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.

That is what kids will come away with, together with a dose of wishful thinking: the vague belief that, with good will and a foe from far away, all those feuding parties of the Wild West - the cowboys, the Indians, and the no-good rogues - could have settled their differences and got along just fine. Go tell it to Gary Cooper.

I happen to find the result intrusive, presumptuous, and often absurd, but, for anyone who thinks that all formality is a front, and that the only point of a façade is that it should crack, Jackie delivers a gratifying thrill.

The first third of Aftermath is stripped to emotional basics (one man seized up with grief, another with guilt), and it delivers quite a jolt. Sadly, as the characters converge, the rest of the movie loses force; it slackens and then rushes, and the time frames feel out of joint.

The movie’s substance remains largely implicit; its pleasures are partial, detached, and superficial. It offers little context, background, personality, or anything that risks distracting from the show.

Everest, in short, suffers from the same problem as Everest: overcrowding.

Allied is written by Steven Knight and directed by Robert Zemeckis, who seems uncertain whether to treat the tale as a wrenching saga of split loyalties or as a glamorous jaunt. Having gathered all the ingredients for derring-do, he forgets to turn up the heat, and the derring never does.

A romantic adolescent boy’s view of friendship.

As a whole, Shattered Glass is carefully constructed, intently played, and shot with creepy calm. It is also, by a considerable margin, the most ridiculous movie I have seen this year. [3 November 2003, p. 104]

Deep and Morton are really flying here (the scene in which the hero instructs the heroine in the passionate possibilities of her art), and they leave the rest of the film looking heavy on its feet. The second half, especially, grows dour and maundering, and by the end the movie seems to flail in desperation, more like a work in progress than like a finished piece.

It takes place in the TV land of predictability -- that plain of dowdy realism where a boy finds his manhood by developing the courage to stick to his principles and stand up to his father.

The film’s overbearing effort to say something serious about society at large seems to force del Toro’s directorial hand. It pushes him to up the razzle-dazzle in order to keep the didactic element entertaining. The result is a movie that is bloated in length, literal in its messaging, and overdecorated, like a cinematic Christmas tree, with dutiful dramatics that leach it of tension, energy, and spontaneity.

The Last of Robin Hood, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, is often pallid and thin.

Clooney and company could have used Sturges - or, even better, Clifford Odets - when it came to rewrites. With all the betrayals and gassy ambitions swirling around here, we badly need dialogue to ignite the film, instead of which even the most aggressive spirits keep firing the dampest of lines.

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.

The supporting cast provides centripetal force; too bad the center cannot hold.

The characters never take hold, and the result feels eerily hollow, like a series of charming improvisational bloopers.

For all its handsomeness and its occasional moments of piercing intelligence, it's a fundamentally depressing piece of work--not because it deals with tragic events and memories but because the characters seem hapless and even stupid, and the writer-director can't, or won't, take control.

Just creepy and unsavory at moments, but pleased to be so.

The picture is schmaltzy and phallus-shrivelling, too.

The result is remarkable, yet it’s still a hairbreadth away from credible.

Has an oddly amorphous and inconclusive feeling to it. We never do find out who Tony (Jake Gyllenhaal) is, and his best friend, Troy (Peter Sarsgaard), who shifts back and forth between sanity and hysteria, is a mystery, too.

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

This famous film, high on most lists of the greatest films of all time, seems all wrong - phony when it should ring true. Yet, because of the material, it is often moving in spite of the acting, the directing, and the pseudo-Biblical pore-people talk.

A minor work, but so menaced by distress that the characters take every opportunity to dance the dark away.

The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and changeable, shifting abruptly from snuggling happiness to angry defiance.

The Bikeriders displays the cost of noninterventionist direction, of sticking to source material with a self-inhibiting fidelity. These characters are still in search of their auteur.

Too bad that the director, George Cukor, doesn't have a little more feeling for the loony baroque; the story is treated much too soberly.

A slight and rueful affair, intermittently funny.

LaBute's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Restoration comedy is undercut by the fact that his dialogue is only fitfully funny, and you can't help but feel soured by the flat, ritualistic look of the action. The one enlivening performance comes, surprisingly, from Jason Patric.

The film is perceptive and shrewd about such matters as the awkwardness of two kinds of aristocracy and power brought face to face. But "Hyde Park" never catches fire.

The whole saga, complete with shootings and a car chase, is cooked up for the film. Meanwhile, when it comes to those with whom Davis worked so fruitfully to forge what he calls “social music,” we get nothing of Dizzy Gillespie or John Coltrane, say, and only the odd glimpse of Gil Evans (Jeffrey Grover).

The dramatic format seems borrowed from television, with multiple threads jumpily interweaved, to ward off impatience. With so many balls in the air at once, the movie lacks the kind of patient observation that this story demands.

Unfortunately, The Bride! falls victim to this hollowing out of character, and the result feels simultaneously like a reduction and an expansion—or call it an inflation, an accretion of curious traits that crop up conveniently but remain undiscussed and undeveloped.

