Time's Scores
- Movies
- TV
For 1,584 reviews, this publication has graded:
-
56% higher than the average critic
-
2% same as the average critic
-
42% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.3 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 65
| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
|
|---|---|
| Lowest review score: |
Critic Score
0
|
Score distribution:
-
Positive: 929 out of 1584
-
Mixed: 485 out of 1584
-
Negative: 170 out of 1584
1,584
movie reviews
- By critic score
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Keough is nearly worth risking life (Diane's) and limb (Martin's) for. The eldest grandchild of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, she has a pale, dreamy lusciousness that puts as viewer in mind of Amanda Seyfried, though without the overt sexuality. Her not-quite-there appeal matches both the opacity of Martin's intentions and the entire underhanded, underwhelming experience that The Good Doctor offers.- Posted Sep 1, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Despite enough pummeling to flatten Rocky Balboa in all six movies, the only thing that truly rewards your attendance is Pitt in another effortless star performance.- Posted Sep 3, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
Apparently Bachelorette has been divisive, with audiences either falling hard for it or walking away disgusted. I'd have fallen harder for it if I'd walked away more disgusted.- Posted Sep 6, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
- Posted Sep 10, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Most viewers are likely to be impressed more by the magnitude of the effort than the magnificence of the effect. Cloud Atlas is a Terry Gilliam movie without the kinks, a Wong Kar-wai film without the smoky dreamscape, a time-and-Space Oddity that remains frustratingly earthbound. Put it another way: this is no "Speed Racer."- Posted Sep 10, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
In its lesser moments, of which there are more, Liberal Arts calls to mind more the spirit of an alumni magazine, so bathed in nostalgia for academia that you expect autumn leaves to flutter down to the theater floor.- Posted Sep 13, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Watson makes a smooth matriculation from the England-made Harry Potter epics to this movie's thrifty, six-week Pittsburgh shoot.- Posted Sep 13, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
The performances here are so sharp that viewers may wish End of Watch has been shot by someone who knew how to find the right point of view for a scene and leave it there.- Posted Sep 24, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
- Posted Oct 18, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
Like most children's movies, Rise of the Guardians mimics the patterns of adult entertainment. Where is the magic in that?- Posted Nov 21, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Deadfall, though, is a thing of pieces: splendidly efficient in its action sequences (car crash, knife fight, snowmobile chase), dawdling in dialogue scenes that should smolder with tension.- Posted Dec 6, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
Suspense isn't Burns' thing though, and it may be foolish to even ask for it this far into his career. Burns has made it crystal clear what his style is: lots of chatty, mostly amiable folks, working out their not so troubling differences in the greater New York metropolitan area.- Posted Dec 6, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
The movie lacks majesty. Grand in parts, the movie is too often grandiose or grandiloquent; and the running time is indefensible.- Posted Dec 6, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Sensitive souls in search of wrenching emotion can be guaranteed their Kleenex moments; you will get wet. But aside from that opening scene, you will not be cinematically edified. This is a bad movie.- Posted Dec 11, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
- Posted Dec 18, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
The archivist's meticulousness with which this movie was assembled defeats the starving-hysterical-naked urgency of its source material. Could the old Hollywood pharisees have been right? Maybe On the Road is unfilmable.- Posted Dec 20, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
As the movie goes on, the laughs are fewer and farther between, and for the last 30 minutes, not only did I not laugh, I wanted it to end so I could get back to my own boring but less precious life.- Posted Dec 20, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
The blend of fairy-tale sentiment and knowing irony worked exactly once, in "The Princess Bride," and fails here. But there's enough visual ingenuity - eye candy, if you will - to make this Hansel & Gretel an intermittently tasty temptation.- Posted Jan 28, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
The man (Sparks) is a cultural magpie, capable of borrowing from a 1991 Julia Roberts flick and M. Night Shyamalan in one fell swoop. He’ll never get an award for originality, but when it comes to rehashing formula and pleasing his audience, the man is a master.- Posted Feb 16, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 50
The technology is undeniably there to make a credible beanstalk fly into the heavens, and giants that are utterly grotesque and vividly threatening. But how about something we can take our kids too? Doesn’t anyone want them to be there?- Posted Mar 2, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
Raimi, who launched his career with the cheapo horror mini-masterpiece "The Evil Dead" before helming the blockbuster "Spider-Man" trilogy, can’t infuse the story with much verve or joy.- Posted Mar 7, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
- Posted Mar 18, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
It’s "Identity Thief" with flying piranhas, or Plains, Trains & Automobiles on foot.- Posted Mar 25, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
In space, Jack hopes, someone may hear you dream. But in a movie theater, no one will see you yawn.- Posted Apr 22, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 50
X-Men Origins: Wolverine is an O.K., not great, Marvel movie...Wolverine doesn't rise above the level of familiar competence.- Posted Apr 29, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The first few minutes have promise (with an all-star list of Gen-X actors), and the last few minutes provide fun (with snapshots of lovers and losers). In between there is a void--feeble jokes, a lot of falling down and foolish declarations. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Mostly the movie is like the marriage: good casting, golden promise, yet somehow a grating ordeal. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
