Repetitive, meandering and dull, Mr. Ross’s film keeps steering attention to its director at the expense of narrative by relying on two tics that quickly wear out their welcome.

It’s thin and flat, the opposite of inventive, surprising, daring or insightful. Though it’s billed as a comedy-drama, nothing in it generates laughs, even of the cringe variety.

Director Luca Guadagnino and screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes tell the story out of order, jumping around in time so often that it becomes tiresome, especially since there is so little forward-moving plot.

By most standards of conventional film narrative, this movie is a mess. [25 June, 1987, p.22(E)]

The book’s subtitle was “A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon,” and the film gets that part wrong. It’s deadly dull and conspicuously short on obsessiveness.

Truth be told, though, the film, which Mr. Iannucci directed from a screenplay he wrote with Simon Blackwell, is blissed out on its own cleverness and ultimately exhausting.

Mr. Boyle has made more than his share of memorable films, but he has also delivered some stinkers and unfortunately his new one carries the fragrance of a zombie underarm.

Mr. Hausmann-Stokes hopes to keep the movie darkly comic until pivoting to a final, emotional payoff, but the mawkish late scenes are even more inept than the supposedly funny ones, as the director stages tearful hugs accompanied by soapy attempts at emotional dialogue.

When it comes to taking this premise in interesting directions, however, Ms. Park proves inept.

Ordinary moviegoers, on the other hand, may wonder what they're supposed to feel, apart from bored.

Even an audience expecting very little would be underwhelmed by this meandering, snowy dud, which, for all its extravagance, at a reported $120 million budget, combines insipid messaging with witless comedy and a weak plot that gets resolved in a silly way.

I tried to buy into the characters, to enjoy the performances on their own terms, but no dice. I saw only performers who, with one conspicuous exception, were working hard to ignite a glum drama that declined to combust.

Every element other than Mr. Grant is brain-scarringly awful—the flat characters, the dull acting, the rusted-battleax dialogue, and above all the action scenes, which are frenzied, chaotic, meaningless and vapid, overflowing with CGI that is no more awe-inspiring than the average TV commercial about lizards selling auto insurance.

What’s missing is nuance (the idea of Mr. Nighy’s performance, like others in the film, is wittier than what’s actually on screen); connective tissue (the story is semicoherent at best, a jumble of characters rushing to and fro); and depth of feeling.

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill inflicts intolerable cruelty on its characters, and on its audience -- though I'd like to believe that there is no mainstream audience for what has already been described, quite correctly, as the most violent movie ever released by an American studio.

Almost the entire movie is lifted from other sources, and then edited in a way that makes his enemies (do they know they’re his enemies?) look as foolish as possible. The punditry is trite. The snark is boring.

To call The Harder They Fall transgressive would be giving it too much credit: Its various outrages are obnoxious because they have so little to do with anything like a story—which, for all the subplots and posing to come, is about payback for that first scene.

This nasty little bottom-feeder of a film is too condescending to be trusted, too manipulative to be believed, too turgid to be enjoyed, too shameless to be endured and, before and after everything else, too inept to make its misanthropic case.

In The Hunger Games it's both a feast of cheesy spectacle and a famine of genuine feeling, except for the powerful - and touchingly vulnerable - presence of Jennifer Lawrence.

Never mind the awfulness of the three madwomen being relentlessly mad, or the silliness of their journey’s logistics; not for a moment do you believe that this grievously afflicted trio actually inhabits what amounts to a small, rickety and unadorned paddy wagon. What’s definitively awful is the spectacle of unrestrained vanity.

I found it insufferably fatuous and damned near interminable. [26 Jun 1998]

The Hateful Eight wears out its welcome well before the halfway point, leaving the equivalent of a whole other movie to sit — and suffer — through.

I’m not sure I’ve ever before come across an original feature with a screenplay credited to 11 writers (not to mention four “story consultants”), and yet nobody in this mirth brigade brought any operational comedy ammunition.

Mr. Jarecki undercuts his own case -- not just undercuts but carpet-bombs it -- by using the same propaganda techniques he professes to abhor.

