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.