In short, Elizabeth Gilbert is the Julia Roberts of writers, which means that the film adaptation by Ryan Murphy (the creator of Nip/Tuck and Glee) got at least one thing right.

At over two hours and forty minutes long, with repeated scenes of bone-crunching violence and a maddeningly unrelenting percussive score by Hans Zimmer, The Dark Knight Rises is something of an ordeal to sit through.

Niccol's bizarrely stilted sci-fi thriller In Time, a movie so consistently flat-footed, with pauses between lines of dialogue so vast, that you begin to wonder if the whole thing might be a psychological experiment of some kind...Or has he just made a really dull movie?

Had enough grit to scratch its way through my cynical defenses, at least until its grotesque ending. But that capper isn't an aberration -- it's the logical extension of the movie's grandiose ambitions.

Thanks to Hancock's evasive storytelling, it's never clear why Houston moved so slowly or why so few Texians came to the Alamo's aid. The middle of the movie is pokey and unfocused--and, given the circumstances, bizarrely lacking in urgency.

The Hateful Eight is bold, gorgeous, verbally clever, morally repellent, and, in some way I am still struggling to put my finger on, possibly somehow evil. Any movie that inspires mixed feelings that intense can, I suppose, be said to have done its work on the viewer. But I’m not sure the work The Hateful Eight performed on me was what the filmmaker intended or that it’s an operation I would consent to again.

The most fluid, lyrical, and even-toned work of his (Burton's) career. It's also the most boring by a factor of 10.

August: Osage County is a mess, an overcooked movie-star stew that never quite coheres into a movie.

Is Brad Pitt the worst actor on earth? The case could be made, and Meet Joe Black could serve as Exhibit A.

Once again, in trying to find our way past the icon to the woman underneath, we have only pushed Norma Jeane further away.

No one's asking for a song-by-song re-enactment of the concert, but Lee's refusal to focus even for a moment on the musical aspect of the festival starts to feel almost perverse, as if he's deliberately frustrating the audience's desire.

A visually over-crammed, emotionally empty mega-spectacle on the model of Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland."

Apart from Caroline Aaron's turn as Darin's overbearing sister...Beyond the Sea has nothing to recommend it.

I can't recall another movie that cries out so incessantly for running commentary.

At 93 minutes, Chronic felt unbearable to sit through, at once intimate and difficult, boring and acute. Its tone aspires to the numbness of a limb pinned for too long under a heavy weight.

The old-school horror tricks (the fake scare followed by a real one, the safe haven that isn't) feel more like cribbing than homage, but they get the job done.

For all its exquisite boxes-within-boxes compositions and cleverly designed sets (the production design is by longtime collaborator Adam Stockhausen, who won an Oscar for his work on The Grand Budapest Hotel), this whole movie unfolded for me as if behind a thick pane of emotion-proof glass.

Corny, predictable, and packed with gay stereotypes.

The climax, a multipart showdown in the corridors of a hospital, is unforgivably manipulative. What self-respecting director still cuts away to shots of a heartbeat monitor flat-lining? Hancock isn't the only underachiever on the premises--the talented Berg settles for far less than he should.

Howard and his writers are so in love with their own hip self-consciousness that it's a wonder they don't feature film critics discussing their movie.

Babylon is a defecating elephant of a movie: gigantic, often repulsive, but hard to look away from.

Though The Fantastic Four: First Steps has all the elements in place to make it the keystone of a new Marvel era, the script (by Josh Friedman, Jeff Kaplan, Eric Pearson, and Ian Springer) never loses a vague, hand-waving quality that leaves its central characters as indistinctly drawn as the moral conflict they ultimately face.

I Feel Pretty has more nuance than the trailer suggests. Unfortunately, those shades of meaning get mangled up in nonsensical plot contrivances and tired running jokes. If it’s offensive, it’s because of its blandness, not its political incorrectness.

So how did this happen? Who is Cheney? How did he amass such power? What were his motives and goals? Any work about him—a book, film, play, or whatever—needs to deal with these questions. Vice does so shallowly and evasively.

Like Cooper's lady-killing character, Face, The A-Team is utterly convinced of its own lovability even as it strains our credibility, abuses our patience, and punishes our eardrums.

For audiences expecting a two-hour charm offensive, Passengers is not the movie you think you’re going to see. It’s something considerably darker and dumber.

Every era, accordingly, tends to create an Emily Brontë in its own image, and Frances O’Connor’s film Emily is a prime example of this: beautifully photographed, preoccupied with its heroine’s fragility, and deeply silly.

I don't know if Howard had fun directing, writing, and starring in this thing; but he had to have gotten more masochistic pleasure out of it than the audience does.