In short, this film is what would remain if you deleted all the spaceships from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the tale of a once ordinary man beset by an unworldly thirst that he can neither explain nor quench.

The entire film is tinged with a cloying glaze that seeps into the interstices of the drama and limits his characters’ range of motion.

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.

McTiernan supplies one climax after another, but when the whole intense, meaningless experience is over you may have trouble putting a name or a face to the movie that just had its way with you.

Well thought out and with a feeling for ordinary American talk, but too mechanical, too blandly sensitive, too cool to be popular; it's the sort of small-scale picture that's a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office.

This all-star version of an Agatha Christie antiquity promises to be a sumptuous spread, and so it is, but not as tasty as one had hoped.

Sixty-six years later, when a black man holds the Presidency, equality may still be, for some, unbearable, but Robinson abruptly moved America forward. 42, however limited at times, lays out the tortured early days of that advance with clarity and force.

Not bad, but not quite top-grade Bond. A little too much under-water war-ballet.

The plot of The Dry, it has to be said, is not a model of elegance and plausibility. I sniffed out the villain, who barely merits the description, a fair way off, and the dénouement, though it involves the threat of fire-starting, is the dampest of squibs. Yet the film has serious staying power.

The movie's problem begins as you lift up your eyes to the hills. In Chekhov these are craggy and hostile, a fitting backdrop to the dried-out souls who dwell below, but Dover Koshashvili's film lingers on green slopes. They suggest fruition and escape, whereas for Laevsky, the eternally stifled dreamer, there should be no way out.

This update has to be one of the most ludicrously dumbed-down versions of a classic to date. But it does have a hip, hybrid soundtrack, and, as directed by Alfonso Cuarón ("A Little Princess"), it's so visually stunning that it's almost gripping in its incoherence.

Pfeiffer digs into the role and won't let go. The rest of the movie is conventionally earnest.

Willis musters a fine, beaten air as a love-struck schlub, and Hawn proves that a comedian can be infectiously funny even as a woefully depressed character. The best reason to see the film is Streep. She deliriously sends up the kind of show-biz narcissist who can turn a pelvic tilt into an expression of self-love.

Disney-style kitsch. It's technologically sophisticated, but with just about all the simpering old Disney values in place.

Unlike the films of such great modern stylists as Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppola, and the three Ter(r)ences—Davies, Malick, and Nance—Wright’s movie offers an illustrated screenplay, in which images deliver and adorn the text rather than embody its ideas.

A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way.

Despite its physical horrors, the movie is also a celebration of the body, of the bond between pleasure and pain, agony and ecstasy—and that fusion proves to hold for family bonds as well. But the psychology and the practicalities of the story are ultimately thinly sketched, the abrupt transitions calculated to elide reflection in repose. The movie is too specific and detailed to be starkly and abstractly symbolic, yet too vague and general to convey the complexity and density of a relationship.

You can love the look of the movie and still not believe a single word of it. To be fair, the climax is surprisingly touching; somehow, the residents of this cooked-up tale manage to earn our pity and support.

Glazer’s movie is a presentation of nearly unfathomable horrors by way of bathos, alluding to enormities in the form of minor daily inconveniences. There’s conceptual audacity in the effort, yet Glazer doesn’t display the courage or the intellectual rigor to pull it off successfully.

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

No one else can balance the ups and downs of wistful sentiment and corny humor the way Capra can - but if anyone else should learn to, kill him.

Athena is a vision of political apocalypse, and it names the enemy while throwing its cinematic hands in the air, along with the camera. It turns its own story into just another figure in the mediascape that it decries. It offers no discourse, no practice, no options, no alternatives; strangely, in the process, it denies the residents of Athena agency. In the end, even its protagonists are mere extras in a nation-scaled drama.

Niccol's work is artful but self-important and thin.

With the help of blankly matter-of-fact yet omniscient voice-over narration (spoken by Madeleine James), D’Ambrose achieves the span and the depth of a cinematic bildungsroman in shards of experience and epigrammatic flickers.

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.

McKay has a point, though his frame of reference hardly stretches beyond the United States, and the stink of localized political contempt all but overpowers the plot.

The salesmen's scams are entertaining, but their spritzing is too tame, and the action is prolonged with limp, wavering scenes. Levinson wants to be on the humane side of every issue, The best work is done by the supporting players.

The realization of her life online, as she interacts with a profusion of screens and windows, is extraordinarily complex and detailed, but the drama is thin and predictable; despite the quasi-documentary authenticity of the details of Alice’s work, the movie offers more prowess than perspective.

Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein's script promises more fun than it delivers, slowly frittering away its store of jokes and thrills.

Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's rowdy dream of newspaper life, first produced on the stage in 1928, seems to be foolproof, and the structure still stands up in this version, directed by Billy Wilder. But something singular and marvelous has been diminished to the sloppy ordinary.

Two winter-season entertainments -- "Haywire" and Contraband with the minimalist but inexorable Mark Wahlberg -- have no greater ambition than to engage our dreams of behaving badly. Of the two, Contraband is the more absorbing. [30 Jan. 2012, p.79]

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

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

The picture, rousingly directed by William Wellman, was indeed a success, but Cooper, horribly miscast as a dashing young British gallant...was embarrassingly callow, almost simpering, and he looked too old for the part.

A peculiarly hollow, centerless blend of theatre and literature, from which what’s missing, for the most part (though not entirely), is precisely the cinema...It isn’t so much that The Third Man is a bad movie—far from it. But it’s far from being a great one, too.

The director of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Guy Ritchie, and there are hints, in the Berlin scenes, that he is tempted by the murkier option. Before long, however, as befits the maker of “Snatch” and “RocknRolla,” he drops the shadowy chic, decamps to Rome, and gets down to silliness.

The Matador teeters between comedy and moral inquiry but doesn't quite make it either way. The movie features a startling performance, however, by Pierce Brosnan.

The filmmakers keep to the surface of the bluntly rowdy story while conveying apolitical layers of regret and exasperation, in wanly comic and affectingly melodramatic action alike.

Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.

The film offers some spectacular special effects and excellent ensemble acting, including two virtuoso performances by Geraldine Fitzgerald and the late Julian Beck. But the movie, like most sequels, has no reason for existing beyond the desire to duplicate a financial success.

Dimples, wigs, bazooms, and all, Dolly Parton is phenomenally likable as the madam; her whole personality is melodious, and her acting isn't bad at all, even though the director, Colin Higgins, has made her chest the focal point of her scenes.

This Merchant-Ivory production strains so hard to portray dignified restraint that it almost seizes up with good manners.

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

Dahl’s story was never intended to be anything other than a sticky-fingered feast, whereas the movie flits through pedophobic creepiness and ends up as a slightly costive parable of family values.

This movie (directed by Sam Wrench) hardly adds another level of experience to the performances, because its visual composition, moment to moment, is burdened by convention and complacency. This doesn’t get in the way of the music, but it disregards the authenticity of Swift’s presence, the physical side of her performance.

Director Martin Campbell's lumpy direction doesn't coalesce into anything much beyond a pleasant assembly of set pieces.

The whole thing is amorphous and rather silly, but it's clearly a trial run for some of the effects that Altman brings off in Nashville.

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

The late Harry Dean Stanton, in one of his last roles, infuses the slightest gesture and inflection with the weight of grave experience, but this maudlin drama mainly renders his grit and wisdom wholesome and cute.

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 movie persuasively depicts the appallingly casual reduction of a woman’s body to a commodity and the oppressive inequalities of a justice system that clobbers the poor and the nonwhite into desperate submission. The power of these premises makes the movie’s vain sensationalism all the more unfortunate.

Structurally a mess and unevenly made, but the first forty minutes or so are quite beautiful. [7 July 2003, p. 84]

As a comic figure, Tati had a nice spare buoyancy in Jour de fete and Hulot's Holiday, but here his whimsical bumbling seems precious and fatuous.

As a study of inflammation in the body politic, The Insult is engaged and astute. In comparison with “West Beirut,” though, it seems oddly programmatic in its moral layout, designed to prove that, in Wajdi’s phrase, “no one has a monopoly on suffering.” Some viewers will emerge from the cinema feeling more schooled than stirred.

As Mike Nichols has directed the material, the effects are almost all achieved through the line readings, and the cleverness is unpleasant -- it's all surface and whacking emphasis.

You have to admire it, when so much of the competition seems inane and slack, but you can’t help wondering, with some impatience, what happened to its heart.

Ford creates a title character, played by Aubrey Plaza, who seems to carry a world with her, and he sets the action in a shadow realm of workaday grifters which emerges in fascinating detail. Yet that core of cinematic power gives rise to a modestly engaging but undistinguished, mundane movie, one that speaks as much to the givens of film production as to Ford’s own ambivalent achievement.

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.

Time and again, as it comes to the next stage of deterioration or distress, it flinches. Try laying it beside Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which shows the effect of a stroke on an elderly woman, no less refined than Alice, and on her loved ones. Haneke knows the worst, and considers it his duty to show it; Glatzer and Westmoreland want us to know just enough, and no more.

Woman Is the Future of Man is doomed to infuriate, and its scrutiny of disconnected beings, filmed in long, hold-your-breath takes, might feel like old hat to anyone reared on Antonioni, yet Hong has a grace and stealth of his own, and his scenes tend to tilt in directions that few of us would dare to predict.

