Richard Corliss

It's like a restaurant where you go for the food and go back for the atmosphere. Or for the waitress. [13 July 1995]

The lumpiness of The Good Lie’s progression – from infancy to adulthood, and from the horrors of war to gentle social comedy and back again – proclaims a respect for facts and truths that can’t be molded into a smooth narrative.

World War II was a historical event, but also a movie genre, and Fury occasionally prints the legend. The rest of it is plenty grim and grisly. Audience members may feel like prisoners of war forced to watch a training-torture film.

Never quite transcending the sum of its agreeably disparate parts, IV is less groovy than gnarled and goofy, but in a studied way. Call it an acquired taste with a kinky savor.

But the actor (Nolte) finds truth in Wade's emotional clumsiness, in the despair of a man who hasn't the tools or the cool to survive. There are too many of these men in life, and not enough films that tell their sad tales.

It's hard to know how to respond to Falling Down: deplore its crudeness or admire its shrewdness. But it is occasionally the movies' job to plunge into the national psyche, root around in its chaotic darkness and return to the surface with some arresting fantasy that helps bring our uglier imaginings into focus. In that sense, this often vulgar and exploitative movie has some value. [1 March 1993, p63]

Harold and Kumar are pothead patriots in the first feel-good torture film.

This British film has the regal, clubby aura of Masterpiece Theatre. [21 July 1997, p. 70]

Well, it's sorta funny, and most genial: for all their ranking on parents and drooling over hot babes, Wayne and Garth are innocent kids wasting time creatively.

The project loses traction toward the end, as the picture strains to become a full-blooded action film - the very thing it spends the rest of its time mocking. And yet 21 Jump Street earns my genial nod because of its limber, 120-IQ take on the whole notion of movie revivals.

The film's steamy sex scenes—especially the first, which takes place in the kitchen among foods and utensils as elemental as love and death-will raise eyebrows and temperatures...Like Last Tango in Paris, Rafelson's Postman shows what his doomed lovers do but does not tell who they are. Their willful sex scenes are explicit and incandescent; their motivations are elliptical smoke signals viewed from the other side of Death Valley.

It’s Roberts’ deepest, strongest, liveliest film work.

Though this Nick and Norah have a lot more angst, they're just as worth watching, admiring and cuddling up to.

An epic-size, largely entertaining parable of repression and awakening.

Kurylenko, a lovely Russian-Ukrainian hybrid who is oddly duskied up to look vaguely Latina, is a whiz at raising Quantum's temperature and gradually luring Bond out of his stolid shell.

It’s as if von Trier shot the main scenes while in one of his famous depressive funks, then edited the film in a more cheerful, impish mood. At times, the tantalizing mixture of sexual neurosis and wayward humor in this memoir of a woman of pleasure suggests a collision between "Fanny Hill" and "Annie Hall."

So appealing is Gordon-Levitt that, for great stretches of his new movie, I suspended my disapproval of his character and just went with the nonstop flow. He almost persuaded me that the film is, if not a premium rush, then an economy high.

The movie isn't handsome or measured or seamless -- the very notion of a well-made film would offend the director's antiaesthetic -- but once it gets revved up, Cry-Baby is keen fun from the onetime Belial of Baltimore.

The Ides of March says that American politics, no less than Italian, is a beachfront property with sharks surfing the waves. That makes this skeptical, savory movie a fitting offering from Hollywood's suavest ambassador to Venice and the world.

The movie is best seen as straightforward, sometimes harrowing melodrama, packed with mistaken identities, beautiful villains, a kindly tourist who can outrace the bad guys, and a lost little girl whom the film brazenly sends onto a highway full of speeding cars. It's as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin.

Martin, who wrote the pretty-funny, too-soppy script, means to drink from the river this time. He wants it all: laughs, tears, low comedy, uplift. It doesn't quite happen, partly because the movie begs for poignance like an orphaned puppy, partly because modern plastic surgery makes the plot anachronistic, partly because, even with his Cyranose, C.D. is a darned sight more attractive than his beefy rival. Aaaahh, who cares, as long as Steve Martin gets a chance to strut his physical grace, wrap his mouth around clever dialogue, clamber up to rooftops like a Tarzan of the Northwest, give new life to the old-fashioned nobility of the love letter, and drink wine through his nose?

Savages isn't great cinema, but it's a very alive movie about people who probably ought to be dead.

Near Dark has filmmaking finesse to spare, but puts its dank characters on display rather than cadging sympathy for them. It is the Blue Velvet of date-night spook shows.

Ward Serrill's feel-good doc, which covers seven years in the life of Resler's Roughriders, is hobbled by a narration so syrupy, it could be poured on pancakes. But the movie soars because of the sport's natural drama and its luck in finding a complex heroine.

The film bubbles with acid wit, in the tradition of Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, while simmering with the ache of lust pursued and love lost.

