There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.

Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history.

While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.

To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.

Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.

A corny, old-fashioned backstage farce.

Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.

The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."

His (Miyazaki) stories, and often his character design, just leave me cold. I know I'm supposed to be magically transported by his fanciful tales and his whimsical grandiosity, but they make me listless.

So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper.

Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.

Nolan may want us to believe in the darkness that lurks within each of us, but instead of leading us to it visually, he chops it up and sets it out in front of us, a grim, predigested banquet.

The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded "maximum city" of Mumbai. On one hand, this environment of Dickensian, almost hallucinatory contrasts between rich and poor, good and evil feels perfect for Danny Boyle.

If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it.

Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."

It remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.

Am I alone in thinking that computer animation is the work of the antichrist?

What was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde. [Review of re-release]

For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.

It is a very expensive-looking, very flashy entertainment, albeit one that groans under the weight of clumsy storytelling in the second half and features some of the most godawful dialogue this side of "Attack of the Clones."

Comes off not as topical but as opportunist. The picture is brushed with a fine glaze of slickness, a product sealed in a blister pack. It's like airplane air -- it has a packaged freshness that isn't really fresh at all.

I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.

When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.

The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.

Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.

Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?

The plot of Howl's Moving Castle meanders so listlessly that its details become less and less charming.

Not far below the surface Captain Phillips is also an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, a film that’s not entirely happy with itself.

A singularly unpleasant movie.

You can choose to understand The Force Awakens as an embrace of the mythological tradition, in which the same stories recur over and over with minor variations. Or you can see it as the ultimate retreat into formula.... There are moments when it feels like both of those things, profound and cynical, deeply satisfying and oddly empty.

You may find yourself spellbound or colossally irritated; it's a close call either way.

Condon's tone is gentle and lifeless and at times baffling: The picture is a weird cross between clinical and whimsical.

Well-meaning but remote picture.

"Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.

The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.

Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.

I felt like I'd been invited to a seven-course dinner, and all seven turned out to be cake – and then the host insisted on delivering a lecture about how cake would bring me closer to God.

Bits of the picture are fascinating to look at, but eventually, exhaustion kicks in, to the point where we're not sure what we're looking at, or why.

The whole experience of watching casts of talented and over-eager actors try to make sense of his (Allen) nonsensical scripts becomes increasingly strained and bizarre. I’ve felt that way about recent Allen movies I mostly enjoyed, like “Midnight in Paris” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and it goes double or triple for Blue Jasmine.

The Thin Red Line, either by incompetence or willful perversity, dispenses with plot, characterization, dramatic structure and emotional payoffs in favor of the sort of painstakingly composed pictorial diddling that invariably gets critics frothing about the director's "indelible" images.

The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.

None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."

A large part of the movie's problem is that both the characters and the actors who portray them serve as vehicles for Ramsay's stylistic flourishes.

Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always.

It doesn't matter if the movie around Firth is a good one or a lousy one: Either way, I wouldn't be able to explain how an actor could come up with a performance as subtle, in both its heartbreak and its magnificence, as this one is.

I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years.

There's so little love to be found in Dreamgirls. It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.

Slowly but surely, Flight degenerates from a tale of moral paradox and wounded romance into a mid-1990s after-school special about addiction and recovery.

It's a late-night infomercial masquerading as a concert movie, more an advertisement for vitality than a picture of vitality itself. There's something self-congratulatory, preening, about both the performance and the filmmaking.

For a while, at least, this one feels like Iñárritu’s masterpiece, until that familiar too-muchness begins to take over.

It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration.

Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.

Anderson's other hallmarks here are brilliant gags that deflate in the execution, potentially interesting characters that end up so flat they feel as if they'd been cut out of paper, a plot that's all setup and no story.

Toothless, gutless, one-note political movies like Jonathan Demme's The Manchurian Candidate, a picture that purports to have a galvanizing, liberal-minded theme (big business is taking over our country and our lives) but is really just ploddingly pedestrian.

At its best, State and Main is fast and sharp, but when a movie like this goes off the rails, it's more disappointing than when a bad movie does.

Beyond its easy-on-the-psyche message, the picture is reasonably pretty to look at.

As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.

It's an unholy mess, simultaneously too Gothic and too sarcastic, that preaches liberation and delivers only puritanism. It's a craftsmanlike but robotic imitation of "interesting" filmmaking, only in patches, and by accident, the real thing.

I personally find the Russo brothers’ lightning-fast action scenes difficult to process — it’s as if cinema editing now exceeds the speed of human brain functions — but they’re undoubtedly exciting and skillfully constructed.

Well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.

Trainwreck is not very good, but Schumer is frequently amazing in it. Officially, her fans will not be disappointed; not far below the surface, it’s a bummer.

