Thin, gulpy, awkward, it stands before us, artlessly begging sympathy but betraying its creator's worst weakness. [9 Mar 1987, p.86]

The Devil All the Time is just a pileup of awful people doing terrible things, for no reason other than to prove how wretched humans can be. The template is pure Southern Gothic, but without the subtlety of top-drawer practitioners of the genre, like Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.

Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."

It's a feel-good frolic, which is fine for anyone who prefers their Hitchcock history tidied up, absent the megalomania, the condescending cruelty and tendency to sexual harassment that caused his post-Psycho blonde discovery Tippi Hedren to declare him "a mean, mean man."

Roger Michell's movie is, pretty consistently, dreadful.

Watching the film is like reading Playboy for the articles.

The possibilities are rich. But Old is just dumb.

Attention must be paid to movie allure, in a star like Depp and his current harem. Angelique may be the only satanist among the women here, but they're all bewitching.

If Hollywood is going to remake a '70s movie, it might as well be Pelham, and it ought to work as competently as this one. But wouldn't it be nice, once in a while, for Hollywood to turn contemporary traumas into vigorous movies instead of hijacking the anxieties of the past?

Armed or not, Reeves is the weapon that can go off at any time. That's why Street Kings, though it isn't a great movie, is a pretty damn cool Keanu Reeves movie, one that on the Reevesian action scale measures somewhere between "Whoa" and "Wow."

Like the provocative classics Dog Day Afternoon and Network, this is discomfiting entertainment–its edges are serrated, sharp enough to cut. The camera moves to just the right place every minute, and the editing is crisp. Moments of nearly unbearable tension are broken by bursts of energy and even humor.

Yesterday, a fantasy that works well enough as a Beatles love letter but falls short in the love-story department.

For a surprisingly solid stretch, Ambulance is great fun.

Valmont arrives stiffened by the elegant, inert formalism of Forman's direction, and chilled by Carriere's all too sober respect for his source and by their mutual determination to apply modern psychological understanding to the behavior of the principal figures.

Screenwriter Frederic Raphael has managed to preserve the book's broad vision while clarifying its bucolic speech. His most valuable ally is Director John Schlesinger (Darling), who displays the best sense of Victorian time and place since David Lean in Great Expectations, alternating his stars with a brilliant cast of minor players who serve as a Greek chorus in tragicomic peasant roles.

Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this?

Veronica Guerin paid with her life. This film would make her proud, for it is ultimately not depressing but -- we say without a shred of journalistic irony -- inspiring.

They’re cute together, these two big stars, but the film around them, a sort of Tarantino lite, is desperately empty.

I found myself almost literally leaning closer to the screen during Megalopolis, trying to grasp exactly what Coppola is seeking to communicate. I might have caught about a third of it, at best, but I’ll take a messy, imaginative sprawl over a waxen, tasteful enterprise any day.

The Hundred-Foot Journey is on a mission to make you cry. Whether you oblige will depend on your fondness for, or immunity to, the gentler stereotypes of movie romance.

In its best moments, Aquaman is transportive. There are worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Enough of Curtis' lovably crazed characters do succeed in finding love in all the unlikely places that you leave the theater with your heart humming happily. He has his dark -- well, darkish -- side under control. Which is to say that he is an Englishman, well practiced in masking pain and absurdity and descents into sheer goofiness with mannerly behavior, sly irony and stiff upper lips.

This wisp of a movie turns out to be more thoughtfully affecting than many a more high-flying film.

Starsky & Hutch has moments of hilarity a little greater than you might expect of a movie that is just out for a lazy good time.

Left-wingers in the mainstream media - by which I mean me - are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie. Some organic life is needed. And the only crop Promised Land harvests is Capra Corn.

It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.

There are a few good scenes—an intricately executed train wreck, for example—but the movie is notably slack where it should be zestful.

What's unusual about the sometimes screwy but mostly smart and always heartfelt Perfect Sense - is its search for a middle ground.

Sergio’s intentions are pure, and the movie is pleasingly old-school in the way it merges political drama — and tragedy — with romance. Sometimes, though, the burden of playing a dedicated servant of the people appears to be too much for Moura: the performance feels stiff and stately, as if he’s considered every breath. Moura makes us see the gleaming role model, but it’s much harder to see the man underneath — and you can’t leave a legacy without first having had a heartbeat.

While Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have good chemistry, and director Edward Zwick moves the narrative along nicely, the film is too self-satisfied to be genuinely touching.

Heart and art can make a beguiling pair. Those are mostly missing in this strained hybrid, which is less Bollywood than Follywood.

There are a reserve and a realism in Huston's work that make her very modest film more affecting than you might expect.

Barefoot in the Park is one of the few plays to be reincarnated on-screen while playing on the Broadway stage. Happily, it loses little in transition.