I finally surrendered to the script's breezy intelligence and the movie's relatively mature sensibility. As for Emma Stone, she didn't have to win me over. She conquered me from the first A.

Best to savor The Grifters for its handsome design -- the picture looks as clean as a Hockney landscape -- and its juicy performances. [11 Feb 1991]

A cheerful entertainment, suitable for kids and parents of the brighter stripe. It's just not Nick Park great.

Brothers isn't up there in the empyrean of classic movies, but it is a solid drama -- about a family at war with itself.

While trading on viewers’ familiarity with the series’ venerable fetishes (a cheer rises at the sight of Bond’s old Aston Martin and the sound of Monty Norman’s guitar theme from Dr. No), Skyfall has the life, grandeur and gravity of a satisfying, stand-alone entertainment.

Director Peter Berg cannily hypes the tension and the sentiment in the only one of the current Middle East political movies designed to appeal to the action crowd. Hard truths are absorbed while stuff blows up.

Not quite in the class of the first film, Underworld 4 is still the most enlightened girl-power film of the week, nosing out Gina Carano's "Haywire" by the length of Pinocchio's proboscis.

The first hour of the film sets up the situation with a naturalistic vigor and cinematic resourcefulness unique to Scorsese. He knows precisely how to move the camera, dress a set, direct his splendid actors, underlay the music, edit to keep the viewer off guard and consistently impressed. But Raging Bull has nowhere to go but down and out. As Jake follows the trajectory of his predictable degradation, the film threatens to become as bloated and repetitious as the fat ex-champ in his cups.

Wahlberg could be the actor that action movies have been looking for since Sly, Arnold, Harrison, Bruce, Jackie and Jean-Claude -- all in their 50s or 60s -- got too old to execute the leg lifts necessary to kick bad guys in the butt.

The humor is gross-out but inoffensive, since it's rooted in whimsy, not malice. Smith finesses the sophomore jinx with sophomoric high jinks. [6 Nov 1995]

When it gets going, it’s a pretty fine movie.

In a movie era remarkable for its reluctance to dramatize erotic intimacy, Shame merits praise for the dark energy of its sexual encounters.

Manages to make its point--that we are all impaired, short on that rarest quality, common sense--without being imprisoned by its complex format.

Another crowd-pleasing, expert-babysitting vaudeville turn.

It proves that, at the end, he was still a thriller. Fans and doubters alike can look at the gentle, driven singer-dancer at the center of this up-close document and say admiringly, This was him.

The plot, though, is only the lid of this Pandora's toy chest. Inside, the alert viewer will find humor, imagination and a little Oriental mysticism.

Not a great film but a warm one that pushes the viewer's emotional buttons so deftly it feels like a massage. My guess is that you will laugh and cry at all appropriate moments. Resistance is futile.

In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy old men.

A British romantic comedy with not much inside its pretty head but the spinning out of an ancient Hollywood riddle.

On the way to this predictable conclusion, the movie offers plenty of smart entertainment. You'd be a schmuck to miss it.

It parades a screen chemistry rarely seen since the original Butch and Sundance.

For all its superpower simplifications, White Nights has discovered in Baryshnikov a keen and passionate movie hero. Giggle at the film's naiveté; then feast on Misha and dance down the steppes.

The actors emote up a summer storm. Maguire’s otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy’s magnetism and weakness.

Like some silly summer song that can't be shaken from the mind, this is a catchy enterprise, no better than it tries to be and no less funny.

Yeah, well, I still like the film.

Small in stature but consistently entertaining, Seven Psychopaths is a vacation from consequence for the Tony- and Oscar-winning author, and an unsupervised play date for his cast of screw-loose stars.

The real kick, however, is in the grandeur and detail of the production design, by Jim Dultz and David Rockwell.

If Michael Lehmann's direction were a bit more astute, the movie could be the classic genre mutation it aims to be: Andy Hardy meets "Badlands." [17 April 1989]

Defiance says that it took grit, desperation and courage under fire to say, "Not this time," and fire back. Beyond that, it's a pretty good movie -- a bold, uneasy mix of romance, political debate and vigorous action.

Speed Racer announces the arrival of the virtual movie. If you watch the film overwhelmed by the assault of seductive visual information and wonder what you're seeing, here's the happy answer: the future of movies.

Knoxville and his team bring a defiant cheerfulness to their venture; the gang's idiocy is both self-aware and somehow innocent. Their gags have the anachronistic simplicity of pre-CGI stunts, when daredevils risked their lives to make an audience go "Wow!"

A reboot of an A-level spy series seems too pretty-good to be true. Shadow Recruit occupies this weekend’s movie screens as familiarly and reassuringly as a Walther PPK fits in the hand of James Bond.

It's just fine. Not great; just fine.

A delicate counterpoise of passion and restraint, The Invisible Woman is a major work in a minor key.

Even if a Chinese movie doesn't sound like your idea of summer fun, give 2046 a chance. Its pearly artistry and gorgeous faces should put you quickly, deeply, in the mood for love.

