The Lovely Bones has been fashioned as a holiday family movie about murder and grief; it’s a thoroughly queasy experience.

This disposable date movie is not so much written and acted as cast—just about every young actor in the country is in it.

A mixed-up and over-loaded American spy thriller by Alfred Hitchcok, with the unengaging Robert Cummings in the lead and an unappealing cast, featuring Priscilla Lane and Otto Kruger. Nothing holds together, but there are still enough scary sequences to make the picture entertaining.

The movie is gorgeous, as you would expect from Sorrentino, but beauty this great can lead to suffocation. The plot goes round and round and nowhere, and the highlight is a couple of blistering monologues — one from Weisz, delivered while she is cloaked in mud, and another from Jane Fonda, as an aging screen goddess, encased in her own crust of powder and Botox.

Lavishly detailed yet dramatically vague, opulently produced but blandly depicted.

The movie, bad as it is, will do as a demonstration of a talented man’s freedom to choose different ways of being himself.

It sounds promising, but Bogdanovich attempts an exercise in style, and the result is sustained clutter.

As the feigning wears off, and Captain America: Civil War crawls to a close, you sense that the possibilities of nature have been not just exceeded but exhausted. Even the dialogue seems like a special effect: “You’re being uncharacteristically non-hyperverbal,” Black Widow remarks to Iron Man. Translation: “Say something.”

Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense.

Even viewers who take their comedy black, without sugar, may wince at the violence that is doled out; Stearns raises laughs and then chokes them off.

Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive.

The failure of topicality in “Don’t Look Up” is, not least, that the movie’s cynically apolitical view of politics contributes to the frivolous and self-regarding media environment that it decries—starting with the very celebrity power that the movie marshalls to score its points.

Having delighted in the doominess of Drive, as its journey began, I ended much less joyful than repelled.

So heavily does the movie strain for offbeat detail—a killer who watches cartoons at full blast; Jay equipped with a neck brace and a leaf blower—that it refreshes one’s respect for Wes Anderson, whose eye for oddities remains clear and bright.

The few good jokes (most of them courtesy of the Pharaoh's high priests, voiced by Martin Short and Steve Martin) are swallowed up in this humorless epic.

The result is that what should be most uplifting, in The Glorias, is most at risk of clunkiness.

Unconvincing and ineffective; the many patches of ideological montage, growing like kudzu throughout the film, weaken the impact of its best moments.

You can’t deny the smiling mood that wafts through the film like incense, and to that extent it honors the original three days; but not once does a character’s show of feeling stir you, send you, or stop you in your tracks, and the loss is unsustainable.

Kevin Smith turns out to be reverent after all: he wants to separate true love from mere copulating for money, but his story mixes romance and porn so inextricably that he seems confused, and the movie trips over its own conceits.

There is evidence that at some point this project (which was initiated by Oliver Stone) might have been serious, but Campbell has produced little more than a churning, vivid backdrop for romance. [10 November 2003, p. 129]

If “The Lobster” remains Lanthimos’s most vital work, that’s because it tempers the gloom with a mischievous play of wit. The Killing of a Sacred Deer, by contrast, is stubbornly hard to enjoy; there are jokes, but they make few dents in the programmatic rigor of the plot.

The narrative lacks a magnetic north; it encompasses so much, and the needle swings from Jeanne’s predicament to her mother’s dismay and to the support that comes from a celebrated Jewish lawyer, played by the ever-compelling Michel Blanc.

Martin Ritt's big, noisy production clunks along like a disjointed play; it defeats Jones, and along the way it also inadvertently exposes the clobber-them-with-guilt tactics of the dramatist, Howard Sackler.

Why, as a patron of Rock of Ages, do I wish I had taken the precaution of entering the theater drunk? [25 June 2012, p.84]

This, to put it mildly, is new terrain for Macy, and his journey--from Arthur Miller, as it were, to Céline and Dostoyevsky--does not always convince.

Gray would have been happiest, I guess, to make movies in the nineteen-seventies, and this one feels much closer to 1975 than to 1988; he could certainly use a seventies audience to watch his movies now--one that could be trusted not to grumble about his slow, unexcitable fades.

