I know there are intelligent people who are awed by this sort of deep-dish magical mystery tour, but surely something is wrong with a movie when you can't tell a live character from a dead one and you don't care which is which. [9 December 2002, p. 142]

Thank heaven for Dwayne Johnson, whose foot-wide smile will not be switched off, and who saves the life of the movie. Whether it deserves to be saved is another matter.

100% pure-plastic adolescent male fantasy.

Frank Tashlin directed this attempt at a stylish comedy-thriller; it goes very wrong--there's no suspense, because we have no idea what's going on, and the spoofy, slapstick embellishments are almost painfully self-conscious.

The Iron Orchard, though geographically confined, is all over the place. We flit past the patches of Jim’s life that matter (what happened during those two years, as the dollars poured in?) and linger on those that don’t. Random flashbacks alert us to his youth. The musical score is overcooked, the cast underpowered, and the dialogue something of a mishmash.

As a journey through Darwin's discoveries, Creation fails, although, given the intricacy and the patience of his working methods, it is hard to imagine how such a film might succeed.

Hitchcock scraping bottom.

It may have the melody, visage and basics of a Bollywood biggie, but truth be told, The Guru, despite it’s zest and lure, gives the far-off genus a bad wrap. [3 February 2003, p.98]

Suffice to say that even he (one of our finest actors) is trapped by the miasma of unsubtlety that creeps into the film and causes all involved to lose their professional bearings. [5 May 2014, p.84]

The picture is a kind of fattened goose that's been stuffed with goose-liver pâté. It's overrich and fundamentally unsatisfying.

The director, Claude Berri, who did the adaptation with Gerard Brach, aimed for fidelity to the novel; he said it was his task to give the material "a cinematic rhythm," but "there was no need for imagination." That's what he thinks.

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

The Green Hornet is what you get when someone who dropped out of high school to do standup comedy, then spent a decade in movies and television, conceives a Hollywood "passion project." [24 Jan. 2011, p. 82]

A dully conventional film about a brilliantly unconventional musician.

Seeing “Raiders” is like being put through a Cuisinart—something has been done to us, but not to our benefit.

Jodorowsky plays with symbols and ideas and enigmas so promiscuously that the confusion may be mistaken for depth.

Most of Burger’s film, in truth, is either numb or dumb.

Bertolucci is trying hard to shock us with this stuff, but, for all the perversities and the abundant nudity, the movie has an air of inconsequence about it. [9 February 2004, p. 74]

It's a miserable piece of moviemaking -- poorly paced and tearjerking.

Lightning didn't strike three times; the movie is lumbering... I don't think it's going to be a public humiliation, and it's too amorphous to damage our feelings about the first two. [1 Jan 1991]

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.

In the more anonymous American setting, and without the mad conviction of a director like John Woo, all the choreographed murder feels dull, poorly paced, and, come to think of it, pretty demented.

This George Stevens film is over-planned and uninspired: Westerns are better when they're not so self-importantly self-conscious.

The irony of this hyped-up, slam-bang production is that those involved apparently don't really believe that beauty and romance can be expressed in modern rhythms, because whenever their Romeo and Juliet enter the scene, the dialogue becomes painfully old-fashioned and mawkish, the dancing turns to simpering, sickly romantic ballet, and sugary old stars hover in the sky. When true love enters the film, Bernstein abandons Gershwin and begins to echo Richard Rodgers, Rudolf Friml, and Victor Herbert.

It's not boring (given the subject, how could it be?), but almost nothing in it works.

Fanny Brice is herself, though she isn't on screen enough to vitalize this lavish, tedious musical biography; it goes on for a whopping 3 hours.

Sadly, the men here come across as whiny and infantile, and Green is dangerously keen to stress their retardation. [17 & 24 2003, p.204]

In the movie's best moments, the misery has a comic lilt to it. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

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.

A combination of raw pulp and gooey kitsch.

Penn gives a strenuous, at times shrewd and acid performance, which has been embedded, unfortunately, in a clumsy and ineffective movie.

The problem is not that Kurzel cuts the words, which is his absolute right, but that he destroys the conditions from which they might conceivably have sprung.

