The aviation footage is still something to see, with great shots of zeppelin warfare...But the First World War story, involving two brothers...is plain awful.

Sparks like that are scattered through, and yet the sad fact is that Jersey Boys is a mess. Parts of it feel half-finished.

The bedgraggled plotting forces Hanks into maudlin situations, but he manages to get under some of his material and darken it.

One of the more high-minded and painful follies of recent years.

In a long career of giving pleasure, this is one of the few occasions when (Rogers) failed; it isn't her worst acting but there's nothing in the soggy material to release the distinctive Ginger Rogers sense of fun.

American Dharma succeeds neither as journalism nor as portraiture, neither as political critique nor as cultural survey nor as psychological study.

A confused, humorless grind.

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

The picture is a pile of poetic mush set in some doom-laden, vaguely universal city of the past and/or the future.

A forgettable Bogart melodrama that was already familiar when it came out; it had been synthesized from several of his hits, with Lizabeth Scott's role processed out of Mary Astor and Lauren Bacall routines.

More like the Pelican Long-and-Drawn-Out: well over two hours of plots, subplots and super-subdialogue.

Whatever sense of obsession drives Robert’s art and whatever emotional freedom inspires Miles’s, neither is found in the cinematic aesthetic of “Funny Pages”; the movie is merely a conventional vessel for Kline’s ardent ideas, which pass through the cinema without leaving a trace.

This is an ethnic variant of all those the-summer-the-adolescent-became-a-man pictures, done in a messagey, exploitation manner.

Cassavetes built this movie on a small conceit--a love affair between two people who are wildly unsuited to each other--and it doesn't work.

As obsequiously respectful as if it had been made about living monarchs who might reward the producer with a command performance. Viewers are put in the position of celebrity-lovers eager to partake of the home life of the dullest of the Czars.

The winner, on points, is Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), who crashes the party and leaves them both dumbfounded, not least because she has the wit, and the wherewithal, to confront evil while wearing a conical bustier.

Its exuberant love of New York seems forced, and most of the numbers are hearty and uninspired.

This awkward and half-digested movie gives off a melancholy reek.

The film is essentially a primitive rah-rah story about an underdog's triumph over a bully, and in the times that Americans are living through now the things in it that are merely simple seem simplified to the point of odiousness...In the Heat of the Night seems to be made up of a great deal of attitudinizing and very little instinct. [5 Aug 1967, p.64]

What lends the film its grip and its haste is also what makes it unsatisfactory.

The pointlessness would be vastly more appealing if Wang and Auster didn't make such a point of it.

A clunky and obvious comedy.

The picture teeters on the edge of parody without giving itself the relief of falling over.

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]

As a director, he seems incapable of trusting his actors to carry the mood, preferring always to lend them a backup -- jokes, fripperies, kooky camera angles -- that they don't require. [5 Nov 2001, p. 105]

I hesitate to ask, but did anyone actually tell McClane, before he arrived, that the Cold War is over?

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.

Shirley, by contrast, coats her in gothic excess as if glazing a ham, and of her humor scarcely a shred remains. As a sworn devotee of “Airplane!,” I found myself praying that once — just once — she would utter the words “And don’t call me Shirley,” thus rending the veil of gloom from top to bottom. Sadly, it was not to be.