Together is less a fully conceived horror movie than a plodding relationship drama with some impressively disgusting effects superimposed on it. The two elements, alas, don’t quite complete each other.

The more I thought about it, the less I liked what it turned out to be -- a vague promise unkept.

Seldom has such a glittering wagon been hitched to such dull stars.

I like Mr. Gordon-Levitt a lot as an actor, and I wish him only the best in his future work as a filmmaker. There is, however, the matter of this particular movie, an overheated disquisition on the pleasures and limitations of masturbation.

Jack's problem is that he's a commoner, but the movie's problem is that its script is commoner still, an enchantment-free pretext for animated action, straight-ahead storytelling and ersatz romance.

In spite of Josh Brolin's heroic efforts, W. is a skin-deep biopic that revels in its antic shallowness.

Coraline is distinguished, if you can call it that, by a creepiness so deep as to seem perverse, and the film finally succumbs to terminal deficits in dramatic energy, narrative coherence and plain old heart.

Too many mind and the story grows tedious or absurd. No mind and the spectacle suffices.

The movie doesn't shed much light on their famously contentious marriage. Instead, it spreads gloom all around.

Trouble With the Curve finally finds its zone when Gus and Mickey find the young baseball prodigy they've been looking for. That doesn't happen until the narrative's last inning, though, too late to save the movie. I'd call it "Neanderthalball."

Mr. Peele has loads of ideas and builds up considerable suspense and dread, but he fails to tie everything together with a resounding final act.

For all its immersion in the roar, grease and danger of Formula One, the fact-based Rush — about the sport's great rivalry of the 1970s — is also more predictable than a pit stop, something well-suited to Mr. Howard. He's made perfectly palatable pictures, but never a truly great one, partly because he has such a weakness for the commercial and a consequent gift for the obvious.

The film seeks no more than to be fan service, a two-hour hangout with favorite characters and situations. Like many a runway trend, it isn’t going to last more than a season in anyone’s memory.

But Samba’s personality, intriguingly volatile for a while, turns unpredictable, with no coherent center, as suspicion grows that the film’s stylistic shifts — including a genial parody of a well-known Coke commercial — are little more than pretexts for showing what its multitalented star can do.

Shallow down inside, End of Watch is a music-video Frappuccino of quick cuts, sparkling banter, serial crises, grisly violence and tongue-jerk profanity. But the film is exciting, in its manipulative way, and exhausting.

The oblique nature of the final act might perhaps be justified if the rest of the movie were better. As it is, I kept thinking, “I guess that’s funny, in a way” rather than actually laughing at any of Mr. Rankin’s aggressively whimsical notions.

Much of “Over 30 Years Later,” without the surprise factor, seems very soft.

Caper movies rely heavily on how well they build plausibility into the doings of professional scam artists, but Emily the Criminal scores poorly on that front.

It's sad to see a promising fantasy turn into yet another industrial-scale fantasy-delivery system that beats up on its audience with mindless intensity and undercuts its own humanity -- and caninity -- in the process.

There's a wonderfully sly, farcical verve to these early moments, but it dissipates when the script, with its strains of "E.T." and "The Fly," moves into high sci-fi gear.

The gags seem fun and refreshing at first, but they get stale quickly. Moreover, since there is no plot and no dialogue, the quirky central idea never takes on any narrative momentum. What might have been a brilliant short subject—at, say, 15 minutes—gets stretched to its limits, and then some.

Total fluff, though its totality is reasonably agreeable, and Pascal Chaumeil's comedy cum scenery-mainly Monte Carlo-gives the mercurial Romain Duris a chance to show his chops as an homme fatal.

The movie isn't all bad, and it's sure to succeed with its target audience.

For a while Green Zone generates genuine excitement, as well as plenty of provocation--a fatuous surrogate for Ahmed Chalabi, a pervasive scorn for American planning--but then goes off its own reservation into a won't-fly zone of awkward preachments and hapless absurdities.

