It's such a disappointment that The Descendants isn't a better movie than it is. In this soap opera disguised as a comedy, Payne, who was always a master at balancing sharp satire with an essential humanism, has traded his tart lemon center for a squishy marshmallow one.

As a political statement, American Dreamz is overly didactic and liberal in a read-too-many-blogs sort of way.

Superficially respectful but ultimately cruel.

That City by the Sea isn't laughed off the screen is testament to Caton-Jones' attention to actors and to some tightly written scenes.

I suppose it's too much to expect Pirandellian stature from the madness of Chuck Barris -- but that's about the only thing that would have made this mixed-up ego trip work.

Wendy recognizably reflects Zeitlin’s vision; it’s less a follow-up to "Beasts" than a kind of echo of it. The mistakes the movie makes, and the ways it fails to fulfill its predecessor’s promise, make me want to say something critics rarely express: I wish that the studio had meddled a little bit more.

A few billion 1s and 0s in search of a movie.

The movie's curious capacity for self-erasure makes it a tough one to write about; less than 24 hours later, I recall it with all the clarity of something I half-watched on a plane with a hangover in 1996.

Turns out to be semi-enjoyable, semi-tacky retelling/updating of the old Elizabeth Bathory legend.

It's just too bad the end result isn't a better movie.

Uncanny singing animals aside, a secondary effect of the film’s commitment to zoological verisimilitude is to place the voice actors in a relatively powerless position. It’s a strange choice to assemble an all-star cast from various walks of celebrity—actors, pop singers, rappers, comedians—and then make their only contribution a verbal one.

Shutter Island is an aesthetically and at times intellectually exciting puzzle, but it's never emotionally involving.

Chloe remains engaging for longer than any movie this schlocky and overwritten has a right to be. But the movie loses what little goodwill it's managed to build up by the last act, which feels clumsily grafted from a completely different film.

Jasmine attains the paradoxical state of being fascinatingly tiresome. The same pair of words might be used to describe Blue Jasmine, which, whether you like it or not, surely counts as one of Allen’s more unexpected films of the past decade

As a ravishingly photographed, high-minded meditation on the potential of art and therapy to exorcise the vilest sort of psychological poison, it is positively riotous -- an Everest of idiocy.

Just don't believe the anti-hype. There are lots of reasons to have a good cry these days -- here's a nice, warm place to get squeezed.

Fincher is a master of mood and atmosphere, but this chilly, efficient movie never transcends the shallowness of its source material.

Feels workmanlike at times.

Rock (is) arguably the best comedian in America, as well as a curiously important cultural figure. It does not, however, make him an actor. In fact, it makes him something like the opposite of an actor. He does not produce lifelike gestures and emotions.

This tawdry freak show is a telling substitution for the actual stupidity mocked in Veber's original. Roach's remake manages both mean-spiritedness and timidity the same time. That's some feat-moviemaking for boneheads.

Ready Player One has no obligation to be a rigorous intellectual exercise, even if it amounts to a wasted opportunity to explore who else might steer tech, and society, toward greater equity. But it doesn’t have to be so facile, either. Maybe next time the screenwriters shouldn’t set the difficulty mode to “easy.”

Trolls World Tour was made to play in theaters that can’t open, celebrating a kind of performance that’s on indefinite hold. All I could feel watching its climax was how much I miss that feeling of being together in the dark, and how long it’ll be before it feels safe to do it again.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a generic romance cynically engineered to appeal to the lowest common denominator of female fantasy.

Many American viewers may take Haneke at his word and walk out midway through this grueling ethics exam of a movie. But much as I may resent the facile polemics of Haneke's shame-the-viewer project, I have to respect the way that he nailed me, trembling, to my seat.

As a scare picture, Signs is good enough. As a religious parable, it's scarier -- and I don't mean that as a compliment.

Why remake a crappy movie five years later if it's only going to be marginally less crappy?

For all its tasteful spareness and eerie, diaphanous mood, Blue Caprice feels, in the end, insubstantial. It’s a true-crime story that illustrates little about the crime in question and a character study whose characters, even when haunting, remain stubbornly opaque.

Forget the thin characters and showoffy temporal structure. Rendition's worst flaw is its political deck-stacking.