It's not so much a miscalculation of his audience by Burton as it is a disregard. What lingers after Frankenweenie, far more than its stunning technique, is a sad suggestion of solipsism.

Gyllenhaal is particularly unsuited to this role, his saucer eyes flashing from calm to crazed.

A rambling depiction of a junkie's descent into zombitude.

DiCaprio provides one of those tailor-made Oscar turns - cocking his head at odd angles, twitching and gesticulating with childlike awkwardness, his face a mask of sweet innocence and uncontrollable tics. [4 Mar 1994, p.03]

And did I mention that it's long? It's long.

An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.

Alas, Brick, from writer-director Rian Johnson, isn't as clever as its conceit.

Feels downright ancient.

Tedious sports inspirational that genuflects before the mythology of Notre Dame football with the story of a walk-on who fulfilled a lifelong dream of suiting up for the Irish. [26 May 1994, p.E05]

Aspires to the devilish crudity and unfettered social commentary of South Park. But Zwigoff's direction lacks the exaggerated cartoonishness necessary.

The film is a ponderous, overwrought meditation on grief, loss, guilt, and memory that prods and probes its characters more like lab rats than living, breathing creations.

Less a Holocaust retribution fantasy than a messy homage to war movies, and to movies, period.

It's hard to know whom to blame for this futile exercise: Morris or Rumsfeld.

Given the filmmaker's privileged perspective of hindsight, to not consider the real-world repercussions of their theater, to not connect the dots between 1968 and 2008 is a squandered opportunity.

Structurally and narratively amputated, Volume 1 retains head and guts but loses its heart and gams to the second installment. Maybe Tarantino figured that Thurman's legs, as long as the Mississippi, were sufficient to carry this half of a movie.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

A comedy that belongs back on the drawing board.

For the casual viewer who feels like maybe all the Sith hoopla is worth checking out, well, it's like tuning in to the season finale of "24" without having watched a minute of its lead-up episodes.

In Framing John DeLorean, Philadelphia-based documentarians Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce (The Art of the Steal) mix fact, drama, and speculation to draw an ambitious portrait of the fabled automaker, but within the frame, key questions remain unanswered.

While Last Days succeeds as a nature documentary, Van Sant fails to penetrate human nature. The result is a portrait without a face.

A sappy excursion to Edwardian days.

A sloppy, sentimental story line and pivotal plot turns that are only sketchily realized undermine the life-on-the-road misadventures.

Over the Hedge isn't by any stretch bad. It's just banal.

Moderately scary, moderately amusing, intermittently dull and obvious, Diary of the Dead is not groundbreaking, nor even ground-quaking.

Jonathan and Christopher Nolan's adaptation of this novel by Christopher Priest offers three acts of exasperating muddle.

Funny things, images. While to depict something visually is not necessarily to endorse it, when Bigelow shows rape as she does in Strange Days, she does so from the rapist's point of view. It's kind of like making a movie about the dangers of the atom bomb that glamorizes the aesthetic beauty of the mushroom cloud. [13 Oct 1995, p.05]

Miami Vice, the movie, is an atmospheric muddle, as gorgeous and unintelligible as raven-haired stunner Gong Li.

To the delight of gadgetheads and the dismay of the rest of us, Spy Kids' paraphernalia is better developed and considerably more fun than its story.

Rogue One is a minor little story with a likable cast and familiar Star Wars themes. But it tries so hard to be an epic masterpiece – with self-important speeches and an insanely outsize orchestral score – that it ends up a laughable parody of itself.

Shy sheriff Stewart comes up against mobster Fonda and his gang of outlaws; not as good as this pairing should have been. [02 Jun 1994, p.E04]

As a director, Poitier hasn't come up with any startingly new twists on the old Western cliches. [11 May 1972, p.14]

Thornton swills the Matthau role with the unslakable thirst of W.C. Fields and idiosyncratic sexuality of Johnny Depp. So this is what Bad Santa does during the off-season.

High-Rise feels like a throwback to a time when this kind of social commentary, in literature and film, seemed shocking and true. Not sure whether it's progress to say that in 2016, High-Rise doesn't shock at all.

Gimmicky artifice.

Half enjoyable goof, half an uncomfortable panorama of urban terrorism that just doesn't sit well after Sept. 11.

While these individually diverting factors add up to a good time, they don't add up to a good movie.

