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.