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

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

The directing, by Brian De palma, is canny and smooth, but this musty genre calls for fresh jokes and sharp, colorful personalities, and that's not what he's working with.

What happens, though, and what lures the film into disaster, is that Hartley lets slip his sense of humor (always his strongest asset) and begins to believe his own plot.

Under its compelling influence, we are lured into feeling that these various lives, marked by vacuity and frustration, are in some way destined to end at the point of a gun — that the murderer and his victims coexist on a continuum of despair. Try telling that to the people of Aurora.

The pleasures of the design fade along with those of the pat and callow drama.

What a comedown, after the weirdly beautiful things Singer and his technicians did in the first two movies.

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.

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]

The best reason to stay with it is Vaughn, whose lanky wryness wards off the threat of pomposity. The worst reason is Jada Pinkett Smith, who gets stuck with a thankless role as the unwittingly lethal villain -- a newspaper journalist, of course.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

When Beatty and Hoffman doe their (deliberately hopeless) singing numbers, jerking like mechanical men, phrasing unmusically, going off-key, they don't have the slapstick skills for it. That's when you long for Martin and Murray, or some other comics. [1 June 1987, p.102]

The impulsiveness and raw flamboyance that make the book exciting are missing, and the cool, elegant visuals outclass the characters right from the start.

The last third of the movie is as bad as anything I’ve seen this year, with the laughs trailing off, and half of the supporting characters, the zestier ones, being airbrushed from the frame. (What director in his right mind would drop Tina Fey from the proceedings?)

War Horse is a bland, bizarrely unimaginative piece of work. [2 Jan. 2012, p.79]

Ugh. A murder mystery that starts from a Leslie Charteris story but never gets anyplace you'd want to go to.

Screenwriter Oliver Stone and the director, Alan Parker, have subjected their Billy (Brad Davis) to the most photogenic sadomasochistic brutalization that they could dream up. The film is like a porno fantasy about the sacrifice of a virgin. It rushes from torment to torment, treating Billy's ordeals hyponotically in soft colors -- muted squalor -- with a disco beat in the background.

It may well be most amenable to the completely blotto. I made the grave mistake of seeing it sober, and there were moments when I simply lost my courage and had to look away, as some people do during the tooth-drilling scene in “Marathon Man.”

Regardless of Zhao’s (and Marvel’s) intentions, Eternals is a parade of faces without experience, a movie that reaches back and forth through history and comes back empty-handed.

The message appears to be that the spirit of M-G-M in the 40s still lives in the hearts and jokes of homosexuals.

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.