It's a fun ride for the most part, with a bumping soundtrack and genuine moments of warmth and heartbreak. But one can't help but wish Gondry had simply let the camera roll, and let the kids speak for themselves.

So deadpan a film is Napoleon Dynamite, the story and the name of a gangly high school misfit in Preston, Idaho, that I can't say whether it was intended as a character study or a comedy.

The twist of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, a laugh-out-loud if not-exactly-good stoner comedy, is that its heroes, an entry-level investment banker and a brainiac pre-med student, are not dimwits.

A disquieting and ultimately disappointing political thriller.

Over-orchestrated and underdeveloped interpretation of Jeffrey Hatcher's play.

There's a fine line between stupid comedy that's actually pretty smart and stupid comedy that's just dumb, and The Other Guys crosses the line - into realms of unredeeming dunderheadedness - more often than it should.

The constant flipping between stagecraft and reality creates a dissonant static that prevents any satisfying connection with the film.

A haunting allegory about the rise and fall of a figure who possesses powerful charisma, if weak karma.

Shortbus suffers from a vague, ad lib-y script and a cast that, while hardly shy, isn't exactly charismatic.

Unfortunately, Turner's performance is as forced as Serial Mom's humor. Both boast false smiles but can't mask the fact that there's something sinister in the suburbs and about this movie. [15 Apr 1994, p.03]

The Naked Gun 33 1/3 has the feel of a movie with too many jokes off the cutting-room floor. Through it all, Nielsen's consummate timing and ability to come through in the klutz makes things seem more amusing than they are. [18 Mar 1994, p.3]

A movie that by turns is wincingly awful and heartbreakingly fine. It boasts an unforgettable performance by Björk.

Am I crazy, or are Spring Breakers and "Oz the Great and Powerful" essentially the same movie? James Franco stars in both - a tattooed, gun-totin' gangsta in one, a charlatan magician in the other (you figure out which is which), and, in both, he's encircled by a bevy of Hollywood babes determined either to get witchy on him, or get that other witchy-rhyming word on him.

Feels more like a postscript than a probing, provocative documentary.

Although its low-key realism is admirable, Eden doesn't really work: the long silences, the aching stares, the telling props, Breda's quivering blues, Billy's drunkenness, his distraction. There might as well be a sign stuck to the Farrells' front door: Dysfunctional family lives here.

Keanu doesn't go far enough. Key & Peele was searing and incisive about race and American culture, and Keanu doesn't even scratch the surface.

Illsley's fine cast, with a riotous contribution from William H. Macy as the sheriff who falls for Harry, plays out the comedy without condescension.

It is diverting but insubstantial.

Tonally, the film from director Anurag Basu has more personalities than Sybil. Basu strictly observes the B-movie convention of giving the audience an embrace, explosion, or chase sequence at regular intervals. If you don't like the genre, wait three minutes.

The Woman in Black has lovely period atmosphere. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much else besides atmosphere.

It's still a submarine movie, confined by the ship, the sea, and a convention-laden script.

Despite its penchant for the crude and lewd, is gooey in ways that have nothing to do with bodily fluids.

Far-fetched and utterly humorless, with a literally tacked-on conclusion (yes, more text on the screen), the only thing that's surprising about Unbreakable is how lame it is.

The film feels long, the editing is choppy, and the plot strands are at once convoluted and cliched.

Somebody should tell Ward that winning isn't everything. Character is. And this is what his movie lacks.

Boy, can Harvey Keitel be bad -- and not bad like "Bad Lieutenant," bad like bad acting.

A worthy subject is poorly executed.

Take the flat tire that was "Madagascar." Retread it with "The Lion King" storyline. Pump it up with air. Now you have Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.

The Weather Man belongs to a school of earnest, artsy Hollywood flicks that includes the Michael Douglas-goes-bonkers "Falling Down," and a lineage that goes back to revered 1970s pics like "Five Easy Pieces."

There is much of interest in Baumbach's pictures - the confident handling of actors, the introspection, the terra-cotta and teal-painted walls. But what do you call a comedy of manners that's not particularly funny? [19 June 1998, p.04]

Filmmaker Roger Michell doesn't so much adapt Ian McEwan's fine novel Enduring Love, a surgically precise anatomy of romance and obsession, as eviscerate it and wave its entrails before the audience.

Either an airless allegory about opportunistic Americans or another one of the director's parables of female persecution. OK, maybe it's both. But life is too short for three hours of misanthropy and misogyny.