The only reason to see it is Riz Ahmed's performance as Omar, the supposed brains of the operation. Mr. Ahmed reminded me a bit of Robert Carlyle. He's dynamic, quick-tongued and intense. And much too classy for this tatty room.

It's a fascinating story, but Mr. Nichols and his actors never stop reminding us how fascinating it is. With the exception of Mr. Hoffman, a master of understatement, everyone acts up a storm, yet context is lacking.

The film proves to be as smug and shallow as the plutocrats it lampoons.

Only Le Carre fans with tin ears and clouded eyes will fail to note the film's sour tone, crude performances and drab look.

The worst part of Ms. Zellweger's plight is that she, along with others in the cast, has fallen victim to a first-time feature director whose vocabulary doesn't seem to include the word "simplicity."

It’s overstuffed, and essentially empty.

I defer to no one in my admiration for Ms. Pike and her fellow cast members, but it’s no fun watching them soldier on through this heavy-handed and mean-spirited charade. I Care a Lot is a good title for the film that might have been. In the film that is, you can’t find anyone to care about.

Bring Zoloft and a tank of oxygen to Closer, an airless, ultimately joyless drama of sexual politics.

There’s no sense to almost every element in the movie, and its sensibility is this: that dull dialogue is bound to sound witty if delivered in an English accent. It doesn’t. At least the costumes are pretty.

The effort shows in all three performances. Spontaneity is in short supply. The comedy seems willed, the solemnity mechanical, the dialogue rhythms awkward and self-conscious.

A grim disappointment for grown-ups, and far too violent for young kids. I found it to be clumsy, misanthropic and intractably lifeless.

When bad movies happen to good people, the first place to look for an explanation is the basic idea. That certainly applies to My Week With Marilyn, a dubious idea done in by Adrian Hodges's shallow script and Simon Curtis's clumsy direction.

Superb as Ms. Kruger is, there’s nothing she can do to keep the taut, heartfelt narrative from going off the rails.

What's worse, some mysterious movie curse has turned the three once-lively adventurers into wood.

A slow and lugubrious film about the impact of adoption on the lives of three women.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.

Where to Invade Next is documentary filmmaking gone wrong, a churlish polemic that uses the tools of propaganda to construct its world view. The film itself is an invasive presence, wreaking havoc in the realm of truth.

The director was Baltasar Kormákur, a gifted filmmaker from Iceland who shouldn’t be blamed for a case of industrial filmmaking gone wrong — the culprits in elaborate clunkers like this are usually the producers and the studios.

The video-game sequences are impressive, but you know that a 'toon is in big trouble when its most powerful theme is planned obsolescence.

A good subject has been ill-served by Ms. Greenwald's cliched script and clumsy direction.

The film is painfully slow from the beginning, then really starts to drag as it reveals that it essentially has no plot. A late turn to drama makes a bad film even worse. May Mr. Brown and Ms. Hall quickly move on to more rewarding roles. The way this movie squanders their talents is a sin.

J. Michael Straczynski's disjointed script manages to ring false at almost every significant turn (Collins' psychiatric-hospital stay has grown into a latter-day version of "The Snake Pit") and Clint Eastwood's ponderous direction -- a disheartening departure from his sure touch in "Letters From Iwo Jima" and "The Bridges of Madison County" -- magnifies the flaws.

No catharsis redeems the horrors we’ve witnessed; no useful lesson is learned; there isn’t even so much as a sociological observation. One leaves the theater with an unpleasant feeling, equal parts depleted and cheated.

Meant to evoke such distinctive examples of the genre as “Shock Corridor,” “The Snake Pit” and, on a much grander scale, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” And it’s also safe to say that whether or not you enjoy Unsane — I didn’t, for the most part — there’s a terrific scene in a padded cell.

The script is dead in the water, and most of the misanthropic repartee rings resoundingly false.

