It's not much fun to watch.

A sour, visually ugly comedy from director Billy Wilder and his co-writer, I. A. L. Diamond, which gets worse as it goes along -- more cynical and more sanctimonious.

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.

Crowe is attempting a modern screwball comedy--the kind of thing that, sixty years ago, Howard Hawks, directing Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck, would have turned into romantic farce--but he has scaled the movie as an epic and turned his gabby heroine into a fount of New Age wisdom.

When it's time to wrap up the mystery, the movie leaves too many of the plot's enigmas unresolved, and Branagh's insouciance loses its charm.

A thriller stripped of thrills--or, even worse, a thriller that thinks of itself as somehow rising above the vulgar pleasures of excitement.

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

No one wants a movie that tiptoes in step with political correctness, yet the willful opposite can be equally noxious, and, as In Bruges barges and blusters its way through dwarf jokes, child-abuse jokes, jokes about fat black women, and moldy old jokes about Americans, it runs the risk of pleasing itself more than its paying viewers.

Amsterdam is, or is meant to be, a caper: an easygoing endeavor, you might think. But capering is as tricky on the silver screen as it is on the dance floor, and the tone of the tale keeps losing its footing.

At almost every point where we might expect a little ping of surprise or mystery, Donner lets us down. It's a limp and dreary movie.

Tracy and Hepburn, but not a comedy, and not good, either.

Griffin Dunne's plodding adaptation of Alice Hoffman's novel can't decide whether it's a horror show, a cute comedy, or a soap opera.

You wind up feeling doubly bullied -- first by the brutal enormity of the set pieces, and then by the emotional arm-twisting of the downtimes. [20 May 2013, p.122]

Anyone hoping that 2 Days in Paris will revisit such peppy romance (“Annie Hall”), however, will be frustrated. There is an extra rawness here, a determination to confront and annoy.

Val Lewton produced, but except for a few touches, it's a mess.

The movie only stirs in the final twenty minutes.

Jasper hits every note of sentimental manipulation in a tale that’s as fleetingly affecting as it is insubstantial and mechanical.

There's no electricity in it, no smart talk, no flair. Written and directed by George Seaton, it's bland entertainment of the old school: every stereotyped action is followed by a stereotyped reaction -- cliches commenting on cliches.

The horror flick, at its height, was a lyrical caressing of our fears; by the end of this nonsense, you fear for the well-being of the genre. “It’s dead!” [24 May 2004, p. 96]

Lamb preens and strains to be admired even as it reduces its characters to pieces on a game board and its actors to puppets.

It's a shame that the movie whose coattails these wonderful actors are attached to is such an empty suit.

Larry Crowne is worryingly light on laughs, yet it never dares to worry too much about the plight of its central figure. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.100]

Yet, with all the obvious ingredients for success, Spellbound is a disaster.

Even by the standards of disaster movies, The Day After Tomorrow is irretrievably poor: a shambles of dud writing and dramatic inconsequence which left me determined to double my consumption of fossil fuels. [7 June 2004, p. 102]

It’s a monumentally unimaginative movie: Kubrick, with his $750,000 centrifuge, and in love with gigantic hardware and control panels, is the Belasco of science fiction. The special effects—though straight from the drawing board—are good and big and awesomely, expensively detailed. There’s a little more that’s good in the movie, when Kubrick doesn’t take himself too seriously. [Harper's]

You may get off on this enthralling stuff, But after half an hour I'd had enough.

The two characters are ciphers, and the script, which Sachs co-wrote with Mauricio Zacharias, is by turns underwritten or banal.

The picture hasn’t been thought out in terms of movement or a visual plan. Dylan merely gives his actor friends some clues as to what he’d like them to do and they improvise, without reference to what has gone before or what will follow.

Paul Newman in a bungled attempt to recapture the Bogart private-eye world of The Big Sleep. Shelley Winters gives the picture artificial respiration for a few minutes, but it soon relapses. A private-eye movie without sophistication and style is ignominious.

It's a slovenly piece of moviemaking and it's full of howlers. Charly may represent the unity of schlock form and schlock content -- true schlock art.

