Travels fast and straight down a linear plot, and the ceaseless rush quickly becomes monotonous.

James Jones's antiwar novel was blandly realized by the usual bunch of Hollywood do-gooders in 1953...Sominex is cheaper and probably safer.

Out of Sight engaged me less and less, until by the end I no longer cared which of the characters lived or died. Not even the engaging Jennifer Lopez, George Clooney, Albert Brooks, Don Cheadle, and Ving Rhames or the talented secondary cast can survive the abbreviations and last-minute shoehorning their characters receive.

Though it's meant as a droll comedy of manners, what emerges is mincing, crabbed, and petty.

Dismal SF deep think that gave birth to an equally dismal string of sequels and TV spin-offs.

The script, by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, takes a few vague pokes at Wall Street and the financial elite but mainly revives the ponderous psychodrama of the first movie.

Fans of director Lynne Ramsay's first movie, the bleak Ratcatcher won't be surprised that this little existential exercise makes The Stranger look like a funwagon.

A very bad film--snide, barely competent, and overdrawn--that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

None of the characters or ideas is allowed to develop beyond its cardboard profile.

Misogynistic claptrap about a divorced husband (Dustin Hoffman) fighting for the custody of and learning to cope with his little boy (Justin Henry) - a movie whose classy trimmings (including Nestor Almendros's cinematography) persuaded audiences to regard writer-director Robert Benton as a subtle art-house director.

Sluggish, repetitive, and strangely timorous, with little of the zap and imagination of the Pythons' television work.

What matters most is feeding white-bread fantasies (the film is set in the slow-footed 50s, when blacks are only a rumor and nobody's ever heard of slam 'n' jam) and laying on the inspirational corn.

The low point is a New York sequence in which Waterston puts some Puccini on his stereo, pops his personal (custom-made?) videocassette of Cambodian atrocities into his video recorder, and goes into a heavy voice-over recounting the crimes of Amerika. Didacticism doesn't get much cruder than this, yet the emphasis of the sequence is on Waterston's exquisitely tortured conscience—it's there to demonstrate the profound, compassionate depths of his humanity.

Though his subject is a serious one and his intentions are apparently noble, Nava has made a film that is essentially indistinguishable from Love Story.

It's grave, lumbering, arrhythmic, and bloated, an emotional hogwallow of catchpenny insights and easy sentimentality...In short, a real bagful.

Woody Allen's naive notions of art--he thinks it means a story with a moral--might have some primitive charm if he didn't put them forward so self-importantly.

Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks—obtrusive and gimmick-crazed, this film has been “directed” within an inch of its life—and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience (at one point, we're compared to the drooling voyeurs who inhabit his vision of Bellevue), and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.

The resulting movie (2005) covers seven years and touches on some of the same social issues that gave "Hoop Dreams" its epic sweep, yet Serrill fails to treat any of them adequately, and the narrative loses its shape as events unfold.

The concept was interesting and charming in "Love Letters," up to a point, but here it quickly becomes repetitive, obvious, and dull.

If you want to waste a couple of hours, you can surely do much better looking elsewhere.

Ludicrous and inept, this low-budget 1985 splatter film directed by former Chicagoan Stuart Gordon tries to compensate for its complete failure to establish even a sliver of credibility by inflating the usual quotient of giggly camp humor and squishy gore effects...It's this kind of flat-footed stuff that gives garbage a bad name.

Insofar as one can distinguish the investigative research from the career move, this Sundance prizewinner is effective muckraking, but it lacks much of a political program apart from the message that we're poisoning ourselves.

Once again, the overall premise is milked for some mild titillation involving the hero's sexual innocence, making one wonder if the genre's popularity might involve some deeply sublimated form of kiddie porn--arguably the distilled ideological essence of squeaky-clean Reaganism.

Stone's all-purpose conspiracy theory, built like a house of cards, rivals "Mississippi Burning" in its sheer crudeness and contempt for the audience.

With this odd mixture of elements the film's tone is gloomy, portentous, and hysterical, yet at the same time strangely earnest and square, as if David Lynch had tried to somehow make a movie version of Scientific American.

The kids are impressively plucky, but Weihenmayer comes off as an egomaniac, arguing with his team and endangering the youngsters' lives. Lucy Walker directed this cloying and manipulative 2006 documentary.

The effects are just as delirious this time around, but the nightmare poetry has vanished, along with the sense of archetypal purpose and narrative inevitability that held the jack-in-the-box original together.

May be amusing if you feel a pressing need to feel superior to somebody, but the aim is too broad and scattershot to add up to much beyond an acknowledgment of small-town desperation--something Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis did much better back in the 20s and 30s.