Unfortunately, the film only hints at its larger ambitions and leaves them undeveloped. The story is told mainly methodically, sometimes deftly, but with little verve, relying on a generalized sensitivity that never approaches imaginative curiosity. It holds attention as a yarn but doesn’t build the incidents of its plot into a world view.

It's so tastefully tame that there's no supsense.

Cooper’s movie certainly doesn’t make Bruce’s childhood look happy, but in limiting Bruce’s retrospective gloom to the personal realm, it ignores the singer-songwriter’s wider social vision. The movie doesn’t have the courage of the real-life Springsteen’s convictions.

The ideas behind Enduring Love may be fascinating, but they don’t play; they sulk.

Most of the movie lacks zest.

With its straining yet deadened feel, this is the movie of a director who dreams of putting on one last show before going home.

Red Rocket is over-plotted, over-aestheticized, under-characterized, and under-observed.

If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, In the Heart of the Sea, sadly, is not the place to start. Try “Splash.”

The images aren’t only stripped of superfluities; they’re hermetically sealed off from anything that could impinge from offscreen, from the world at large. They feel designed, deadeningly, to mean just one thing.

Cranston, in Last Flag Flying, seeks out the same terrain, but his crudeness is more of a crotchety act, and the journey concludes on a glum conservative note. Some stories need not be told again. ♦

Pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end. [26 Nov. 2012, p.87]

Ennio turns out to be overlong, overblown, and larded with such praises that Morricone, a modest if determined soul, would blush to hear them.

The tragedy of these two peoples, killing each other because each has just claims to the same plot of ground, is presented with efficient, impersonal evenhandedness, so that we care about neither of them.

If I were a Turkish official, I would not be too worried by this picture. Nothing so slippery can stir up indignation. [18 November 2002, p. 104]

The script is sketchy and somewhat puzzling (after a blissful night with Mousse, Paul leaves in the morning without explanation), but we're carried along by the potently ambiguous moods, the slow shifts from distant friendship to intimacy.

Rather than offering a stark and incisive vision, this aesthetic of tacitness delivers a sentimentalized prettiness. The results are merely vague, in a way that seems willfully naïve about Japan, about labor, and about art.

It’s telling that, in a picture that exudes more than a whiff of artistic fatigue, the newcomer to Lanthimos’s company supplies the freshest impact.

Only Hailee Steinfeld’s committed performance as Nadine, a troubled high-school junior in Oregon, and Woody Harrelson’s deft turn, as a teacher who helps her, make this thin and cliché-riddled comic drama worth watching.

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

Apart from Blanchett's performance, Veronica Guerin is not very interesting. The movie offers a brainless Hollywood version of investigative journalism. [10 November 2003, p. 129]

Compare this film with "Mud," and you realize how desperately you cared about the fate of the boys in "Mud," whereas those in Vogt-Roberts's movie are often too listless and too plaintive to earn, let alone heighten, our anxiety. [3 June 2013, p.74]

The movie holds one in its surly grip, but when it's over, few people, I think, are likely to be haunted by it. Futility may work as a mood in a short story, but in a full-scale movie it doesn't bear looking at for very long. (29 Oct 2001, p. 92)

It's a Velveeta comedy, processed like a Neil Simon picture, with banter and gags and an unctuous score. All its smart talk is low-key and listless. It stays on the surface, yet it's dissatisfied with the surface; it's a deeply indecisive movie.

To be fair, Irresistible picks up in the final quarter, with the aid of a clever twist that whistles in from nowhere. We get an assortment of different endings, each undercutting the last. It’s as if this dozy film has woken up, belatedly, to its comic responsibilities and opportunities.

The script, by Miles Hood Swarthout and Scott Hale, is a mechanical demonstration of how greedy and unfeeling the townspeople are, and Don Siegel's directing lacks rhythm--each scene dies a separate death.

Damon may be too young, too unformed, to play an amnesiac. Gazing at that blank face, we can't imagine that Bourne has any experiences or memories to forget. [17 & 24 June 2002, p. 176]

By the end of The Hateful Eight, its status as a tale of mystery and its deference to classic Westerns have all but disappeared, worn down by the grind of its sadistic vision. That is the Tarantino deal: by blowing out folks’ brains, he wants to blow our minds.

In short, the pursuit of pleasure is not confined to our hero alone but extended to all comers, with a horny democratic good will, and it’s typical of Korine to suggest that, in an era as acrimonious as ours, the true provocation is to harbor no grudges, to forgive us our trespasses, and to drift along, catching the tide of contentment.

The actors’ skill is in the foreground, and it’s impressive—it’s the one thing worth watching the movie for (remarkably, this is Zendaya’s first major dramatic-movie role). But Levinson spotlights that skill at the expense of emotional risk, including—indeed, especially—any of his own.

