The way the story line has been directed it's a clumsier versions of the plots of 50s musicals.

In this handsomely traditional movie, Kevin Costner has tried to fix the Western myth for all time in the stern contours of Duvall’s face and the guttural beauty of his voice. [1 September 2003, p. 130]

Powerful, concise, fully sustained.

Malik Vitthal’s first feature gives rich dramatic life to a piercingly analytical view of the American way of incarceration.

Once again, a "daring" Hollywood movie exposes social tensions--touches a nerve--and then pours on the sweet nothings. But along the melodramatic way, there are some startling episodes (and one first-rate bit of racial interchange), and recordings by Bix Beiderbecke, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and others set quite a pace.

What’s concrete in the film are its bluff and energetic performances. Tomei is, as ever, a wonder of passion and imagination. Burr is a dynamo of roaring invention. And, above all, Davidson himself, with his blend of blank comedic aggression and bare-nerve vulnerability, provides the film with an emotional complexity that surpasses the bare storytelling.

Yost is a veteran of historical documentaries, and his experience handling information is apparent; the film tells an enormously complex story of financial fine points and political maneuvering, along with the underlying social and personal backstories, with a deft touch and a brisk sense of wonder.

Clooney and company could have used Sturges - or, even better, Clifford Odets - when it came to rewrites. With all the betrayals and gassy ambitions swirling around here, we badly need dialogue to ignite the film, instead of which even the most aggressive spirits keep firing the dampest of lines.

The movie goes like the wind, but it's more a technological exercise than anything else.

A Master Builder is a bold endeavor, thriftily made, and there is muscle and volume in the performances; but had Demme hung back, and kept things cooler and quieter, the mastery of what Ibsen built, and the agon of his extraordinary hero, would have cast a more looming shadow. [4 Aug. 2014, p.75]

Cassavetes built this movie on a small conceit--a love affair between two people who are wildly unsuited to each other--and it doesn't work.

You could argue that such silly satisfaction comes with the territory, but although I enjoyed the snap of Long Shot, I couldn’t help remembering how “Roman Holiday” (1953) — another film about a lowly journalist who falls for a higher being — draws to its wrenching close.

The director, James Wan, sends cars repeatedly airborne and seems himself to marvel at the results; the movie’s real subject is the stunt work, but its stars’ authentic chemistry lends melody to its relentless beat.

Midler gives a paroxysm of a performance - it's scabrous yet delicate, and altogether amazing. The movie is hyper and lurid, yet it's also a very strong emotional experience, with an exciting visual and musical flow, and there are sharply written, beautifully played dialogue scenes.

The re-creations of the Castles' dances are painstakingly authentic, and most of them are fun to watch, but the movie is cursed with the dullness of big bios--especially those produced when some of the key figures are alive.

Jasper hits every note of sentimental manipulation in a tale that’s as fleetingly affecting as it is insubstantial and mechanical.

Wonderful comedy about a tragedy.

The required resolution is a long time in coming, but there's plenty to keep you diverted, including the light backchat among the semi-weirdos who make up the brothers' family, and Bullock's ridiculously watchable performance.

Gunn decides to treat the quest for meaning seriously — a lethal move that not only leads to the noisy palaver of the climax but also undermines Chris Pratt, who likes to hold these movies at arm’s length, as it were, and to probe them for pomposity.

The Life of Chuck confronts the mysteries of life and the universe and leaves no wonder at all.

Why, then, does the pulse of the narrative falter in the second half? Mainly because Van Sant has covered so much ground in the first, and there isn’t a great deal left to recount.

Stewart chose the great Iranian actress Shohreh Aghdashloo to play Bahari’s mother, but, with her tragic face and her magnificent contralto voice, she plays a tiny role as if she were in an amphitheatre.

Given the earnest mayhem that prevails at your local multiplex, there is surely a place for a lightly mocking modernist with a growing distaste for the modern. [9 April 2012, p.84]

A movie needn’t be a work of art—and "The Final Reckoning," the baggiest, least satisfying film of the McQuarrie quartet, falls well short of the mark.

The images of Wakanda Forever allow for little creative interpretation; the performances are slotted into the plot like puzzle pieces. The script is the main product, and it’s engineered with the precision of a high-tech machine, with all the artificial artistry to match.

The Darjeeling Limited works best when the level of artifice is at its highest and most overt.

After a while, you stop counting the chases -- they just get longer and louder, and it's like watching the revival of a forgotten art form; the fact that it's done with a minimum of special effects makes it all the more stirring.

I know there are intelligent people who are awed by this sort of deep-dish magical mystery tour, but surely something is wrong with a movie when you can't tell a live character from a dead one and you don't care which is which. [9 December 2002, p. 142]

The Final Year is stirring and saddening, but too well behaved by half; I wanted it to be a little less Steven Pinker and a little more Dwayne Johnson. I wanted the huge fight.

