Novocaine is a numbing experience that’s best seen on cable at 3 a.m., preferably after you’ve numbed yourself with the vice of your choice.

The film comes across as an irksome contrivance. What’s meant to communicate the mysterious, even taboo allure of playing chameleon instead just leaves us scoffing.

A documentary that falls somewhere between overlong and compelling as it follows the 39th president on his controversial book tour.

All the cinematic huffing and puffing only calls attention to the paradox on which this movie is built: It’s a portrait of a woman who’s not particularly interested in being seen other than to prod the world to value other women as much as they value men — culturally, politically, and financially.

Nobility with little pacing, imagination, or energy tends not to work too well on the screen. Rahim has the eyes of the young Mandy Patinkin. If only he had some of the wildness.

Sorvino can't pass for a man, but that's beyond the point in this rarefied situation. She's beautiful and she can usually act, but here the only convincing thing she projects is fatigue from running around the garden all day.

Artful, especially in the ways it avoids sentimentality and employs vintage film clips of truly riveting performances...But Maximilian's narcissistic examination of his theatrical family -- can be boring, and his creative license with the truth is kind of troubling.

It is at least an "experience" that has to be labeled exhilarating.

The group’s thematically, comedically broad inversion of the source material is consistently entertaining, and squeezes in some nicely played character growth to boot.

When it comes to writing and directing movies, though, Murdoch has some work to do. “Girl” meanders narratively and with random chronology, some scenes playing like tepid music videos, others as unhelpful efforts at exposition, some as strained drama, and some as the genuine, funny, spontaneous interactions of gifted young people.

Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.

The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.

I’m tired of this stereotypical depiction of autism. It’s as if Hollywood has to assign superpowers to people on the spectrum in order for them to be accepted by mainstream audiences.

James has the forward drive of a trash-compacted Ralph Kramden with some of Ed Norton's random gentility and, here at least, he has a knack for fine-tuned physical comedy that gets you laughing even when the script's not there.

Notoriously remembered as a mastermind of the Final Solution, Eichmann was also infamous for the just-following-orders dispassion he maintained all the way through his trial, a banality that Kingsley channels expertly.

Anderson is the rare filmmaker who doesn't want to use the actress as an instrument or to exploit her independent-movie cachet. She has freed Moore to be what she hasn't been with many directors: credibly human.

It says something about Deutch’s appeal that she does manage to pull the story from the vexing hole it digs itself into. She takes us on an absorbing journey through the various stages of Sam’s time-stalled predicament.

Macdonald knows plenty about crafting something evocative from unscripted material.

Some angst away from the dolphin tank feels like padding, but there’s enough bona fide narrative to please tomorrow’s marine biologists and their parents.

So, no, August: Osage County isn’t all that original, and sometimes it’s just a lot of yelling. But it does rouse itself to a powerful fury every so often, and Letts knows an audience’s dirty little secret: We love the bloodlust of a family feeding on itself.

The character-isolating bits furnish us with immolating heroines and dread-laden glimpses of Pennywise unmasked — you know, stuff to fill the quiet moments between arachnophobe nightmares and a predatory scene even more perverse than the saga-opening storm-drain vignette.

The Mist doesn't provoke further thought; it provokes active annoyance at being punished in the service of a pulp morality tale with pretensions.

Usually loud and almost always ridiculous, F9 is action-packed enough to make your carburetors seize up.

The happiest news about the third (and final?) X-Men movie is actually quite sad: headstones. Yes, The Last Stand brings the lamentable deaths of several major characters.

Warm, smart, and funny!

All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.

The novel is extremely funny. It's hilarious as well as horrific (all sorts of bad things are going on outside the limo - and a few inside of it, too). Yet whenever the movie is funny, it feels like a mistake. Comedy has never been a Cronenberg strength.

Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]

This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.

It exists for no other reason than that people like Matt Damon, they like him as this character, and the producers know audiences are willing to see more of him.

Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.

