The film is alive with bad rock bands and dizzying bit parts, the standout being Kieran Culkin, in the role of Scott's gay roommate, but we feel them gyrating around a hollow core.

Streep can do anything. She is, of course, wasted on this elephantine fable; if only Doubt had been made in 1964, shot by Roger Corman over a long weekend, and retitled "Spawn of the Devil Witch" or "Blood Wimple," all would have been forgiven

The general opinion of Revenge of the Sith seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, "The Phantom Menace" and "Attack of the Clones." True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion.

Quite an achievement: the American director Todd Haynes revisits the world of London glam rock and manages to make it look dull.

The whole thing does seem preternaturally stained with Weltschmerz.

The tale begins and ends in a flurry of joke violence; Cameron has decided to spoof what he used to take seriously, and the result, though bright and deafening, feels oddly slack -- he loosens the screws, and our interest drops away.

Road to Nowhere is a dead end. Most of the performances are carved from balsa wood. [13 & 20 June 2011, p. 129]

A long, lumbering brute of a movie, no easier to maneuver than the vessel itself. [29 July 2002, p. 92]

Miss Potter is a grave disappointment, because it never listens out for that note. It is a soft, woolly film about a smart, unsentimental woman who did constant battle with her frustrations.

The problem is that Snyder, following Moore, is so insanely aroused by the look of vengeance, and by the stylized application of physical power, that the film ends up twice as fascistic as the forces it wishes to lampoon.

Can a director be arrested for the attempted hijack of our emotions?

Forget satire; this guy doesn't want to scorch the earth anymore. He just wants to swing his dick.

Made me laugh precisely once, as a magazine editor let fly with a Diane Arbus gag. It is no coincidence that she is played by Candice Bergen, who gets just the one scene, but who is nonetheless the only bona-fide movie star on show.

All is dour and dun. We are a long way from Errol Flynn marching in with a deer slung over his shoulder, or from the Fairbanks who didn’t merely scamper and swing from one errand of justice to the next. He SKIPPED.

The truth is that almost nobody, and certainly no nation, emerges well from this sour endeavor. [18 & 25 August 2003, p. 150]

Ferocious onslaught of obligatory good cheer.

Emmerich’s main achievement is to take a bunch of excellent actors, including Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Woody Harrelson, and to prevent all of them--with the exception of Oliver Platt and a pair of giraffes--from giving a decent performance.

But by the end, the charm and delicacy of the 1961 cartoon have long been replaced by laborious gross-outs. Is this now official Disney policy?

The movie--directed by Atom Egoyan, who should know better--is closely adapted from “Nathalie,” a French film of 2004, with Gérard Depardieu and Emmanuelle Béart, but what seemed like standard practice for Parisians comes across here as unsmiling porno-farce.

Bad movie!

The Catholic Church has nothing to fear from this film. It is not just tripe. It is self-evident, spirit-lowering tripe that could not conceivably cause a single member of the flock to turn aside from the faith.

This picture ain't funny. I winced three times, and gave a couple of short laughs, but that was it.

The Expendables is savage yet inert, and breathtakingly sleazy in its lack of imagination.

The new movie wears an air of old hat. I would absolutely defend Haneke’s right to relaunch his broadside on our voyeuristic vices, but he’s not keeping up with the times; he’s behind them.

Some people make films in homage to Ingmar Bergman, others nod to the French New Wave, but only the Wilsons would think to follow in the footsteps of Burt Reynolds.

There is a fine film to be made about the retreat from worldly obligation into erotic rite, and Brando and Bertolucci made it in 1972. But what “Last Tango in Paris” proved was that our skin-grazing view of a body makes us more, not less, enthusiastic to grasp the shape of the soul that it enshrines.

The first ten or fifteen minutes of Michael Bay's movie tremble, unaccountably, on the verge of being fun. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.101]

The over-all result is a misstep for Fleischer. [21 Jan. 2013, p. 78]