Mitty is a lovely romantic comedy — the portrait of a man, nearly swallowed by the gulf between the world his lives in and the world he dreams of, who manages to bridge the two and to find Ms. Right in the workplace he cherishes.

The 80 minutes it spends on the atoll alone with Hanks make for engrossing storytelling. The film is less sure-footed back in civilization.

A film full of smart laughs.

When they get to canoodling and conniving, you won't ask for your money back.

This is the animated film as art film. Coraline doesn't try to ingratiate; it just looms, like a cemetery gate, daring curious souls to tiptoe in and fend for themselves.

No masterpiece, Persia is fun for exactly as long as it takes to sit through it.

Applying Dad's directorial style of sweaty closeups, prowling telephoto shots and an ominous electronic score (by ex-Tindersticks member Dickon Hinchliffe), the younger Mann has dished out a meaty drama with familiar ingredients from the Law & Order kitchen but a distinctively bitter taste.

There's no reason Banderas, after two Hollywood decades, couldn't do Robert justice; yet for a man whose mourning has turned to madness, he is strangely remote, lifeless, displaying neither rage nor poignancy. If Anaya is the heart at the center of the film, Banderas is the hole.

What I'm saying is that I resisted the film but it won me over, a little more than I care to admit.

The movie may not soar like Aladdin or roar like The Lion King, and it demands plenty of parental guidance; but it fulfills the Disney animators' dream.

But it also has enough buoyant '70s music to shake anybody's tail feather, and a kind of easy jubilance of narrative and character. Bet it makes you wanna dance. [11 Oct 1993]

Let all Marvel franchises have as long a life as Logan. But could Singer let Jackman sing a few numbers as the knife-fingered mutant? They could call it Les Scissorables.

The main problem is that Ritchie keeps playing the same old song. It's a swell tune, and we don't mind hearing it every few years, but we'd welcome another subject in a transposed key. Even the Material Girl tries out fresh material.

The film has such a weakness for the easy incongruity (short men dancing with tall women--isn't that hilarious?) that it could almost be Australian. But Shall We Dance? also has an emotional gravity; it is grounded in a middle-aged man's nagging belief that he has one last chance to grab at life. [16 June 1997, p.76]

The action is plentiful and thumping; Marvel-size thrills await you and the generations of kids who still believe in Superman. I just mean that the movie finds its true, lofty footing not when it displays Kal-El’s extraordinary powers but when it dramatizes Clark Kent’s roiling humanity. The super part of Man of Steel is just O.K.; but the man part is super.

Through the actress's effort and her director's generosity, this book about an irresistible man becomes a movie about a remarkable woman. Madison County is Eastwood's gift to women.

M:i:III accomplishes its mission: to run smart variations on dumb tropes. After all, summer movies are not for students but for thrill consumers. Devour and enjoy.

The script, by Peter Hedges from his novel, spins out a few too many eccentricities, and the direction, by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), meanders. But DiCaprio and Cates bring loopy authenticity to their roles, and Depp is, as always, a most effacing star.

Doesn't touch (Li's Hong Kong movies). But it is trying something clever.

Until The Raven almost literally loses itself during a chase in the city sewers, it nicely balances its literary gamesmanship with a R-rated thriller's mandatory gross-out tableaux.

This is the rough cut of a good movie, and a splendid opportunity wasted.

The invention is impressive, but there is little indication of the Henson-Oz trademark: a sense of giddy fun.

Laughter trumps political fairness, and Get Hard made me laugh at, and with, situations I hadn’t thought could tickle me. The movie has a warm heart beating under its seemingly scabrous shell.

There's something missing, beyond the iconoclastic theology, in this perfectly OK, blandly underwhelming superproduction. The movie lacks an elevating passion, a cohesive vision, a soul. It's as if The Golden Compass has misplaced its artistic compass. Somebody stole its daemon.

It points out what's missing in his (Oshii) approach: fluidity of character line, the subtlety of expression that brought humanity to a Warner Bros. cartoon duck or rabbit.

The acting ensemble is crucial. Everyone's really fine.

This is cinema reduced or distilled to its purest definition, of movies that move. If you want dewy humanity in your entertainment, watch Lifetime.

With all its boardroom bickering, the plot is a gun that shoots mostly blanks. G3 is too faithful to the deliberate pacing of the first two films: the slow walking into a dark room, the silence surrounding the threats... The film is a slow fuse with a big bang. [24 Dec 1990, p.76]

Morning Glory is a cut above most other recent light fare, but not a prime cut.

It's an efficient thriller, with scare weapons ranging from the primitive (a pitchfork) to the apocalyptic (an A bomb). The acting is only horror-film-functional, and you might wish that our trio of renegades knew a few basic laws of the genre.

