The movie is of minimum interest; the story of the movie, however -- or, rather, of the way in which it has been engulfed by its own publicity -- is bound to fascinate connoisseurs of cultural meltdown.

Every Bay film is cheesy, but this one counts as high-speed cheese, grilled to the max by Danny’s thoughtful advice: “Just. Drive. Fast.”

You can read a lot into it, but it isn't very enjoyable. The lines are often awkward and the line readings worse, and the film is often static, despite economic, quick editing.

Even as Cold Weather approaches nullity, it gives some pleasure. [7 Feb. 2011, p. 83]

Near the end, we get to hear John Barry’s “The Persuaders” — not only one of the catchiest TV themes ever composed, redolent of moneyed innocence, but a key to the tactics of this movie. It is at once damnable and debonair. It seduces as it repels.

It's pleasant to see these two in a picture where they're not carrying all the sins of mankind of their shoulders, but they've gone too far in the opposite direction--they're not carrying anything.

What’s lost is the way a colossal spirit such as Dylan confronts everyday challenges with a heightened sense of style and daring.

Elegant nonsense. For some years, it's been clear that De Palma's work has lost the jolting intellectual energy and wit of his "Carrie" and "Dressed to Kill" days, and in Femme Fatale the Master is just diddling. [25 November 2002, p. 108]

Almost nothing engages us emotionally. [8 Oct. 2012, p.86]

There is something willed and implausible at the heart of L’Enfant, beginning with the child himself--the first non-crying, non-hungry infant in human history, let alone in cinema.

Hysterical twaddle.

The curious thing is that, as with many big-budget horror flicks, this small French-Belgian movie feels too pleased with its own outrage; the grosser it grows, the less interesting it becomes. When the carnage was over, I went out and had a steak.

The movie’s heart is certainly in the right place--it’s a quietly outraged work--but I wish there were more excitement in it from moment to moment.

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

BlackBerry plays like a prototype still waiting to be realized, a sketch that’s still undeveloped.

When Logan and Laura unleash their furious scythes nothing feels settled or satisfied. The world grinds on, fruitlessly weary and wild.

Given the upheavals of the past two years, along the fault line between electoral and sexual politics, Reitman could have told the sorry saga from Rice’s point of view — her brush with fame, and her demonization as a temptress, or worse, at the hands of the media. Why must the fall of man, rather than the survival of woman, still be the main event? Can’t we have the business without the monkeys?

The one element Zeffirelli removes that the other bowdlerizers also removed is Shakespeare's language. Only about half the play is left, and what's there doesn't build up the rhythm of a poetic drama. Heard in isolated fragments, the lines just seem a funny way of talking that is hard to understand.

The sumptuousness of Schlesinger's style is impressive. There's something lordly (and a little bored) in this director's command of the medium. While he gives you the felling that he knows what he's doing, he has no staying power--he doesn't develop any of the ideas he tosses in.

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.

If only the style of The Artist’s Wife could scald with equal intent. Alas, it opts for plangency, with a musical score applied like a gentle balm, and a plot that hungers for healing—absurdly so, given the incurable nature of Richard’s plight.

Even judged by the not excessively demanding standards of middle-aged renovation fantasies, A Good Year isn’t much.

By the time Tarantino shows up as a redneck with an unexplained Australian accent, Django Unchained has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.

Gaudy black-exploitation film with explicit racism and some that's implicit. Partly slick, partly amateurish.

Rather shrill and tiresome.

As a study in prankhood, this Banksy film can’t touch “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’s 1974 movie about an art forger. Welles both conspired with his untrustworthy subject and held him at arm’s length, like a conjurer with his rabbit, and you came out dazzled by the sleight, whereas Exit Through the Gift Shop feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult--almost, dare one say it, of a brand.

Reitman is a witty filmmaker, but here he seems a little disconnected, too.

As daft, outlandish, and speedy as it needs to be, and, for all its newfangled effects, touchingly old-fashioned in its reverence for the Jules Verne novel that inspired it.

Low-grade horror.

There's a prodigious amount of talent in Francis Ford Coppola's unusual, little-seen film, but it's a ponderously self-conscious effort; the writer-director applies his film craftsmanship with undue solemnity to material that suggests a gifted college student's imitation of early Tennessee Williams. The result is academic, and never believable.

The standard defense of such material is that we are watching “cartoon violence,” but, when filmmakers nudge a child into viewing savagery as slapstick, are we not allowing them to do what we condemn in the pornographer--that is, to coarsen and inflame?

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

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.

When the picture stops being comic it turns into a different kind of kitsch... The material turns into cheesy plot-centered melodrama... Beetlejuice would have spit in this movie's eye. [17 Dec 1990]

Thor: Love and Thunder, directed by Taika Waititi, is far from the worst of Marvel’s big-screen offerings. It’s brisk, amiable, and straightforward...But the film passes through the nervous system without delivering any sustenance or even leaving a residue.

