It’s tempting to see Tigertail in the tradition of the Ingmar Bergman classic “Wild Strawberries,” with its emotionally constipated hero looking back over a lifetime of mistakes and missed connections. But the comparison only highlights Yang’s weaknesses as a first-time feature director: flat dialogue that mistakes subtext for text, glacially paced scenes that lack dramatic momentum, stolidly unimaginative camerawork, and a central character so unsympathetic that you end up siding with his ex-wife and daughter.

The best thing in the movie is Pratt. Firmly established in not one but two franchises — Guardians of the Galaxy and the Jurassic Park reboot — he’s come a long way from Parks and Recreation. He alternates here between charming wise guy and sensitive family man: Peter Quill domesticated.

One wonders if a director more playful than Kenneth Branagh might have come up with something less hectic and more fun — or even just as hectic and more fun. Taika Waititi, anyone? Jojo Rabbit is almost as odd a name as Artemis Fowl.

It’s a shame: Odenkirk begins the movie with a rep as a smart and slippery performer, but by the end of Nobody, he could be anybody.

If you like your revenge slow and cliched, you may like Ricochet. The plot, which by now may be too stock even for TV police dramas, is about an escaped convict bent on torturing the cop who put him behind bars. [05 Oct 1991, p.10]

It’s nasty and clumsy, tonally erratic, lacking in texture, and pretty stupid.

More self-mockery is needed, less self-regard. [07 Apr 1995, p.90]

Finch pretty quickly settles into a buddy picture. It’s a dog picture, too, of course, Goodyear, a mutt, being so good at mugging for the camera. The whole thing is as sentimental as it is implausible, and it’s very implausible.

Von Trier's visuals are stunning enough to almost conceal the hollowness of his elliptical story. [03 Jul 1992, p.42]

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.

Sweet, but slight. [20 Oct 1995, p.52]

As baseball movies go, Little Big League is a bunt single. Metaphorically speaking, it knows how to put the bat on the ball, though it's too lightweight to knock anything out of the park. [29 Jun 1994, p.83]

The constant sense of low-grade menace that helps make the first quarter of The Card Counter intriguing and effective gets put on hold, in a good way, whenever Haddish is on screen.

Project Power is the kind of action/sci-fi bone-cruncher where the cast is better than the material, the characters are more interesting than the premise, and the dialogue chugs along in the middle. It’s on Netflix and is worth a few hours if you’re in a B-movie state of mind.

Marla Grayson is less a three-dimensional person (or even an interesting two-dimensional one) than a symptom of a sick society. And symptoms wear out their welcome pretty quickly. That shallowness renders Marla’s sexuality and stated feminism cynical rather than ironic, and it turns I Care a Lot into a lesser Coen brothers movie: No Country for Old Fogeys.

The most amazing thing about Jack Frost may be that it took four writers to come up with a film as insubstantial as tinsel and as leaden as fruitcake. Then again, perhaps none of the writers wanted to bear the blame alone. [12 Dec 1998, p.C4]

Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Time is a lovely visit to a Budapest that yields its secrets more willingly than the sad, repressed woman at the story’s center.

For a stylish thriller to work, it needs to be at least a little bit stylish and offer an occasional thrill. Deep Water does neither.

The movie itself suffers from hyperbole, hyper-self-consciousness, at times hyperventilation. A magical-realist coming-of-age fairy tale set in Buffalo and environs, it toggles between whimsy and grim realism.

It’s perfectly generic on-demand product that will eat up an hour and a half of your life and be immediately forgotten.

The dialogue is as pedestrian as the plotting is far-fetched.

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.

Worse, by neutering the specifics of where these people live and come from, Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy renders the story meaningless.

A characteristic early offering from horror icon David Cronenberg, rough production values and all. [30 May 2004]

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.

With what doubtless are the best intentions, the film wants to do several things, and does. The trouble is that it doesn't do any of them very well. [07 Feb 1992, p.32]

A Good Man in Africa has its sensibilities in the right place, and sometimes its wit, too, but its shenanigans can't mask a certain shortfall. [09 Sep 1994, p.53]

Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.