The Great Gatsby is a superficially beautiful hunk of a movie with nothing much in common with the spirit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel.

Sam Peckinpah's The Killer Elite is directed and acted with a certain nice style, but it puts us through so many convolutions of the plot that finally we just don't care.

While the spectacularly gifted and enormously likable cast has the firepower and charisma to match the testosterone-fueled ensembles of those earlier films, Ocean’s 8 is more of a smooth glide than an exhilarating adventure.

The awkwardly titled Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre is a mixed bag that plays like a cross between a “Mission: Impossible” movie and “Get Shorty,” and there are some moments of hilariously dark humor and a few nifty fight sequences. But the plot is so convoluted it feels as if chunks of different scripts were all fed into some kind of A.I. blender, with the result being an inconsequential serving of empty cinematic calories.

Cuts back and forth between a tragic story involving the Holocaust and an essentially trivial, feel-good story about a modern-day reporter. It's an awkward fit and diminishes the impact of the earlier story.

A lot of Trollhunter - but not enough - is funny. I imagine the best way to see the movie would be the way it was presented at Sundance, at a "secret" midnight screening at which the capacity audience allegedly has no idea what it is about to see.

I know the novel, and as dark as this film is, I believe it hesitates to follow Greene into his dark abyss. It is about helplessness and evil, but isn't merciless enough.

Mirror Mirror is a sumptuous fantasy for the eyes and a pinball game for the mind, as story elements collide and roll around bumping into each other.

The plot of the movie is meh.

Beautiful Creatures springs to life whenever Irons, Thompson or Rossum is centerstage. The grown-ups get to wear all the coolest costumes and spout all the juiciest lines. Problem is, this isn't their story. It's first and foremost a semi-plodding teen romance with supernatural overtones.

The weakness of Black Girl is in its slow, journeyman style; one feels that Sembene learned filmmaking by making this film. It also suffers from a kind of primitive naturalism, as if the script were by James T. Farrell out of Theodore Dreiser. Every motive is spelled out in unnecessary detail, and little attempt is made to get into the minds of the characters.

Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds and, indeed, all the members of the cast are finely tuned and very good. What the movie totally fails at, however, is its attempt to make some kind of significant statement about its action.

Many of the scenes in this movie are almost formula, despite the energy of Scorsese's direction and the good performances. They come in the same places we would expect them to come in a movie by anybody else, and they contain the same events.

Sort of entertaining, but lacks the focus and comic energy of Judge's "Office Space" (1999), and to believe that Suzie would be attracted to the gigolo requires not merely the suspension of disbelief, but its demolition.

Fosse’s attempt to give us Lenny Bruce as society’s victim and a martyr to noble causes never quite works, and so the movie becomes just several good scenes and a fine Hoffman performance, not a persuasive portrait of a man.

Musical Chairs is a feel-good romantic fantasy that is likely to inspire a hollow laugh among some people in wheelchairs. Either it knows little about the realities of disability, or it knows too much.

Road House exists right on the edge between the "good-bad movie" and the merely bad. I hesitate to recommend it, because so much depends on the ironic vision of the viewer. This is not a good movie. But viewed in the right frame of mind, it is not a boring one, either.

It all comes down to the difference between a "concert film" and a documentary. Let’s Spend The Night Together is essentially a concert film recording an "ideal" Rolling Stones concert, put together out of footage shot at several outdoor and indoor Stones concerts. If that's what you want, enjoy this movie. I wanted more.

Nightbitch positions itself as an edgy, body-horror film with shock-value imagery, and there’s no denying the validity of its premise that even in 2024, the sacrifices of motherhood are taken for granted and underexamined.

One Night at McCool's does not quite work, but it has a lot of fun being a near-miss.

Coppola's new film is not so much about the car as about the man, and it is with the man that he fails to deliver.

12 Strong winds up being an almost-good film about some great American soldiers.

By the end of the film the 1949 film noir sources are plainly in view, but earlier, Soderbergh seems more interested in personality quirks than double-crosses, and those are the more interesting scenes.

