A competent (often overrated) thriller by John Huston about a group of crooks who plan a jewel robbery and how their characters determine the results.

The plot material isn't as strong as in the first two movies--if anything, it feels a bit desperate--but the anti-Disney joke blunderbuss remains in good working order.

Has a slapdash feeling to it.

The movie offers a more insightful view of the music business than of Baker’s art.

Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.

Naive yet powerful.

The picture doesn't come together and much of it is cluttered, squawky, and eerily unfunny. But there are lovely moments --especially when Olive is loping along or singing, and when she and Popeye are gazing adoringly at the foundling Swee'Pea (Wesley Ivan Hurt).

The crud and petty desperation of The Cooler is enjoyable as atmosphere, and the movie is passionate. [12 January 2004, p. 86]

The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non-sad.

That the story is true (and based on an expertly written book by Jonathan Harr) doesn't make A Civil Action any more satisfying dramatically -- there's a streak of obviousness in the moral melodrama that dampens one's interest.

The chemistry is great, but the plot and tone are wobbly.

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]

The Interpreter is long and tangled, the score is yet another drownout from the thundering James Newton Howard, and the avowed thoughtfulness--about sub-Saharan politics, about the clashing commitments to peace and justice, about the kinship of damaged souls--is at once laudable and vaporous.

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

A thin but well-shot suspense melodrama, kept from collapsing by the suggestiveness and intensity that the director, Jacques Tourneur, pours on.

Yet, for all its skill, Public Enemies is not quite a great movie. There’s something missing--a sense of urgency and discovery, a more complicated narrative path, a shrewder, tougher sense of who John Dillinger is.

Barbie is fun, no question, yet the fun is fragmented. You come away with a head full of bits: interruptions that are sprinkled over the plot like glitter.

The film is rather misshapen, particularly in the sections featuring William Holden, and the action that detonates the explosive finish isn't quite clear. However, Alec Guinness is compelling as the English Colonel Nicholson.

There's a total absence of personal obsession - even moviemaking obsession - in the way Crichton works; he never excites us emotionally or imaginatively, but the film has a satisfying, tame luxuriousness, like a super episode of "Masterpiece Theater."

Diesel, of course, slots into the Fast and Furious films as neatly as a dip-stick. Not only does his name remind you of the stuff you pump into a car; when he opens his mouth, he actually sounds like a car. [3 June 2013, p.74]

The movie’s dramatic framework is bound up tightly and sealed off, and Haynes doesn’t puncture or fracture it to let in the wealth of details that the story implies—of art and money, power and presumption. The result is engaging and resonant—but it nonetheless feels incomplete, unfinished.

Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman's not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. There is, however, great intensity in many of the images.

The pictures seems dogged and methodical, though it is graced with a beautiful performance by Kotto.

Lucas shifts back and forth between this kind of original invention and a dependence on pompous dead-level dreck, a grade-B cheapness that he's obviously addicted to. [20 May 2002, p. 114]

Within its own terms the picture is sensitive and very well done, but it's also tiresomely fraudulent -- an idealization of a safe, shuttered existence, the good life according to M-G-M.

Frankly, who cares who assassinates whom?

There's so much going on you can't take your eyes off it, but none of it means anything.

Inside the stony exterior of The American beat some tired old ideas about innocence and redemption. How can you make an intellectual thriller and put a whore with a heart of gold in it?

The Butler is a lightweight, didactic movie, a kind of well-produced high-school entertainment.

If The Son lacks the grip of Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” (2020), it’s because the fable of Nicholas and Peter has the brittle feel of a setup.

It's a pity the film, directed by Fred Wilcox, didn't lift some of Shakespeare's dialogue: it's hard to believe you're in the heavens when the diction of the hero (Leslie Nielsen) and his spaceshipmates flattens you down to Kansas.

The elements are all there, and Mitchum, looking appropriately square-headed, tries hard and has some good scenes. But you get the impression that the dialogue is moving faster than the action.

Peter Sarsgaard, with an oozing voice and a wolfish smile, is a terrific creep, and Hank Azaria and Bobby Cannavale have fun overplaying porn-world figures, but the movie, at its center, remains unawakened.

It's nothing we haven't seen done better before (by Paul Greengrass in the recent "Bourne Ultimatum," for instance), but it's good enough as kinetic entertainment.

This movie, though perfectly pleasant, does not have a great script.

We don't get enough understanding of Stroud to become involved in how he is transformed over the years.

Who will stay with this film, and glorify it? Two sorts, I reckon: real revellers, randy for sensation, out of their heads; and, a block away, coffee-drinking Ph.D.s, musing on the cinema of alienation, too lost inside their heads to break for spring. [25 March 2013, p.108]

The movie is strange and muddled -- a disorganized epic -- but Day-Lewis, disporting himself with royal assurance, does what he can to hold it together. [23 & 30 December 2002, p. 166]

Despite some expert performances --the picture remains as confused as its hero; unlike him, it never does find its identity.

