Martin Scorsese's obsession with a dubious mystique of masculinity turns Raging Bull into a ponderous work of metaphysical cinematic bull.

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.

A crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

Watching Thurman's character "triumph" in a context as joyless and self-referential as Tarantino's is a soul-deadening experience, one that over two hours takes on the same dreary monotone as the cheapest pornography.

The story is maddeningly oblique and incomplete, despite paying what at times feels like excruciating attention to the minutiae of a dying love affair's final hours.

Miyazaki, like an evil sorcerer, has plucked the heart out of Jones's story and left it there to die.

A cynical, sexist and shallow work from cinema's premier misanthrope, Robert Altman, who here shows neither compassion for -- nor insight into -- the human condition.

In the end, I'm wondering what's so special about a film that has but one guilty pleasure and that's Ben Kingsley spraying saliva-lubricated variants of the F-word into the atmosphere like anti-aircraft fire for 10 solid minutes.

We're really celebrating Hollywood's freedom to create biographies of anyone, no matter how high or low on the social ladder, and still come up with the same banal characteristics, messages and conclusions. In this sense, The People vs. Larry Flynt doesn't champion, so much as squander, freedom of speech.

For all its stylishness, verve and moments of visual poetry, the relentlessly punishing slapstick and overall cruel tone left me cold.

Best of Enemies exists mainly as an occasion to replay the footage of Vidal’s smug taunt and Buckley’s seething response. It’s great television, but it has been available on YouTube for some time now.

As Frank Galvin, the misbegotten inspirational hero of Sidney Lumet's imbecilic courtroom melodrama The Verdict, Paul Newman takes sanctimonious satisfaction in impersonating the sorriest excuse for a crusading attorney since Anne Bancroft misrepresented Margaux Hemingway in "Lipstick." [17 Dec 1982, p.F12]

Feels like something I know is supposed to be good for me, but that I just couldn't stomach.

Ultimately undermined by the fact that the two rock bands Timoner chose to focus on -- the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols -- simply don't matter as much as she thinks they do.

The film, whose title may or may not refer to a slang term for a dog’s erection, often teeters between compassion and something that feels perilously close to cultural voyeurism.

The film is probably of interest only to those viewers who, like Gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with Chomsky.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest. [U.S. theatrical release]

Doesn't progress or deepen, it just gets weirder, and to no good end.

Obstreperous, male-bashing pain in the patoot.

While the younger Van Peebles certainly looks the part, Baadasssss! never feels like anything more than kids playing dress-up.

Stone's film is a case study in cultural analysis that aims at too much and achieves too little.

With Titane, Ducournau joins the crowded realm of elevated horror, to increasingly outlandish and alienating effect.

A pulpy grindhouse B-picture tricked out in art house pretensions, counting on the siren call of sex and violence to fleece the rubes. Choose your own adventure. And maybe bring a barf bag.

The filmmakers keep trying to make Will appear paranoid, but he’s not fooled for long — and most viewers won’t be, either.

The film, like the cheap double-scotches quaffed down by the central character, leaves a distinctly sour aftertaste that's hard to wash away the morning after.

A shapeless collection of encounters with Texas prison inmates and their victims, what could have been a well-aimed examination of the most troubling contradictions of capital punishment instead becomes a maudlin, unrestrained wallow.

It orders you to love it. It demands love, which is the best way not to get it.

The story behind Hercules, Walt Disney’s insipid, lifeless, animated feature, is hardly the stuff of children’s entertainment.

Unrelentingly grim, unremittingly gross and unforgivably unattractive, 28 Days Later is an orgy of troubling images and bestial sound effects.

Things happen in On the Rocks, but the caper-flick high jinks viewers expect to ensue never come to full, cockeyed fruition.

King of Comedy aggravates the problem it's supposed to illuminate. Far from clarifying the nature of a creepy social pathology, the movie assumes an attitude of smug, unjustified superiority toward every character in sight and the cockeyed spectacle of pop culture in general.

Roll past this casino.

This is another unhelpful screed, uncontaminated by sense or perspective, that preaches loudly to the choir.

The good news might be that Huppert wasn't available for Alias Betty, but the bad news is that it didn't stop France from exporting yet one more cold, pretentious, thoroughly dislikable study in sociopathy.

The whole thing looks like an ad for cologne.