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.

Some sign of mental reach would have been welcome, even if it extended only as far as their children. Indeed, given the title, it's remarkable how little space is granted to the offspring, who are introduced as excretory machines, sex-blocking irritants, and occasional simpering angels, but never as beings unto themselves. Any parents who see this movie should be warned about the final score: Friends 6, Kids 0.

Yes, we all contain multitudes. And, yes, we must learn to take the bad with the good—a lesson that Inside Out 2 bears out more dispiritingly, I think, than its makers intended.

Directed by Alan Parker, the movie takes itself inordinately seriously as a moral fable expressing eternal truths. It feels morose and unrelieved, despite the efforts of the two actors.

It wants to be a jaunty heist-caper movie, like Topkapi, of 1964, but it's of quintessential mediocrity: not hip enough to sustain interest, not dreary enough to walk out on.

If you fed the earlier gangster movies into a machine and made a prototype, you'd come up with this picture.

The Oxford theory is ridiculous, yet the filmmakers go all the way with it, producing endless scenes of indecipherable court intrigue in dark, smoky rooms, and a fashion show of ruffs, farthingales, and halberds. The more far-fetched the idea, it seems, the more strenuous the effort to pass it off as authentic.

Sinatra sings pleasantly, and Brando and Simmons are ingratiatingly uneasy when they burst into song and dance, but the movie is extended and rather tedious. The Broadway version is legendary; the movie provides no clue as to why.

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is certainly something to behold. I’m less convinced, for all its frenzied emoting and rain-soaked rutting, that it’s something to feel.

T2 cannot hope to break the mold, as “Trainspotting” did, but Boyle and his cast rifle eagerly through the shards: a motley of plot scraps, crazed camera angles, flashbacks, trips, sight gags, and musical yelps.

From the start, it feels handsome, steady, and stuck; the ties that bind the historical bio-pic are no looser than those which constrain a royal personage, and the frustration to which Victoria would later admit is legible in the face of Emily Blunt, who takes the title role.

I suspect that Buffalo Soldiers is not about the Army at all. Without much ado, it could have been turned into “Buffalo Management Consultants” or “Buffalo Movie Executives.” Any clenched community would suffice. [8 August 2003, p. 84]

A virtual textbook of action clichés.

So self-conscious about its themes that nothing in the storytelling occurs naturally.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi yokes Johnson’s formidable cinematic intelligence to an elaborate feat of fan service that feels, above all, like the rhetorical and dramatic gratification of a religious sect.

The movie is a divertissement; it's lightweight and almost meaningless except for the fights, which are extraordinarily violent. [30 Jan. 2012, p.79]

A methodical, pointlessly grueling movie.

Rather than reconsidering history by intimate acquaintance with a lesser-known hero, it turns its hero into a stick figure no more personalized, complex, or contextualized than a comic-book creation. Far from arousing curiosity, the movie forecloses it.

Somehow the movie that Rob Marshall has made from Golden's novel is a snooze. How did he and the screenwriter, Robin Swicord, let their subject get away from them?

But the picture as a whole isn't in the class of "Tootsie" and "Some Like It Hot," mostly because its premise is sentimental, not cynical.

The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie's core, but in the end there's no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.

The Life of Chuck confronts the mysteries of life and the universe and leaves no wonder at all.

The film will neither change minds nor soothe embittered hearts, I fear, and an opportunity has been missed.

The director, Blake Edwards, sets up promising slapstick situations, and then the payoffs are out of step (and worse, repeated); after the first half hour or so, the film loses momentum.

Covino’s technique, for all its finesse, has a mechanistic quality that soon turns deadening. The movie is less a screwball comedy than a screwball contraption—a madcap farce that the screenwriters have reduced to a math problem.

Richard Thorpe directed this package, shrewdly designed to give satisfaction to the new raunchy rock generation. The story ends happily, and the movie made millions, though Presley never begins to suggest the vitality that he showed in documentary footage.

Too self-conscious, though; the cinematography, by Franz Planer, may sometimes evoke Balthus, but the atmosphere is heavy and lugubrious.

The documentary is a mere encyclopedia-like info-product, which reduces its rich audiovisual archival material and its heartfelt interviews with people who knew and loved Bourdain to freeze-dried sound and image bites. It hardly deserves the attention it’s received—and Neville’s audio stunt, far from marring the film, merely serves as a brazen form of self-promotional publicity.

So rich is that visual yield, however, that it needs no verbal boost. Yet, from the moment that Margot says to Daniel, while sitting next to him on a plane, "I'm afraid of connections," the dialogue strains and grunts so hard for effect that it threatens to pull a muscle.