Lester's decorative clutter is the best thing about the film: he loves scurrilous excess. But the whole thing feels hectic and forced. You want some gallantry and charm; you don't want joke, joke, joke.

Having dreaded the prospect of Sylvia, I admired it precisely because it refuses to play along with the mythologizing that has sprung up, and vulgarized, the lives of two poets. [20 October 2003, p. 206]

The Grand Budapest Hotel is no more than mildly funny. It produces murmuring titters rather than laughter -- the sound of viewers affirming their own acumen in so reliably getting the joke. [10 March 2014, p.78]

Its big idea, though vague, is at least a fascinating curiosity. But with its jumble of clichés, its blatant word-bubble declarations, and its hectically rushed impracticalities, the movie—which is based on a comic-book series—invites an air of antic exaggeration and revved-up stylization. It hints frustratingly, throughout, at a comedic impulse that the direction of its actors suppresses.

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

For regular moviegoers, The Apparition will seem most remarkable for what it is not. So accustomed are we to yarns of demonic possession that the beatific equivalent comes as quite a shock.

Given this mockable array, Holofcener goes surprisingly easy on her troupe of fools. Could it be that, over the years, her approach to the hypersensitive has lost a pinch of sourness and grown more sympathetic?

A good-natured and engaging minor novel by Steinbeck, turned into a good-natured and engaging (though corny and quaint and picturesque) film at M-G-M.

The film seems to go on for about 45 minutes after the story is finished. Audrey Hepburn is an affecting Eliza, though she is totally unconvincing as a guttersnipe, and is made to sing with that dreadfully impersonal Marni Nixon voice that has issued from so many other screen stars.

Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

Neel’s cast is terrific, from Schnetzer and Flaherty, with their soft and soulful — and thus punchable — faces, to Jake Picking, who plays the leader of the frat pack, and whose Popeye arms and buggy unblinking eyes make him both a monster and, if you stand aside from the melee, a bad joke.

The movie keeps insisting that the gruelling experience it's putting us through is really meant to edify us; it drags us into the mud and then tells us that we haven't got dirty.

The director, Sydney Pollack, isn't particularly inventive, but he has tight control of the actors. They work well for him, and he keeps the grisly central situation going with energy and drive.

Almost amusing in a harmlessly, pleasantly stupid way.

How keenly you respond to it will depend on how tempted you are by the salad days of Solo. Personally, I preferred him in “The Force Awakens” (2015), at the other end of his career.

The movie may be a grim warning against the perils of technology and its ability to spew alternative realities, but Cronenberg himself can hardly claim to have his feet firmly planted on the ground.

The picture doesn't have a snappy enough rhythm, and the repartee is often too slow, and the story takes a bad turn just past midway by making a melodramatic villain out of a likable character. But until then it's generally fresh, and it has a lovely soft visual quality, with unusually pleasing camera placement.

Schamus is a great producer of independent cinema, having overseen — and sometimes co-written — the work of Ang Lee, but this is the first movie he has directed, and the rhythm of the storytelling feels careful and courteous to a fault.

It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but Skyfall, in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]

Its script is junk—but junk brought to the screen with verve.

The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.

M:i:III, like many blockbusters, would be nothing without its star.

Running two hours and forty minutes, never finds the same balance: by the time he gets to the lust, it is too late to throw caution to the winds.

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.

This spoofy black comedy is thin-textured and it's sedated; it doesn't have enough going on in it -- not even enough to look at. The nothingness of the movie is supposed to be its droll point, but viewers may experience sensory deprivation.

Even if you like your movies sick and black, as many people do, it's hard to miss the irony: in the very act of trying to intensify his Southern tale, Friedkin dilutes the impact.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

Housebound and fearfully lofty.

For all its turbulent action and extravagant expressiveness, Maestro is hollow; even its strongest moments play like false fronts, like veneer far fuller, stranger, more struggle-riddled lives.

What ensues is a devout communal effort, tricked out with various hops through time and space, to make us forget that it was a piece of theatre in the first place. Needless to say, the attempt is in vain.

Penn is given so little to work with here that it's practically a pantomime performance. He's worth watching, even though the picture is singularly unimaginative.

For a better reckoning of 1968, you need a better writer — Norman Mailer, unloved by Buckley and Vidal alike, whose “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” covered the same events. Next to his fervid look at the sinews of power, as they sweat and flex, Best of Enemies is barely more than a skit.

What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

Of the two attempts, I still prefer the one from my childhood.

The acting is of a soaring ineptitude; the deeper Diesel emotes, the more he resembles a man who dabbed too much wasabi on his tuna roll.