Gray would have been happiest, I guess, to make movies in the nineteen-seventies, and this one feels much closer to 1975 than to 1988; he could certainly use a seventies audience to watch his movies now--one that could be trusted not to grumble about his slow, unexcitable fades.

Shyamalan often tries too hard, but nobody else can conjure such a sudden flood of worry, or summon so unmistakable a stink of evil, and you come out of Signs, as you did from "The Sixth Sense," in severe need of loud music, bad jokes, and drinks with cherries and umbrellas in them -- anything to waft away the fug of unease. [12 August 2002, p. 82]

Maguire has the nerve to give her heroine a big speech on the “integrity” of proper journalism — this after Bridget Jones’s Baby has made fun of foreigners’ names, and arranged for her to put the wrong Asian guest in front of the cameras. (Do all Asians look alike to her? Is that the joke?) So reliably does she embarrass herself at every public event that the film, trudging by on automatic, becomes an embarrassment, too.

To transform a TV series into a film is to surround yourself with pitfalls, and “Absolutely Fabulous,” sad to report, nosedives into every one of them.

If the rest of the movie had been on Travolta's level of sly knowingness, it might have been a hip classic, rather than what it is -- a summertime debauch. [23 July 2012, p. 81]

Yet the film, directed by Laurent Tirard, has something. To be exact, it has Fabrice Luchini and Laura Morante, as M. and Mme. Jourdain.

Sentimental, without being convincing for an instant.

Paltrow is as radiant as ever, but she keeps picking parts that focus on technical skills like accents -- she has yet to perform the real star's trick of being herself, and inviting the audience to identify.

The Drama plays like an extended internet trolling that exists solely to stimulate discourse.

Dull for the first hour and beefy with basic thrills for most of the second.

The strength of the movie resides mainly in the work of its cameraman, Chris Menges, who delivers a barrage of images as rousing and changeable as the fortunes of Collins himself.

In trying to do too much in its mere eighty-seven-minute span, “Kim’s Video” does too little. For all Redmon’s self-described passion for movies and obsession with the Kim’s Video trove, the film has little to say about a wider view of video-store life and its relationship to the movie-viewing experience.

LaBute's didactic purpose kills any possibility of frivolous entertainment. [19 May 2003, p. 94]

The ultimate deflation of the movie into a pointed drama of norms and ethics doesn’t, however, dispel its glorious hour of theatrical spectacle and artistic mystery.

The movie is fatally perfunctory about emotion, atmosphere, suspense. But if the overall effect is disappointing, from moment to moment the details are never less than engaging, and are often knobby and funny.

Ballerina—like the four John Wick films that it’s spun off from—is, strangely, far better at story than at action.

In serious roles, Weisz can be stiff-backed and righteous, but here, doing comedy, she appears to be a major actress eager to reveal everything she’s been holding inside.

The result is a movie of a cynicism so vast and pervasive as to render the viewing experience even emptier than its slapdash aesthetic does.

If the original “Little Mermaid,” in its effervescent way, talked down to its audience, the new one, bluntly but amiably, talks ever so slightly up to its young viewers. It adds hints of a complicated world beyond the narrow realms of fantasy; it delivers earnest cheer.

Unimaginative Bond picture that is often noisy when it means to be exciting.

For Apatow, one guesses, the only things that can forestall death are comedy (the movie is full of superb comics, including Albert Brooks and Melissa McCarthy) and the flourishing of his children, Maude and Iris, who appear in the movie as Debbie and Pete's daughters.

You look at the screen even though there's nothing to occupy your mind--the way you sometimes sit in front of the TV, numbly, because you can't rouse yourself for the effort it takes to go to bed.

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

Emotions are not toyed with glancingly but stretched out and blazoned forth, and the result is that the new film is nearly an hour longer than the original cartoon.

So klunky and poorly paced, and so loaded with sanctimonious moral lessons, that even the George and Ira Gershwin score doesn't save it.

The script and conception are so maudlin and degrading that Cagney's high dedication becomes somewhat oppressive.

Innocuous musical version of A Christmas Carol, starring Albert Finney looking glum. The Leslie Bricusse music is so forgettable that your mind flushes it away while you're hearing it.

With its somersaulting trucks, drafts of quaffable blood, and skies full of digitized ravens, Bekmambetov's movie has every intention of whacking "The Matrix" at its own game.