After the complex buildup of tensions, the last ten minutes of the movie are a comic-pathetic letdown: the subdued acting and the trash-strewn street scenes lead to nothing more striking than the kind of overexplicit clichés heard in mediocre TV dramas. Even De Niro's discipline and skill can't save lines that should never have been spoken in the first place. [9 September 2002, p.162]

This film brings out all the weaknesses of its director, Sidney Lumet, and none of his strengths. The whole production has a stagnant atmosphere, and the big dance numbers are free-form traffic jams.

The director, Hector Babenco, treats William Kennedy's Albany novel, set in 1938, as a joyless classic; the movie has no momentum--the running time (144 minutes) is like a death sentence.

There's no motivating idea visible in this version, produced abroad by Hal B. Wallis, and the leaden script, by John Hale, lacks romantic spirit and dramatic sense.

In short, this popular love story isn't much of a story, and falls badly short on love.

There's nothing to look at except Gino and Jerry's mummified skits, which are directed at a deliberate and unvarying pace. Mamet piles on improbabilities in a matter-of-fact style; flatness of performance seems to be part of the point. This minimalist approach--it suggests a knowingness--takes the fun out of hokum. The result is like a Frank Capra--Damon Runyon comic fairy tale of the 30s in slow motion.

The movie fails politically to make clear what democracy is up against, and it fails artistically to imagine the unimaginable and give voice to the unspeakable.

A larger, slower, duller version of the spy thrillers [Hitchcock] made in the 30s.

Spunky yet maudlin, grim yet heartwarming, the movie—written by Mooney and Kevin Costello—is mainly a batch of hollow gestures.

This one doesn't look too bad, but it has no snap, no tension. It's an exhausted movie.

Aster is so intent on using ripped-from-the-headlines events that he fails to make proper use of them, and ends up cynically debasing them all.

House of Gucci is Gaga’s movie, and she tears into it with an exuberant yet precise ferocity. She is the main reason why the movie at times transcends the limits of its scripted action.

In truth, von Trier is not so much a filmmaker as a misanthropic mesmerist, who uses movies to bend the viewer to his humorless will.

Processed schlock. This could only have been designed as a TV movie and then blown up to cheapie-epic proportions.

This movie, in short, kneels at the altar of high capitalism.

The filmmakers’ self-imposition of a pristinely clean aesthetic results in the kind of emptied, tranquillized, minutely calibrated experience that’s no less a matter of fan service than the latest installment of comic-book I.P., and offers no more meaningful a view of life.

The kind of uplifting twaddle that traffics heavily in rather basic symbols: the gold light on the pond stands for the sunset of life, and so on and so on...A doddering valentine.

Enigma is, to be blunt, "No way Out" meets "Revenge of the Nerds," and the meetinhg is not a happy one. [22 & 29 April 2002, p. 208]

It's take-the-money-and-run filmmaking, with the actors practically winking their dialogue at each other, and it's all supposed to be tongue-in-cheek fun. It isn't.

The happy couple (Farrell/Dawson) do enjoy one great scene together, and it's the high point of the movie-a naked tussle, in which she puts a knife to his throat. The whole sequence is quick, funny, and arousing, in sharp contrast to the rest of Alexander, which is sluggish, unsmiling.

Even diehard fans may long for something to hold the tacky flourishes together—a plot, or maybe even a guide that's more lucid than the Necronomicon.

To the extent that the movie’s charm depends on that of its two stars, they’re forced so rigidly into the plot’s contrivances that they have hardly any room to maneuver, hardly any chance to be merely observed, and are snippeted to live-action publicity stills of themselves.

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.

In Phillips’s new sequel, “Joker: Folie à Deux,” he walks back the hectic ideology that gave that earlier movie its energy, however dubious; the sequel is merely innocuous, grandiose in its scale of production but minor in its dramatic substance.

It makes “Yellow Submarine” look like a miracle of sober narrative.

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

You do wonder how this commanding actor (Neeson)--who carries so much more conviction than the plot--felt about delivering the line "I'll tear down the Eiffel Tower if I have to."

With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.

The futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]

This tale of faith, fate, death, and redemption is non-threatening and also non-inspiring.

The film flails all over the place in an attempt to appear tense and authoritative--but the plot never takes hold.

