With Old, facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic—on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

Along with Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, Burton is one of the few magi who know what can be dredged up, even now, from the cauldron of special effects. [21 May 2012, p.80]

The film grows into a caustic comedy, rife with fidgety questions.

Can a director be arrested for the attempted hijack of our emotions?

The movie is fun, largely because it proposes that fun is the principal legacy of the Beatles.

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.”

Viewers will be split between those who wonder about this silly, trumped-up story and those who already know and love the silliness for what it was. [4 November 2002, p. 110]

The film is based on the novel by Helen Schulman, who co-wrote the script with Kidd, and it suffers from the same hobbling that bedevils so many literary adaptations; namely, that what strikes a reader as a conceit of some delicacy will strike a moviegoer as clunking whimsy.

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]

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.

What Rachel McAdams is doing in this nonsense is anyone's guess, but she must realize that the long journey from "Mean Girls" to Mary, with her mousy bangs and her timid pleas counts as a serious descent. [11 Nov. 2013, p.90]

The movie is a technological and publicity triumph, and a calamity in every other way.

With its intellectual earnestness, first-person grandiosity, and aesthetic extravagance, the film is more floridly and brazenly youthful than anything else Coppola has made.

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.

This update has to be one of the most ludicrously dumbed-down versions of a classic to date. But it does have a hip, hybrid soundtrack, and, as directed by Alfonso Cuarón ("A Little Princess"), it's so visually stunning that it's almost gripping in its incoherence.

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]

Nothing more than an inept thriller.

In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when (Rogers) failed; it isn't her worst acting but there's nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun.

Huckabees is the real thing--an authentic disaster--but the picture is so odd that it should inspire, in at least a part of the audience, feelings of fervent loyalty.

Although it's an agreeable movie, Caton-Jones's direction is too discreet -- too civilized -- to stir the viewer's blood.

Sloppy, clumsy Hitchcock thriller. Brian Moore is credited with the original screenplay, but probably his friends don't mention it.

A funky, buoyant farce. The picture doesn't have the dirt or meanness or malice to make you explode with laughter, but it's consistently enjoyable.

Love and Other Drugs has many weak spots, but what it delivers at its core is as indelible as (and a lot more explicit than) the work of such legendary teams as Clark Gable and Joan Crawford, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.

[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?)

Almost amusing in a harmlessly, pleasantly stupid way.

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.

It may well be most amenable to the completely blotto. I made the grave mistake of seeing it sober, and there were moments when I simply lost my courage and had to look away, as some people do during the tooth-drilling scene in “Marathon Man.”

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.

Thoroughly derivative, and it doesn't illuminate youth crime -- it exploits it.

Linus Pauling was quoted as saying, "It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world." The greatest ability of the director, Stanley Kramer, may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from eminent people.

The first three-quarters of an hour...is junkily entertaining. but when they're on the road in the South, Willie turns into a curmudgeonly guardian angel, the boy starts learning lessons about life, and the picture is contemptible.

Improbable and, at times, sadistic, but, considered as a piece of direction, this Western, set in New Mexico in 1885, is as confident as anything that Ron Howard has done. [8 December 2003, p. 139]

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]

There are gags and scraps of action that give the movie fits of buoyancy, and these tend to come not so much from the younger, eager performers as from the old hands.

Bean's touch is unsteady, and Noise is certainly odd, but the movie is alive with the creative madness of New York.

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.

With Arthur hiller in charge, much of the dialogue turns into squawking, and the movie is flattened out and rackety, with Midler doing her damnedest to pump sass and energy into it.

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]

A glitter sci-fi adventure fantasy that balances the indestructible James Bond with an indestructible cartoon adversary, Jaws (Richard Kiel), who is a great evil windup toy. This is the best of the Bonds starring the self-effacing Roger Moore.

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.

It’s party time, and the movie is wild and crude without being mean--it’s a comedy of infantile regression, “Animal House” for grownups. [17 March 2003, p. 154]

Angels, according to this movie's nonexistent logic, travel at the speed of thought and are invisible except to other angels, children, and the dying.

Clooney gives it everything, but what does he get in return? A void where the story is meant to be.

It's an accomplished, stately movie -- unimpassioned but pleasing. [28 July 2014, p.78]

Structurally a mess and unevenly made, but the first forty minutes or so are quite beautiful. [7 July 2003, p. 84]

This muckraking melodrama has considerable power and some strong performances. The script, by W.D. Richter, has offhand dialogue with a warm, funny edge.

To Rome with Love is light and fast, with some of the sharpest dialogue and acting that he's put on the screen in years. [2 July 2012, p.84]

The disgraceful script is by Duncan Kennedy, Donna Powers, and Wayne Powers. Directed with occasional flashes of nasty wit by Renny Harlin.

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.

An obscene, ridiculous, and occasionally very funny movie, and if it ever gets to the Middle East it will roil the falafel tables on both sides of the Arab-Israeli divide.

