At first fascinating and never less than bonkers movie is eventually sunk by its own theological overreach.

I found the film -- excruciatingly flat-footed, with one of the most exasperating scores (by Philip Glass) ever written. The most fascinating thing in the movie is a nose.

An affectless piece of moviemaking.

In its eagerness to drag us through the lower depths of human experience, Precious leaves no space for the audience to breathe or to draw our own conclusions. For a film about empowerment and self-actualization, it wields an awfully large cudgel.

After two hours and 20 minutes of flamboyantly repulsive variations on this well-worn theme, even the strongest-stomached and most feminist of viewers could be excused for muttering, We get it already.

This is a rhythmless, stupefying work. A person with no discernible pulse ought not to be directing a movie about disco.

The greatest disappointment is how much of the script seems to have been assembled from a kit by someone afraid to deviate from the instructions. In a sequel to "The Lego Movie," that’s not just a letdown, it’s a betrayal.

Psychologically thin, artistically flabby, and symbolically opaque.

The movie is a modern facsimile of the potboilers James transfigured. A great movie may yet be made of James, but it will have to be done by someone who has read him.

This isn’t the churning of ambiguities; it’s a muddle, a mess.

Like Ari Aster’s Eddington earlier this year, Bugonia invites us inside the internet-poisoned imagination of a lonely male protagonist who has “done his own research”—and, as with Eddington, the result is an allegory about contemporary life that’s as nauseatingly gory as it is thuddingly obvious.

This is a movie that sends you out shuddering, chuckling nervously, wanting to tell the people in line for the next show, "It's the feel-bad movie of the year!"

I found it so oppressively smug that I had to get up and pace the aisles three or four times, and I'd have bolted if I hadn't been duty bound to stick it out.

The performances are so terrible that it's hard to know whether Cronenberg wants to signal that much of what we're seeing isn't "real" or he has just forgotten how to write for hemoglobular flesh vessels--i.e., human beings.

As usual with Penn, I don't completely buy the character, but I completely buy that he has brilliantly internalized SOMETHING. He goes to some weird psychological places, our Sean.

When a movie wrenches you with the deaths of children then leaves you with nothing to take home but your confusion, it can make you thirsty for the blood of directors.

A somnolent load of wank.

The laborious title of an even more laborious Cockney action movie that some people think is the cat's pajamas crossbred with the bee's knees.

Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.

Schrader is like a reformed addict who isn't even honest enough to show what once gave him pleasure. He's the most dangerous kind of crusader. In Auto Focus, he makes you hate sex and movies equally.

It might even have been a landmark film about race relations had its aura of blunt realism not been dispelled by a toxic cloud of dramaturgical pixie dust.

Ends up leaving you starved for a single moment of unhyped emotion. You can barely see the characters for Luhrmann screaming.

Like licorice, Marie Antoinette is a confection you either love or hate, and both affects seem tied to your feeling about the director herself and her apparent identification with Louis XVI's bride. For my part, I can definitely say that I love licorice and hate Marie Antoinette. But I'm still wrestling with the enigma of Sofia Coppola.

First-time feature writer Sofia Alvarez’s attempt to shrink Han’s lengthy, largely internal, and culturally specific story into a 97-minute movie is, simply put, a botch job. Stilted and scattered and strangely cold in its cinematography, it’s a handsomely shot whole lotta nothin’.

The remarkable feat of churning out a whole new set of clichés and setting a new level of degradation. That’s Miles Ahead, Don Cheadle’s biopic about Miles Davis.

The movie is barely sufferable.

At times the movie's crudeness has an eerie beauty, but the musical fantasies are a bewildering hash, and the protracted climax on death row is nearly unendurable.

Any irregularity in tone becomes a part of the movie’s intentionally rough, imperfect surface — a formal strategy I might find interesting if I could make head or tail of what the movie that’s using it is trying to say.

So brutal a negation of the popcorn aesthetic is liable to be mistaken for artistic courage. A grindingly slow pace, a quarter-baked plot, a semidocumentary focus on the lives of the working poor: It's enough to make you whimper "Matt Damon" in defeat.

A sour little psychodrama.

There's not a single thing about Air Force One to recommend, except perhaps the controlled performance of Glenn Close, who does remarkably well as the recipient of several phone calls from the sky.

As messy and flat-footed as its predecessor is nimble and shapely. It's an ugly, bloated, repetitive movie that builds to a punch line that should have come an hour earlier (at least).

My real problem with Matchstick Men is that it didn't con me well enough: I saw every trick up its sleeve in the first 20 minutes. If everything had been what it seemed--now, that would have been a stunning twist.

The politics of Dogville are on par with a third-rate gangster picture: cheap, opportunistic nihilism, with no enlivening sense of humor.