The pace is deadly slow, the style old-fashioned and the acting devoid of spontaneity. These are skilled actors, but the writing is so threadbare — an important character from the novel has been eliminated — and the direction (by Thomas Bezucha, working from his own adaptation) is so lacking in nuance that genuine dramatic energy gets lost by the wayside during the road trip to North Dakota.

Split reworks some of the themes Mr. Shyamalan developed in the 2000 “Unbreakable” — weakness and strength, unstoppable power, a sense of emergent destiny. The film contends that people are purified by suffering. Having suffered through the screening, I’m still waiting for my purer self to kick in.

The Matrix Resurrections is a recycling dump of murky effects, indifferent action and a crazily cluttered, relentlessly repetitive narrative.

Maybe the worst part (there's so much to choose from) is the sight of a good actor like Edward Herrmann parading around looking like a demented quarterback, the shoulders of his suit jacket grotesquely padded. Mr. Schumacher has dressed the adorable Corey Haim in even weirder getups, jackets with pastel stripes and little outfits that resemble dresses. The vampires aren't nearly as creepy as those clothes. [6 Aug 1987, p.1]

A snapshot, to be sure, but scattershot as well.

Killer Joe is, at bottom - and I mean bottom - ugly and vile, not to mention dumb and clumsy.

Sometime around what I guessed to be the one-hour mark in The Five-Year Engagement, I checked my watch and honestly thought the battery had given out. Five years doesn't begin to tell the interminable tale.

Adolescent is the ruling adjective here; this is an increasingly tiresome and almost wholly senseless feature.

A train wreck of mind-numbing proportions.

Everything that was modest, soundly grounded and therefore horrifying about the 1971 rodentarama that starred Bruce Davison is now insistent, Grand-Guignol-intense and therefore shrug-offable when it isn't downright awful.

One of the least appealing movies I've seen in a while.... When a member of the audience belched loudly, that got the biggest laugh of the day. [17 June 1986, p.E26]

A guaranteed downer that's devoid of any upside, and free of dangerously entertaining side effects.

Secretariat stumbles along beneath the weight of leaden life lessons. They're dispensed at frequent intervals by Diane Lane, who does better than anyone had a right to expect, since she is saddled with dialogue of exceptional dreadfulness.

As juxtapositions go, regressed Goth rock star and Holocaust could hardly be more bizarre, and bizarre can be good when it's done deftly. In this case, however, it's done ponderously and sententiously.

A symphony for tin ears, a sniggering assessment of human nature delivered with the faux-lofty tone of a Lexus commercial.

The denizens of Judd Apatow’s Funny People have been pulled every which way to fit a misshapen concept, yet they remain painfully unfunny, and consistently off-putting.

The blithely dishonest script would have us believe that the real Napoleon can't prove his identity when the fake Napoleon refuses to come clean. Not only is that patent nonsense, it's cockeyed dramaturgy.

Perhaps some of the goofiness was intentional — you can’t always tell from this production’s wavering tone — but Spectre is full of not-good things, and some oppressively bad things that may come to feel like drill bits twirling in your skull.

The plot beats are so dull, contrived and poorly engineered (for a few minutes the wolves must pretend to be rivals who don’t know each other) that the movie becomes an onerous chore comparable to the one that launches the action. Who can I call to make this dead movie disappear?

Even the pleasurable sight of Michael Gandolfini —son of the late James Gandolfini, who played Tony in that series—as young Tony was never going to make up for the complete absence, in this film, of anything remotely reflective of the tone and color of “The Sopranos.”’ Or of anything resembling a credible character or plot line.

Mr. Fraser looks so spectacularly awful as Charlie in the film, directed by Darren Aronofsky, that this chamber piece amounts to a variation of torture porn for highbrows, with a fat suit rather than a meat cleaver as the bringer of cinematic shock.

Grotesque doesn't begin to describe Ms. McCarthy's new character. Scarily insane comes closer; repulsive occasionally applies. Mullins's insanity can be extremely funny from time to time, but her anger grows as punishing for the audience as it does for the victims of her unrestrained police work.

Universal conscription for every able-bodied man from 18 to 40 is about to be instituted, and the events of this shallow, cheap and corny story seem unlikely to offer much in the way of comforting memories for those who get sent to the trenches.

