The film as a whole never takes flight, though not for lack of trying.

GOTG 3 is a blahbuster that, like other recent Marvel disappointments (“Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”), jogs along from one visually extravagant, strenuously jokey set piece to another without offering much in the way of either dramatic engagement or actually funny ideas.

To get to the beginning, one must first get through the end, which is almost literally unendurable.

There’s no secret life because there’s no life, only the promise of pets in perpetual motion.

The screenplay, by Antonio Macia, is earnest and unsurprising--not a good combination--and neither the director nor the star quite knows what to make of the quirky character inside the traditional garments that signal otherworldly innocence to customs agents.

I say don't bite unless your taste runs to thin gruel, and grueling gruel at that.

Having run its course in the third installment, the franchise jogs and lurches but mostly meanders through a story that tests the limits of true love (Shrek's, and ours).

In a production based on a nonfiction book by Diane Ackerman, a brilliantly specific story has been reduced to conventional drama and synthetic heroics.

There's nothing wrong with beguiling star turns, but I wish this one had been surrounded by more of a movie. Birthday Girl is a harmless trifle that makes 93 minutes go by as if they were hardly more than an hour and a half.

One could argue that the target audience - black teenagers, Mr. Lucas has said - might be most receptive to a film that conveys history through contemporary entertainment. But this isn't contemporary entertainment, it's antiquated kitsch reprocessed by the producer's nostalgia for the movies of his boyhood. The story has been stripped of historical context - don't black teenagers and everyone else deserve hard facts? - and internal logic.

Screenwriter Steven Knight has much to answer for in Callas being quite so shrill, but Ms. Jolie is unable to turn her storied character—one of opera’s most important and influential performers, a woman of polarizing voice, scandalous history and tempestuous personality—into something recognizably human.

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.

If the movie gets by, as it surely will during the current entertainment drought, most of the credit should go to a couple of performers (Latifah/Keaton) who come from different traditions, yet share a gift for breathing life into moribund material.

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

A deeper problem in The King Is Alive is an almost total absence of spontaneity.

The movie isn't terrible -- a few clever notions snap to life and pay off, at least modestly -- but it's dispirited and eventually dispiriting, a force-fed farce that falls far short of fascination.

One can understand the draw of The Fanatic for someone like Mr. Travolta: It calls for full immersion, mentally and physically. And he pulls it off.

In their engaging, fast-paced and ultimately ludicrous combo of espionage and mayhem, the makers of The November Man give us a very Putin-like villain in Arkady Federov (veteran Serbian actor Lazar Ristovski).

For all the luster of its subject, though, this earnest biopic lacks the spark of life.

It isn’t until the last half hour that the film finally switches tones from aggressively and charmlessly filthy to thoughtful.

In stripping down the legend—no talk of ancient curses or silver bullets here—Mr. Whannell may have modernized it, but he has also made it so joyless that it might as well have been produced by Glumhouse. This “Wolf Man” chases its own tail.

At least Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day has the good grace to go wrong quickly, you don't have to sit there squirming with doubt.

Furiously raunchy, occasionally bright and eventually benumbing comedy.

I wish I could say that the film gives a great actor a worthy role, but the truth is otherwise. The character is banal — Günther lavishes attention on remarkably uninteresting spycraft — and Mr. Hoffman, like everyone else, is stuck with the glum tone set by the director, Anton Corbijn ("Control," "The American").

The book presented several special, perhaps even insuperable, problems for adaptation to the screen, and the movie, which was directed by Robert Benton from a screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, hasn't solved them.

What's been carefully filtered out of the film as a whole is the tumult and passion of Robinson's life.

The heart of the Gru-niverse is slapstick and capers, but the balance is all off here.

Instead of scintillation, the movie gives us a succession of discrete set pieces, as if the action takes place in rooms but not in the halls connecting them.

What brings Monsters down from its extremely low perch is a conspicuous lack of monstrosity.

Certainly grows in its own right, into a coarse-grained summer vaudeville that could have been much smarter and sharper without losing its target audience.

Villains who aren’t good at their jobs are a bit boring, and despite their menacing regalia these Nazis are effectively lambs to the slaughter. “Sisu” is simply the slaughterhouse Mr. Helander has built around them, with all of the narrative and thematic artistry that implies.

Having been deeply moved — though often exasperated — by Terrence Malick's previous film, "The Tree of Life," I don't have the heart to belabor the failings of his new one, which is depressed and deeply depressing. The only thing that's wonderful in To the Wonder is the imagery.

