It's bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters.

Pegg co-wrote the screenplay with the director, Edgar Wright, and together they have fashioned a smart, cultish, semi-disgusting homage to the fine British art of not bothering.

Jude, with his multiple dimensions of inquiry and imagination, poses philosophical questions about conscience and consciousness, media consumption and social order, that reach far beyond the case and era at hand to challenge the deceptions and delusions of ostensible present-day democracies.

An extremely well-crafted exercise in physical invention and fear. Yet within those limits--the limits of a pop-digital survival drama--Poseidon is an exciting show.

If the original “Little Mermaid,” in its effervescent way, talked down to its audience, the new one, bluntly but amiably, talks ever so slightly up to its young viewers. It adds hints of a complicated world beyond the narrow realms of fantasy; it delivers earnest cheer.

If the story of Jean Seberg is one of the more wretched footnotes in the chronicle of fame, that’s all the more reason to treasure those occasions, onscreen, when she was not a victim — when she bore herself, and whatever pains she harbored, with mastery and grace.

Uneven and often clumsy, yet with a distinctive satirical charm, the picture is full of misfits and faddists and social casualties.

The Sky Is Everywhere is a movie of inner vision, of fantasy and symbol, that coexists with the drama even when it doesn’t quite coalesce with it.

Visually, it’s an original, bravura piece of moviemaking, with a weirdly ingenious vertical quality: the camera always seems to be moving up and down, rarely across.

So calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness. What makes the movie unusual is the metallic elegance and the singleminded proficiency with which it adheres its sadism-for-the-connoisseur formula.

Wondrous yet rueful views of the city, with its blend of grandeur and squalor, are anchored by the wanderings of an actress, Zhao Tao, whose mysterious role is clarified by one of the most anguished of testimonies.

Heldenbergh owns the role, holding the camera's gaze with ease. The look and the sound of him hark back to Kris Kristofferson, but there is a hint of Nick Nolte, too, around the eyes--unfazed by the world, yet easily bewildered by its wiles. [11 Nov. 2013, p.91]

Nostalgic, affectionate Southern Americana out of Faulkner; the style is a little too "beguiling" but it's an awfully pleasant comedy anyway.

Cronenberg has made an eccentric and beautiful-looking movie - a languid, deadpan, conceptualist joke.

There’s something in Schoenbrun’s sense of style that captures the alluring yet alienating essence of screen-centered lives: the feeling of not being where one is, the feeling that what’s happening elsewhere, on those screens, is more important, even more real, than one’s own life.

Though with little in the way of directorial originality, character development, or social perspective to recommend it, “Hustle” manages to turn a clattery plot and a treacly sentimentality into a refracted self-portrait, a work of personal cinema.

It has a gentle, unforced rhythm, and what’s there is good and true. But there’s not enough of it--the movie needs more plot, more complication, more conflict.

Thanks to Walter Murch’s keen, intuitive sound montage and Hackman’s clammy, subtle performance, the movie captures a more elusive and universal fear—that of losing the power to respond, emotionally and morally, to the evidence of one’s own senses.

In Side Effects, the working out of the thriller plot is accomplished with too much verbal explanation. [11 & 18 Feb. 2013, p.114]

Gray is hampered, to an extent, by treading in the tracks of Werner Herzog, who went to South America with Klaus Kinski, his leading man (or, as Herzog calls him, “my best fiend”), and returned with the extraordinary “Aguirre, Wrath of God” (1972) and “Fitzcarraldo” (1982).

The movie is a lucid and comprehensive picture of a rotten system, but it’s a relief to know that some people in the midst of disaster were doing their jobs.

Silly, but with zest; there are some fine action sequences, and the performers seem to be enjoying their roles.

What will divide viewers is the plot; either the ending makes no sense or it forces you to rethink everything that went before.

Raising Arizona is no big deal, but it has a rambunctious charm. The sunsets look marvelously ultra-vivid, the pain doesn't seem to be dry – it's like opening day of a miniature golf course. [20 Apr 1987, p.81]

Fahrenheit 9/11 offers the thrill of a coherent explanation for everything, but parts of the movie are no better than a wild, lunging grab at a supposed master plan. [28 June 2004, p. 108]

Its kitschy grabs at the surreal--the scene in a lunatic asylum, where German troops are billeted, manages to be at once implausible and offensive--that blocks any close engagement with the drama. That said, you must see this film for one unstoppable reason, and that is Lee Marvin.

Ingenious, moralistic, and moderately amusing.

There's a sourness, a relentlessness about the movie which borders on misanthropy. In both the social and the personal scenes, the conversational tone veers between idiotic pleasantries and fathomless bile, with nothing in between.

The movie is best when it calms down and concentrates on the sinister peculiarities of the experience, and when it focuses on Franco's face. [8 Nov. 2010, p . 93]

Christopher Nolan, for all his visionary flair, wants to suck the comic out of comic books; Anne Hathaway wants to put it back in. Take your pick.

We need another movie, one that shows us why some charter schools work and others don't. And there's an issue that needs to be addressed by Guggenheim and such people as Bill Gates, who appears in the movie as an advocate for charter schools, which he has generously funded.It is the question of scale.

