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

Why do people keep making films about writers?

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.

Though the film has its bright moments, and some weird ones, too, the first freshness is gone. Even the effects seem repetitive.

The result is remarkable, yet it’s still a hairbreadth away from credible.

The film’s self-undercutting subtleties and its big dramatic reveal serve a greater purpose: its depiction of oppression in an out-of-whack, past-tense America calls to mind the country’s current-day political pathologies. “Don’t Worry Darling” serves that purpose with a cleverness to match its focussed sense of outrage.

Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

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]

Turgidly predictable.

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]

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]

Even judged by the not excessively demanding standards of middle-aged renovation fantasies, A Good Year isn’t much.

The Box turns into a kind of sacrilegious Christian fable; it’s haunted by God, but it delivers a vicious doctrine. At the risk of impoliteness, I would suggest that Kelly drop his reliance on religio-mystico-eschatological humbug and embrace, in realistic terms, the fantastic possibilities in ordinary acts of murder, fear, heroism, and death. If he pulls himself together, he could be the next Hitchcock.

It’s time for this talented man (Assayas) to pull himself together. He may have something serious to say about the brutal impersonality of global capitalism, yet he’s caught somewhere between insight and exploitation.

The film is paced like a breezy sixties romp and there are some good gags, but the plot's a bit creaky and lacks the clever zing of a good scam.

At its best, the picture is violently exciting; at its worst, banal and monotonous. Yet the relative absence of mighty significances did not prevent the Matricians sitting all around me--mostly men aged about thirty--from remaining utterly still, as if at a High Mass, throughout the movie. [10 November 2003, p. 128]

If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, In the Heart of the Sea, sadly, is not the place to start. Try “Splash.”

Sam Peckinpah's happy-go-lucky ode to the truckers on the road--a sunny, enjoyable picture.

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.

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

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

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]

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

Once you get past the clumsily antic early scenes, the moody texture can take hold of your imagination. At its best, the film is a soft Irish kiss.

To be fair, Irresistible picks up in the final quarter, with the aid of a clever twist that whistles in from nowhere. We get an assortment of different endings, each undercutting the last. It’s as if this dozy film has woken up, belatedly, to its comic responsibilities and opportunities.

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.

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.

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.

Dave’s dread of his brother hooks The Ardennes onto a long chain of fraternal crime dramas, from “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) to “We Own the Night” (2007). Pront can hardly be blamed if his actors lack the sinew of Cagney or Brando.

A classic case of Hollywood hypocrisy and ineptitude.

Toward the end, though, this dubious, shapeless patchwork of a movie does achieve a strange, halting power—by making an inquiry into the nature of power itself.

Why, as a patron of Rock of Ages, do I wish I had taken the precaution of entering the theater drunk? [25 June 2012, p.84]

If the original did not exist, would this picture be worth seeing?

It's a shame, then, that the later stages of Lakeview Terrace should overheat and spill into silliness. The plot is compromised, not resolved, by the pulling of a gun.

A very strange, often terrible affair that is nevertheless mesmerizing, in a limited way.

By embracing the Roman pageant so openly, using all the emotional resources of cinema, Gibson has cancelled out the redemptive and transfiguring power of art. [1 March 2004, p. 84]

A rich-meets-rich picture, and worse than one imagines. Al Pacino gives a torpid performance as a spiritually depleted Grand Prix racing-car driver who falls in love with a well-heeled free spirit (Marthe Keller), a metaphysical kook.

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.

Ryder is devious and witchy, her eyes flashing, her crinkly voice developing knife edges. She gives an acidly brilliant performance as a desperate, lying woman. [24 Jan. 2011, p. 83]

The tangled plot is decorated in gaudy colors (thanks to the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) that contrast sadly with the sordid doings.

The supporting cast of yokels commit plenty of redneck faux pas, but the witty script is weighed down by the director David Dobkin's heavy hand.

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.

All movie adaptations of Nabokov fall short, by definition, but this one is the most graceful failure so far.

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.

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.

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.

Visceral though it is, “Honey Don’t!” whips up a merely decorative frenzy, concealing the well-worn tropes (hectic criminal ventures and blunders toward justice) on which it relies. Yet something of substance remains, even if it takes a long, clattery while to show itself.

Bad movie!

The saddest thing about If I Stay is that it affords Moretz so little opportunity to be non-sad.

But the cut-to-the-enlightenment dramaturgy of Ronald Bass's screenplay feels desperate and false.

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.

The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith.

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]

A dog of a movie about a horse.

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.

We don’t ask for much from this kind of movie, but Knight and Day tramples on our desire for just enough plausibility to release the fun. It makes us feel like fools for wanting to be entertained by froth.

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

The problem is, there’s only just enough story to go round. You can hear the creak as both characters and subplots get jacked up out of proportion.