At 2 1/2 hours, it all plays like the rough assembly of a 90-min. caper film--an anecdote told at epic length. Grier, foxy lady of '70s blaxploitation, is given little chance to radiate. [22 Dec 1997, p.80]

When Possession finds its true home, lodging in the convulsive certitude of Victorian romance, it does indeed catch fire -- and warms any viewer in the mood for love.

The movie is less to be experienced than to be appreciatively studied, like an insect, a stuffed bird, or the sketch by a gifted artist in the style of an Old Master — in this case, the Master of Suspense. It’s not pure Park or pure Hitchcock but a muted, mildly mesmerizing blend of the two. You might want to take a careful stroll in this Hitchpark.

My advice to Scott and Lindelof is, Try harder - to bring the characters as well as the creatures alive; to extend the grandeur of that music-of-the-sphere scene to an entire movie; to devise new horror-film money shots; and to scare the crap out of me.

Law, sexy and crafty as ever, and here with a flinty innocence, proves again he has the star-quality goods.

The plot becomes landlocked in true-life implausibilities; the characters rarely get a hold on the moviegoer's heart or lapels. What saves this meditation on the vestiges of colonialism is, ironically, its celebration of American star power.

Romantic comedies often make do on flimsy premises, but this one is thinner than Kate Moss and nuttier than an Almond Joy.

For all the energetic milling, Rise of an Empire proves superior to its predecessor by making war a game both sexes can play, on nearly equal terms. In comparison, the R-rated "300" seems as innocent as Adam in the Garden before the delicious complication of Eve — or Eva.

Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness.

Agreeable but never compelling, Silverado proves it takes more than love of the western to make a good one. Maybe the dudes at K-Tell were a mite too slick for the job.

Obvious, though, is the word for Hopper's direction. It amplifies to rock-concert level every pained plosive in Bertie's speech, forces certain characters dangerously close to caricature.

With his round, ruddy face, Tighe always seems on the verge of derisive laughter or flash-fisted rage; it's enjoyable guessing which fever will surface first. The rest of the movie is less entertaining, a righteous homily without the grits.

Payne cannot shape or propel his own good material. He lets things dawdle when briskness would be a boon, and defeats the gung-ho efforts of Dern and other worthy actors. [9 December 1996, p.82]

The Keane story is a rich parable that deserves either a wilder or a more acute telling than Burton provides here.

By the end-credit sequence, when the stars appear in spandex outfits to reprise Dancing Queen, the audience may be singing along as if they'd overdosed on ouzo.

Flouting all rules of the sea but honoring every war-epic cliche about guts under pressure.

Provides the familiar cheap thrills but with a salsa tang.

This is what lifts Seven Pounds above other Smith dramas -- he does tentatively allow another adult onto his solitary planet.

The Lady is still titled away from the churning melodrama of Suu Kyi's country and toward the intimate dilemma of a loving couple forced apart by circumstance.

It is the rare conspiracy thriller that ripens as the villains' organization and motives are gradually revealed.

The film's payoff raises more questions than it answers, which may be Shyamalan's intent in this political parable of fear.

The movie is a little gimpy. But Murray's molto impressive. He drops his voice half an octave; he walks like a golem tailored by Armani; he puts his silky style in the service of menace. It's a whole nother dimension to him. [8 March 1993]

Hanks has a wonderful scene, late in the film, that shows a strong man collapsing into frailty. It hints at the emotional depth the movie might have plundered. The rest of Captain Phillips must rely for its drive on the relentless mechanical agitation of Henry Jackman’s score. It can’t save an overly muscled docudrama that is more pounding that truly gripping.

It should make audiences happy. But then so did most of his earlier movies, and they were lame, gnat-brained pieces of demagogic doo-doo!

Guys and gals from the first film, now thicker and with incipient crow lines, pair up in more or less the same permutations as when they were young and shiny. The movie's message is that the way to face impeding maturity is to embrace your inner teen idiot.

Rumble Fish is the messiest, most provocative inkblot of the year.

Anchorman 2 is more like SNL in the sharper years (1995–2002), when McKay was a writer and Ferrell one of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players. Expect no more and you should be satisfied. Wine connoisseurs would call this a new Burgundy with an old bouquet.

The Cotton Club is not a bad film, just a bland one; not inept, just inert. Given its garish production history, one rather expected The Cotton Club to sing with hot-jazz desperation. Instead, we get the mediocre craftsmanship of a pit band in Vegas.

There's enough narrative for three fine films. But not enough for The Interpreter. The thriller pieces feel assembled rather than organic.

There's nothing profound going on here; the truisms don't blossom into life-enriching truths. It's more like the person you meet at a bar who, on second glance, is surprisingly attractive. Call Think Like a Man a perfectly satisfactory one-night stand at the movies.

Invigorating and annoying, Lola could use a dose of Ritalin. Best to take this 76-minute riff on alternate destinies as an antidote to Europe's minimalist art-house cinema and to enjoy Potente's sweaty radiance.

Does Solondz feel remorse for libeling his own kind? He might need to if his portraits didn't have the gift of dark wit, the ring of social truth. One makes allowances for a master storyteller.

