The movie offers no details about any conflict between domestic and artistic life—because Trier and his co-screenwriter, Eskil Vogt, display no interest in Julie’s artistic development or activity. The Worst Person in the World is driven by a relentless focus on Julie’s personal life, but it’s a focus that remains obliviously impersonal.

The writer and director, Ana Lily Amirpour, delivers this imaginative tale as a simplistic allegory of the haves and the have-nots; she ruefully delights in the wasteland’s postindustrial wreckage while leaving characters’ thoughts and motives blank.

The action simply doesn't have the exhilarating, leaping precision that Spielberg gave us in the past... The joyous sureness is missing. [12 June 1989]

Linus Pauling was quoted as saying, "It may be that some years from now we can look back and say that On the Beach is the movie that saved the world." The greatest ability of the director, Stanley Kramer, may have been for eliciting fatuous endorsements from eminent people.

Broadly played, in the 50s telegraphing-every-thought comic style.

Audiard may know and understand something about romantic entanglements, family commitments, and professional lives. But by centering his characters’ desire and pleasure, and then filming these aspects of their lives with smarmy smugness, he sacrifices the realm of knowledge in yielding to fantasy.

This version isn't a total dud, but it's a coarser piece of slapstick, and not at all memorable.

As it is, the movie's lethal climax, with its vague protest against corporate control--and hence in favor of art, music, drugs, or whatever--feels like a poor theft from a more conventional film.

Black Adam feels like a place-filler for a movie that’s remaining to be made, but, in its bare and shrugged-off sufficiency, it does one positive thing that, if nothing else, at least accounts for its success: for all the churning action and elaborately jerry-rigged plot, there’s little to distract from the movie’s pedestal-like display of Johnson, its real-life superhero.

The correspondences he wants us to see from up there start to look contrived, illusory. [27 Sept 1993, p.98]

Marlon Brando is airily light and masterly as the veteran anti-apartheid barrister who takes the case even though he knows that he can't get anywhere with the rigged court. He saves the picture for the (short) time onscreen. But the director, Euzhan Palcy, seems lost; her work is heavy-handed, and the script (by Colin Welland and the director, from a novel by Andre Brink) is earnest and didactic.

This dramatization of the last stages of Vincent van Gogh’s life, directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Willem Dafoe as the ill-fated genius, lurches between the ridiculous and the sublime.

When the credits were over at last, I sighed, and took away a moviegoer's fantasy of Ledger and Miller starting work again, far away from Venice and ball gowns, on something that might be worth seeing.

The movie may have significant truths to impart, although I have my doubts, but it feels too inexperienced, too unworldly, to have earned the right to them.

Someone at Universal had the brainstorm of redoing the 1925 silent Lon Chaney horror picture and taking advantage of the fact that it was set in an opera house to make it not only a sound picture but a high-toned musical. The result is this flaccid, sedate version.

Conversation is pause-heavy; smiles are fleeting and tight with anxiety; the plot is a knot.

Rees uses voice-overs to bring the many characters to life, but the text is thin; the movie’s exposition is needlessly slow and stepwise, and the drama, though affecting, is literal and oversimplified.

Instead of suggesting depths of thought and feeling lying below the surfaces of busy lives, the movie’s exaggerations and artifices merely serve Audiard’s vigorous yet narrowly deterministic approach to the story.

He can follow any train of thought, so he does, and it’s no surprise when the trains run out of steam.

The film is peculiarly masochistic and self-congratulatory.

No surprise, then, that Goldblum seems a little lonely and marooned in the latest venture, which suffers from a nagging case of Smithlessness.

LaBute's didactic purpose kills any possibility of frivolous entertainment. [19 May 2003, p. 94]

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

The Man Who Knew Infinity, based on Kanigel’s book, and directed by Matthew Brown, feels sluggish and stuck, and it hits an insoluble crux.

There are too many rancors--hatred of life, hatred of others, hatred of their means to happiness--to contend with here, and the loveliness of the verse beats fruitlessly against them, as if against a wharf.

Richard Brooks, who adapted the novel by Judith Rossner and directed, has laid a windy jeremiad about our permissive society on top of fractured film syntax. He's lost the erotic, pulpy morbidity that made the novel a compulsive read.

There are two drawbacks here. One is a shortage of superior zombies, although where one goes to rent extra zombies I have no idea...Second, we have a serious shortage of fright. [30 June 2003, p. 102]

A fantasy with music for children that never finds an appropriate style; it's stilted and frenetic, like Prussians at play.