The safe course is to recommend the film, which seems pitilessly long at 147 minutes, only for the transcendent quality of Javier Bardem's performance.

Sacha Baron Cohen's tosses off some sensationally funny stuff before descending into a rat-a-tat rhythm of random insult and ritual vulgarity.

A model of mediocrity.

Mr. Gilroy’s new film doesn’t try for lean. When its lawyer hero isn’t citing legal precedent, he uses spectacularly florid language that reflects his unusual mental state. But there’s a disconnect between what we see and hear and what we’re meant to feel.

What may feel like Mr. Sfar's indulgences are sometimes just that, but one could hardly make an honest movie about Gainsbourg that wasn't as recklessly ambitious as this.

This is Mr. Fogelman’s directorial debut, and an auspicious one; it feels as if he’s long been accustomed to working with actors — with exceptional actors like those he has brought together here.

Uncle Frank feels like a memoir, and also feels extraordinarily true, and fresh, thanks to the untrammeled terrain it visits, at least in New York.

The movie lacks a resonant center. The script seems to have been written by committee, with members lobbying for each major character, and the action, set in vast environments all over the map, spreads itself so thin that a surfeit of motion vitiates emotion.

Mr. Clooney and his colleagues have crafted an elegant screen version of a novel by Lily Brooks-Dalton with a resonant performance at its center—his own.

What’s admirable about Pioneer is its succession of interesting environments, both below and above the water’s surface, and the quietly appealing figure at the center of the international intrigue.

With all its flaws, though, The Grey Zone deserves to be respected, and to be seen.

Rarely has a major motion picture -- and this one is major by virtue of its misplaced ambition as well as its budget -- been afflicted by such flagrant dissonance between subject and style.

The film doesn’t lack for audacity, or ultimate purpose — it’s against hate and in favor of love. But the adaptation isn’t funny enough to sustain the style, which owes an overt debt to Mel Brooks and amounts to Springtime for Hitler Youth.

I can't pretend that the third episode instilled a fever in my blood, but it didn't leave me cold. For the first time in the series I felt I'd seen a real movie.

This one, a debut feature, is awfully inept, whereas the short isn’t long enough for ineptitude to take hold, or for a story to develop.

It’s a slow-release dose of sincere feelings.

In the title role, Sydney Sweeney must be relieved to be giving people a reason to discuss her acting. She’s excellent in the role, small and vulnerable yet tough and fierce, a pink-clad dynamo who is nevertheless beholden to others.

It's short, taut, nicely shot, well-acted, astutely directed, specific where it might have been generic, original enough to be engrossing and derivative enough to be amusing.

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.

Pulls you in with smooth assurance, then holds you hostage to extremely creepy developments in the most awesome haunted house since "The Shining."

A machine for killing time, and it does so fairly painlessly.

The younger man's personality is all the more startling for the skill and generosity with which Mr. Brolin creates a persuasively vital K while foreshadowing the grump to come. The script explains the change in elaborate detail, but the performance defies explanation; it's mysteriously marvelous.

Simultaneously beguiling and frustrating -- the product of an imagist and dramatist uncomfortably conjoined.

Snowden is mostly flat, overlong, unfocused and didactic.

Lawless is one of those films that, through seeming serendipity, has a cast that defines its moment. There have been others - "The Breakfast Club," "The Godfather" and "Silverado," to name one irrelevant and two relevant examples. But Lawless really lucked out.

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.

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 entire movie comes across as awkward, even flailing to hold our interest.