Poky but often charming.

Setting aside the woeful omission, though, and considering the film outside the realm of preëxisting facts, as if it were a work of fiction about a fictitious character, “Michael” still counts as only a modestly noteworthy achievement, enjoyable yet flawed—because it contains other, artistic blind spots that keep the drama thin and narrow.

There are some good silly gags, and the animals look relaxed even in their dizziest slapstick scenes. And the picture certainly never starves the eye; the cinematography is by the celebrated Pasqualino De Santis.

The cast looks sound enough—John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma, Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as the Rubbles—but the script, cobbled together by a crowd of writers, gives them nothing but a handful of limp gags.

Gemini Man is largely a sad affair. Fans of double characters should stick with Austin Powers, who, in “The Spy Who Shagged Me” (1999), enjoys the rare privilege of meeting the person he was ten minutes ago. “You,” he says, “are adorable.”

You have to feel sorry for Moore, who is called upon to supply an unappealing mixture of neurosis and starch, and whose instinctive frailty is so endlessly exploited by Howitt's movie that the jokes, such as they are, go into retreat. [3 May 2004, p. 110]

The movie only stirs in the final twenty minutes.

The revelation is Wilde. A slender beauty with high cheekbones, she makes Anna a full-fledged neurotic, candid and demanding and changeable, shifting abruptly from snuggling happiness to angry defiance.

Reitman is a witty filmmaker, but here he seems a little disconnected, too.

Amelia is handsome yet predictable and high-minded--not a dud, exactly, but too proper, too reserved for its swaggering subject.

In this smutty kiddie farce he's a clownish action toy, and he grows wearying, fast.

Thank heaven for Dwayne Johnson, whose foot-wide smile will not be switched off, and who saves the life of the movie. Whether it deserves to be saved is another matter.

Although it's refreshing to see an action movie that doesn't pretend to be something it isn't, this frankness has a downside, because what the picture so unapologetically is isn't, in fact, much.

Considered as a sequel, Be Cool is not an insult, but it’s a lazy, rhythmless, and redundant piece of moviemaking.

Whatever they pay these movie stars to keep a straight face, it’s not enough.

Penn gives a strenuous, at times shrewd and acid performance, which has been embedded, unfortunately, in a clumsy and ineffective movie.

A lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films, and, with a decisive trim, it could truly have fulfilled its brief as a bright, semi-abstract pop fantasy, at once excitable and disposable. Oddly, it did once exist in that form: in the first trailer.

However mystifying, or downright boring, you find the result, rest assured that the Refn faithful will swoon. Peace be with them.

Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.

With its restless parade of grainy closeups, the movie is a haze of retro rapture and wishful thinking, and, above all, a lost opportunity. We don't want to hear any more about ancient constitutional crises. We want to watch a three-way with a former King of England, in a bungalow. Madonna, of all people, missed a trick.

Has so many things wrong with it that one can only stare at the screen in disbelief. [25 April, 2011 p. 89]

A short, meaningless blast of fun from Disney.

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

Though Space Jam: A New Legacy fails, woefully, as an aesthetic object and as a viewing experience, it somehow nonetheless succeeds as a conceptual representation of a Hollywood studio’s terror in the face of streaming domination, of the movie industry at large that, like Warner Bros., is in the process of being swallowed up in one Serververse or another.

Wright’s best film so far, livelier and more disloyal to its source than “Atonement” or “Pride and Prejudice” — crams without a care. The outcome is that increasing rarity, a proper children’s film; even the tears are well earned.

The picture is stupid and often perfunctory; at the same time it's moderately enjoyable.

The movie is hectic, exhausting, and baffling. It's an embarrassment.

The result is more or less a remake of the great scene in “Sherlock Jr.,” where a dozing Buster Keaton dreams himself through a shuffled sequence of backgrounds. Jumper is ten times as brutal, maybe a thousand times more costly, and eighty-four years late, but it’s a start.