Simon instinctively makes things easy and palatable, and there's a penalty: it's the retrograde, pepless snooziness of the picture. You come out feeling half dead.

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

The picture starts out in the confident Capra manner, but with a darker tone; by the end, you feel puzzled and cheated.

There isn't a whisper of surprise in Redford's performance, and he's photographed looking like a wary, modest god, with enough backlighting and soft focus to make him incandescent even when he isn't doing a thing.

As a moviemaker, [Pryor's] a novice presenting us with clumps of unformed experience. It isn't even raw; the juice has been drained away.

Pious muck.

How the West Was Lost would be a more appropriate title for this dud epic, since, as conceived by the writer, James R. Webb, the pioneers seem to dimwitted bunglers who can't do anything right.

The screenwriters retain much of Mamet's dialogue, but they piece it out, and the director punches up the breaks between scenes with rock music. It's like being pounded on the back every two minutes when your back is already sore (because the dialogue has been whacking you so hard).

Fantasy is still Walt Disney’s undisputed domain. Nobody else can tell a fairy tale with his clarity of imagination, his simple good taste, or his technical ingenuity. This was forcibly borne in on me as I sat cringing before M-G-M’s Technicolor production of The Wizard of Oz, which displays no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.

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.

A the start, Lemmon has vanished almost totally into his role, but soon he's so insufferably perky and boyish and obliging that you feel he deserves the puling lines that Goldberg gives him.

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.

The killings pile up, yet Jarmusch, the master of mellowdrama, would rather die than be accused of overkill. His heart isn’t really in the blood and guts. The line between the laid-back and the listless, in The Dead Don’t Die, may be too fine even for him, and most of the running gags don’t run at all, merely loping around in a circle.

The movie’s most potent closeup is of a black policewoman, in a line confronting protesters; if you can film her, why not learn what she has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt.

If the movie has any merit at all, it’s in the seemingly unintentional mockery of the conventions and styles of far more purposeful and intention-laden films. In its chaotic whirl of tinsel images, it thumbs its nose at the kind of plain realism that too often passes as synonymous with sincerity.

The material has been turned into a trivially narcissistic product for teen-age girls who want to feel indignant about wrongs they are unlikely to suffer.

Rambo is to the action film what Flashdance was to the musical, with one to-be-cherished difference: audiences are laughing at it.

There’s a big hole in the middle of the movie: the director, Tom Tykwer, and the screenwriter, Eric Warren Singer, forgot to make their two crusaders human beings.

Off the dance floor, however, Black Swan is trashy and incoherent. Aronofsky, for all his gifts, is a gaudy maestro, opportunistic and insecure as an artist.

As often occurs with topical tales, which are hellbent on catching a widespread mood (in this instance, anger and disgust), there’s something hasty and undigested about Bombshell....the action is relentlessly sliced and diced. Why, we could almost be watching TV!

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

This baseball weeper was very clumsily directed by John Hancock; everything stops dead for the dialogue scenes.

Over six seasons The Sopranos at least compensated for its reductive aesthetic with complex patterns of narrative information. The Many Saints of Newark, by contrast, reduces characters of potentially mythic power to a handful of defining traits and pins them to a diorama-like backdrop of historical readymades.

The tone is too playful, too bright. Is the heiress herself meant to be a treasure? Is she meant to be charmingly klutzy? You can't tell.

The Dictator, like its predecessors, is short (eighty-three minutes), but it runs down fast, and the lewd jokes pile up. [28 May 2012, p. 76]

A rigid faced Joan Crawford, in a role that would make sense only if played by a ravishing young beauty. She's twice too old for it, and her acting is grim and masklike.

The two elements work against each other, each revealing the fault lines of the other: the fictional side remains bound to (and limited by) the most conventional and unquestioned observational mode of documentary filmmaking, while the documentary aspect strains against the simplifying framework of the drama in which it’s confined.

In this movie, Phoenix turns himself inside out, but Cotillard’s reserved performance doesn’t move us. Bruno advances in his confused way, Ewa resists, and, despite Jeremy Renner’s flickering presence, the movie becomes dour and repetitive. Looking at them, you finally think, Enough! Life must be elsewhere.