The film fails most importantly, almost inexplicably, at telling its story of governmental abuse and personal suffering in a coherent fashion. And the disorganization of Ms. Parks’s script is enhanced by a succession of montages that must have been put together to camouflage narrative gaps.

Mr. Pearce (“Iron Man 3,” “Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation”) and his director have no idea what kind of picture they want to make. Instead they have four or five different concepts which they set loose like cars ramming into each other as they jostle for position.

In this frustrating fizzle, the friendship does keep struggling to change into a love affair. But year after year, July 15 after July 15, it's the same old same old - two increasingly tedious people talking self-conscious talk.

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.

While the film is partially redeemed by a couple of surprisingly touching late scenes involving Ridley and her dad, for the most part it’s merely a weak satire in which we’re meant to cheer as the moneyed class gets a sanguinary comeuppance, with crushed skulls and spilled intestines presented as hilarious.

Had anyone recognized the signs and done something about them, the picturesque fable would have gone up in smoke, or snow, and Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter would have become a different picture. I’d prefer that one, though, sight unseen. This one is a closed system about a closed system.

Occasionally, he allows his gift for creating poetically beautiful and architecturally elevated cinema to spill out across the screen. The thing that eludes Mr. Carax—as Annette so amply and painfully demonstrates—is balance.

As pleasing as the film may be to those who treasure ambiguity and nuance, it strikes me as dry and tedious.

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

Thanks to an inert story and disagreeable characters, its 90 minutes go by slowly.

The Life of Chuck is an overstuffed suitcase of a movie, one that comes off as a bit graceless and misshapen with all of the cramming and jamming.

I found this sequel deeply slumping, not to mention unnecessary, unmagical and often unfunny. The misuse of talent is what slumped me the most.

Enjoyable enough for what it is, a clever idea developed by fits and starts.

Without the fizz of wit and humor the underlying emotional scenario ends up feeling flat.

The film turned out to be plodding and boring. No one can accuse Hardcore Henry of being plodding. It does get to be boring, but in the high-tech, cutting-edge mode of first-person-shooter videogames that dazzle your eyes, spark your synapses and numb your brain.

The film’s airless, cramped quality demands consistently high-level dialogue—words that sting and burn. Instead, the two big speeches, especially the second one, land somewhat like filibusters.

The only rewards, and they are real albeit insufficient, involve watching Jane Fonda in full cry and Catherine Keener in a quieter fullness of feeling.

I was put off by the acting, or more properly by the spectacle of good actors dutifully following leaden direction, and equally by the writing, which is as thin as the veneer of civilization it purports to peel back.

There is less artistry to the film than there is sloganeering. Call Jane would be more effective if it stuck to human drama rather than having its characters make sweeping assertions that sound like stump speeches given at political rallies.

Instead of growing from a sweet young thing into a strong woman who is Maxim’s equal, this bride stays scared and vulnerable until close to the end, when the script turns her implausibly into a sort of Nancy Drew doing detective work for the husband she adores. Who could have guessed that the film with a modern perspective on gender politics was the one made 80 years ago?

It's as if the filmmakers, having committed themselves to the book, fled from its essence, which is wildness.

Now the two men are back, along with Irene. But she vanishes all too soon in this overproduced, self-enchanted sequel, and so does the spirit of bright invention that made the previous film such a pleasant surprise.

It's overextended and exhaustingly comic.

The director, Steven Soderbergh, and his large, cheerful cast have managed to make the least possible movie that still resembles a movie.

Nothing if not ambitious, yet at war with itself stylistically.

The new movie has all the oft-mocked pretension of classic art film and none of the poetry. It’s a work of almost ostentatious mediocrity.

Punishes the audience with a flat starring performance; Mr. Jane finds few sparks of life in a hero who wasn't all that lively to begin with.

Goes by pleasantly enough as you come to understand where it’s headed, but this romantic comedy, directed by Isabel Coixet from a screenplay by Sarah Kernochan, wears out its welcome, and energy, through unswerving conformity to its dramatic scheme.

Higher Learning put me in mind of a long lecture by a well-meaning but dull professor. What he has to say may be worthwhile, but it's delivered with plodding predictability. [12 Jan 1995, p.A12]

As a first-time feature director, though, he (Ball) seldom lets the material speak for itself. Every shot is a statement, every scene sells an attitude.

When does banter turn to blather? In the case of this action adventure, which was directed by Baltasar Kormákur, it's when you realize that keeping track of the barely fathomable plot isn't worth the bother.

I came out of this would-be epic feeling physically exhausted, psychically mauled and none the better for wear.

Joy is at its annoying worst when it’s clamoring to be antic, and at its brilliantly funny best when Joy and her adversaries — including one played by Bradley Cooper — are deadly serious about business as mortal combat.

