But as good as it is, the film falls short of translating the exaltation and near-gospel music feel of the band in full flight. [2 Nov 1984]

Banshees is like a short story trying to be a novel. The extra pages get filled with the postcard views. There are bits of wit — again, this is Martin McDonagh we’re talking about — but overall “Banshees” is lugubrious and slow.

It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.

Most of the movie feels like an interlude. Pacing, velocity, and flow don’t interest Lowery. He knows the effects he wants and, skilled as he is, knows how to get them. But are they worth getting? A film that’s consciously laborious is still laborious. In a world where nothing is more real than magic, its absence is sorely felt.

It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.

A remarkable subject, the Kraffts cry out for a remarkable filmmaker.

The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]

It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.

All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.

These are truly tedious stakes for an action movie. The franchise isn't worried about world safety. It's fretting over whether to start wearing Depends.

Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.

Fiennes has an excellent rapport with Lewis-Parry, making their scenes as compelling and moving as anything “28 Years Later” had to offer. It’s too bad that every time the Samson-Kelson plotline gets good, we’re yanked back to dopey Jimmy’s goofy gang and its religious mumbo jumbo.

Once again, Fastvold and Corbet have crafted a movie I admired more than I liked.

A textbook case of filmmakers who can't make up their minds about their characters; it's a failure of nerve disguised as dramatic ambiguity.

The result is a clattery, unfocused affair that at times is more irritating than fun.

Ad Astra is moody, meditative, and slow (though not the knife fight or rover demolition derby).

Nick Nolte electrifies the football-cum-drugs saga with a remarkable performance as Phil Elliott, a pot smokin', beer swillin', cocaine sniffin' tight end for the North Dallas Bulls. But the erratic direction of Ted Kotcheff and the wayward script are strictly second-string. [10 Jun 2014, p.G15]

Full of action, but no soul.

Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie so fully collapse in its third act as this one does, and it does so without warning.

Is it being a spoilsport to suggest that the Hubble’s original 2-D images are a lot more stupendous than all the IMAX 3-D hurly-burly?

Despite the material’s fit, the story’s relentlessly downbeat tone is challenging. Strong performances by Logan Lerman (“Fury”) and Sarah Gadon (Hulu’s “11.22.63”) can’t keep the film from feeling like exhaustingly slow going.

The situation provides a framework for the writer-director, Kogonada (“Columbus,” 2017), to dwell on the workings of memory and the various meanings of mortality and family. This is rich and challenging material. “After Yang,” while pleasant enough and certainly distinctive, isn’t altogether up to the challenge.

The constant sense of low-grade menace that helps make the first quarter of The Card Counter intriguing and effective gets put on hold, in a good way, whenever Haddish is on screen.

Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.

The film’s episodic nature, which serves to underscore the moments of grim drama, adds to the problem. One can only salute the filmmakers’ ambition and seriousness of purpose, but it’s hard to see who The Breadwinner audience is.

It’s a daring choice to force audiences to spend 2 hours with someone they won’t like, but “If I Had Legs, I’d Kick You” is more of an experiment than an empathy machine. It overstays its welcome by at least 30 minutes.

When Dafoe is onscreen, his unpredictable energy drives a deserving stake into the film’s stodgy heart.