Most of the film feels recycled from sexually explicit art movies dating back at least to "Last Tango in Paris" (1972) and continuing with movies like Patrice Chéreau's "Intimacy" (2001) or Götz Spielmann's "Antares" (2004). With nothing new in its characters, settings, or themes, Shame has little to offer except McQueen's style, which does little to elucidate anything around it.

A festival favorite in 1992, this flamboyant Australian crowd pleaser and first feature by Baz Luhrmann ("Moulin Rouge") struck me then as one of the more horrific and unpleasant movies I'd seen in quite some time.

By the end of this 124-minute drama I'd have settled for ANYONE else, but like most visits with irritating people, the movie lingers, sharpening one's judgment.

Unfocused, condescending, and corny.

I suspect the unconverted will want to be beamed up pronto.

A blandly twisting plot with no meaningful revelations or substantial themes.

Watching Allen fart out a story when he has no characters is always painful, as people are defined through clumsy expository dialogue and ranked according to their cultural accomplishments. But the script here is lazy even by his standards.

Despite a certain grace in the dialogue and casual plot construction, this is positively reeking of a desire to be cheerful in the face of adversity.

A limp, cheaply made version of the Broadway. Director Randal Kleiser shows no real sense of how a musical is constructed: the songs are bunched together, the production numbers don't move, and the whole project shifts awkwardly between naturalism and stylization.

The first four letters say it all.

It's pretty perverse for William Wheeler, who scripted this feature, to get most of the facts wrong, inflating details that don't need any spin. (As Irving himself remarked, "You could call it a hoax about a hoax.")

Maybe the self-consciously stoopid humor works better in microbursts, but at 75 minutes it's a total drag.

Compels questions about Kinski's bravado and artistry, and suggests that it might not always be easy to distinguish his from Herzog's.

Whatever you think of her, Madonna’s a veteran video star with a well-developed ability to use a camera as a blunt instrument. A good or honest director would see that, and take steps to compensate for it, but Keshishian is a collaborator, not a journalist. With a child’s self-absorption, Madonna thinks everything she says or does is endlessly fascinating.

For me the film creates more embarrassment than sympathy, but at least it's a kind of embarrassment that's instructive.

Director John Landis is so deficient in basic storytelling skills that he must spend hours explicating the most elementary plot points while and Murphy are sidelined.

The plot is largely a series of excuses for one-liners expertly delivered by Maguire, making all the hatred, maiming, and killing seem like digressions.

Of the star-studded cast, only Mark Ruffalo (playing Bruce Banner) and Robert Downey Jr. (as Iron Man) bring any personality to the place-holder dialogue. Overlong, monotonous, violent, and simple-minded, this is like one of those "World's Biggest Gang Bang" videos, except that no one onscreen appears to be enjoying himself.

After making their two best features to date, "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," the Coen brothers have surely come up with their worst.

Although their love is undeniably a blessing, I was disconcerted watching the elderly couple smile and chuckle today as they recall their daily letters and secret meetings in the midst of such wide-scale death.

The narrative decays more quickly than the characters.

Torturously dull.

But the big scare scenes seem particularly isolated here, supported by neither the flat characters nor the vague plot.

Walter Hill's first outright failure, this revisionist western draws on the major themes of his work—the relationship of pursuer and pursued; the beauty of clean, planned action; the attraction to violence and resultant moral revulsion—but none of them ignites.

The film exudes complacency and self-congratulation; it is a very cowardly, craven piece of ersatz art.

The picture is completely devoid of cinematic interest, adopting instead a tiresome theatrical aesthetic in which showy monologues are filmed in interminable, usually ill-chosen long takes.

Cringe-inducing when it's not cliched, this brassy, vulgar 2008 comedy from Australia mines mental disabilities for laughs.

Unfortunately, director Richard Donner doesn't pay much attention to text, subtext, or anything else; his 1986 film is empty glitz in search of a style, with arbitrary action substituting for ordinary narrative coherence.

Pretentious and overconceived, the movie purports to celebrate self-determination yet squashes it at every turn.

If your idea of a good time is watching a lot of stupid, unpleasant people insult and brutalize one another, this is right up your alley.

As creator and head writer of "The West Wing," Aaron Sorkin had a gift for making policy debate seem sexy, but what worked in the context of that liberal fantasy founders badly amid the realpolitik of this cold war drama.

A film about a junkie rock musician, played by Michael Pitt at his most narcissistic, doing nothing in particular for the better part of 97 minutes isn't my idea of either a good time or a serious endeavor.

In Private Parts Stern is clearly presenting a sanitized version of his story--he had control over every aspect of the film and vetoed more than half a dozen scripts before choosing the one that pleased him--in an attempt to reach a whole new level of stardom.

If you care whom she winds up with or why, you probably caught more of the TV references than I did.

