It seems that the director, who also made "The Incredible Hulk" and "Clash of the Titans," will do anything to distract us from the emptiness to which he has devoted himself. [10 & 17 June 2013, p.110]

However mystifying, or downright boring, you find the result, rest assured that the Refn faithful will swoon. Peace be with them.

Unfortunately, it's also maddeningly repetitive, and dependent on the kind of strained English whimsy that leaves your throat sore from laughter that dies in the glottal region.

That's the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it's running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying--or calculating--that some of them will fly.

Much of what Oskar says in the book is amusingly beside the point. Onscreen, however, the sound of a hyper-articulate boy talking semi-nonsense becomes very hard to take.

As you watch, you don't think of the decline of American civilization; you think that these are good actors giving themselves a hell of a workout in a misbegotten movie. [6 Jan. 2014, p.72]

The movie is heavy on exposition, and the story isn't dramatized - it's merely acted out (and hurried through), in a series of scenes that are like illustrations. And, despite the care that has gone into the sets and costumes and the staging, the editing rhythms are limp and choppy.

There are potentially funny scenes, but Bergman doesn't know how to give timing and polish to his own jokes.

May have been written by a young woman, but it feels like a middle-aged man's fantasies about young people. The dialogue is actually - to retrieve an old word - vulgar. [7 Feb. 2011, p. 82]

The movie is messily ineffective. Daniels likes charged, discordant scenes, with sudden explosions of violence. He shoves the camera in people's faces, and he can't convincingly stage a scene with more than two people in it. [8 Oct. 2012, p.86]

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 Canyons is not porn, but it has the demoralized second-rateness and the lowlife inanity of the porn world.

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

There isn't a whisper of surprise in Redford's performance, and he's photographed looking like a wary, modest god, with enough backlighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing.

As a moviemaker, [Pryor's] a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn't even raw; the juice has been drained away.

Pious muck.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.

The screenwriters retain much of Mamet's dialogue, but they piece it out, and the director punches up the breaks between scenes with rock music. It's like being pounded on the back every two minutes when your back is already sore (because the dialogue has been whacking you so hard).

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.

Tasked with reinterpreting one of the most frightening and emblematic villains in the Disney canon, Gadot evinces no feel for malevolent cunning, or even knowing cynicism; smacked down repeatedly by her Magic Mirror, she can barely conjure a decently icy glare in response.

A the start, Lemmon has vanished almost totally into his role, but soon he's so insufferably perky and boyish and obliging that you feel he deserves the puling lines that Goldberg gives him.

There’s enough going on in The Marvels—enough situations with dramatic potential, enough twists with imaginative power—to develop several decent movies. Unfortunately, they’re snipped and clipped, jammed and rammed, dropped into the movie (and swept out of it) with an informational indifference that doesn’t even have the virtue of speed.

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.

The movie’s most potent closeup is of a black policewoman, in a line confronting protesters; if you can film her, why not learn what she has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt.

If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity.

The material has been turned into a trivially narcissistic product for teen-age girls who want to feel indignant about wrongs they are unlikely to suffer.

Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

There’s a big hole in the middle of the movie: the director, Tom Tykwer, and the screenwriter, Eric Warren Singer, forgot to make their two crusaders human beings.

Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.

As often occurs with topical tales, which are hellbent on catching a widespread mood (in this instance, anger and disgust), there’s something hasty and undigested about Bombshell....the action is relentlessly sliced and diced. Why, we could almost be watching TV!

Prince of Persia is meant purely as light entertainment, but the way it draws on layers of junk is depressing.

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

Over six seasons The Sopranos at least compensated for its reductive aesthetic with complex patterns of narrative information. The Many Saints of Newark, by contrast, reduces characters of potentially mythic power to a handful of defining traits and pins them to a diorama-like backdrop of historical readymades.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

The Dictator, like its predecessors, is short (eighty-three minutes), but it runs down fast, and the lewd jokes pile up. [28 May 2012, p. 76]

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

The two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.

