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]

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.

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]

But by the end, the charm and delicacy of the 1961 cartoon have long been replaced by laborious gross-outs. Is this now official Disney policy?

The narrative staggers on, enlivened only by the hovering threat of kitsch and the musical dubbing. Moore, like an upmarket version of Lina Lamont, in “Singin’ in the Rain,” lip-synchs convincingly to the sound of Renée Fleming. But not quite convincingly enough.

Maybe some of the audience should wonder if they aren't performing the Devil's work by sitting so quietly through movies that turn wonders into garbage.

Despite some memorably painful moments and underlying artistic urgency, the film’s implications remain unprocessed and unquestioned.

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.

In Godard’s “King Lear,” a single phrase, a single word, gives rise to an astonishing outpouring of visual investigation and invention.

The director, Roland Joffe, and his co-screenwriter, Bruce Robinson, took this inherently dramatic subject and got lost in it; the script is a shambles.

The picture's only claim on one's attention is in the two sequences staged by Busby Berkeley.

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.

All this leaves The Zero Theorem looking both disorderly and stuck. And yet, to my surprise, on returning for a second viewing I found myself moved by the film — by the very doggedness with which it both hunts for and despairs of meaning.

There's a sweet, naive feeling to the movie even when it's violent and melodramatic and atrocious, and when it's good it's good in an unorthodox, improvisatory style.

The most surprising aspect of the film is its suburban mildness, plus the hapless charm of its hero, Enn (Alex Sharp).

Dumont turns the tale into a dialectical spectacle: he stages military musters like Busby Berkeley productions, seethes at the torturers’ rationalizations, delights in hearing his actors declaim the scholars’ sophistries, and thrills in the pugnacious simplicity of Joan’s defiant responses, which reduce her captors’ pride to ridicule.

Bullock shades what she normally does into something more interesting -- the angriest and sexiest work she's done. [6 May 2002, p. 138]

"Gentlemen, I wash my hands of this weirdness," Captain Jack says. Sir, you speak for us all.

The longer that After the Wedding goes on, the more it concentrates on the woes of white folk, to the exclusion of all else, and you gradually realize that the Third World, far from being a source of cultural tension, isn’t even a backdrop to minor domestic events on the East Coast.

Wilson and the director, Steven Shainberg, draw on Arbus's family and on many elements from her life and her art, only to turn the material into feeble nonsense.

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.

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]

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.

An extremely well-crafted exercise in physical invention and fear. Yet within those limits--the limits of a pop-digital survival drama--Poseidon is an exciting show.

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]

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

It's a dull, poky picture, which provides an unwelcome showcase for MacLaine's increasingly insufferable cute-gorgon shtick and no showcase at all for Cage's tremendous comic talents.

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