It’s the warmth of Gladstone’s presence that leaves a lasting impression and endows this remake—with all its reshufflings, inspired or strained—with a whisper of something authentically new.

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.

As a performer, Morales is laughably smart, sympathetic, and engaging, and what’s so clever about Language Lessons is the deployment of that allure.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

The plot consists of bits: a fiery slugfest, a pause for bonding, a quick weep, and a patch of jokey repartee, before the slugging returns. Acts of sacrifice are dotted throughout, and we are urged to applaud the burgeoning fellowship of those who unite against Thanos, but, in truth, it’s every man for himself.

Maps to the Stars is at its most potent and beautiful by far when it becomes a ghost story — when the departed, not just Havana’s mother, return to quiz the living.

Desplechin and his co-writers have created an enticing set of characters who arouse a viewer’s curiosity not only about their connections to one another but about their relation to the world in which they live. But in “Two Pianos” there is no such world.

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

Again and again, “F1” finds fresh pathways into familiar material; it keeps its surface-level moves unpredictable even though its overarching trajectory isn’t.

This documentary film, about the deconstruction of a great American city, is surprisingly lyrical and often very moving.

Unconvincing and ineffective; the many patches of ideological montage, growing like kudzu throughout the film, weaken the impact of its best moments.

The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

The scattered fine comic moments don't make up for the wide streak of fuddy-duddyism in the notion that the family used to be the bulwark of the nation's value system.

By far the best spectacle movie of the season, and one of the few films to use digital technology for nuanced dramatic effect.

It has a distinctive and surprising spirit. It's funny, delicate, and intense -- all at the same time.

The trouble with Holofcener's scheme is that the center of the movie is dead. Olivia has no drives or hopes or powerful regrets. She has nothing to say, and Aniston does most of her acting with her lower lip.

There’s a tension, too, between the observant realism of Layton’s style and the derivativeness of the plotting, though the three leads, all superb, smooth it over with considerable skill.

There are simply too many characters to get a handle on, and the sheer proliferation of special effects offers Singer a license so unfettered that most of the mutants act not according to their natures but purely on the ground of what, at that juncture, looks most groovy. [12 May 2003, p. 82]

As the teen-age small-town girl looking for excitement who joins up with a carnival that's traveling through, Jodie Foster has a marvelous sexy bravado. The dialogue, from Thomas Baum's screenplay, is often colorful, but the picture is heavy.

The movie is exhilarating in a way that only hard-won knowledge of the world can be.

The picture is just a flimsy, thrown-together service comedy about smart misfits trying to do things their own way in the Army. But it has a lot of snappy lines (the script is by Len Blum, Dan Goldberg, and Ramis), the director, Ivan Reitman, keeps things hopping (it's untidy but it doesn't lag), and the performers are a wily bunch of professional flakes.

Miracle is busy on the eye. As in a documentary, we follow the characters around from one task, whether grim or menial, to the next. Stand back, however, and Apetri’s careful patterning can be discerned.

The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out.

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.

At its best when the characters sit around, dither, and ruminate. Moviemaking seems to have become almost magically easy for this independent writer-director. He builds a detailed atmosphere, brings his good people and his bad together, and lets them jabber at one another; the virtuosity is rhetorical rather than visual.

The movie, bad as it is, will do as a demonstration of a talented man’s freedom to choose different ways of being himself.

A high-spirited, elegantly deadpan comedy, with a mellow, light touch.

Herbert Ross directed, unexcitingly; there's no visual sweep, no lift.

While displaying the erratic workings of the law and the crucial importance of journalism, the movie’s legal focus narrows its imaginative scope; the drama, though infuriating and moving, sticks to its characters’ surfaces.

Cool, violent, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gosling reprises his inexorable-loner routine from “Drive.” Cianfrance and the screenwriters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder wrote thirty-seven drafts of the script, but gave him almost nothing to say. He rides, he smokes, he knocks over banks, he loves his baby, and that’s it.

Perhaps just because it is so concerned with fidelity to the facts it's less exciting than one might hope; something seems to be missing (a unifying dramatic idea, perhaps), but it's far from a disgrace, and the performers are never an embarrassment.