Elvis is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; it’s a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presley’s authentic tragedy.

A Hitchcock stinker, set in Australia in the early 19th century (though shot in England).

As for the overriding reason to see the film, that's easy. Lighten Zahedi's complexion, stuff him in a fright wig, and this fellow would be a ringer for Harpo Marx.

Morning Glory has a depressed, rancid air. [22 Nov. 2010, p. 141]

And there you have the problem with this film. It is gray with good taste — shade upon shade of muted naughtiness, daubed within the limits of the R rating. Think of it as the “Downton Abbey” of bondage, designed neither to menace nor to offend but purely to cosset the fatigued imagination. You get dirtier talk in most action movies, and more genitalia in a TED talk on Renaissance sculpture.

By the end of the movie, Refn has toyed with cannibalism, lesbian necrophilia, the egestion of an eyeball, and other minor sports, all of them filmed in lavish taste. It’s enough to make you reflect longingly on the Agatha Christie drama that he made for British TV in 2007. Say what you like about Miss Marple, at least she merely questioned her suspects. She didn’t eat them for tea.

The picture is a piece of technological lyricism held together by the glue of simpleminded heroic sentiment; basically, its appeal is in watching a couple of guys win their races.

And so, as the solemnity of the enterprise is frittered away, you feel moved to ask: what is this film for?

A space epic with a horse-and-buggy script. It's dull out there in space, though not as depressing as listening to the astronauts' wives back home. John Sturges directed, in his sleep

You have to feel sorry for Moore, who is called upon to supply an unappealing mixture of neurosis and starch, and whose instinctive frailty is so endlessly exploited by Howitt's movie that the jokes, such as they are, go into retreat. [3 May 2004, p. 110]

The narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough.

A shapeless mess, but at least it’s not as monotonous as “Kill Bill Vol. 1.” [19 & 26 April 2004, p. 202]

You have to admire Shyamalan’s efforts to deconstruct a genre that he evidently loves, yet there is just so little to haunt or to fool us in the result, and a few sharp laughs might have helped his cause.

In short, it’s up to Curtis to rescue the film. She’s meant to be the villain, but her lines, even the motley ones (“The stars aligned, we slayed the dragon, and we won”), are delivered with such a delectable thwack that I kept forgetting to boo.

Birdman trades on facile, casual dichotomies of theatre versus cinema and art versus commerce. It’s a white elephant of a movie that conceals a mouse of timid wisdom, a mighty and churning machine of virtuosity that delivers a work of utterly familiar and unoriginal drama.

Has its satirical charms, but it repeats itself remorselessly, and it has no emotional center. We are so distant from Val that when he gets his sight back we don't feel a thing. [20 May 2002, p.114]

Put the evidence together, and it’s no surprise that this poor little movie fires blanks. It never wanted to be a Western at all.

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

There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue.

The movie is derivative, flat, halfhearted, its squareness unrelieved by irony or fantasy. [3 March 2003, p. 94]

It winces with liberal self-chastisement: Redford is surely smart enough to realize, as the professor turns his ire on those who merely chatter while Rome burns, that his movie is itself no better, or more morally effective, than high-concept Hollywood fiddling.

This is a film noir without malevolence or mystery. It's a Yuppie thriller: it has no psychological layers.

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 movie, which posits an impending nuclear strike on a major American city, is a flimsy yet high-minded piece of doomsday schlock, largely populated by ciphers in suits and drained of the pulp pleasures that schlock, at its best, can afford.

A perplexing compound of the silly and the glum.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

Bullock is refreshingly natural, as usual, but Affleck seems uncomfortable as the romantic lead--if she's light as a feather, he's stiff as a board. Marc Lawrence's implausible script and Bronwen Hughes's tin-ear direction do nothing to improve matters.

The emotional repression and intellectual stiffness that suffuse Angela Schanelec’s melancholy new drama are as much a matter of style as of substance.

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.

The movie is halfhearted, fragmentary, unachieved.

One of the dreariest films in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy series; it has a metallic flavor.