Byrne is trying for something large scale: a postmodern Nashville. Byrne sets up the material for satirical sequences, yet he doesn't give it a subversive spin. His unacknowledged satire is like a souffle that was never meant to rise.

The futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]

When the actors begin to talk (which they do incessantly), the flat-footed dialogue and the amateurish acting (especially by the secondary characters) take one back to the low-budget buffoonery of Maria Montez and Turhan Bey.

Do not be fooled by the sci-fi trimmings of this film. Despite its light and amiable manner, it’s a sort of “Deliverance” for the digital age, deriding the ability of tame souls, at a supposedly advanced stage of civilization, to cope with the unknown.

The movie, which Miranda July wrote and directed, is pretty sharp, not to say acidic, on the silliness of good intentions, but she also takes care to slant the best lines toward the subject of time, and its terrible crawl.

Indeed, there is barely a frame of Branagh’s film that would cause Uncle Walt to finger his mustache with disquiet.

In truth, Mr. Holmes is not Holmesian at all. It is Jamesian, as shown by a wonderful encounter between Kelmot and Holmes — an attraction of opposites, you might say — on a garden bench.

The machine itself is a beauty, with a red velvet seat and gadgets made of ivory and rock crystal, and the time-travel effects help to make this film one of the best of its kind. However, it deteriorates into comic-strip grotesqueries when the fat ogreish future race of Morlocks torments the effete, platinum-blond, vacant-eyed race of Eloi.

This joyously square musical succeeds in telling one of the root stories of American Life.

This square movie, at its best, is very powerful.

But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon. [8 Apr 1985, p.123]

Mostly it gets by on being good-natured enough for you to accept its being clumsy and padded and only borderline entertaining.

The picture isn't enough of anything; there isn't a thing in it that you can get excited about or quarrel with.

As Mostow proved in “Breakdown” and “U-571,” he can churn out excitement at a steady pace; whether he can handle dread--altogether a more unstable material--is another matter. [14 & 21 July 2003, p. 85]

One of the gentlest, most charming American movies of the past decade. Its subject is less food as something to cook than food as the binding and unifying element of dinner parties, friendship, and marriage.

First, you try to understand what the hell is going on. Then you slowly realize that you will never understand what is going on. And, last, you wind up with the distinct impression that, if there was anything to understand, it wasn’t worth the sweat.

An amiable family comedy one step above a TV sitcom (and several steps below “Moonstruck.”

Harmless, but it gave me a pain. Why make such a fuss over middle-aged bodies anyway? [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]

The whole picture is edited and scored as if it were a lollapalooza of laughs. And, with Murphy busting his sides guffawing in self-congratulation, and the camera jammed into his tonsils, damned if the audience doesn't whoop and carry on as if yes, this is a wow of a comedy. [24 Dec. 1984, p.78]

Eastwood’s subject is wasted lives and wasted talent; Wilson’s charisma and Hollywood’s money prove irresistible, and their sheer power brings noteworthy results—but they emerge from a needless vortex of ruin.

Certainly holds one's attention, but it's a strange and grim experience, ice-cold and borderline pointless. [28 October 2002, p. 119]

Abe is blustery and self-pitying, but, with Solondz's new tender mercies fully engaged, Gelber makes you feel close to a guy for whom nothing was ever meant to go right.

When it's time to wrap up the mystery, the movie leaves too many of the plot's enigmas unresolved, and Branagh's insouciance loses its charm.

The joke is that Wiener-Dog is about as non-epic as can be, but there’s also a sleight of hand, with the dazzle of the images distracting us from the fact that the movie has run out of plot. Meanwhile, the depths of doghood remain unplumbed.

The film swings from farce to soap opera and back again—but it's got enough girl-power moments to make a Spice Girls fan happy.

Layer by layer, this dumbfounding movie devises its magical recipe, and dares us to resist it: ketchup, mustard, two slices of pickle, and hold the irony. Delicious.

What gives this trash a life, what makes it entertaining is clearly that the director, Norman Jewison, and some of those involved, knowing of course that they were working on a silly, shallow script used the chance to have a good time with it.

This one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie.

There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort; the writer-director applies his film craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams. The result is academic, and never believable.

Even as the film abounds in behavioral details, rendering its four protagonists’ personalities in sharp outlines, it never presumes to know too much about them; the movie shows what Sasquatches are like without assuming what it’s like to be a Sasquatch.

A movie about mother-son incest may sound like a daring writing-directing début, but David O. Russell, the fledgling auteur, stacks the deck like an old sharpie.