While the movie sticks to the familiar Disney formula, the cute sidekicks are less intrusive and the songs are not as overbearing as usual; for the most part, it sustains an enjoyable hum and a simple, delicate glow.

Not for them the straightforward spoof, but, instead, a slightly creepy desire to have it both ways -- to inject new life into noir, but also to laugh behind their hands at its antique solemnity, and to urge us to follow suit. [5 Nov 2001, p. 105]

Mesrine was no more a movie star than John Dillinger was, but both men could dream, and Cassel catches the folly of such dreaming, with its blasts of thuggery and its rare flashes of style, as neatly as anyone since Warren Oates took the title role of "Dillinger," in 1973.

There is no denying the boldness of Persepolis, both in design and in moral complaint, but there must surely be moments, in Marjane’s life as in ours, that cry out for cross-hatching and the grown-up grayness of doubt.

The movie ends in bitterness. Unable to prevent catastrophe, the most honorable man in this entire affair - an outcast among frauds and the cannily acquiescent - considers himself a failure.

The director, Rouben Mamoulian, rather overdoes the pseudo-science at the beginning, but at some levels this story seems to work in every version, and this one, set in a starched mid-Victorian environment, suggests the lust that has to come out--and the attraction of the gutter.

This brittle satiric tribute to Hollywood's leopard-skin past--it's narrated by a corpse-- is almost too clever, yet it's at its best in this cleverness, and is slightly banal in the sequences dealing with a normal girl (Nancy Olson) and modern Hollywood.

There is plenty to inflame in this picture and nothing to corrupt. [18 Mar 2002. p.152]

It's a seize-the-day movie, even though the day is a long time coming. [7 May 2012, p.80]

[A] brilliantly analytical and morally passionate documentary .

Caine brings out the gusto in Naughton's dialogue and despite the obvious weaknesses in the film (the gratuitous "cinematic" barroom brawl, the clumsy witnessing of the christening, the symbolism of the dog), he keeps the viewer absorbed in Alfie, the cold-hearted sexual hotshot, and his self-exculpatory line of reasoning.

The Duchess is enragingly elusive and possibly mad; the General is very direct and also possibly mad.

An accomplished, intelligent, often exciting piece of work, but I can't help wishing that Haggis had figured out how to make it more fun. [22 Nov. 2010, p. 140]

The story may sometimes come off as a ribald soldiers’ tale that Siegel, born in 1912, had been awaiting a sexual revolution to tell; still, his intense, intelligent breakdown of the film’s wild outbursts reveals subtleties of love, despair, and shame beneath the schematic luridness.

To find a comic-book hero who doesn’t agonize over his supergifts, and would defend his constitutional right to get a kick out of them, is frankly a relief.

Judi Dench is especially good; playing a vulnerable character, for a change, she allows her habitual toughness to give way to uncertainty, fear, and moments of gathering resolve, and she delivers one of her most wide-ranging and moving performances. [7 May 2012, p. 81]

The result is at once a work of efficient charm and, to those of us who treasured Frears in his more acerbic phase, a mild disappointment.

Among other things, Our Brand Is Crisis is about the failure of good intentions--a potent American theme at the moment. As the movie suggests, this failure, born of American arrogance, embraces liberals as well as neocons.

De Wilde’s film is a more clueful affair, and Flynn (soon to star in a bio-pic of David Bowie) makes an arresting Knightley — more bruiser than smoothie, with a hinterland of unhappiness.

It’s plain and uncondescending in its re-creation of what it means to be a high-school athlete, of what a country dance hall is like, of the necking in cars and movie houses, and of the desolation that follows high-school graduation.

I gradually grew more interested in Curtis, who has his own solitude to cope with. This represents the first non-comic leading role for Robinson (moviegoers will know him from “Pineapple Express” and “Hot Tub Time Machine,” among other films), and he commands it with a gruff and amiable ease.

The dialogue is thin and the action is patchy, but Durra films Hana’s travels—and the places that she visits—with an ardent attention that fuses emotional life with aesthetic and intellectual exploration.

The irony is that what makes the movie challenging is not the scientific theory—which is delivered with a diplomatically light touch—but a glut of political paranoia.

The Valet does not show Veber at his best. His palate for misunderstandings of every vintage is as refined as ever; what he has lost is his taste for human failing.

Taymor has played with Shakespeare's text -- switching genders, and inventing, dropping, and transposing passages -- but there's an emotional gain. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]

No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?

Paddington in Peru belongs to Olivia Colman, who, as the Reverend Mother at Aunt Lucy’s retirement home, delivers a performance so rich in winking mischief, and so blissfully untethered to the mechanics of the plot, that she should be billed in the credits as Irreverent Mother.

Kechiche digs a good story out of the flux, and, in the movie's final forty minutes, the suspense is terrific.

I don't know if Beethoven and a sympathetic newspaper reporter can redeem a messy American city, but this movie makes a plausible case for so fervent a dream.

It's a tenderhearted feminist picture.

