It’s impossible to imagine that “The Rise of Skywalker” won’t do huge business, even though it’s merely good, not great, and though there’s a growing sense around the galaxy that Star Wars fatigue has set in.

This new film, though, is mainly appalling, and not instructively so. It’s all over the place, to the point of inducing numbness or suffocation. In the end it comes out in favor of love, which is good, but getting there may leave you glassy-eyed, unless you’re deeply into bling porn.

The movie's emotional content was manifest as an absence. What stayed with me most memorably was the father's insufferable bombast and the son's sad passivity.

Declarative sentences are as scarce as detectable feelings in this stylish, emptyish thriller -- it's Tarantino with the vital juices left out.

The result is lots of gunplay and explosions governed by little logic.

He's (Crowe) thwarted by the production's almost total, and truly absurd, absence of fun.

Despite the numerous predictable jokes about geriatric sex, the movie is very appealing for numerous surprising reasons. Many of them have to do with ice fishing in Minnesota. [9 Dec 1993, p.A14]

Everyone is touched by sadness or hobbled by self-deception, and everyone is interesting, even moving, to watch until the drama slowly suffocates beneath the weight of its revelations.

Another is how the film manages, in the absence of a coherent plot, to be so funny and engaging until, somewhere around the midpoint, it goes as flat as a stepped-on creepy-crawly.

Emancipation is tonally discordant, attempting to merge serious historical drama with the silly dynamics of an action thriller.

A limited movie that can't animate its subject amid all the tricks and glitz. De-Lovely is devoid of life.

Despite the curry flavoring Ms. Nair has seen fit to add, this is a Vanity Fair without spice.

Mr. Timberlake has displayed his many gifts in multiple formats, but nothing quite like “Palmer,” not in his character’s complexities or in the way he navigates Palmer through the social circumstances explored by Ms. Guerriero’s canny script. Young Ryder Allen is also something to see: He makes Sam’s matter-of-fact self-acceptance funny, yes, but inspiring as well.

The film is far from perfect, but it’s certainly ambitious, often entertaining and, compared to the feeble competition from new American films of the moment, a singing, dancing, stomping and chomping “Citizen Kane.”

Palindromes finds him (Solondz) stuck with his single theme inside a sealed dollhouse of his own construction. He has gifts to give a larger audience, if ever he breaks out.

There’s a scary amount of stuff going on in writer-director Christopher Landon’s horror movie/murder mystery/domestic drama/deep-state thriller/coming-of-age teenage romance. It may be based on the short story “Ernest” by Geoff Manaugh. But there’s nothing short about it. At the same time, it has its charms.

The two human leads, Nani and Lilo, don’t have nearly enough charm to make up for the deficiencies around them, which leaves the entire movie essentially in Stitch’s claws. Yet even his demented-toddler-on-three-espressos energy isn’t funny, perhaps because the digital animation is so dismal.

The movie—consistently amusing, amiably performed and never really credible—concerns itself with questions of artistic inspiration, and one leaves it thinking that Ms. Miller has, at the very least, an eccentric muse.

Amateur is curiously monotone: a pulp fiction with all the pulp strained out. [13 Apr 1995]

It’s clear what the film means to be—a bittersweet portrait of a daughter’s love for her incorrigible father. But the characters don’t add up. The complexities and nuances that might have brought them fully to life never made it to the screen.

The story line, a sequence of very loosely connected events, sustains a state of almost pure brainlessness with its indifference to dramatic development and the dictates of logic, even the fantasy logic of cartoons. It’s as if most of the script had been generated by algorithms.

Don't bother to see this film unless you expect to be tested in film class about the Coens' serial dissertation on American cinema. [10 Mar 1994, p.A16]

This franchise needs more than a reset. It's ripe for retirement.

Most of the prime goofiness is given over to Vassili and Konig sharpshooting at each other while the battle rages. The movie's a red elephant.

Heart-breakingly awful -- slow, lugubrious, and misconceived to the point of baffling amateurism.

Mr. McKay’s comedy is at its best when his tone is big, ridiculous and cheerfully subversive.

Strong acting often lends authenticity to writing that lacks it, and Mr. McConaughey is, to be sure, an exceptionally strong actor. Yet this screenplay is so arid in its didacticism, so pallid in its would-be passion, that it defeats his efforts and our involvement.

My heart was warmed by gratuitous moments when Mr. Carrey clowns for clowning's sake - in the best of them, he makes a slo-mo entrance to a press conference, even though the camera is running at normal speed.