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]