The dramatic format seems borrowed from television, with multiple threads jumpily interweaved, to ward off impatience. With so many balls in the air at once, the movie lacks the kind of patient observation that this story demands.

The film is rich in fillips--smart little taps and strokes. But after a while you start asking yourself, what is this movie about? (You're still asking when it's over.)

Painful to sit through, because you want to see someone like Paul Thomas Anderson take hold of the character and the actress and start again from the beginning. Bob Dolman understands Suzette, but the rest of the movie is composed of ham-handedly obvious scenes. [23 Sept 2002, p. 98]

The movie is immensely pleased with itself, in the manner of adorable kids who know they can get away with anything--the commercial opportunism is so self-confident in its silliness that you can’t really fight it. [7 July 2003, p. 84]

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

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

It's bright and blithe, like the sound of the 60s girl groups on the track; the flimsy plot hardly matters.

Daniel Mann's direction is maybe even worse that the Charles Schnee-John Michael Hayes script.

Spanglish chokes on an excess of sincerity and guilt, and, in retrospect, its failure may turn out to be momentous for a sincere and guilty community--Hollywood liberals in a state of post-election dismay.

Tears of the Sun may be a flattering myth, but it’s not a bad myth to be flattered by. [17 March 2003, p. 154]

There are potentially funny scenes, but Bergman doesn't know how to give timing and polish to his own jokes.

A clear failure, yet Lee is getting at things that mystify him, and I was touched by parts of the movie. [13 & 20 Aug. 2012, p.97]

This movie is a smooch-free zone, and the arc described by its leading lady, proud and nerveless, is an elegant one: she starts by taking a punch to the face, without malice, from another woman, and, at the climax, delivers one herself—unmanning her male opponent with a decisive thump to the groin. If Lara Croft weren’t already a role model, she is now.

This is not a question of a movie selling its soul. The soul is in the selling.

The movie's horror-comics second half is cheesy, derivative, and ultimately a little wearying. But it's also unpretentious and insanely cheerful.

If you were to watch Lockout a few months from now, at home alone, it wouldn't produce more than a shrug. Movies this bad need to be revered in public places. Go see it in a mall, and try to sneak a beer or two in with you.

One of the few great films based on a great book; its acerbic humor matches the tale’s stifled horror of stifling morals.

Does it matter that the plot is so full of holes that you could use it to drain spaghetti?

Brown and now Ron Howard have added an incendiary element to trash--open hostility toward the Catholic Church.

An all-star send-up of the Bond films, with multiple Bonds and multiple directors, has some laughs, but it makes one terribly conscious of wastefulness. Jokes and plots and possibilities are thrown away along with huge, extravagant sets, and famous performers go spinning by.

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]