Generic booze is, in its way, a shortcut, something pretending to be something else—something achieved through time, effort and expense. As such, it’s not a bad analogy for this movie.

The narrative is telegraphic rather than dramatic, with story points ticked off like bullet points, and the actors (excluding Ms. Mulligan, once again) act mainly for the camera, as if they aren’t sure their leaden emphasis is weighty enough. The intended tone is darkly comic, but the supporting cast isn’t sufficiently skillful to sustain it.

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

The absence of any nuance in the father's character bespeaks the filmmaker's unwillingness to trust his audience. Making the movie may have been therapeutic for him, but I can't say the same about watching it.

The film, streaming on demand, brings old news that can’t hold a flickering candle to the events of our flabbergasting moment, and a clever twist doesn’t redeem long passages of gratingly broad and awkward humor.

Ms. O'Hara, like almost everyone else, falls victim to a prevailing tone that's short on wit and long on self-congratulation.

None of it is enough, though, to save this glum drama from its schematic self.

The good news is that Mia Wasikowska is back in the title role, bright-spirited and skillful as ever, but she’s burdened by the manic direction of James Bobin, working from a dramatically inert script by Ms. Woolverton.

Mr. Judge has done better...Here, by contrast, we're dealing with one-note characters, among them a sexy grifter (Mila Kunis) and a dim-witted gigolo (Dustin Milligan); situations that stretch all credibility; and jokes that are never more than sort of funny.

It's so easy to be seduced by technique... What a disappointment, then, to find the technique pressed into the service of little substance and lots of fashionable cynicism.

Jeff Cronenweth did the lovely cinematography. It's the only element that improves on the original material.

This icon of witchcraft can't save a production that's suffocatingly elaborate yet insufficiently bewitching.

It's just that the picture doesn't have a strong idea behind it, just a fog of many half-expressed ideas. [26 Feb 1987, p.20(E)]

Starts busily, and soon becomes a bafflement -- such an interesting cast, such technical excellence, so many intricate details and parallel plot threads, yet so little clarity or urgency.

Someone makes a jokey reference to the cartoon contrivance of “Scooby-Doo,” and the comparison is brutally apt.

The pursuit is manipulative and repetitive.

Did the film fail the actress? Or vice versa? In the case of The Last Showgirl, I’d say they failed each other.

The first film wasn’t bad, though it had its lapses. “Cars 2,” an aberration, was readily forgotten. This one feels like the series, at the end of the road, is running on fumes of nostalgia for its earliest self.

Ms. Aitken seeks to draw a connection between Terry’s life story and her dedication to helping these impossibly vulnerable and sweet birds, but a documentary that avoids important questions is a failure.

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.

Some of the action sequences, and a few of the performances, are enjoyable enough to make up for the dialogue, which has been upgraded to cheerfully absurd, and the plot, which has been simplified to the point of actual coherence.

All three sides of the love triangle are appealing, and the movie as a whole might have been winning if it weren’t for the absurdist style that was clearly dear to the filmmaker’s heart. Sometimes Aloha reminded me of John Huston’s cheerfully unfathomable “Beat the Devil.” More often than not, though, it left me yearning for simplicity and sweet clarity.

Visually epic, sonically relentless and otherwise fatuous, the film has a dramatic inertia occasionally punctuated by eruptions of utter catastrophe—a series of shocks that leaves you singed, shaken and not much better for it.

Jonathan Abrams’s script is so amateurish it feels like a first draft.

Like everyone else on hand, Mr. Woodall deserves a better director than he gets here, just as the audience deserves a better script than one that asks us to believe Göring was so clever he nearly dodged blame for the Holocaust.

It may be cheaper than a trip to see the gentlemen of Chippendales but, artistically speaking, it’s on roughly the same level.

It's slapdash, crudely crafted and resolutely adolescent. And occasionally, though only occasionally, very funny.

The film is less like a full-fledged story than a series of notifications you might get on your phone, most of them couched in language that could have been generated by a buggy AI program.

The plot borrows as freely from Hitchcock and Henry James as from the Bard of Avon, and doesn't make scrupulous sense, though I'd have to see the film again, which I won't do, to make sure it doesn't cheat.

Mr. Garrone seems so desperate to create a powerful humanist plea that he has neglected to provide his movie with the detail and artistry that would give it force, and he conspicuously concludes his story just before it would have started to become more contentious—and more interesting.

Predictably dumber than its predecessors, though that shouldn't get in the way of its profitability.

Ms. Fahy, who had a breakthrough with the second season of “The White Lotus,” tries admirably to dignify her character, but the attempt is overwhelmed by the plot’s silly hijinks, its twists more like arbitrary swerves.

