Impressive landscapes, plus Kristen Wiig's appealing Cheryl, the fellow worker who inflames Walter's passion, make the movie enjoyable enough. Yet its style is a constant bafflement.

The film functions as a high-wire act that can leave you giddy with laughter.

On screen it looks crazed, but the comic energy is huge, if indiscriminate, and Mr. Sandler's performance -- think Topol doing Charles Boyer -- can be as delicate as it is gleefully vulgar or grotesque.

For a film filled with jagged shards of glass, and sometimes shot kaleidoscopically, through the windows of houses or cars, Bee Season is carefully, almost relentlessly, intended. That said, the script, by Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal, touches on themes that rarely make it to the big screen.

There's so much of so many flavors of cleverness — a surfeit of surfeits — that sensory overload causes aesthetic suffocation.

For all its flashy trappings, weighty ruminations and zero-gravity floatings aboard the International Space Station, Life turns out to be another variant of “Alien,” though without the grungy horror and grim fun. In space no one can hear you snore.

The larger problem, transcending all realms, is that this action-adventure sequel from Marvel soon turns so dumb and 3-D-murky that it hurts.

Mr. Kormákur somehow elicits a shoddy performance from the sturdy English actor Idris Elba, whom I’d never seen flail like this.

The movie comes up with a couple of tender moments that could pass for human, and a mano-a-mano climax in which the superhero of yore, the glint in his eye dulled but not extinguished, functions as a weirdly touching tyrannosaurus.

For all its video-game bedazzlements, Attack of the Clones suffers from severe digital glut, periodically relieved, if you can call it that, by amateur theatrics.

Whatever the cause, the movie turns sour when the singers aren't singing. And the first-person accounts don't work at all, even though much of their substance comes from the show.

This movie needs a star performance at its center, and the director, Joe Johnston, doesn't seem to know it. His closeups dote on Mr. Mortensen's striking face, and on the actor's interesting inwardness, but he doesn't ask for, or find, the sort of zest that could turn laconic into romantic.

Oh, what awful voices -- clumsy words as well as cheesy accents -- come out of the actors' mouths! Though I wanted to appreciate the human story, and the lavish spectacle, I couldn't get past the clangorous echoes of Charlie Chan.

Mr. Kamiyama has sent into battle nothing but armies of clichés.

Seeking spontaneity and release for her character, Ms. Streep gets stuck in a laboriousness that I don’t want to belabor, since her efforts are gallant — she does her own singing and playing — and there are fleeting moments of real fun. Still, it’s hard not to wonder why so much in the movie went so wrong.

It's just a little film that strives to be likable, and is less so than it might have been.

Jakubowicz has made a muscular, messy and vulgar film based on a life that has been all those things.

Unconcerned with context or tonal nuance, it frames itself as an action thriller with a signature moment that could have been lifted from an old western.

Full of entertaining vignettes that eventually make a happy mockery, as they're meant to do, of the tragedy vs. comedy dialectic.

Not many performers can please an audience as much as Mark Wahlberg, but the pooch comes close.

Mostly, though, there's the endlessly resourceful, endlessly inventive, bedazzling Mr. Coogan. Hamlet Schmamlet. Not since "Death of a Salesman" has failure been quite so entertaining.

Here’s the bad news: Brüno is no "Borat." Here’s the worse news: Brüno crosses the line, like a besotted sprinter, from hilariously to genuinely awful.

Fewer and better-drawn supporting characters would have helped give some substance to Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s script, but as it is the movie centers on the chatter of the two principals, creaky one-liners and blowout action scenes that mistake frantic editing for excitement.

Strays is wildly inappropriate. It’s also wildly funny.

Rather than the laugh a minute promised by old comedies, Get Smart generates approximately one laugh per hour, and I can't remember either one.

Ambitious, visually stunning and hugely accomplished.

The film too often feels like the plodding presentation of a sad story. And it gets sadder still, though as the plot goes on the movie tends to skirt genuine awfulness, reaching instead for the inspiring flashback, the righteous moment of justice or the happy, improbable surprise.

A shamelessly fictionalized biopic.

The film should have been cleverly dark and dripping with insider takes. Instead, it’s boringly schematic.

Wittily written and directed by Gerard Johnstone, who directed but did not write the first film, the follow-up is notably clever, amusing, ambitious and densely plotted. Unlike its predecessor and most works from the horror-thriller production company Blumhouse, it combines a high-concept premise with a highly complicated story.

Tests your patience to the breaking point -- maybe beyond.