The movie that Josée Dayan has made about the Duras-Andréa affair is not a scandal. Unfortunately, it’s not much of anything but a solemn joke. [14 April 2003, p.88]

Never Let Me Go is in such good taste that we never feel any horror over the idea at the center of it.

The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

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

The bedgraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it.

One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years.

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.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

A confused, humorless grind.

Does it matter that the plot is so full of holes that you could use it to drain spaghetti?

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

A forgettable Bogart melodrama that was already familiar when it came out; it had been synthesized from several of his hits, with Lizabeth Scott's role processed out of Mary Astor and Lauren Bacall routines.

More like the Pelican Long-and-Drawn-Out: well over two hours of plots, subplots and super-subdialogue.

Whatever sense of obsession drives Robert’s art and whatever emotional freedom inspires Miles’s, neither is found in the cinematic aesthetic of “Funny Pages”; the movie is merely a conventional vessel for Kline’s ardent ideas, which pass through the cinema without leaving a trace.

This is an ethnic variant of all those the-summer-the-adolescent-became-a-man pictures, done in a messagey, exploitation manner.

Cassavetes built this movie on a small conceit--a love affair between two people who are wildly unsuited to each other--and it doesn't work.

As obsequiously respectful as if it had been made about living monarchs who might reward the producer with a command performance. Viewers are put in the position of celebrity-lovers eager to partake of the home life of the dullest of the Czars.

The winner, on points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who crashes the party and leaves them both dumbfounded, not least because she has the wit, and the wherewithal, to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier.

Its exuberant love of New York seems forced, and most of the numbers are hearty and uninspired.

This awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek.

The film is essentially a primitive rah-rah story about an underdog's triumph over a bully, and in the times that Americans are living through now the things in it that are merely simple seem simplified to the point of odiousness...In the Heat of the Night seems to be made up of a great deal of attitudinizing and very little instinct. [5 Aug 1967, p.64]

What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory.

The pointlessness would be vastly more appealing if Wang and Auster didn't make such a point of it.

A clunky and obvious comedy.

The picture teeters on the edge of parody without giving itself the relief of falling over.

The whole thing, shot in the manner of "Masterpiece Theatre," with a flaccid musical score to match, is itself hopelessly antiquated, greeting with very British giggles, and without a trace of honest curiosity, the needs of the women it seeks to honor. [21 May 2012, p.81]

As a director, he seems incapable of trusting his actors to carry the mood, preferring always to lend them a backup -- jokes, fripperies, kooky camera angles -- that they don't require. [5 Nov 2001, p. 105]

I hesitate to ask, but did anyone actually tell McClane, before he arrived, that the Cold War is over?

The character of Hugo is written and directed with an aw-shucksiness that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Mickey Rooney musical, and his romance with Alita has a simple and absolute purity that’s as sentimentally drubbing as it is devoid of substance.

Shirley, by contrast, coats her in gothic excess as if glazing a ham, and of her humor scarcely a shred remains. As a sworn devotee of “Airplane!,” I found myself praying that once — just once — she would utter the words “And don’t call me Shirley,” thus rending the veil of gloom from top to bottom. Sadly, it was not to be.

The sense of calculation makes the journey feel like a lockstep march; the movie’s sense of a story that’s dictated rather than observed makes its good feelings feel bad.

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

An honest failure. This United Artists big-budget musical film, directed by Martin Scorsese, suffers from too many conflicting intentions.

Burroughs invented a primal fiction: a man winds up on another planet, and has to find his way among strange creatures. Sticking to that fable, which was central to "Avatar," might have saved John Carter, but Stanton loses its appealing simplicity in too many battles, too many creatures, too many redundant episodes. [26 March 2012, p.108]

The emptiness of “Die My Love” isn’t a failure of adaptation but of observation; what’s missing isn’t a sense of drama but a sense of life.

Toss everything you can find, starting with roughly diced plots, into the blender, press "Pulse," and pray: such appears to be the method behind Tower Heist.