It's a decent February movie that smartly extends Washington's God-on-the-run character.

The real battle here is between two generations of acting styles: meticulous method vs. star quality.

The Informant! may end up closer to the non-starters. Its lunacy is too deadpan, and its denouement too drawn out, to appeal to those who liked the Bourne movies, or, for that matter, the Gore. But it's worth seeing, and a salutary achievement.

Forman and Weller have created an impressive but strangely lopsided movie.

For all the carnage, Lee's tone is contemplative.

The word "mixed" isn't mixed enough to fit my response to this film.

The Other Woman earns a viewer's respect for the grace notes that director-screenwriter Don Roos finds beneath these familiar tunes, for the unassertive skill with which he paints upper-class life on the Upper East Side, and for the rightness of the performances.

If you take Tykwer's film even half-seriously, it will be like one of those horror movies that you leave, suspecting that the crazy, ingenious super-killer is waiting for you outside. A warning, then, to the susceptible: After seeing The International, don't dare go to an ATM.

A serious film about the gnawing of conscience and the thirst for redemption, but the tone is so dispassionately vile it may leave viewers shaken or sick. [16 Nov 1992, p.95]

In ingenuity and charm, this DreamWorks offering isn't up there with "Kung Fu Panda," which remains the sharpest, fullest film from the studio. You may get the feeling that Megamind was made for, and possibly by, really smart six-year-olds. Nothing wrong with that; audiences of all ages can be tickled by the higher form of preadolescent humor.

It's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting.

Pfeiffer restores honor to the family drama.

So little wit is expended on the dialogue and so much on the imagination of disaster that you may as well sit back and enjoy the jolting ride.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol is no "Fast Five."

Lynch and his film will surely be reviled, but as an experiment in expanding cinema's dramatic and technical vocabulary, Blue Velvet demands respect. [Sept. 22, 1986]

Neither the acting nor the story matters much here; the movie is simply the sum of its 3D effects.

If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?

The film mostly simmers.

This spectacle of strenuous improvising is more stunt than true experiment.

This is a Bond with great body but no soul.

Me, I'm of two minds about a movie that wants to be a nail-ripping thriller and a statement on an artist's unholy communion with her role. It's reminiscent of older, better movies.

It's soppy enough to suit the requirements of the weepie genre...But the movie also has an aching solidity that allows you to surrender to its cuddly-creepy feelings without hating yourself in the morning.

The movie is way too colorful - cute, in a repulsive way, with its crawly special effects - and tame compared with its source.

Picaresque movies often feel longer than they are. For them to work, they need an interior spring with more thrust than Darjeeling's attempt at reconstituted brotherhood. The problem is in Anderson's approach, which is so supercool, it's chilly. Anderson has the attitude for comedy but not the aptitude.

A decent sampler for Americans who've never seen a full-out Bollywood musical, since it goes heavy on the action scenes and light on the big dance numbers.

To accept the film, though, one must first understand its point of view, and that is maddeningly difficult. All we know for certain is that Do the Right Thing is not naturalistic. [July 3, 1989]

The problem with shock comedy is that it works in its purest form only the first time. Where do you go after you've gone too far? No artist can get heads to swivel and stomachs to turn indefinitely.

You may salute Lone Survivor for its desperate intensity; but the film remains pinned down by its military and political dilemma: between gung-ho and F—, no.

Eastwood can earn both laughs and respect just by standing in a crowded elevator and grunting ''Swell'' to his boss. Truth is, this time around, he doesn't get to do much else. [18 July 1988, p.73]

For the uninitiated, The X Files: I Want to Believe may seem as musty and forbidding as one of those dank secrets that Mulder and Scully were forever digging up from some backyard, or fetid swamp, or their own aching hearts.

Lohman's pensive loveliness carries the film.

If the film is to work at all - and it eventually does - the two 27-year-old leads must radiate enough star quality to obviate the ramshackle plot. They just about do.

Non-headline-making but often entertaining docu-travelogue.

Wrath of the Titans, like its predecessor, is a slightly-better-than-OK mashing of one of history's great literary troves: the Greek myths.

At its shambling best, Office Space is like a bracing break at the coffee machine. Some horrible Monday, why not cut work to see it?

In the end, I, Robot is just an assembly-line product of a not very advanced model.

The Secret Life of Bees may not be a "To Kill a Mockingbird" on page or screen, but Fanning is the center of its soul and intelligence. It's Hollywood's job to find strong parts for this precocious genius as she matures into womanhood.

The film has a hectic, sitcom air and a full-of-himself hero who is as likely to grate as to ingratiate.

Lawless tries to be flawless; as a movie, it's often listless - lifeless.

It's a great idea that Niccol can't translate into a great movie.

Howard and Goldsman have efficiently touched all the bases. But they haven't found a way to replicate the book's page-turning urgency.