The audience is left to feel sorry for characters we’re meant to find amusingly contemptible and to groan at the way the writing keeps taking potshots at the most obvious targets. When the film thinks it’s being wicked, it’s closer to being trite.

All the same, X2 and recent action adventures like it constitute a mutation in their own right: fast-paced, slow-witted movies in which the impact is the message; impersonal movies that deny any need for characterization; disjointed movies that make no apologies -- and pay no penalties -- for making no sense. Their special gift is giving little and getting a lot.

This all-too-realistic animated feature will impoverish, rather than enrich, those who watch it by asking less rather than more of their imaginations. That’s because its images have been stripped of the animator’s true art — daring, bedazzling designs that can thrill us with their surreality, and lift our emotions to hyperreal heights.

The editing is like a kaleidoscope fed through a food processor, the camera has less ability to sit still than a 4-year-old stuffed with birthday cake, and both lead actors veer into camp.

Mr. Kinnear is fine; he's an actor we always like, and he gives a skillful, heartfelt performance. The problem is the material -- dramatic in the describing but painfully predictable in the telling.

Audacity can’t carry a drama that’s unequal to its subject in almost every respect. ( Brian Cox does what he can, sometimes admirably, to breathe life into the title role.)

Functions mainly as an action extravaganza, and a numbingly depersonalized one at that.

Malevolence is in generous supply throughout the film. Easy enjoyment is not.

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 movie's tone is at war with its subject, and sometimes with its wavering self.

Even those who find Ms. Wilkerson’s thesis convincing are likely to concede that it is more at home in the library than at the multiplex. Many others will find Origin confusing and dry.

This frenzied sequel has all of the clank but none of the swank of the previous version.

The film is beset by incoherence and implausibilities that are perplexing, given the close relationship between the Wachowskis and the director, Mr. McTeigue.

Does not bring a single fresh, inventive idea to the table.

No, this time out, the "Star Wars" enterprise isn't anywhere as enjoyable as the original...One might argue that all this represents a gain, adding to the original, sophistication, richness, depth. But truth to tell, these developments seem little more than inappropriate. To place internal struggles within one-dimensional characters who by definition have no interior is absurd; just as it also seems misguided to take such frothy stuff as the "Star Wars" saga and attempt to give it substance and weight.

Its inventions and speculations aren’t very interesting. Nowhere do they hint at the man who gave us the plays.

Among the books that McCall carries with him is a volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”; we see the cover in pointed close-ups. That can serve as one of the hero’s life lessons. Take a pass on the movie and you avoid losing two hours.

There’s also a sense of ineptness in a script that constantly reaches, with only modest success, for amusing things that the mammoths and their friends can do.

It neglects, for one thing, to make any sense.

What passes for the movie's reality is interlocking episodes of ersatz ecstasy and angst -- a Cupid-governed "Crash" -- plus snippets of wisdom dispensed by Mr. Freeman's character.

The filmmakers can't keep the strands of their clumsy plot straight, but they create brilliant images and manipulate them with blithe abandon.

The movie is stifling, all right, and depressing in the bargain.

How you feel about Paul Haggis's new film may depend on your contrivance threshold.

A provocative but eventually dislikable two-part film that dares us to dislike it.

Mr. Murray and his co-director, Howard Franklin, who adapted Jay Cronley's novel for the screen, succeed mainly in illuminating what made them want to direct the material. At least this picture struggles to emit a few gasps of fresh air as it goes down. [19 Jul 1990, p.A8]

I haven't seen the original, but I can vouch for the clumsiness of the new version. As usual, though, Queen Latifah is an indomitable, if sometimes undirectable, comic force.

Sometimes comes on like a NASA commercial; those logos loom gigantic on the IMAX screen. More troublingly, the film fails to explain how computer animations were combined with actual imagery from the missions.

This new Disney film, marked by myriad lapses and marketing follies, bears the woefully familiar earmarks of a big studio production that was pulled and hauled every which way until it lost all shape and flavor.

Mr. Scott seems content to restage story beats and action scenes from the first film. Most cold-case sequels aren’t very good, and maybe there’s a reason for that.

A heavier-than-air adventure, set in Victorian England, that seldom rises above the level of elegant hokum.

The director Don Hall and his co-director and screenwriter Qui Nguyen (who last year collaborated on a slightly less mediocre Disney picture, “Raya and the Last Dragon”) seem to have put all of their effort into gaudy backgrounds, wacky gadgets and strange ancillary monsters instead of into dramatic urgency or conflict.

In a film that has the courage of its absurdity but not much else, Mr. Pattinson gets the best of what passes for style.

An overlong, unfocused and distractingly stylized take on Ms. Steinem’s life.

