cage is the only reason to check out an otherwise mediocre movie.

The only real acting in this movie comes from Janet McTeer and Charles Dance as Will’s aggrieved parents. They bring some ballast to this blubberfest.

I realize Legally Blonde 2 was not intended as scathing political satire, but I wish someone out there in movieland did indeed have just such an intention these days.

There is nothing magical about seeing one’s umpteenth car chase. Mark Ruffalo plays the weirdly scruffy FBI agent on the case, while Morgan Freeman, in super-slow mode, plays a famous magic debunker. He’d make the ideal critic for this movie.

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.

The pace is a little too languid, and the vulgarity a little too frequent, for the movie to work as intended.

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

Any resemblance (except qualitatively) to "An Officer and A Gentleman" is strictly unaccidental.

The writer-director Andrew Niccol is best known for writing "The Truman Show," another movie that got carried away by doomsday deep-think. The deep-think here is even sillier.

The satiric idea behind Crazy People deserves a better movie.

I’m not sure that depicting Rove as a demonic Wizard of Oz does much more than stir righteous indignation among the already indignant. A more pertinent and challenging mission would have been to show just how the public can be gulled by Rove's dirty tricks in the same ways again and again.

A creaky and slow-going morality play.

The action, directed by Shane Black, ranges from passable to interminable. The plot goes from clang to bang. Downey Jr. is still the best thing about this series.

Art as a passport to healing may be what audiences are craving these days, but the poultice provided by this movie couldn't cover a paper cut.

The problem with Christine Jeffs’s Sylvia, as with most movies about deeply troubled artists, is that for the most part we are seeing the troubles and not the artist.

It’s possible to enjoy White Sands from moment to moment because the actors are avid and the New Mexico locations are delicately beautiful. Still, there’s something disconcerting about this anything-for-effect style of filmmaking. It doesn’t add up to anything satisfying.

Stone may think he's made a movie about the toxicity of the Bush presidency, but what we have instead is a cautionary tale of a decidedly lower order. As far as I can make out, the real message of W. is: Don't vote for anybody who talks with his mouth full of food.

Something happens to Robin Williams in serious roles. He becomes so drab that it's almost as if he's trying to efface himself from the screen.

Director Gavin O’Connor and screenwriter Bill Dubuque have made a textbook example of the "what were they thinking?" movie genre. Judging from the befogged look on some of the actors’ faces, they must have been wondering the same thing.

Is it possible to truly start life all over again? Arthur Newman might have been better if it had not started at all.

The honey runs thick in The Secret Life of Bees, and so does the treacle. The cloying dullness sets in early, although not from the first frame.

Eastwood and Morgan are not con artists, but their awe here is so unblinking that their film comes across as a transcendent con job.

It’s like an over-the-hill gang variant on “The Dirty Dozen,” except not as much fun as that sounds.

Is Malick deliberately courting self-parody here? Probably not. That would imply he had a sense of humor.

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

Oldman makes a four-course dinner out of the scenery with enough slash and burn to leave you wondering if he is vying with Nicolas Cage for the title of filmdom's biggest hambone.

If you go to Burlesque expecting a campy hoot on the order of "Showgirls," you may be in for a disappointment. It's not quite awful enough, although it's plenty bad.

Wilson does his callow good-guy routine (if you close your eyes you'd swear he was his brother, Owen) and Thurman looks as if she'd rather be stalking prey in "Kill Bill."

Morgan is a wonderful writer when he's working from the headlines, but his "personal" movies, like "Hereafter" and this one, release a bleary, pseudo-profound aspect of his talent that's best left in the dark.

The jokes mostly fall flat and the dramatic scenes fall even flatter.

If you have claustrophobia and/or fear insects, the last film you should see is Bug. I'm not sure it's worth a trip even if you don't suffer from those maladies.

Sadly, it lacks the classic awfulness that might have lifted it into the pantheon of Truly Bad Movies. Instead, what we have here is a garden variety bad movie, of which there have been all too many lately.

Potty jokes and bawdy gross-outs predominate, and the few good laughs are swamped by the overall laughlessness.

The Golden Compass is a blatant attempt to duplicate the success of the "Harry Potter" franchise. The only thing missing is richly imagined characters, a comprehensible story line, good acting, and satisfying special effects.

It occurred to me that Emmerich and Co. might be playing this whole thing for laughs. It probably occurred to them, too.

