Story lines don't come any clammier.

It's too psychically flat and dramatically inert. Instead of reinvigorating a Hollywood classic, Burton only takes it to camp.

ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.

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.

A well-made, reasonably diverting night at the multiplex that will seem overly familiar to everyone except teenage girls.

Suffice to say that Shawn Levy, director of the "Cheaper by the Dozen" movies, is no Blake Edwards; for every finely tuned slapstick fillip, there's a ton of messy, family-friendly buffoonery.

An acceptable but uninspired simulacrum: an overly faithful multiplex translation of a very, very popular airport novel.

Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.

If one were to compare this film to one of Jobs’s own products, it would be more like the Cube than the iPod.

The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.

A lot of talent gets wasted in Wilson: not just Harrelson, Dern, and Clowes.

The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael is sweet but dumb and clumsily executed, with its central character overdrawn and undermined, and the adults mostly written off as geeks. What the film needs is some of the troublemaking spunkiness Roxy showed when she left town. [12 Oct 1990, p.30p]

Little more than a screenful of boy meets boy, boy meets baggage, boy loses baggage.

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

The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.

It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.

For all its unforgivable blandness, "High School Musical" opens young audiences to the charms of this most transporting of movie genres.

Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.

Studding your movie with friends, admirers, and sycophants is having a ball; it does not bring us to question the illusory power of cinema or the politics of entertainment.

He doesn't just kill a good buzz. He bludgeons it.

The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski.

That’s the ultimate dividedness of “The Silent Twins.” What feels most fresh and true in it is, literally, imaginary, June and Jennifer’s flights of fancy. What feels most leaden and movie-phony is based on fact.

Point is, the property is running on bald tires, and, for all its ear-splitting racket and lavish effects, “Apocalypse” is the barest of retreads.

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.

This is no corporate project made to squeeze a few more dollars from a fading cash cow. No one else has been asking for another "Rocky," other than maybe Burt Young . No, this is a rarer beast -- an auteur sequel -- and it's so wrapped up in its maker's personal mythology and psychic needs that it becomes a hall of mirrors to which we're given a slack-jawed ringside seat.

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

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.

Isn't just lame; it's neutered.

We do learn that love heals and that the movie's title makes a terrifically lewd little rock song. (Thank you, Sol.) But that's about it.

Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.

Takes on provocative and stimulating subject matter, but can't bring it into satisfying dramatic focus, stranding three strong actors who are superior to their material.

Despite the climactic hugs all around and spiritual healing celebrated by a tearful service in the cathedral, some moments en route make an impression.

Fans of Lanthimos’s works outside his Emma Stone movies will find “Kinds of Kindness” worth watching. As for the rest of us: You’ll start out clapping along with “Sweet Dreams,” but by the end, you’ll be singing Peggy Lee’s immortal question, “Is That All There Is?”

It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.

Never quite scary, never funny for long, never enough over-the-top. It's never compelling plotwise, either, especially toward the sloppy ending, when Mantegna is inexplicably erased from the plot. [26 Oct 1996, p.F3]

There are echoes of Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” in all of this that are impossible to miss.

Unfortunately, “The Roses” is a toothless take on the material. The stakes are never as high as they were in the 1989 movie, and the film takes too much time trying to humanize these people. By the time they’re actively trying to sabotage and murder one another, the movie has completely lost its nerve. The end result feels rushed and weak-willed.

I wish I could say there is something pleasurable in watching John Goodman reminisce about the good old days while impaled on a steering wheel in the Volvo he's crashed on a California freeway, but I can't find what it is.

Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.

After an hour of biting charm, Something Wild turns into something else. In a twist that turns the movie into a silly story of violence, Demme surrenders his style to a stupid plot. [7 Nov 1986]

All Dogs Go to Heaven" has the right spirit, and its warmth will offset what for small kids might be some scary moments. But it does seem skimpy and warmed over. [17 Nov 1989]

The idea behind Girl Rising is strikingly simple and even more strikingly imaginative.

Completely unnecessary but painless, like dentistry performed by mimes.

Far and Away is a throwback to the handsome but stodgy historical romances Hollywood used to make, and it can at least be said that it's more ambitious than most of what we'll see this summer. [22 May 1992]

One of the most lazily scripted, poorly structured, smugly stereotyped star vehicles in recent memory. Bizarrely, this seems to be the point.

Rockwell is a hoot as Frankie, but during the stretches when he's not on screen, the air goes out of the film.

As he did with his "Everest" cast, Kormákur draws a strong, pathos-rich performance from Woodley, filled with moments of her character confronting her own mortality and looking back on safe choices not made. It’s solid drama, but also very slow going.

The first hour or so is lively, a bit crude, and more fun than it has any right to be. Expect double crosses, switcheroos, serious spoiler-level plot twists. Most are ridiculous, but that’s OK. The excitement starts to feel mechanical, even stale, during the second hour.

If the Marvel/Disney comic-book movies tend toward the chromium brio of the “Avengers” series, the DC superhero movies purveyed by Warner Bros. have taken their cue over the years from the 1986 revisionist graphic novel “The Dark Knight Returns,” and they are very dark indeed. Joker is the culmination of that approach, a slab of self-important pop-culture masonry whose only bright spot is the figure dancing brilliantly along its top.

