The finished film remains a mess of tangled, turgid continuity and florid, mock-operatic style -- at best a collection of production numbers and set pieces waiting in rain for a story capable of accumulating suspense and meaning.

Days of Heaven leaves one wanting more: either a totally revolutionary approach to pictorial storytelling or traditional dramatic interest....It may be artistic suicide for Malick to continue his style of pictorial inflation without also enriching his scenarios. If he doesn't, he's likely to be remembered not for his undeniable pictorial talent but for his eccentricity. [5 Oct. 1978, p.B10]

I appreciate No Country for Old Men for the skill in the film craft. I understand No Country for Old Men for its penetrating disquisition on narrative conventions and its heroic will in subverting them. I admire No Country for Old Men for the way it tightens its grip as it progresses, taking us deeper and deeper into a hellish world. I just don't like it very much.

After slapstick farces as exuberant and hilarious as Sleeper and Love and Death, it comes as a soft, fuzzy, mildly diverting letdown.

All foreplay and no climax.

Shakespearean in tone, epic in scope, it seems more appropriate for grown-ups than for kids. If truth be told, even for adults it is downright strange.

The Little Mermaid is only passable. Even at its highest points, it cannot claim a place next to even the least of the great Disney classics.

By many other directors' standards, Au Revoir would be a major achievement. But Malle has reached higher. If he'd made his childhood movie earlier in his career -- when he didn't have the sense to be so dispassionate -- it might have packed a meatier punch. Now it's just a deftly aimed poke.

Mulholland Drive is an extended mood opera, if you want to put an arty label on incoherence.

The result is a curios, unsatisfactory pastiche of documentary tidbits acquired from Reichenbach and speculative filler supplied by Welles himself, who appears prowling around in his Felliniesque hat and cape, performing a couple of magic tricks and mostly pontificating about himself, Hughes, Irving, de Hory and the nature of art and illusion in the editing room or a the dinner table.

It’s possible to see why McDonagh’s fans love his quirks and clever structural feints (the war of wills in “Banshees” often plays out like variations on a theme), as well as his characters’ willingness not to be liked. But what they find at the end of the filmmaker’s rainbow is less likely to be a pot of philosophical gold than prosaic self-satisfaction.

What accounts for the curious appeal of such a pretentiously amateurish scare movie? Surely not the raggedy direction of Robin Hardy, obviously struggling with his first feature. It must be the softcore sex, the illusion that Summerisle is an out-of-the-way paradise where you can get all the action you crave. [26 Nov 1980, p.B9]

The writer in Soderbergh proves the ultimate weak link. In sex, lies' last third, he seems seized with a compulsion to make sense of it all, bring everything to bear, give everyone their moral comeuppance, their screenplay payoff.

In the end, Like Water for Chocolate is an overwrought potboiler that punishes Tita for her sexual freedom.

Scrappy and unsubtle where "We Were Here" is elegant and nuanced, How to Survive a Plague isn't nearly as formally beautiful as its predecessor.

Short of good, better than awful, it opens brilliantly, then just goes on, toward self-negating absurdity.

At times, May December feels like an interrogation of the elusive nature of truth.

For all the When Irish Eyes Are Smiling's and Love Is a Many Splendored Thing's filling the soundtrack, Voices never engages more than your eyes and ears. It leaves you out in the cold and vaguely wondering, Is the entire British nation depressed?

Maybe the best way to describe Beasts of the Southern Wild is faux-k art. Even Hushpuppy's name suggests an author more interested in the folk- and foodways of a culture-with-a-capital-C than the people who comprise it. Too often, she and her peers are presented as curios to be exhibited rather than as fully realized -- if resolutely un-mythic -- human beings.

It's a cult movie in search of a cult. It'll probably find one. It certainly looks and feels like no other movie ever made.

It's frenetic to the point of crazy while achieving a mark that barely exceeds mediocre.