Although there's nominally a lot of action, the film doesn't exactly abound in narrative pulse. But its portraits and textures take up a lot of the slack. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Jarmusch captures all this in Super 8 Hi Fi 8 video, which gives a gritty, dirty feeling. Maybe it's fake authentic, but it feels right. [24 Oct 1997, p.C8]

Disclosure is a classic guilty pleasure. You won't be proud of yourself in the morning for having watched it, but you won't be able to take your eyes off it while you do. [9 Dec 1994, p.53]

The marriage between its uplifting personal message and its embrace of big business is a rocky one, but Longoria and company hold the union together.

There’s a reason the names in the title don’t appear in alphabetical order. Abdul is the far more interesting character, but it’s her majesty the movie dotes on. God save the queen? Oh yes, and God help the rest of us.

The 100-Year-Old Man may appeal to viewers who like the madcap and the whimsical, no matter how self-conscious. Me, I’ll take Max von Sydow’s moroseness any day.

When Boston Strangler focuses on the two journalists who wrote about this case, it is quite involving.

Astounding. It is also bizarre, challenging, and, at times, admirably overreaching. In short, it's the kind of ambitious little film that can leave critics in a swoon and American moviegoers scratching their heads.

Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.

After a sensuous introductory act, The Reader descends into a series of dismaying contradictions regarding the moral toxins of the Holocaust - which still pollute postwar Germany.

In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.

Child's Play is junk fun. [09 Nov 1988, p.95]

The performances are excellent, but it’s the direction that lifts the movie up and spins it around. Like Hitchcock, Park storyboards everything ahead of time, and while that level of control might seem claustrophobic in theory, it ends up freeing Stoker to sail into zones of malevolent visual sensuality.

In James Marsh's The King, the usually wonderful Gael Garcia Bernal is all wrong for the role of Elvis Valderez.

The script is by first-timer Randy Brown, but it feels as if it were spit out by one of the assistant GM's computers, so regular are its beats and revelations.

Hard Candy is the rare movie that may be worthiest for the arguments you'll have after it's over.

Object of Beauty is another zap-the-yuppies outing, more elegant than most, and sophisticated, too, but hollow and on the whole charmless as it leaves us uninvolved with the spectacle of cash-strapped John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell holed up in a posh London hotel, living on room service and dodging the manager. [19 Apr 1991, p.42]

Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, Defiance is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders.

Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]

There’s a line between enjoyably stupid and stupid-stupid, and Nerve sails over it right around the halfway mark.

I’ve said this a million times before, so it will sound familiar: All a rom-com needs to work is characters you want to see end up together. “Eternity” fails this test big time.

Barber, who directed the neglected, unabashedly satisfying vigilante thriller “Harry Brown” knows how to get the blood pumping and stoke an audience’s craving for righteousness, vengeance, and vicarious sadism. What he lacks is the woman’s touch, if by that one means nuance, ambiguity, and empathy.

Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.

One of the best things about the movie, aside from its screwily positive message, is the blithely freewheeling yet clever way that Rogen and company assemble the story’s puzzle pieces.

Brown Sugar fails to produce an image of hip-hoppery as fascinating and complex as the moment when Halle Berry set her tongue wagging during a ghetto-fabulous grind with Warren Beatty in ''Bulworth.''

Director Bruce Beresford keeps stars Sissy Spacek, Jessica Lange, and Diane Keaton firmly rooted in the deep, dark black humor of Beth Henley's Pulitzer Prize-winning play. [01 Jul 2014, p.G15]

Rather than a suspenseful action exercise with volleys of gunfire, The Mule is more of a quixotic character picaresque, a distant relative of the recent Robert Redford farewell, “The Old Man & the Gun,” without being nearly as well written.

To see this final installment is to know: It’s time.

He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.

Turbo makes an entertaining go of it by borrowing very liberally from the “Fast & Furious” franchise — Michelle Rodriguez even voices a character — and sticking a slime trail onto “Rocky” for the rest.

When the new movie wings it, it sputters but clears the runway. When it sticks to the script, it crashes and burns.

Doing nothing special, Freeman manages to make the picture seem wiser, funnier, and more eloquent than it is.

The movie wails in pain. And it's that sort of grand empathy that makes Iñárritu both impossible to dismiss and impossible to live with.