This new Star Trek is nonsense, no question ("Prepare the red matter!"), but at least it's not boggy nonsense, the way most of the other movies were, and it powers along, unheeding of its own absurdity, with a drive and a confidence that the producers of the original TV series might have smiled upon.

In short, there are moments, in this very uneven film with its lamination of the ancient and the monstrously new, when the spirit of Fellini hovers overhead like a naughty angel. [25 March 2013, p.109]

Although it's an agreeable movie, Caton-Jones's direction is too discreet -- too civilized -- to stir the viewer's blood.

Based on a script condensed from Robert Bolt's scripts for two projected films about the 1789 mutiny, this misshapen movie doesn't work as an epic -- it doesn't have the scope or the emotional surge of epic storytelling. It's certainly not boring, though.

One has to ask: does it allow for immersion? Even as we applaud the dramatic machinery, are we being kept emotionally at bay? [29 Oct. & 5 Nov. 2012, p.128]

A likable first feature by the director Taylor Hackford; it has verve and snap, despite a rickety script and a sloshy finish.

Gilliam has a cacophonous imagination; even the magical incongruities are often cancelled out by the incessant buzz of cleverness. It's far from a bad movie, but it doesn't quite click together, either. The director doesn't shape the material satisfyingly; this may be one of those rare pictures that suffers from a surfeit of good ideas.

This Gene Kelly-Frank Sinatra musical has an abundance of energy and spirit, and you may feel it could be wonderful if it weren't so stupidly wholesome.

As an evocation of danger, the movie seems threatening yet is nowhere near serious or intelligent enough to satisfy our current sense of alarm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]

Dershowitz's life-enhancing scenes are flatulent, and they're dishonest: the movie seems to be putting us down for enjoying the scandal satire it's dishing up. [19 Nov 1990]

The movie’s energies drop perceptibly in the middle section; lines of dialogue are recited at a sluggish rate, with lengthy pauses, as if the pressure of the presiding theme had numbed the characters’ tongues.

If you’re slow, like me, and find yourself bemused by the chronology, don’t worry; your reward will be a topnotch twist toward the end. By rights, that should make you want to watch the movie all over again, in order to sort out what belongs where, except that everything about it is so scummy—even the sight of creamer being stirred into coffee makes you gag—that a second viewing would feel like the grimmest of grinds. Destroyer is a thriller, but only just.

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.

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.

In spite of its noirish glow, De Palma's thriller is oddly unsuspenseful. Although his vaunted technique and Hitchcockian effects are all here, there's no life in the story (co-written by De Palma and David Koepp), and the last-minute burst of sentimentality is especially lame.

Ballerina—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

It's too long by half an hour, and the director, Ted Demme, can't hold onto a rhythm, but the actors are uniformly sharp, and so are the actresses.

The picture strains for seriousness now and then, but even when it makes a fool of itself it's still funny.

What’s jolting about Shyamalan’s film is its call to capitulation. The director puts the onus on the liberal and progressive element of American society to meet violent religious radicals more than halfway, lest they yield to even worse rages, lest they unleash an apocalypse.

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.

Despite Cornwell’s striving for reflexivity, for getting behind the onscreen talk to explore his relationship to Morris, nothing so dramatic takes place; the high-stakes mind games that he likes to think he’s playing never really occur. The Pigeon Tunnel is nonetheless an absorbing, colorful self-portrait.

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.

It’s a contemporary story that feels as if it has been worn away to a featureless, atemporal perfection of the sort that has been handed down, in the industry, through producers’ dictates and story conferences, and which filters into the world of independent filmmaking by way of film schools and handbooks, rounds of workshops and mentoring.

The writer and director, Jeremy Leven -- himself a former shrink -- has taken a heavy conceit and lightened it into comedy, which is what it deserves.

Often seems on the verge of being funny, but the humor is too clumsily forced.

Weapons is essentially a mystery, and a good one, if conventional...yet Cregger’s storytelling is slick and textureless, featuring characters whose personalities are reduced to their plot functions and a town that has no characteristics beyond its response to calamity.

It’s no surprise that the film should so often stumble and trip, yet I would sooner watch it again and sort through my mixed feelings about it than revisit, say, the nullity of “Joker.” There is genuine zest in the unease of Jojo Rabbit, and it’s weirdly convincing as a portrait of childhood under surreal strain.

What is most disconcerting about Dominik's film is his choice of rhythm. We pass from reams of conversation, or cantankerous monologue, to throes of extreme violence, then back to the flood of words - most of them to do with buying, selling, slaying, whoring, or doing time.

