The tangled plot is decorated in gaudy colors (thanks to the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) that contrast sadly with the sordid doings.

This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good.

This film is at once sumptuous with thrills and surplus to requirements. Let sleeping aliens lie.

Adapted from the million-selling novel by Janet Fitch. Not adapted enough, I would say. [14 & 21 October 2002, p. 226]

The film has many of the ingredients of a shocking, memorable movie, but it's shallow and earnest...It's a mess, with glimmerings of talent and with Newman's near-great performance.

The movie is so tautly constructed that not a single idea can seep in; it’s a mechanism made with an eye to spare elegance so obsessive that it runs without functioning, like a watch without hands.

It’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone.

Is there a piece of casting more ineffably Hollywood than Cher as a busy, weary public defender? She's all wrong for this role: her hooded, introspective face doesn't give you enough--she needs a role that lets her use her body.

Why do people keep making films about writers?

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.

A lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films, and, with a decisive trim, it could truly have fulfilled its brief as a bright, semi-abstract pop fantasy, at once excitable and disposable. Oddly, it did once exist in that form: in the first trailer.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

Credit is due to Dick Pope, the cinematographer, who toughens the film and somehow prevents the fabled grandeur of the locations from softening into the pretty.

Thanks for Sharing is worth it, because of Pink. [30 Sept. 2013, p.85]

Angels, according to this movie's nonexistent logic, travel at the speed of thought and are invisible except to other angels, children, and the dying.

The case itself had so many dramatic elements that the movie can't help holding our attention, but it's a very crude piece of work, totally lacking in subtlety; what is meant to be a courtroom drama of ideas comes out as a caricature of a drama of ideas, and maddeningly, while watching we can't be sure what is based on historical fact and what is invention.

The cracking of the mystery, at the conclusion of Gemini, is daft and unsatisfying, but no matter.

The director looks empathetically at lives of convention and duty that stifle romance and desire, but she reduces the fiery literary lovers to ciphers.

This literal-minded movie sells old pieties and washes away fear so thoroughly that it creates a new kind of fantasy, in which all's right with a very troubled world. [21 April 2014, p.110]

They have pruned, or purged, the drama until it runs just over an hour and a half, and, in so doing, mislaid its nervous languor.

The film is more than three hours long, some of it dangerously close to dawdling; not until the final third does Cameron apply the whip and remind us that, in the choreographing of action sequences, he remains unsurpassed.

A tacky, lighthearted parody of crime-wave movies--camp for kiddies.

Transcendence is a muddle; it takes more creative energy than this to catch up to the present. [28 April 2014, p.86]

The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids.

Aside from Heche, who is a quick, witty actress, the film seems to reside in a bizarre time warp of bad seventies comedy, complete with retrograde ethnic stereotypes and huge, jiggling breasts.

Much of the dialogue is scissor-sharp--you would expect no less of Marber, who wrote "Closer"--but he is up against blunt and obvious material.

Yet Oblivion is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda.

The result is a mere yarn that, lacking any sense of meaningful retrospect at a quarter century’s distance, remains untethered at either end of its time line and merely goes slack.

It's essentially a skit idea, not a dramatic idea, and the best the movie does with it is to repeat it. What saves Bridesmaids is Feig's love of performers - in particular, his love of actresses.

The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank.

The action simply doesn't have the exhilarating, leaping precision that Spielberg gave us in the past... The joyous sureness is missing. [12 June 1989]

Linus Pauling was quoted as saying, "It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world." The greatest ability of the director, Stanley Kramer, may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from eminent people.

Broadly played, in the 50s telegraphing-every-thought comic style.

Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.

This version isn't a total dud, but it's a coarser piece of slapstick, and not at all memorable.

As it is, the movie's lethal climax, with its vague protest against corporate control--and hence in favor of art, music, drugs, or whatever--feels like a poor theft from a more conventional film.

Black Adam feels like a place-filler for a movie that’s remaining to be made, but, in its bare and shrugged-off sufficiency, it does one positive thing that, if nothing else, at least accounts for its success: for all the churning action and elaborately jerry-rigged plot, there’s little to distract from the movie’s pedestal-like display of Johnson, its real-life superhero.

The correspondences he wants us to see from up there start to look contrived, illusory. [27 Sept 1993, p.98]

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

This dramatization of the last stages of Vincent van Gogh’s life, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as the ill-fated genius, lurches between the ridiculous and the sublime.

When the credits were over at last, I sighed, and took away a moviegoer's fantasy of Ledger and Miller starting work again, far away from Venice and ball gowns, on something that might be worth seeing.

The movie may have significant truths to impart, although I have my doubts, but it feels too inexperienced, too unworldly, to have earned the right to them.

Someone at Universal had the brainstorm of redoing the 1925 silent Lon Chaney horror picture and taking advantage of the fact that it was set in an opera house to make it not only a sound picture but a high-toned musical. The result is this flaccid, sedate version.

Conversation is pause-heavy; smiles are fleeting and tight with anxiety; the plot is a knot.

Rees uses voice-overs to bring the many characters to life, but the text is thin; the movie’s exposition is needlessly slow and stepwise, and the drama, though affecting, is literal and oversimplified.

Instead of suggesting depths of thought and feeling lying below the surfaces of busy lives, the movie’s exaggerations and artifices merely serve Audiard’s vigorous yet narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

He can follow any train of thought, so he does, and it’s no surprise when the trains run out of steam.

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

No surprise, then, that Goldblum seems a little lonely and marooned in the latest venture, which suffers from a nagging case of Smithlessness.

LaBute's didactic purpose kills any possibility of frivolous entertainment. [19 May 2003, p. 94]

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on Kanigel’s book, and directed by Matthew Brown, feels sluggish and stuck, and it hits an insoluble crux.

