In this smutty kiddie farce he's a clownish action toy, and he grows wearying, fast.

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.

Although it's refreshing to see an action movie that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't, this frankness has a downside, because what the picture so unapologetically is isn't, in fact, much.

Considered as a sequel, Be Cool is not an insult, but it’s a lazy, rhythmless, and redundant piece of moviemaking.

Whatever they pay these movie stars to keep a straight face, it’s not enough.

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

A lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films, and, with a decisive trim, it could truly have fulfilled its brief as a bright, semi-abstract pop fantasy, at once excitable and disposable. Oddly, it did once exist in that form: in the first trailer.

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

Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.

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.

Has so many things wrong with it that one can only stare at the screen in disbelief. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]

A short, meaningless blast of fun from Disney.

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

Though Space Jam: A New Legacy fails, woefully, as an aesthetic object and as a viewing experience, it somehow nonetheless succeeds as a conceptual representation of a Hollywood studio’s terror in the face of streaming domination, of the movie industry at large that, like Warner Bros., is in the process of being swallowed up in one Serververse or another.

Wright’s best film so far, livelier and more disloyal to its source than “Atonement” or “Pride and Prejudice” — crams without a care. The outcome is that increasing rarity, a proper children’s film; even the tears are well earned.

The picture is stupid and often perfunctory; at the same time it's moderately enjoyable.

The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling. It's an embarrassment.

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.

The movie rages on for a hundred and fifty minutes and then just stops, pausing for the next sequel.

Its big idea, though vague, is at least a fascinating curiosity. But with its jumble of clichés, its blatant word-bubble declarations, and its hectically rushed impracticalities, the movie—which is based on a comic-book series—invites an air of antic exaggeration and revved-up stylization. It hints frustratingly, throughout, at a comedic impulse that the direction of its actors suppresses.

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]

In the end, Dreamcatcher is an abominable-worm picture. The movie is also an unholy mess, a miserably organized and redundant collection of arbitrary scares and thrills without a unifying visual or poetic idea. [31 March 2003, p. 106]

This disposable date movie is not so much written and acted as cast—just about every young actor in the country is in it.

Levinson is terrific at claustrophobia. In fact, this doesn't resemble any of his previous films so much as it does his gripping TV series, "Homicide."

The result is clever, and the narrative twistings keep you on your toes, but there's just one hitch: it ain't funny.

To be honest, I would be perfectly happy to walk with a zombie after ninety minutes of this; it would feel like light relief.

Comes in well under the ninety-minute mark, leaving no room for bombast or overkill.

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

The director is Bob Spiers, though it's hard to judge whether he actually turned up on the set.

The Bubble (which Apatow co-wrote with Pam Brady) is a sort of good bad movie, in which the aesthetic falls flat but the personal motive, the emotional core, is authentic, pugnacious, derisive.

The whole thing appears to have been designed by some crazed Oedipal wing of the N.R.A. And what are the aliens known as? The Others. I rest my case.

Mike Myers plays Steve Rubell as the druggy epicenter of Studio 54, and his performance gives director Mark Christopher's soapy morality tale its only moments of wanton, hedonistic spirit.

No surprise, then, that Goldblum seems a little lonely and marooned in the latest venture, which suffers from a nagging case of Smithlessness.

These basic failures of taste and sensibility are a subset of Hooper’s over-all failure of literal vision: he doesn’t really see what he’s doing, and the virtual invisibility of his own movie to himself is reflected in an odd set of metaphors that result from his casting.

There is evidence that at some point this project (which was initiated by Oliver Stone) might have been serious, but Campbell has produced little more than a churning, vivid backdrop for romance. [10 November 2003, p. 129]

The movie is of minimum interest; the story of the movie, however -- or, rather, of the way in which it has been engulfed by its own publicity -- is bound to fascinate connoisseurs of cultural meltdown.

This is the first occasion on which Moodysson has lost his balance, allowing his wrath to outweigh the charity that he used to extend to even the most boorish of his characters.

All we have to look forward to is: When are these two going to discover fornication? The director, Randal Kleiser, and his scenarist, Douglas Day Stewart, have made the two clean and innocent by emptying them of any dramatic interest. Watching them is about as exciting as looking into a fishbowl waiting for guppies to mate. It's Disney nature porn.

As the lines drone on -- paced with a sledgehammer -- you may feel you could die for a little overlapping dialogue. But with this material you can't even have the frivolous pleasure of derision.

Reese Witherspoon is a woman, aged thirty-five, with a bundle of grownup roles behind her. Yet in order to retain her slot in romantic comedy, it appears, she must reverse into her teens. What makes the transition yet more depressing is the memory of Tracy Flick. [27 Feb. 2012, p.86]

The self-confident fatuity and condescension of the movie is offensive.