Like Ken Loach, Arteta is clearly confident of preaching to the converted, and of whipping up indignation at those who mean us harm. Thanks to his leading players, however, the movie grows limber, ambiguous, and twice as interesting, and the sermon goes astray.

Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Wonderful dumb fun.

The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones." True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

Gunn is admirably overflowing with imagination, but he squanders his best material.

It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.

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.

Good summer fun, but it’s only about two-thirds the picture it could have been. Since Edward Norton has nothing to play against, the rivalry at the heart of the movie never heats up. [16 & 23 June 2003, p. 200]

Voyage of Time inhabits a rarefied plane of thought, detached from the practicalities of daily life, that leave it open to a facile and utterly unjustified dismissal, given the breathtaking intensity of its stylistic unity and the immediate, firsthand force of its philosophical reflections.

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.

Noah may not make much sense, but only an artist could have made it. [7 April 2014, p.74]

Crimes of the Future is, for better and worse, a conceptual film; it’s less an experience than it is an idea, less a drama of characters’ experiences than an allegory for Cronenberg’s despairingly diagnostic view of present-day crimes, ones that society commits against society.

It's like reading a fairy tale that has the mixture of happiness and trauma to set your imagination whirling; the fire-breathing dragon--scaly, winged, huge--is more mysterious, probably, than any we could have imagined for ourselves.

The narrative lacks a magnetic north; it encompasses so much, and the needle swings from Jeanne’s predicament to her mother’s dismay and to the support that comes from a celebrated Jewish lawyer, played by the ever-compelling Michel Blanc.

The invective energy of Four Lions and its Swiftian vision of a confederacy of dunces are never in doubt. The problem is one of form. [15 Nov. 2010, p.99]

The sumptuousness of Schlesinger's style is impressive. There's something lordly (and a little bored) in this director's command of the medium. While he gives you the felling that he knows what he's doing, he has no staying power--he doesn't develop any of the ideas he tosses in.

Most important, given that Onkalo will hide and bury just some of Finland's waste, what about everyone else's? [14 & 21 Feb. 2011, p. 139]

The Good Thief is too spindly and unconfident for an actor of this bulk, yet without him it would curl up and die. [7 April 2003, p.96]

The emotional repression and intellectual stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s melancholy new drama are as much a matter of style as of substance.

The boyfriend, one Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), a Brit rocker and professional sex god, turns out to be the best thing in the movie.

Meanders pleasantly, like a road movie, with a seventies-style, anything-goes offhandedness that whisks the audience through the rough spots.

It's lightweight and disorganized; it's a shambles, yet a lot of it is charming, and it has a wonderful seedy chorus line--a row of pudgy girls with faces like slipped discs.

Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.

This clumsy, naive film was banned and argued about in so many countries that it developed a near-legendary status.

For all its sententious grandiosity and metaphorical politics, “The Way of Water” is a regimented and formalized excursion to an exclusive natural paradise that its select guests fight tooth and nail to keep for themselves. The movie’s bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas.

Slamming different kinds of experience together, Lee tries to do with montage what he cannot do with dramatic logic.

Full of forced, unnaturally fast quips that one might, in a state of extreme exhaustion, find fairly funny.

Gaudy black-exploitation film with explicit racism and some that's implicit. Partly slick, partly amateurish.

Some of the film's junkiness is enjoyable, but there's also an unenjoyable cultural fundamentalism at work. Marshall is telling us that the complications of the last two decades are unimportant.

The people in this serious Woody Allen film are destroyed by the repressiveness of good taste, and so is the picture. It's a puzzle movie, constructed like a well-made play from the American past, and given the beautiful, solemn visual clarity of a Bergman film, without, however, the eroticism of Bergman.

Personally, I reckon that Portman tips Vox Lux off balance. The simple act of drinking through a straw is turned into an embarrassing megaslurp.

No one wants a movie that tiptoes in step with political correctness, yet the willful opposite can be equally noxious, and, as In Bruges barges and blusters its way through dwarf jokes, child-abuse jokes, jokes about fat black women, and moldy old jokes about Americans, it runs the risk of pleasing itself more than its paying viewers.

Spunky yet maudlin, grim yet heartwarming, the movie—written by Mooney and Kevin Costello—is mainly a batch of hollow gestures.