Employs superb craftsmanship and a powerful Denzel Washington performance in an attempt to elevate genre material above its natural level, but it fails. The underlying story isn't worth the effort.

What a wondrous vision Excalibur is! And what a mess.

Kleine could have used Gregory’s lifelong trajectory to tell a larger story of the international avant-garde theater scene. Instead there is overmuch fuss about his coterie of dear companions.

It is intensely involving at the outset, but it faces an insoluble problem: The story, like the characters, has no place to go.

Is Terminator 3 a skillful piece of work? Indeed. Will it entertain the Friday night action crowd? You bet. Does it tease and intrigue us like the earlier films did? Not really.

The documentary visits elderly women who, then and now, can best be described as tough broads, and listens as they describe the early days of women's wrestling. What they say is not as revealing as how they say it.

I was interested all through the movie--interested, but not riveted. I cared, but not quite enough.

It scares and shocks us because it's so cleverly made; the writer-director, David Cronenberg, uses invention and imagination to replace expensive shock effects.

Lopez and Affleck are sweet and appealing in their performances; the buzz said they didn't have chemistry, but the buzz was wrong. What they don't have is conviction.

Big Fish of course is a great-looking film, with a fantastical visual style that could be called Felliniesque if Burton had not by now earned the right to the adjective Burtonesque.

Did this movie have to be so lockstep, so trapped by its mechanical plot, so limited by a murder mystery? What the movie has to say is so pale and limited that, ironically, the most interesting character in the movie is the victim.

The result is a reassuring fairy tale that will fascinate children and has moments of natural beauty for their parents, but makes the tigers approximately as realistic as the animals in "The Lion King."

This is a framework that could have benefitted from more irony and complexity, especially with the resources of Langella, but at the end, I felt the movie was too easily satisfied.

If the film had been less extreme in the adventures of its heroes, more willing to settle for plausible forms of rebellion, that might have worked. It tries too hard, and overreaches the logic of its own world.

It glories in its silliness, and the actors are permitted the sort of goofy acting that distinguished screwball comedy. We get double takes, slow burns, pratfalls, exploding clothes wardrobes, dropped trays, tear-away dresses, missing maids of honor, overnight fame, public disgrace and not, amazingly, a single obnoxious cat or dog.

Country Strong is a throwback, a pure, heartfelt exercise in '50s social melodrama.

Hotel de Love is a pleasant and sometimes funny film, without being completely satisfying.

While it’s hard to make sense of the narrative developments in The Signal, it must be said that it’s always visually compelling. And that some of the standout sequences (including, yes, the Mind-Blowing Twist Ending) suggest that Eubank could have a terrific future as a director. As a screenwriter, though, maybe not so much.

Here is Lee at his most spontaneous and sincere, but he could have used another screenplay draft, and perhaps a few more transitional scenes.

White Men Can’t Jump 2023 is the second remake for director Calmatic this year, following the disastrous “House Party” from last January, and while it’s not as clumsy or weirdly tone-deaf as that bomb, the screenplay by Kenya Barris (“black-ish”) and Doug Hall misses a couple of major opportunities, including the decision to have the most dramatic development of the entire movie take place offscreen.

Comes so close to working that you can see there from here. It has the right approach and the right opening premise, but it lacks the zest and it goes for a plot twist instead of trusting the material.

The movie has many scenes of delicious comedy, Clooney and Zeta-Jones play their characters perfectly in an imperfect screenplay.

The movie's problem is a fundamental lack of substance.

The movie they made is the movie they made, and while there are some genuinely moving moments, and filmmakers Josh Tickell and Rebecca Tickell clearly took great care in respecting Indigenous People culture and getting the details right, too much of On Sacred Ground focuses on William Mapother’s cliché-riddled Daniel.

It is a brave experiment, based on life and using actors who play themselves, but it buys into the whole false notion that artists are somehow too brilliant to be sober.

Plays like it was directed as a do-it-yourself project, following instructions that omitted a few steps, and yet the movie has an undeniable charm.

