What binds and clads the new movie most thoroughly, however, is not storytelling but the high pressure of atmosphere.

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.

Not even Neeson, with his strength and his wounded-giant vulnerability, can prevent our interest in Unknown from sliding into contempt.

In its own sombre, inflated terms, the picture is effective, but it's dragged out so many self-importantly that you have time to recognize what a hopelessly naive, incompetent, and untrustworthy lawyer the hero is.

Beatty packs the movie with labored period references and unsubtle allusions to Donald Trump. He delights in Hughes’s high-handed wisdom, his high-stakes gamesmanship, and his petty idiosyncrasies, while looking ruefully at his paranoid reclusiveness.

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.

It's a beautiful disaster, like a bomb test out in the middle of nowhere. [7 Oct 1991, p.100]

The trouble with Holofcener's scheme is that the center of the movie is dead. Olivia has no drives or hopes or powerful regrets. She has nothing to say, and Aniston does most of her acting with her lower lip.

A frantic and funny diversion, but it pales and tires before its time is up. It doesn't know the meaning of enough.

As is proved by documentary footage at the end, Garth Davis’s film is based on a true story; though wrenching, there is barely enough of it to fill the dramatic space, and the second half is a slow and muted affair after the Dickensian punch of the first.

Martin has a few good silly gags, but you may find yourself fighting to stay awake and losing.

Ernst Lubitsch, who directed, starts off on the wrong foot and never gets his balance; the performers yowl their lines, and the burlesque of the Nazis, who cower before their superior officers, is more crudely gleeful than funny.

The Dark Knight is hardly routine--it has a kicky sadism in scene after scene, which keeps you on edge and sends you out onto the street with post-movie stress disorder.

The movie was written and directed by Brian Helgeland, whose screenplay for “L.A. Confidential” (1997) won an Oscar — deservedly so, for the skein of plot required a steady hand. Legend, by contrast, pummels us into believing that it has a plot, where none exists.

Kaufman seeks admiration for his warmhearted and gentle humanism and also for his extravagant creativity, even when the latter gets in the way of the former—when his cleverness stands like a child’s antics in front of the screen where the movie is playing, defying viewers to pay attention to what’s going on behind him while amiably indulging or ignoring his trickery.

The director Peter Yates and the writer Steve Tesich try to make a new, more meaningful version of a 40s melodrama, but their Manhattan-set thriller bogs down in a tangle of plot.

A scruffy, thick-grained piece of work, shot in thirty days and scrawled not with luscious coloring but with the tense and inky markings of a society that is fighting to keep its reputation for togetherness, and wondering what that reputation is still worth. [18 & 25 Feb 2002. p. 199]

Less than the sum of its outrageous gags and inventive bits of business. The story is impressively bloody, but the blood is thin, and it keeps leaking out; Tarantino has all he can do to maintain the movie's pulse. Mostly, he tries to get by on film-school cleverness – a homemade pharmaceutical cocktail of allusions, pop music, and visual jolts. [19 Oct 1992]

Who needs a movie that is almost all predators, with barely a word from their prey?

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

But finally the film is no more than a flamboyant curiosity, replacing the spooky obsessiveness of "La Jetée" with a much tamer kind of weirdness. Also with Brad Pitt, in a showy role as a voluble lunatic; he's dreadful.

If you were to watch Lockout a few months from now, at home alone, it wouldn't produce more than a shrug. Movies this bad need to be revered in public places. Go see it in a mall, and try to sneak a beer or two in with you.

Traces of real history are hard to spot in Fuqua’s Western, but there isn’t much evidence of a real Western, either. You sense that an entire genre, far from being revitalized, is being plundered for handy tips.

The premise of this Hitchcock thriller is promising, but the movie, set in Quebec and partly shot there, is so reticent it's mostly dull.

Hill attempted to stylize gangster characters and conventions, and although he succeeded in the action sequences, which have a near-abstract visual power, the stylized characters, with their uninflected personalities, flatten the movie out.

In truth, the only soul to emerge with any credit from “Bullet Train” is Brad Pitt, who drifts through the tumult in a haze of unbothered charm.

Like so many earnestly conceived morality tales, Promised Land is built around a man's quandaries. Any actor less skilled and sympathetic than Damon might have betrayed the material into obviousness. [14 Jan. 2013, p.78]

The suspense, to be honest, is pretty half-cocked, and made to seem more intense than it is by outbursts of dimly choreographed panic.