Mona Lisa is consistently undercut by sentiment, whether it's the cute routines between George and his best friend, a mechanic and junkman, or the "heartwarming" stuff between George and his estranged daughter. In the end, "Mona Lisa" is another movie about the lovable little people; the movie is mushy where it should be monstrous. [16 July 1986, p.D1]

Though lacking in any particular narrative surprise, the film nevertheless takes the viewer completely by surprise several times.

If Eastwood had any emotional depth as an actor, the character's anguish might come through.

For all its stunning, poetic imagery, it's almost impossible to sit through.

Needlessly complicated and at times almost impossible to follow, its narrative inscrutability often coming across less as the result of nonlinear storytelling than as simply a cinematic affectation.

Unlike Hollywood's hygienic undersea dramas, Das Boot graphically depicts the nasty intimacy of a long mission.

Although Rohmer's adaptation, shot in German with a cast of actors drawn from the German stage, is pedantically faithful to the letter of the original - almost word-for-word as well as scene-for-scene - it substitutes a style that seems woefully wrong. Rohmer's approach is too static and repressed to release the comic ironies Kleist perceived in the very premise of an honorable man's lapse leading to an honorable woman's distress and built into his brilliantly objective story-telling style. [21 Jan 1977, p.B15]

But for the most part, The Last Days fails to play as a document of the survivors' lives, or even as their memory of that time. Rather, it feels removed, distant, a document of an attempt to re-create a memory.

As far-fetched as it sounds, such torque-y plotting works, catching the audience off guard, even if the quasi-feminist payoff is less satisfying than it should be, thanks mostly to the film’s puerile fascination with girl-on-girl action.

Like Cheung's ethereally plaintive voice, the movie is a siren song that's appealing at first, but held too long. It becomes an increasing whine.

A well-mounted, macabre seriocomedy with passing punchlines. And for about half the movie, it's compelling stuff.

Mishima tries to make sense of both its subject's life and his work, and ends up illuminating neither.

As beautiful and compelling as Ramsay’s filmmaking and Phoenix’s central performance are, the degree to which viewers will buy You Were Never Really Here depends on the degree to which they accept yet another display of febrile vigilante brutality motivated by sexual violence perpetrated against young girls. One person’s trope, after all, is another’s shopworn cliche.

Based on Gerry Conlon's own account of his arrest and subsequent incarceration, the film takes forever to do what "60 Minutes" does with the same meat in a single segment.

There is no evidence of life outside the immediate world of the movie.

11 minutes longer than the original, and 11 minutes worse. [2000 re-release]

The story, such as it is, follows Renton's inconsistent attempts to kick his habit.

If amusing, A Room With a View is little more than a lark, a series of skits, a two-hour tribute to the rich British eccentric.

It's a depressing little kingdom, even when Gordon tries desperately to goose the drama with the requisite "Eye of the Tiger" riffs and some junior high-level palace intrigue.

The thrust of the film is to escalate the Superman idea to the point where the charm is no longer visible. A snide and knowing viewpoint has left a cloud of smudge over the original clean satire. [19 Jun 1981, p.19]

There’s nothing wrong with tackling romantic miscommunication, but Birbiglia’s script leaves little room for surprise or depth. Paradoxically, Don’t Think Twice feels both dramatically thin and overstuffed.

Reminded me somewhat of Archibald MacLeish's famous line that a poem "should not mean but be." That's the reality of The Apostle: It does not mean, it simply is.

This is not really riveting material if you didn't go to high school with these boys, and perhaps not even if you did. Played by Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon and Timothy Daly, they seem fundamentally decent, but hopelessly trapped in the limits of the time and place. That grubby atmosphere, looked upon as endearing, is the only thing the film has to offer, and while it's amusing at first, one quickly gets the idea. [5 March 1982, p.11]

The trouble with this art movie is that it's more a movie than it's art.

The first section of Three Times is fabulous; the second is fascinating if remote; and the third a jangly, modernist mess.

Speaking of jail, "Shawshank"-the-movie seems to last about half a life sentence. The story, chiefly about the 20-year friendship between Freeman and Robbins, becomes incarcerated in its own labyrinthine sentimentality.

The total effect is fast and attractive and occasionally amusing. Like a good hot dog, that's something of an achievement in a field where unpalatable junk is the rule.