One of those hyper-articulate messes which inspire awe and a kind of nauseated pity. [3 March 2003, p. 94]

The picture seems to crumble... because the writer and director don't distinguish Loew's fantasies from his actual life... But with Cage in the role we certainly see the delusions at work. This daring kid starts over the top and just keeps going. He's airily amazing. [12 June 1989]

Falls below even minimal standards of dramatic decency. John Q is a trashy, opportunistic piece of pop demagoguery. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]

The mélange of plots, subplots, reveries, gags, cartoons, dirty bits, and hissy fits points to a work that is structurally modelled less on the classic narratives of cinema than on, say, a portion of Russian salad.

Although Premonition is not a frightening movie, it is aimed squarely at an audience of frightened souls.

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]

Pfeiffer, enormously likable in the role, almost saves the movie. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

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

It’s when Landais departs from the original, or has a bright idea for expanding on it, that the movie’s troubles begin.

What it's really about, of course, is the very delicate marketing problem of turning a super-bland pop star into an acceptable human being onscreen. [4 Mar 2002, p. 90]

Carrey, unable to pretzel himself in this role, has to do a normal job of characterization, but he never fills in the blank spaces in Peter Appleton. [28 Jan 2002, p. 90]

The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power.

The whole enterprise heaves and strains with a sadistic overkill that even Dario might find too rich.

The funniest thing about The Women is that Mick Jagger is one of the producers.

This shameless piece of sentimentality is indignantly on the side of feelings and spontaneity and against coldhearted technique, as if those were the only two choices in training doctors.

Madonna's mess of a movie grabs at the rub and rancor of multiculturalism, which it proceeds to squash into a litter of clichés, or, more simply, insults.

I saw Brooks’s Fever Pitch when it came out, and was instantly smitten...Fever Pitch still delivers the same terse, grim, and ironic power that it had when I first saw it.

Parts of Bangkok Dangerous, far from seeming unfamiliar or freshly stylized, offer nothing that you couldn't catch in an episode of "CSI."

The director, Frank Marshall, who has produced films for Steven Spielberg, gets his own Michael Crichton book to play with—and the results are disastrous.

The only thing that Butler and Aniston have in common, however, is identical Aruba-bronze skin tones: they seem to have been sprayed with the same can.

This is a certifiably loony picture; it's so bad it puts you in a state of shock.

Travel-folder footage of Rio mixed with father-daughter incest (in a disguised form)...Most of the movie is an attempt to squirm out from under its messy erotic-parental subject.

This picture seems ingenious at the start, but Crichton can't write people, and he directs like a technocrat. This is the emptiest of his pictures to date.

Compare 88 Minutes with "Sea of Love," another murder mystery that Pacino made, in 1989, and you find him sporting the same loud ties, but everything else has leached away: suspense, credibility, wit, and the lost art of flirtation.

The sheer ineptitude of the movie is supposed to be funny, but there's no lunacy behind it: Shore and his writers are like comedians on Prozac, smiling through the fart jokes without a hint of desperation.

This intense, furious melodrama, by the Filipino director Lino Brocka, fuses its narrative energy with documentary veracity.

It’s more than the portrait of an artist (or even of two); it’s a revelation and exaltation of the artistic essence, of the very nature of an artist’s life as an unending act of creation in itself.

The film is at the same time intensely personal and riddled with occasionally cringe-inducing clichés. No matter: Rockaway is an agonized and sharply moving film.

By means of suggestive editing, plus a potent score by Patrick Gowers, Hazan makes us feel that we are watching a mystery. Naturally, no solution is provided.

Despite the merely functional reticence of Glowicki’s direction, along with the narrow scope of the drama, Tito is an instant classic of acting.

Jia’s restrained yet fierce X-ray of the ills of modern China also evokes a calm, intimate compassion for its struggling survivors.

For all the earnest diagnosis of race relations in a country that doesn’t recognize race, Zadi crafts an extraordinary comedic work of lilt and sparkle.

Long before the plot is resolved, Joji offers a sardonic vision of patriarchal tyranny and the pathologies it spawns—and the obvious artifice of the ending declares, with bitter irony, that there’s no end in sight.

In Rewind & Play, Gomis does more than reveal the discussion that didn’t see the light of day in 1970; he reveals the cinematic methods by which the fabricated and tailored view of Monk’s life and work were crafted.

Lodkina borrows one of the most familiar of young filmmakers’ tropes—the drama of a film student struggling to complete a thesis film—and transforms it into something as original as it is personal.

In short, this film is what would remain if you deleted all the spaceships from Close Encounters of the Third Kind: the tale of a once ordinary man beset by an unworldly thirst that he can neither explain nor quench.

The film’s own style may feel more prosaic than the poetic, but it’s awfully irresistible prose; its most conventional element, a plaintively beautiful musical theme composed by Tommy Wai, is also its most emotionally effective. Yet Hui does infuse a wistful poetry into her filmmaking