As the film floats on, drifting from one extravagantly engineered reverie to another, the filmmaker only occasionally succeeds in making the audience feel his sorrow, regret and alienation. More often, his flights of fancy are merely exasperating.

It plays like pure television by an Aaron Sorkin disciple, and there is no reason whatsoever to see this on the big screen.

After covering much of its ground at a stylish canter, The Other Boleyn Girl finishes at a plod.

The press notes boast that Mr. Cutler was given "unprecedented access" and the right of final cut; these advantages don't seem to have done much for this listless film.

Jennifer Aniston brings a needed liveliness to Derailed, though not enough to go around.

Neither the director, Ellen Kuras, a cinematographer and documentarian whose debut narrative feature this is, nor the film’s three screenwriters can solve its essential problem, which is that it amounts to a string of grisly anecdotes.

Why didn't Mr. Jordan spend more time grounding his self-enchanted script in some semblance of reality? Unlike "Splash," this film finally goes plop.

While Mr. Holland is a clear talent with a screen presence at once natural and vivid, his character is passive to the point of emptiness. Any interesting resonances that might have been found in the idea of an actor having to relearn his own character, so to speak, are unfortunately absent here.

This is moviemaking in a modular mode, an inspiration-free action adventure — with cheesy cinematography — that fills its modest running time by fitting together familiar elements into something reliably, even insistently, not new.

This denial of nature is more banal than inspiring. The robot may grow a heart but the movie feels strictly mechanical.

A wispy, fundamentally sentimental tale about a nice girl who has to support herself by working as a phone-sex siren, Spike Lee's movie takes the better part of an hour to get started. Once it does it still can't dramatize the script's one good idea. [2 Apr 1996, p.A12]

To fill the downtime between commercials, there's a fitfully entertaining adventure.

The movie isn’t above using its star like a pin-up model. It isn’t above much, in fact, and it’s certainly below the level of the breezy rom-coms that Hollywood used to churn out with ease.

Aspiring to pure action -- several very long passages are wordless -- the movie ends up teetering on the brink of self-parody.

Sony Pictures is positioning “The Woman King” as not only a rousing action film but also an important one: At the screening I attended, a marketing slide read, “Join the conversation.” I’ll start: Is there any limit to Hollywood shamelessness?

An exhaustive and exhausting dissection of a relationship that was never all that promising in the first place.

In the end, the only question of consequence that the story poses is whether superior acting can prevail over inferior writing. The answer lies not in the stars.

As directed by Tom George from a script by Mark Chappell, See How They Run hits like a watered-down cocktail rather than a bracing belt of intrigue.

A ponderous pirate saga, 168 minutes long, with more doldrums than "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Those doldrums are relieved from time to time by spectacular effects.

UHF, a parody of trash television, is almost defiantly silly, but when it's funny it is very funny. This sloppy, good-natured satire certainly doesn't threaten "Network's" status as the classic decimation of the television business. [27 Jul 1989, p.1]

I dearly wished someone from Wick-land would emerge to take out this self-aggrandizing dunce.

This hugely elaborate production is supposed to be the reboot of a foundering franchise, but rebooting a computer wipes the silicon slate clean. In the movie, what's old is old again.

The best that can be said of it: inoffensive.

The world didn't need a superficial big-screen adaptation of a rich, dense book that's about, among many other things, the passage of time. The perplexity is why the film is so lifeless and remote.

Sacha Baron Cohen's tosses off some sensationally funny stuff before descending into a rat-a-tat rhythm of random insult and ritual vulgarity.

The film may be pretty to look at, but this passion project isn’t likely to generate much of it.

The ultimate poor judgment: the decision to put Babel before the camera. That defies comprehension in any language.

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

If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

Lacks a crucial element of the heist subgenre: ingenuity.

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.

Movies like this have been around forever too. They're a normal condition of winter's doldrums, which, in the fullness of time, will pass.

Babes is the kind of comedy that makes you wonder what jokes are, exactly, and if what you just saw contained any.

What's remarkable here is the consistency of the mediocrity.

A great premise for a movie. Unfortunately, The War of the Roses is not clever, at least not very often. [14 Dec 1989, p.A20(E)]

Beneath the glitzy surface of Vox Lux — the title of one of Celeste’s studio recordings — lie deeper superficialities, so many that I found myself admiring the movie’s wild ambition while grinding my teeth at its pretentiousness.

I watched the film in an agitated space between engrossed and aghast.