Inserting glitzy musical numbers amid such drama could have come off as a subversive twist, but because everything is presented with the same gentle glow of sentimentality it ends up feeling merely tasteless. For “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” this is the kitschy kiss of death.

Steven Soderbergh's new film is a puzzle wrapped in a mystery inside a perversity. The puzzle is Mr. Soderbergh's approach to what might have been an intriguing experiment, rather than the off-putting one it turned out to be.

Like so many parties, this one goes on too long.

This is slash and burn strictly by the numbers. There's never an ounce of doubt where the movie's going; the only suspense is how long it's going to take to get there and how high the body count is going to get.

The point of the film is vacuous materialism, but the way these larcenous children return the camera's impassive gaze suggests that no one is home behind their beautiful faces and dead eyes.

This gets to be exhausting, since there’s hardly a scene that isn’t manipulative or assaultive.

Sergio, a Netflix docudrama directed by Greg Barker from a banal screenplay by Craig Borten, catches flashes of his brilliance from time to time but scatters and dims them through a mosaic structure that’s ultimately no structure at all.

This franchise needs more than a reset. It's ripe for retirement.

A dispiritingly vitriolic, only sporadically funny satire of ’50s Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! verifies a suspicion long held here, that the Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, really hate the movies.

No one could save Is Anybody There? from its treacly self and Michael Caine doesn't, but he gives it a grand try.

The subject matter is worthy of serious dramatic interrogation, and there’s a good movie in here someplace. But “After the Hunt” feels like a messy first-draft script, shoddily directed, rather than an accomplished feature from a veteran filmmaker.

As in most movies of this sort from "Rebel Without a Cause" to "West Side Story" to last year's "Thirteen," adults are marginalized, clueless or absent. I'm with them.

Of the original and the remake, only one film feels authentic, and it's not The Good Thief.

I found the film so insistently campy yet painfully mirthless—its style lies somewhere between opera buffa and telenovela—that my mental state of acute anguish may have skewed my perceptions of whatever the story has to offer.

Ms. Richardson and Mr. Csokas are sunk mainly by the script (it's the handiwork of "Closer" playwright Patrick Marber and Chrysanthy Balis) and by their complete lack of chemistry. Still, their performances do them no credit.

I wish I could report the arrival of an impressive movie, but this one, for all its ostensibly big ideas about mathematics and wounded minds, struck me as an elaborate pretext for a synthetic love story.

Does Meet the Fockers make you laugh? Sure it does, from time to time. Just lower your expectations to the altitude of the gag that's showcased in the trailer, the one in which Jinx the cat flushes a little dog named Moses down a toilet.

Al Pacino is his own venue as yet another flamboyant, self-ironic, self-dramatizing, self-parodying, self-selfing quasi-Mephistopheles. His performance isn't very good, but it's big.

Is the film worthy of her? Not really. It’s informative, in a didactic way, but basically an exercise in hagiography, a skin-deep celebration of someone who has never settled for superficiality in her life’s work.

It’s all B-movie stuff, though sporadically entertaining and occasionally witty on the intertwined subjects of bedevilment and in-laws.

Mr. Dujardin won a best actor Oscar in 2012 for his buoyantly funny performance in “The Artist” as George Valentin, a silent-film star on the way down. Here he’s Georges with an “s” but without the buoyancy or the fun, a man descending into murderous delusion. Quentin Dupieux’s glum absurdist fable gives absurdism a bad name. It’s a facile notion inflated to feature proportions — just barely, since the running time is only 77 minutes.

No one knew Mr. Sorkin was a good director, but he is, and his filmmaking chops come topped with intelligence and curiosity. That makes it all the more remarkable, and I don’t mean good remarkable, when the film takes a last-reel turn into slushy psycho-sappiness, enlisting someone we thought we’d seen the last of to explain what the story was really about.