Comes briefly to life, after many longeurs -- many large longeurs in IMAX -- with the discombobulated entrance of B.E.N., a dysfunctional, hyperverbal robot voiced by Martin Short.

A bad movie with a good title.

Breakfast on Pluto, with an impressive cast that includes Liam Neeson and Brendan Gleeson, deploys its whimsy in many ways, all of them cloying.

Why an Oscar-winning screenwriter would make a film that makes so little attempt to dig into its central character is baffling. That an Oscar-nominated director with a celebrated eye for the ethereal, strange world of girl-women living in beautiful boxes could make a film as workaday as this one is frustrating.

It’s hard to believe that human minds conceived the story line of Godzilla vs. Kong—not because it’s so intricate, elegant or spiritually elevated, but because it’s so incoherent and idiotic.

J. Edgar, with Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, is at war with itself, and everyone loses...Mr. Eastwood's ponderous direction, a clumsy script by Dustin Lance Black and ghastly slatherings of old-age makeup all conspire to put the story at an emotional and historical distance. It's a partially animated waxworks.

Some movies are toxically misconceived, and “The Drama” is among them. It wants to be wicked and outrageous but it’s really just dismal and depressing.

Mr. Pratt’s charm is no match for the crude filmmaking or the stupid plot that keeps him running around in a constant state of artificial animation.

Ms. Weisz is always a strong presence, but her talents are wasted here on a naive heroine - the fictional Kathy is exceedingly slow to grasp the extent of the corruption - and a narrative style that turns the horror of the prostitutes' plight into harrowing melodrama.

There's no maybe about its standing as romantic comedy -- definitely bad.

Think of Joker as both dental drill and Novocain. This origin story of the famously depraved smiler deals in pain from start to finish — pain that the hero, Arthur Fleck, first suffers, then inflicts — and Joaquin Phoenix plays the title role with piercing intensity. Yet the film, directed by Todd Phillips, leaves you numb. And glum. Days after the screening I was still under its stultifying spell.

Every joke is leaned on, as if it were some Shavian gem; every pregnant pause eventually aborts.

As the Roses start to become increasingly hostile to each other in front of others, the tone is meant to be hilariously nasty. Instead it’s merely monotonously vulgar, as a long string of one-liners relies more on the supposed shock value of profanity than on wit.

I didn't mind the preposterousness of the premise nearly so much as the general ineptness with which it's presented. After all, good trash has its place. [8 Dec 1994, p.A16]

The whole movie is a sinkhole — not because it’s smutty or raw, but because it’s lazy, and demeaning to the talented people at its center.

Rarely has a major motion picture -- and this one is major by virtue of its misplaced ambition as well as its budget -- been afflicted by such flagrant dissonance between subject and style.

The film doesn’t lack for audacity, or ultimate purpose — it’s against hate and in favor of love. But the adaptation isn’t funny enough to sustain the style, which owes an overt debt to Mel Brooks and amounts to Springtime for Hitler Youth.

This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.

Snowden is mostly flat, overlong, unfocused and didactic.

The entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.

Mr. Snipes and Mr. Rhames get credit at least for doing their own stunts. By the middle of the film, viewers will take a certain satisfaction in each punch that lands on either of them.

Mr. Li is a master not only of martial arts, but of composure; no one does nothing better. The film itself is no great shakes.

These people -- the filmmakers as well as the cast -- have brought a rare sense of camaraderie to their work. Unfortunately, they forgot to bring a script. They even forgot, in the midst of their joyous self-involvement, to take good pictures of the places they visited.

The best thing to be said for this lumbering comedy is that it offers a chance to see Vanessa Paradis, the singularly alluring French singer, actress and model, play Avigal, a melancholy Hasidic widow in Brooklyn, N.Y., and play the role with exceptional delicacy. Otherwise, arrgh!

"Dial of Destiny” is, if anything, even more breathless and filled with stunts than “Raiders,” but everyone’s feats look like insipid fakery.