The verdict is sad but unavoidable. Poor Things is a 141-minute mistake.

In the important things, in all the ways that really count, Caché is a handsome fraud.

The movie’s failure to engage is illustrated by directors Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s approach to the climactic scene. They shoot it almost entirely in long shot, as if inviting the audience not to care — or worse, as if admitting there was nothing to care about, after all.

Sirât is a film of impression and feeling, not logic or plot.

The Lighthouse is more than four times longer than a “Twilight Zone” episode, and 100 times worse.

For all the beautiful scenery and Thoreau-like contemplation, Evil Does Not Exist stalls, then implodes.

Petzold said he conceived of the film during the pandemic lockdown — that makes sense, considering the sparseness of the setting and small cast — and was inspired by the character studies of French filmmaker Éric Rohmer and Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Unfortunately, he needed inspiration from another great artist: Christian Petzold.

In the end, Da 5 Bloods feels like a clumsy hybrid of two fine impulses — to make a heist movie set in Vietnam, and to make a statement about race in 2020. Alas, each intention doesn’t serve the other, and so both go unrealized.

While The Assassin is a noble misfire, here’s hoping Hou, who is 68, can saddle up for another ride soon. Another decade would be too long to wait for another vision from this most special director.

This picture is disgusting. [15 Aug 1986]

It is a mess of a film, botched but also misconceived, with a central performance by Natalie Portman that evokes nothing about Jackie Kennedy, beyond the stylish clothes and the secret smoking.

On its own terms, the film is overlong, repetitive and lacks impact. Even if this were the first gorilla-in-love movie ever made, audiences would come away vaguely dissatisfied, suspecting there was an intriguing idea buried somewhere in here, but it didn't quite come off.

Chinese Portrait is a great art installation, but a thoroughly unsatisfying film.

Thinking people also like a little drama with their science fiction. On that score, Annihilation comes up short.

Still, when you’re making a Christian epic and the best thing about it is the guy playing the inquisitor, you have a serious problem.

Things happen in a flat, deadpan way.

Only Lovers Left Alive is simply dead, an exercise in style, bland humor and vague gesture that yet seems to have been made in the naive expectation of a conventional response - that is, of an audience's actually caring.

It’s awful. But it could be where movies are going — into a wasteland.

The movie asks us to wonder what’s real and what’s false, and what it all means. But it goes on for 134 minutes without ever giving viewers a reason to keep watching. Few Netflix customers will make it all the way to the end, and even fewer will be glad they did.

With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.

There’s just one big problem here: It Comes at Night is about as enjoyable for the audience as it is for the people in the movie. On both sides of the screen, misery reigns.

Not counting no-budget movies with casts of nonprofessionals, The Humans is one of the worst-directed films in recent memory. It plays like a wicked practical joke or a deliberate act of sabotage.

Noirish thrillers live or die by their plot twists and dialogue -- talk literally being cheap compared to action shots. Unfortunately, the script by first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson fails on both counts.

Logan Lucky is not a contemptible piece of work. It’s a genuine effort by talented people that never quite comes off.

Every so often an obviously talented person makes a bad movie, and that’s what we have in Nope. The talent is there, the movie is dead on the screen.

Women Talking has a remarkable cast — Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley, Claire Foy, among others — and it’s grounded in dramatic real-life events. But it’s mannered in its conception and wooden in its execution, and has little to do with living, breathing people.

Still, I’m not sure Kiarostami really intended this film to be a movie. It seems more like an art installation. Of note is the terrific sound design; the sound is credited to Ensieh Maleki, who captures full, rich, peaceful sounds of nature.

Seems more appropriate for a science museum than the Metreon, but that's not the film's problem. The problem is that oceanic movies in actual science museums are far more interesting and nuanced than this documentary.

The worst failing of Corsage is that it makes Sisi boring and unsympathetic when it’s trying to do the opposite. You kind of catch on that there’s something wrong with a Sisi biopic when you start sympathizing with Franz Joseph, who not only was a lousy husband but helped start World War I.

Listen Up Philip wants to say something meaningful about human relationships. But like a frustrated writer staring at a blank piece of paper, the words just never appear.

It takes one of the most gifted screen actresses of her generation and casts her out to sea with nothing to hold onto but a hideous script that’s all attitude without depth or understanding.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is a strange case, a drama that's disturbing and yet inert. Writer-director Sean Durkin builds an atmosphere of dread, which means that he persuades us to believe in the characters and in the central situation. But he doesn't build interest.