You're left with an inert, politically neutral movie, a satire that can't bring itself to properly satirize anything.

The trouble with Quantum of Solace is that the frills are a mess, too. Even the customary opening title sequence, with its writhing silhouettes and screechy theme song by Jack White and Alicia Keys, is a cheesy throwback to the Roger Moore era: Ladies and gentlemen, the Quantum of Solace dancers!

You’re left with another Denzel Washington performance that gets under your skin and stays there, rankling away. That’s a lot more than most movies offer — even the better ones.

Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.

Imagination is what these filmmakers could use more of, as their ingenious concept doesn’t develop much beyond a gimmick.

Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.

Danny Collins leaves absolutely nothing to chance. The cast is full of sharp little turns by Melissa Benoist — the girlfriend in “Whiplash” and a future Supergirl — and Josh Peck and Katarina Cas, the latter playing Danny’s bubblehead user of a fiancée.

The movie rarely takes the easy way out of a scene, and the observational details can be rich.

This does seem to leave room for bigger, bolder, more momentous adventures down the line.

The Midnight Sky is handsome to look at and, in its early scenes, quite engrossing. But it’s an oddly structured affair and, in the end, the director can’t keep it on course.

A movie called Snakes on a Plane had better be one of two things: So bad it's good or so good it's great. Darned if it isn't a little bit of both.

Avildsen's - and the screenplay's - blatant manipulations make Freeman's job harder. To his credit, Freeman not only sustains the level of fever pitch at which Clark operates throughout, but succeeds in making him seem admirable, if not exactly likable. A well-meaning steamroller is still a steamroller. Are people who question Clark necessarily wrong? And why, for instance, do the students have to be presented with an either-or picture of Mozart and gospel music? Why can't they have both? The script to Lean on Me plays like something written by the Reagan administration. It supplies a rationale for white-controlled governments to ignore the educational needs of largely black school districts that need funding most. With Freeman breathing inspirational fire, Lean on Me is never dull. But it sidesteps some troubling questions. [3 March 1989, p.43]

The good news is that while the movie is susceptible to some pandering, it also takes the story’s charming core elements and gives them a contemporary luster.

iIf you can ignore a ridiculously overbearing soundtrack - a big if - the film's a pleasant bauble. Still, those coming in cold may be forgiven for thinking they've wandered into "Atonement" remade as a farce.

A relentlessly serious action movie, characterized by, of all things, sorrow.

Should be seen: It's a worthy ordeal, with flaws that, ironically, make grist for later arguments.

It takes us nowhere we haven't been before, except geographically.

A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.

Hirschbiegel and Friedel win credibility points for painting Elser as noble without painting him as a saint.

Stay patient through those Seinfeldian stretches in which Martin isn’t so much acting as performing, and you’ll be treated to the bonus of some surprising emotional depth and poignancy.

Despite the appearance of numerous free-speaking conservatives, the movie's partisanship leans nakedly to the left.

You realize the movie isn’t nearly as clever as it looks.

There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.

The back and forth between the two actors becomes fraught with confusing allusions and muddled metaphors before ceding control to some unsuccessful supernatural elements.

This movie is especially egregious since it bundles the civil rights era, garden-variety bigotry, and the achievements of Ernie Davis, the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy.

These movies are more about the experience of hearing girls and women who should know better holler at the screen. They could just as well be at a concert.

Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.

The writing is coy when it should be direct, and the characterizations of the main antagonists are so broad that it reduces Martin to victim-like status.

There are many complaints to be made about “Wicked Little Letters” — its forced humor, its even more forced moral lessons, its tonal unevenness (flat-footed jokiness here, cheap sentimentality there) — but chief among them is wasting Buckley.

Walking the line between the movie’s broad strokes and its near-perfect pitch is the art itself, which has been designed and constructed by a team of smart designers.

The movie's heart is in the right place, but all its messages of tolerance might resonate better if the Spanish-accented pirate didn't get drawn with a gold tooth and the turban-wearing Khalil wasn't an opportunistic rug merchant.

The film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people.

You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.

So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.