This Must Be the Place is dazzling to behold, not least when our hero leaves Ireland. [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]

[Rankin’s] film, at its best when it expresses a sincere belief in the possibilities of human connection, can feel trapped in the margins of its conceit, short-circuited by movie love.

Listening to Kenny G subtly and surely teases out the mighty and overarching idea of the inseparability of the artist and the art, the notion of art as the embodiment of the artist’s personality—for better or for worse.

In short, The Last of the Unjust is every bit as quarrelsome as it should be. Murmelstein, recounting the circumstances in which he took mortally serious decisions, dares to ask us if we could have done any better.

The surprising thing about this film, given its potential for devastation, is how funny it can be.

This show-business farce is the first film directed by Richard Benjamin, and it's a creaky job of moviemaking, but it has a bubbling spirit; Benjamin is crazy about actors--not a bad start for a director.

In Logan Lucky, Soderbergh, for all his felicitous exertions, falls back on a certain artistic facility. This doesn’t mean that the film was easy to make; it means that Soderbergh relies on what he knows rather than wandering off into what he doesn’t. He knows a lot, and it shows; his pleasure in sharing it is substantial.

Even if you grow impatient with White Noise—an intimate black comedy that dreams of becoming an epic—stick with it, for the sake of the end credits.

Heartbreaker, which begins as a Hollywood-style caper and turns into a romantic comedy, is no more than a luxurious trifle. But it is also enjoyable for the vast difference in temperament between its two stars.

So what kind of movie is this? A conservative one, I would say, not in politics (a topic that never arises at the table) but in its devotion to long-ripened skills and to the sheer hard work that goes into the giving of pleasure.

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

Putting it mildly, this style of shallow, panting composition isn't the way I’d like movies to go, but, of its kind, The Bourne Supremacy is incredibly skilled--much more exciting than its predecessor.

We are entertained, but we see this squalid world clearly. The great cinematographer Chris Menges keeps the images cool and crisp. [15 September 2003, p.100]

The Director, Douglas Sirk, shows his talent for whipping up sour, stylized soap operas in posh settings.

The movie is immensely pleased with itself, in the manner of adorable kids who know they can get away with anything--the commercial opportunism is so self-confident in its silliness that you can’t really fight it. [7 July 2003, p. 84]

Everything ends badly, or sadly, and one can imagine the film being screened for M.B.A. students as a cautionary tale—frequently very funny, but often disheartening, too.

No one could say this wasn't a rousing movie. It's also romantic, big, commercial, and slick, in the M-G-M grand manner.

It is the most oppressive of the great tragedies, and "Macbeth" aside, the leanest, and the task that Fiennes has set himself is to liberate it from the theatrical while preserving the dramatic bite. In that, he succeeds with brio. [23 Jan. 2012, p.86]

For all its droll shading of the screenwriter’s art, “All of Us Strangers” is a screenwriter’s movie, in which the power of intention over observation, of the blueprint over the finished product, is asserted with a vengeance.

Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Although Not Quite Hollywood was clearly put together with fanatical love, the suspicion remains, as often with genre cinema, that these trash-rich movies are a lot more fun to hear about, and to watch in snatches, than to sit through.

Why see this film? Partly because of the leading men, but mainly because of a girl. An Australian actress named Angourie Rice plays March’s daughter, Holly, who is thirteen.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

Jarmusch keeps the picture formal and cool, and it has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun. But it's softhearted fun--shaggy-dog minimalism--and it doesn't have enough ideas (or laughs) for its 90-minute length.

The film depends, in other words, on its stars. Both, you can tell, have studied their respective masters with scrupulous care, and the results of their pupillage are plain to see.

The hitch with tales of endurance, onscreen, is their unfortunate habit of becoming endurance tests for the viewer, and, after a while, The Revenant turns into a slog. Make no mistake, it’s a very beautiful slog. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography summons a wealth of wonders.

Above all, the movie offers the mournful thrill of new methods that Kiarostami didn’t live to develop further.

For Apatow, one guesses, the only things that can forestall death are comedy (the movie is full of superb comics, including Albert Brooks and Melissa McCarthy) and the flourishing of his children, Maude and Iris, who appear in the movie as Debbie and Pete's daughters.

Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.

One problem with Lawless, though, is that it feels chock-full of entrances that never quite lead anywhere. [3 Sept. 2012, p.78]

The deep drawback of Taking Sides is that it forgets to be interested in music. [8 September 2003, p. 100]

Stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the ironies of historical momentum.

By the end, Soderbergh’s movie subverts common belief far more effectively than some of the fantasy movies knocking around this summer. It’s a vertiginous experience that grows increasingly hilarious, and the joke is on us.

Noomi Rapace throws herself into the title role, but something about the conception of her character, and about the far-reaching urgency of the sociopathic shocks behind the killing, smacks of a filmmaker pushing too hard. That is why the movie finds it impossible to wind things up.

This light-toned but thematically substantial autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs.

Kasdan is shrewd and funny about such things as the ease with which powerful people can mimic, when they need to, the forms of sincerity and concern. The satire is unrelenting but not too broad; it stays close to common observation.

So well made, and so compelling as a portrait of a man at war with himself, that, right up until the end, many people will probably be entertained by its intricately preposterous story.