The film that results is at once panicky and abstruse, and we are left with little more than the delirious shine of McConaughey’s eyes and the preacherly rapture in his voice.

Sadly, the new film is glum, dishearteningly so, and its narrative pulse is weak.

The best parts of the new film, by a long stretch, are the flying sequences, in which Dumbo wheels around inside the tent. Sometimes he even has a jockey, in the daring shape of Colette (Eva Green), the in-house trapeze artist. Elsewhere, however, we are dragged through patches of glum and listless drama.

Shyamalan remains as coolly unstirred by sex as he was in his previous movies--an astounding indifference, given the historical entwining of eros and fright. Even more bizarre is the gradual draining of humor from his work; the anatomy of horror demands a tongue in the cheek to go with the baring of teeth, but much of The Village is a proud and sullen affair.

Anyone who soldiered through "The Expendables," two years ago, will be touched, and a little surprised, to learn that there is more to expend. [3 Sept. 2012, p.79]

The movie is so discreet and respectful that, outside the classroom, within whose walls the glory of French literature and language triumph, it never quite comes to life. [16 April 2012, p. 86]

The scenes of the musicians rehearsing or talking about music, with the actors playing parts of Opus 131 themselves (the longer stretches are played by the Brentano Quartet), are fascinating and moving for anyone who loves this music; the rest of the movie is conventional.

Estevez has made a vague gesture at a large, metaphoric structure without having the dramatic means to achieve it. His choreography of the panic and misery in the hotel after the shooting is impressive, and some of the actors do fine in their brief roles. But his script never rises above earnest banality, and we are constantly being taught little lessons in tolerance and humanity:

The result may be the oddest film of the season. It boasts an array of sublime backdrops and a yearning score, but the climate of feeling is anxious and inward, encapsulated in Stiller’s darting gaze, and the movie itself keeps glancing backward, at the lost and the obsolete.

The Terminal is highly crafted whimsy; it lacks any compelling reason to exist, and its love story is a dud. Ever bashful when it comes to boy-girl stuff, Spielberg has structured the relationship between Amelia and Viktor to be as asexual as possible.

The film is rich in fillips--smart little taps and strokes. But after a while you start asking yourself, what is this movie about? (You're still asking when it's over.)

This movie is both a satirical epic and a square celebration, yet the satire backfires.

The movie tells an admirable and moving story about a woman overcoming her troubles, but it arouses no aesthetic interest, no sense of discovery in real time, no sense of creative risk.

In Holdridge's movie there is as much to repel as there is to allure, and I cannot imagine leaving a screening of it in anything less than two minds.

Contriving somehow both to dawdle and to rush, Murder on the Orient Express” is handsome, undemanding, and almost wholly bereft of purpose.

The exaggerated, unambiguous expressivity and the connect-the-dots definitions of character (featuring pat confessions and reheated memories) reflect the closed-off academicism of acting workshops and screenplay pitches rather than the open-ended complexities of life.

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 bio-pic, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd, is an oddly unsettled compound of glorification and malice. It whirts around restlessly and winds up nowhere. [2 Jan. 2012, p.78]

It is possible to applaud Pacific Rim for the efficacy of its business model while deploring the tale that has been engendered — long, loud, dark, and very wet. You might as well watch the birth of an elephant.

One is forced to ask: who wants to make, or watch, a major Hollywood musical about mental block?

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.

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

Inception, is an astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.

It's marred by a holiday family-picture heartiness--the M-G-M back-lot Americana gets rather thick.

The extreme innocence of Rose (Andrea Riseborough), the young girl whom Pinkie seduces in order to keep her quiet, is no longer very convincing, or even interesting.

It's a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness. The plot is compromised, not resolved, by the pulling of a gun.

Boyle is genial, eager, and prolific, and his effusion has ignited films like "Trainspotting" and "Slumdog Millionaire," yet for every blaze that excites us there has been another that burns itself out without leaving a mark, let alone a scar, on our emotions. So it is with Trance. [8 April 2013, p.88]

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

Singleton's plot is disappointingly conventional; it obeys screenwriting-class rules. The experience he's dealing with here deserves something more than the tidy dramatic structure that he has imposed on it.

Considered as a sequel, Be Cool is not an insult, but it’s a lazy, rhythmless, and redundant piece of moviemaking.

The pieces are clever enough that the film is rarely boring—it keeps a viewer hoping that the spark of life will strike sometime before the lights go up. But it’s not to be: it remains a movie in search of an animating spirit.

The line between the dispassionate and the dull can be ominously faint, and when Rohmer kicks off his film with ten or fifteen minutes of solid anecdotal chat, you fear for the stamina of the audience. [13 May 2002, p. 96]

A junk-food mixture of poetry, black anger, bathroom humor, and routines that have come through the sit-com mill.

People hadn't seen anything like it; that doesn't mean they needed to.

And that's it, really: two hours of loneliness, interleaved with havoc. The dialogue has been distilled to expletives and grunts. [16 Sept. 2013, p.74]