On many levels, Kingsman has the makings of a sure-fire hit. Yet, this is one spy story even the most dedicated addicts of the genre would do well to miss.

Just about the only cast member who doesn't go misty at one point or another is the horse that Down Under cinema charmer Bryan Brown takes for a trot late in the film.

It's refreshing to see an actor tell his own story with some real honesty. Overall, however, Tab Hunter Confidential is too much like every other Hollywood True Story out there.

Allied comes off like a highlight reel that mimics the look and feel of a whole school of great films, from "Casablanca" to Hitchcock's "Suspicion" and "Notorious."

A movie where the action scenes feel like filler, the romantic leads have little magnetism, and, before long, its metaphysical underpinnings fall to pieces.

Tumbledown comes up light in the categories that matter most, miring a capable cast in a forced cable-knit folksiness familiar to anyone who has ever watched anything set in New England.

Life of Crime is like an errant golf putt that appears headed for the hole, but just keeps rolling and rolling, all the way off the green. In other words, just missed . . . by a mile.

It musters both the merits and the drawbacks of the landmark original.

Too cute by half (or maybe three-quarters).

Somehow the star emerges from this mess smelling like pure testosterone. You can't stop the Rock.

Zemeckis, who blazed trails mixing live-action with animation in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit," blazes not even a footpath here.

If you want to see a Renaissance faire turned into an apocalyptic battlefield, this is the ticket.

Castellitto directed and stars in this unbearable film, a case study of a surgeon with a raging madonna-whore complex.

Scafaria's movie never catches fire. The bad news: The end of the world comes with a whimper. Worse: And two wimps.

Run All Night isn't dull. The pace is breakneck, and necks get broken. But the violence is relentless, ugly, unredeemed by any real humanity.

Who knows if it was Del Toro's idea, or Stone's, but at a particularly crucial - and criminal - moment, as a very bad thing is about to occur, the actor twirls his mustache menacingly, like a Mexican Snidely Whiplash. Yes, Savages is that kind of story.

As a commentary on gender roles, maternity, paternity and test-tube fertilization, Junior does manage to get in a few good yuks - but far fewer than you'd expect given the story's, um, fertile premise. [23 Nov 1994, p.E01]

The film whipsaws between hyperbolic character study and preachy account of the recent financial meltdown. The two story lines are not well-integrated.

Heights manages to make the lives of all these beautiful people seem quite tedious. Despite their accomplishments, the only thing they seem suited for is hailing cabs.

Having unleashed Phoenix, Phillips doesn’t seem to know how to contain or couch the performance. At some point he seems to have surrendered, and when the movie is over you realize Arthur is its only substantial character.

A loud, abrasive comedy that squanders the talents of its three stars, The Ref is the sort of project that stands or falls on its writing - it needs to be deep and deliciously dark. But as scripted by Richard LaGravenese and Marie Weiss (he penned The Fisher King, this is her first produced screenplay) and directed by Ted Demme (Jonathan's nephew, making his feature film debut), all we get is superficial rage. [11 Mar 1994, p.03]

A horror pic with a new gimmick that likely will spawn an entire subgenre of more substandard rubbish.

However charming Kingsley and Shaw are as the lovestruck pawns and Sorvino as the advancing queen, the premise is less playful than played-out.

"There's nothing here!" screams Romina Mondello - Kurylenko's Euro gal pal, walking the deserted sidewalks of this Anytown, U.S.A. Boy, truer words . . ..

Because the movie is about addictive behavior dulling the pain of grief rather than in the larger drama of dealing with grief, the movie reduces the scope of Hoffman's performance.

Awash in nostalgia and amped-up male camaraderie, Richard Curtis' Pirate Radio takes a great story - the hugely popular offshore radio stations that illegally broadcast pop and rock in 1960s Britain - and turns it into an aggressively irritating floating frat-party romp.

Let's face it: Kids aren't a very demanding audience. If there's color, movement, and a high quotient of silliness, they're happy.

Freeman and Hoskins lend the film a level of artistry it doesn't really deserve. Unleashed has a vivid concept, but savagery and sentimentality make strange costars.

This hotly anticipated film delivers on the premise of its celebrated title. But it offers little more in terms of suspense, originality or enjoyment. Mostly, it lays there on the screen like a big lazy boa.

Full of forced jocularity and drawing-room hissy fits, with its cast parading around in vintage threads and antique cars, Easy Virtue is a close-to-insufferable souffle based on the 1925 Noel Coward play.