In striving for more than the original, it achieves far less.

Richard Dreyfuss, hunching over and baring his teeth like a shark cruising off a Martha's Vineyard beach, does a wicked impersonation of Cheney. His relish for the part suggests that the movie should have been done not as an earnest bio-pic but as a satirical comedy -- as a contemporary "Dr. Strangelove," with a cast of satyrs and clowns.

There are not only glancing moments but whole sequences in this movie when the agony of social embarrassment makes you want to haul the characters to their feet and slap them in the chops.

The failure of The Rider to see Brady in his intellectual and experiential specificity, to render him as interesting as the dramatic shell in which Zhao places him, is a failure of directorial imagination.

It's intended to be a thriller, but there's little suspense and almost no fun in this account of a schizophrenic ventriloquist.

In short, we are watching an old-fashioned exploitation flick — part of a depleted and degrading genre that not even M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of Split, can redeem.

An aggressively silly head-horror movie, the result of the misalliance of two wildly different hyperbolic talents-the director Ken Russell and the writer Paddy Chayefsky.

In the film's second half, Hudson twists the story into knots in order to deliver his "statement" that apes are more civilized than people; the movie simply loses its mind, and dribbles to a pathetically indecisive conclusion.

For all its sententious grandiosity and metaphorical politics, “The Way of Water” is a regimented and formalized excursion to an exclusive natural paradise that its select guests fight tooth and nail to keep for themselves. The movie’s bland aesthetics and banal emotions turn it into the Club Med of effects-driven extravaganzas.

A sombre, boring little thriller based on David Baldacci's ridiculous right-wing best-seller.

The absolute tastelessness of Bay’s images, their stultifying service to platitudes and to merchandise, doesn’t at all diminish their wildly imaginative power.

The stars lack any sort of chemistry, which is too bad, since the script, by the always unreliable Ron Bass (with William Broyles), is intended as a romantic cat-and-mouse fantasy.

Second-rate bawdiness--that is, bawdiness without the wit of Boccaccio or Shakespeare or even Tom Stoppard--is more infantile than funny, and I’m not sure that the American playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, who concocted this piece for the stage and then adapted it into a movie, is even second-rate.

Cocaine Bear has a peculiar jostling quality, as the various characters shuffle onto center stage and then get elbowed aside to make way for the next contender.

Probably the material was too precious and fake-lyrical to have worked in natural surroundings, either, but the way it has been done it's hopelessly stagey.

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

The 12th James Bond film goes through the motions, but not only are we tired of them, the actors are tired of them - even the machines are tired...The producers have made the mistake of deciding on a simpler, more realistic package, without dazzling sets or a big, mad super villain.

The actors have occasional intense and affecting moments, going through emotions that they set off in each other, but Cassavetes is the sort of man who is dedicated to stripping people of their pretenses and laying bare their souls. Inevitably, the results are agonizingly banal.

The new film finds a few of its most inspired moments where it revises the plot to reflect current sensibilities, but its strained efforts at reviving the characters and situations of the original make it feel both hollow and leaden.

The Recruit is quick and tense, and some of it is fun, but I didn't believe a single thing in it, and the over-all effect of the movie is to make one depressed that the Christmas "art" season is over. [27 January 2003, p. 94]

Even Frances McDormand, the salt-of-the-earth actress who has warmed so many of the Coen brothers movies, falls into a queasy dead zone.

Say what you like about the feuds of old, they exerted a dynastic thrust that made sense, whereas Leterrier’s magic tricks are the foe of logic; for some reason, the scorpions wind up as friendly transport for our heroes, so why battle them in the first place?

Talky and stiff, the film never finds the passionate tone that it needs.

We are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. [6 October 2003, p. 138]

It's all meant to be airy and bubbly, but it's obvious, overextended (2 hours plus), and overproduced.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers’ incuriosity about Willy is matched by their incuriosity about the star’s range and depth.

Yet Ritchie has made significant alterations. First, he has modified the law of sultanic succession by giving women the right to rule. Second, by some cunning spell, he has taken all the fun from the earlier Disney film and — abracadabra! — made it disappear. The big musical numbers strain for pizzazz. The action sequences are a confounding rush.