The whole thing makes Dustin Hoffman’s performance in Levinson’s “Rain Man” seem like a triumph of underplaying.

As a creative work, it’s mild, but it’s audacious nonetheless, and its audacity lies in its very existence—its dramatization of the making of one of the most famous (and, now, infamous) movies of all time, its portrayal of two of the greatest actors of all time, and its reconstruction of the scene of a moral crime and the crime’s agonizing aftermath.

That's the problem with this third installment of the franchise: not that it's running out of ideas, or lifting them too slavishly from the original comic, but that it lunges at them with an infantile lack of grace, throwing money at one special effect after another and praying--or calculating--that some of them will fly.

Road to Nowhere is a dead end. Most of the performances are carved from balsa wood. [13 & 20 June 2011, p. 129]

An interminable, redundant, unnecessary epic devoted to suffering, suffering, suffering.

With special effects of a startling simplicity—the filmmakers launch the action into cosmic realms.

Among the Scots, look out for James Douglas (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the bellow of whose triumphal rage is at once thrilling and scarcely human. For a few seconds, we forget that we are watching a well-mounted period drama about a minor regional conflict; a blood-thirst as basic as this feels horribly timeless.

Biosphere, though sometimes larky in tone, is also a frowningly intense venture that never stops being about itself.

Toss everything you can find, starting with roughly diced plots, into the blender, press "Pulse," and pray: such appears to be the method behind Tower Heist.

Even diehard fans may long for something to hold the tacky flourishes together—a plot, or maybe even a guide that's more lucid than the Necronomicon.

No, what’s dismaying about All Is True is that it plays so slow and loose.

The director, Hugh Wilson, aims for harmless froth, and what he winds up with, as the hysteria level rises, is something brash and strident.

Coppola observes the connection of big ideas to fine details, the power of intensive collaborations, and the ultimate creative helplessness once the show starts.

The film is garishly overloaded with splices and grafts from other movies, other genres, and other premises, including a mythical setting and an evil corporation. The result is a distracting jumble that reduces the stakes of the movie’s mighty showdown nearly to a vanishing point, and turns the title titans and their other colossal cohorts into the incredible shrinking monsters.

When Attenborough starts crosscutting from the escape to Woods' flashback memories (with bursts of choral music), the movie is dumbfounding. It looks as if Attenborough staged scenes and then didn't know what to do with them, so he stuck them in by having the escaping Woods think back. An every time Biko appears in a flashback our interest quickens; this man with fire in his eyes commands the screen -- Denzel Washington is the star by right of talent.

Luckily, Ferguson is fabulous in the role. She and Curran take possession of the tale and save it with sprightliness; their smiles arise without warning. I only wish that Rose had been around when Jack Torrance was on the rampage. What a lovely couple they’d have made.

No stranger man - not even Nixon - has ever been at the center of an American epic.

Disney may have seen lightning strike for the fifth consecutive time with this animated smash, but it's the weakest of the bunch: a bland, predictably p.c. story so taken up with teaching lessons about tolerance and the environment that it leaves hardly any room for laughter.

In brief, I fell cheated by these clever, narrative-disrupting films. They seem to miss the point. After all, every fiction film is magical--an artifice devoted to “What if?”

The funniest moment comes when Carrey mimes the effects of the Mask without special effects.

Cooper’s movie certainly doesn’t make Bruce’s childhood look happy, but in limiting Bruce’s retrospective gloom to the personal realm, it ignores the singer-songwriter’s wider social vision. The movie doesn’t have the courage of the real-life Springsteen’s convictions.