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.