Dumbfoundingly erratic, for the most part, but smart and funny from time to time.

Jim Carrey is the prime offender here. He's such an unseemly showoff that the movie keeps stopping in its tracks.

Reasonably entertaining time-travel romance.

Green Book warms the heart, then numbs the mind. It’s a broad-brush lesson in racism, a sermon on the power of empathy, a user’s guide to tolerance packaged as a mismatched-buddies comedy.

Congrats to Mr. McConaughey, usually a beanpole, for making himself unfashionably fat. The movie, though, is thin, if semi-clever, the synthetically exuberant tale of a rogue’s journey from rags to riches and back again.

There are few moments in the film—one that is wearyingly indignant and emotionally inert—that feel genuine.

Here's one more studio extravaganza brought down by numbing action and an addiction to generic digital effects.

Going on too long seems to be the disease of the week; it's certainly what brings this movie down, though the going on here stems from a surfeit of implausible plot that suffocates the main characters and the excellent actors who play them.

The story refuses to combust; it's a strangely unsatisfying combination of bloodless observations and unresolved sexuality.

Exemplifies Hollywood's standard practice of stomping a brilliant concept beyond recognition.

The movie moves at such an agonizingly stately pace that by the end, side effects be damned, Henry's time-traveling gene starts to look mighty appealing.

Ted is often hilarious, sometimes sweet and, in the spirit of "Family Guy," consistently raunchy. Yet it's seriously overextended and, as the premise wears ever thinner, frantically overproduced.

There's no scarier myth for males, and Mr. Lichtenstein turns various images of emasculation into a black comedy that flirts, fairly tediously, with pornography.

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

Be warned: Although it was filmed on the North Shore of Hawaii's Oahu island, this is a surf movie, not a surfing movie. As for the empowered-girl premise -- well, the kids may not notice, but Blue Crush is about as progressive as a Virginia Slims commercial.

Mr. Dauberman, abetted by cinematographer Michael Burgess (“Malignant”), finds ways to make the Lot both anxious and dour, though the moods don’t always match up with the wobbly storytelling, or help set it on a purposeful path.

Where the Ruby-teacher relationship falters is not the fault of the actors, but the writer. Mr. V is meant to be slightly unreasonable, a hard-liner about Ruby being both serious and on time. But the script takes the very common and dubious tack of not letting the characters simply explain their situations to each other.

It's ended up a weak imitation of the original. [09 Aug 1990]

The biggest battle in Monsters vs. Aliens is banality vs. originality, and banality carries the day.

Remember "The Flight of the Phoenix," the movie about the misshapen plane, built from scavenged parts, that flies its builders to safety? Music and Lyrics is like that plane, up to a point. The plot is misshapen, the pieces are scavenged and nothing quite fits. The film does manage to take off, albeit barely, then flits around cheerfully in search of coherence, but finally crashes and fizzles.

The story wanders unconvincingly and tediously into corporate law offices and big, splashy nightclubs. Still, Mr. Hackford has the documentary maker's eye for realistic detail, so it all looks right. [01 Mar 1984]

The movie's real locus of anger must have been the director, Ang Lee, once he realized what an epic clod his computer wizards had wrought.

I'm sorry to report that Biyi Bandele's would-be saga, based on the celebrated novel by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, is disappointing, a romance pastiche that muddles the politics of the period beyond comprehension.

Nolan’s 168-minute odyssey through the space-time continuum is stuffed with stuff of bewildering wrongness. Eager for grandeur, I went in hoping for the very best from a filmmaker with his own vision of the theatrical medium’s potential. The last thing I expected was a space adventure burdened by turgid discussions of abstruse physics, a wavering tone, visual effects of variable quality and a time-traveling structure that turns on bloodless abstractions.

It’s a cousin to other superficially gritty but essentially cloying movies about the traumas of urban striving, such as “Precious” or “Moonlight.”

It's a movie at war with itself. The first half, more or less, is witty about California culture, or the lack of it, in a "Clueless" kind of way, which is a very good way.

Mr. Shyamalan’s movies have often been turgid in a distinctive way, with overtones of lofty sadness, and dramatized deliberately or violently, but seldom spontaneously. This one follows the pattern, for not so good and worse. It’s a lofty letdown.

There’s a more interesting, less strident film under the surface, but it never manages to get out.

This new feature, though, sets up a dialectic between reason and faith and argues it insistently, with eye-rolling earnestness.

If Bono is melodramatic, Mr. Dominik is an enabler. Thom Zimny’s matter-of-fact direction of another paternally damaged rock star’s concert confessional, “Springsteen on Broadway,” let its star’s charisma shine through. “Stories of Surrender” is more like an epic of self-parody.

The result is heavy and humorless, despite a smart, skillful performance by Brooke Smith.

Like Poirot’s mustache, the movie as a whole is a waxworks.