An all-star send-up of the Bond films, with multiple Bonds and multiple directors, has some laughs, but it makes one terribly conscious of wastefulness. Jokes and plots and possibilities are thrown away along with huge, extravagant sets, and famous performers go spinning by.

There are some good ideas tucked away inside scrambled unpleasantness.

The script has first-rate, hardheaded, precise, sometimes funny dialogue, but it errs in bringing this girl too much to the center. Dramatically, the film lacks snap; there isn't enough tension in the way Max destroys his freedom, and so the story drags--it seems to have nowhere to go but down.

On the Road is always on the verge of imparting some great truth, but it never arrives. [14 Jan. 2013, p.79]

By the end of the film, you just want to get away from these people.

There has long been a strain of sorry lassitude in Kaufman's work, and here it sickens into the morbid.

The most surprising aspect of the film is its suburban mildness, plus the hapless charm of its hero, Enn (Alex Sharp).

Gunn is admirably overflowing with imagination, but he squanders his best material.

The picture is stupid and often perfunctory; at the same time it's moderately enjoyable.

The result is sweet and moody, and richly photographed by Sven Nykvist, but you can't help feeling shortchanged; Hanks and Ryan have quick wits, and funny faces to match—they should be striking sparks off each other, not mooching around waiting for something to happen.

The plot of Silver City is movieish in the extreme, with filthy abandoned mines subbing for the bars and alleys of urban noir, but it’s no more than mild cheese--“The Big Sleep” or “Chinatown” without the malice, rigorous design, and narrative epiphanies.

Near the end of the journey, chronicling Sunni car bombers in Iraq, he (Baer) talks sorrowfully of Muslims killing Muslims, and he concludes that suicide bombing has lost any coherent political meaning and has taken on an irresistible life of its own as a glamorous cult.

How, then, does The Good German--adapted by Paul Attanasio from Joseph Kanon's novel--wind up so insubstantial, its impact lasting no longer than a cigarette?

The result is clever, and the narrative twistings keep you on your toes, but there's just one hitch: it ain't funny.

The film was lavishly produced, with great care given to the sets and costumes and makeup, but the spirit is missing.

Everything’s in place, and there’s not a weak link in the cast, with Debicki — lofty, playful, and unreadable — in especially beguiling form. The idea that art, like love, is something that you can make or fake, and that surprisingly few people can tell the difference, will always be ripe for exploration. And yet the movie stumbles.

Lumet wrote the script alone, and he's so busy laying on the rancorous, bantering atmosphere that he waits too long to get to the plot; the movie becomes torpid.

The hero's restlessness infects the rest of the movie; the story feels febrile and unhappy, and Allen seems to take his dissatisfaction out on his helpless characters--especially the women.

Yet the movie’s grasp of experience feels tenuous, trippy, and, dare one say, adolescent; if you gave an extremely bright fifteen-year-old a bag of unfamiliar herbs to smoke, and forty million dollars or so to play with, Mother! would be the result.

Tintin is exhausting, and, for all its wonders, it wears one out well before it's over.

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.

The showdown in Houston, for instance, comes across as tacky rather than triumphant, its sexual politics smothered in salesmanship, and redeemed only by the ferocity of Stone’s demeanor as she puts away yet another smash.

The unexciting look and feel of the movie wouldn’t have bothered me if the filmmakers had penetrated Hanssen’s skull a little.

The whole film, in fact, which Pitts wrote and directed, lurks on the borders of the unspecified. That is the source of its cool, but also of its sullen capacity to annoy.

This film's got EVERYTHING, although purists might quibble that it lacks any sliver of plausibility or dramatic interest.

"Deep Throat" bore an X certificate. Inside Deep Throat is an NC-17. Neither is suitable for grownups.

Hal Ashby directed this intuitive yet amorphous movie, which falls apart when he resorts to melodramatic crosscutting.

The farce situations are pushed too broadly, and have a sanctimonious patriotic veneer, but this first American film directed by Billy Wilder was a box-office hit.

The movie doesn't suggest that adolescents have a right to sexual experimentation -- it just attacks the corrupted grown-ups for their failure to value love above all else. It's the old corn, fermented in a new way.