The film is a one-of-a-kind entertainment, with a kinetic, breakneck wit.

I felt sorry for Gyllenhaal, berated in both his personae for being weak, and for Adams, strapped and laced into a role that scarcely lets her breathe.

Russian Dolls offers touristic views of London, Paris, and St. Petersburg, where Wendy and Xavier both go for the wedding of another former roommate, and many pretty faces and bodies; it's froth with a sprinkling of earnest reflection.

T2 cannot hope to break the mold, as “Trainspotting” did, but Boyle and his cast rifle eagerly through the shards: a motley of plot scraps, crazed camera angles, flashbacks, trips, sight gags, and musical yelps.

Is the movie fun? Yes, for half the time. An hour would have sufficed. [24 June 2013, p.84]

For all its handsomeness and its occasional moments of piercing intelligence, it's a fundamentally depressing piece of work--not because it deals with tragic events and memories but because the characters seem hapless and even stupid, and the writer-director can't, or won't, take control.

The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.

The movie is a peculiarly irritating failure -- a leaden piece of uplift.

This Franco-Italian-Scottish co-production, directed by Damian Pettigrew, is an extraordinarily controlled piece of film. [14 April 2003, p.88]

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]

Shelton doesn't quite engage with the material; the picture is lame and rhythmless. Still, it's never boring, and it offers a ribald view of Southern politics that contrasts with the stern melodramatic portrait of Earl's older brother Huey as a fascistic demagogue in the 1949 film All the King's Men.

Doucouré pays keen attention to Amy’s quest for a self-made identity—and to a sexualized, commercialized mainstream culture that deludes children, especially those raised in cultural isolation. The film’s ultimate subject is the ghetto itself; a remarkable symbolic ending redefines French identity.

The Halloween of today is slick and sick, but little is left of that sleep-destroying dread. Still, not all is lost, because the Bogeyman, bless him, has not forgotten his manners. For old times’ sake, he gets to sit up straight.

There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman's work, and here it sickens into the morbid.

It packs political machination, helicopter gunships, single-malt whiskey, Las Vegas, Islamabad, naked butts, and eight years of war. The film, adapted from George Crile’s book, doesn’t always work, but it sure offers value for money.

Martin has a few good silly gags, but you may find yourself fighting to stay awake and losing.

The Armstrong Lie goes on forever, perhaps because Gibney can’t believe that, like everyone else, he’s been had. Again and again, he looks for elements of moral clarity (never mind remorse) in Armstrong, and the cyclist looks back at Gibney (and at us) as if he were a fool.

Foster gives a taut performance despite the unstrung absurdities of the plot. The story is anchored in Paris’s Jewish community, but the context remains anecdotal and unexplored.

Made in a documentary manner as styled as a Hollywood musical, the movie is hyperconscious of art, of politics, of itself, and at times it's exasperatingly affectless.

The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of The Last Duel involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center.

Invention is a film about pollution—media pollution, the despoiling of the American mind along with the landscape.

A fantasy with music for children that never finds an appropriate style; it's stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.

The movie doesn't find a way to give us the emotional texture of the interrelationships and dependencies in the book (one can probably enjoy the film much more if one knows the book) but the principal actors (Marlon Brando, Brian Keith, Elizabeth Taylor, Julie Harris) were able to do some startling things with their roles.

Anyone hoping that 2 Days in Paris will revisit such peppy romance (“Annie Hall”), however, will be frustrated. There is an extra rawness here, a determination to confront and annoy.

How can one defend this prolonged mumble of a motion picture? Well, some of the motion has a hypnotizing grace.

Looking back at the film, I don't buy all this, but no matter; Channing is so stormy, so keen to unleash her resentments, that for an hour or so you do believe in Julie. [17 Dec 2001, p.98]

Sandler isn’t doing a strained meta riff on his persona; he’s playing an honest-to-God character, plagued by stress, uncertainty, and an unfashionably big heart. There’s art to his performance, and no shortage of life.

As an example of the "woman's picture" this doesn't have any of the grubbiness or conviction of the Barbara Stanwyck Stella Dallas, but de Havilland works hard confecting cold cream.

The movie is a divertissement; it's lightweight and almost meaningless except for the fights, which are extraordinarily violent. [30 Jan. 2012, p.79]