I'm more than ready to welcome a new style and a new metaphysic, but I still respond with skepticism and exasperation to Weerasethakul's work, which is sensuous and ruminative but also flat, almost affectless. [28 March 2011, p. 116]

The tangled plot is decorated in gaudy colors (thanks to the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro) that contrast sadly with the sordid doings.

This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good.

This film is at once sumptuous with thrills and surplus to requirements. Let sleeping aliens lie.

Adapted from the million-selling novel by Janet Fitch. Not adapted enough, I would say. [14 & 21 October 2002, p. 226]

The film has many of the ingredients of a shocking, memorable movie, but it's shallow and earnest...It's a mess, with glimmerings of talent and with Newman's near-great performance.

The movie is so tautly constructed that not a single idea can seep in; it’s a mechanism made with an eye to spare elegance so obsessive that it runs without functioning, like a watch without hands.

It’s fun to see Washington square off against a brace of performers who could not resemble him less in bearing and tone.

Is there a piece of casting more ineffably Hollywood than Cher as a busy, weary public defender? She's all wrong for this role: her hooded, introspective face doesn't give you enough--she needs a role that lets her use her body.

Why do people keep making films about writers?

First, you try to understand what the hell is going on. Then you slowly realize that you will never understand what is going on. And, last, you wind up with the distinct impression that, if there was anything to understand, it wasn’t worth the sweat.

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.

The shaded black-and-white cinematography and the dialectical romances mimic the styles and moods of nineteen-seventies French classics without their intimacy, rage, or historical scope.

Credit is due to Dick Pope, the cinematographer, who toughens the film and somehow prevents the fabled grandeur of the locations from softening into the pretty.

Thanks for Sharing is worth it, because of Pink. [30 Sept. 2013, p.85]

Angels, according to this movie's nonexistent logic, travel at the speed of thought and are invisible except to other angels, children, and the dying.

The case itself had so many dramatic elements that the movie can't help holding our attention, but it's a very crude piece of work, totally lacking in subtlety; what is meant to be a courtroom drama of ideas comes out as a caricature of a drama of ideas, and maddeningly, while watching we can't be sure what is based on historical fact and what is invention.

The cracking of the mystery, at the conclusion of Gemini, is daft and unsatisfying, but no matter.

The director looks empathetically at lives of convention and duty that stifle romance and desire, but she reduces the fiery literary lovers to ciphers.

This literal-minded movie sells old pieties and washes away fear so thoroughly that it creates a new kind of fantasy, in which all's right with a very troubled world. [21 April 2014, p.110]

They have pruned, or purged, the drama until it runs just over an hour and a half, and, in so doing, mislaid its nervous languor.

The film is more than three hours long, some of it dangerously close to dawdling; not until the final third does Cameron apply the whip and remind us that, in the choreographing of action sequences, he remains unsurpassed.

A tacky, lighthearted parody of crime-wave movies--camp for kiddies.

Transcendence is a muddle; it takes more creative energy than this to catch up to the present. [28 April 2014, p.86]

The most curious passages of Generation Wealth are those in which the director questions her own parents and kids.

Aside from Heche, who is a quick, witty actress, the film seems to reside in a bizarre time warp of bad seventies comedy, complete with retrograde ethnic stereotypes and huge, jiggling breasts.

Much of the dialogue is scissor-sharp--you would expect no less of Marber, who wrote "Closer"--but he is up against blunt and obvious material.

Yet Oblivion is worth the trip. There are two reasons for this. The first is the cinematography of Claudio Miranda.