For all the nippiness in the dialogue (the script is by Jim Kouf) and the comic interplay of the actors, the picture doesn't leave you with anything.

What fun there is derives from the smart editing (Rodriguez did his own cutting, and he's quicker on the draw than most of the pistol-packers) and from Antonio Banderas, who, stepping neatly into the Mariachi's boots, lends irony and calm, and even a trace of sweetness, to a nothing role.

The Duplasses' sensitivity, which is genuine, yields too much tepid relationship-speak, and Marisa Tomei, one of the most appealing actresses in Hollywood, is left with little to play.

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

Imagine a different film on a similar theme, with Hubert moved to center stage and García replaced by Pedro Almodóvar, for whom cross-dressers in a Catholic country would be meat and drink. Poor Albert could then retreat into the shadows, where he so evidently belongs, emerging only to pour the wine and clear away the feast.

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

Parts of Bangkok Dangerous, far from seeming unfamiliar or freshly stylized, offer nothing that you couldn't catch in an episode of "CSI."

Luhrmann's vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he's less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste. [13 May 2013, p.78]

The script, by James Toback, is a grandiloquent, egocentric novel written as a film; it spells everything out, and the director Karel Reisz's literal-minded, proficient style calls attention to how airless and schematic it is.

You have to applaud for sheer folly. This doesn't just reprise another film. It reprises a French film.

The movie isn’t a desecration, but it’s action filmmaking, not America, that needs to be reborn.

Annette is a folie de grandeur, alas, without the grandeur.

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

In striving for more than the original, it achieves far less.

Richard Dreyfuss, hunching over and baring his teeth like a shark cruising off a Martha's Vineyard beach, does a wicked impersonation of Cheney. His relish for the part suggests that the movie should have been done not as an earnest bio-pic but as a satirical comedy -- as a contemporary "Dr. Strangelove," with a cast of satyrs and clowns.

There are not only glancing moments but whole sequences in this movie when the agony of social embarrassment makes you want to haul the characters to their feet and slap them in the chops.

The failure of The Rider to see Brady in his intellectual and experiential specificity, to render him as interesting as the dramatic shell in which Zhao places him, is a failure of directorial imagination.

It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun in this account of a schizophrenic ventriloquist.

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.

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.

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.

For all its sententious grandiosity and metaphorical politics, “The Way of Water” is a regimented and formalized excursion to an exclusive natural paradise that its select guests fight tooth and nail to keep for themselves. The movie’s bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas.

A sombre, boring little thriller based on David Baldacci's ridiculous right-wing best-seller.

The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power.

The stars lack any sort of chemistry, which is too bad, since the script, by the always unreliable Ron Bass (with William Broyles), is intended as a romantic cat-and-mouse fantasy.

Second-rate bawdiness--that is, bawdiness without the wit of Boccaccio or Shakespeare or even Tom Stoppard--is more infantile than funny, and I’m not sure that the American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who concocted this piece for the stage and then adapted it into a movie, is even second-rate.

Cocaine Bear has a peculiar jostling quality, as the various characters shuffle onto center stage and then get elbowed aside to make way for the next contender.

Probably the material was too precious and fake-lyrical to have worked in natural surroundings, either, but the way it has been done it's hopelessly stagey.

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

The 12th James Bond film goes through the motions, but not only are we tired of them, the actors are tired of them - even the machines are tired...The producers have made the mistake of deciding on a simpler, more realistic package, without dazzling sets or a big, mad super villain.

The actors have occasional intense and affecting moments, going through emotions that they set off in each other, but Cassavetes is the sort of man who is dedicated to stripping people of their pretenses and laying bare their souls. Inevitably, the results are agonizingly banal.

The new film finds a few of its most inspired moments where it revises the plot to reflect current sensibilities, but its strained efforts at reviving the characters and situations of the original make it feel both hollow and leaden.

The Recruit is quick and tense, and some of it is fun, but I didn't believe a single thing in it, and the over-all effect of the movie is to make one depressed that the Christmas "art" season is over. [27 January 2003, p. 94]

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.

Say what you like about the feuds of old, they exerted a dynastic thrust that made sense, whereas Leterrier’s magic tricks are the foe of logic; for some reason, the scorpions wind up as friendly transport for our heroes, so why battle them in the first place?

Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.

We are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. [6 October 2003, p. 138]

It's all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it's obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.