There are too many rancors--hatred of life, hatred of others, hatred of their means to happiness--to contend with here, and the loveliness of the verse beats fruitlessly against them, as if against a wharf.

Richard Brooks, who adapted the novel by Judith Rossner and directed, has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He's lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read.

There are two drawbacks here. One is a shortage of superior zombies, although where one goes to rent extra zombies I have no idea...Second, we have a serious shortage of fright. [30 June 2003, p. 102]

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

Tomorrowland is a bright and pliable sci-fi thriller that stiffens into a sermon. Can’t it just be fun?

Spurlock's documentary will tell you how, and whether, you should join the pilgrimage. Because I have never watched "Battlestar Galactica," and because of my absurd reluctance to dress up as Wonder Woman, I wouldn't last five minutes. [23 April 2012, p. 82]

It all looks fussed over. Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher.

The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all.

Schroder inadvertently exposes Bukowski's messianic windbag sensibility at its most self-satisfied. You wouldn't guess at Bukowski's talent from this movie.

Often quite beautiful. But Madagascar, which was directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, is mismanaged pretty much from start to finish.

This first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel, rather than from the novel itself, and it becomes too stagey.

The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce.

What makes Valkyrie more depressing than exciting is that it forces you to ask, against your judgment, what, exactly, he achieved.

The only performer who seems at ease is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in one juicy moment spies Gemma and her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and confesses not to envy but to “a strange kind of jubilation” at seeing Flaubert’s narrative lock into place.

The director, Neil Jordan, and his cinematographer, the great Philippe Rousselot, have given the movie an extraordinary seductive look, but Rice (who wrote the screenplay) doesn't provide enough narrative to keep the audience satisfied.

Holy Motors is full of larks and jolts, but the movie is so self-referential that it's mainly aroused by itself. The audience, though eager to be pleased, is left unsatisfied. [22 Oct. 2012, p.88]

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

Never quite shrugs off its literary manners. [18 & 25 Feb 2002, p. 200]

The good news is that Matchstick Men is saved. Not by the plot, which entails a con so long that you can spot it coming a mile off, but by the presence of Alison Lohman. [22 September 2003, p. 202]

It’s a sad movie--funny, yet wounded and bewildered.

Huckabees is the real thing--an authentic disaster--but the picture is so odd that it should inspire, in at least a part of the audience, feelings of fervent loyalty.

The film is one continuous spurt of energy...But the picture is abstract in an adolescent way. Miller's attempt to tap into the universal concept of the hero (as enunciated by Jung and explicated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces") makes the film joyless.

I know that we are meant to be drawn into the undergrowth of these ordinary lives, and the long tale is neatly split into four symbolic seasons;...But do they and their fellow-Brits honestly swell the heart, or do they grate, exasperate, and finally grind us down?

The supporting performances, impressive as they are, only sketch characters, rather than embodying them—because Abbasi’s merely efficient direction leaves the actors little time and little space onscreen to delve into their roles.

It's the first boring performance of Damon's career, although the bland inertia may not be his fault. The way Eastwood stages the "readings," they hold no terror for George.

In short, the Sheridan of In America wants us to pity his characters for the rough ride that they endure, yet at the same time he traps them inside a bubble of the picturesque and the outlandish. Even if you like this movie, you have to ask: What has it done to deserve its title? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

The movie leaves us with the sense that, twelve years after Biggie Smalls's death, a lot of people are trying to extract whatever profit or pride they can from the chaotic life of a young man who was, as he well knew, a work in progress.

The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.

Moderately enjoyable, in its exhausting way. [5 March 2012, p. 87]

Yet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]

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.

Unfortunately, Garfield isn’t a musical force of nature or anything close. His mere sufficiency in that department is the wavering note to which the entire movie is tuned and which, for all its many virtues, makes the film slip away from its emotional center.

It's apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art.

It holds the viewer's interest, but it does so by setting up the bodybuilding champions for you to react to in a certain way, and then congratulating you for seeing them in that psychologically facile way.

The picture, written and directed by James Bridges, tries to be thoughtful and provocative, but it has nothing to say.

The Crudup of "Almost Famous" was both hairier and more appealing than the tortured womanizer of World Traveler. Couldn't Cal have just stayed home, grown a mustache, and called his dad on the phone? [22 & 29 April 2002, p. 209]

All we are left with, in essence, is an unlikely love affair, performed by two actors so remorselessly skilled that, by the end, you can't see the love for the skill. [3 November 2003, p. 104]

The sad fact, however, is that, as Tully proceeds, it tumbles into clunkiness.

Movies are good at this sort of brute physicality, but the trouble with The Impossible is that is also tells a rather banal story. [28 Jan. 2012, p.81]

The drab script is by Albert Maltz and Malvin Wald; the film is visually impressive only.

The scenes are often unshaped, and so rudderless that the meanings don't emerge. Rowlands externalizes schizophrenic dissolution; she fragments before our eyes. But her prodigious performance is enough for half a dozen tours de force--it's exhausting.

The later sections of the story, dealing with Mercury’s AIDS diagnosis, are carefully handled, but most of the film is stuffed with lumps of cheesy rock-speak (“We’re just not thinking big enough”; “I won’t compromise my vision”), and gives off the delicious aroma of parody.

Arnold, a major artist of cinematic fiction, has made characters’ self-presentation, their sense of performance in daily life, a crucial part of her most original drama, “American Honey.” In “Cow,” Arnold hasn’t considered her subjects or her place in their world as stringently or as originally.

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

The latest minimalist provocation from the infuriating but talented French director Bruno Dumont. [12 April 2004, p. 89]