Lee loads up his movie with so many hot buttons that the film resembles a compendium of all his previous provocations.

As a result, the mystery itself eventually becomes tiresome and shrug-worthy, even as the film breathlessly racks up the revelations. In the end, this twisty thriller just winds up twisting in the wind.

It replicates the template and the atmosphere of the original, but it lacks invention and emotional investment.

When he's playing a relatively normal guy ringed by eccentrics, as in "There's Something About Mary" and "Meet the Parents," Stiller can be flat-out funny. In Zoolander, he's just one nutso among many, and he cancels himself out.

Creative Control is the most elegant vision imaginable of a world in the process of losing its moorings.

The problem with Holland is that Cave has no aptitude for tone.

The film’s bursts of violence are genuinely bracing — a face bashed in, a skull shattered, and the signature act of animal mutilation performed by a carnival geek, a figure of abject degradation who haunts the film’s ill-fated protagonist. But for a pulpy tale of addiction and desperate lives on the fringes, Nightmare Alley is otherwise depressingly short on actual darkness and discomfort.

Although it's shot in lovely, dusty shades of brown with splashes of Coca-Cola red, John Hillcoat's Lawless is dead weight: listlessly classical and then bludgeoning.

The movie is lighter, more fun, and ultimately more satisfying than its weighty predecessor.

It’s a case of diminishing returns: gorgeous, occasionally evocative, but, in the end, mostly dull.

Despite being half–“Let’s put on a show” movie and half–romantic comedy, two genres dedicated to delight, Magic Mike’s Last Dance never achieves satisfaction.

Novelist-turned-director Leigh's dryly efficient style is perched between the matter-of-fact and the impossibly arty.

Echo Valley feels in need of an additional twist, or one fewer — to either commit to being foremost a drama about addiction or to go harder into the suspense, rather than ending up an awkward hybrid of the two.

Their doomy romance is supposed to be fated, but it just seems sloggy, certainly not the stuff of myth. A good comedy could be made from this same premise.

It may be that Merchant Ivory need the armature of the past in order to create a sense of the present. Le Divorce is mustier than any of their movies set back in time.

Those bookending sequences, the start and the finish, are the only ones The History of Sound fully inhabits, while in all the others it plays coy, holding back for no particular reason than that it offers the illusion of sophistication.

Moderately entertaining, immoderately splattery spaghetti Western.

With all the narration and fits of slow motion, the movie seems like the work of a nervous chain-smoker. It lacks concentration--and with it, the potential for rapture.

Hopelessly amateurish, the troupe is saved by a remarkably pretty young blonde called Douce with a sweet soprano to match her angel face. The gifted, unknown actress-singer who plays her, Nora Arnezeder, also saves the movie, which would otherwise blur into a mass of droopy, mustached, big-honkered Gallic character actors.

The lax, lame A Walk in the Woods is a road movie without a road, a journey of self-discovery without discovery, and a tale of friendship without any chemistry.

As Brown becomes more flagrantly self-destructive and at the same time more deluded, you realize you're watching "Bad Lieutenant" made by a tediously finger-wagging Jew instead of a tediously desecrating Catholic.

The sequel, Planes: Fire and Rescue, is still a DisneyToon production, but it does aim higher, with a visual zip that was lacking from the first. It is, in almost all respects, a better movie. It’s still not particularly good, though.

Too much is skimmed over rather than dug into deeply.

The performance is extraordinary, literally: Close resembles no man I've ever seen, or woman either. She's the personification of fear - the fear of being seen through, seen for what she is.

The doubt about what is real and what isn’t has permeated so much of the film that when things take a turn for the serious in the final act, we the audience can’t even quite believe what we’re seeing, until the credits roll and you shrug to yourself, “Huh, I guess it was for real.” That’s a weirdly muted note to end such an otherwise over-the-top — conceptually and physically — comedy.

The film would be better if it were gentler. It's broadly written and played, the actors too busy telegraphing their characters' emotions to let us contemplate their faces in peace.

One of the pleasures of afterlife movies is the leaps taken visually, but Eternity looks hopelessly mundane. Still, the actors are game, and that’s half the battle.

The movie substitutes milky, washed-out color and funereal music for insight. The murders are purposely un-fluid: When you see Mohammad or Malvo take a shot, you don’t see the impact of the bullet. When you see the victim struck, you don’t see the shooter.