A paean to creative impulses, this work channels the vision of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi.

The result is a little like a comedy crossed with a home movie. It is also, like many home movies, somewhat rambling, and overly dependent on knowing the names of all the players.

The elegantly composed visuals, the stately progression of the scenes, the deliberate understatement of the dialogue, are all as "faithful" to James as a film can be. But that's exactly the film's problem: Ivory hasn't found a way to make his own film, and has ended up with a classroom version of James, a film with no juice or life of its own.

There is something not quite right about the film itself.

What is wonderful about Angela's Ashes is Emily Watson's performance, and the other roles that are convincingly cast.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks is the new Disney production from the team that made Mary Poppins, and it has the same technical skill and professional polish. It doesn't have much of a heart, though, and toward the end you wonder why the Poppins team thought kids would like it much.

This is a well-intentioned and sometimes quite sharp high school movie that falls just short of the mark due to a few way-off-the-mark scenes and too much heavy-handed preaching.

The movie is ultimately not quite successful; when it was over I felt there was some additional payoff or explanation still due. Perhaps the arbitrary, unfinished nature of the story is part of its purpose. But I felt that characters this interesting should not be allowed to remain complete ciphers. Still, in individual moments, The Comfort of Strangers has an eerie, atmospheric charm.

Weird has the ingredients of a brilliant half-hour special stretched too thin.

This is a paint-by-numbers procedural that expects the audience to know the history of Watergate, hits the ground running—but then feels more like a steady jog through the past than a fast-paced thriller.

Branagh is a world-class actor and a fine director, and he scores stylistic points on both counts here, but this “Orient Express” loses steam just when it should be gaining speed and racing to its putatively shocking conclusion, which isn’t all that surprising — even if you haven’t read the book or seen the 1974 movie

The movie's dialogue is constructed out of funny names, puns and old jokes. Sometimes it's painfully juvenile. But there are some great visual gags in the movie, and the best is Pizza the Hutt, a creature who roars and cajoles while cheese melts off its forehead and big hunks of pepperoni slide down its jowls.

To Kill a Mockingbird, set in Maycomb, Alabama, in 1932, uses the realities of its time only as a backdrop for the portrait of a brave white liberal.

Amusing without ever being break-out funny.

This is a modest but likable film, and Anjelica Huston plays a heroine who makes us smile.

Works splendidly as a courtroom thriller about military values as long as you don't expect it to seriously consider those values.

One of the sly pleasures of Latter Days is the sight of this gay-themed movie recycling so many conventions from straight romantic cinema, as if it's time to catch up.

We’re only about 20 minutes into the half-baked, ultra-lightweight, almost instantly forgettable rom-com “Ticket to Paradise” when our hearts start to sink, as we realize this big-screen re-teaming of Julia Roberts and George Clooney is quite likely going to be sideswiped and eventually sunk by a leaden screenplay that doesn’t come close to maximizing their massive respective star power.

There was a lot I liked in Cletis Tout, including the performances and the very audacity of details like the magic tricks and the carrier pigeons. But it seemed a shame that the writer and director, Chris Ver Wiel, took a perfectly sound story idea and complicated it into an exercise in style. Less is more.

Just remember that its hero stands for countless others.

Les Miserables is like a perfectly respectable Classics Illustrated version of the Victor Hugo novel. It contains the moments of high drama, clearly outlines all the motivations, is easy to follow and lacks only passion. A story filled with outrage and idealism becomes somehow merely picturesque.

There's funny stuff here. We like everybody.

The movie did make me smile. It didn't make me laugh, and it didn't involve my emotions, or the higher regions of my intellect, for that matter. It's a perfectly acceptable feature cartoon for kids up to a certain age, but it doesn't have the universal appeal of some of the best recent animation.

Red Tails is entertaining. Audiences are likely to enjoy it. The scenes of aerial combat are skillfully done and exciting.

