Morlang is a repressed creep whose worst crime, as far as the audience is concerned, is dullness.

It’s also a movie that further establishes Vaughn as one of the edgier and more underrated genre voices of the moment, and that makes us wonder why Colin Firth hasn’t indulged in an action sideline all along.

The title might trumpet Harley Quinn’s emancipation, but she again feels like a character trapped in a movie that’s mediocre at best.

Contrived, inane, absurd, and occasionally brilliant, it’s all a blur.

Directed by Melvin Van Peebles as the '60s writhed to a close, it's very much a product of its time: unsubtle, psychedelic, truly weird, occasionally very funny. [08 Dec 2002]

Despite the frenetic pace, “Saturday Night” falls flat and fails to raise one goose pimple.

What’s best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.

As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.

A sweeping romantic period drama, heavy with themes of love and duty and fate, lifted up by cinematic craft and great performances.

Consistently intriguing as all the lit-process tidbits are, the film struggles to mesh footnotes and somber notes.

Not without its charms. But it never rises to its clever what-if concept.

If there's one image that sums up the filmmaking style of Takashi Miike, it's the close-up of a bubbling hot pot on the family dinner table.

Sometimes it works — let’s say 12 percent of the time — and The Lost City can actually be deft and imaginative. Unfortunately, that leaves 88 percent which doesn’t.

This native send-off is robotic enough to leave you eager to see what an artist might do with a reboot.

There are moments in Christopher Nolan's thematically ambitious film noir that make you wish he had the time and money and, to a certain degree, talent, to fulfill his lofty goals. [11 Feb 2000, p.C9]

Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.

I know the opening credits for a James Bond movie are supposed to be silly, but the start of Spectre achieves almost orgasmic levels of kitsch.

Fatale is, truthfully, a mess - an absurdly overwritten Eurotrash thriller that beggars an audience's suspension of disbelief. It's also great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood.

For all the juicy storytelling, Alice Neel remains, in this film, a cipher: brash, grandmotherly, and beyond understanding.

It is haunting in its literal and symbolic meanings, which is the powerful, lingering effect of Yellow Asphalt.

Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.

Engrossing and provocative.

The Invisibles favors quantity of remembrance over quality of any one experience.

The movie is genial, sloppy, slightly above average summer movie fun.

Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.

Strange’s superpowers are many. So are Cumberbatch’s, and one of them is making sneering seem practically jolly.

I liked the “Freaky Friday” remake. It had some real emotional heft to it, much of it due to the excellent performances by Curtis and Lohan. This time, all the characters are one-note, especially the teenagers.

A lot of this is naughty, overproduced egghead fun, and the scenes between Eisenstein and Canedo simmer with sexual tension. But too much is never enough for Greenaway, and while the leading men give bravura performances, the supporting cast is weak — Lisa Owen as Mrs. Upton Sinclair is actively dreadful — and the film’s hyperactivity ultimately wears you down.

It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.

Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.

Where Do We Go Now? has a heart and an anger to offset its structural fuzziness. It's refreshingly open-minded about faith, too.

Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.

Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.

Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.

So, how's the food? The camera never even goes up close. That's the kind of restaurant documentary this is.

Whenever Ronan’s not on the screen, “See” seems to lose something. It’s no mystery why.

It’s an engrossing portrait not only of government intrigue and crusading after the truth, but of media and their tangled motivations. Engrossing enough, in fact, that Cuesta needn’t try as hard as he occasionally does to heighten the drama and give it added flash.

Much of the charm of this highly charming film is the window it affords on the offstage Beatles and their families.

Jeff Who Lives at Home devotes so much of itself to mocking the loneliness and personal shortcomings of these characters that once it stops jabbing and turns serious, you start laughing.

There aren’t sufficient words to describe the remarkable visual environment; suffice it to say that the production designers are the stars here as much as the cast. More so, really.

Johnny Handsome may lapse into downbeat formula, but its acting is pungent, and, in the case of Barkin and Henriksen, as immediate as a razor slash. [29 Sep 1989, p.34]

Wolfs has enough action to keep us from contemplating how silly it is.

Hinds and Manville do a credible job of portraying a marriage that has run its course, and their best work occurs in the silences that pass between their characters, Gerry and Sheila.

Involving and sometimes comically bleak but never fully convincing as drama.

It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.

Juice is a film about choices. The right ones. The tragically wrong ones. There will be comparisons to Matty Rich's brilliant "Straight Out of Brooklyn," but Dickerson's effort is more richly textured, more grounded in an ordinary kid's point of view. And Dickerson's dogged determination to film from that perspective has resulted in a film rich in the right lingo, the right clothes, the right attitudes. [17 Jan 1992, p.67]

Cranston’s performance is the motor that runs Trumbo, and that motor never idles, never flags in momentum or magnetism or idealistic scorn. At its entertaining worst, the movie’s a high-spirited game of Hollywood dress-up.

A likable satire on celebrity, Flemish-style, it is no less pointed than its American counterparts, just a lot less pompous.

A delightful alternative to most current multiplex fare, which wouldn't recognize a juicy bon mot if it tripped over one in the aisle.

The film doesn't amount to an emotionally palpable experience. Most of the stops it attempts to pull out are rusty. The movie ends with a gigantic lump in its throat, one that would take a tall glass of Barbara Stanwyck to wash down.

The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.

Has extraordinary depth and insight about the limitations and follies of human beings.

An opaque kidnapping drama that features three expertly crafted performances operating on three different planets.

As a Goodfellas-ish crime drama that vividly evokes time and place, Saints is rendered with enough bare-knuckled verve, unpredictability, and darkly glinting wit to make it work.

Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.

