Hushed minimalism is a rare and appealing quality in the cinema these days, but so little happens in 35 Shots of Rum that I'm hard-pressed to describe the plot. It doesn't exactly have one.

The second-half of Burning is allegorical and intentionally obtuse. It’s intriguing, even. But it all leads to an ending that satisfies no one, especially after 2½ hours.

It's an endurance test. Though never boring, the movie is a fairly long slog through the snow.

The story is too slender for its two-hour running time, and the pace is lugubrious, as though everyone in front and behind the camera were depressed. But the biggest obstacle is the protagonist (Joaquin Phoenix), who is almost without definition.

So the most noticeable thing about the first minutes of Greta Gerwig’s new screen adaptation of the Louisa May Alcott classic is that the women in Little Women seem just a little bit snooty here, more like privileged actresses from 2019 than like a Northern family living in genteel poverty during the Civil War.

Panah Panahi, making his feature debut with Hit the Road, definitely inherited his old man’s trouble-making genes. His eye for composition is accomplished, but the movie meanders and the pacing sometimes drags. The problem, of course, is the filmmaker holds back the relevant information that would keep a viewer engaged until the end.

With Reichardt, you really do feel like you’re actually there. The only problem is that, a lot of the time, you’re really not happy to be there.

Yet all this wit and effort and occasional beauty is in the service of a movie that is little more than a two-hour chase scene, one that seems founded on the assumption that if you show one set of people chasing another, that’s enough to get an audience excited: Oh, no, let’s hope they don’t get caught!

The first film seemed a fully formed, lived-in world. The sequel leaves Julie on her own; an interior monologue that Hogg, and Swinton Byrne, can’t quite externalize.

A sweet but curiously unfulfilling story.

Beautiful but hollow.

It’s sincere and intelligent — but it’s weak as a social statement and even weaker as drama.

For art lovers, though, there is plenty to savor.

All this makes Zama interesting and unique and something to be respected. But none of this translates into anything resembling a satisfying narrative or even entertainment as we know it. Still, as bleak experiments go, Zama is the real thing.

Perhaps because Jenkins can’t translate to the screen the incisiveness and music of Baldwin’s prose, he brings on real music from other sources. Over and over, and increasingly as the movie wears on, Jenkins drowns his film in mirthless jazz and pop interludes to the point that the action feels stuck in cement.

Unlike other recent films noirs -- ''The Grifters,'' for example, or ''After Dark, My Sweet,'' both of which were based on Thompson stories -- One False Move lacks style and wit, and doesn't explore its characters beyond their cheap, cruddy exteriors. [24 June 1992, p.E1]

About Endlessness is like a bunch of Debbie Downer skits directed by Ingmar Begman, just not as entertaining.

The best thing about The Banshees of Inisherin is Kerry Condon as Pádraic’s sister, an intelligent woman with an even temperament and a good sense of humor who finds herself marooned in the wrong part of Ireland and in the wrong half of the 20th century.

Naysayers have been claiming for years that the "Moneyball" book wouldn't work as a movie. But ultimately, it's the cinematic touches that keep this film version from becoming something exceptional.

This is highly skilled filmmaking, but the movie is not for everybody — the relationship involves dominance and submission, sexual games played at a high pitch. This material falls short of pornographic, but still packs plenty of erotic punch.

In the end, the film shakes down as a kind of eat-your-spinach exercise, a movie that’s worthy and perhaps good for you, but is labored and only enjoyable intermittently.

Still, no matter how flat “The Lost Daughter” can sometimes seem, there’s always something to hold our attention. The movie is never great, but it’s never exactly dull. There’s always a reason to stick around for the next scene.

If it were just a middling effort, The Master would be a lot less frustrating. But the latest from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has greatness in it - two extraordinary performances, intuitive and revealing photography and scene setting, and a distinct directorial sensibility that hovers between sobriety and satire. Yet all those virtues are undermined by a narrative that goes all but dead for the last hour.

Leaves an impression, while its specifics fade almost immediately.

Take Shelter has a problem, the simplest of all problems but no less serious for its being simple. It's a film without suspense and with a slow-moving story that unfolds without surprise or embellishment.

If you needed that explanation, April and the Extraordinary World might not be for you. If you’re a steampunk fan, by all means go. Just don’t expect a classic.

All over this movie there are cliches that are just plain embarrassing, and unsettling moments in which it's obvious Kloves is writing about stuff he doesn't know a thing about. [13 Oct 1989, p.E1]

If you have to watch someone cooking or eating, Juliette Binoche is as good a choice as any, but even she can’t make scintillating entertainment out of chewing, stirring a pot and putting on oven mitts.

Though the movie is riddled with memorable scenes of violence, its pace is slow -- too slow. It has an epic sprawl, but it's not an epic. It's more like a bloated fairy tale. [7 Aug 1992]

A fine ensemble piece, but a maddening and unjustified length.

Doesn't hit its stride until the last 30 minutes, and by then, it's just a little too late.

