Weak comedy.

The standard line on this actor-heavy, brain-light concoction by writer-director John Herzfeld (1996) is that it’s Short Cuts meets Pulp Fiction, but it isn’t a tenth as good as either.

There are a few witty touches (POV shots given to the urn holding the mother's ashes) but the mood swings erratically and ineffectively from deadpan drollery to heartfelt romance.

Photographed in murky yellows and browns by John Alonzo, this 1979 film is sluggish and vague, trivializing its subject in a wash of unearned sentimentality.

A moment or two between Richard Farnsworth and Wilford Brimley recall the verbal skills of Levinson's Diner; the rest of the film is bloatedly “visual”: blinding backlighting, grandiose slow motion, overstudied montage.

This three-hour 1962 remake of the Charles Laughton-Clark Gable MGM classic (1935) was the first production in which Marlon Brando really ran amok, with various delays causing the budget to skyrocket. Hardly anyone was pleased with the results.

Everyone seems sincere and bursting with energy, yet there is a strange lack of conviction: Forman has taken the honorable route by refusing to treat the material as easy nostalgia, but the confrontational sentiments no longer have the substance to survive his straightforward presentation.

The heavy-handed delivery may reflect the urgency of the message--that women need to face the past and stand by their children--but it impedes the drama.

Lee has tried hard to give this shapeless picture some visual patterning though the cluttered effect created by his mistrust of silence is even more harmful than in the past.

Paul Mazursky hasn’t only remade Jean Renoir’s sublime 1931 Boudu Saved From Drowning: he’s yuppified it, inverting virtually every meaning until the film becomes a celebration of the crassest kind of materialism.

Dispenses so many rubber masks to allow the characters to swap identities that no hero or villain winds up carrying any moral weight at all.

Horror maestro Christophe Gans ("Brotherhood of the Wolf") directed this feature, worth seeing for the zombie nurses who gyrate like a Bob Fosse chorus line before slicing each other to ribbons.

William Friedkin's direction of this 1970 film adaptation (made the year before The French Connection) doesn't do much more than underline the flaws in the material: every scene is shaped to build to the same forced hysteria.

The color-coded cinematography is nice but the jokes are obvious and the dialogue drags whenever metaphysics gets brought up.

Various news stories have noted the movie's accuracy, which I don't doubt, but the blanket antipathy makes for a wearying and predictable story.

Naim's premise has possibilities, but its execution often feels slapdash -- the viewer's sense of deja vu may be even more excessive than the characters'.

Might be for you. Or you might be bored anyway.

Director Zack Snyder races through the story, faithfully reproducing this bit of dialogue from Moore and that bit of imagery from Gibbons but never pausing to develop a vision of his own. The result is oddly hollow and disjointed; the actors moving stiffly from one overdetermined tableau to another.

All of this comedy's jokes are old.

[Brooks's] second Williams adaptation (1962) is literally a form of emasculation that offers little indication of what made the original play interesting (especially in Elia Kazan’s stage production), despite the fact that Paul Newman and Geraldine Page are called on to reprise their original roles—as a hustler returning to his southern hometown and a Hollywood has-been—and do a fair job with Brooks’s hopeless script.

The feature has some lovely effects.

The best visual design in the world doesn't mean a thing unless there's someone around with a rudimentary sense of story. Jeff Bridges, playing the human hero sucked into the machine, has to carry the film's entire burden of charm and appeal; he seems to have freaked out under the strain, turning in some surpassingly weird, alienating work.

The appearance of circus performers in any film not by Fellini usually bodes ill, and it does so here.

A narrative that tries to juggle thriller elements, tons of pop culture imagery, and way too much philosophical baggage.

The first half is better than average for an opulent Classics Illustrated film, thanks to realistic period detail, brisk storytelling, and Reese Witherspoon as the saucy rags-to-riches Becky Sharp. Then the whole lumbering weight of the production catches up with the filmmakers, slowing the proceedings to an interminable crawl.

Never coherent and frequently pretentious, the film remains an audacious attempt to place obsessive personal images before a popular audience--a kind of Kenneth Anger version of "Star Wars." (Review of Original Release)

George Lucas served as executive producer for this effects-heavy action film about the Tuskegee Airmen, and it feels as synthetic and dull as "The Phantom Menace."

The problem is that the imagery—as Sadean as Pasolini's Salo—isn't rooted in any story impulse, and so its power dissipates quickly. The real venue for this film is either a grind house or the Whitney Museum.