Although it contains many visually compelling passages and some provocative moments, the movie is strangely banal and simplistic.

The movie made almost no sense whatever to me. I literally could not follow it, even as I was dazzled by it.

Put delicately, this is one long sit, made all the more so by a turgid story, a dour visual palette and uninspiring action.

Intriguing, oddly banal and ultimately deflating.

The aim is oddball romantic comedy, with himself and Mia Farrow embodying a funny-grotesque mismatch; unfortunately, the obligatory demonstration of attraction and compatibility between these characters escapes Allen; the affair degenerates into a mawkish botch. [27 Jan 1984, p.D1]

The movie has some beautifully observed moments and a generous spirit, but in the end, it's undone by its own sweetness and charm....It's just not distinctive enough to sustain your interest. A lot of the movie is routine coming-of-age stuff.

My 20th Century is like a dream, without a unifying logic -- ravishing fragments without coherence or meaning. Immersed somewhere in all this are Enyedi's meditations on the true nature of women, the shortcomings of 20th-century progress, and the connections between art and science. Yet though her own inventiveness and witty command of the medium are invigorating, her thinking is so scrambled that her originality is undermined. The movie is overintellectualized and yet not fully thought out.

Suffers from what might be called colonitis. It comprises too many equal parts, and they tangle each other up. Everything is important, which comes to mean that nothing is important.

It becomes apparent during the stuttering course of the movie itself that exploiting a nuclear power plant as an effective deathtrap in a doomsday thriller requires more than melodramatic wishful thinking. [16 March 1979, p.B1]

Upon leaving The Big Short, audiences are likely to feel less enlightened than bludgeoned with a blunt instrument, albeit one wrapped in layers of eye-catching silks and spangles: You may be too old to cry, but it hurts too much to laugh.

Your Name is still highly watchable, even when this mystical Young Adult love story cloys — or confounds.

At first, the movie's restraint is enticing, and even soothing. By the end, though, Tran's strategies have an enervating, numbing effect. The same methods he uses to pull us in finally kill our interest.

A vivid but vaporous portrait of collective unease that feels uncannily of this moment.

Purely visual cinema was accomplished successfully in "Days of Heaven," where there is no story line to speak of, but people and nature are made memorably vivid through the moving picture.Picnic at Hanging Rock is not up to that level visually, because it occasionally slips into the hair-color advertisement school of slow-motion beauty. But even the attempt is marred: Looking for game clues would spoil any painting, but having to look and not being able to find them is worse. [16 March 1979, p.18]

Overheated and recklessly violent.

For all its virtues, Wendy and Lucy seems like the most overrated of art movies. Yes, it's obscure and distancing and makes you pay attention. Williams's performance is nuanced, moving and well worth any awards she gets. But Wendy is also anonymous.

It has certain je ne sais quoi, if graphic nudity, self-referential humor and serial murder — neck stabbing, eye gouging, alligator munching and shotgun blasting — are your thing.

What starts out as an invigorating odyssey winds up becoming an enervating series of postures.

The infuriatingly slow pace proves a point, but it makes for a gritty-eyed viewer with mashed potatoes for brains...It's a relief to escape the theater after this one, though it's good for several hours of discussion over dinner. It's not entertaining, but it does fall into the should-see category. Pop a couple of Stress-Tabs before you go. [2 Oct 1981, p.17]

You leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.

People bicker and play word games with each other to hide their true feelings, just like you and me, and yet absolutely nothing is at stake.

The movie is maddeningly plain...I found the movie infuriatingly underdone, but what is clear about it, and perhaps what reaches sensibilities more sublimely tuned than mine, is the utter seriousness of the piece. It cares about eternal issues and faces them head on. [15 May 1998, p.D05]

Visually, the film is arresting; Robby Mueller's images have a low-energy vibrancy. But Jarmusch won't come out of himself. He's got juice, but only enough for doodling. He's too hip to live.

It's precisely Henry's coldblooded affectlessness that is meant to shock and disturb us. But "Henry" leaves us feeling more numbed than moved. Half art film, half schlock-horror cheapie, "Henry" isn't quite sure what it wants to be.