If The Informers doesn't sound to you like a pleasant time at the movies, you are right. To repeat: dread, despair and doom. It is often however repulsively fascinating and has been directed by Gregor Jordan as a soap opera from hell, with good sets and costumes.

The problem may be that Bill Melendez, who directed, and Charles M. Schultz, who wrote the movie based on his own comic characters, couldn't decide whether to aim for kids or their parents.

The plot has holes big enough to drive a Harley-Davidson through. But the film is better than it might have been, and better than it had to be. Take it on its own terms and you might find it interesting.

No movie has ever been able to provide a catharsis for the Holocaust, and I suspect none will ever be able to provide one for 9/11. Such subjects overwhelm art.

Could metamorphose into an entertaining sitcom.

If only Deadpool were as clever, dark and funny as it believes itself to be.

Airport 1975 is good, exciting, corny escapism and the kind of movie you would not want to watch as an in-flight film.

The movie is a competent thriller, but maybe could have been more.

Mr. Jealousy isn't quite successful, but it does provide more evidence of Baumbach's talent.

As light as a feather, as fresh as spring, and as lubricious as a centerfold... There is something extroverted and refreshing in the way these women enjoy their beauty and their sexiness.

The high-tech stuff is absorbing. Harrison Ford once again demonstrates what a solid, convincing actor he is, and there's good supporting work from Archer, Thora Birch as the Ryans' precocious daughter, and the irreplaceable James Fox as a British cabinet minister. But at the end, when a character is leaping into a burning speedboat in choppy seas, I wondered if this was exactly what Tom Clancy had in mind.

When the film was over I was not particularly pleased that I had seen it; it was mostly behavior and contrivance. While it was running, I was not bored.

Here is a movie that embraces its goofiness like a Get Out of Jail Free card.

It's kind of neat to see how some of these sounds were produced, but beyond that, a lot of trippy blather, guitar geekdom and talk of oysters. [21 Dec 2003, p.5]

The movie as a whole lacks the conviction of a real story. It is more like a lush morality play, too leisurely in its storytelling, too sure of its morality.

This is not great comedy, and Wayans doesn't find ways to build and improvise, as Carrey does.

Eddie Murphy looks like the latest victim of the Star Magic Syndrome, in which it is assumed that a movie will be a hit simply because it stars an enormously talented person. Thus it is not necessary to give much thought to what he does or says, or to the story he finds himself occupying.

Despite the undeniable importance of this story and the obvious passion of those involved in telling it, Emancipation is more than anything a relatively standard-issue, period-piece action film — and that’s a shame, because we see glimpses of how it could have been something much more than that.

Easy Money is an off-balance and disjointed movie, but that's sort of okay, since it's about an off-balance and disjointed kinda guy. The credits call him Monty Capuletti, but he is clearly Rodney Dangerfield, gloriously playing himself as the nearest thing we are likely to get to W.C. Fields in this lifetime.

The gray, drab monotony of the setting seeps into the marrow of the prison drama Camp X-Ray, though it’s invigorated, somewhat, by strong central performances from actors on opposite sides of a locked steel door.

This version of The Thing, directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., provides such graphic and detailed views of the creature that we are essentially reduced to looking at special effects, and being aware that we are. Think how little you ever really saw in the first "Alien" movie, and how frightening it was.

It's awkward, not because of the subject matter, but because of the contrasting acting styles. Here are two men trying to communicate in a touchy area and they behave as if they're from different planets.

What we have is the movie, and it’s a well-intentioned, well-acted and sometimes visually arresting picture that unfortunately features a primary character who is so foul and irredeemable it’s virtually impossible to believe certain happy-ending developments late in the film. It feels contrived and forced.

Despite Redford's sure-handed (but typically stolid) direction, an intriguing premise and a cast filled with top-line talent both veteran and relatively new, nearly every scene had me asking questions about what just transpired when I should have been absorbing what was happening next.

It doesn't have that sneaky sense of awful things about to happen. Scott makes the hero so rational, normal and self-possessed that we never feel he's in real danger; we go through this movie with too much confidence.