Here is an art-house flick, cunningly coated in the gleam of a high-tech thriller.

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.

The movie keeps insisting that the gruelling experience it's putting us through is really meant to edify us; it drags us into the mud and then tells us that we haven't got dirty.

The director, Sydney Pollack, isn't particularly inventive, but he has tight control of the actors. They work well for him, and he keeps the grisly central situation going with energy and drive.

Almost amusing in a harmlessly, pleasantly stupid way.

How keenly you respond to it will depend on how tempted you are by the salad days of Solo. Personally, I preferred him in “The Force Awakens” (2015), at the other end of his career.

The movie may be a grim warning against the perils of technology and its ability to spew alternative realities, but Cronenberg himself can hardly claim to have his feet firmly planted on the ground.

The picture doesn't have a snappy enough rhythm, and the repartee is often too slow, and the story takes a bad turn just past midway by making a melodramatic villain out of a likable character. But until then it's generally fresh, and it has a lovely soft visual quality, with unusually pleasing camera placement.

Schamus is a great producer of independent cinema, having overseen — and sometimes co-written — the work of Ang Lee, but this is the first movie he has directed, and the rhythm of the storytelling feels careful and courteous to a fault.

It would be lovely to announce that the new Bond movie is scintillating, or at least rambunctiously exciting, but Skyfall, in the recent mode of Christopher Nolan's "Batman" films, is a gloomy, dark action thriller, and almost completely without the cynical playfulness that drew us to the series in the first place. [12 Nov. 2012, p.94]

Its script is junk—but junk brought to the screen with verve.

The resulting film is a kaleidoscopically shifting—and dazzling—collage of elements that have their irony built in and that, jammed together, meld intense sincerity with self-parody (above all, Perry’s own) in an artificial artifact that nonetheless proves more authentic than a plain and unadorned recording.

A Serious Man, like “Burn After Reading,” is in their bleak, black, belittling mode, and it’s hell to sit through.

M:i:III, like many blockbusters, would be nothing without its star.

Running two hours and forty minutes, never finds the same balance: by the time he gets to the lust, it is too late to throw caution to the winds.

Cool, violent, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, Gosling reprises his inexorable-loner routine from “Drive.” Cianfrance and the screenwriters Ben Coccio and Darius Marder wrote thirty-seven drafts of the script, but gave him almost nothing to say. He rides, he smokes, he knocks over banks, he loves his baby, and that’s it.

This spoofy black comedy is thin-textured and it's sedated; it doesn't have enough going on in it -- not even enough to look at. The nothingness of the movie is supposed to be its droll point, but viewers may experience sensory deprivation.

Even if you like your movies sick and black, as many people do, it's hard to miss the irony: in the very act of trying to intensify his Southern tale, Friedkin dilutes the impact.

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.

Housebound and fearfully lofty.

For all its turbulent action and extravagant expressiveness, Maestro is hollow; even its strongest moments play like false fronts, like veneer far fuller, stranger, more struggle-riddled lives.

What ensues is a devout communal effort, tricked out with various hops through time and space, to make us forget that it was a piece of theatre in the first place. Needless to say, the attempt is in vain.

Penn is given so little to work with here that it's practically a pantomime performance. He's worth watching, even though the picture is singularly unimaginative.

For a better reckoning of 1968, you need a better writer — Norman Mailer, unloved by Buckley and Vidal alike, whose “Miami and the Siege of Chicago” covered the same events. Next to his fervid look at the sinews of power, as they sweat and flex, Best of Enemies is barely more than a skit.

What stirred the fans around me, causing them to levitate in their seats, was not the film’s emotional sway (for it has none) but the miraculous visitation of characters from other Marvel flicks, many of them played by embarrassed-looking British actors, whose every entrance was met with ejaculations of joy.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

Of the two attempts, I still prefer the one from my childhood.