Jackson has marched the modern fantasy-action epic into a thundering blind alley; the movie exhausts your senses without ever engaging your imagination.

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.

A paranoid male fantasy about cheating, with surface similarities to Hollywood movies like ''Fatal Attraction" and ''Unfaithful." This one's Italian, though, and its attitude toward adultery is more European.

All sword and sorcery movies are parodies, but Sam Raimi's "Army of Darkness" is the best intentional parody that hardware-heavy genre has ever seen, piling conventions from other genres on top of it until the screen seems a multilayered deli delight...Entertaining and ingeniously resourceful, it's a virtuosic comic-strip movie. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]

All is True is expertly acted and handsomely filmed but suffers from an excess of sentimentality, a rash of revelations, and a surfeit of subtext, with characters blurting out the hidden motives for their behavior instead of simply behaving them. I imagine Shakespeare himself might be simultaneously tickled and appalled.

Ultimately undercut by its fictional elements and its flat characters.

Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.

It has every mark of inspiration by imitation.

The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.

I suppose that if you’re familiar with the designer and his history, you’ll find this movie entertaining. But there’s nothing here for newbies or those wanting to know more about its subject. I found little of use, so it was a long, dreary slog to get to the end credits.

It’s another brightly rendered effort, but, as the title indicates, a lot of the real creativity seems to have been used up the first time around.

Godzilla vs. Kong has speed, wit, and a refreshing refusal to take itself very seriously.

If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.

Though fitfully entertaining, it lacks the conviction and urgency present in even the weakest of his quasi agit-prop productions.

Ultimately, No Hard Feelings is the story of two people who are afraid of life for different reasons, and how they help each other lose that fear. I’ve heard complaints that it sacrifices filth for feelings. To those folks, I say — you can always watch “Porky’s” instead.

Not surprisingly, Doctor Sleep splits the difference, dutifully attempting to honor both King’s writing and Kubrick’s film simultaneously. The movie actually manages to pull it off for a time, until in the last act revisited concepts start to play more like ill-advised retreads.

Wonderfully cast and slickly directed, but so crudely written.

This is a movie about excess. It's excessively long (at least it feels that way), the slo-mo is used in excess (so are the swords), and our heroine, Yuki (Yumiko Shaku), when she does emote, is excessively weepy for a coldblooded assassin.

The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.

Becomes a creepy yet amusing look at how he tries to take control of the film being made about him.

The filmmaking team of director James Ivory, screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and producer Ismail Merchant, remained loyal to James, assembled a brilliant cast and created one of the best films of the year. [10 Aug 1984]

That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.

In the film’s sharpest visual sequence, they land in ancient Egypt, with the filmmakers entertainingly cribbing from “Indiana Jones” and “The Wizard of Oz” to get them out of tight spots.

Actually, everything in Bowdon’s rant about America’s woeful public school system is important, including Bowdon.

Carell's performance is enjoyable but safe, and while he and Knightley play well enough together, there's no genuine chemistry - no zap to convince us these two deserve to be the last lovers on Earth.

While the film grabs us on cue with its sudden strikes that end with blood dripping from the monster's dragon fangs as it zips back into the dark, it's also true that predictability robs the thrust and counterthrust of the purely visceral impact it once had. The monsters just aren't that scary anymore, and so the film mostly just sits there, gloomy and inert, sunk in exhausted myth, looking and sounding Wagnerian but feeling underpowered despite its diversionary moves. [22 May 1992, p.29]

Throughout, Firth compellingly plays a man struggling to make sense of the ordeal that his life has become. Too often, though, you can feel the movie struggling right along with him.

Pays high-toned tribute to its subject. How high-toned? Bach and Ravel play on the soundtrack as a honeyed light streams through the windows of Cartier-Bresson's Paris apartment.