Blomkamp proceeds to spend the last two-thirds of his film crashing spaceships into lawns, or staging high-tech fistfights between Elysium’s stolid hero and his even duller arch-nemesis. It’s a waste of a perfectly good dystopia.

It's like a memorial service with killer special effects.

I'm at a loss to account for how OFF this film is -- how a movie can seem so conscientiously earnest yet so creepily exploitive. It's like a Christmas stocking over a crematory.

Hordes of good actors evidently lined up to appear in Confidence, which wastes Weisz, Guzman, Logue, Forster, and Paul Giamatti, among others. Midway through, a grizzled Andy Garcia shambles in, chewing on a cigar, as an FBI agent; he's so fatuously hammy that his true narrative function is never in doubt.

Joker is a bad movie, yes: It’s predictable, clichéd, deeply derivative of other, better movies, and overwritten to the point of self-parody. (If a feature-length sendup of Joker was made, it’s hard to imagine in what details it would differ from Joker itself.) The experience of sitting through it is highly unpleasant, but that unpleasantness has less to do with graphic violence — there are only one or two scenes that go hard, gore-wise — than with claustrophobia and boredom.

At its worst, This Is 40 feels like being condemned to watch two hours of someone else's home movies - overly long, self-indulgent, and bone-crushingly banal.

I didn’t like the movie at all — found it boring, unintentionally comical, at times even (a word I seldom use) pretentious — but I admire the rest of your work so much that I nonetheless feel the need to defend To the Wonder.

Slow-acting poison. For the first third of the movie, you'll experience a not-unpleasant tingling in the extremities, giving way to an encroaching torpor. An hour in, your pupils will have shrunk to pinholes, and by the time the closing credits roll, you'll be capable only of a dim longing for the defibrillation paddles. Who would have thought a movie about a beautiful, frequently naked female Nazi could be so dull?

Benigni's movie made me want to throw up.

This forced march through a chamber of personal and sociological horrors is difficult to endure but easy to forget.

The final illuminations (people have demons, a mind is a terrible thing to lose) are a poor return on nearly two hours of ear-buckling, eye-stabbing incoherence.

George Clooney is all by himself among living leading men in making smarm pass triumphantly for charm. But the movie lacks momentum, clarity, a decent payoff, and a location with the personality of Vegas.

The realities that Crowe creates all seem like pleasant enough places to be, but you'd never mistake them for real life. The fuzzy, squishy world of We Bought a Zoo may be the Cameron Crowe-iest of them all.

Material so utterly conventional that you can predict every plot turn after the first half-hour.

All the rest of Thor's 113 minutes felt so synthetic and overfamiliar that those brief flashes of spontaneity stood out like Morse code messages from another, better movie.

Snow White and the Huntsman, the first feature from British commercial director Rupert Sanders, has its work cut out for it if it wants to be a truly dull piece of junk - but it manages.

The whole movie is like that: showy stunts, explosions, over-the-top acting, fiesta colors, lurid angles, and a sense of nothing--nada--at stake.

One of the least entertaining satires ever made.

I had a hard time maintaining interest in (let along liking) any of these self-involved Hollywood twerps, and scene after scene is a grating mixture of self-aggrandizement and masochism.

The premise is admittedly a killer--fun to think about, fun to see realized, not so fun to see screwed up in the last half-hour.

Russell is a manically inventive writer-director--maybe the most fearless talent of his generation. It's not a contradiction to say that I admire him more than ever while pronouncing Huckabees an unmitigated disaster.

It's a schlock melodrama dolled up in arty frontier vestments.

Volcano is just another $100 million genre movie, and a pretty lousy one, to boot.

It’s just a deeply misguided mode of franchise-building.

The only surprise about U-Turn is the good reviews it got from people who should know better.

Maybe the movie would work better if, like Se7en, it were set in an unnamed noir city instead of a real police department with real abuses, or if the script relied on more than genre shorthand to sell its noxious ending. As things stand, however, the only way to enjoy The Little Things is to ignore the big things.

Lousy remake.

A film adaptation should, of course, treat its source material as inspiration rather than dogma. But did Burton have to get the books so ENTIRELY wrong?

A movie so lifeless you’d have more fun guessing the Netflix niche group that the production is supposed to satisfy.

I wonder if anything could have made this misfire work.

A thesis movie, almost a manifesto for despair, and certainly worthy of the aforementioned NR-DS rating. Except that its bad vibes don't linger. Have dinner and smart conversation with friends, hug a child, pick up a good book--and poof, life returns with a happy vengeance.

Lost Highway, David Lynch's first movie in five years, is a virtuoso symphony of bad vibes.