Sensitive souls in search of wrenching emotion can be guaranteed their Kleenex moments; you will get wet. But aside from that opening scene, you will not be cinematically edified. This is a bad movie.

The film is a lavish, linear, way-too-long (3 hr. 21 min.) storybook of Malcolm's career, the movie equivalent of an authorized biography, a cautious primer for black pride.

Mind you, I don't begrudge the creators of even a junk-food movie like Cloverfield the fun they had demolishing New York one more time.

Ask the Dust is the ghost of a cult novel; it can't bring itself to life.

It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.

By turns amusing and annoying, Young Adult could be the flip side, plus the sequel, of "Juno."

The joke barrage becomes hit-or-miss, as if the creators — including screenwriter Dan Stewart, working from a story by Rogen and Greenberg — don’t know or care which is which.

That heart comes bursting out of Funny People, Apatow's intermittently engaging, 2 hr. 26 min. essay in schizo-cinemaphrenia.

The film's director, Kevin Macdonald, who did "The Last King of Scotland," is not a flair fellow. The chase scenes interpolated into this version have no special oomph; the encounters no residual kick. Paging Ridley Scott? Oh, sorry, too late. So there it is: another film that can't compete with a TV show.

Even Galifianakis's pervy charm, and a deeply weird cameo by Mike Tyson, can't save The Hangover. Whatever the other critics say, this is a bromance so primitive it's practically Bro-Magnon.

Raimi, who launched his career with the cheapo horror mini-masterpiece "The Evil Dead" before helming the blockbuster "Spider-Man" trilogy, can’t infuse the story with much verve or joy.

The new PG-13 movie is a fairly close adaptation of the Verhoeven, and lacks not just the earlier film's newness but its vigor, density, humor and R-rated juice. It's like the dinner-theater revival of a classic play, whose single asset is to remind those present how good the original was.

Rourke does strong, sensitive work here, which will cheer his old-time admirers and win him new fans...But the movie itself is pretty bad.

What you will find is both familiar in its contours and unique in its casting: the definitive alterkocker action picture. Call it "The Old Dogs of War," or "Incontinent Basterds."

At heart, though, the story is about the deep, complex, poignant love a man has for his daughter: it's the Lolita syndrome without the lust but with every bit of the doting possessiveness. [30 Dec 1991, p.71]

More a case history than a devious puzzle, the movie is like a story overheard from the next restaurant booth: for all your curiosity as to how it turns out, you're not likely to have much personal investment in the people.

When it shifts into action mode, the movie can be a spectacular rush.

The new film is a toss-up with George Pal's very watchable 1953 version: the special effects are even better here, the drama even lamer.

The result is that John Carter plays like an alternate, inferior version of "Avatar"…Plus fleeting hints of John Ford's "The Searchers" - for this is also a Western.

In space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one will see you yawn.

The performances here are so sharp that viewers may wish End of Watch has been shot by someone who knew how to find the right point of view for a scene and leave it there.

Gradually, though, the movie sinks into ordinariness, serving up too many Spielbergian reaction shots of each cast member gawking or gulping at an alien encounter, and too many moral lessons that must be learned or taught.

All glitz, no glory. [7 September 1998]

Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."

Something got lost in the move from storyboard to screen, and in the stretch from seven minutes to 103. [27 June 1988]

This movie exists wholly in the realm of metaphor, whose messages stick out like placards: Find joy through pain. Reunite with estranged loved ones. Keep hope alive.

The film manages to be both sensational and stodgy, like a guided tour that goes on until it drones.

Simultaneously diverting and annoying.

Nowhere Boy is a surprisingly conventional film - adroit at weaving a time-and-place mood but way too rigid dramatically to bring the Lennon family dynamic to life.

To Western eyes, this meandering parable registers as a perplexity and a disappointment.

Is comedy a young man's game, like skateboarding or sex? Writing jokes, creating droll characters -- these take ambition, ingenuity and energy, and after decades of devotion to this voracious muse, a fellow can get pooped.

Not bad, but certainly not good; classify the movie as lazy fun.

Seeing Fincher's version is like getting a Christmas gift of a book you already have. This edition has a nicer binding and prettier illustrations than your beloved old paperback, but it's essentially a reproduction of the same old dragon. Dragon Tat-two.

But it IS a movie about dopes: goofy guys, born without the ambition gene, and who would not survive a minute in the drug world, or the real one, without the guardian angel of a scriptwriter hovering to think them out of scrapes.

Raimi directs the film at Maguire's pensive pace. Some scenes are just inert.

Sometimes intelligent, often cuddlesome and ultimately bland.

The movie proved to be an exasperating, fitfully enjoyable jumble of Perryana, full of insult humor, a gospel choir and, not to give too much away, plot elements borrowed from "Chinatown," "Precious," "Imitation of Life" and "Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke" - all restitched and Tyler-made.

The better class of moviegoers will love Billy Elliot. And I loved hating it.

The enterprise is sluggish when it's not grinding toward the preposterous.