Film anybody's trip to Italy, and it would be more interesting than this, or at least equally boring.

Attack the Block is the other alien-invasion movie opening today, the lousy one, the one from Britain. In Britain, it's probably just a regular bad movie, but here - with accents that are barely comprehensible and in-jokes about council flats, not to mention a swerving handheld camera and some of the cheapest effects since "Night of the Lepus" - it's surprising this thing ever got released.

Goodbye to Language seems like an appropriate title if it’s meant to suggest that logic and sanity have completely disappeared from this world.

The artistic signature is unmistakable — 30 seconds in, you’d know you were watching a Wes Anderson movie. But Anderson’s human connection seems to have short-circuited, so that his irony now bypasses the world and becomes an ironic contemplation of his own work. This is a dead-end, and it’s just not interesting.

Here's a tiresome feature that could be made into a wonderful 20-minute film -- or, with a few adjustments, into two or three 10-minute shorts.

The director's most painfully slow movie yet.

No, this is not good. This is just not good.

In her feature debut, Manzoor does something truly bizarre here, and not in a good way. She gets a whole audience rooting for love to triumph but then tries to make a lovable heroine out of the irrational, malevolent character who wants to undermine everything the audience is looking forward to.

This is not one of the good Altmans. This isn't even one of the mediocre Altmans.

A House of Dynamite is an attempt to make a white-knuckle thriller, but there’s very little suspense to it. We have a pretty good idea of how it’s all going to end even before the first segment is over. And after that, we really know it, as we’re forced to watch the same events play out two more times.

Without a compelling - and convincingly compelled - character at its center, the details in this film lack an agonizing drop-by-drop tension. The various pieces fall apart like the shattered mirrors that figure in the crimes. [15 Aug 1986]

Diamantino is one of those movies that looks super fun to make but is mind-numbing to actually watch.

So it’s not my bag, but I went into Jackass Forever with the best intentions.

It will bring joy in a way certainly not intended, as one of the most gloriously and unwittingly silly films ever devised by a major American filmmaker.

Going into Armageddon Time, I had no interest in James Gray’s childhood. But that was to be expected. What I didn’t expect was to have even less interest going out.

Great to look at but not much fun to watch… An emotionally uncommitted picture that's smirky and mawkish, by turns, and at heart, empty. [14 Dec 1990, Daily Datebook, p.E1]

The movie doesn’t just suffer by comparison to “High and Low” (itself adapted from Evan Hunter’s novel “King’s Ransom”); taken by itself, its pace drags, its tone staggers and its ideas are muddled.

Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn is provocative and irritating — and intentionally so. That makes it particularly annoying, because even as you’re provoked and irritated, you are also aware that writer-director Radu Jude wanted you to feel that way.

Essentially, this is a two-person picture that falls flat.

Anyone can make a bad movie, but it takes a good filmmaker to make one as bad as I'm Not There.

The movie suffers from two fatal ailments -- a dearth of vitality and a story that's shapeless and uninflected.

Features an exceedingly dapper Richard Gere in a series of nice suits and handsome close-ups that serve no purpose other than to remind us how exceedingly dapper Richard Gere looks in nice suits and handsome close-ups. The rest of the movie registers as a loss of: time, money, talent and logic.

Sonatine eliminates the one virtue American action films can legitimately claim -- vitality -- and replaces it with fake- existential claptrap wrapped in an inept narrative.

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

Ultimately, “Mija” fails almost totally, and two main things tank it: (1) the lack of complete access to the subjects, who should have been grateful for the exposure, and (2) too much collaboration between the director and her subjects. There are documentaries and there are promotional films. A documentarian needs to keep those categories rigorously separate.

In a word, bull - cruddy, foul-smelling and fly-specked, an excuse for a series of cheap sex scenes and single-entendre gags. [15 June 1988]

Will-o’-the-Wisp, a flight of fancy from Portuguese provocateur João Pedro Rodrigues, has a few ideas, a fun little musical sequence and quite a bit of eye candy. But it seems like a series of tonally different short films mashed together — an art installation rather than a movie.

Despite good reviews at this year's Sundance Film Festival, this is the kind of squishy lost cause that gives liberal guilt a bad name.

As an exploration and celebration of a sub-culture, the movie fails. The people don’t seem especially bright or interesting. Whatever fascination Moselle felt for this world doesn’t come across in the movie.