Williams acts all over the place, yet the movie - 2 hours and 47 minutes of documentary seriousness - is so poorly structured that you keep wondering what's going on and why he has agreed to inform on his friends...Things don't begin to come together until you're heading into the third hour.

So repelled is Clooney by the response of white suburbia to African-Americans, and so keen is he to insure that we share his outrage at what they endured, that he quite forgets to be interested in them.

Kevin Kline does his best movie work yet as Nick Bottom...But in most other ways this "Midsummer Night" is hard to endure.

It’s no “Barbie”; the action is blatantly promotional and brazenly conventional. Nonetheless, it’s got enough personality to make me wish that Hess had had a still freer hand.

Illogical and glum. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

The simplifications and sanitizations of Brooklyn would be only dreary if they merely served the purpose of a streamlined and simplified story-telling mechanism. What renders them odious is the ethos that they embody, the worldview that they package.

As a thriller, regrettably, “I.S.S.” fails to fulfill its mission. Any air of plausibility soon leaks out of the plot, and the whole thing drifts into silliness, tricked out with familiar tropes.

You're supposed to need a strong stomach to sit through this one, but it's so stupefyingly obvious and repetitive that you begin to laugh with relief that you're not being emotionally affected; it's just a gross-out.

The movie is grandiose but not impressive, elaborate but not eye-catching; its most poignant simulation is the effort to make it feel like a movie for adults, with grownup concerns, which remain dramatically undeveloped but are delivered with a thudding earnestness.

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

Tim Allen's talent for dry regular-guyness fails to kindle Disney's sappy big-screen Yule log.

Michael Moore has teased and bullied his way to some brilliant highs in his career as a political entertainer, but he scrapes bottom in his new documentary, Sicko.

Not meant to be realistic; it was shot by the director Steven Shainberg in a slow, dreamy neo-De Palma style and in candy colors, and Gyllenhaal has a Kewpie-doll silliness that almost makes the naughty parts of the movie fun. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]

Tuggle keeps whomping us on the skull with good-evil symbolism, but the movie has no more depth than the usual exploitation film in which pretty girls are knocked off.

The script, by Robert Rodat, skips around in time to elucidate the amped-up drama, but it never gets close to Berg’s own character. The film, directed by Ben Lewin, strongly suggests that Berg was gay, but leaves the theme undeveloped.

The narrow and merely illustrative drama is matched, unfortunately, by an impersonal cinematography that fails to suggest texture or intimacy.

Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded--not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.

The way the story line has been directed it's a clumsier versions of the plots of 50s musicals.

As for Ferrell, a noted Eurovision nut, there’s no mistaking his affection for the brave hogwash of the genre, but even he is felled by the movie’s swerve into P.R.: a sing-along, say, in which genuine victors from Eurovisions past team up in a rolling medley.

The clichéd macho silliness of the picture gets to be infuriating after a while.

With ideas skimmed off the top of various systems of thought, Zardoz is a glittering cultural trash pile.

The directing, by Brian De palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with.

What happens, though, and what lures the film into disaster, is that Hartley lets slip his sense of humor (always his strongest asset) and begins to believe his own plot.

Under its compelling influence, we are lured into feeling that these various lives, marked by vacuity and frustration, are in some way destined to end at the point of a gun — that the murderer and his victims coexist on a continuum of despair. Try telling that to the people of Aurora.

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

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

The best thing about “Quantumania” is, surprisingly, its script (by Jeff Loveness), which is like saying that the best thing about a building is its blueprint.

The urge to make viewers squirm is fair enough, but when it runs ahead of the urge to entertain -- when the jokes trail in the wake of the embarrassments -- you can't help leaving the theatre sad and soured. [4 Feb 2002, p. 82]

The best reason to stay with it is Vaughn, whose lanky wryness wards off the threat of pomposity. The worst reason is Jada Pinkett Smith, who gets stuck with a thankless role as the unwittingly lethal villain -- a newspaper journalist, of course.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

When Beatty and Hoffman doe their (deliberately hopeless) singing numbers, jerking like mechanical men, phrasing unmusically, going off-key, they don't have the slapstick skills for it. That's when you long for Martin and Murray, or some other comics. [1 June 1987, p.102]

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.

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?)

War Horse is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work. [2 Jan. 2012, p.79]

Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you'd want to go to.

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

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.”