This thinly autobiographical gangsta odyssey never achieves liftoff, and Jackson is unconvincing.

Given the fact that Life was co-written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who co-wrote the wacked-out “Zombieland” and “Deadpool,” the film’s glum earnestness is doubly disappointing.

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.

If you're the kind of moviegoer who likes puzzling out the plots of insoluble movies, then by all means rush to see Stay, a great big blurry mess.

The flashback sequences sometimes come across like "'For Whom the Bell Tolls' for Dummies."

Foster seems blinkered and tone-deaf to what's actually appearing onscreen.

Country Strong is the latest and, in many ways, the least impressive entrant in the achy-breaky sweepstakes.

Writer-director Massy Tadjedin cuts back and forth between these twin temptations. Will Michael succumb and prove Joanna correct in her suspicions? Will Alex's French accent conquer all? Do you care? I didn't.

Both as a writer and as a man, Salinger was nothing if not unconventional. Rebel in the Rye is so tasteful that it practically slides off the screen.

It would take a lot more than holy water to rescue Season of the Witch from mediocrity.

This is certainly the grubbiest Holmes in movie history.

The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.

Given the decibel level of this movie, it's a miracle that these guys were able to give creditable performances. To give you an idea of the magnitude of the achievement: Imagine delivering a stirring rendition of the Gettysburg Address while standing under Niagara Falls.

His drug-smuggling underworld, specifically the Amsterdam-New York connection, is likewise drably depicted. Is this because director Kevin Asch and screenwriter Antonio Macia deliberately played it down, or are they just incompetent? I’ll be charitable and vote for the former, but sometimes sensationalism is preferable to being altogether unsensational.

Morning Glory isn't targeting the dumbing down of TV news. It's pandering to the audience that craves the dumbness.

Draggy pastiche of tired gags and half-baked homilies.

There's enough family dysfunction here to fill out a dozen soppy soap operas.

Too many different stories are vying for attention here, and none of them are very good.

Zemeckis tries to juice things up by staging numerous chase scenes up and around London, but do we really need "A Christmas Carol: The Action Picture"?

The best thing The Edge of Love could do for you is to send you back to Thomas's poetry. Dash this folderol.

The tonal problem of the second installment, which often resembled a drug-infested pulp thriller instead of a comedy, is also problematic here.

The film cuts back and forth between the present and 1979, when Donna, blandly played as a young woman by Lily James, met her three beaus and went gaga for Greece. Scenery-wise, I can see why she did. I trust that everyone connected with this film had time to work on their tans.

The result is this metabiography that says almost nothing about the great photographer's life or art.

Essentially a Harlequin Romance with pulleys, E.L. James’s novel is not exactly “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” but the movie, directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Kelly Marcel takes itself so seriously that it almost cries out to be lampooned. I’m sure the “Saturday Night Live” crew is already on the case.

Even if the film were sharper, even if it was made by satirists on the order of Stanley Kubrick and Terry Southern in their “Dr. Strangelove” days, I would still argue that greenlighting such a film is a blunder. The exercise of free speech does not exempt one from the consequences of stupidity.

Writer-director David Ayer doesn’t have the right graphic technique for a comic-book-style jamboree – he’s strictly a noirish-pulp guy – and the characters, all of whom are promisingly introduced, fizzle fast.

Any movie that opens with the killing of a pet dog is definitely going to capture your attention. But where do you go from there?

The stage is set for a full-scale racial conflict, but neither actor is really up to the task - McDermott seems lost in his voluminous beard and Snoop Dogg spits his lines out.

The problem with this year-by-year structure is that the slow crawl to the end can seem agonizing if the film isn't engaging. And One Day, despite strenuous attempts by all involved to make us laugh, cry, and laugh-cry, is more likely to induce winces. We've seen it all before – and better.

Thomas Harris adapted his own bestseller and Peter Webber, who previously directed "Girl with a Pearl Earring," had the unenviable task of trying to give this glop, which is too gruesome to be campy, a high gloss. It should be called Man With a Severed Head.

Violence in the movies, no matter how many CGI effects are utilized, can't help but be far more luridly realistic. And, in the case of Wanted, to what end?

Amid all the mayhem, there is Paris in all its faded-light glory. Is the movie worth seeing as a travelogue? Only if you are (a) a masochist, (b) a terrorist, or (c) desperate.