In The Conspirator, one wishes that the director had found the grace to touch upon, rather than belabor, the parallels between the conspirators of 1865 and the present-day inmates of Guantánamo.

[Ridley Scott] draws you into a dull, sensual daydreaminess, but after watching Tom Berenger and Mimi Rogers for a while, you look around for the stars. With so much buildup - so much terror-tinged atmosphere - you expect actors with some verve, and you wonder why the script doesn't sneak in a few jokes. (Has a good thriller ever been this solemn? Or this simple?)

Fassbender, who was, frankly, much sexier and more devilish in "X-Men: First Class," is required to spend much of his time staring with blank intensity into the middle distance.

Edwards pulls laughs, though. He does it with the crudest setups and the moldiest, most cynical dumb jokes.

Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive.

The one thing you do need to know about Avengers: Endgame is that it runs for a little over three hours, and that you can easily duck out during the middle hour, do some shopping, and slip back into your seat for the climax. You won’t have missed a thing.

The battle scenes are extraordinarily mucky and violent, but here, as in Tavernier's "Let Joy Reign Supreme," the intricate protocols of aristocratic sexual passion are the most startling elements. The movie, however, is opaque at its center. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]

The picture is scrappily edited, and the director seems willing to do almost anything for an immediate effect. It's only in the best scenes that satire and sultriness work together.

At key moments, Lucky You loses its nerve.

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.

When the film came out, Michelangelo Antonioni's mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seemed to have a numbing fascination for some people which they associated with art and intellectuality.

Although Shirley MacLaine tries hard, it's obvious that her dancing isn't up to the demands of the role. It's a disaster, but zoom-happy Fosse's choreographic conceptions are intensely dramatic, and the movie has some of the best dancing in American musicals of the period.

The formulaic drama is of a piece with the movie’s action sequences, which exhaust their ingenuity from the get-go, with the Matera chase and shoot-out.

The film is trite, and you can see the big pushes for powerful effects, yet it isn't negligible. It wrenches audiences, making them fear that they, too, could become like this man.

The movie is a showcase for digital technology and for Norton’s virtuosity, but I wish it weren’t such a weightless shambles.

It's a peculiar movie, frantic and useless, with a hyperactive camera that gives us no more than fleeting impressions of Edie ecstatic at parties, Edie strung out on drugs, Edie lying mostly naked on a bed, with her skin splotchy from injections.

The trouble with Super, as with "Kick-Ass," is that the director wants to have his cake, put a pump-action shotgun up against the frosting, blast vanilla sponge over a wide area, and THEN eat it. [4 April, 2011, p. 83]

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

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

As written and directed by Lorene Scafaria, the movie offers enough moments of sharp emotion and keen perception to keep anticipation high throughout. Yet the movie stays on the surface, to yield, for the most part, a simplistic, unexplored celebration of characters who are molded to fit the story’s amiable tone.

But soon the movie falls flat under an uninspired good-versus-evil plot and pathetically simpleminded dialogue.

Is this a case of spectacularly rotten timing, or is something being kept from us? The account of why the friends cross the border isn’t very persuasive…The young men may be clueless, but the filmmakers’ habit of obfuscating key points makes us wonder whether somebody is lying.

The performances are lusty and concerted, but they remain just that - performances, of the sort that may make you feel you should stagger to your feet at the end and applaud. If so, resist.

Because the pieces of the movie are calculated to fit together in unambiguous arrangements, the performances are reduced to ciphers.

Probably nobody involved was very happy about the results; Dylan doesn't come off at all.

I have a vision of eight-year-olds leaving the movie in bewilderment. Why are the creatures so unhappy? That question doesn’t return a child to safety or anywhere else. Of one thing I am sure: children will be relieved when Max gets away from this anxious crew.

I enjoyed parts of "Wedding," and I'm not about to tell people that they should not have enjoyed it. I'm just afraid that Hollywood will respond to its success by making many more sitcoms in the guise of movies. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]

Turgidly predictable.

Despite the fluent editing and the close-in documentary techniques and the sophisticated graphics, the pictures is a later version of the one-to-one correlation of an artist's life and his art which we used to get in movies about painters and songwriters. Hoffman makes a serious, honorable try, but his Lenny is a nice boy. Lenny Bruce was uncompromisingly not nice.