If there’s anything more you need to know before deciding whether to watch this, I should tell you that it’s nothing like “Eighth Grade,” “Booksmart,” “Clueless” or “Election,” all astute studies of the high-school scene. The calculations of this screenplay, adapted by Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer from a young-adult novel by Jennifer Mathieu, are naked enough to qualify as nude scenes.

Like Seberg, too, Ms. Stewart is able to distinguish herself when encumbered by fairly feeble material. That said, Seberg is a bit much to ask of anyone.

The mystery posed by Oblivion as a whole is why its mysteries are posed so clumsily, and worked out so murkily.

Greta is petit Guignol trying to pass for Grand, a horror flick made by people who forgot to have fun. One of them, the director, Neil Jordan, made a memorable film called “The Crying Game” almost three decades ago. This is the groaning game, an inept tale of danger, entrapment and dismemberment.

Camp X-Ray isn’t anti-American, despite much of Ali’s rhetoric. It is about the evils of ignorance, wherever it rears its ugly head.

The title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy.

Bobs and weaves between gross-out comedy and violent psychosexual drama, ultimately sliding into parody.

Ethan Hawke is appealing as a polysyllabic coward of some complexity, but Mr. Washington has been stripped of his usual verve and grace. Sometimes you can catch him going slack, like a man looking for the exit.

The sometimes hilarious Good on Paper is actually an anti-romantic comedy.

This more than 2 1/2 hour film would rank as one of Hollywood’s sleepiest fantasy blockbusters of the century even without the pointless musical interludes, of which there are at least half a dozen.

I owned a deep sense of discomfort (which the movie means us to feel) that gave way to increasing boredom until the search led to an appliance repair store in a seamy area of the San Fernando Valley, and to one of its employees, Albert Sparma, the suspect played by Mr. Leto.

Mr. Forster’s affinity for flat dialogue, cartoonish characters, hokey contrivance and dull inspirational messages continue to be his hallmark, and the Hallmark Channel seems like an ideal place for his future work.

The deeper problem with Rock Star is its insistence on turning a heavy-metal fairy tale into a morality tale that's as heavy as lead.

Bee Movie isn't a B movie, it's a Z movie, as in dizmal.

It's no classic, but you don't need to be a cultist to get in on the tawdry fun.

As I watched the minimal plot unfold at a glacial pace in claustrophobic settings, I found myself wondering where the rest of the movie was.

Penguin Bloom is alternately despairing and inspiring—more of the former than the latter, I found, simply because of the production’s honesty, and the lifetime of difficulty the Blooms’ story suggests.

The plot makes no sense — time travel as multiverse Dada. Worse still, it renders meaningless the struggles that gave the first two films of the franchise an epic dimension.

The film does a poor job of illuminating human frailty because everything in it is so transparently contrived, so clumsily aimed at your tear ducts.

Not a pretty sight, any of it.

The perverse fascination of Jet Lag is watching two superb actors struggle with material that doesn't suit them.

To enjoy what's enjoyable in The Fighting Temptations, you've got to take in the music and shut out the words -- not the lyrics of the wonderful songs, but the dialogue stuffed into actors' mouths.

A lovely surprise. Ripe with feeling and lush with physical beauty, it's a love story that swings confidently between age and youth, and, like the young Tiger Woods of old, avoids every trap along the way.

Mr. Woo’s frenzied love of operatically heightened violence may have influenced some talented younger directors, but without an interesting screenplay to work from his movies sink into mindlessness. “Silent Night” is nothing to shout about.

The results are startlingly original, if occasionally overambitious. This is "Tsotsi" without the feel-good glow, a tale of entrepreneurship's perils and boundless pleasures.

The most surprising thing about Alice in Wonderland is its general lack of surprise.

If there’s a secret to a successful screen adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time, it’s still secret. Disney’s version of the Madeleine L’Engle young-adult novel is a magical mystery tour minus the magic and mystery, and a great disappointment, since there were so many reasons to root for the film’s success.

The Beekeeper, which is both a bee movie and a B movie, falls in the same category as many other Statham-versus-everyone action thrillers: not very good, yet enjoyable enough.

A chance to see four terrific actresses — let’s not use the gender-neutral term in this context — having varying degrees of fun with matters of sisterhood, sex and hope in a movie that touches on mortality and holds out the prospect of later-life joy.

Though all of the film’s events could be recounted in a few sentences, “Anemone” is a vivid character study and an acting showcase for the four lead performers, each of whom gets ample opportunity to show a deep understanding of their tortured pasts.

It's hard to stop quoting from a movie this good.

This teenage interracial romance runs hot and cold, sweet and silly, with many more fits than starts.

