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.

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

Maguire has the nerve to give her heroine a big speech on the “integrity” of proper journalism — this after Bridget Jones’s Baby has made fun of foreigners’ names, and arranged for her to put the wrong Asian guest in front of the cameras. (Do all Asians look alike to her? Is that the joke?) So reliably does she embarrass herself at every public event that the film, trudging by on automatic, becomes an embarrassment, too.

To transform a TV series into a film is to surround yourself with pitfalls, and “Absolutely Fabulous,” sad to report, nosedives into every one of them.

If the rest of the movie had been on Travolta's level of sly knowingness, it might have been a hip classic, rather than what it is -- a summertime debauch. [23 July 2012, p. 81]

Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

Paltrow is as radiant as ever, but she keeps picking parts that focus on technical skills like accents -- she has yet to perform the real star's trick of being herself, and inviting the audience to identify.

The Drama plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse.

Dull for the first hour and beefy with basic thrills for most of the second.

The strength of the movie resides mainly in the work of its cameraman, Chris Menges, who delivers a barrage of images as rousing and changeable as the fortunes of Collins himself.

In trying to do too much in its mere eighty-seven-minute span, “Kim’s Video” does too little. For all Redmon’s self-described passion for movies and obsession with the Kim’s Video trove, the film has little to say about a wider view of video-store life and its relationship to the movie-viewing experience.

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

The ultimate deflation of the movie into a pointed drama of norms and ethics doesn’t, however, dispel its glorious hour of theatrical spectacle and artistic mystery.

The movie is fatally perfunctory about emotion, atmosphere, suspense. But if the overall effect is disappointing, from moment to moment the details are never less than engaging, and are often knobby and funny.

Ballerina—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

In serious roles, Weisz can be stiff-backed and righteous, but here, doing comedy, she appears to be a major actress eager to reveal everything she’s been holding inside.

The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.

If the original “Little Mermaid,” in its effervescent way, talked down to its audience, the new one, bluntly but amiably, talks ever so slightly up to its young viewers. It adds hints of a complicated world beyond the narrow realms of fantasy; it delivers earnest cheer.

Unimaginative Bond picture that is often noisy when it means to be exciting.

For Apatow, one guesses, the only things that can forestall death are comedy (the movie is full of superb comics, including Albert Brooks and Melissa McCarthy) and the flourishing of his children, Maude and Iris, who appear in the movie as Debbie and Pete's daughters.

You look at the screen even though there's nothing to occupy your mind--the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can't rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed.

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

Emotions are not toyed with glancingly but stretched out and blazoned forth, and the result is that the new film is nearly an hour longer than the original cartoon.

So klunky and poorly paced, and so loaded with sanctimonious moral lessons, that even the George and Ira Gershwin score doesn't save it.

The script and conception are so maudlin and degrading that Cagney's high dedication becomes somewhat oppressive.

Innocuous musical version of A Christmas Carol, starring Albert Finney looking glum. The Leslie Bricusse music is so forgettable that your mind flushes it away while you're hearing it.

With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.

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

The movie is pervaded by a cataclysmic sense of loss, but we don’t need to be chastised with the ideal of Christian love to understand that sex isn’t enough. And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough, either. Only a major filmmaker could have made To the Wonder, but nothing in it adds up.

The chemistry of pop vulgarization is all-powerful here; factually, this life of Billie Holiday is a fraud, but emotionally it delivers.

Directed by James Fargo, this third in the series doesn't have the savvy to be as sadistic as its predecessors; it's just limp.

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

Despite clichéd depictions of Nazi atrocities, the movie persuasively evokes, with its wealth of details, the slender threads on which historical events—and historical truth—depend.

As you watch, you don't think of the decline of American civilization; you think that these are good actors giving themselves a hell of a workout in a misbegotten movie. [6 Jan. 2014, p.72]

The movie could be every errant husband's self-justifying fantasy. (And the way Burstyn overacts, a man would have to be a saint to have stayed with her so long.) Directed by Bud Yorkin, from a script by Colin Welland, the picture is like a sermon on the therapeutic value of adultery, divorce, and remarriage, given by a minister who learned all he knows from watching TV.

The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.

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.

What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies.

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.

Cronenberg has made an eccentric and beautiful-looking movie - a languid, deadpan, conceptualist joke.

Greengrass is as dexterous as ever, yet the result, though abounding in thrills, seems oddly stifled by self-consciousness and, dare one say, superfluous. Come on, guys. There are so many wrongs in the world. If Bourne could tear himself away from the mirror for a moment, could he not be persuaded to go and right them?

The film’s attempt to portray the Queen as more politically enlightened than her courtiers is kindly but unconvincing, and many of the actors bark and behave as if participating in a spoof.

An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents-the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky.

For those who think of cinema as dramatic roughage, The Reader should prove sufficiently indigestible.

The movie is a form of hysterical, rabble-rousing pulp, yet it isn't involving; it doesn't have the propulsion of good pulp storytelling.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

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

Stroker slips down the gullet with less fuss, but there are enough blood sprays and snapped vertebrae to pacify the director's clamorous fan club -- and, for the rest of us, plenty of chances to reconsider his style. It is, unquestionably, something to behold. [8 March 2013, p.80]

The intricate baseball knowledge that gets passed back and forth among the characters in Trouble with the Curve is much more interesting than the moral simplicities that the movie offers. [8 Oct. 2012, p.87]

Defiance, as it turns out, makes insistent emotional demands, and those who respond to it at all, as I did, are likely to go all the way and even come out of it feeling slightly stunned.

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.

The three actresses put so much faith in their roles that they carry the movie, triumphantly. They take the play's borderline pathos about heartbreakingly screwed-up lives--it's a mixture of looniness and lyricism--and give it real vitality.

