Walk Hard runs down quickly, and suffers further from having the wide-eyed and weightless Reilly as its star.

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.

His (Francois Ozon) theme could hardly be less original (think of "Bonjour Tristesse"), but the tautness is that of a horror film. [5 May 2014, p.85]

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.

Mariel Hemmingway tries hard as Dorothy, but she's all wrong for the part - she's simply not a bunny type. Fosse must believe that he can make art out of anything - that he doesn't need a writer to create characters, that he can just take the idea of a pimp murdering a pinup and give it such razzle-dazzle that it will shake people to the marrow. He uses his whole pack of tricks - flashbacks, interviews, shock cuts, the works - to keep the audience in a state of dread. He piles up such an accumulation of sordid scenes that the movie is nauseated by itself.

One imagined that a movie about the Crusades would be gallant and mad; one feared that it might stoke some antiquated prejudice. But who could have dreamed that it would produce this rambling, hollow show about a boy?

The problem is not that the film debases the book but that movies themselves are too capacious a home for such comedy, with its tea-steeped English musings and its love of bitty, tangential gags.

Whom could this operetta offend? Only those of us who, despite the fact that we may respond, loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel.

The film strains to achieve a breathless panache and a lurid swagger for which David Leitch’s direction is too heavy-footed and literal.

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

A rudimentary but thoroughly enjoyable step musical.

Friends with Benefits is fast, allusive, urban, glamorous - clearly the Zeitgeist winner of the summer.

It's a relief to see Sacha Baron Cohen, in the role of a seamy innkeeper, bid goodbye to Cosette with the wistful words "Farewell, Courgette." One burst of farce, however, is not enough to redress the basic, inflationary bombast that defines Les Misérables. Fans of the original production, no doubt, will eat the movie up, and good luck to them. I screamed a scream as time went by.

Tennyson wrote Enoch Arden in 1864, and the movies have been making versions of it ever since D.W. Griffith did it in 1908 (and again in 1911). This one is the most famous and the funniest.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

In spite of his problem of sentiment, it's a happy, unpretentious farce.

Changeling is beautifully wrought, but it has the abiding fault of righteously indignant filmmaking: it congratulates us for feeling what we already feel.

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.

The masochistic gifted-victim game has been played in recent American writing on just about every conceivable level, but Irving's novel is still something special: he created a whole hideous and deformed women's political group (the Ellen Jamesians) in order to have his author-hero, his alter ego, destroyed by it, and the film is faithful to Irving's vision.

Hardly even a shadow; Myrna Loy, William Powell, and Asta go through their paces for the fourth time, but the jauntiness is gone.

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

All in all, Pirates of the Caribbean is the best spectacle of the summer: the absence of pomp is a relief, the warmth of the comedy a pleasure. [28 July 2003, p.94]

What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory.

The movie re-creates Sam's miserable days with enough sympathy to come within hailing distance of such emblematic works of American disillusion as Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and Saul Bellow's "Seize the Day."

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, wrote and directed this Western near-parody; though methodically conceived and occasionally tense, it’s slight and sluggish.

Master Gardener is a movie divided against itself. Here, Schrader tells a different kind of story, with a different kind of dramatic contour and focus, and the result is a jolting, ironic disjunction of style and substance.

It feels at once crammed and sketchy, riddled with flashbacks and framing devices, and woefully light on frights.

It's a detached, opaque, affectionless movie; since it doesn't regard the young prostitutes as human, there's no horror in their dehumanization--only frigid sensationalism.

As Octopussy, the beautiful amazon Maud Adams is disappointingly warm and maternal - she's rather mooshy.

The performance that lingers, once the tale is told, is that of Jay Pharoah as Nate, a fellow-patient on Sawyer’s ward, who has furtively kept hold of his cell phone (she was deprived of hers), and who lends the film an understated calm.

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]

Cronenberg’s movie was an early showcase for his tense formal style and intellectual Grand Guignol. He displays a true shock-meister’s instinct by saving the worst for last. The result is a cinematic bad dream that generates recurring nightmares.

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

The only person who wakes the movie from its slumbers is Emily Blunt. She gets a nothing role as a publicist, and makes something both sultry and casual out of it.

Only the fine cast lends life to the movie’s superficial caricatures, even if the hectic, blatant script edges the performances toward the clattery side and Östlund’s precise but stiff direction leaves little room for inventiveness.

A showdown of blood and fire, and the one point, I’d argue, at which Let Him Go takes a seriously false step. It is George who girds himself for the final reckoning, but it ought to be Margaret. Her grief has driven this fable. She should be the one to end it.

Martin Scorsese’s début feature has just the slightest bit of story line, but the movie is a fascinating portfolio piece: a black-and-white blueprint for “Mean Streets."

World War Z is the most gratifying action spectacle in years, and one reason for its success if the Pitt doesn't play a superhero. [1 July 2013, p.76]

Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance.

In short, we are watching an old-fashioned exploitation flick — part of a depleted and degrading genre that not even M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of Split, can redeem.

As this matron on the loose, Allen is rancorously funny.

Bertolucci is trying hard to shock us with this stuff, but, for all the perversities and the abundant nudity, the movie has an air of inconsequence about it. [9 February 2004, p. 74]

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

The tale begins and ends in a flurry of joke violence; Cameron has decided to spoof what he used to take seriously, and the result, though bright and deafening, feels oddly slack -- he loosens the screws, and our interest drops away.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade.

Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone.

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.

No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?

This isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.

Tight, clever thriller.

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.

Whereas Cruella sent me back to Dodie Smith, as a blessed escape from what Disney has done to her creations, Tove dispatched me down a rabbit hole, or through a Moomin door. I recommend the trip.

Strange and off-putting, and hard-nosed types in the film business will no doubt dismiss it as a nothing. But, even if Bubble hasn't brought down the Bastille, the movie is far from nothing.

Cera can be winning enough, with his flat-toned goofiness, in films like "Superbad," but there's only just enough of the guy to fill out one dramatis persona; two at once prove to be beyond him. [11 Jan. 2010, p.83]

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.

[Silver's] densely textured images have many planes of action, which he parses with pans and zooms, revealing the volatile bonds of a group on the verge of combustion as well as the howling horrors of unremitting solitude.

Is it any surprise that this disturbing brand of cinema was triggered by 9/11, a catastrophe that, despite the valor it called forth, and the wars that ensued, lies beyond redemption and revenge? Or that Hotel Mumbai, a well-staged model of the form, should leave you feeling fidgety and low? You can admire a film, reel at the horrors it unfolds, and still wind up asking yourself, helplessly, what it was all for.

The movie’s plush, cozy aesthetic and unintentionally funny melodrama are at odds with its subjects: revolt, theory, originality, and observation.

The quarter-century-old disgruntled fantasies of two English comic-book artists, amplified by a powerful movie company, and ambushed by history, wind up yielding a disastrous muddle.

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.

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

Large in conception, it comes across as small of spirit, cramped in its sympathies and crabby in its attitudes.

Thanks to Lane, Hollywoodland, no great shakes as a thriller, becomes a quiet horror story about the monstrosity of time.

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.

In the film's second half, Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his "statement" that apes are more civilized than people; the movie simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion.

Skip Godzilla the movie. Watch the trailer.

The movie's conceits are just barely endurable, but the sharpness of Dörrie's eye--for Tokyo's electric night, for Fuji's iconographic landscapes, for cherry blossoms--sustains emotion even when story logic fails.

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.

A raffishly ironic and insinuating movie--and probably the most sheerly enjoyable film of the year so far.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

Sappy but engaging. [7 & 14 July 2014, p.95]

Soderbergh ends the movie with a few jokes, which is casual and neat but leaves you wondering whether the practice of making enormous movies about nothing isn't a little mad.

This stylized movie of ideas is a lean, impressive piece of work.

Where its predecessor kept a foot planted in reality, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” barrels through the underworld with an ever-looser, crazier Looney Tunes energy.

The picture's attempt to satisfy the aggressive fantasies of a graying white-male audience is weirdly fascinating. It's something you don't see every day: a geriatric comic book.

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.

Even when the male of the species tries to do better, he does his worst; and the most merciless verdict in Klown is delivered not by the law, or by fate, but by the eyes of women.

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

It’s worth seeing precisely for the heat of the arguments that you can enjoy after the screening and, above all, for Emma Thompson.

The thing that breaks the back of this movie, and makes the second half so much less prodigious than the first, is a simple matter of geography. Once the combatants are split up and scattered around the island (Packard here, Chapman there, Conrad and Marlow stuck in their own heart of darkness), the story loses focus and even starts to drag.

Tacky low-budget picture about a scientist whose carelessness gets him into a tragic pickle.

In the end, the problem with Conversations with Other Women is not that it pulls an ordinary romance into unfamiliar shapes but that it doesn't pull far enough. It may be dotted with fine observations, yet somehow the charm of its novelty grows stale, and the airless feeling of a closed set begins to fester.

Ritt takes his time in building the atmosphere and introducing the people, and lets an image stay on the screen until we take it in. The movie is impressive yet lifeless.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

The story moves forward smoothly, but the pace is too even and the course is predictable.

A space epic with a horse-and-buggy script. It's dull out there in space, though not as depressing as listening to the astronauts' wives back home. John Sturges directed, in his sleep

Almost everything about Permission feels flighty and parochial when laid beside the fateful mire of “Loveless,” yet Hall, in particular, lends a sober grace to the erotic roundelay.

The directing, by Brian De palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with.

Mister Foe flirts too often with the unlikely and the foolish, yet there is something to admire in the nerve of its reckless characters, so uneasy in their skins.

For anyone who was transfixed by the first movie, watching the new one is a little like being unplugged from the Matrix: What was I experiencing all that time? Could it have been . . . all a dream? [19 May 2003, p.68]

Saved! is a minor work, yet it has a teasing lilt to it, and to make it at all took courage and originality. [31 May 2004, p. 88]

The film's chief distinction is Julie Christie; she's extraordinary--petulant, sullen, and very beautiful.

It's a seize-the-day movie, even though the day is a long time coming. [7 May 2012, p.80]

Levy, holding his nerve, does cut through the chaos, delivering a fable that, if not exactly coherent, is nonetheless tinged with the very last virtue that you’d expect in a movie of this ilk. It has charm.

Two classic themes, the eternal triangle and a provincial’s big-city struggles, get distinctive twists in Philippe Garrel’s brisk yet pain-filled new drama of youth’s illusions.