Too much of the film feels like one of Balsan’s house parties: undriven, indulgent, quite at ease.

Foote can't make poetry out of material as laundered and denatured as what he comes up with here. The movie is intended to by a hymn, but all he and Masterson can do is give some of the characters a limp, anesthetized grace.

Billy Wilder's inane yet moderately entertaining version of an Agatha Christie courtroom thriller, with Charles Laughton wiggling his wattles.

In the end, The Souvenir is a movie about experience that doesn’t itself offer much of an experience.

Let the Sunshine In is said to be loosely based on Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse” — very loosely, I would argue, in the same way that “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” was based on a branch of Home Depot. As for Claire Denis, anybody new to her methods will be addled by her breaking and stretching of the rules.

It isn't particularly entertaining; it's just busy.

[Downey] can make offhandedness mesmerizing, even soulful; he passes through the key moments in this cloddish story as if he were ad-libbing his inner life.

The Hangover Part II isn't a dud, exactly - some of it is very funny, and there are a few memorable jolts and outlandish dirty moments. But it feels, at times, like a routine adventure film set overseas.

How can one defend this prolonged mumble of a motion picture? Well, some of the motion has a hypnotizing grace.

Ham-handed, wartime Hitchcock.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes.

As a form of wish fulfillment, it’s fascinating if unpersuasive; as a vision of its subject—high-school life—it’s as faux-sweet and faux-innocent as the films of the Frankie Avalon era.

Dougherty isn’t quite sure whether to wow us with the hulking immensity of the action scenes or to wag his finger at us for the environmental hubris of our species.

This is pitiful stuff, and, like the violence, it eats away at the blitheness for which Kingsman strives, leaving an aftertaste of desperation that the Connery of “Goldfinger,” say, would not have dreamed of bequeathing. The sadness is that Firth, alone in the film, does raise the spectre of those days, radiating a lightly amused reserve amid the havoc.

Mainly it's full of sort-of-funny and trying-to-be-funny ideas. The director Elliot Silverstein's spoofy tone is ineptitude, coyly disguised.

Dave’s dread of his brother hooks The Ardennes onto a long chain of fraternal crime dramas, from “The Public Enemy” (1931) and “On the Waterfront” (1954) to “We Own the Night” (2007). Pront can hardly be blamed if his actors lack the sinew of Cagney or Brando.

There is much to savor here, especially the unforced performance of Judah Lewis — one more recruit to the terrific roster of younger actors who are streaming into the movies. Yet the film lacks the courage of its affliction.

How can a parable that set out to take the side of little people, versus gargantuan greed, end up using them as disposable comic fodder?

The bare script seems written by telegram, reducing the characters to pieces on a historical chessboard, and the portentous pace and lugubrious tone of Cooper’s direction take the place of substance.

An inflated sci-fi action-horror film...[Cameron] does it in an energetic, systematic, relentless way, with an action dicretor's gusto, and a shortage of imagination. The imagery has a fair amount of graphic power, but there's too much claustrophobic blue-green darkness.

Downton Abbey concludes with both Lady Edith and Daisy uttering the sacred words “I’m happy.” Upstairs and downstairs, in perfect concord: believe that, and you’ll believe anything.

Starts smart and ends dumb. [24 Aug 1987, p.79]

The picture's only claim on one's attention is in the two sequences staged by Busby Berkeley.

It's an ambitious movie made with an inept, sometimes sly, and very often equivocal script...But it's by no means a negligible movie.

The movie is never plain boring, but its comic pathos and Southern-gothic cuteness can grate on you.

A forgettable, generally forgotten Hitchcock gothic, from a Daphne du Maurier novel, full of Cornwall shipwrecks and smuggling and murder in the time of good King George IV.

We are left to rue This Is Our Land as an opportunity missed, and to wonder how else the tale could have been told.

The new comedic drama Blinded by the Light feels designed to be heartwarming, and does a depressingly good job of defining by example that innocuous quality