Husbands and Wives ultimately reveals itself as an extremely bitter film, with the kind of sour conviction that tries to pass itself off as wisdom. Allen knows how people talk and how they evade really talking. But his jaundiced vision -- as though he just found out that a marriage can't always be like the first month of dating when you're 17, and now he can't believe how crummy it all is -- just makes him seem naive. In the end his perception yields no insight. Old men like young women. Really? [18 Sept 1992, p.C1]

Its slow-boiling brew of dread turns out to be more tepid than terrifying.

What Laika achieves is an effective mixture of hyper-real and hyper-stylized, a combination that keeps “Kubo” appealing to the eye for audiences of all ages. If the film’s plotting and dialogue had measured up, “Kubo” might have been a masterpiece.

Really doesn't pay off much.

The result is like any other Lynne Ramsay movie, whether it’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin” or “Ratcatcher” — slow, soporific and, here and there, wonderful.

Most of Widows isn’t felt. It’s a cold exercise, and occasionally a ridiculous one, as when McQueen tries to get fancy, with camera angles that make no sense.

Part travelogue, part narrative and part art-history class. The class is what's best about this pretty decent movie.

Infused with a dark charm that will appeal to some girls, A Little Princess, based on the classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett, is as near to a mannered, lushly photographed Merchant/Ivory-style film as you'll get in a kids' movie.

It’s a pretty good movie that automatically goes up one full notch because of a single great scene, which is one more than most movies have.

A corny, overblown romance, and while it eventually wins you over with its atmosphere and good nature, it's far from the masterpiece you've been hearing about. [15 Jan 1988]

While “Viet and Nam” is filled from beginning to end with outstanding visuals and thought-provoking ideas, it is perhaps too lethargic and, at a little over two hours, overlong. Yet there is still much to enjoy.

The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.

Wild Reeds is a sober, heartfelt piece of work, sensitively directed and lovingly photographed -- though slightly dull, if we're going to be perfectly honest.

What it brings to the filming of a rock concert other than novelty remains to be seen.

Under the Skin can be confused for a movie that hides its meanings, when it's really a movie that hides its meaninglessness.

It's a film with impressive elements, though taken as a whole it's pop entertainment that doesn't fully deliver on the entertainment end.

The result is a beautiful void, a structureless emptiness buoyed by some good scenes and performances.

As for the movie’s ultimate resolution, nothing specific can be said here, except that it borders on inexcusable.

What looks good on paper contracts doesn't guarantee results. Stylized but spasmodic, this "Sweeney" seems more interested in distancing than captivating an audience.

The Love Witch has an air of geeky satire. The presentational acting style is so self-aware you almost expect the cast to occasionally underline a joke by turning toward the camera and winking at the audience (no one does, though).

127 Hours, about an unimaginably unbearable experience, is pretty much an unbearable experience of its own. And yet, it must be said, it's exceptionally well made.

Cold Comfort Farm may be hysterically funny to regular readers of Hardy, Lawrence, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, but it won't ring many bells for the rest of us.

It is probably unlike any movie you've ever seen, and in ways both bad and good. It is, by turns, inept and brilliant, shockingly amateurish and inspired. To see it is to sit there for long stretches amazed at how clumsy, fake and misguided it is. But then, five minutes later you might easily be riveted and moved by its awkward brilliance.

You’d have to be passionately interested in the details of an Irish small town not to find “Small Things Like These” something of a slog.

If the ultra-slow pacing, sparse dialogue and depressingly gray pallette don’t get you, perhaps that super big close-up of a toe-clipping session will.

There is no diverting from strict chronology, no point the documentary wants to make that requires moving forward and back through time. It just inches ahead, one year to another, sometimes one day to another. By the middle, each time a year changes, it's a relief.

The story here isn't much, and the truth it reveals, to them and us, isn't earthshaking, just quiet and somber.

A tense, expertly acted Russian film clouded by its intentional ambiguity.

We end up with a movie in which it becomes very possible to respect the intent and yet be frustrated by the result.

It's engaging as a non-drama of people doing nothing, but suffering a lot.

If we're going to be honest, we need to look inside and ask ourselves: Do we really want to see a listless movie about a woman whose dream is to move into a double-wide trailer?

In spite of its downbeat subjects, Drugstore Cowboy becomes a satisfying drama of redemption. [27 Oct 1989]

The best aspect of “A Hero,” and probably the aspect which Farhadi would most like us to contemplate, is the internal journey of Rahim, who, over the course of his difficulties, slowly and belatedly seems to come into his manhood.

Long segments of The Killer are devoted to people getting blown away, the bloodbaths played out always with guns. But the highly choreographed action, featuring point-blank shots of writhing victims, takes on a numbing aspect after a while. Reduced to cartoon overkill, it becomes as tedious in its way as carpenters working with nail guns.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia is boring, but not in the usual way of boring movies. It is colossally, memorably and audaciously boring.

Stranger by the Lake has no rating, but if it had, it would earn an NC-17 ten times over.

It's dull in the precise way that life can be dull. To watch it is like sitting in on a staff meeting, listening to people talk on and on and on. Professors are used to talking nonstop, and in a few cases in At Berkeley it's rather astonishing to hear them repeating the same ideas over and over, instead of just coming to a point and stopping.