It's too empty to applaud, too insignificant to deplore. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The actors, especially the ever appealing Smith, do what they can to ground the movie in reality, but it stubbornly remains dawdling, remote and pretentious. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
It just runs on and on -- like a slightly stupid story you wish you hadn't overheard in a singles bar. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Things finally work out all right--except for audiences, who will find this thin movie bereft of the more richly textured sentiments of Tornatore's "Cinema Paradiso." -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Not a bad concept, and Martin Lawrence is appealing. Unfortunately, the writers have no gift for comic writing. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The film finally collapses under the burden of implausibility. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Soderbergh slices, dices and Cuisinarts the script into flashbacks, scene shifts, stop motion and other distracting foolery. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Don't ask us why this minimalist drama won prizes last year at Cannes or why it is getting raves in its U.S. release. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
On your already groaning Shakespeare for Teens video shelf, stack this one above "10 Things I Hate About You" (a.k.a. "The Taming of the Shrew") and quite a bit below "Romeo + Juliet." -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Maid in Manhattan is not so much a movie as a collection of career moves. J. Lo needs a comedy hit to support her principal activity, adorning magazine covers. Fiennes needs to warm his austere British image if he hopes to become a true international star. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Donen got it gloriously right the first time. Why do it again? And why do it like this? -
-
-
Critic Score 40
The movie lets down the material. It's to cool: all attitude, no sizzle. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Sells out real satirical possibilities to its marketing potential as teen fluff. Everyone loses -- except Hedaya, who keeps faith with his character's nutsiness. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Will the movie end in an orgy of sentiment? Why do we bother to ask? -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Kasdan has been a serious filmmaker, so he gives the goofiness a smart look and some pertinent metaphors about Americans wrongfully detained. But the aim is no higher than the impulse of old schlockmeisters like Roger Corman and Ed Wood: to get the audience to scream. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Loutishness without self-awareness remains loutishness--and it is finally depressing. -
-
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The net result of this mighty effort is perhaps predictable: near total inconsequence. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
As the director of this noble weepie, Nelson so overuses visual tricks -- zooms, zip pans and multiple perspectives on a simple scene -- that she turns the viewer into an exasperated parent; this is a directorial style in need of a spanking. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The result is tiresome and tone-deaf and a disappointing comeback for Bogdanovich. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The film (directed by Andy Tennant) has more problems than Melanie, and they're insoluble. Its lazy calculation telegraphs each plot turn and underlines emotions with corn-pone music. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The story has to carry way too much weight, as war remorse battles McCarthyism. The Majestic's makers don't get what made Capra movies invigorating. -
-
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Pretty lethargic stuff. Monty, a convicted drug dealer on his last day before he is to report to prison, does more moping than moving. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Lee must have thought he could work a similar magic on this clunking, clanking machine. But despite a few witty wipes and split-screen tricks, he fails. Hulk is no better than hulking. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
A grim and uninvolving film, for which Philip Glass unwittingly provides the perfect score -- tuneless, oppressive, droning, painfully self-important. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
This is, alas, one weary ride--77 minutes that sometimes feel like that many hours. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Arcand has a gift for witty dialogue but a weakness for force-feeding his story with sentiment. References to ancient holocausts and to 9/11 simply expose the intent of a director who will do anything to touch his audience -- with a sweet gesture or a cattle prod. And in a comedy of manners, that behavior is very impolite. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The film fairly groans from all the narrative gamesmanship and lavish romantic gestures...The unbewitched viewer may groan as well. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Maybe Wellesley isn't the only injured party here. Can an audience sue for cruel and edifying punishment? -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Dispassionate, curiously lifeless, lacking the energy of either youthful commitment or a deeply engaged re-examination of the past. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Intent on both dazzling and punishing the viewer, Gilliam gets lost in creepy spectacle and plenty of old film clips (notably "Vertigo"). But at the sight of three giraffes crossing a city bridge, you'll think of a more recent movie. A bad one. [8 Jan 1996, p.69] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The weather is always inclement, the protagonists are all muddy when they're not bloody, King Arthur's Christianity is muscular but joyless, and Guinevere is often daubed with blue paint. No, folks, we're not in Camelot anymore. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Finding Neverland takes a big, brave leap and lands splat on the sidewalk. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Tin tailspins into silliness and never regains its flight pattern. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