The witty title aside, this is a miserably dull exercise in stingy-Jew humor and post-Jarmusch nonreaction.

One reason this production-design vehicle is so incredibly boring is that the characters keep having to explain the plot to one another.

Its paper-thin characters turned into caricatures by egregious hamming, this 1996 Japanese comedy-drama about shy ballroom dancers is sentimental goo and downright interminable.

George Roy Hill's 1969 film moves with steady, stupid grace from oozy sentimentality to nihilistic violence.

There are no characters to care about or remember afterward - just a lot of flashy technique involving decor, some glib allegorical flourishes, and the obligatory studied film-school weirdness.

The boring, humorless pair do nothing to refute the image of eco-worriers as preening, puritanical douchebags addicted to symbolic gesture and allergic to cost-benefit analysis.

The wit is too weak to sustain a film, and the songs all sound the same.

Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.

Awkward storytelling and spotty exposition reduce it to a string of rude shocks--not even the eventual denouement provides a lucid enough account of where this is all coming from.

A feeble sequel to The Naked Gun that's about one and a half rungs down from its predecessor and a good four or five down from Airplane!

Unfortunately, as the opening title might suggest, the filmmakers have punted on the hard cinematic work of making the incredible seem credible; instead they've turned Russell's story into a broad farce with one wocka-wocka gag after another.

Mechanical, soulless.

A bewildering mixture of fairly accomplished storytelling (I enjoyed it more than Dead Poets Society, which isn't saying a lot), awkward contrivances in the script, and lies in the overall conception so egregious they undercut any pretensions the film might have to social seriousness.

The glorification of the FBI, the obfuscation about Jim Crow laws, and the absurd melodramatics may all have been well-intentioned, but the understanding about the past and the present of racism that emerges is depressingly thin.

Big, cruel, stupid actioner.

The novelty wears off almost immediately, leaving this a real chore to watch; there's something bizarre about low-budget spontaneity being replicated in such a labor-intensive medium.

The U.S. vs. John Lennon isn't so much a history of Lennon's pacifism as a continuation of it, the last bed-in, so to speak, with contemporary figures like Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky on hand to connect Vietnam with Iraq, President Nixon with President Bush, and the FBI's spying on Lennon with the current administration's domestic surveillance.

The film reveals its true colors at the end, with a plug for the New Age dude ranch the entrepreneurial couple has since established in Texas.

Overcalculated, thoroughly false humanist mush—one of those “real movies about real people” without a single authentic moment.

This is the dullest and least successful adaptation of the Christmas chestnut I've ever seen, possibly because the mixture of Muppets and humans creates anomalies of scale and degrees of stylized behavior that the film tries to ignore rather than work with.

The moody images and Michael Nyman's score aren't enough to salvage this banal 1997 science fiction story.

A geek festival that mainly invites us to hoot at a bunch of alleged crazies.

The action is clotted and murky, and Coppola obviously hasn't bothered to clarify it for the members of his cast, who wander through the film with expressions of winsome, honest befuddlement.

This 1965 hit is the sort of film that reeks of emotional Muzak, the most elemental responses programmed right into the scenario. Every audience sniffle and tear has been taken into account.

Payne is just as guilty of using her (Ruth) as a figurehead for his ideas--most of them about the stupidity and futility of politics--as are the targets of his satirical abuse.

Thomas is a couch potato as well as a recluse, and a terminal bore to boot. The women, real and simulated, are only slightly more interesting, and then only when they talk back.

I can't remember when I last hated an art-house movie as much as this one...Other reviewers have praised the film's alleged quirky humor, but I was repelled by the two heartless creeps who set the story in motion and baffled by the protagonist's fascination with them.

Fast-paced editing doesn't compensate for unconvincing dialogue.

Dismal Stanley Kramer morality play about a middle-class couple facing the prospect of their daughter's marriage to a black man (Sidney Poitier). A disaster on all counts.

If you're an 11-year-old boy at heart, this is undoubtedly even better than the pile of dinosaur shit in Jurassic Park.

Smug, uninsightful light drama.

Stunning vistas of New Zealand's rolling countryside aren't enough to carry this lame 2006 horror spoof.

Wolfgang Petersen and writer Andrew Marlowe, apparently afraid to really make fun of any American icons, challenge us to take the story straight no matter what, but the only thing this ponderous movie has going for it is its unintentional humor.

Despite the resourcefulness of the two leads, the movie finally registers as much ado about very little.

Not even D.W. Griffith, Steven Spielberg, and Stanley Kubrick working together could succeed in making this pandering piece of nonsense work dramatically on any level except the most egregiously phony.

Ponderous, predictable, and unfunny, this gangster comedy was directed by Brian De Palma, though apart from a few of his characteristic symmetry gags in the opening sequences, it's indistinguishable from the work of any average TV hack.