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

Hoffman and Beatty are so tone-deaf they don't even know how to play the songs for deadpan humor. They seem old, white, and without shtick. [14 May 1987, p.26(E)]

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

Can't hold a candle to Robert Altman's 1992 comedy "The Player." Both films present themselves as knowing views of the movie business, but Mr. Altman and his writer, Michael Tolkin, really knew.

Ghostface tends to veer from fiendishly brilliant to unbelievably thick depending on the writers’ limitations.

A general sense that things aren’t heading anywhere too exciting pervades this cinematic chunk of corporate synergy.

Unfortunately, the movie could use a bit of pachyderm memory, given its habit of flashing back to Tien's childhood with exactly the same footage used in previous flashbacks. Instead of the narrative being deepened, it keeps getting shallowed.

The film should have been played for pure farce and is not, hence the head-scratching in which a viewer will engage before very few bodies are cold.

The sensibility of the earlier production has been transformed, despite Ms. Gadot’s continuing authority. Wit has been replaced by feverish caricature, feeling by sentimentality, and Wonder Woman is left with almost nothing to do for long stretches of a very long and disjointed story.

The star shouldn’t be blamed, though, for the failings of the direction and script. Here’s a case of consistently miscalibrated tone, from the first clumsy stabs at humor to the hero’s default expression, which is painfully pained.

Written by Tim Smith, Keith Thomas and Arkasha Stevenson, and directed by Ms. Stevenson, The First Omen relies heavily on gory imagery, jump scares and shocking dream sequences to cover for its weak plotting.

None of the film's tropes — fancy camera angles, dark streets, persistent rain, psycho killers in doomy settings, Scudder trudging around the city on their trail — can hide the essential hollowness of a not-very-interesting revenge tale that takes a not-at-all-welcome turn into grisly, ugly horror.

A mawkish core remains, though, and the resulting disjuncture—between the film’s indie style and its sludgy sentimentality—makes the whole effort feel phony.

Susan Sarandon is Marnie Minervini, a recent widow and the meddlesome mother of The Meddler. Marnie is an Italian iteration of Molly Goldberg minus the charm. She might be charming if there were a full-fledged movie around her instead of a display case —Ms. Sarandon is, of course, a deft comedian.

Ms. Brown, who first came to our attention in “Stranger Things,” and for good reason, is surrounded by a cast that may have lost a bet.

Occasionally the movie does offer up a pleasing little nugget about the creative process, as when Springsteen changes a lyric from the third person to the first: There is glory in such little adjustments. But most of the movie’s backstage material is uninspired.

Jean's material is so flat-out awful it's amazing she gets hired at all, let alone that she once supposedly had headliner potential. It's a discrepancy that Introducing the Dwights never addresses.

Fabrice Luchini is thwarted by an unwieldy plot.

If this adds up to a full-fledged feature film, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Amusing, in fits and spurts, and sure to make tons of money, but terribly familiar and fatigued.

Though the new Little Mermaid makes excellent use of all that digital wizardry has to offer, its heart is lost at sea.

The narrative lacks a strong heartbeat; you keep wondering why the spectacle isn't as affecting as it is picturesque.

Ms. Scott Thomas is as intelligent and attractive as ever, but the synthetic world her character inhabits can't compete with a harrowing past that depicts French complicity in Nazi atrocities.

That mildness is characteristic of the film, which is colorful to look at but dull. The story is plodding, the characters are boring and earnest, and the supposed comic-relief act provided by the trio of stumblebums on Arco’s trail is a wince-inducing failure.

The pretext of the movie, which was directed in broadbrush-cartoon style by Anne Fletcher from a coarse-textured script by Dan Fogelman, is a road trip taken by mother, Joyce, and son, Andrew.

Mr. Stanfield is a gifted performer. Thanks to an amateurish script, however, Clarence is a lifeless Brian.

Once Captain America goes off to war in his endearingly silly suit, however, the movie starts to lose its vibe.

The script's foolish contrivances crush its content.

Not even she (Patricia Clarkson), however, can save a movie that suffers from terminal self-enchantment.

If you're able to take The Missing seriously, as I was not, you'll be impressed by its sweep and ambition. The most lasting impression it made on me was one of absurd overreaching.

The production feels tentative and underpopulated: I thought not only of Katniss Everdeen but of the marvelous pandemonium in Danny Boyle's zombie epic "28 Days Later."

That “Crime 101” seeks to position itself as a successor to “Heat” is laughable. A more accurate title would have been “Lukewarmth.”

Mr. Crystal underplays his role wisely and well, while Mr. De Niro parodies -- maybe the better word is pillages -- himself and his career with scary gusto.