By the film's self-congratulatory final shot, Stevie has become less a portrait of a sorry young man's difficult life than the story of auteurist arrogance and self-deception run amok.

The satirical edge has been dulled in a film that is dominated, and ultimately swamped, by its star's mannered, pixilated performance.

It's the sort of movie that can make normally well-read and intelligent viewers feel stupid.

The director, who is the son of filmmaker David Cronenberg, seems to have inherited some of his father’s worst excesses, which are here unleashed in a manner that is sophomoric, fetishistically violent and hyper-sexualized.

Worse yet is the insincerity of the film's central performances. Too cool by half, Glodell, Wiseman and Dawson speak every line as if it had air quotes around it. In fact, the entire movie feels as though it has air quotes around it.

As long as it stayed mainstream dirty it was okay, but when it got into perversions the American Psychiatric Society hasn't even named yet, it left me behind.

Only the most committed Aster-pologists are likely to enjoy Midsommar at its fullest; others, meanwhile, may admire its handsome visual design and bravura performances without completely buying in to the alternately diseased and fuzzy fable at its core.

Escapes is an eccentric portrait of a not especially eccentric — or even terribly interesting — subject: Hampton Fancher.

It’s just a giant missed opportunity to be something more.

Welcome to “The Batman,” yet another lugubrious, laboriously grim slog masquerading as a fun comic book movie.

Unfortunately, the drama operates on a see-through, easily shatterable metaphor: the frigidity of the WASP soul. [17 October 1997, p.N32]

Can a script exploring some truly deep questions about human sexuality and emotions be any shoddier and wooden?

I would rather have a more interesting group of desperate people to spend my post-apocalyptic time with.

In Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, a great deal of engine noise and clanking iron is drowned out by the audience's resounding ho-hum. It's comic books in a Cuisinart, all costumes and cute monikers and no story, a sort of case history of just what's wrong with sequelitis. [10 July 1985]

There’s some fun to be had, as long as your idea of fun includes being grossed out.

The real problem isn’t an overabundance of potential killers. Rather, it’s the fact that the film, from writer-director Aaron Katz (“Land Ho!”), does so little to make you care about the crime, or its victim, that the whole thing feels like an academic exercise.

In the end the movie goes nowhere a hundred movies haven't already been and tells us nothing we don't already know. It does so with so much violent energy, however, it's like four brutal years at film school crammed into an hour and a half.

A typical student film with its arty angles, bad lighting and pretentious observations.

The new Dutch film Black Book manages to turn World War II into a large piece of cheese. A lurid, pulpy, slightly perverse potboiler, the movie suffers mainly from its utter lack of seriousness.

The director Alexander Sokurov is a visual virtuoso. So it’s odd, not to mention a bit disappointing, to find that the Russian filmmaker’s latest project, Francofonia, is so talky and, with rare exceptions, visually dull.

Crazy? Crazy is too mild a word by far to describe the twisted worm at play inside the skull of the Canadian director David Cronenberg -- And that craziness is given full vent in the vomitorium called eXistenZ.

There is something disturbing about yet another iteration of what's become one of the movies' creepiest conventions, in which the developmentally disabled are portrayed with almost supernatural powers to humble, teach and ultimately redeem their mentally "superior" (read: morally inferior) friends, family and acquaintances.

It's so laden with foreboding, you want to get out from under it and gasp for air.

Unfortunately the cast members are made into symbols themselves, bereft of blood and emotion, under the direction of the great John Huston. It's like a death pageant, grueling and dismal and distant...It is a dreary process at best. And this film is a tedious and time-consuming study of decay and lost values, lost souls and lost empires. [13 July 1984, p.17]

A picture-book French film that's pretty and trite, rather than edgy and moving.

Kicks is gritty to the core, and its commitment to verisimilitude is its undoing. All of the characters are selfish, and their sense of loyalty is purely circumstantial.

Very much like sex. On second thought, make that bad sex. Actually, sexual assault is more like it. It will leave you feeling used, bruised, violated, mistrustful and unclean.

Body Double twists and turns miserably between the comic and the macabre; it's definitely not dressed to kill.

Nothing in the first Gremlins came close to being as bad as these early segments in the second one, and because the concept is no longer fresh, and the suspense over what's going to happen is lost, we're ready for the filmmakers to get on with it long before they've finished setting the table.

It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.

There is no attempt to explain why an actress would go to pieces when she discovers a point of identity with her role; nor why an actress who is constantly loony, drunk, abusive or all three would not be understudied, let alone replaced. It should be noted that the play-within-the-movie is even worse than the movie-about-the-play. [14 Apr 1978, p.18]

A dog-frequency movie: enjoyable only to those tuned in to its particular register.

Gator never emerges as anything but a blatant and outspoken -- and virulently brutal -- jerk.

It's a silly, if simultaneously deadpan and stomach-churning, psychological portrait of one crazy lady.

A few minutes of inspired lunacy aside, The Yes Men is largely a case of the same old preachers preaching to the same old choir.

A rambling disappointment.

Ghost suffers most from a distinct lack of anything, well, cinematic.

A grisly, often cynical piece of work whose joyless, aggressive spirit is made even less appealing by its soulless visual style.

Kari may eventually go far, but for now he's one of the less interesting inhabitants of international art cinema's disaffected-youth ghetto.

The Hateful Eight never lives up to its intriguing opening minutes and provocative premise, its wide-screen canvas wasted on a talky, claustrophobic chamber piece that descends, in due Tarantino fashion, into a mean-spirited slough of bloodshed and mayhem.

A sporadically funny, marginally interesting fiasco that might have evolved into a memorable romantic comedy.

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener's earnest first feature is a low-budget comedy drawn from the pages of her own dear diary. Most women have sense enough to burn theirs.

Of the many comic book superhero movies, this is by far the lamest, the loudest, the longest. Good Lord, what an epic sit. My rear end deserves a medal...I wish I could say it wasn't so, but for most of us, this "X" marks a splat.

Trudging nobly under a mantle of impeccably earnest intentions and a fussy, too-quaint-by-half production design, Honeydripper lags and drags to its utterly predictable end. There's not a spark of spontaneity or soul about it.

It's too bloody to be funny and too silly to be dramatic and too self-indulgent to be anything other than what it is, one more bad movie.

Stanley Kubrick's production of The Shining, a ponderous, lackluster distillation of Stephen King's best-selling novel, looms as the Big Letdown of the new film season. I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie. You might say that The Shining, opening today at area theaters, has no peers: Few directors achieve the treacherous luxury of spending five years (and $12 million-$15 million) on such a peerlessly wrongheaded finished product.

Director Michael Winterbottom languidly unspools the story; nothing seems to lead to anything.

With its outré images and pulsating shots of human viscera, Crimes of the Future is clearly meant to shock, as well as reference very real anxieties about technology, genetics and environmental degradation. But as the convoluted plot wears on, Cronenberg’s transgressive kink looks more and more played out.

If it's art, it's only mildly interesting.

As Primer progresses, it just gets murkier and the experience of it more drudgelike.

Friends, Washingtonians, countrymen, I come not to praise Gladiator but to bury it.

Too clever for its own good.

Keaton and DiCaprio manage to bring several levels of emotion to their characters, but everyone else is a cardboard cut-out.

For audiences who prefer their movies to be as weird and even off-putting as possible, Annette comes fully wrapped as a pretentious, arty, occasionally breathtaking, ultimately misbegotten midsummer gift.

Although the performances are strong and committed — especially Qualley’s — the movie is little more than a conversation between two people who are constantly, maybe even constitutionally, full of it.

The best reason to see The Rose is to be in a position to relish the inevitable parody on "Saturday Night Live." Here's a sitting turkey that virtually sits up and begs to be plucked. [8 Nov 1979, p.F1]

True Stories is united not by narrative, but by Byrne's sensibility, and this is where it descends from being a boring piece of whimsy into something reprehensible.

For a man who so desperately wanted to show us perfection -- or at least project the illusion of it -- Jackson would never, ever want us to see this film.

Until the last 20 minutes or so of Rock School, the actual playing, while often startlingly good, is kind of boring.

Meant to be a sleek, dark, disturbing David Cronenberg-style thriller, Olivier Assayas's film is just an annoying concoction.

The Boys Next Door is just another exploitation movie about murderous nuts -- exactly what you wouldn't expect from Penelope Spheeris, the director of "Suburbia." [12 Nov 1985, p.B11]

Director McGrath retains the novel's highlights, but he slices everything to ribbons.

The end result is a movie that feels oddly detached, especially considering the raw intimacy of Leigh’s previous films.