It’s bouncy, clever, amiable, and idiosyncratic, but its virtues seem inseparable from its over-all inertness and triviality.

You have to have considerable tolerance to make it through Chayefsky's repetitive dialogue, his insistence on the humanity of "little" people, and his attempt to create poetry out of humble, drab conversations.

You'd think that if anybody could film Sam Shepard's 1983 play and keep it metaphorical and rowdy and sexually charged it would be the intuitive Robert Altman, but the material seems to congeal on the screen, and congealed rambunctiousness is not a pretty sight.

Large in conception, it comes across as small of spirit, cramped in its sympathies and crabby in its attitudes.

Its effortful attempts to craft and sustain an ominous mood comes at the expense of observation, which is too bad, because the film’s premise is powerful and its lead actors are formidable.

The director, Michael Curtiz, seems to be totally out of his element in this careful, deadly version of the celebrated, long-running Broadway comedy.

There is barely a graceless frame in the whole affair.

All movie adaptations of Nabokov fall short, by definition, but this one is the most graceful failure so far.

The best things in [Spielberg's] version of “West Side Story”—the songs, their acerbity, the view of racial discrimination and class privilege—are already in the old one, while the best things in the old “West Side Story” are missing.

An action drama about the widespread legitimation of abuses by police departments, it arrives onscreen with a jolt but then subsides into a comfort zone of formulaic tropes.

It would be comforting, and tidy, to suggest that the director had waited all his life for the chance to make this film, as if it meant everything to him; yet I still have no idea what truly quickens his heart, and at some level, for all the movie’s narrative momentum, Che retains the air of a study exercise--of an interest brilliantly explored. How else to explain one's total flatness of feeling at the climax of each movie?

Rob Reiner's film, taken from Stephen King's autobiographical novella "The Body," overdoses on sincerity and nostalgia. Seeing it is like watching an extended Christmas special of "The Waltons" and "Little House on the Prairie" - it makes you feel virtuous. All that stays with you is the tale that Gordie, the central character, tells his friends around the campfire.

A mosaic that never comes together.

Kasdan has eliminated all the conflicting interests and the psychological impediments to a happy marriage, leaving the physical separation as the only obstacle. There's nothing left for the movie to be about except how the hero and the heroine can conquer space. (And at the end, the pictured fudges even this.)

As the cinematic equivalent of an airport read, Anatomy of a Fall is adequate—not brisk but twisty, not stylish but unobtrusively informational. But the artistic failings are obvious and distracting throughout.

This whole production is a mixture of wizardry and ineptitude; the picture has enjoyable moments but it's as uncertain of itself as the title indicates.

Ultimately disappointing--it's bigger budgeted, but somehow less engrossing when played outside the solitary intimacy of the tube. It'll be a great video flick.

For all its technical sophistication, this movie is as blaring and unambiguous as a picture book for the very young.

The movie has a deep-toned flossy and "artistic" clarity and a peculiarly literary tone - the dialogue doesn't sound like living people talking.

Skip Godzilla the movie. Watch the trailer.

For most of Annette, Carax films the actors singing mainly in long travelling shots that hardly reveal much personality on the part of either actor or director.

Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto--a character out of folk humor. And without the boredom of the first three-quarters of an hour Roberto wouldn't be so funny.

Seems a touch too long, too airless, and too content with its own contrivances to stir the heart.

The hero is so blandly uninteresting that there's nothing to hold the movie together.

Some exciting scenes in the first half, but the later developments are frenetic, and by the end the film is a loud and discordant mess.

An intricate time-jumping framework is a large part of what makes the film distinctive, but the compromises made to achieve this are responsible for a pervasive feeling of emptiness.

This attempt at screwball charm was directed by Susan Seidelman, who wipes out her actors. All their responsiveness is cut off -- there's nothing going on in them. This flatness can make your jaw fall open, but it seems to be accepted by the audience as New Wave postmodernism.