One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years.

The Dictator, like its predecessors, is short (eighty-three minutes), but it runs down fast, and the lewd jokes pile up. [28 May 2012, p. 76]

Quantum of Solace is too savage for family entertainment, but, as a study in headlong desperation, it's easier to believe in than many more ponderous films.

The result is a lively bout between bio-pic and fairy tale.

The audience decided to sell Snakes to itself, and that became the event--the actual movie could never have been more than another exploitation picture.

A long, lumbering brute of a movie, no easier to maneuver than the vessel itself. [29 July 2002, p. 92]

The pleasures of the design fade along with those of the pat and callow drama.

Even though the target of satire in Jojo Rabbit is clearly the Nazis, the movie sharply but unintentionally satirizes itself, as well as its makers and the movie industry at large that saw fit to produce, release, and acclaim it.

The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying.

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.

Cry Macho doesn’t resound with the hectic astonishment of The 15:17 to Paris or the tragic imagination of Sully, but it delivers whispers of both. Its breezy, easygoing fable of late-life adventure and connection is also a story of an over-the-hill athlete who may meet his match on any street corner.

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

What is most disappointing about Big Fish is the nervousness of its fantasizing--a strange unwillingness, new in Burton's work, to trust the wit of the audience. [15 December 2003, p. 119]

One problem with Lawless, though, is that it feels chock-full of entrances that never quite lead anywhere. [3 Sept. 2012, p.78]

There are lapses in the continuity, and the picture is pushed toward a ready-made, theatre-of-the-absurd melodrama--the kind of instant fantasy that filled One From the Heart.

With the exception of Jake Gyllenhaal, whose shambling self-disgust hits the only genuine note, the movie is a classic of Hollywood miscasting and ambition gone askew.

The movie is never plain boring, but its comic pathos and Southern-gothic cuteness can grate on you.

Now the mush has taken over, and Columbus has slowed his pace in nervous deference to the solemnity of his plot (not to mention the opulence of his characters' lives).

The action goes beyond conventional excitement to achieve a tragic grandeur.

It’s hard not to conclude that, in the case of “Eden,” Howard simply isn’t mean enough for this material. His temperament is better suited to stories of heroic resilience than ones of greed, bloodlust, and cynical isolationism.

"All good stories deserve embellishment," Gandalf says to Bilbo before they set off, and one has to ask whether the weight of embellishment, on this occasion, makes the journey drag, and why it leaves us more astounded than moved. And yet, on balance, honor has been done to Tolkien, not least in the famous riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum.

The plot material isn't as strong as in the first two movies--if anything, it feels a bit desperate--but the anti-Disney joke blunderbuss remains in good working order.

Shallow, but the gimmick is appealing, and Woodward's showmanship is very likable.

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.

This is an impersonal and rather junky piece of moviemaking. It's packed with torture scenes, and it bangs away at you. And every time there's a possibility of a dramatic climax - a chance to engage the audience emotionally with something awesome - the director Richard Marquand trashes it.

Some of the episodes are ripely satirical, others almost heartbreaking. Allison Janney appears as a coarse drunk who taunts her kids; Maggie Gyllenhaal is a pushy New Age mom whose aggressive virtue saps the strength of everyone around her.

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.

Tomlin confirms herself as a star whenever she gets the material, and Dolly Parton's dolliness is very winning, but it's easy to forget that Jane Fonda is around - she seems to get lost in the woodwork. The director, Colin Higgins, is a young fossil who sets up flaccid, hand-me-down gags as if they were hilarious, and damned if the audience doesn't laugh.

Nothing that happens in this movie is in the least surprising, but it's all quite pleasant and even, at times, moving.

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.

Eastwood's gun power makes him the hero of a totally nihilistic dream world. Ted Post's direction is mediocre; the script by John Milius and Michael Cimino is cheaply effective.

Eventually, despite a number of Dionysian interludes, not least a drug-driven scooter ride with neither helmets nor clothes, this on-off emotional rhythm grows demoralizing, and the movie becomes a less than appealing blend of rave and rut.

This one is really only for Trekkies; others are likely to find it tolerable but yawny.

You should, nonetheless, make a date to watch Mangold’s film, and, if you have to duck out after an hour because you’ve left something in the oven, no matter.

By the time Dorothy and her friends march on Elphaba’s lair, there seems to be something more pernicious than mere mediocrity at work. It’s as if the picture were so cowed by its iconic predecessor that it could only respond with a petulant urge to destroy the classic it could never be.

The last third of the movie is as bad as anything I’ve seen this year, with the laughs trailing off, and half of the supporting characters, the zestier ones, being airbrushed from the frame. (What director in his right mind would drop Tina Fey from the proceedings?)

It's a candied Mean Streets, evenly and impersonally directed by Stuart Rosenberg. It has no temperament -- it doesn't even have any get-up-and-go. But Patrick supplies colorful "ethnic" dialogue, and the actors run with it.

Low-budget sci-fi, from an often amusing suspense script by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffith, directed by Paul Bartel in his ingratiatingly tacky, sophomoric manner. Bartel seems to have an instinctive kinky comic-book style; the picture rips along, and there's a flip craziness about it - it's an ideal drive-in movie.

One of the year’s more luscious releases, offering not just the sleekest car chase but the most romantic of rainstorms.

In the movie, Myers still boasts his inexplicably confident and cheery expressions -- he's a mischievous smile button. But Carvey overworks his twisted mouth.

Feels at once secondhand in its eagerness and unknowing in its scorn.

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.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

Standard gory imitation of Dirty Harry, The French Connection, and Bullitt.

“Them” — apart from a few affecting scenes — is a hollow, high-minded folly.