Youth may be wasted on the young in this muddled movie. But age is equally wasted on the aging.

Mr. Rudd, whose overall performance as the former con-man Scott Lang is fairly pallid, confines himself to genial winks and nods in a film that will surely be popular, given Marvel’s marketing might, but one that’s woefully short on coherence and originality.

The concept is schematic and predictable, and watching first-rate actors - the cast includes Susan Sarandon as a local librarian - doing third-rate material is a dubious pleasure.

Suffers from a lifelessness that seems built into the terse, slightly detached style of the director, David Mackenzie, who also did the adaptation.

A slow start, a single star performance surrounded by indifferent acting and an onslaught of computer effects that range from seen-it-all-in-"Transformers" to a whole sky full of spectacular stuff in the midtown Manhattan climax.

Mannered, episodic and slow.

A shopworn studio contraption, slapped together from second-hand parts.

The more the film trumpets its thematic seriousness, the sillier it gets.

She's All That isn't mindless, just techniqueless...What's on the screen says they aren't yet up to speed on making feature films. Most of the actors mumble while the script lurches from one sketchy notion to the next. All the same, She's All That offers insights into life as it is lived, or at least filmed, in Southern California. [29 Jan 1999, p. W1]

The story leaves you snoozing with the fishes.

Mr. Hopkins gives the production what he was hired for. Whenever you wonder how much longer he can trade on Hannibal Lecter's special zest, the same answer comes up-a lot.

As dry and matter-of-fact as Ms. Zhao was in Nomadland, which won her Oscars for best director and best picture (as she was one of its producers), she is the opposite here, driving her actors to maximal emoting. The movie purports to dip into the deep well of Shakespearean magnificence but emerges only with a ladle full of greasy schmaltz.

Cold and clever to a fault, like the main character played by Liam Neeson, the movie is based on a fundamental miscalculation—that our desire to penetrate its mysteries will trump our need for people to care about.

David may be a towering figure of biblical lore, but this telling of a chapter of his story is not merely animated, it’s cartoonish.

The Fifth Estate gives us an obsessive-compulsive messiah with a taste for martyrdom, and full-screen cascades of computer code in place of a coherent plot. Exhausting in a new way, the movie is a data dump devoid of drama.

Superman can be a myth, a god, an American emblem or a symbol of the overachieving immigrant, but making him a schmo who’s so weak he’d be in deep trouble if it weren’t for his ridiculous dog feels like a dizzyingly dismissive choice.

Depending on how you feel about Zac Efron, he is either a sensitive hunk or an inexpressive hunk, but definitely a hunk. Unable as I am to locate any feelings about him, I see Mr. Efron as a hunk with a problem delivering sustained dialogue in units of more than one or two sentences.

Rather than a character rooted in some sort of reality-social, satirical, psychological, take your pick-Hesher is an abstract notion animated by false energy.

There's simply too much stuff for a two-hour feature, and three writers, including Tony Gilroy, haven't figured out how to boil it down into a readily comprehensible narrative, or how to solve the problem of an ending that goes blah rather than bang.

In the new film beauty is sought, and seldom found, in glitzy surfaces. Enchantment is chased, and never captured, in extravagant set pieces that owe less to fairy-tale tradition than to Cirque du Soleil grandiosity.

What I do know is that I was gripped for a while by the strength of Mr. Gibson's filmmaking, only to be repelled and eventually excluded by his literalist insistence on excruciation. There is watching in horror, and there is watching in horror.

What happens when a genuinely dear John gets a Dear John? For the answer, just meander--no need for running or walking--to your local multiplex. That's where Dear John, based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name, will be meandering on its downward path from sweetly tender to terminally turgid.

The possibilities of the dating game are endless and the potential for pain is great, yet the permutations of the movie's plot are predictable and repetitive.

The picture's blandness - and hollowness - is startling when you consider the collaborators. [26 Nov 1986]

Mr. Freeman, a superb actor, creates the illusion of drama even when there is none.