When our sympathies shift to [Cameron Diaz's Kimmy], the movie sours. It is no help either that Ronald Bass neglected to write (or Mulroney was unable to find) a character in Michael. Why all this fuss over this lox, we keep wondering. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Bewitched means to be a civilized entertainment, which occasionally it is. But the gentility of this antique sitcom cannot be recaptured at this late date. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
But that's the thing about this movie. It never leaves well enough, or good enough, alone. It keeps looking--sometimes a little too hard--for ways to transform the ordinary into the discomfiting. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
But in shaping their tale for the screen, shouldn't he have honored their courage--and, yes, inventiveness--with something other than cliches? -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Disney is trying to lure the disparate audiences of "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" (kids) and "The Passion of the Christ" (Evangelicals). But on either level, Narnia fails. There's no fire, no passion and not much fun. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
A vampire story needs vampires, sure, but it also needs a human victim to lead the audience into the vortex and help them escape it. Otherwise, the fear factor evaporates, and you get this mishmash: an interview in a void, a vampire movie with underbite. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
For a viewer sympathetic to Schwarzenegger's and Cameron's best selves -- the ironist with muscles and the mordant fabulist -- True Lies is a loud misfire. It rarely brings its potent themes to life. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Tom Cruise heads a tony cast in a best-seller movie that is firm at the start and infirm by the end. -
-
-
Critic Score 40
Because director Adrian Lyne takes all this so slowly and seriously, Indecent Proposal is an inadvertent comedy. As such, it is much funnier than "Honeymoon in Vegas", which tried in vain to be funny about the same idea. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
But we don't go to movies like this in search of stylish apercus. We go to see innocents like ourselves getting swept up by irresistible tides of terror. And to have the pants scared off us. That doesn't happen in The Pelican Brief. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The Santa Clause presents us with an Anti-Claus, Tim Allen of Home Improvement, hard-edged, discomfitingly frenetic and spritzing cheerless one-liners. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Lady doesn't work. Although he detonates a few terrific frissons involving the scrunt, the stabs at comedy are lurching and arrant. The spreading of tension from one character to many dilutes the mood. The would-be rapturous Spielbergian ending is on the wussy side. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
At this late stage in a long career, Allen might consider not trying to make films like the early, funny ones. Instead he should aim simply to match "Match Point." -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Copycat, directed by Jon Amiel ("The Singing Detective", "Sommersby"), means to be a Greatest Hits album of atrocities. A sick mind is a terrible thing to waste. [13 Nov 1995, pg.120] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
The result is a Big Mac of a movie, junk food that somehow reaches the chortling soul. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The film causes no tremors, only a hemi-Demme-semiquaver. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
M. Butterfly, the David Cronenberg film of David Henry Hwang's Broadway play, fumbles its romantic and political metaphors and loses the game. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Neither jokes nor fast, flashy action can completely distract audiences from the failure to establish an authentic, rather than a purely conventional connection between Nolte and Murphy. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Ultimately the script's often sharp social satire is drowned out by the noise and confusion. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Last Action Hero starts out mostly nuts, and winds up mostly bolts. Or, rather, winds down. That's a problem with pastiche: it must be constantly jump-started with ingenuity, and even that ultimately pales. By the end, nothing matters. [21 June 1993, p67] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Their film is not so much thought out as strung together -- colorful incident upon colorful incident, but without logic, gathering suspense or any attempt to establish emotional connections between audience and actors. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat ( and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. (24July 1989, p.53) -
-
-
Critic Score 40
The screenplay, which begins as genuine comedy, soon degenerates into spurious melodrama. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Warm-hearted humanism is glopped all over Renaissance Man in the hopes that we won't notice that the story makes no sense. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
As handsome and slack muscled as a surfer past his prime, the movie renounces ambiguity for confusion. In the end, like an old set of tires or a frayed friendship, Tequila Sunrise just wears out. [19 Dec 1988, p.79] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
There is no rhyme or reason to this jumble -- except perhaps to stress Edith's endless self-victimization. This lack of narrative coherence naturally has the effect of distancing us from her story. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The entire film is in fact a ferocious meditation on the dilemma of a son choosing his father. Which one will Bud emulate: the noble failure or the triumphant sleaze? The outcome is never really in doubt, so streamlined and predictable are the characters. [14 Dec 1987, p.82] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
"Wanna see something really scary?" asks Guest Star Dan Aykroyd at film's end. The Miller and Dante episodes are. So is the epic waste that informs much of this movie. [20 June 1983, p.73] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The film has just enough collisions to be a crashing bore. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The movie is less ho-ho-ho than uh-oh, or oh-no. Emitting a stale odor from the first reel, Fred never engaged the audience of kids and adults that I saw it with. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