The new film will recruit new friends to the cause; but if we seek George Smiley and his people, with their full complement of terrors, illusions, and shames, we should follow the example of the ever-retiring Smiley, and go back to our books. That's the truth.

Though Space Jam: A New Legacy fails, woefully, as an aesthetic object and as a viewing experience, it somehow nonetheless succeeds as a conceptual representation of a Hollywood studio’s terror in the face of streaming domination, of the movie industry at large that, like Warner Bros., is in the process of being swallowed up in one Serververse or another.

The director, Vincente Minnelli, stages an impressive romantic ball, but the whole movie is hopelessly overscaled.

The gags are almost all on this level, and the little sops to sentiment are even worse.

In short, [Showalter] can’t see Tammy Faye as a person, rather than as a character in a media drama. As a result, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, far from getting behind the public image, merely creates another one.

The Wolf of Wall Street is a fake. It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking. It’s actually a little monotonous; spectacular, and energetic beyond belief, but monotonous in the way that all burlesques become monotonous after a while.

By the end, in truth, I found myself swamped by Scott, and wondered if he might have made more impact as a secondary character — maybe as a foil to his widowed mother, Margie, who is played to perfection by Marisa Tomei.

Hearts and Minds, which gives no clue that atrocities were committed by the other side, and which allows Davis to cut from a rampaging football game, back home, to the Tet offensive, will be a lesson to anybody who thinks that Michael Moore invented the notion of documentary as blunderbuss.

Perhaps the farthest out of the Bob Hope--Bing Crosby road pictures. Some of the patter is pure, relaxed craziness, but the topical jokes and the awful quips keep pulling it down.

The film is too cadenced and exotic and too deliriously complicated to succeed with most audiences (and when it opened, there were accounts of people in theaters who threw things at the screen). But it's winged camp--a horror fairy tale gone wild, another in the long history of moviemakers' king-size follies. There's enough visual magic in it for a dozen good movies; what it lacks is judgement.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone is, despite its trickery, that plainest and least surprising of artifacts; the work of art that is exactly the sum of its parts, neither more nor less. [19 Nov 2001, p. 78]

Sam Peckinpah directed in imitation of Sam Peckinpah; it's a mechanical job, embellished with a vivacious, erotic subplot involving Al Lettieri and Sally Struthers.

Much of the film glides past with a slightly purposeless elegance. Astounding landscapes rise and fall away; enticing women glance and dance and disappear.

It’s almost as if the movie were following the blueprint of a moral scheme, like the layout of a herbaceous border, and plausibility be damned.

The writer-director Robert Benton is unquestionably intelligent, but he seems to have misplaced his sense of humor, and this murder mystery set in Manhattan shows almost no evidence of the nasty streak that's part of the pleasure of a good thriller, or of the manipulative skills that might give us a few tremors.

The year's most divided movie to date; everything that happens in the higher realms, vaguely derived from Nordic legend, is posturing nonsense, whereas the scenes down here are managed, for the most part, with dexterity and wit. [16 May 2011, p. 133]

Sean Penn’s Into the Wild is certainly visual--it’s entirely too visual, to the point of being cheaply lyrical.

The movie takes time to warm up, it weakens into soppiness at the end, and the game itself, if you think it through, makes very little sense.

Zwick can’t find anything fresh in this deeply pious East-meets-West stuff. The movie comes close to dying between battle scenes. [8 December 2003, p. 139]

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.

Yes, it's a collection of barbs and sick jokes, but it's not fun, and it lacks a punch line...The young, inexperience director, Michael Lehmann, doesn't find the right mood for the gags. [17 Apr 1989]

The ineluctable downward pull of absolutely everything in this movie is more exasperating than moving. [12 January 2004, p. 86]

The film's technical achievements may be complex, but its emotions are facile.

The filmmakers peddle fear and then try to claim the moral high ground; the treatment is foolish, confused, and borderline irresponsible.

Probably the first mistake was to approach the book cap in hand, and the next was to hire Pinter; the film needed a writer who would fill in what's missing--Pinter's art is the art of taking away.

I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.

The facetious dialogue is a wet blanket, and De Palma isn't quite up to his apparent intention -- to provide cheap thrills that are also a parody of old corn.

The director, Desiree Akhavan, who wrote the script with Cecilia Frugiuele (adapting a novel by Emily M. Danforth), expresses and elicits apt outrage, but the action is schematic and the characters are thinly sketched.

A mild farce - benign but not really very funny.

While re-creating the vast swing of German forces in and out of Russia, Kadelbach tries to capture the inner turmoil of two men. Call it half a victory.

Strange, empty movie, a metaphysical Cracker Jack box without a prize in its empty-calorie depths.

Full of forced, unnaturally fast quips that one might, in a state of extreme exhaustion, find fairly funny.

Nothing in the movie makes sense, but I prefer to think that Ride Along is just a badly told joke, rather than an insult to its audience.