Ultimately, Titanic will sail or sink not on its budget but on its merits as drama and spectacle. The regretful verdict here: Dead in the water.

Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero -- because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is on a mission to make you cry. Whether you oblige will depend on your fondness for, or immunity to, the gentler stereotypes of movie romance.

In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director.

All these roles could have been found at a garage sale of comedy stereotypes. To the extent that 50/50 works, it is because of Gordon-Levitt, one of my favorite actors.

The blend of fairy-tale sentiment and knowing irony worked exactly once, in "The Princess Bride," and fails here. But there's enough visual ingenuity - eye candy, if you will - to make this Hansel & Gretel an intermittently tasty temptation.

AP2 starts out bright and clever--shagnificent, we might almost say--before sinking into a swamp of shagnation.

So put it this way: If the Altmans were a real family sitting shiva, I’d drop by to commiserate and give a cheek-kiss to a few of the mourners (Bateman, Driver, Fey, maybe Fonda). I enjoyed seeing them, but I’d hate to be sentenced to being with them for the full seven-day stretch.

This is a good-natured retro romp that is truer to Golden Age movies than to golden oldies songs.

Clever ideas early on go rogue, or go missing, in the gallop toward an action-film climax that then, perversely, doesn’t materialize. The movie’s intelligence is artificial, its affect solemn.

If the movie had been content to replicate the Taken formula, and left the fatherhood angle as a subtext, it would be easier to take. Instead, even for Costner admirers, it’s a hard 2 hours to kill.

A wildly flawed but fitfully diverting picture.

It's a clever idea that, around the mid-point, stumbles into absurdity as the movie itself makes too many lunatic choices.

She (Blanchett) seems the only guardian of sanity in this good-old-boy Bellevue.

The pulse of Curtis Hanson's direction is lethargic; the comic bits are so slack and deadpan you could mistake the film for an earnest drama--an Afterschool Special for troubled kids and their pooped parents.

Keough is nearly worth risking life (Diane's) and limb (Martin's) for. The eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, she has a pale, dreamy lusciousness that puts as viewer in mind of Amanda Seyfried, though without the overt sexuality. Her not-quite-there appeal matches both the opacity of Martin's intentions and the entire underhanded, underwhelming experience that The Good Doctor offers.

The result is a knockoff cinematic ceramic.

It's strenuous, smartly-made and ordinary to an extraordinary degree.

By buying the pitch that its central character’s escapades were the stuff of mesmerizing drama or comedy, Scorsese, Winter and DiCaprio reveal themselves as dupes — the latest in a long line of clever folks swindled by Jordan Belfort.

Corelli is a coffee-table movie: one leafs through the gorgeous vistas and nods through the narrative.

Can The Hunger Games, in the movie version directed by Gary Ross, successfully navigate the crossing from page to screen? Our answer: Eh.

The archivist's meticulousness with which this movie was assembled defeats the starving-hysterical-naked urgency of its source material. Could the old Hollywood pharisees have been right? Maybe On the Road is unfilmable.

Theirs was a ruthless Cinema of Cruelty; this is whimsy with a coating of corrosion.

The new film is conflicted about its subject -- it both derides and adores what it means to parody -- and it's miscast at the top. Still, the Eve Ahlert -- Dennis Drake script has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit.

In the end, the Cuban newspaper was nearly right: it's not the Castro character but the whole of this grand, doomed experiment that lacks "charisma and depth."

Ruby Sparks tries its damnedest to make a picture that seduces moviegoers into accepting it as their best imaginary friend forever. But the sweat shows more than the sparkle.

Never to be mistaken for a Christmas classic - or even, strictly speaking, a good movie - H&K 3D Xmas obeys one other solid comedy rule: that after things are broken, they must be repaired and restored.

At the core, though, one finds a slacky, sappy film. The human mystery that breathed so easily in "Shawshank" is often forced here.

This agitated comedy could be called "The Big Chillin'" if it had a smidge of the 1983 film's wit and charm.

Until a vigorous climax, the action scenes have little punch.

The film's blithe misogyny soon becomes wearying; it refuses to see women as more than the sum of their private parts.

The Terminal is Spielberg's shortest feature since the first "Jurassic Park," yet it drags, plods, piling one lifeless situation atop another. For all the effort and good intentions, the movie is in-terminal-ble.

In this bad-better-best movie, the Flik story is the bad, the choir singing much better and Peters the soul-stirring best.

In Susan Minot's goofy script, Tyler ministers to ailing writer Jeremy Irons and other artsy layabouts while searching for the man on whom to bestow her virginity. The climactic deflowering scene provides the only giggles in an otherwise stodgy mess.

The problem is that this pot of intrigue takes ages to boil, and the cook refuses to turn up the heat. And if vitality is not an element Sayles cherishes, neither is nuance.