Wright's performance is the key to a movie that pulses with the sick thrill of historical discovery. The Conspirator reminds us that. when we surrendered so many of our Constitutional rights and judgments after 9/11, it wasn't the first time.

And while the new Lion King is slightly easier to take—maybe because these heavily CGI-enhanced “real” lions don’t have the same cartoon humanity of the earlier version’s animated ones—the picture still has a manufactured, preachy sheen. This is calculated virtuousness masquerading as imagination, though it’s easy to be sidetracked by how adorable the cub Simba is.

Tawdry but compelling.

A film worthy of being displayed on a screen eight stories high.

A perfectly coherent, handsomely rendered couple of hours, animated in particular by Damon's good performance -- shrewd, innocent, angry, wistful and, above all, likable.

O.K., Ritchie mistakes flash for style. Perhaps that's the price you pay for storytelling exuberance. If he keeps making films as down and witty as Snatch, we may learn to forgive him.

As for Blanchett, she's simply wonderful. She has played her share of queenly figures, but her acting essence is, emotionally speaking, plain-Jane. She's a straight shooter, with an uncanny ability to find a character's spine and communicate it without fuss or feathers.

In its lesser moments, of which there are more, Liberal Arts calls to mind more the spirit of an alumni magazine, so bathed in nostalgia for academia that you expect autumn leaves to flutter down to the theater floor.

A movie that demands our surrender -- to its energy, to its bold-stroke moviemaking, to its acting (particularly by Cruise and Watanabe, who blend musing and graceful muscularity) and, above all, to its romantic vision of a lost world.

This is a comedy with the old-time blend of wit and sentiment. Years from now, when you stumble across it on TV, you could persuade yourself that, back in the two-thousand-oughts, they made pretty good movies.

This is potentially moving dramatic stuff—or at least bracing melodramatic stuff—but Showalter’s dramatization has a glazed, glassy-eyed surface, like a Pee-wee Herman movie without any of Paul Rubens’ surreptitiously sophisticated kindergarten wit.

The picture still meanders and drags, and sometimes Iñárritu’s lofty ideas come off like a hot-air balloon that deflates and gets stuck in the trees. You wish he could just move on with things already. And yet there are some magnificent visions in Bardo.

The Adam Project should be fun, but it’s sabotaged by its unwieldy ambitions. Forget the complexities of time travel, of wormholes and the laws of physics. This movie can barely get from point A to point B without tripping over itself.

The world may have seen the outcome, but it’s still convincing, a story of courage without platitudes, and it features one of Antonio Banderas’ best performances in years.

The actors emote up a summer storm. Maguire’s otherworldly coolness suits the observer drawn into a story he might prefer only to watch. DiCaprio is persuasive as the little boy lost impersonating a tough guy, and Mulligan finds ways to express Daisy’s magnetism and weakness.

It’s an intellectual joyride without the joy.

One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. [20 April 1998]

These aren't really characters; they are points on a rigidly conceived political spectrum. Singleton has made all the right political moves given his complicated circumstances, but he hasn't really made a movie of them.

Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking.

Nair sleekly manages the story’s thriller aspects, especially the kidnapping. But this is a character study, and she has found some superb actors to fill it.

All three skits are only mildly illuminating front-line communiqués from the sexual wars. But when Simon is writing them and Matthau reading them, substance seems almost beside the point.

Other than Baldwin, Allen and Eisenberg - who is delightful - few of the performances are memorable. Page is miscast as a femme fatale, but adroit with Allen's lines, but the other women, Cruz, Pill and Gerwig hardly register.

A lively, nutty film, one full of clumsy, clanging battles filmed by the gifted, eccentric Besson with bloody brio.

Mitty is a lovely romantic comedy — the portrait of a man, nearly swallowed by the gulf between the world his lives in and the world he dreams of, who manages to bridge the two and to find Ms. Right in the workplace he cherishes.

The result is a laff riot. Well, all right, a laff scuffle -- a picture that isn't quite as funny as it might be, but is as funny as it needs to be.

This is an effective and unsettling piece of filmmaking, partly because Gyllenhaal has one of the most sympathetic faces in movies today--it's haunted and haunting.

The clutter makes your head feel like it's about to explode - and not in a good way, with wonders upon wonders. Instead it seems like arcana that might show up on the midterm final: the next Marvel movie.

In the end Beast is, frankly, sort of dumb.

It's an enjoyably old-fashioned shoot-out, if you can shake off the current headlines and sink in to a fantasy of hyper-violence that plays like an NRA vision of America the Beautiful.

In an era when films reduce the aged to comic cranks, Rifkin is heroic--the Lear of grumpy old men.

There is good, broad humor amid the very gross gore effects. And when the Living Impaired stalk our hero's home, it's a family reunion out of your bloodiest nightmares. [8 Feb 1993, p.83]

An exhilarating two hours of serious fun.

