The film often looks third class, and the director, Jim Abrahams, doesn't have the knack of making the details click into place. You're aware of an awful lot of mistaken-identity plot and aware of how imprecise most of it is. Yet the picture moves along, spattering the air with throwaway gags, and a minute after something misfires you're laughing out loud.

The picture doesn't have a snappy enough rhythm, and the repartee is often too slow, and the story takes a bad turn just past midway by making a melodramatic villain out of a likable character. But until then it's generally fresh, and it has a lovely soft visual quality, with unusually pleasing camera placement.

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.

The filmmakers peddle fear and then try to claim the moral high ground; the treatment is foolish, confused, and borderline irresponsible.

There are treasures in Knight of Cups. It’s worth seeing just for the underwater shots of dogs as they plunge, mouths laughingly agape, into a pool to grab a tennis ball.

When the Dostoyevskian drama kicks in, Allen’s venomous speculations take over, and bring to the fore a tangle of ghostly conundrums and ferocious ironies, as if the director, nearing eighty, already had one foot in the next world and were looking back at this one with derision and rue.

A frankly practical look at professionalism and its blurry borders.

Made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show.

Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

The hermetic logic of the plot is as impeccable as it is ridiculous. It’s a drama crafted with robotic insularity for the consumption of viewers being rendered robotic at each moment of the soullessly uniform spectacle.

The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids.

Lucky Number Slevin is a bag of nerves. Everything here is too much. The older the actors, the saltier the ham of their performances.

Screenwriters Brian Koppelman and David Levien have given some crackerjack card-shark dialogue to two hot young actors—Matt Damon and Edward Norton—and together with John Dahl's atmospheric direction they've all made a dream of a poker movie.

A virtual textbook of action clichés.

All is dour and dun. We are a long way from Errol Flynn marching in with a deer slung over his shoulder, or from the Fairbanks who didn’t merely scamper and swing from one errand of justice to the next. He SKIPPED.

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.

This film's got EVERYTHING, although purists might quibble that it lacks any sliver of plausibility or dramatic interest.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.

Smart, saucy, and ingenious in the extreme. The trouble is that when a subtext is dragged to the fore, however splendidly, the poor old text gets lost.

Penn is given so little to work with here that it's practically a pantomime performance. He's worth watching, even though the picture is singularly unimaginative.

The first half of this 1997 movie suffers from abstraction. Still, it's a compelling erotic nightmare.

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]

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]

It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

Is there a piece of casting more ineffably Hollywood than Cher as a busy, weary public defender? She's all wrong for this role: her hooded, introspective face doesn't give you enough--she needs a role that lets her use her body.

In Sharp Stick, Dunham forces a flood of experience and pain into a compact vessel.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

The gist of the critical response has been that The Tender Bar follows a well-worn path. Fair enough, but is that such a sin? (You should try the new Matrix movie. Now, that’s worn.) What counts is the firmness of the tread, and Clooney sets a careful but unloitering pace.