A pretty good movie expansion of a pretty good stage musical; what bumps it up into contention and makes it of interest beyond devotees of musical theater — you know who you are — is Kendrick.

In other words, it’s hopeless tosh — but expertly done hopeless tosh.

The movie is less a movie than a collection of scenes lined up in a row, and the tone wobbles between pomp and circumstantial melodrama.

What Allied increasingly offers is insincere sincerity: As the emotional quotient rises, so does the phoniness.

The movie does offer intriguing, perceptive glimpses of the everyday difficulties of being both a survivor and the child of a survivor.

Pretty clearly determined to deliver the antidote to Stallone's movie, the filmmakers take their cues from Christopher Nolan's Batman filmscape, dropping Dredd into a fictional concrete sprawl (actually South Africa) that's relentlessly grounded, visually and dramatically. In a generic way, the environment works.

Whether this movie works for you largely depends on whether you're willing to work for it. To which I say: Bring your gym clothes.

A watchable disappointment. Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly.

Lightyear overcomes gravity of the physical sort. That’s what Space Command specializes in. It has a harder time with the emotional kind.

A charming study of masculinity and friendship, the movie makes the case that “goodness” is a measure of how boys perceive themselves in relation to others. It may be another addition to the “adolescent party odyssey” line — think “Superbad” (2007) and “Booksmart” (2019) — but Good Boys yields something fresh.

"Adorable" is not an adjective I’ve often applied to a movie, but “K-Pops!” earns it. It will play well on the big screen, and make you forget about your troubles for two hours.

After 110 minutes of the "n" word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of "Behind the Music" turns into an evening at church.

What’s best about the movie is mood and texture, and the ensemble cast (the second best thing about the movie) mostly defers to those qualities. In that sense, Motherless Brooklyn might be described as novelistic, and in a good way.

The Whale is being hailed as the comeback vehicle for Fraser. The actor has been through a lot, and he deserves roles that showcase his numerous talents. But he fails to bring humanity to this character who lives in a state of constant apology. The role feels like a cynical grab for an Oscar, which he’ll probably win as the Academy loves masochistic malarkey.

I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole, but I can say that Warm Bodies pulls off a pretty impressive trick: It has its "Twilight" and goofs on it too.

The film is at its most quietly powerful, though, when telling the story of a group of African-American high school kids who took their discontent to the highest court in the land.

Subpar stuff with a few multiplex-worthy bits: a gonzo opening chase with the US Border Patrol, some wisecracking narration, and grungy location atmosphere. [15 July 2012, p.N10]

This chronicle of an ’80s high school cross country coach leading a team of Mexican farm laborers’ kids to competitive glory may be based on a true story, but the forced drama doesn’t help it to feel that way.

The Neon Bible doesn't always supply the depth or underpinning its images demand, but there's nice work in it, and it won't bore you. [19 Apr 1996, p.55]

Bride Flight is pretty predictable once the basic situation gets established.

Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.

The quality of the acting makes it easy to overlook how increasingly leaden Stillwater becomes — but not easy enough.

It's all prefab stuff, rendered acceptable by the sunny dispositions of the performers and the Jamaican location shots. You really have to love bobsledding, or Jamaica, or both, to love Cool Runnings. [1 Oct 1993, p.55]

There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.

State of Grace is a high-powered, luxuriantly textured Irish gang movie that you keep watching, convinced that at any moment it's going to come together and really grab you. It doesn't. [05 Oct 1990, p.45p]

Dans Paris provides a brooding, poetic echo - an after-dinner mint to a lasting meal.

It’s surprising to see how straight McGregor plays it for director Marc Forster (the J.M. Barrie portrait “Finding Neverland”), allowing the CG-animated Pooh and friends to endearingly steal the show.

A passable, sometimes skillful farce.

The sequel isn’t a disaster, but it’s a dud.

With relentless and ruminative deliberateness, Reygadas shows us a Mexico City that seems to be decaying from the inside out.

To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.

What sinks the movie (rather than the character) are the tortured melodramatics of its backstage plot and dialogue that aims for clever — and sometimes is — but that generally approximates Shakespeare for, like, beginners.

If you’re going to make a dopey, bawdy, foul-mouthed, predictable lady-buddy-cop movie, you might as well make it funny. And until it overstays its welcome in the final half-hour, The Heat is shamefully funny.

A line gets crossed. It isn’t the one between California and Nevada. It’s the one from “Bad” to worse.

Tone is everything here, and the film never loses the smiling poise and benevolence that help you buy its gauzy plot as the three sashay through it. Douglas Carter Beane's script is witty as well as buoyant, which is a big help. [08 Sep 1995, p.99]

Think of Red Doors as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.

The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.

The Brits do this kind of light and dark juggling act better than almost anybody (see “Billy Elliot” or “The Full Monty”), and the filmmakers and their cast deliver a movie that’s perfect for viewing on a lazy Sunday afternoon at the movie theater.

Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.

Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Leo Bassi - tumble with zest through a daisy chain of sexual capers. But while warmly energized, their carryings-on also seem a little generic.

The sheer intelligence and independence of spirit in Driver's busy eyes almost carry The Governess past its structural limitations. [07 Aug 1998]

The thing barely makes a lick of sense. Rapturous on a scene-by-scene basis and nearly incoherent when taken as a whole, the movie is idealistic and deranged, inspirational and very, very conflicted.

When the action sequences move into the sky-diving stuff, they give you a real rush.... Otherwise, though, Point Break is all wet. Too bad, because you always get the sense in a Kathryn Bigelow outing ("Near Dark," "Blue Steel") that she's trying to push a genre into new places. [12 July 1991, p.54]