Elegance isn't Zack Snyder's bag; a certain sort of impact is. Watchmen establishes him as Hollywood's reigning master of psychic suffocation.

Most of the film, a debut feature directed by Christophe Barratier, is quite shamelessly formulaic. The Chorus redeems itself, though, with Mr. Jugnot's astute, understated performance.

Messy as it is, Deadpool & Wolverine is the first MCU movie in several years that’s mostly enjoyable.

If Lords of Dogtown accomplishes nothing else, it shows how hard writing a fiction film can be, and what a vast artistic distance can stand between a bad fiction film and the first-rate documentary that inspired it.

Ms. Robbie, on the other hand, aces her role from the start; she’s got an unerring gift for romantic comedy. Still, the film itself comes to feel like a con, thanks to a script that’s too clever by two-thirds, and butterfingered in the ways of portraying love.

After the first bit of fish bait is consumed, actually even before, this one-trick movie is a tough slog.

Considering the gravity of the subject, and its immense potential, “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is not just a letdown, but something more like an insult. The film will do less damage to Mr. Putin’s reputation than to those of Mr. Assayas, Mr. Law and Mr. Dano.

There's a jaunty score by Randy Newman, and Clooney, as always, has charm to burn, but here, he's off his game.

What’s increasingly bewildering and perversely curious is how unpleasant Spinster is, in almost every regard: The lighting is atrocious, the framing is erratic and Ms. Peretti’s comedy, which is generally about demolishing the banalities that constitute most human interaction, may well have the audience saying, “Well, of course Gaby’s alone. She’s intolerable.”

The visuals are kinetic, the pacing frenetic; the violence, or at least its aftermath, doesn’t just border on the excessive, it makes major incursions. But given the criminal milieu at hand, nothing less would have seemed plausible, or equal to the heightened, sordid sensibility Mr. Johnson creates in the film’s opening moments and maintains right up to an ending that is among the more perverse in recent memory.

Percy Vs Goliath has a solid sense of place—the Canadian prairie—and Mr. Walken gives us a solid sense of Percy, a man whose instincts are so contrarian he sometimes seems unsure whom to disagree with, or what to refuse to do.

Who am I to call it soulless, graceless, witless, incoherent — even for the franchise — and, not incidentally, brain-numbingly long at 136 minutes?

Mr. Murray and his co-director, Howard Franklin, who adapted Jay Cronley's novel for the screen, succeed mainly in illuminating what made them want to direct the material. At least this picture struggles to emit a few gasps of fresh air as it goes down. [19 Jul 1990, p.A8]

Much of the fun is awfully silly. The story strains logic, as well as credulity. It's been cobbled together, often crudely, from pieces of classic predecessors. (Here snippets of Hitchcock, there stretches of "Speed," with wings on the bus.) Yet the silliness parades itself in a spirit of cheerful self-awareness, while Liam Neeson fills the thrill quotient impressively as an air marshal.

The fur flies, the claws come out and the bad jokes hit the fan.

The whole movie seems to be on fast-forward, with crushingly brainless dialogue, hollow imagery and no way of slowing down the febrile action or making sense of the chaotic plot.

Once the plotters plunge into action, though, Valkyrie becomes both an exciting thriller and a useful history lesson.

Mr. Nixey is doing an Alfred Hitchcock homage within a movie lacking anything as subversive, or skilled, as Hitchcock.

The film is a lesbian-road-trip gangster farce with a hint of political satire, and though it’s admirably offbeat I found it only mildly amusing.

Watching these two intensely likable comedians work together is a special pleasure.

This coming-of-age movie, is a clumsy contraption, but it's nice to see Rupert Grint coming out from under that colorful thatch, and coming, not a moment too soon, into an appealing pre-maturity.

The movie doesn't shed much light on their famously contentious marriage. Instead, it spreads gloom all around.

The drama is repetitive rather than resonant, an over-calculated, under-ventilated studio production -- even paranoid thrillers need to breathe -- whose plot machinery grinds grim and coarse.

What Minions does have is abundant if relentless cuteness, which audiences are sure to accept in lieu of content; people love these little guys.

Wall Street is a silly, pretentious melodrama that panders to the current fascination with insider trading. [10 Dec 1987, p.1]

War Machine, with a screenplay and direction by David Michod (of 2010’s ferocious “Animal Kingdom”), is a comedy because, as per the old Angela Carter line, it’s tragedy happening to other people. But it’s also a highly accessible examination of why the Afghanistan war couldn’t be won the way we—in the person of Gen. McChrystal—were fighting it.

All of the nonsense piled on nonsense does provide some measure of pleasure. Unknown gets better by getting worse.

Starts busily, and soon becomes a bafflement -- such an interesting cast, such technical excellence, so many intricate details and parallel plot threads, yet so little clarity or urgency.