It's dull in a very tasteful way, with none of the reverberating tenderness and sometimes surly vigor that characterize Rohmer's best work, things like "Summer" and "The Aviator's Wife."

An endless battle scene in search of a movie. It's every bit as harrowing -- and also every bit as pointless and misguided -- as the botched military mission it depicts.

For the most part "Inception" is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth. Nolan establishes a fascinating world, loaded with trapdoors, symbols and hidden secrets, and then squanders the opportunity on an overpriced "Twilight Zone" episode.

Carefully made, respectful and dull.

Given the debased standards of action cinema these days this might be enough to make The Town a hit. But almost everything else about the movie is badly off balance, starting with Affleck's decision to cast himself as the implacably sexy and good-hearted Doug.

Wag the Dog is such a crisply delivered political satire, so packed full of wickedly amusing details and expertly modulated performances and with its heart so obviously in the right place that I really, truly wish I could tell you it was also a good movie.

To say that this undercover operation does not go well is an understatement, and the resulting portrait of the domestic anti-terrorism campaign, although it’s admittedly a portrait in miniature, could hardly be more disheartening.

If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.

Isn't a good movie. It's drab, visually ugly and a little pokey...but the two heroines are so recognizable as real girls, and the young actresses who play them are so appealing, that you keep rooting for these kids.

It's too convoluted by half, and turns what ought to be an idiosyncratic, delightful folktale-film into a baffling personal psychodrama with a nasty sting in its tale. Still, Breillat wouldn't be Breillat if she made movies that were easy to like, or to get your head around.

Cold Mountain is a romance, refreshingly free from the taint of any political realities other than the "War is hell" variety. It's also completely juiceless.

Although his (Eastwood's) intentions are good, he simply isn't capable of the wry, wistful blend of humor and sadness this story desperately needs.

Though I admire much of what Cuesta does in L.I.E., the film didn't give me much pleasure. I didn't find it unpleasant or repulsive; it's just that I felt he was too much outside the story.

Cars is an elaborate concoction all right. But it feels soldered together from a scrap heap of tired ideas.

Arguably, A Girl Cut in Two is more fun around the edges, as an assemblage of bizarre supporting characters and throwaway comic bits, than it is down the middle, as a classic French morality tale.

Mechanical plot that seems dull even before it laboriously clanks and screeches into motion.

This is like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, and although the cutting is much slower than in Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just about as much sense. The movie's leisureliness is aggressive; the picture is artfully designed to make you feel that if you're bored, it's your own damn fault.

Feels like a movie that keeps wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel, an epic poem, anything but that populist thing we call a movie. Mendes makes movies as if he hates them.

Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene -- he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, "Mystic River." But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy -- or, maybe more important, the ones who don't.

What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?

A consistently engrossing piece of work.

It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.

There's nothing in Earth that's as moving as the sight of the mother penguin "grieving" for her chick in "March of the Penguins." You can applaud Earth for not jerking tears. On the other hand, an occasional tear isn't such a bad thing.

It's almost a great war movie in one direction, and almost a piece of irredeemable cheese in the other, and there you have it.

"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.

Curiously and disappointingly lethargic.

Match Point is a fatally neat exercise in detached craftsmanship, and maybe that's the best we can expect from Allen at this point.

Aided by witty and understated work from Baldwin and Stewart and the capable direction of Glatzer and Westmoreland, Moore does her utmost to pull Still Alice toward the realm of meaningful social drama. Let’s put it this way: It’s a way better movie than it ought to be, but not good enough to escape its pulpy, mendacious roots.

Offers an intriguing, and profoundly frustrating, view of the New York underground hero whose 1962 erotic fantasy "Flaming Creatures" paved the way for Andy Warhol, John Waters, the "queer cinema" explosion and pretty much anybody who's ever made a movie starring his friends in weird Salvation Army outfits.

In the end The Silence is more like an intriguing work of misdirection than a great crime film, but it has a dreamlike and disturbing undertow you won’t soon forget, and Odar is unquestionably a director to watch.

Scottish comedian Billy Connolly shows ample ability in the role, but he can't locate much charm in the character.

By the end of Wonderland, I might have felt completely pistol-whipped if not for the gracefulness of some of the movie's actors.

The sad thing about All the Real Girls is that Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters. If that's not a town without pity, I don't know what is.

The big problem with it is that the setup is treated as just that, a scheme around which many things that are intended to be funny (but aren't very) are packed like ice around a fish.

The chief problem with Thank You for Smoking, isn't that it's over the top; it's that it fits so neatly UNDER the top.

Never quite establishes its own identity, and when you remember it in two years it's likely to be that movie you saw that you kind of liked with that girl in it, what's her name, from TV.

To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.