Single White Female is a frustrating proposition. It has impact, given its two stars. But it spends a lot of time trying to get its footing, find its tone and rhythm. Surprisingly, Schroeder has trouble pacing a film any one of a dozen Hollywood hacks could have handled more sure-handedly. [14 Aug 1992, p.41]

Whitney's body of work doesn't suggest a filmmaker so much as an opportunist with a video camera. He makes a very specific sort of reality movie. It's called porn.

Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.

Plays more like an exercise in nostalgia than a dramatic re-creation of a triumphant fight for civil rights.

At its best when Anna confronts her tangled Afrikaaner legacy and when it brings the heretical notion of forgiveness up front, where a non-African audience can come to grips with it.

Not particularly good -- meaning navigable, remotely entertaining, pleasing to the eye -- it does, rather nobly, want to hip its audience to gender fluidity.

This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.

There is nothing especially wrong with it other than that for some of us it represents 105 minutes in hell.

Visually, Fat Man and Little Boy is almost obscenely beautiful. But while Joffe's eye is magnificent, his dramatic instincts are flaccid. [20 Oct 1989, p.79p]

The Way Back is the first real Sad Ben film. It’s earnest and old-fashioned and sturdily made, and I wish that were enough to make it good.

For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.

Though it initially shows signs of overcoming its creakiness, “Capital” loses value when its screenwriters try too hard to be clever.

All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract’ feels more like a collection of crumbs.

Although dated, it's not a bad musical.

An opportunity to capture on film a unique cultural enclave is reduced to a Hollywood pastiche.

Even at 104 minutes, practically a short by superhero-movie standards, Morbius feels draggy.

The animation techniques are sophisticated but the story tends to get bogged down in pop philosophy. [01 Mar 2015, p.N]

The film's final scenes are among its silliest, unfortunately.

Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.

The party itself is something to see. A Pasadena blowout turns into a horny, druggy, apocalyptic scene culminating in riot police, news choppers, and a gentleman with a flamethrower.

This is a buddy movie in which one of the buddies is dead. Yet, if anything, the emotional bonding is — or wants to be — more resonant than ever.

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere has enough good material to make you wish it were better. Unfortunately, it owes debts to the biopic genre that no honest film can pay.

Usually a French comedy such as this requires some crude modifications before a studio like Touchstone can remake it for American audiences. In this case, though, they just need to lose the subtitles and dub in the voices of actors like Rob Schneider or Adam Sandler. Until then, bon appetit!

With inconsistency, [Collins Jr.] articulates the murkier and subtler aspects of a thinly written character through his physicality, revealing flashes of brilliance. But this feels undermined by directorial choices that don’t embrace or take full advantage of the potential primal nature of the performance.

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

The film is arriving on these shores in the wake of such successful foodie nonfictions as “Jiro Dreams of Shushi,” a 2012 art-house hit about an 85-year-old master of raw fish. Like that film, Ramen Heads reaches for the lyrical with slow-motion shots of roiling broth and soaring classical music on the soundtrack. Unlike the earlier movie, it goes so far overboard in ladling out praise that viewers might wonder if they’re being sold a bill of goods.

Wimbledon is refried "Notting Hill" with a Teen People glaze. The latter movie also gave us an American star cheering up some tired British guy. Wimbledon is blander and far less worth rooting for.

In occasional vignettes voiced over home movies and old photos, Chesney talks with humble conviction of reaching people in the cheap seats.