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.