This is filmmaking by the numbers meant to succeed by the numbers.

When the film leaves the realm of the impolite or even criminal for something far more extreme, it achieves a level of excess that makes the whole enterprise increasingly cartoonish, rather than just awful.

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.

The island locale rings with reggae music regardless of its proximity to Jamaica, and any action sequence is rendered in painfully deliberate slo-mo.

What's not fine is the dead zone occupied by the monster of the piece, Tom Cruise's veteran rocker, Stacee Jaxx.

The movie makes no attempt to dress up any of its many clichés.

For all its seriousness, though, Levity struck me as pretentious and intractably lifeless.

The essence of Youth Without Youth, which was shot -- luminously -- in Romania, lies in its solemn speculations about aging, time and consciousness. Mr. Coppola is one of the cinema's peerless masters, and I would have enjoyed nothing more than a chance to celebrate his new film. I'm truly sorry to say, then, that I found it impenetrable.

If this death-obsessed drama is a classic, then give me potboiling life.

Mr. Clooney’s prancing, dancing and clowning for the TV camera feel tame and vaguely self-conscious when measured, as they will be, against the calculated craziness of his role’s model, Mr. Cramer, who usually manages to seem simultaneously shrewd and stridently unhinged.

Ms. Berry works hard in her role, generating some excitement in the course of her distress. But the story's convolutions can't cover a deficit of substance, or sense.

The only thing Mr. Tarantino spells out is the violence. I have seen much more blood spilled, yet I felt sickened by the coldness of this picture's visual cruelty. [29 Oct 1992, p.A11(E)]

Despite the surface Mr. Safdie has designed—hand-held cameras, unglamorous sets, closeups of people in misery—The Smashing Machine is notably reluctant to go deep.

Feelings play second fiddle to stylized attitudes in Spartan, and fancy style can't conceal the film's clumsiness.

Mr. Braff's idea of self-discovery is my idea of narcissism.

The issues in the film add up to a rat’s nest of athletic, economic and gender questions. But they’re given only superficial scrutiny in a production that’s essentially propaganda, powered by pumped-up music and pumped-up players.

This is an odd and ultimately dispiriting film, despite some intriguing ideas about brute force vs. moral authority, the elaborately staged uprising -- and impressive actors in the cast. That is to say, they've been impressive elsewhere.

Little more than a showcase for Owen Wilson's amiable shtick, and a showcase in the merchandising sense of the term.

The situation in The Situation is grimly photogenic, yet persistently opaque.

Like many dreams that enliven filmmakers' nights, this one derives from other, better films, though it does have a few clever twists.

Spontaneity has been banished by rigid stylization, and the net effect is as lifeless as a severed head that turns up in a basement freezer.

The fault lies not with Ms. Jones, an appealing performer, but with Gareth Edwards, who directed doggedly from a delight-free script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy.

This time, though, the happy ending plays out in real life, while the screen version falls afoul of a laggardly pace, an earnest tone and a surfeit of domesticity.

This latest iteration of the Tolstoy classic was clearly the product of audacious thinking, stylishly applied. Still, the thinking was as wrongheaded as it was hollow-hearted. Yet another elaborate production chases its audience away.

This critic is a sucker for Ms. Knightley, so please disregard anything here that sounds remotely positive. Because it really is a ludicrous exercise, the kind one hopes was fun for the actors because the results are so wacky, and the cast so prestigious.

The movie commits the sin of boredom, partly because Ms. Martin is exceedingly inexpressive.

I've enjoyed Ms. Leoni's comic gifts in the past, and I'll enjoy them again, but Spanglish asks her to play crazed, and she delivers with a performance of unremitting, crazymaking shrillness.

The writing and direction, by Robert Budreau, range from pedestrian to lethargic — not a good thing when the subject is passive more often than not.

Civil War is superficially silly—Mr. Garland writes himself into a trap in one tense scene and gets out of it with an absurd moment of action-hero gusto that is, as presented, not possible—but it’s also deeply silly. It’s a statement movie that contains no insights at all.

The movie is pleasant enough, in its studied way, and Mr. Hopkins does as well as anyone could in the role of a wise man with vaguely supernatural powers. Still, it's awfully amorphous and pokey.

The root problem is repetitiveness, the seemingly endless cycle of progress and relapse that causes heartbreak in real life and induces déjà vu in audiences — even dejà déjà vu, since there’s repetition within the already familiar pattern. The mosaic structure is simply, though not successfully, an attempt to hold our attention.

This documentary feature is fascinating and infuriating in unequal parts, the latter far outweighing the former, since Mr. Jarecki’s instrument is a shoehorn.

Any movie that gives Helen Mirren a chance to shoot really big guns, wear an ermine astrakhan and channel Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth can't be all bad, and Red 2 isn't, though it comes close.