But ultimately all that melancholy stifles the characters.

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.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the story’s stark melodramatic clarity—the rooting interest of saving a child from injustice, the outlaw with a heart of gold risking his life to undertake that responsibility—“Rust” is a painful slog and a nearly inert experience.

The Last of Robin Hood, written and directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, is often pallid and thin.

The fight against traditionalism has long been won, so the movie’s indignation feels superfluous, but Mike Newell’s direction is solid, the period décor and costumes are a sombre riot of chintz and pleated skirts, and the movie has an air of measured craft and intelligence. [22 & 29 December 2003, p. 166]

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.

This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good.

It's a peculiar movie, frantic and useless, with a hyperactive camera that gives us no more than fleeting impressions of Edie ecstatic at parties, Edie strung out on drugs, Edie lying mostly naked on a bed, with her skin splotchy from injections.

If The Son lacks the grip of Zeller’s previous film, “The Father” (2020), it’s because the fable of Nicholas and Peter has the brittle feel of a setup.

The comedy is brutal and paper thin, but that is less bothersome than the ending of the movie, which abruptly changes its tone.

There was always a dreaminess in his vision of the city, but now it feels as distant as the polished floors and the Deco furnishings of the Fred Astaire movies that Boris finds--of course--whenever he turns on the TV.

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

As an evocation of danger, the movie seems threatening yet is nowhere near serious or intelligent enough to satisfy our current sense of alarm. [3 June 2002, p. 100]

So well made, and so compelling as a portrait of a man at war with himself, that, right up until the end, many people will probably be entertained by its intricately preposterous story.

Pfeiffer digs into the role and won't let go. The rest of the movie is conventionally earnest.

Just when this sunshiny and affectionate comedy is beginning to bloom, the inevitable, tear-jerking conclusion closes off the fun like a Venetian blind blocking the light. (29 Oct 2001, p.93)

This picture ain't funny. I winced three times, and gave a couple of short laughs, but that was it.

It’s a romantic, erotic drama that’s told with an unusual blend of rapture and coldness, of overwhelming yearning and clinical detachment — and, above all, the movie has images that go far beyond the recording of performances and the framing of action in order to make a melancholy and mysterious visual music.

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.

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]

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.

Makes a suitable staging post in Witherspoon's headlong career. She may want to forget it by Christmas, yet its cushioned slackness allows her to sharpen her grasp of a steely American type: the girl next door who will kill to get out of town. [30 Sept 2002, p. 145]

The movie collapses into banality. The marriages hang together, but fear and guilt provide the glue. Perhaps the biggest insult to women here is the idea that they can't get better men than these two vacuous guys. [14 March 2011, p. 78]

The story of young George’s childhood and rise to fame has a tense and turbulent charm, but the story of the professional heavyweight’s dash to the championship and everything that follows (up through the nineteen-nineties) has a whiff of a ghostwritten corporate autobiography.

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.

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

Full Frontal is the sort of arbitrary mess that gives experimentation a bad name. The news that the movie was shot on digital video and film in eighteen days, and that the actors drove themselves to the set and applied their own makeup, would have made a nice Sunday Times story if the movie were any good. But it isn't. [5 August 2002, p. 80]

As for Nargle, he seems like a refugee from a Christopher Guest film, and I can imagine him, say, as an artist-in-residence among the folksingers of “A Mighty Wind” (2003). Whether he merits a movie to himself is another matter.

In 2002, Carnahan made an intense and violent little cop film, "Narc," with Jason Patric and Ray Liotta. He seemed to have absorbed the influences of John Cassavetes and Martin Scorsese and come up with a style of his own. I was a fan of that movie, but Smokin’ Aces feels like Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" pushed much further along into lethal absurdity.

The movie is hardly in a position to chastise Gage for his empty soul when its own style is one of numbing, desolate slickness.

This comedy has some wonderful gags and a lot of other good ideas for gags, but it was directed by Arthur Hiller, who is the opposite of a perfectionist, and it makes you feel as if you were watching television.

The Expendables is savage yet inert, and breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination.

It's an erratic and, finally, disappointing picture (it loses its snap). Yet you keep rooting for it, because Elizabeth McGovern, as the assault victim, a cocktail waitress, has the style and resources that the other two leads lack, and the cinematography, by Gil Taylor, his a snazzy verve, and Hanson has some clever ideas, such as the way he sets up a courtroom sequence and the way he directs the almost mute psycho (the chilling, well-cast Brad Greenquist).

At the center of the movie, in place of the ardent, emotionally pulverizing Judy Garland, there is James Franco...as he smirks and winks, his reflexive self-deprecation comes off as a gutless kind of cool, and it sinks this odd, fretful, uncertain movie like a boulder. [18 March 2013, p.86]

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