Bourne used to be an anguished amnesiac. Now he remembers who he is, but this fourth episode of the franchise forgot to make him human.

For an animated feature, Scarlet is unusually ambitious: It’s a “Hamlet”-adjacent existential pacifist revenge parable. It contains lots of instances of its heroine stopping to wonder what everything means, which is another way of saying it’s ponderous and pretentious.

Even the Bollywood ending, a pleasant echo of “Slumdog Millionaire,” is intercut with darker reminders of dwindling days. Much of this sequel is clumsy, and awfully silly, but consistently shallow it is not.

Born on the Fourth of July would be merely a hilariously inept gathering of Vietnam War movie cliches. Instead it is an unrelenting series of dramatic blows; almost every scene packs violence, sleaze, screamed rage and an ear-splitting music with headbutt force. For someone who despises the military, Mr. Stone is quite bellicose. [21 Dec 1989, p.1]

How bad must a movie be to be good fun? How dumb to be smart? (Or, in the case of "Dumb and Dumber," how pretend-dumb to be surpassingly smart?) Whatever the case, Hot Tub Time Machine doesn't make the cut.

The film, which was written and directed by Todd Robinson, begins with those dreaded words “Based on a True Story,” meaning in this instance concocted from certain established facts, lots of unconvincing fiction and large dollops of sentiment into a disjointed tale that means to inspire us, yet manages against steep odds to be dull and emotionally remote.

Cuckoo brings up a lot of ideas but doesn’t organize them into anything like a satisfying resolution. As frenzy follows frenzy, it aspires merely to create a feeling of senseless chaos.

Angels & Demons is a serious slog. Still, it's an odd kind of a slog that manages to keep you partially engaged, even at its most esoteric or absurd.

A not-bad idea lurks inside this insipid story.

A misshapen semi-spectacle that seems to be simulating an epic, and getting away with it only occasionally.

The movie . . . doesn’t have the smarts to embrace its own stupidity.

Comes to the screen missing subtle cues and crucial connections.

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.

Seldom has grandeur struggled so mightily, and fruitlessly, with rampant goofiness.

At its best, Ava DuVernay’s biographical film honors Dr. King’s legacy by dramatizing the racist brutality that spurred him and his colleagues to action. The director and her screenwriter, Paul Webb, are less successful — sometimes much less so — at breathing life into the private moments that define King as an inspirational figure with human flaws, and a political as well as spiritual force.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever may not have the same flaws as Marvel’s other recent disappointments, but it continues what amounts to a creative losing streak.

Can't lift the double curse of too little genuine action, as opposed to quixotic events, and too many fancy words.

The shallow-seated problem with Murder by Numbers is that it's serious and doggedly intricate but not much fun.

It’s easy to see why Mr. Burton, an influential imagist in his own right and a collector of Keane paintings, was attracted to this saga of contending Keanes, and the result, photographed by Bruno Delbonnel, is a study in yummy colors and period design. But I watched wide-eyed with dismay while the film turned as lifeless as the paintings.

Mr. McQueen has created a documentary that gives little life to history—or, for that matter, to the present that treads forever in its shadow.

The result is a mess -- sometimes an entertaining mess, but mostly a movie that makes a perfunctory mockery of the mockery currently passing for political discourse.

A visionary film with dramatic myopia.

It’s a deranged story, one that offers all kinds of opportunities for examining changes in the state of artificial insemination, medical ethics, the ways in which the human body has been opened up like an evidence locker, and the catchup that legislation has to play with technology.

Ms. Gladstone draws a lot of sympathy as the modest, helpless Mollie, but like everything else here her performance suffers from inertia. She spends the bulk of the movie mired in illness and despondency, and her look mirrors how I felt as I watched: numb and trapped.

In what was clearly designed to be a chick flick, the on-screen chicks work hard at being endearing, while Jude Law, as Amanda's more than conversational partner, charms everyone effortlessly and gets the best lines.

The movie is counterfeit too, a coarse imitation of a stylish star vehicle for stars who deserve the real thing.

The more these two likable people rattled on, the more I found myself thinking about the elusive distinction between characters talking genuinely smart talk and simply chattering for the camera.

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.

Perhaps the Oscar winner was simply attracted to reliving glory days, just as Mr. Levinson must have enjoyed revisiting the territory of one of his best movies, the 1991 Bugsy Siegel saga “Bugsy.” "Alto Knights is, however, buggy: a curious mixture of the inert and the frenetic.