The movie is pervaded by a cataclysmic sense of loss, but we don’t need to be chastised with the ideal of Christian love to understand that sex isn’t enough. And someone might tell Malick that beauty isn’t enough, either. Only a major filmmaker could have made To the Wonder, but nothing in it adds up.

(Lurie's) a shameless, if skilled, manipulator of easy emotions. (29 Oct 2001, p. 93)

As director, Foster, working with Kyle Killen's screenplay, treats the goofy premise with a literal earnestness-as a family drama about separation and reunion-that seems all wrong. A little wit would have helped.

Disney may have seen lightning strike for the fifth consecutive time with this animated smash, but it's the weakest of the bunch: a bland, predictably p.c. story so taken up with teaching lessons about tolerance and the environment that it leaves hardly any room for laughter.

With its restless parade of grainy closeups, the movie is a haze of retro rapture and wishful thinking, and, above all, a lost opportunity. We don't want to hear any more about ancient constitutional crises. We want to watch a three-way with a former King of England, in a bungalow. Madonna, of all people, missed a trick.

It's not the most high-concept movie of the year, or indeed of any other. Due Date is most interesting, and most fearful, when it loiters on the threshold of the homoerotic.

Adapted from the Marvel Comics series, this movie lacks the mournfulness that sustains a good horror strip; it's trashy, but too deafening and invasive to have the appeal of good pulp.

Apart from this going-postal moment, and a nice song from Frank the Pug (a resident alien from the original, played by the same dog), MIIB is pretty much a disaster -- repetitive beyond belief, and so busily inconsequential that it neuralizes your brain and leaves you with nothing to respond to. [8 July 2002, p.84]

The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. Jumper is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.

Gillespie stages his empathy for Tonya at arm’s length; he fails to respond to her experience in a direct, personal way. The result is a film that’s as derisive and dismissive toward Tonya Harding as it shows the world at large to have been.

Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only Doubt had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled "Spawn of the Devil Witch" or "Blood Wimple," all would have been forgiven

The movie is all whoosh and whack and abrupt closeups -- jerky digital punctuation. It's alienating experience, without emotional resonance or charm. [28 March 2011, p. 116]

This is trash pretending to serve the cause of history: a "Dirty Dozen" knockoff with one eye on "Schindler’s List."

If the rest of the movie had been on Travolta's level of sly knowingness, it might have been a hip classic, rather than what it is -- a summertime debauch. [23 July 2012, p. 81]

Spanglish chokes on an excess of sincerity and guilt, and, in retrospect, its failure may turn out to be momentous for a sincere and guilty community--Hollywood liberals in a state of post-election dismay.

But the screenplay for this deliberately over-the-top (under-the-bottom?) farce—about Carrey's unwitting retrieval of some ransom money and his effort to return it to his dream gal (Lauren Holly) in Aspen—doesn't pass muster as a string of moronic skits (studded with urine and fart jokes) or as a lampoon of buddy movies.

If you admired Bette Midler in The Rose and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, you may want to bash you head against the wall...The director, Garry Marshall, shows no feeling for the material - not even false feeling.

The result is a movie thinned out almost to the point of total insubstantiality—as close to a non-experience as I’ve had at the movies in a while.

The first film scored a few palpable hits, but the new one barely makes the effort.

Glum, protracted, and needlessly nasty.

The script, by Israel Horovitz, has trim, funny lines but also terrible, overingratiating ones, and some of the most doddering, bonehead situations to be soon on the big screen in years. Directed by Arthur Hiller, the film is blotchy in just about every conceivable way.

In the Cut is completely controlled and all of a piece, and yet, apart from one performance (Mark Ruffalo), it's terrible--a thriller devoid of incidental pleasures or humor, or even commonplace reality. [27 October 2003, p. 112]

In itself, XXX is not worth getting bothered about -- a half-dozen big pictures as bad as this one come out every year. At the very worst, it will kick off a pointless new movie franchise. [19 & 26 August 2002, p.174]