Seven Psychopaths is the kind of movie that can lift someone who's had a crappy day out of a funk. It's an unstable mess filled with lunatic invention and bizarre nonsense, and some of it is so spontaneous that it's elating. [22 Oct. 2012, p.88]

The director, John Badham, does a glamorous, showy job, and, what with all the stunt flying and the hair-trigger editing, this is the sort of action film that can make you fell sick with excitement, yet it's all technique -- suspense in a void.

This asinine story just about smothers the good-natured hoofing.

May be the most exquisitely crafted movie ever made about a bunch of nitwits. [10 & 17 June 2013, p. 110]

The Report has purpose and grip, as does any film that carries the stamp of Adam Driver.

Lumet wrote the script alone, and he's so busy laying on the rancorous, bantering atmosphere that he waits too long to get to the plot; the movie becomes torpid.

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.

Cyrano is a thuddingly dull film that sinks under the ponderous undigested mass of its own bombast, squandering the talents of a fine cast and a fine concept.

You should see it just for Chester — the adventurous sham, running ever deeper into a maze of his own devising.

The film's technical achievements may be complex, but its emotions are facile.

Hyper-articulate and often breathtakingly intelligent and always brazenly alive. I think it's easily the strongest American film since Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," though it is not for the fainthearted.

The movie is rife with confusions of every type, and Hooper handles them with clarity, grace, and a surprising urgency, far more at ease in this intimate drama than he was with the super-sized galumphings of “Les Misérables.”

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.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.

The weirdness of Truth — and, I fear, its involuntary comic value — arises from a disparity between the sparse and finicky minutiae of the narrative and the somewhat bouffant style of the presentation.

The Spanish director Isabel Coixet works with candor, directness, and simplicity. She isn't afraid of lengthy scenes of the two actors just talking to each other, mixed with lavish but respectful attention to Cruz's body, especially her bare chest, which is treated as one of the wonders of all creation.

Perhaps too much attention to special effects.

Harlow is intensely liable, delivering her zingy wisecracks with a wonderful dirty good humor, and Gable is at that early peak in his career when he is so sizzlingly sexual that it seems both funny and natural for the two women to be fighting over him.

Easily the best American movie so far this year.

Its effortful grandiosity transforms it into something hollow and even, at times, risible.

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.

Penn, with curled hair and wire-rims, makes a brilliant, slippery high-end shyster; his modulated hysteria is amazing. So is Brian De Palma’s direction. Few films actually made in the disco era can match the kinetic allure of this 1993 production, which has a bluesy undertow all its own.

The range of tones and moods, like the range of situations, characters, and actors, is so wide, so recklessly self-contradicting, that it turns a tautly crafted local story into a comprehensive vision.

The action is loud and flashy, but there isn't really much suspense. The movie operates in such well-charted waters that it feels less like a dangerous naval mission than like a luxury cruise: the accommodations are cozy and the activities carefully planned.

The characters observe no boundaries, and neither does the movie--Baumbach hasn’t worked out the struggle between speaking and withholding, as Bergman did. People simply blurt out scathing remarks, so there’s little power in the revelations and betrayals. “Margot” is sensually as well as dramatically impoverished.

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.

The standard defense of such material is that we are watching “cartoon violence,” but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer--that is, to coarsen and inflame?

What makes the movie memorable is the over-all excellence of the performers.

It's all very well to satirize perfect white females, but if you're sick of their attitudes why single them out as protagonists in the first place? What happened to the Asian Nerds? Or the Unfriendly Black Hotties? Or the tired teachers? Why can't we see a movie about them? [10 May 2004, p. 108]

The result is an unorthodox blend of courtroom drama and old-style weepie, and somehow it comes off. [23 Dec 1993]

Dumb Money, touching on questions of the authority of personality and the importance of nonfinancial—even completely irrational—motives in the investment world, offers a gleeful romp through strange and treacherous territory that merits a closer, more careful look.

Richardson is able to encompass so much in the widescreen frame that he shows how the whole corrupt mess works.

Jewison has given it an atmosphere that recalls his crack 1967 comedy-mystery In the Heat of the Night, and he has also given it a beautiful sense of pace, and brought out all the humor he can find.

It's about guns and sex and fast boats, and, baffling as it is at times, it's still the kind of brutal fantasy that many of us relish a great deal more than yet another aerated digital dream.

As impressive as the film is, the many thrillingly imaginative moments remain suspended and detached from each other, like scattered storyboard frames. The result is a film that’s accomplished but seemingly unfinished—indeed, hardly begun.

Master is a tensely effective, terrifyingly affecting drama that’s also a virtual vision of the power and the purpose of the modern right-wing war on truth.

Marling is the star, and the core of the film's concern. She also co-wrote it with the director, Mike Cahill, yet the result comes across not as a vanity project but as a sobering study of the thoroughly dazed and confused, with a mind-ripping final shot.

There are joyous moments when we share Peter's point of aerial view.