LaBute's attempt to follow in the footsteps of Restoration comedy is undercut by the fact that his dialogue is only fitfully funny, and you can't help but feel soured by the flat, ritualistic look of the action. The one enlivening performance comes, surprisingly, from Jason Patric.

For me, the possible false note lay not in Aramayo’s performance but in the script. At times, it seems that Jones’s film, far from being strictly diagnostic, might in fact be egging John on, for the sake of our entertainment, toward perverse new heights of verbal invention.

Consistently entertaining and eerily beautiful.

The humor of two clerks arguing about ethics and sex deflates before the halfway mark, but the writer-director, Kevin Smith, dishes up some funny profanity in his low-budget black-and-white debut.

This ghost movie has an overcomplicated plot, but it has a poetic feeling that makes up for much of the clutter.

It's more languidly paced than his mid 30s work, and the dialogue is spoken in stage rhythms, but there are inventive moments.

The movie has a deep-toned flossy and "artistic" clarity and a peculiarly literary tone - the dialogue doesn't sound like living people talking.

One of Edna Ferber's heartfelt, numbskull treks through the hardships and glories of the American heritage.

Contagion is serious, precise, frightening, emotionally enveloping.

The film isn't just about the widow -- it's about family, community, America, and Christian love. But Benton's gentle, nostalgic presentation muffles this. His craftsmanship is like an armor built up around his refusal to outrage or offend anyone; it's an encrusted gentility.

What distinguishes the latest Cage freak-out is the care with which it’s paced; not until halfway through does he start to lose his hinge, and, even when his face is sprayed with blood, he keeps his glasses on, as if hoping to settle down with a book. Oh, and, if you’ve always wanted to watch him milk an alpaca, your time has come.

I don’t buy it, Jane Austen wouldn’t buy it, and deep down I don’t think Song buys it. In attempting to merge escapist pleasures with financial realities, Materialists trips up on its own high-mindedness.

The stylistic thrills of “The Phoenician Scheme” are inseparable from its turbulent, violent physical action, and it is here that the film proves most surprising and most original: its linear narrative lays bare Anderson’s cinephile obsessions.

But Byrne, who has lacked good movie roles of late, is marvellously grave.

Cedar Rapids is certainly a guys' movie, yet it leaves us with the unmistakable impression that men are simple engines. [28 Feb. 2011, p. 80]

The director, Radu Jude, unfolds the horrific treatment, involving long needles, tight wraps, and a full-body cast, with an unflinching and fascinated specificity that contrasts with the teeming theatrical tableaux in which he films life in the lavish facility.

It feels fresh, almost improvised, mainly because Mills doesn’t drive his scenes toward an obvious resolution.

Inglourious Basterds is not boring, but it’s ridiculous and appallingly insensitive.

Never Let Me Go is in such good taste that we never feel any horror over the idea at the center of it.

It has so many unpredictable spins that what's missing doesn't seem to matter much. The images sing. [10 July 1989]

Babel is an infuriatingly well-made disaster.

The movie is a mess, but it’s certainly not dull.

There's a sourness, a relentlessness about the movie which borders on misanthropy. In both the social and the personal scenes, the conversational tone veers between idiotic pleasantries and fathomless bile, with nothing in between.

Most of the movie lacks zest.

The one element Zeffirelli removes that the other bowdlerizers also removed is Shakespeare's language. Only about half the play is left, and what's there doesn't build up the rhythm of a poetic drama. Heard in isolated fragments, the lines just seem a funny way of talking that is hard to understand.

There's too much metaphysical gabbing and a labored boy-gets-girl romance, but audiences loved this chunk of whimsey.

Most of the plotting is ingenious, and soft-faced Mary Steenburgen, as the woman from 20th-century San Francisco who is charmed by the Victorian Wells, makes it all semi-engaging.

As is proved by documentary footage at the end, Garth Davis’s film is based on a true story; though wrenching, there is barely enough of it to fill the dramatic space, and the second half is a slow and muted affair after the Dickensian punch of the first.