Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Although Not Quite Hollywood was clearly put together with fanatical love, the suspicion remains, as often with genre cinema, that these trash-rich movies are a lot more fun to hear about, and to watch in snatches, than to sit through.

Why see this film? Partly because of the leading men, but mainly because of a girl. An Australian actress named Angourie Rice plays March’s daughter, Holly, who is thirteen.

The message is not very different from that of Hello, Dolly! or Mame, but Harold's flaccid asexuality (he's like a sickly infant, a limp, earthbound Peter Pan) and Maude's advanced stage of pixiness give that message a special freaky quality. And the film has been made with considerable wit and skill.

Jarmusch keeps the picture formal and cool, and it has an odd, nonchalant charm; it's fun. But it's softhearted fun--shaggy-dog minimalism--and it doesn't have enough ideas (or laughs) for its 90-minute length.

The film depends, in other words, on its stars. Both, you can tell, have studied their respective masters with scrupulous care, and the results of their pupillage are plain to see.

The hitch with tales of endurance, onscreen, is their unfortunate habit of becoming endurance tests for the viewer, and, after a while, The Revenant turns into a slog. Make no mistake, it’s a very beautiful slog. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography summons a wealth of wonders.

Above all, the movie offers the mournful thrill of new methods that Kiarostami didn’t live to develop further.

For Apatow, one guesses, the only things that can forestall death are comedy (the movie is full of superb comics, including Albert Brooks and Melissa McCarthy) and the flourishing of his children, Maude and Iris, who appear in the movie as Debbie and Pete's daughters.

Zellweger’s singing here passes through to the other side. Suddenly, Zellweger herself seems to pass over to the other side of the character, to come out from behind the curtain and reveal that the cabaret performer and singer in question isn’t Judy Garland but Renée Zellweger, and has been all along. She leaves the movie behind, where it belongs, and heads off on her own, by herself.

One problem with Lawless, though, is that it feels chock-full of entrances that never quite lead anywhere. [3 Sept. 2012, p.78]

The deep drawback of Taking Sides is that it forgets to be interested in music. [8 September 2003, p. 100]

Stately rather than stealthy, is no match for it, but you are borne along, nonetheless, by the clash of characters, and by the ironies of historical momentum.

By the end, Soderbergh’s movie subverts common belief far more effectively than some of the fantasy movies knocking around this summer. It’s a vertiginous experience that grows increasingly hilarious, and the joke is on us.

Noomi Rapace throws herself into the title role, but something about the conception of her character, and about the far-reaching urgency of the sociopathic shocks behind the killing, smacks of a filmmaker pushing too hard. That is why the movie finds it impossible to wind things up.

This light-toned but thematically substantial autofiction is organized like a sequence of diary entries brought to life with Moretti’s wryly confessional voice-overs.

Kasdan is shrewd and funny about such things as the ease with which powerful people can mimic, when they need to, the forms of sincerity and concern. The satire is unrelenting but not too broad; it stays close to common observation.

So well made, and so compelling as a portrait of a man at war with himself, that, right up until the end, many people will probably be entertained by its intricately preposterous story.

Yet the movie is not to be skipped. You should sample its mixture of bacchanal and gall, and revel in Farhadi’s dependable deftness, as he sketches and frames his collection of characters.

The strange thing is that, as the film unfolds, the beauty of the place grows ever more unforgiving. It resembles another planet, fresh from the act of creation, but it feels like a prison.

Viewers reared on The Lego Movie will find plenty to nourish them anew. The songs are still peppy. The principal voices are still supplied by Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, and Will Arnett. And real, non-animated kids are still shown, now and then, sporting with their Lego creations.

Bad fun. This sophisticated variant of the LA. cops-and-coke-and-art-world thrillers has a creepy, rhythmic quality that sucks you in and keeps you amused.

Maps to the Stars is at its most potent and beautiful by far when it becomes a ghost story — when the departed, not just Havana’s mother, return to quiz the living.

Burdge infuses her rigidly and scantly defined role with tremulous vulnerability, and Silver, aided by the splashy palette of Sean Price Williams’s cinematography, evokes derangement with a sardonic wink.

The dialogue is crisp and often quite startling, and though the editing may be a little too showy and jumpy, the picture has originality and depth, and it’s full of sharp, absurdist humor.

You find yourself gradually engulfed, as if by rising waters, and it seems only fair to report that The Wild Pear Tree lasts for more than three hours.

They are Abbott & Costello with dirty mouths--indomitable, ungovernable, and possibly immortal.

Goodbye, Lenin! is often drab--the color is washed out, the lighting flat. Yet the movie is sweetly enjoyable as a sardonic elegy for a dream that went bust. [8 March 2004, p. 92]