For all the movie's coarse grandeur -- for all the blood in its battle scenes and the grim historical accuracy of its depiction of antediluvian medical procedures -- the story of Master and Commander feels like something intended not for adults but for children.

The experience of watching Foxcatcher is of constantly waiting for something to happen — and of giving up, long before something actually does.

After nearly two hours of A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, anyone who entered the theater on a Wednesday might wish for it to be Thursday, too.

Even as it stands, Fish Tank is a valuable movie, though it aspires to a social insight it doesn't attain and a psychological penetration it won't maintain.

A fascinating look at a bizarre man and a brilliant talent. But a good deal of the movie is described by its subtitle -- "A Son's Journey'' -- and to the extent it is, the movie sags.

If only Lars von Trier took into account that audiences might actually want to enjoy Melancholia, rather than endure it, or sift through it, or submit to the director's will, he might have made something extraordinary.

This film by Alison Ellwood feels thin. Anemic. Even shortsighted. Sure, the documentary frames the band’s story with that astounding fact of their first number one record, but beyond that underscored point, “The Go-Go’s” plays like paint by numbers for music documentaries.

Shot almost entirely within a hotel, the film operates as a low-budget answer to “Roma,” Alfonso Cuarón’s much-lauded film that also centers on the life of a domestic worker.

As a movie about mental illness, Silver Linings Playbook is more lightweight than lighthearted. But thanks to Lawrence, it does one good thing most movies don't do. It actually gets better as it goes along.

All this is interesting, or interesting enough, depending on how you feel about Elaine Stritch. If you're a particular fan, this documentary is a must-see. But for everyone else, a little of Elaine's personality goes a long way.

Although more Fiennes is always a good thing, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple simply doesn’t have the solid storytelling or enthralling characters that its predecessor has.

The new Ridley Scott movie is fascinating and charming and crammed and overstuffed, and it’s a curious case, too. It gets all the seemingly hard things wonderfully right, but then caves in at points that should have been easy.

So there’s talent on view here, but in service of a questionable proposition, with the whole thing tiptoeing toward the exploitative. It would be nice to see Mascaro try his hand at less volatile material.

While the latest “Texas Chainsaw” installment dropped on Netflix a few weeks ago, “X” owes so much in style and tone to the 1974 slasher classic it feels like more of a legitimate heir than the film bearing its name.

In the end, the whole enterprise comes off as too clever for its own good, a social satire without a clear target. It’s a movie that you admire more than you like.

Skillfully made and offering moments of great power, the French Canadian drama Incendies nevertheless overplays its hand, piling tragedy on tragedy until we feel browbeaten with misery.

Incredibles 2 was 14 years in the making, and it feels almost that long watching it.

Stolevski obviously wants us to sympathize with these wounded characters who have been shunted aside by a cruel society, but that’s hard to do when they are so verbally cannibalistic.

By the end, a sense settles in that Whale Rider could have accomplished as much -- and been considerably more powerful -- as a 25- minute short.

Despite a too slow pace for my own tastes, Hauer helps move the film along by being captivating even in just a few scenes. He, Michael York as a businessman and Charlotte Rampling as the Virgin Mary provide what little dialogue exists in a screenplay that could have used a little more backstory.

Buscemi is characteristically likable here, when Del, mercenary in his treatment of human and beast, should not be so likable. Such is the curse of Buscemi, the delightful killer from “Fargo.”

That its premise is a fundamentally corny one we’ve seen a million times before is a separate matter, but filmmaker Kuosmanen (“The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki”) and his two lead actors camouflage that well in naturalistic behavior and psychological depth.

Eventually, though, these scenes get repetitive, and the muddled final act neither builds nor gets scary. Writer-director Peter Strickland is much more interested in the atmospherics, so when Gilderoy plunges into the abyss (or wherever), we are left confused, and not in a satisfying, David Lynch kind of way.

So just showing a glacier breaking off, or a hurricane in full force, doesn’t prove there is climate change. Perhaps if Kossakovsky had provided some context — something to indicate this is happening more frequently, for example — Aquarela might have had more impact. Then it would have been more than just a series of pretty pictures.

To be clear, there are dazzling sequences in The Other Side of the Wind, and virtually every minute has something interesting in it. It’s absolutely worth seeing as a curiosity. But as a work of narrative art it doesn’t sustain itself for its full two-hour running time. After an hour, you might even have to struggle to stay awake.

I Am Love casts no spell and creates no narrative urgency. It's as compelling as mildly interesting gossip about people you don't know.

For a bighearted effort like this one, some patience on the audience's part is not too much to ask. Go ahead. Take a chance.

As painstaking as a documentary but without the satisfaction of a documentary or the impact of a drama.

It’s true that “Dune 2” is as depressing as watching the news, but that doesn’t make it relevant, because it isn’t the news. It’s more like unnecessary self-torture, like watching a depressing newscast from another planet.

If you see the movie, notice how the ending is no ending, and the fact that it even feels like one is entirely a function of Michael Giacchino's musical score.