The production as a whole is awfully clumsy, and Ms. Moretz, who is only 17, needs more help than she gets from the first-time feature director, R.J. Cutler.

What's strong and true in Harrison's Flowers -- the hideous chaos of war, the stirring heroism of photographers and journalists -- falls victim to what's familiar, melodramatic and false.

The story is impenetrable, with more betrayals than you can give a damn about, and the frigid tone borders on self-parody, with frequent excursions to the wrong side of the border. As strong and formidable and commandingly tall as Ms. Theron is, she can’t rise above the gloom.

A horror flick is only as good as its ending; It either delivers on its promises, or it disappoints. This one builds up to a climax that is meant to be spectacular, but is actually a bore thanks to its literalism.

Starts out stylishly, and promisingly, but then coarsens into a silly parody of film noir.

Even though it starts out likable, it gets sillier as it goes along and winds up as camp.

Amateur is curiously monotone: a pulp fiction with all the pulp strained out. [13 Apr 1995]

I won’t make a case for No Escape being a good film; the first half is pretty good and the second half ranges from pretty bad to truly awful. Nor will I deny having enjoyed quite a bit of it as a zombie film, never mind that it’s supposed to be an international thriller with contemporary political significance.

An English-language debut by Russian director Kirill Sokolov, who also co-wrote its script, They Will Kill You is tongue-in-cheek but not witty, reveling in its excesses without bringing anything fresh to the party.

Every scene in this oppressive film has a theme or didactic purpose, but little life.

Anna and the Apocalypse does have its singular moments. On the whole, though, I’d say don’t bite.

The revelations of The Invisible Circus don't justify the quest.

Despite Mr. Howard's best efforts in the role, though, the film rarely realizes its subject's potential.

The film suffers from a style that settles for pleasant or touching at the cost of spontaneous or impassioned. Too bad, because Ms. Garner is a genuinely pleasing presence.

A remarkably dislikable film, long on atmosphere -- I admired Dion Beebe's brooding cinematography -- and desperately short on vitality.

Kevin Spacey's pinched portrayal of Quoyle as a scared palooka rarely transcends its own artifice.

I’ve gone on about the creatures because there’s so little to say about the humans, who, in their turn, have little to say about the creatures, because the writers haven’t written enough lively dialogue.

Ms. Robbie, on the other hand, aces her role from the start; she’s got an unerring gift for romantic comedy. Still, the film itself comes to feel like a con, thanks to a script that’s too clever by two-thirds, and butterfingered in the ways of portraying love.

After the first bit of fish bait is consumed, actually even before, this one-trick movie is a tough slog.

A film that tries constantly to amuse, but succeeds only fitfully.

The result is fitfully interesting, and Mr. Kinnaman, best known for "The Killing" on television, compels our empathy with a kind of macho melancholia. Still, the whole thing comes down to an action adventure that's graphics-rich, logic-poor, coherence-challenged and pleasure-impaired.

The intended overarching message is that vile men can exercise a kind of mind control over their innocent girlfriends. Perhaps. But Alice, Darling delivers an equally striking unintended message: that two people in a failing relationship have a tendency to bring out the worst in each other.

It's too much for a feature film, and too little, but it certainly isn't dull.

Strong acting often lends authenticity to writing that lacks it, and Mr. McConaughey is, to be sure, an exceptionally strong actor. Yet this screenplay is so arid in its didacticism, so pallid in its would-be passion, that it defeats his efforts and our involvement.

No one ever stops talking. Twenty-somethings talk incessant small talk, or cute talk, or fatuous talk that's supposed to be clever.

By the climax, the adult has finally become a responsible though still charming citizen; the child has become age appropriate and, yes, even cuter. Tsunami swell of music. Roll the credits. Minus the charm, that pretty much sums up Uptown Girls.

While there's gore by the gallon, inventiveness is in short supply.