The project as a whole conveys a drab sense of bureaucratic necessity, a "let's get this over with" wheeziness.

He (Annaud) doesn't have a clue how to dramatize the romance. Fiennes, whose eyes are extremely close together, stares with a mixture of rage and longing at Weisz, whose eyes are extremely far apart, and the film turns into "The Dating Game" designed by Picasso.

Malcolm & Marie is certainly stylish, shot entirely in black and white, with its leads in fancy clothes for a good portion of its runtime, but its aesthetic virtues are suffocated by all of its screenwriter’s hot air.

Feminist cinephilia has always been a complicated proposition, but it should surely demand better than this blunder.

Fatuous, sappy, and dull.

Con Air is boring to the marrow.

It may or may not be the worst movie ever made, but it is one of the most unhinged.

The Iron Lady is, to put it kindly, a shambles.

Congratulations to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald for being the first flat-out terrible product of the Harry Potter expanded universe. The first two movies were not good movies, but no matter how sludgy and overlong Chris Columbus made them, they were salvaged by the truly magical origin stories they told.

It's deeply committed to its own weird conceit, diminishing returns and all.

There are no real people in The Producers --only actors laboring to dispel whatever magic they once were thought to possess. The director, Susan Stroman, has brought the Broadway smash to the screen (where it began, almost 40 years ago) with cataclysmic results.

The film that Nicholas Hytner has directed (from a screenplay by the playwright Wendy Wasserstein) is slick, sweet, and disastrously unmoving -- even people who live to cry at the movies will find themselves depressingly dry-eyed.

This is an extraordinary -- and unfathomable -- piece of whitewashing: a true snow job.

The 12 scenes of Irreversible--each shot in a single, semi-improvised take--constitute something of a tour de force. But so would being dragged through the streets by a wire noose.

George Lucas does it his way in the pallid Phantom Menace. Even cultists will wish he'd hired a director and some writers.

Inexpressiveness is what separates the film from its models (chiefly Antonioni) and what makes it so exasperating.

What's disappointing about Anonymous is that it isn't dumb enough.

Borderline incoherent, theologically unsatisfying, and short to the point of dwarfism on suspense.

The biggest problem with The Hunt is its phenomenally lazy script, which is by Damon Lindelof and his frequent collaborator Nick Cuse. (Booting the movie into the next year prevented Lindelof, who created HBO’s Watchmen, from having his name on one of 2019’s smartest entertainments and one of its dumbest.)

Tron: Legacy is the kind of sensory-onslaught blockbuster that tends to put me to sleep, the way babies will nap to block out overwhelming stimuli. I confess I may have snoozed through one or two climactic battles only to be startled awake by an incoming neon Frisbee.

Owen, Giamatti, and Bellucci--all fine actors at the peak of hireability--must have been coming off a collective coke bender when they agreed to be in this murky, straight-to-video-looking piece of crud.

The last 20 minutes are horrifically violent, relentlessly claustrophobic, and irredeemably pointless. Von Trier has us on the hot seat, and he's going to walk us through his most primitive sexual nightmares--not because they'll bring us to a greater understanding of madness or love or grief, but just because he bloody well feels like it.

If it isn't the worst sequel ever made, it's only because it has too much competition: Impersonal and frenetic, it's a landmark Hollywood disgrace.

Even when engineering a howler like this, De Palma does it in such high style, with such a confident swagger, that the movie is half over before you realize how little is there.

The key, according to the film, is dialogue and altruism — namely, black overtures to white hate. The onus is as misplaced as the movie’s sympathies.

Much of K-Pax consists of Spacey grinning like Stevie Wonder behind sunglasses, -- taking dippy steps, and bobbing his head as if attached to an invisible Walkman.

His (Lee) Oldboy is relentlessly unpleasant and difficult to watch, without offering audiences much moral or aesthetic payoff for its hour and 40 minutes of graphic violence and abject degradation. Oldboy is both original and uncompromising, I’ll give it that—it just doesn’t happen to be any good.

The worst thing about I'm Still Here is the fact that it exists.

What was already a raucous put-on, a goof on Aldrich's brutal action movies, is now a hyperbolic, gross-out cartoon, with a cast of enormous ex-football stars (plus the 7-foot-2-inch Indian wrestler Dalip Singh) only adding to the air of facetiousness.

The Lightning Thief is loud, scary, oversexed, and really unfun. All that would have been fine if my daughter liked it, but instead it left her and her friend stunned.

Ought to have been called "Slugs for Snails," so leisurely does it creep toward its predictably bombastic conclusion.

I walked out of Choke feeling hustled, which is appropriate enough, I guess, for a movie that's a portrait of a compulsive hustler.