As a rule, movies about toys need to be approached with extreme caution; some of them have been bad enough to count as health hazards. This one is the exception.

Tsangari’s view of her world is blocked by her ideas; she is so concerned with what she has to say that she doesn’t see what she’s not showing.

Unbalanced and unjust, Spencer is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.

Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman.

Paltrow is as radiant as ever, but she keeps picking parts that focus on technical skills like accents -- she has yet to perform the real star's trick of being herself, and inviting the audience to identify.

The picture is swill, but it isn't a cheat; it's an entertaining marathon of Grade-A destruction effects, with B-picture stock characters spinning through it.

Walter Hill has a dazzling competence as an action director; he uses the locale for its paranoia-inducing strangeness (it suggests Vietnam), and he uses the men to demonstrate what he thinks it takes to survive. Its limitation is that there's nothing underneath the characters' macho masks.

Judas and the Black Messiah needed a coup of casting in order to find a performance that’s up to the character of Hampton. Kaluuya’s seems, instead, to render the extraordinary more ordinary, to indicate and assert Hampton’s unique, historic character rather than embodying it.

The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.

If the movie falters, it’s because, as a bio-pic, it cannot do otherwise. Even the most expert of storytellers is defeated by the essential plotlessness of the form: one damn thing after another.

If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than Spencer does, try Hive.

The Ground Truth is an emotionally potent work, but the great study of an Iraq vet, in either documentary or fictional form, has yet to be made.

Despite the shafts of black comedy, and a sudden ruckus of violence, The Killer is oddly calculated and cooked up; it’s easier to be excited and amused by the proceedings than to be stirred or convinced.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian is what my mother would have called a kakabarly--a large, foaming broth into which she emptied the forlorn and highly miscellaneous contents of her icebox.

The film's plea for old-fashioned pride and racial tolerance is muffled by a plain, unanticipated fact: Pete Perkins is out of his mind.

Tense and firm at either end, it sags in the middle like a mattress. Also, the grownups are pretty dull and flat, their mood set to maximum glower; luckily, we have Remmy—played first by Brooklynn Prince and later, as a teen-ager, by Nell Tiger Free—to steer us through the doldrums and to energize the plot.

Greengrass is as dexterous as ever, yet the result, though abounding in thrills, seems oddly stifled by self-consciousness and, dare one say, superfluous. Come on, guys. There are so many wrongs in the world. If Bourne could tear himself away from the mirror for a moment, could he not be persuaded to go and right them?

Not once does this ruffled sweetness seem like Hanson’s natural terrain. "Wonder Boys" took emotional risks, daring to suggest that with age comes not wisdom but confusion and crummy robes, whereas everything in the new film is designed to slot together with an optimistic click.

In the end, this odd, beautiful movie is remote and more suggestive than satisfying--a coolly impassive film about catastrophe made at a time when some of us might prefer an attempt at explanation. And yet Elephant is something to see. [27 October 2003, p. 112]

The movie is disappointingly impersonal; it doesn't provide readers of the autobiography anything like a fresh vision of its remarkable subject.

Within the carnivalesque atmosphere and high-spirited revelry of Moore’s show, there’s a master of political rhetoric at work, and he devotes that mastery to a high patriotic calling. At its best, Michael Moore in TrumpLand is a moving act of devotion, a motivating turn of rhetoric of potentially historic import.

Roman Polanski’s version, from 1980, of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is textured and smooth and even, with lateral compositions subtly flowing into each other; the sequences are beautifully structured, and the craftsmanship is hypnotic. But the picture is tame.

Tasteful and moderately enjoyable.

Expensive pop disaster epic, manufactured for the market that made Airport a hit. Ronald Neame directed, with dull efficiency.

This isn't a good movie but it's compellingly tawdry and nasty -- the only movie that explored the mean, unsavory potential of Marilyn Monroe's cuddly, infantile perversity.

The director, Sidney J. Furie, brings the film energy and he keeps the gags and the sentiment coming.

Fiennes and his team have mounted a handsome re-creation of Victorian England, but the Dickens-Ternan affair isn't much of a story -- at least, not as realized here. [6 Jan. 2014, p.73]

This comedy has some wonderful gags and a lot of other good ideas for gags, but it was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite of a perfectionist, and it makes you feel as if you were watching television.

The movie is as smooth and deadening as a quart of old whiskey, and every bit as depressing as it was meant to be. But why do it at all? [23 Nov. 1994]

A thumper of a movie, full of furious souls.

So acclimatized are we to action flicks, and to onscreen conflicts teeming with soldiers, that it’s refreshing to find a film that concentrates on hanging back and reversing out of harm’s way.