Mirthless and barely musical.

Cynical to an extreme, it doesn't illustrate its points but blasts them at us -- in italics, boldface and capital letters.

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.

Although it isn’t a top-flight horror movie — too slow for thrill-chasers, too ridiculously fictionalized for historians — the film serves as a proper 99-minute commercial for that San Jose tourist spot.

A disappointment, a precious and grotesque exercise reminiscent of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's "Delicatessen," only less amusing.

When a movie sets out to be awful and achieves its goal, does that make it a success?

The overall result of this remake is something as safe and dull as oatmeal.

probably less painful than actual childbirth, but it's still a very long 86 minutes.

This tale of tortured love between a Mormon missionary and a West Hollywood tomcat renders its gay and religious characters so stereotypical that neither lifestyle appears attractive.

Has all kinds of good intentions, but the comedy is too broad and the pacing is clumsy. And then there's the Andy Griffith sex scene.

Showcasing three individuals whose spiritual and physical journeys are both repellent and mundane, the film is just a long and pointless slog.

Somehow, the funny stuff gets sucked into a kind of black hole in the center of the satire, along with all the comic debris. What should have been a surreal flight to the planet Lucas crumbles into a harmless collection of cosmic dustballs. [24 Jun 1987, p.52]

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.

After the first few minutes, viewers will get the feeling they just emerged from a 14-month coma. Even the non-movie jokes focus on last year's news.

A cute movie, a little too cute and a little too aware of its own cuteness.

This is the animated children's film equivalent of "Another 48 Hours."

Mitchell may be another Russ Meyer -- a dubious honor -- but he's no Tony Kushner.

Beatty's "Heaven Can Wait," released in 1978, was a comic fantasy about a near-death experience. This new version is a near-life experience.

It's great to see cherished, longtime stars in big roles to which they can bring so much spontaneity and finesse; you wish only that this movie were sturdier and had aimed higher. Judging from the bloopers that unreel during Grumpier Old Men's end credits, the cast had lots of fun making this movie--more fun, it would seem, than it is to watch.

It’s not like bad Tarantino. That would be too kind. It’s like an imitation of a bad imitation of Tarantino — violent, unfelt and witless, and straining to be funny.

It's a shame that "Confessions" doesn't aim higher because there is a great film to be made about the consumer bait-and-switch that has led so many Americans to live beyond their means.

If you don't guess the big twist in the first 30 minutes, Intruders is half of a good movie. If you do, it's about a third of a good movie. Either way, there's a whole lot of bad movie to contend with.

A film to be enjoyed only by science-fiction movie completists and middle school boys with extreme cases of attention deficit disorder.

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.

Ana de Armas is inspired and flawless as Marilyn Monroe, and yet “Blonde” is a total bomb. Intuitively, that would seem impossible, for someone to be that good in a failed picture. Here’s something else that would seem impossible: “Blonde” has seriousness of purpose and a strong director, Andrew Dominik, who clearly made the movie he wanted to make. It’s still bad.

10 stories are just way too many. Had producers cut it down to, say, the five most promising stories and fleshed them out a bit, the results might have been better. Instead, it feels just as you might be sucked into a story, it’s over.

Stone tries to make us like Alexander because he's good, when he should have made us want to watch Alexander because he's amazing.

No one is likely to claim it's a great, or even good, movie, but it does offer some guilty pleasures.