There are moments when music and lyrics bear only the faintest relation to each other, a tricky state of affairs in a work that is almost bereft of spoken dialogue.

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.

A perplexing compound of the silly and the glum.

Shyamalan remains as coolly unstirred by sex as he was in his previous movies--an astounding indifference, given the historical entwining of eros and fright. Even more bizarre is the gradual draining of humor from his work; the anatomy of horror demands a tongue in the cheek to go with the baring of teeth, but much of The Village is a proud and sullen affair.

Deep and Morton are really flying here (the scene in which the hero instructs the heroine in the passionate possibilities of her art), and they leave the rest of the film looking heavy on its feet. The second half, especially, grows dour and maundering, and by the end the movie seems to flail in desperation, more like a work in progress than like a finished piece.

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.

We are led through a murky and, it must be said, wholly uninvolving saga of substance abuse and related multiple murders. [6 October 2003, p. 138]

There are many unanswered questions here (why, for instance, does Pitt's Grim Reaper seem semi-retarded?), not to mention unintended spasms of comedy; in the end, however, they all get swallowed up in the mush.

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 hero's restlessness infects the rest of the movie; the story feels febrile and unhappy, and Allen seems to take his dissatisfaction out on his helpless characters--especially the women.

Larry Crowne is worryingly light on laughs, yet it never dares to worry too much about the plight of its central figure. [11 & 18 July 2011, p.100]

As it is, the movie's lethal climax, with its vague protest against corporate control--and hence in favor of art, music, drugs, or whatever--feels like a poor theft from a more conventional film.

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

We should not be surprised, then, if this bellowing beast of a movie looks and sounds like the extended special-edition remix of a Duran Duran video.

You have to applaud for sheer folly. This doesn't just reprise another film. It reprises a French film.

You may feel safe in your bed, but be warned: even as you sleep, Earth is under threat from a vast, overheated surplus of character actors.

The movie takes time to warm up, it weakens into soppiness at the end, and the game itself, if you think it through, makes very little sense.

Say what you like about the feuds of old, they exerted a dynastic thrust that made sense, whereas Leterrier’s magic tricks are the foe of logic; for some reason, the scorpions wind up as friendly transport for our heroes, so why battle them in the first place?

The Crudup of "Almost Famous" was both hairier and more appealing than the tortured womanizer of World Traveler. Couldn't Cal have just stayed home, grown a mustache, and called his dad on the phone? [22 & 29 April 2002, p. 209]

The happy couple (Farrell/Dawson) do enjoy one great scene together, and it's the high point of the movie-a naked tussle, in which she puts a knife to his throat. The whole sequence is quick, funny, and arousing, in sharp contrast to the rest of Alexander, which is sluggish, unsmiling.

The cast looks sound enough—John Goodman as Fred Flintstone, Elizabeth Perkins as Wilma, Rick Moranis and Rosie O'Donnell as the Rubbles—but the script, cobbled together by a crowd of writers, gives them nothing but a handful of limp gags.

You have to feel sorry for Moore, who is called upon to supply an unappealing mixture of neurosis and starch, and whose instinctive frailty is so endlessly exploited by Howitt's movie that the jokes, such as they are, go into retreat. [3 May 2004, p. 110]

A lot more fun than bludgeoning, soul-draining follies like "Terminator Salvation" or the "Transformers" films, and, with a decisive trim, it could truly have fulfilled its brief as a bright, semi-abstract pop fantasy, at once excitable and disposable. Oddly, it did once exist in that form: in the first trailer.

Though the film is not as criminally poor as "V for Vendetta," which the Wachowskis wrote in 2005, it struck me as more insidious.

With its restless parade of grainy closeups, the movie is a haze of retro rapture and wishful thinking, and, above all, a lost opportunity. We don't want to hear any more about ancient constitutional crises. We want to watch a three-way with a former King of England, in a bungalow. Madonna, of all people, missed a trick.

A short, meaningless blast of fun from Disney.