It all looks fussed over. Parker simply doesn't have the gift of making evil seductive, and he edits like a flasher.

The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all.

Schroder inadvertently exposes Bukowski's messianic windbag sensibility at its most self-satisfied. You wouldn't guess at Bukowski's talent from this movie.

Often quite beautiful. But Madagascar, which was directed by Eric Darnell and Tom McGrath, is mismanaged pretty much from start to finish.

This first American version, directed by Tod Browning, was adapted from a play based on the Bram Stoker novel, rather than from the novel itself, and it becomes too stagey.

The topic is so grave, and the corralling of ancient Greek comedy so audacious, that you long for Chi-Raq to succeed. Sad to report, it’s an awkward affair, stringing out its tearful scenes of mourning, and going wildly astray with its lurches into farce.

What makes Valkyrie more depressing than exciting is that it forces you to ask, against your judgment, what, exactly, he achieved.

The only performer who seems at ease is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in one juicy moment spies Gemma and her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and confesses not to envy but to “a strange kind of jubilation” at seeing Flaubert’s narrative lock into place.

The director, Neil Jordan, and his cinematographer, the great Philippe Rousselot, have given the movie an extraordinary seductive look, but Rice (who wrote the screenplay) doesn't provide enough narrative to keep the audience satisfied.

Holy Motors is full of larks and jolts, but the movie is so self-referential that it's mainly aroused by itself. The audience, though eager to be pleased, is left unsatisfied. [22 Oct. 2012, p.88]

It is no mean feat to make a boring film about Jesse James, but Andrew Dominik has pulled it off in style.

Never quite shrugs off its literary manners. [18 & 25 Feb 2002, p. 200]

The good news is that Matchstick Men is saved. Not by the plot, which entails a con so long that you can spot it coming a mile off, but by the presence of Alison Lohman. [22 September 2003, p. 202]

It’s a sad movie--funny, yet wounded and bewildered.

Huckabees is the real thing--an authentic disaster--but the picture is so odd that it should inspire, in at least a part of the audience, feelings of fervent loyalty.

The film is one continuous spurt of energy...But the picture is abstract in an adolescent way. Miller's attempt to tap into the universal concept of the hero (as enunciated by Jung and explicated by Joseph Campbell in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces") makes the film joyless.

I know that we are meant to be drawn into the undergrowth of these ordinary lives, and the long tale is neatly split into four symbolic seasons;...But do they and their fellow-Brits honestly swell the heart, or do they grate, exasperate, and finally grind us down?

The supporting performances, impressive as they are, only sketch characters, rather than embodying them—because Abbasi’s merely efficient direction leaves the actors little time and little space onscreen to delve into their roles.

It's the first boring performance of Damon's career, although the bland inertia may not be his fault. The way Eastwood stages the "readings," they hold no terror for George.

In short, the Sheridan of In America wants us to pity his characters for the rough ride that they endure, yet at the same time he traps them inside a bubble of the picturesque and the outlandish. Even if you like this movie, you have to ask: What has it done to deserve its title? [1 December 2003, p. 118]

The movie leaves us with the sense that, twelve years after Biggie Smalls's death, a lot of people are trying to extract whatever profit or pride they can from the chaotic life of a young man who was, as he well knew, a work in progress.

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.

Moderately enjoyable, in its exhausting way. [5 March 2012, p. 87]

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]

The characters observe no boundaries, and neither does the movie--Baumbach hasn’t worked out the struggle between speaking and withholding, as Bergman did. People simply blurt out scathing remarks, so there’s little power in the revelations and betrayals. “Margot” is sensually as well as dramatically impoverished.

Unfortunately, Garfield isn’t a musical force of nature or anything close. His mere sufficiency in that department is the wavering note to which the entire movie is tuned and which, for all its many virtues, makes the film slip away from its emotional center.

It's apparent that the decor and color were intended to create moods, but the whole thing seems to be the product of an aberrant, second-rate imagination that confuses decor with art.

It holds the viewer's interest, but it does so by setting up the bodybuilding champions for you to react to in a certain way, and then congratulating you for seeing them in that psychologically facile way.