The movie’s stylistic idea gets in the way of its story, and the story is too slim to sustain a full-length feature. And as the political ideas become as self-conscious as the style, Where Is Kyra? starts to feel a little like poverty porn.

Despite its actors, its lush photography and its obvious seriousness of purpose, is as close to a form of torture as any film ever devised. I can't think of any individuals I dislike so much as to force them to see this picture.

There’s one big problem about No Ordinary Man: The Billy Tipton Documentary: It’s not really about Billy Tipton. Instead, it’s about how transgender representation is perceived in the media, chiefly between 1989, when Tipton died, and current times.

Happy End is the latest from Michael Haneke, an uncompromising filmmaker whose work is sometimes brilliant and sometimes hard to watch, and sometimes both, but not this time. Happy End is just hard to watch.

A documentary that doesn’t have the stomach to tell the story of what happened on Jan. 6 explicitly, and to express the real threat to American democracy that that day represents, is of no use to anybody.

Mean-spirited and not remotely clever, though it strives for archness at every turn.

It’s not a cookie cutter superhero film or predictable horror film. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it’s form without enough content.

At 2 hours, 21 minutes, feels like a slow death by a thousand cuts.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves feels like Daley and Goldstein, who also co-wrote with Michael Gilio, asked ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI: “Write a Marvel movie except with ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ characters.” Seconds later, this spit out.

Nothing that works here adds up to anything worth a long slog in a movie theater, watching Pattinson punching guys and knocking guns out of their hands. From start to finish, The Batman is mostly just a collection of bad ideas.

It's two hours of your life wasted, time once spent that can never be regained. Don't go. Don't do it. [30 Mar 1988]

Made mostly by white people, it's a film largely about how awful white people are -- just the kind of thing many white viewers will love and consider important. But however you might feel about this kind of movie, Map of the Human Heart is fake merchandise, an unfelt, boring travelogue that covers itself in its anti-racist, anti-war message and then dares audiences to notice its barrenness at the core. [14 May 1993, p.C6]

Wonderstruck should not be confused for a brilliant but challenging film. Rather, it’s narratively deprived and with entire sections that are completely charmless.

It is such a soul-killing exercise in narcissism — and not a very smart thriller, either — that yeah, you can buy into the notion that Tinseltown is a total drag.

It's an assaultive work about an assaultive fellow.

Kurzel and three screenwriters have figured out a way to make Macbeth boring. Now that they proved it can be done, no one need ever do it again.

Dull and unilluminating.

Director Sammi Cohen takes an attention-deficit disorder approach to storytelling, in which every feeling and plot twist is punctuated by a current pop song, and any hint of emotion or thoughtfulness is interrupted by a needle drop.

You can watch 100 movies and never see such joyless joy as in Blinded by the Light.

I hated this film. I hated every minute of it, and at times it even made me angry.

Muddled and endless.

Liotta's acting can't redeem senseless violence.

The movie's excruciating length is without dramatic or thematic justification.

It wimped out by blanding down the story and the characters to the point where she isn't really a shrew and he isn't really a maniac.

The bottom line with Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights is that the writer-director has taken Emily Brontë's tale of undying passion and rendered it passionless.

This is an embarrassing film. It's a sex comedy that sets itself up as a satire of middle-class mores, except there's no truth behind any of its observations. LaBute tries to be shocking and manages only to be shockingly puerile -- tasteless in a high-school-boyish sort of way.

At 86 minutes, Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe feels twice that long. Most of the good laughs are front-loaded in the premise; the rest pop up every 15 or 20 minutes, which isn’t exactly prime Mel Brooks ratio.

An empty exercise.

The picture, which marks the debut of Mexican film maker Guillermo del Toro, is a dull hybrid - a ponderous art film crossed with a vampire story. [06 May 1994]

An unbearable exercise in provocation.

Though the film contains renditions of many of the big hits, they’re so badly performed you’d have every right to wonder what the fuss was all about.

More than confusing. It's opaque.

It exists within a franchise but doesn’t add anything to it, ultimately feeling as hollow as the reanimated corpses it centers on.

Captain Underpants is a very popular book series that doesn’t seamlessly translate to the big screen, and the filmmakers can’t solve this problem. The result is a cinematic wedgie: a little too dark, a little too nihilistic, a little too empty.

Asako’s only appeal seems to be that she’s very pretty. Her depth of character she apparently keeps to herself.

The film isn't very interesting because it isn't well made.

An agony of bad plotting and whimsical, lifeless scenes.