As a sports documentary, Murderball is tame and uninvolving. It does however, offer a hard-edged and unsentimental portrait of strong-willed people.

Under Schnabel's direction, it becomes stilted and static, if not simplistic.

The movie is so surreal it's just not very involving. As an action extravaganza, it's busy but dull.

Paranoid Park is a movie about its teen hero's inability to express his feelings: to himself, to his parents, to his friends and, unfortunately, to the audience.

The film is your basic sensitive young people coming-of-age in the '60s formula piece. [29 Apr 1995]

This bloodless, nuanced little thriller carries small weight save for Huppert's enigmatic, thrifty performance.

The script is as sloppy as Song's unkempt cop, sprinkled with intriguing ideas and imaginative details that, like the investigation, simply get lost in blind alleys.

It's never consistently funny enough to work as a comedy and never forthright enough to be a successful relationship drama. And, like a lot of films made by directors whose apprenticeship was served in shorts, it is so slight it never quite feels like a feature, more like a half-hour film that has been padded out to fill a feature length. [02 Mar 1990]

Some of the scenes are gorgeous, but "Papaya" is so passionless and empty it has no real impact. [04 Feb 1994]

Moormann's reverential documentary, seven years in the making, is most successful as a self-narrated autobiography. It fails, however, to deliver a balanced portrait of the man's life and work.

Feels like the effort of a tired artist reworking the same themes.

The second-class status of women in Korean society is a reminder of Confucianism's dark side. For all its pretty cinematic images and well-meaning bows to a vanishing literary tradition, this movie is a celebration of that dark side.

The movie is never engaging on anything but a superficial level, and it gradually gets decidedly tiresome.

But too much of this movie is unstructured and stylistically haphazard. And by the time we get to its highly predictable conclusion, Gas Food Lodging is just one more formula coming-of-age drama. [28 Aug 1992]

Most successful as a tribute to the martyrs of the anti-apartheid struggle. It fails, however, as a well-reasoned documentary on the subject of the relationship of music to social change.

Seems like very tame stuff, with little in the way of graphic sex and all the baggage of a run-of-the-mill art-house costume drama.

It's a well-acted but rote and strictly by the book "war movie."

While young Coppola is a pro with her camera, she'd be wise to brush up on her storytelling skills.

An inspiring story of pluck, but its politics fall flat.

The mock trailers are for impossibly schlocky Z-movies with titles like "Machete," "Don't Scream," "Thanksgiving" and "Werewolf Women of the S.S." They're by far the funniest part of the program, possibly because they're mercifully brief.

Pleasant viewing, but the unbalanced script and amateur performances keep it from being much more than a walk in the park.

While the film shuns the glamour or glitz that an American movie might demand, Scherfig tosses us a romantic scenario that is just as simplistic as a Hollywood production.

A fairly routine heist drama and a never especially believable puzzle film.

Meanders as aimlessly as its drugged-out characters.

It has its charms, but fails to strike a similar emotional chord.

It's simply not a very good movie. Its story line is populated with so many characters and meaningless names that it's nearly impossible to follow, and its author's message doesn't amount to much more than a cry of despair.

(Arteta's) yanked an eerily accomplished performance out of his lead actor.

Reportedly, Lucas has been tinkering with this "director's cut" for nearly two years, so its sound and visual elements -- which were fairly impressive to begin with -- have been markedly enhanced, while new digital backgrounds give the film a more epic scale. Still, it's an extraordinarily unengaging and tedious affair.