It's hard not to feel a certain affection for a tale that is so unapologetic about just that: affection.

Lorenzo's Oil, which is further encumbered by its funereal pacing and woebegone score, is definitely a remarkable story, but as told by Miller it isn't really an uplifting one.

The film, therefore, is like a child's view of these events, untroubled by complexity, hungry for myth and simplicity.

The Pearl Button may not answer all the questions it raises, yet it is an absorbing experience — at least for anyone with a taste for beauty over insight.

For all its visual delights, however, Coraline remains more an engaging spectacle than a connective drama. That is chiefly because of the writing. Director-writer Henry Selick doesn't reach for the kind of universality that would enrich the movie.

Marvels of animation abound in Monsters, Inc. -- when it comes to irreverent humor and real heart, Monsters doesn't quite measure up.

The film's loveliness does much to modulate its often maddening pace.

This 138-minute film, comprising two thousand performers and a helluva lot of musketry, has several good scenes, including the well-known one in which Christian utters romantic praise to Roxanne from below her balcony, while de Bergerac feeds him lines. But it can't escape Rostand's structural shortcomings.

The insecurities that seem to feed Rivers's often angry humor -- and that have left her face looking like a mask frozen in horror -- are left unexamined.

Gone Girl may get the job done as a dutiful, deliberately paced procedural, but it never quite makes the splash it could have as a thoughtful, timely and thoroughly bracing plunge.

For all its explosive material, this is a fairly straightforward telling.

Herzog has nothing of lasting value to offer the vampire tradition. His Nosferatu is at best unintentional, fitfully risible camp.

Sunrise feels more like an absorbing experiment than a supple success.

Why ... does it feel so lifeless?

While literate and coherent in digest-of-history terms, the chronicle of Gandhi's remarkable career as a mass political organizer and spiritual inspiration distilled from the biographical record by Attenborough and screenwriter John Briley remains grievously doting and squeamishly evasive.

For Americans, the measured accumulation of detail can be frustrating. It's like listening to a story about someone you barely know and being forced to prompt the teller, "And then? And then?"

Aficionados of gore and guts may not mind the comfortably lived-in feel of this blood-spattered Green Room. But anyone looking for the ferocious originality, and unexpected humanity, of “Blue Ruin” will be disappointed by Saulnier’s uninspired cover version of a song we all know.

It succeeds only fitfully. Toggling between Stark's impish goatee and Iron Man's full-metal body condom, and amid so many generic fireballs, kill shots and earsplitting thumps, bumps and crunches, the film finally collapses under its own weight.

A fitfully witty and reliably spine-tingling horror melodrama...While it works you over effectively, Poltergeist betrays a good deal of rather dubious, uncoordinated manipulation. [4 June 1982, p.D1]

The real root of the movie's problems may lie in the fact that Mamet has identified with the men of principle and De Palma with the scoundrels -- in other words, with Capone instead of the eagle-scout Ness.

The daring mission by astronauts to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2009 is the perfect subject for a brilliant, thrilling 3-D Imax movie. Such a movie, alas, has yet to be made.

Breaks no new ground.

Let Me In wants to make your flesh crawl, and it probably will. But it's unlikely to ever get under anyone's skin, the way "Let the Right One In" did.

Never lets viewers fully inside Erik and Paul's world, a reticence that isn't helped by the actors' fey, restrained-to-a-fault performances. That and a frustratingly episodic structure make what might have been a raw and inspiring portrait of commitment and boundaries a surprisingly uninvolving, arms-length enterprise. Keep the Lights On lets go just when it should be holding you tighter.

A ridiculously self-indulgent spree of satanic bogeymannerisms entitled Suspiria, virtually self-destructs in the opening sequence. Eager to menace the audience from every sensory direction, Argento doesn't so much create and sustain an illusion of terror as invite you to marvel at his garish ingenuity, at the spectacle of a filmmaker who can't resist overstylizing and upstaging his material.

It yields surprisingly unspectacular results.