So why is the Jersey Boys film a turgid botch? Eastwood’s résumé hints at a reason. His affinity is for American standards as improvised on piano or guitar by indigenous artists in smoky nightclubs, not for the tightly wound, impeccably pounding songs that Bob Gaudio and Bob Crewe wrote for the Four Seasons.

The real fun is in seeing Hong Kong pop cinema at its innocent, crowd-pleasing best. And for Jackie, that goes double.

The only thing Schumacher and his scrupulous craftsfolk forgot to give the movie was life -- the energizing spirit of wit and passion that makes scenes work and characters breathe.

The movie F.I.S.T. stands for nearly 2½ hours of almost unmitigated boredom—a misfired would-be proletarian epic with Sylvester Stallone misplaying the Jimmy Hoffa part with a self-confidence that borders on the sublime.

Bakshi's animation is good, and the visuals—which marvelously capture the grainy, lowering look of the Manhattan streetscape—are raucous, ingenious and convincing. But Fritz the Cat is, for a cartoon, exasperatingly slow: Bakshi's sense of pace and editing is snail-like, and the dialogue mostly naive and muffled.

A slim but likeable little romantic comedy that feels like a sweeter cousin of HBO's Girls.

Sparkle, while occasionally silly in a way that made a preview audience titter, is decent entertainment.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that 12 Strong–based on Doug Stanton’s 2009 book Horse Soldiers, about U.S. Special Forces troops who traveled to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 to confront Taliban forces–should add up to more than it does.

Allen has assembled an attractive cast and given most of them clichés to inhabit. He has also stinted on inventiveness.

Hamlet 2 is as needy as its hero -- because it wants not to be probing or profound or even witty but, above all else, to be loved.

The problem with shock comedy is that it works in its purest form only the first time. Where do you go after you've gone too far? No artist can get heads to swivel and stomachs to turn indefinitely.

That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point.

One can still appreciate the professionalism with which Levin crafted them and the larky spirits with which the performers force the suspension of incredulity.

It’s a moderately effective horror movie with a much better, creepier and more nuanced one nestled invisibly alongside, the unborn twin ghost of a movie that might have been.

Moxie kicks off as a shout-out to riot grrrl spirit, only to give us an ending written in the cursive script of an inspirational mug. The walk from being a ‘zine maker to a scrapbooker is apparently a short one.

The picture is potent and engaging; even its fictionalized elements ring with the spirit of truth. And Stewart is off the charts, though that’s hardly a surprise.

Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso."

In space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one will see you yawn.

But the film is keyed to Posey's performance: perfectly brittle, faultlessly false. As the most toxic of this family of vipers, she creeps and stings, and no one dares look away.

What saves this movie from hopeless sentimentality is Meryl Streep's subtle performance.

To evaluate For Your Eyes Only and the other Bond movies, it helps to think of them not as, say, different vintages of a fine Bordeaux but as successive models off the Pontiac assembly line. In one vehicle there may be an annoying ping in the engine of narrative; in another the dialogue may be as sleek as Genuine Corinthian Leather. But all meet the same standards of speed, styling and emotion control. If there is no Rolls-Royce in the Bond series, there is also no Pinto.

A feel-good ending is mandatory, even in a comedy like this, which promises to be transgressive because it's the first major-studio job for a director with an underground reputation for being crazy-bold.

The picture is action-packed but mindlessly so, and it’s neither light enough to work as a coltish entertainment nor smart enough to cut beyond anything but the most rote notions of masculinity.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, directed by Francis Lawrence, strives to offer spectacle, drama, and excitement. But it’s really just a tired rehash, albeit an extravagant one, this time with less appealing characters. As dystopias go, it’s a real bummer.

This is a good-natured retro romp that is truer to Golden Age movies than to golden oldies songs.

Most of the fun comes from seeing people fooled by what seems to us, who are in on the joke, a completely penetrable ruse. Curiously enough, what's really unpersuasive about Mrs. Doubtfire -- not to say draggy -- is its nondrag sequences.

The differences between the two Assaults--the new one's pretty good, the old one near great--are of tone, style and perspective.

Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120]

The movie, which Mendes also wrote, doesn’t live up to its setting. There’s a lot going on in Empire of Light—and yet somehow not quite enough.

Director Joel Schumacher's breathlessly paced and incident-crammed movie will induce a certain sense of deja vu among veteran viewers.

Unlike the original, Paranormal Activity 2's pacing is uneven; it builds slowly and effectively before rushing too quickly, and at one point not particularly coherently, through the climax. But the jolts, when they come, are bigger, causing actual physical thrills and chills, at least for me.

Flash: There is intelligent life in outer space. More, anyway, than in this amiable footnote of a movie.

The Dead Don’t Die is better when it’s riffing on zombie heritage, or just being silly. But it’s best when Jarmusch is acknowledging, in that characteristically Jarmuschian way—half resigned, half jubilant — that the world of people, even with all their terrible flaws, is worth preserving