"Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie. [20 June 1983, p.73]

As a director, Eastwood is not as good as he seems to think he is. As an actor, he is probably better than he allows himself to be. Meanwhile, the best you can say for High Plains Drifter is that the title is a low pun. Rarely are humble westerns permitted to drift around on such a highfalutin plane. That, however, is small comfort as this cold, gory and overthought movie unfolds.

The result is a comedy made by a man who has seen a lot of movies, knows all the mechanics, and has absolutely no sense of humor.

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

Its glorious, snow-capped visuals aside, The Hateful Eight comes off as haggard and atrophied. It’s bloodless even in the midst of all its bloodiness; its characters are devoid of nobility, even the horrible kind. These are uglies not even a mother could love.

Indeed, viewers who arrive at the movie five minutes late and leave five minutes early will avoid the setup and payoff for the preposterous twist that spoils this lively, intelligent remake of 1948's The Big Clock.

The first few minutes have promise (with an all-star list of Gen-X actors), and the last few minutes provide fun (with snapshots of lovers and losers). In between there is a void--feeble jokes, a lot of falling down and foolish declarations.

Life is too short for leaden fanfiction liked Wicked: For Good, an extravagant picture that’s not nearly as imaginative as it thinks it is.

The picture is mostly tedious and unpleasant, which is a shame for the sake of the performers. Jackman works hard here, and his performance does away with vanity altogether.

Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true.

Adapted from one of the intricately plotted, well-characterized Martin Beck policiers by the Swedish team of Per Wahloo and Maj Sjowall, it loses a great deal in the translation from Stockholm to San Francisco's Dirty Harry country. Gloomy authenticity, for one thing; pace and a genuine sense of puzzlement, for others.

So why does the movie version, with Robert Duvall as Tom and Robert De Niro as Des, proceed at the sluggish pace of a Sodality novena? Perhaps because Dunne's collaborator on the screenplay was his wife, the Empress of Angst, Novelist Joan Didion. Onscreen, characters who should percolate with rage simply simmer. Two exciting, dangerous actors have little to do: Duvall spends too much time pacing and waiting; De Niro's big scene has him hanging up his vestments.

The film finally collapses under the burden of implausibility.

Mostly, though, Death of a Unicorn just feels like exhausting, enforced fun: its plot goes everywhere all at once for no discernible reason. All the actors are appealing and engaged with the task at hand, but they're at the mercy of an unfocused plot.

Ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion.

Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask?

Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream.

Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors.

Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (kids) and "The Passion of the Christ" (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun.

It’s a shrill, razor-shredded mess, a fringy assemblage of action, cartoony violence, and allegedly snappy dialogue that has the soporific effect of white noise. This is proof that too much lousy action is worse than no action at all.

While Admission remains the story of a woman who comes to question her past choices and jeopardize her career, the movie version is lighter, fluffier and dramatically inert.

As a simple detective story, the film is defeated by narrative loopholes, unconvincing plot twists and the last-minute injection of a demon who seems to have drifted in, half-baked, from The Exorcist. The psychological drama is forfeited by the handling of the central character.

This pickpocket of a movie flashes open its coat to proudly display all its swiped goodies.

It sure is handsome-looking, throwing off a majestic gleam. But that’s not the same as possessing actual majesty. There’s barely a minute when The Great Wall doesn’t veer into the trying-too-hard zone, and to watch all that striving is simply exhausting.

Shot by Garland’s regular cinematographer Rob Hardy, Civil War has the vibe of your standard desolate zombie movie with a modern American backdrop, but it's far less effective than your average George A. Romero project: sometimes a B movie with a sense of humor about itself says more about a nation’s despair than an overserious, breast-beating one.

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 real problem with Sasquatch Sunset is that it’s distancing, in an art-project way. The movie is just too coy, too overt in the way it signals when we’re supposed to be appalled and when we’re supposed to be moved; it advertises its weirdness even as it strives to convince us how much these Sasquatch are like you and me.

Jurassic World Dominion is the biggest, most excessive Jurassic Park–franchise film yet. But what good is a movie that leaves you feeling more flattened than entertained? That rumble you hear is the sound of millions of disgruntled, long-dead dinosaurs, rolling in their fossilized graves.