Director Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “Step Up”) aims for the tear ducts, directing for maximum anguish, righteousness and/or schmaltz, and much of the Dumplin’ message arrives with postage due.

I loved watching this sci-fi spectacle’s moving parts. I just couldn’t get past its brain.

Despite Mr. Molloy’s tapping into his inner Michael Mann and turning Wilshire Boulevard into a scene from “Heat,” there are scattered human moments in “Alex F,” thanks largely to Mr. Murphy, who has always been a provocateur capable of tenderness.

Ms. Stone is a consistent delight, whether thanks to or in spite of the script’s flirtations with self-parody. But Irrational Man isn’t funny either. It’s a Woody Allen film that the next one will make us forget.

In contrast to the series, which was quick-witted, fast-paced and self-ironic -- oh, and sexy -- the movie is earnest, often aimless (couldn't anyone cook up a plot?), visually bland (except for the fashion shows) and, at two minutes short of 2½ hours, a decreasingly amiable meander.

So absurdly overproduced that there's even a surfeit of cherry blossoms. By the end they look like litter.

It’s impossible to imagine that “The Rise of Skywalker” won’t do huge business, even though it’s merely good, not great, and though there’s a growing sense around the galaxy that Star Wars fatigue has set in.

This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn.

The movie's emotional content was manifest as an absence. What stayed with me most memorably was the father's insufferable bombast and the son's sad passivity.

Declarative sentences are as scarce as detectable feelings in this stylish, emptyish thriller -- it's Tarantino with the vital juices left out.

The result is lots of gunplay and explosions governed by little logic.

He's (Crowe) thwarted by the production's almost total, and truly absurd, absence of fun.

Despite the numerous predictable jokes about geriatric sex, the movie is very appealing for numerous surprising reasons. Many of them have to do with ice fishing in Minnesota. [9 Dec 1993, p.A14]

Everyone is touched by sadness or hobbled by self-deception, and everyone is interesting, even moving, to watch until the drama slowly suffocates beneath the weight of its revelations.

Another is how the film manages, in the absence of a coherent plot, to be so funny and engaging until, somewhere around the midpoint, it goes as flat as a stepped-on creepy-crawly.

Emancipation is tonally discordant, attempting to merge serious historical drama with the silly dynamics of an action thriller.

A limited movie that can't animate its subject amid all the tricks and glitz. De-Lovely is devoid of life.

Despite the curry flavoring Ms. Nair has seen fit to add, this is a Vanity Fair without spice.

Mr. Timberlake has displayed his many gifts in multiple formats, but nothing quite like “Palmer,” not in his character’s complexities or in the way he navigates Palmer through the social circumstances explored by Ms. Guerriero’s canny script. Young Ryder Allen is also something to see: He makes Sam’s matter-of-fact self-acceptance funny, yes, but inspiring as well.

The film is far from perfect, but it’s certainly ambitious, often entertaining and, compared to the feeble competition from new American films of the moment, a singing, dancing, stomping and chomping “Citizen Kane.”

Palindromes finds him (Solondz) stuck with his single theme inside a sealed dollhouse of his own construction. He has gifts to give a larger audience, if ever he breaks out.

There’s a scary amount of stuff going on in writer-director Christopher Landon’s horror movie/murder mystery/domestic drama/deep-state thriller/coming-of-age teenage romance. It may be based on the short story “Ernest” by Geoff Manaugh. But there’s nothing short about it. At the same time, it has its charms.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

The movie—consistently amusing, amiably performed and never really credible—concerns itself with questions of artistic inspiration, and one leaves it thinking that Ms. Miller has, at the very least, an eccentric muse.

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

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

The story line, a sequence of very loosely connected events, sustains a state of almost pure brainlessness with its indifference to dramatic development and the dictates of logic, even the fantasy logic of cartoons. It’s as if most of the script had been generated by algorithms.

Don't bother to see this film unless you expect to be tested in film class about the Coens' serial dissertation on American cinema. [10 Mar 1994, p.A16]

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

Most of the prime goofiness is given over to Vassili and Konig sharpshooting at each other while the battle rages. The movie's a red elephant.

Heart-breakingly awful -- slow, lugubrious, and misconceived to the point of baffling amateurism.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

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.

My heart was warmed by gratuitous moments when Mr. Carrey clowns for clowning's sake - in the best of them, he makes a slo-mo entrance to a press conference, even though the camera is running at normal speed.

The Rocker has the requisite vomit, the view of some very unfortunate hind quarters and the suds. It's also got a vein of sweetness and charm.