If only Kim had a sense of humor to match his visual wit. Instead, we get rusted gags and rubbery acting.

Thanks for Sharing is worth it, because of Pink. [30 Sept. 2013, p.85]

It is a grind, it is a slog, it is a bore—it’s a mental toothache of a movie, whose ending grants not so much resolution as relief.

Lucas shifts back and forth between this kind of original invention and a dependence on pompous dead-level dreck, a grade-B cheapness that he's obviously addicted to. [20 May 2002, p. 114]

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.

Sparks like that are scattered through, and yet the sad fact is that Jersey Boys is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished.

Schumacher's direction is coarse and slovenly: the picture has the self-conscious jokiness of the "Batman" TV series and the smudged, runny imagery of a cheaply printed comic book.

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?

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

Budreau’s movie, entertaining as it is, leaves us little the wiser. Maybe it was a job for Bergman, after all.

It's emotionally more alive than anything Allen has done since "Sweet and Lowdown," in 1999. I was absorbed in it, and I liked parts of it. And I wish to God it were better.

A slight and rueful affair, intermittently funny.

Simon instinctively makes things easy and palatable, and there's a penalty: it's the retrograde, pepless snooziness of the picture. You come out feeling half dead.

The film is far from being a seamless work of art, but it probably comes closer to the confused attitudes that Americans had toward the Vietnam war than any other film has come, and so its messiness seems honorable.

Forget satire; this guy doesn't want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick.

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

The story can’t keep still, shifting from year to year and place to place, and, whereas "Mr. Jones" appalls you into wanting to know more, Wasp Network is so temperate in its political approach that you start to forget what’s at stake.

Very bad...Davis throws her weight around but comes through in only a few scenes.

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

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:

If the story of Jean Seberg is one of the more wretched footnotes in the chronicle of fame, that’s all the more reason to treasure those occasions, onscreen, when she was not a victim — when she bore herself, and whatever pains she harbored, with mastery and grace.

It’s as daring and original a work of political cinema and personal conscience as the current cinema can offer.

Well thought out and with a feeling for ordinary American talk, but too mechanical, too blandly sensitive, too cool to be popular; it's the sort of small-scale picture that's a drag in a theatre but shines on Home Box Office.

Yet Oblivion is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda.

If you lack a taste for such hokum, Greta is still worth seeing, for the sake of Isabelle Huppert: an A-grade performer, by any standard, as shown in the rigors of “The Piano Teacher” (2001) and the vengeful perversity of “Elle” (2016).

This literal-minded movie sells old pieties and washes away fear so thoroughly that it creates a new kind of fantasy, in which all's right with a very troubled world. [21 April 2014, p.110]

Within the carnivalesque atmosphere and high-spirited revelry of Moore’s show, there’s a master of political rhetoric at work, and he devotes that mastery to a high patriotic calling. At its best, Michael Moore in TrumpLand is a moving act of devotion, a motivating turn of rhetoric of potentially historic import.

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.

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.

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.

It’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone.

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 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.

They should never have allowed the audience so much time to think about what's going on: the short play turns into a ludicrous, lumbering horror movie.

Despite the déjà vu, there is plenty to savor in Miller’s film, and the final third, in particular, is quite the light show.

The plot would seem more ingenious if the movie itself didn't copy so many other thrillers (notably "The Silence of the Lambs"), and if it weren't so easy to spot every twist half an hour in advance.

As a wisecracking , intermittently violent lunatic, Michael Keaton electrifies this quirky farce. The film isn't the knockout it might have been if it had a few big wild routines. And yes, it's sentimental. But the sentimentality isn't overplayed, and Keaton's fast rap cauterizes much of it.

Dumont doesn’t stint on the Lucas-like dialectics, and he works wonders with wryly blunt yet nonetheless spectacular effects-driven action scenes. But, most exquisitely, he delights in visions of earthly, natural majesty.

The trouble with Mendes’s film is in the effort to combine the pieces in a way that feels natural, in an artifice that’s devised to be nearly invisible. It’s a synthetic that presents itself as organic. In the process, the film smothers its authentic parts, never lets its drama take root and grow, never lets its characters come to life.

The killings pile up, yet Jarmusch, the master of mellowdrama, would rather die than be accused of overkill. His heart isn’t really in the blood and guts. The line between the laid-back and the listless, in The Dead Don’t Die, may be too fine even for him, and most of the running gags don’t run at all, merely loping around in a circle.

Throughout Sinister, the rooms remain darker than crypts, whether at breakfast or dinnertime, and the sound design causes everything in the house to moan and groan in consort with the hero's worrisome quest. I still can't decide what creaks the most: the floors, the doors, the walls, the dialogue, the acting, or the fatal boughs outside.

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

It’s as if a filmmaker’s quest for dramatic universality has deprived his characters of their particulars, has pulled them out of time and space and rendered them all too abstract. What remains is a mechanism of thrilling power that’s missing a touch of mere humanity.