It lacks overall focus, and at the end you may have a question for Michael Mann: Why'dyou bother? [July 6, 2009, p.59]

The scorekeepers at the various sites that rate critics' enthusiasm for a film shouldn't even try to elicit a Pass or Fail grade from me on T3. I'm a fascinated, stupefied outsider. Just mark me Present.

The critic in me can authoritatively declare that the film is crap. The fan in me sent his shirt to the dry cleaners for tear removal.

To evaluate For Your Eyes Only and the other Bond movies, it helps to think of them not as, say, different vintages of a fine Bordeaux but as successive models off the Pontiac assembly line. In one vehicle there may be an annoying ping in the engine of narrative; in another the dialogue may be as sleek as Genuine Corinthian Leather. But all meet the same standards of speed, styling and emotion control. If there is no Rolls-Royce in the Bond series, there is also no Pinto.

Von Trier has a tendency to go overboard in his denunciations of American violence (Dogville). By contrast, Dear Wendy is a cogent, comprehensive take on the land and the films that obsess him.

The picture is no great shakes as cinema, and a shade too cute for its own good.

Conran hasn't attached his technical virtuosity to a ripping yarn or infused it with behavioral brio. The first of its kind often doesn't work; Sky Captain may be the Moses that leads other directors to a blue-sky, blue-screen promised land.

It’s a bit of a botch.

Its visual thrills are chilly and wearying compared with the other films' quirky humanity. It's not a megamovie; it's a Sega movie.

To find that valuable truth, you have to dig through an avalanche of d--- jokes and strenuous slapstick.

Fresh inspiration is sparse here; the sequel is less an extension than a remake. Holmes says of one of his lamer disguises, "It's so overt, it's covert." And the shadow in this game is the imposing penumbra of Ritchie's very satisfying 2009 film. It's overt and overwhelming.

When in doubt, director Tony Scott ("Top Gun", "Days of Thunder") lets loose a spray of water, sparks and sweat-the signature flourish of this Helmut Newton of movie machismo.

This naive little movie hopes to prove itself the Flashdance of football.

He (Tony) could be a self-destructive hero out of a Dostoyevsky or Mailer novel. That portrait gives Iron Man 2 its fascination. The rest is a cluttered, clattering toy story.

No scene lasts more than a few minutes, but the overall is effect is being subjected to 105 mins. of YouTube vignettes that someone has chosen. 360 is probably best appreciated or endured on a long flight similar to the one Hopkins takes in the movie.

Watson makes a smooth matriculation from the England-made Harry Potter epics to this movie's thrifty, six-week Pittsburgh shoot.

A humongous, visionary parable that intermittently enthralls and ultimately disappoints. [8 July 1991, p.55]

Along with other cast members, Penn takes ages registering his stares and scowls, until the movie is finally not about gangs but about actors' attitudes. Dressed up in '80s street slang, this is a '60s exercise in Method excess. [18 Apr 1988]

A film that's fun to argue with.

The film, though, lies dormant in its own decency.

Tries anything for a gross-out laugh — but feels oh-so-familiar

In terms of quality, though, Argo is just so-so.

Like Martin Scorsese’s "The Departed," a bloated Americanizing of the Hong Kong cop movie "Infernal Affairs," the Lee Oldboy will startle newbies with its story ingenuities and morbid revelations, while leaving connoisseurs of the source film wondering why Hollywood couldn’t have left great enough alone.

You get 45 minutes of awesome encased in 90 minutes of yawnsome.

Crowe, despite his loutish rep, is forever surprising viewers by slipping snugly into the disparate characters he plays. This time he surprises by failing. Oh, he can do engaging as smartly as he does stalwart or tortured, but he gets sabotaged by the cloying script.

No deep thoughts here; this is a product of shiny surfaces and glittering patter, the cinematic equivalent of a derivatives offering. Instead of whacking Wall Street, Stone gives it a poke that ends up as a tickle.

Dawn Treader, the name of the ship in the story, should here be rechristened Yawn Treader. If this movie were a bedtime book, the wee ones would be asleep by page two.

Shaggily amusing but familiar and way-too-long.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an O.K., not great, Marvel movie...Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.

Though the movie is no more than agreeable, it does provide a swell showcase for New Zealand wundercomic Rhys Darby (Murray the hapless agent on HBO's Flight of the Conchords) and gives the astrally adorable Zooey Deschanel a rare shot at a lead role in a big Hollywood movie.

Like the ZAZ lads' other films, this is a movie made for a VCR Saturday night. They supply the jokes; you bring the microwave popcorn and modest expectations. [12 Dec 1988]

After a while, Nine plays like some Hollywood charity revue.

Somewhere in recreational value between an afternoon on a San Diego beach and one at a Detroit public swimming pool. Either way, before you know it, it's evening.

The film also serves as the clearest statement of Glee's sacred mission. Through it, we can see how the entire multimedia phenomenon - the show, the albums, the iTunes hits, the recent concert tour and now this movie - has accrued the odor, say the incense, of a secular religion.