The directors, Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, manage to convince us that we have witnessed an action movie, although in fact the quantity of violence is so minimal that, under Hong Kong law, Infernal Affairs barely qualifies as a motion picture.

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

But the movie is in a stupor; everything is internalized. Duvall is locked in, and De Niro is in his chameleon trance - he seems flaccid, preoccupied...You have to put up a struggle to get anything out of this picture.

A comedy without one foot on the ground is no more than a flight of fancy, as directionless as a balloon; the master clowns of silent cinema knew that, and so does Mr. Fletcher, the gravid elder statesman of this film. As he says to Mike and Jerry, “I appreciate your creativity, but let’s be realistic for a second.” Be kind. Erase.

For some viewers, the acidity level of Perry’s movie will be too high to stomach. For others — anyone who thinks that there are too many warm hugs in Strindberg, for example — Queen of Earth awaits.

M-G-M's wartime salute to gallant England, engineered to make the audience choke up.

Burnham’s eye for detail and nuance is keen, and several scenes...have a tightly scripted tension, but he smothers the story in sentiment, stereotypes, and good intentions. Despite Fisher’s calm and vivid performance, Kayla remains merely a collection of traits.

Sandler lacks any kind of discernible comic energy; he's just meandering around the film waiting for something to happen, and almost nothing funny does.

"Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness," Captain Jack says. Sir, you speak for us all.

Coppola's efforts to bring depth to this material that has no depth make the picture seem groggy. It's as if he were trying to direct the actors to bring something out of themselves when neither he nor anyone else knows what's wanted.

The film is comatose; you're brought into it only by the camera tricks or the special-effects horrors, or, perhaps, the nude scenes.

A dog of a movie about a horse.

I’m not sure that the story is the right receptacle for big notions about imperialism, racism, militarism, the balance of power, religiosity, the end of reason; it is a bit like loading the history of philosophy into an egg-and-spoon race.

As in life, intelligence in movies isn’t one-dimensional; it may be woefully lacking from one aspect of a film but shiningly present in another. Although the fight scenes in Nobody offer clever touches, they are nonetheless too stiffly convention-bound to give the movie energy.

The whole thing makes Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Levinson’s “Rain Man” seem like a triumph of underplaying.

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.

An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

The director, Hugh Wilson, aims for harmless froth, and what he winds up with, as the hysteria level rises, is something brash and strident.

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.

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

Script lacks satiric insolence, and the picture grinds on humorlessly. The villain Christopher Lee's fanged smile is the only attraction.

The filmmakers, I think, got in over their heads and couldn't decide whether they were making an action thriller or a drama of conscience; they wound up flubbing both.

In movies like this one, Poitier's self-inflicted stereotype of goodness cancels out his acting.

The trouble with Blindness is that it’s so preoccupied with shouldering this symbolic weight that it gradually forgets to tell a story--to keep faith with the directives of common sense.

What's strange about the movie is that the best things in it aren't developed, and what Superman and the other characters do doesn't seem to have any weight. [11 July 1983, p.90]

Coming from such a probing director, the new work is a disappointment, and yet there’s something diagnostically very interesting about the movie’s failings.

Don’t Worry Darling is about the development of regressive materials—about forcing women back into boxy lives and striving to convince them that they like it there. The problem is not that this is a cautionary tale but that the caution comes as no surprise.

Terrible, but bearable; there's a fascination to its clunkiness.

But all that this encounter-session movie actually does is strip a group of high-school kids down to their most banal longings to be accepted and liked. Its real emblem is that dreary, retro ribbon. [8 Apr 1985, p.123]

I felt sorry for Gyllenhaal, berated in both his personae for being weak, and for Adams, strapped and laced into a role that scarcely lets her breathe.

This is not a question of a movie selling its soul. The soul is in the selling.

It's all plot, and the plot is all holes; it's not just that it doesn't add up right - most of the episodes don't quite make sense. About all that carries the movie along is the functional - and occasionally smooth, bright - dialogue.

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

Tacky low-budget picture about a scientist whose carelessness gets him into a tragic pickle.

The most disturbing and dissonant aspect of The Last Duel involves the filming of the sexual crime at its center.