If this version of Superman is to have a future — as Warner Brothers seems convinced he will, having already green-lit the sequel — I hope Snyder will dial back both the casualty count and the Krypton mythmaking and instead focus on establishing a fictional Earth that’s rich enough to be worth saving.

There's something curiously off about The Time Traveler's Wife.

Underwhelming.

It walks and talks and moves very fast, but it never lives.

Looking for Eric is easily the most commercially accessible of the Loach films I've seen, one of the lightest and least somber. It's also wildly structureless and uneven.

Whether unintentionally or by design, the movie never really makes a case either for or against the troubled figure at its center.

A conspicuously dumb joke nearly ruins a scene, a couple of storylines don’t go anywhere, and the ending simply feels like the film running out of steam. But Sorry to Bother You is so smart and so potent for so long—and so inventive yet thoughtfully measured in its use of the absurd—that the flaws simply give way. You don’t remember the endings of dreams, after all—just the parts that left you in a pool of your own sweat.

As a movie, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has no inner life -- no pulse -- of its own: It's secondhand.

Eastwood and Blyskal can’t seem to decide whether they want Stone et al. to be ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation or whether they were destined for greatness, so they waffle between foreshadowing and simply biding their time.

Five years from now, this bland and forgettable throwaway will be remembered only for Breslin, who will by then be a poised and gifted 16-year-old actress.

Though it's about a pair of lovers whose passion is strong enough to break down the barriers between life and death, this mildly amusing, sort-of-sweet comedy is strangely sexless and passion-free-these bodies, whether human or zombie, feel room-temperature at best.

This is a well-packaged film that arrives like a nicely wrapped Christmas present, full of promise and potential. Then you unwrap it and discover that it's just another electric gravy boat and, worse, it's still got the price tag attached.

Idlewild has moments of sticky sentimentality and stretches of dull exposition, but you've got to give it this: It's unpredictable.

It's full of moving (and surprisingly ungross) filmed deliveries, including those by Epstein and Lake themselves. Unfortunately, the movie is also a propagandistic brief on behalf of the home-birth movement that's so selective in its presentation of information that it makes Michael Moore look like a fat lady in a blindfold holding a pair of scales.

Everything Is Illuminated is not a fiasco, but in some ways I'd have preferred a fiasco—something overreaching and inchoate instead of this self-consciously artistic mood piece.

ATHF can seem brilliantly deconstructive one moment and stupefyingly boring the next--or to provide a more accurate ratio, it can follow five brilliant seconds with five straight minutes of boredom.

Though the movie never overcomes the miscasting of its lead couple, The Romantics does show a surprisingly fine authorial touch.

Some people are finding it difficult to live with the idea that Kaleil could put his employees through hell, lose $60 million of other people's money, and wind up a movie star.

I like my God, though, like I like my comedies: ruder, cruder, and able to show me things I haven't seen before. Bruce Almighty is sadly miracle-free.

Django Unchained provoked a lot of contradictory feelings in me, including some that don't usually come in pairs: Hilarity and boredom. Aesthetic delight and physical nausea. Fist-pumping righteousness and vague moral unease.

Like most movies in which a central story element doubles as a toy tie-in, Prince of Persia isn't overly burdened by ambition.

Given Fawcett’s trailblazing achievements — and Gray’s choice to film in difficult circumstances deep in the Colombian jungle — the film is oddly restrained.

One of the many disappointments of Firewall is how it squanders its own cast. Good character actors, including Robert Forster and Alan Arkin, are wasted--literally, in some cases, as the body count piles up.

The problem is that the movie's worldview, in the end, isn't expansive enough to justify the (quite literal) stage it takes place on.

It feels disrespectful to say it, but this kind of war movie, like war itself, is starting to feel sickeningly familiar.

DiCaprio and Crowe, two supposedly high-wattage movie stars, are remarkably dull to watch together--perhaps because so many of their scenes together take place over the phone.

Hereditary only begins as a Greek tragedy. After a few too many twists and turns, it gets warped into a horror soap — an unnerving but ultimately numbing pile of calamities.

This film is a curiously paradoxical achievement: a visual and aural marvel that is also a crashing bore.