Who will stay with this film, and glorify it? Two sorts, I reckon: real revellers, randy for sensation, out of their heads; and, a block away, coffee-drinking Ph.D.s, musing on the cinema of alienation, too lost inside their heads to break for spring. [25 March 2013, p.108]

Cronenberg’s movie was an early showcase for his tense formal style and intellectual Grand Guignol. He displays a true shock-meister’s instinct by saving the worst for last. The result is a cinematic bad dream that generates recurring nightmares.

Sydney Pollack doesn't have a knack for action pulp; he gets some tension going in this expensive spy thriller, but there's no real fun in it.

Frank Sinatra’s performance is pure gold, but the director, Otto Preminger, goes for sensationalism; the film is effective, but in a garish, hyperbolic, and dated way.

The only person who wakes the movie from its slumbers is Emily Blunt. She gets a nothing role as a publicist, and makes something both sultry and casual out of it.

Only the fine cast lends life to the movie’s superficial caricatures, even if the hectic, blatant script edges the performances toward the clattery side and Östlund’s precise but stiff direction leaves little room for inventiveness.

A showdown of blood and fire, and the one point, I’d argue, at which Let Him Go takes a seriously false step. It is George who girds himself for the final reckoning, but it ought to be Margaret. Her grief has driven this fable. She should be the one to end it.

Martin Scorsese’s début feature has just the slightest bit of story line, but the movie is a fascinating portfolio piece: a black-and-white blueprint for “Mean Streets."

World War Z is the most gratifying action spectacle in years, and one reason for its success if the Pitt doesn't play a superhero. [1 July 2013, p.76]

Maria gets lost in a tangle of clichéd bio-pic narrative stuffing, and runs superficially through the protagonist’s reminiscences by way of an embarrassing contrivance.

In short, we are watching an old-fashioned exploitation flick — part of a depleted and degrading genre that not even M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of Split, can redeem.

As this matron on the loose, Allen is rancorously funny.

Bertolucci is trying hard to shock us with this stuff, but, for all the perversities and the abundant nudity, the movie has an air of inconsequence about it. [9 February 2004, p. 74]

The third in the series, and without any new ideas except a bad one: still airily casual, Nick and Nora Charles (William Powell and Myrna Loy) are now the parents of a baby boy.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is selling a truckload of preposterous goods, but it sells them awfully well, with unfeigned assurance, conviction, and the appropriate ratio of cynicism to hope.

The tale begins and ends in a flurry of joke violence; Cameron has decided to spoof what he used to take seriously, and the result, though bright and deafening, feels oddly slack -- he loosens the screws, and our interest drops away.

To set up the movie’s cagey diminution of the protagonist, Aster diminishes the protagonist’s world, too—he suppresses Beau’s identity in the interest of stoking synthetic effects and inflating a hollow and shallow spectacle.

Branagh’s film has the charm of ridiculous excess: stylistic flourishes are piled high into a treasury of gothic camp, and the camera is tilted, regardless of provocation, at the most alarming angles—Dutch angles, as they are known in the trade.

Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone.

The action and the effects, so gleamingly creative in the original trilogy, are now C.G.I. commonplaces and “John Wick” retreads—and are approached as such. The duels and battles are whipped up with a sense of obligation and filmed with little verve.

No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?

This isn't much of a movie but it manages to be funny a good part of the time anyway.

Tight, clever thriller.

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.

Whereas Cruella sent me back to Dodie Smith, as a blessed escape from what Disney has done to her creations, Tove dispatched me down a rabbit hole, or through a Moomin door. I recommend the trip.

Strange and off-putting, and hard-nosed types in the film business will no doubt dismiss it as a nothing. But, even if Bubble hasn't brought down the Bastille, the movie is far from nothing.

Cera can be winning enough, with his flat-toned goofiness, in films like "Superbad," but there's only just enough of the guy to fill out one dramatis persona; two at once prove to be beyond him. [11 Jan. 2010, p.83]

As deceptions and disguises pile up, the layers of mystery grow thicker, and the lurid symbolism of material objects is thrust to the fore.