The Gentlemen is a mongrel of a movie. There are not enough twists and tangles for a proper mystery, not enough thrills for an action flick, and not enough laughs for a comedy.

There are many unanswered questions here (why, for instance, does Pitt's Grim Reaper seem semi-retarded?), not to mention unintended spasms of comedy; in the end, however, they all get swallowed up in the mush.

As with Spielberg's "Munich," there is an awkward, irresoluble tension between the movie's urge to thrill and the weighty pull of the historical obligations that it seeks to assume. How much, to be blunt, should we be enjoying ourselves? What do we owe to The Debt? Whatever the sum, it is more than the film itself, gloomy with unease, seems able to repay.

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]

Some of the special effects are amusing, and a few are perverse and frightening, but the effects take over in this Hitchcock scare picture, and he fails to make the plot situations convincing. The script is weak, and the acting is so awkward that often one doesn't know how to take the characters.

It would be a shock if Antichrist had turned out to be anything but shocking.

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.

I happen to find the live-action Disney reboots easy to admire but hard to warm to — supremely unlovable, indeed, and stripped of the consoling charm that we look for in their animated sources.

Whatever oddball charm and silliness the first Rocky had is long gone. Rocky III starts with the hyped climax of II and then just keeps going on that level; it's packaged hysteria. This picture is primitive, but it's also shrewd and empty and inept.

It's reprehensible and enjoyable, the kind of movie that makes you feel brain dead in two minutes--after which point you're ready to laugh at its mixture of trashiness, violence, and startlingly silly crude humor.

For all the film’s quietism regarding the particulars of secession and rebellion, “Civil War” is a piece of propaganda, a veritable recruiting video for its own rebels.

The makers of “Wonder Boys,” Douglas’s finest hour, did more to maintain their distance, and their patience, and Solitary Man feels a touch small and sour by comparison. That said, its litany of character studies is more engaging than most of what you will see this summer.

Superman doesn’t have enough conviction or courage to be solidly square and dumb; it keeps pushing smarmy big emotions at us—but half-heartedly. It has a sour, scared undertone.

The young Welsh-born actor Christian Bale is a serious fellow, but the most interesting thing about him--a glinting sense of superiority--gets erased by the dull earnestness of the screenplay, and the filmmakers haven't developed an adequate villain for him to go up against.

It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

You have to have considerable tolerance to make it through Chayefsky's repetitive dialogue, his insistence on the humanity of "little" people, and his attempt to create poetry out of humble, drab conversations.

You'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.

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

Its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.

The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy.

There is barely a graceless frame in the whole affair.

All movie adaptations of Nabokov fall short, by definition, but this one is the most graceful failure so far.

The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.

An action drama about the widespread legitimation of abuses by police departments, it arrives onscreen with a jolt but then subsides into a comfort zone of formulaic tropes.

It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise--of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one's total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Kasdan has eliminated all the conflicting interests and the psychological impediments to a happy marriage, leaving the physical separation as the only obstacle. There's nothing left for the movie to be about except how the hero and the heroine can conquer space. (And at the end, the pictured fudges even this.)

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

This whole production is a mixture of wizardry and ineptitude; the picture has enjoyable moments but it's as uncertain of itself as the title indicates.

Ultimately disappointing--it's bigger budgeted, but somehow less engrossing when played outside the solitary intimacy of the tube. It'll be a great video flick.

For all its technical sophistication, this movie is as blaring and unambiguous as a picture book for the very young.

The movie has a deep-toned flossy and "artistic" clarity and a peculiarly literary tone - the dialogue doesn't sound like living people talking.

Skip Godzilla the movie. Watch the trailer.

For most of Annette, Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director.

Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.

Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.

The hero is so blandly uninteresting that there's nothing to hold the movie together.

Some exciting scenes in the first half, but the later developments are frenetic, and by the end the film is a loud and discordant mess.

An intricate time-jumping framework is a large part of what makes the film distinctive, but the compromises made to achieve this are responsible for a pervasive feeling of emptiness.

This attempt at screwball charm was directed by Susan Seidelman, who wipes out her actors. All their responsiveness is cut off -- there's nothing going on in them. This flatness can make your jaw fall open, but it seems to be accepted by the audience as New Wave postmodernism.

As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter.