Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense.

The Sting was not made to be taken seriously, but many people may find it difficult even to enjoy casually. It lacks the elements that could have given it true drive. [31 Dec 1973, p.50]

Wheatley — who specializes in thrillers with a macabre vibe, like "Kill List" (2011) and "High-Rise" (2015) — overhandles and overworks the dough of Du Maurier’s basic story. His movie is sometimes dumb, sometimes dull and sometimes entertaining; it just doesn’t know what it wants to be, and that lack of vision drains its potential power.

Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment?

Painful, and not in a good way. A glimpse into the '60s should give us not just the warm bath of recognition but the shock of the new, as least as it felt in days of old. That doesn't happen, in a movie that evokes less empathy than apathy.

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.

Bedknobs and Broomsticks could use some magic itself. The fantasy is earthbound, the score by Richard and Robert Sherman (who also wrote music and lyrics for Mary Poppins) is forgettable, the special effects lackadaisical.

Like the first of the Addams chronicles, this is an essentially lazy movie, too often settling for easy gags and special effects that don't come to any really funny point.

It’s wandering, not urgent, while indicating that all-Shailene-all-the-time can be too much of a pretty good thing.

At 70, Hitchcock seems suddenly to have forgotten his own recipe. Topaz contains no chills, no fever—and most disappointing, no entertainment.

He's neither a fun villain or a secret good guy; the movie feels like a senseless venture because, even with his pants down on top of Clotilde or manhandling Virginie, he's the dullest scoundrel around.

The outcome of all this is about as predictable as the benumbing succession of autopomorphic gags. Connoisseurs of camp may enjoy watching Tomlinson ranting at the Volkswagen, but The Love Bug is surely the first film in which the actors (Jones, Michele Lee, Buddy Hackett) are so meticulously insipid that a car can handily steal the show.

Goldblum manages to rise above the proceedings via his invisible jetpack of dry wit — thank God for that. The only newcomer who emerges unscathed is Gainsbourg, who glides through this mess with Zen equanimity—even as chaos reigns, she keeps her cool.

The film has just enough collisions to be a crashing bore.

The frenetic pace masks an emptiness; this Ice Age is just a collection of slapstick moments and fisticuffs.

In this movie version, directed by Robert Wise, the specter is slightly censored—what's left is just the usual commercial spirit. Whenever it appears, the violins on the sound track start to didder, doors open and shut by themselves, people stare about in terror and squeak: The house, it's alive! The picture, it's dead.

As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks -- zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene -- that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking.

It tells us nothing new about evil or our need to take a stand against it; it barely makes us feel what it’s like to stand against evil. All it has to offer is soft-focus piousness. Its ethical purity is inert, a dead butterfly in a jar.

This new Suspiria is bland, grisly, boring and silly. There is nothing poetic or erotic about it.

A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.

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.

The net result of this mighty effort is perhaps predictable: near total inconsequence.

Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end.

Mama is clumsily written and choppily edited, but Chastain doesn't have a bad scene in it, and you can see why she chose to be in this supernatural ghost story.

If Clooney and Roberts are both wonderful actors, at this point they’re just not that good together, at least not in this setup.

Both girls deserve a better vehicle than Little Darlings. The film has an amusing premise: the two heroines race to see who can lose her virginity first. But Director Ronald F. Maxwell, who has done superior TV work (PBS's Verna: U.S.O. Girl), settles for slogging his way through a threadbare script.

For a movie whose chief anthem is an advertisement for the joys of defying gravity, Wicked is surprisingly leaden, with a promise of more of the same to come.

Even the glorious colors of Asteroid City become eyeball-numbing after a while, and the novelty of its Tinkertoy sensibility wears off practically within the first 10 minutes.

Edgeless, it takes a wistful, hopeful approach to heartbreak and job loss. That's sweet, but when it comes to unemployment-themed cinema, I'll take the greater realism of last year's "The Company Men" or this year's "Everything Must Go" over Hanks's too rosy vision of life after the pink slip.

Transplanted from stage to screen, Enid Bagnold's witty, pitiless and elliptical high comedy yields only a withered bouquet of hearts and flowers. Made by Producer Ross Hunter, who customarily trafficks in Doris Daysies, the movie is all thumbs, none of them green.

The director is going through the motions, and he doesn't display the cinematic skill, at least in the release version, to bring off an exercise in either Hitchcockian or Shyamalanian suspense.

Walt Disney has for so long parlayed gooey sentiment and stark horror into profitable cartoons that most moviegoers are apt to be more surprised than disappointed to discover that the combination somehow does not work this time. The songs, by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke, are naggingly reminiscent of other tunes, but none of the cartoon creatures—except, possibly, a whistling beaver playing a bit part—have a fraction of the lovable charm of those in Disney's earlier fables.

It's silly enough that young teens are unlikely to be drawn to it unless they've got a thing for Hudgens or want to take an early peek at Hutcherson, who will soon be seen as Peeta in "The Hunger Games." He was great as a sulky brat in "The Kids Are All Right" but in Journey 2 he comes across as wooden, dull and though not yet 20, too old for roles like these.

Tin tailspins into silliness and never regains its flight pattern.

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

The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners.

But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting.

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.

Batman v Superman lunges for greatness instead of building toward it: It’s so topheavy with false portent that it buckles under its own weight.

The steady wink wink of Queen of Versailles is wearing. I'd say Greenfield is exploiting a narcissist's willingness to talk endlessly about herself, but I think it just as likely that Jackie is exploiting Greenfield's willingness to listen. And to keep that wonderful mechanical eye focused on her.

Unsane isn’t easily dismissible, especially if you think of it as just one fragment of the wild terrazzo of Soderbergh’s career, which includes jaggedly brilliant genre classics like "The Limey" and offbeat crowd-pleasers like "Magic Mike." The movie is worth seeing for its craftsmanship alone.

Moretz gives the movie whatever warmth it has, though not even she can give it a real pulse.

This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours.

The qualities that have kept the Broadway Fiddler running these seven years are in scant supply onscreen. Gone with barely a trace are warmth, joy, insight and even the most elementary kind of entertainment.

[Guadagnino] has made some gorgeous, stirring movies—I Am Love and Queer among them—but After the Hunt feels more like an artistic thesis, and despite its needling provocations, it offers fewer cerebral pleasures than he thinks.

It yearns for Pixar-style wit without quite earning it.

The film promises so much more than it delivers that, by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's Consumer Protection squad.

Actor Eastwood, the sometime star of television's Rawhide, is certainly not paid by the word. In Fistful he hardly talks at all. Doesn't shave, either. Just drawls orders. Sometimes the bad guys drawl back. Just as tersely. Trouble is, after they stop talking, their lips keep moving. That's because the picture is dubbed. Like the villains, it was shot in Spain. Pity it wasn't buried there.

It’s the most magnificent act of oversharing you’ll see all year, a banquet of all the TMI you can eat, just for the price of a ticket. Though when you think about it, shouldn’t Aster be paying us?

At this late stage in a long career, Allen might consider not trying to make films like the early, funny ones. Instead he should aim simply to match "Match Point."

It’s worth half your attention. You might use the other half to mourn the memory of what movies, even enjoyably mediocre ones, used to be.

Mother Mary, arty and self-conscious, is just a slog. It works hard to impress us with its slinky weirdness, which isn’t the same as simply being weird.

Osunsanmi wants you to believe that everything he shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in "Paranormal Activity," which had the added benefit of being a good movie.

It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago.

At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it.

The movie is a series of shopworn jokes, executed with no discernible flair. The writers have done little more than round up the usual array of stereotyped characters: a horny fat boy, a bespectacled nerd, a conceited stud, busty girls and so on.

There is no rhyme or reason to this jumble -- except perhaps to stress Edith's endless self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story.

The movie could have been a gleaming showcase for cartoon wit. Instead it's an 87-minute commercial peddling sainthood for Michael Jordan.

Neither the authentic political atmosphere nor canny performances by Redford, Boyle and Porter go far to cut through the basic glibness of the film. Ritchie incorporates numerous television political commercials and makes a point of their smooth dishonesty and wily distortion. None, however have less substance than The Candidate.

As a kooky fantasy, it’s all fine, if just fine is what you’re after. But at what point does just fine become soul killing, or at least just soul numbing?

Cherry feels like a movie made by a teenager, a bright kid who doesn’t leave his room much but still has plenty of thoughts about, you know, experiences and stuff.

The Last Thing He Wanted makes some kind of sense at the end. But getting through its long, unwieldy middle is an undertaking — and not even a serious-minded political thriller like this one should feel so much like an assignment.

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.

The movie lets down the material. It's to cool: all attitude, no sizzle.

You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.

For a tale of thieving, The Words plods along. Not that a literary heist is as exciting as a bank robbery, but there's a remarkable lack of tension in this story.

The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze? The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. [14 Dec 1987, p.82]

So inward and remote does the movie seem, it might have arrived in a time capsule from one of the four warring planets. Most sci-fi movies offer escape, a holiday from homework, but Dune is as difficult as a final exam. You have to cram for it.

Private Benjamin, meet Meatballs. Bill Murray of Saturday Night Live, meet Harold Ramis, John Candy, Joe Flaherty and Dave Thomas of SCTV. Psycho from Taxi Driver, meet martial music from 1941. Tired moviegoer, meet tired moviemakers.

M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game.

For a film that supposedly celebrates freethinking, there’s a woeful lack of it here.

Freakier Friday is a movie that manages to humiliate everybody. And it appears to exist largely for one reason: to grift off the fondness many adults have for the original, even though the sequel has none of that picture’s breezy, observant charm.

In this space epic, no one will hear you laugh.

A sloppy mess that stumbles toward oblivion like a drunk on a losing streak

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could have been a return to form for Burton, but he loses his sense of direction halfway through. If only he could find his way back to his wild bread-crumb trail, the one that guided him so ably for years.

The movie is vile and brutalizing. Indeed, in many ways it is worse than the book. If The Exorcist had been invested with any real intelligence or passion, if it had wanted to do something other than promote a few shivers, the explicitness would never have mattered. As used here, the explicitness amounts to not much more than a shill, a come-on.

Though Director Robert Wise (West Side Story) has made capital of the show's virtues, he can do little to disguise its faults. In dialogue, song and story, Music still contains too much sugar, too little spice.

It may have been conceived as the kind of classy-but-ribald entertainment that might lure older moviegoers back to theaters. But insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to go.

The actors, especially the ever appealing Smith, do what they can to ground the movie in reality, but it stubbornly remains dawdling, remote and pretentious.

A shaggy, listless action movie that’s too messy to be fun.

The film is one-note; misery is the only game in town.

It’s got too much on its mind, and it’s unsure of its tone. This is the rough cut of a slimmer, better movie

Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.

Roeg and his scenarist Edward Bond (BlowUp) aim for the mind and miss wildly. Their preachy, anti-intellectual Natural Mannerisms are neither convincing nor new.

Maid in Manhattan is not so much a movie as a collection of career moves. J. Lo needs a comedy hit to support her principal activity, adorning magazine covers. Fiennes needs to warm his austere British image if he hopes to become a true international star.

To get serious about Alvin for a moment, there are worse things for your kid to be into.

The film skips along pleasantly, supremely confident in its own cuteness and utterly unapologetic about how shallow or contrived it might be.

Top Gun is about the training of the Navy's best fighter pilots and their blooding in cold war incidents, and the only thing Director Tony Scott has not brought up to date is the story. It is the one about the hotdog who has to be taught to be a team player. They were peddling that one before Writers Jim Cash and Jack Epps Jr. were born.

It's too empty to applaud, too insignificant to deplore.

Directed by the enormously talented New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, it’s well intentioned but ultimately numbing, an instance of fun overkill whose ultimate goal seems to be to put us into a special-effects coma.

Because director Adrian Lyne takes all this so slowly and seriously, Indecent Proposal is an inadvertent comedy. As such, it is much funnier than "Honeymoon in Vegas", which tried in vain to be funny about the same idea.

Five-Year has comic bloat. Virtually every character gets their own moment of stand up, but in most cases, the bits aren't funny enough to warrant the screen time.

Even Connery seems uncomfortable and fatigued, as if he meant it when he said that this would be his last Bond film. It may just be an off year for 007; it may be that he has received too much ribbing from Casino Royale (TIME, May 12). But it could also be that the monumental Bond issue is at long last beginning to deflate.

Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness.

The time may feel right for a wry dystopian sci-fi adventure-comedy. But as satires go, this one is more mild than habanero.

To deny Jackson’s complexity only flattens his genius—as well as his kindness and fragility—into something manageable, explainable. In the end, Michael does the same.

The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul.

Lacking a firm center in Frodo's story, the film plays itself out as a bewildering parade of elves, dwarves, ores, trolls and talking trees.