The movie amounts to some gleefully grotesque moments scattered across an arch but slack pseudo-drama, fluent in the psychobabble spoken by a few too many entries in this genre.

Prometheus, in efficient 3-D, places most of its bets on the wonders that today's visual artists and technicians can work with digital tools. This tale of an interstellar search asks cosmic questions about the meaning of life, but comes up with lame answers in a script that screams attention-deficit disorder.

The film is plagued by flaws: James Newton Howard’s relentlessly bombastic musical score, an elementary storyline, underwritten characters. As expertly as Mr. Greengrass recaptures the flaming horrors, his film is a somewhat superfluous successor to an excellent documentary on the same subject, Ron Howard’s 2020 feature “Rebuilding Paradise.”

Renoir is so beautiful, and so intelligently conceived, that you keep waiting, in vain, for a bit of fire to break out in the narrative.

The pursuit is manipulative and repetitive.

By all wrongs, though — beginning with a single-minded script and clumsy direction — a movie with a compelling story to tell turns into a blunt-force polemic that can’t stop hammering its message home.

The whole thing devolves into such highfalutin silliness that it’s impossible to care what happens to whom. In Mr. Guadagnino’s previous film, “Call Me By Your Name,” the tone was romantic, and sustained to the very end. In Suspiria, style stomps fun into submission.

It's formula stuff, to be sure, but full of feeling for the sweep of the past as well as for the unsettled, yearning present.

It’s all B-movie stuff, though sporadically entertaining and occasionally witty on the intertwined subjects of bedevilment and in-laws.

From early on my strong desire was for this horribly pretentious phantasmagoria to be over.

I disliked it at first — the camera is as jittery as the characters — and kept disliking it until I realized that I’d been drawn in, if not exactly captivated. The film itself is alive with random energy that foreshadows a surprise ending without blowing the surprise.

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.

The script is somewhat predictable and the pace is leisurely, but Ms. Judd makes Lucy's choices seem momentous, and Ms. Adams gives us several beautiful scenes.

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.

I know this sounds like great fun, and some of it is, but there's nowhere near enough good stuff to fill the 114-minute running time.

Too often the film languishes as Mr. Kasdan poses Big Questions and then has his characters answer them in conversations that are so casual they seem improvised. [26 Dec 1991]

The film, for all its visual felicities, comes to life only sporadically.

It’s a movie in which too-muchness ends up being not-enoughness, since the script lacks a vital center. But the premise remains appealing. If you have to travel by air, being 5 inches tall makes a seat in economy a throne.

Expert dramatists know how to develop suspense from the intricacy of details even when the end result is known to the audience, and Mr. Frears does so in the rousing final third of the film.

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.

Mark Ruffalo is yet again a revelation in Infinitely Polar Bear, and he’s not the only one. This is a first feature by Maya Forbes, yet many of its accomplishments put far more experienced filmmakers in the shade.

World War II is often called the “last good war,” which has also meant that it was the last global conflict out of which the studios could make an unabashedly heroic movie. Fury is not that movie. And because it is not, it provides a few psychic disturbances beyond its shocking gore, burning soldiers blowing their brains out, children hanged from trees by the SS and imminent rape.

The story's literary underpinnings are hilariously represented by the denizens of a seedy writers' retreat situated near Tamara's old house, which she has come back to reclaim after her mother's death.

Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.

An attractive, intelligent film that's intractably at odds with itself.

Ambitious and uneven.

Spellbinding on its own terms, a modernist fable with a madly romantic soul.

Watching this mélange of journalism and dramatic license can be enthralling and maddening at the same time, because the ring of truth, which the film has, is not the same as the truth, which remains unknown.