It's just another happily idiotic Will Ferrell comedy, ably directed by Jay Roach ("Meet the Parents," "Dinner for Schmucks") and tossing its bawdy jokes at the side of the barn.

The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.

Of the two French films opening in the Boston area today - "Beloved" is the other - Little White Lies is the less ambitious, more watchable, and ultimately more annoying.

Glass isn’t a terrible film but neither is it a particularly good one, and it certainly doesn’t stick the landing the way the filmmaker and his hardy fans have probably hoped. It’s by turns intriguing, awkward, inspired, misguided, and very, very talky.

Along the way, good food is eaten, the scenery is fabulous, and when the son and a local woman meet cute she not only speaks excellent English but is gorgeous and endlessly understanding. There are some laughs. There are some tears. There’s even a little swearing. Made in Italy has been saddled with what must be the year’s least-deserved R rating.

More to the point, the title doubles as accusation. Progress is dangerous and requires survival tactics, just as a hurricane or avalanche does.

In this TV reality show masquerading as a movie documentary, Brian Herzlinger is a creepy voyeur, a run-of-the-mill loser who obsesses about living the celebrity high life but lacks the talent to pull it off.

When the chemistry isn't there - and it mostly isn't - the actors and film seem merely self-indulgent, despite the obvious devotion with which She's So Lovely was made. [29 Aug 1997, p.C3]

Molly Hartley is dull at worst and surprisingly spooky at best.

But that ending is a whopper all the same: a heartless blast of tragedy, exploitation, amusement, and general flagrance.

It's too fragmented and diffuse to ever bring its parts together in any really satisfying manner.

The biggest problem with Where’s My Roy Cohn? is the documentary’s attitude toward its subject: not that it’s critical (an uncritical approach to Cohn would be about as interesting as a daytime visit to Studio 54), but that it so thoroughly accepts his view of himself.

It's a movie so late in noticing a shift in American male grooming that for a documentary on the subject to work, Spurlock would either have to pitch it to our grandparents (or be a grandparent) or trace the arc of the shift and unpack it.

Before long, it runs out of steam, playing like the pilot for a TV sitcom called "Baby Knows Best." [13 Oct 1989, p.37]

Like a surly teen pilot, you, too, might find yourself bored and muttering, “Honestly, maybe the fate of humanity and the world isn’t important to me, either.’’

The problem with this adaptation of Lawrence Block’s detective yarn isn’t that it casts Neeson in a role we’re seeing him play again and again. It’s that no one else in the movie makes a character feel nearly as broken-in and fully inhabited as he does.

A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.

A more convincing star could make this a degree more tolerable, although in Cyrus’s defense not much more.

Like Purple Rain, the record/film that made Prince a superstar, Graffiti Bridge is a hodgepodge musical that has a few satisfying bits - and a lot of sharp music - but fails as a narrative. [03 Nov 1990, p.22p]

Despite the film’s length and aspirations, its anthropological correctness and historically accurate gore, Bale’s transformation from stone killer to empathetic ally is unconvincing.

A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.

Despite an impressive pedigree in front of and behind the camera, “Shirley” fails to convey just how remarkable the career of Shirley Chisholm really was. The problem isn’t the narrow focus on one of her accomplishments, it’s the even narrower depiction of who she was as a person.

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

It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.

This Equalizer is a brooding, brutal origin tale, one that starts well but steadily caves into genre clichés. It’s a B-movie sheep in A-movie clothing, acceptable meathead mayhem as long as you know what you’re paying for.

A sweet, gentle film with a personality problem. The problem is that it hasn't got enough personality to keep from being overwhelmed by the echoes of other films it evokes. [21 July 1989, p.21]

The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.

Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.

Some of this vigilante-fantasy misbehavior is wickedly funny.

Blandly noisy and inoffensively average.

Presumed Innocent is interesting to the extent that it goes beyond the usual whodunit and courtroom drama formulas and shows how nobody really has clean hands. [27 July 1990, p.29P]

Runs out of fresh ideas about how to make its heroine look nuts.

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.

Writer-director Nic Bettauer can't decide whether to play Duck for tears or laughs.

Never gets horribly bad, but can't sustain its moments of inspiration either.

To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Axel F” is a joyless affair, a mediocre simulacrum that made me long for the original.

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.

Wild Mountain Thyme is not a good movie. Rather, it’s one that believes so deeply and joyously in its potted romantic Oirishness that the audience doesn’t have to.

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.

This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.

As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.

Hand it to Amanda Seyfried - she seems to have a knack for underplaying unstable characters in a way that lets their nuttiness creep right up on you.

The Hunter becomes turgid with corporate conspiracies, hired assassins, and offscreen tragedies, and the appealing leanness of the early scenes gets lost.

The copious violence, as always, is an assault - even aurally, as every thudding knife strike is made to sound like a boulder dropping on the theater.

The film is unobjectionable, sentimental, and not a little dull.

Priest is based on a series of Korean graphic novels. What it's really based on, though, is other movies - a whole lot of other movies.

Dave is one of the most ineffectual characters ever to have an entire movie built around him.