It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. [3 July 1985, p.Calendar 6]

While I have no doubt that Jaws will make a bloody fortune for Universal and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, it is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written.

You can't have Rushmore without Max, and though Anderson obviously planned it this way, the kid is finally too off-putting to tolerate.

A major cult film, but a bit much, to put it mildly. [23 Sep 1991, p.F12]

The film invents a new emotion: passionate ambivalence. Schoenbrun’s argument might be that this is exactly the response they’re after. They’ve accomplished it, but at the expense of engagement, resulting in a collection of leaden scenes that might make the audience want to claw out of its own skin.

There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.

Even when Griffin has a heart of stone, Tim Robbins is lacking in the knid of ice-cold magnetism that allows a thorough bastard to hold the screen like nobody's business. [10 Apr 1992]

This film is sensationalism gone rampant with sex, cruelty, and all the ruddy elements which make for what is known as rough, rugged, brutal appeal. It has to do with soldiering, but it dallies preeminently with sex, and is only in minor degree concerned with war.

While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement - those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced.

Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.

Hamnet’s sweetest note is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the actual Hamnet. The script hangs on our immediate devotion to the boy and he stands up to the challenge.

Looked at now (2017), The Graduate is frankly a film you admire more than actually enjoy experiencing. Dark, pitiless and despairing, it plays stranger and more distant to me today than it did back in the day. So much so that one wonders if that was the plan from the beginning, when the fact that its mildly transgressive attitude seemed fresh and new disguised its essential nature.

Corpse Bride has more warmth and appeal than its title would indicate, but it is finally more grotesque than good-humored. And, even at 75 minutes, it feels longer than its content can comfortably support.

The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.

The best possible face that can be put on things is that Big and Little Edie (the mother died two years after the film was released, the daughter is still living) made an unconscious, unsavory, mutually advantageous bargain with the filmmakers: Make us famous and we'll return the favor. In retrospect it's clear that both parties lived up to their parts; only the audience got shortchanged. [14 Aug 1998, p.F20]

Polanski over-thinks much of this film -- in the same ways that many of us may over-think the details at these moments. He reaches for a psychological instead of an active tone. But the movie still has a taut and creepy impact, like a bug crawling up your arm. [25 Oct 1991, p.F29]

Paradoxically, it is Shawshank's zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience that makes us feel we're doing harder time than the folks inside. [23 Sept 1994]

Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.

The first-time director's unflinching camera, deliberate pacing and maddeningly long takes just amplify the story's innate harshness and test audience endurance levels.

As a stripped-down, minutely detailed portrait of the daily grind as back-breaking Sisyphean ordeal, “Sorry We Missed You” is engrossing and bluntly persuasive. I was less convinced by the family dynamics.

It's a nervy, quasi-documentary scheme that's often successful, perhaps more so than you'd expect for this kind of a hybrid endeavor. But Macdonald's technique eventually turns out to be as distancing as it is involving, paradoxically undercutting the reality as often as it enhances it.

The Holdovers is a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one.

As violent scene follows violent scene, it is possible to notice how phony even the film's painstakingly constructed macho dialogue starts to sound. And Fresh's willingness to use legitimate social problems as nothing more than an excuse for cheap thrills gets increasingly off-putting. Fresh and his father may be able to push those chess pieces around at breakneck speed, but audiences will want to be treated with more respect.

As good as his actors are — especially the wonderful Dequenne, whose Sophie quietly seeks to repair the boys’ broken bond — they cannot conceal the calculation inherent in this story’s design. Nor can they quite overcome the disconnect between the glossy, self-admiring visual beauty of Close and the stormier, uglier emotional depths it purports to uncover.

Chocolat is a film of some subtlety. It has good, even memorable moments to it, and it’s beautiful looking. It is very, very, very French, which may or may not be your cup of chocolat. It is also a suffocatingly precious film, enough to try the patience of an oyster, and one that primly refuses to detonate the mounting numbers of erotic situations it sets up.

Solondz's filmmaking style tries to make a virtue out of flatness and distance, and is always more comfortable indicating where feelings would go than actually providing them.

Though it's a decidedly arty piece, Leviathan, named after the biblical sea creature, also lacks much in the way of traditional beauty or splendor. However, the immersive shots of those swooping and circling sea gulls are quite something.

The Wrestler doesn't add up. It's constructed with great care around a lead performance that is everything it could possibly be, but the picture itself is off-putting and disappointing.