The cinematography is very ordinary, and most of the staging is uninspired, but Lange has real authority, and the performance holds you emotionally. People cry at this movie though it sin't sentimental - it's an honest tearjerker.

Without Nancy and her demon lover, Polanski's Oliver Twist feels handsome, steady, and respectful; it has that touch of mummification which wins awards. But Dickens had murder in mind--women killed for their kindness, children for lack of food--and he wanted us to howl and hyperventilate. He asked for more.

The bare script seems written by telegram, reducing the characters to pieces on a historical chessboard, and the portentous pace and lugubrious tone of Cooper’s direction take the place of substance.

You think afresh of the film’s title and wonder, Who is more unknown here, the nameless victim or the inscrutable doctor?

From the start, Just Another Girl on the I.R.T., an independent film made on a very low budget (reportedly a hundred and thirty thousand dollars), is a polyphonic work of multiple voices and consciousnesses.

When Wright literalizes the fantastic, the movie turns squalid. He does better when he lets his visual fancies roam free. [25 April, 2011 p.88]

It is possible to applaud Pacific Rim for the efficacy of its business model while deploring the tale that has been engendered — long, loud, dark, and very wet. You might as well watch the birth of an elephant.

Only Johnson’s committed, precise, and vigorous performance suggests the power that inherently surges through the story and that the movie leaves nearly untapped.

Yet as art this revisionist movie, grimly effective as some of it is, doesn't hold a candle to the remarkable cycle of pictures in the late seventies and the eighties which captured the discordant character of a tragic war. [11 Mar 2002, p. 92]

Vignettish and offhand, but it’s extremely pleasant, and it suggests what can be done with lightweight equipment and a loose-limbed approach to the right subject. [19 May 2003, p. 94]

If audiences enjoy the movie, it's largely because of the elderly actors and the affection that the young director, Ron Howard, shows for them.

The whole thing does seem preternaturally stained with Weltschmerz.

Jeffrey Caine and Bruce Feirstein's script promises more fun than it delivers, slowly frittering away its store of jokes and thrills.

Above all, what makes the movie work -- what renders it not merely exhausting but fulfilling -- are the boys. Bier summons fine performances all around, but Nielsen, in particular, turns the role of christian into a drama all its own. [4 April, 2011, p. 82]

Spurlock's documentary will tell you how, and whether, you should join the pilgrimage. Because I have never watched "Battlestar Galactica," and because of my absurd reluctance to dress up as Wonder Woman, I wouldn't last five minutes. [23 April 2012, p. 82]

Sydney Pollack's directing is efficient and the film is moderately entertaining, but it leaves no residue. Except for the intensity of Newman's sly, compact performance...and the marvelously inventive acting of Melinda Dillon.

The one, transfixing virtue of Marie Antoinette is its unembarrassed devotion to the superficial. There is no morality at play here, no agony other than boredom, and, until the last half hour, not a shred of political sense. The fun dies out of the film--in fact, the film itself expires--when Coppola suddenly starts dragging in discussions of the American Revolution.

Even as Cold Weather approaches nullity, it gives some pleasure. [7 Feb. 2011, p. 83]

Allen has suggested that “Coup de Chance,” his fiftieth feature, may be his last; if so, he goes out with a self-excoriating bang.

The film is nonsense, and what counts is whether viewers will feel able to lay aside their logical complaints and bask in what remains: a trip in search of a tan.

The few good jokes (most of them courtesy of the Pharaoh's high priests, voiced by Martin Short and Steve Martin) are swallowed up in this humorless epic.

The film is gorgeously shot (slow-motion basketballs spin in the air like Kubrick's spaceships), and the majestic Aaron Copland score helps some of the images to soar, but Lee's screenplay, heavy-handed and didactic, gives the actors little room to convey any real emotions.

For regular moviegoers, The Apparition will seem most remarkable for what it is not. So accustomed are we to yarns of demonic possession that the beatific equivalent comes as quite a shock.

Neel’s cast is terrific, from Schnetzer and Flaherty, with their soft and soulful — and thus punchable — faces, to Jake Picking, who plays the leader of the frat pack, and whose Popeye arms and buggy unblinking eyes make him both a monster and, if you stand aside from the melee, a bad joke.

In short, this film is not quite the frozen and brittle comedy that it appears to be, and, if you can stomach it the first time, you may experience a baffling wish to see it again -- to inspect this crystalline curiosity from another angle. [16 September 2002, p. 106]

The dance numbers are funny, amazing, and beautiful all at once; several of them are just about perfection. And though some of the dialogue scenes are awkwardly paced and almost static, they still have a rapt, gripping quality.

As nonsense goes, this has a certain gusto and glee, and what dismayed me was that Bekmambetov felt the need to spice it with the addition of coarsely chopped violence.

The forced snappiness of the exchanges suggests two woodpeckers clicking at each other's heads. Irritability provides the rhythm in Neil Simon's universe.