Mr. Spall, winner of the Cannes and New York Film Critics Circle best-actor awards, does his best to bring an unpleasant character to life — grunting and snorting like a boar ready to charge, spitting on his canvases and dragging around with a constant wince like a fat baby with colic. With all due respect, he’s too repulsive to watch for 150 minutes.

From his debut feature in 2001, the brilliant and sobering domestic drama In the Bedroom, with Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson, his work has been sporadic but his films have been astonishing, heartbreaking and unforgettable. Not this one.

It is rare that a movie finds its way into the hearts of a massive audience with both flair and sentimentality that made the 1949 "Little Women" so unique and unforgettable. The new one pretty much settles for sentimentality.

Lincoln is also a colossal bore. It is so pedantic, slow-moving, sanitized and sentimental that I kept pinching myself to stay awake - which, like the film itself, didn't always work.

I found I Saw the TV Glow to be an unforgiving slog, a film that occasionally piqued my interest but ultimately left me disappointed.

Never failed to hold me spellbound, even when I saw obvious spots where easy cutting would reduce the agony to a much more comfortable running time.

Despite the title, which relates to a song by Van Halen, it is never clear what everybody wants some of, but the film does feature a cast of obviously talented, charismatic unknowns.

Content to make movies for himself (Malick) that nobody else wants to see as long as he can find someone to foot the bill, he's also an iconoclast searching for significance. So am I, but not 138 minutes worth. Anyone seeking symmetry in this cinematic taffy pull risks emerging from it with a pretzel for a brain.

Rancid, preposterous and hysterically over the top in ideas and execution, “once upon a time” perfectly describes writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is indeed another hopped-up fairy tale like every other Tarantino epic.

I wish I could have enjoyed Widows half as much as the critics who are salivating over it with rapturous praise, but Steve McQueen, Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave, directs movies with a jackhammer. Turning his methodic violence with a camera from the brutality of slavery to a commercially driven feminist heist movie, he does not enhance the old Hollywood genre. He pulverizes it.

There are moments of beauty and simplicity, but not nearly enough to sustain a feature. There’s meaning to be wrung out of extended shots of trees, lumberjacking, and deer skulls, sure, but the movie’s ambivalence gets old quick.

The real issue undermining Durkin’s sophomore effort is central to the weaving of the film’s conceit. It looks like a horror movie, swims like a horror movie, and quacks like a horror movie, but it isn’t a horror movie. So then what the hell is it? Good question. After a long, slow build-up, The Nest winds up being as vacant as the Surrey country house of the title, and leaves the viewers feeling every bit as empty.

This one he (Pattinson) could have skipped. Vile and repulsive, Good Time is just under two hours of pointless toxicity.

There are moments here and there with potentially eloquent points of departure, but they dissolve in the mists of the director's ultimately aimless estheticism. [21 May 1999]

Unfortunately, it turns to be duller and infinitely more stagnant than most Hollywood dreck. But it is partially saved by very good actors who struggle valiantly to make it less monotonous than it is.

Senna's accomplishments are impressive, but his story seems more suited to an ESPN special than a feature-length film.

Preposterous, illogical, senselessly over-plotted and artificial as a ceramic artichoke, David Fincher’s Gone Girl is another splatterfest disguised as a psychological thriller about the disintegration of a murderous marriage that I find one of the year’s grossest disappointments.

This works in her favor, since everything around her is trashy and forgettable. J-Lo is the only reason to see it. As a pop flick of no consequence, it’s inviting but forgettable an hour later — but the praise Lopez has received is well deserved. She’s developed nicely as an actress. Call it learning on the job.

Based on her one-dimensional book Elvis and Me, the movie is a superficial chronicle of minutiae in the life of a naive girl, blinded by phony illusions of glamour, longing for affection from a child-man who never grew up, and trapped behind closed doors of toxic fame from Hollywood to Graceland. In the darkness beyond the klieg lights, it wasn’t much of a life—and it’s not much of a movie, either.

This exercise in hysteria is so over the top that you don't know whether to scream or laugh. Despite an emotionally gripping performance by Natalie Portman, it's nothing more than a lavishly staged "Repulsion" in toe shoes.

Mostly it’s a misguided mess.

By presenting this crucial cultural phenomenon in a staid documentary form and in the reverent tone of a hushed docent, The League has the unintentional impact of making Black baseball seem like ancient rather than living history.

Written and directed with muscle and grit by Kitty Green, The Royal Hotel is loaded with grim ambiance, and there is even some suspense, mainly while the viewer waits to see if anything will ever happen.

A dreary bummer.

It’s a movie that knocks itself cross-eyed trying to be hip, clever and today about acerbic seniors, but instead it only makes you long for old ladies in aprons exclaiming “Land sakes alive, I smell something burning in the oven!”

Oldroyd has found a terrific lead actress on which to hitch his wagon.

Instead, by reshaping this charged moment culled from somewhat recent American history in his own image, Sorkin has made The Trial of the Chicago 7 about something else entirely: himself.

I can't imagine what attracted these two megahunks to such a bore.