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.