It doesn't work. It is just a mess -- though the sound track, full of Dylan songs is, of course, good to hear. But it is not better than the track on Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home" documentary of two years ago. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
That Max Smart is played by the admirable Steve Carell, who is desperately looking for deadpan jokes in all the wrong places, is beside the point. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The movie is an X-ray of an invisible man -- by the film's end, the W. still stands for Who? -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Instead of the meeting of maestros at the top of their form, Righteous Kill has the feeling of Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds facing off for the first time in an exhibition game. It's like Old Timers' Day at the Motion Picture Home. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 40
Inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe of the problem. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The film promises so much more than it delivers that, by the end, I felt like registering a complaint with the Obama Administration's Consumer Protection squad. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Ferrell's latest excursion into delusions of manhood is director Brad Silberling's Land of the Lost, an action comedy with the sloppy construction and saving grace notes of the star's other movies. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Alas, in Tetro he (Coppola) has made a movie in which plenty happens but nothing rings true. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
An ambitious but sub-ordinary SF epic in which, as so often, Willis is better than his material. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Osunsanmi wants you to believe that everything he shows you that's not reenacted by professionals really happened, and is documented by the omnipresent video cameras. It's a device used far more successfully in "Paranormal Activity," which had the added benefit of being a good movie. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
This isn't a love story, it's a misery story that drags on, not to a dramatic conclusion but a tepid moment. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
This pickpocket of a movie flashes open its coat to proudly display all its swiped goodies. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
The film skips along pleasantly, supremely confident in its own cuteness and utterly unapologetic about how shallow or contrived it might be. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
The Greatest often feels like a mash-up of Sarandon's greatest grief hits. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
A movie gaudy enough to make Dancing with the Stars seem dignified. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Stuff still leaps out of the screen -- the snake striking a victim, cars sent flying by Death Eaters -- but few things in the movie lodge in the audience's mind or heart.- Posted Dec 8, 2010
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.- Posted Dec 11, 2010
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
This is the kind of movie you should never see twice, because so much of it is based in appall-me humor. Meaning you'll laugh the first time in the reflexive way you do when you can't believe how audacious the comedy is and how uncomfortable the situations are, whereas a second viewing would afford you an opportunity to feel kind of rotten about laughing the first time.- Posted Dec 15, 2010
- Read full review
-
-
- Posted Jan 29, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Too bad that First Class torpedoes its lofty intentions with flights of idiocy so wrongheaded as to be almost endearing.- Posted Jun 2, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
A Pixar movie is always lively, and this might be the studio's liveliest (and loudest) yet - but its leanest in terms of warmth and heart.- Posted Jun 23, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Edgeless, it takes a wistful, hopeful approach to heartbreak and job loss. That's sweet, but when it comes to unemployment-themed cinema, I'll take the greater realism of last year's "The Company Men" or this year's "Everything Must Go" over Hanks's too rosy vision of life after the pink slip.- Posted Jun 30, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
It's all mildly deplorable and instantly forgettable. Kevin James remains a potentially appealing movie star - if only he didn't have to be in Kevin James movies.- Posted Jul 7, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
A gaudily ornamented medieval banquet table groaning with junk food and open entrails.- Posted Aug 18, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
What's Your Number? is not much dumber than the average romantic comedy, but there is something sad and infuriating about it.- Posted Sep 29, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
The director is going through the motions, and he doesn't display the cinematic skill, at least in the release version, to bring off an exercise in either Hitchcockian or Shyamalanian suspense.- Posted Oct 3, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Filled with competent but unexciting performances and, like its protagonist, is strangely lugubrious.- Posted Nov 7, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
This is Meyer's worst offense - her disturbingly Victorian attitudes about sex and love, which this particular movie falls modestly in lockstep with, even though it concludes years of cinematic foreplay.- Posted Nov 17, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
At 78, Polanski has earned the right to pursue his career-long demons of confinement and anarchy even in a minor film like this. But Carnage is not the word for what he's perpetrated here. Minor irritation is more like it.- Posted Dec 15, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
To get serious about Alvin for a moment, there are worse things for your kid to be into.- Posted Dec 19, 2011
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Alas, it was George Lucas who became captivated by the Tuskegee Airmen and has, after many years as devoted producer, managed to turn their story into a feature film that falls much closer to the goofy "Hogan's Heroes" in the spectrum of World War II-focused productions than "Saving Private Ryan."- Posted Jan 19, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
It's silly enough that young teens are unlikely to be drawn to it unless they've got a thing for Hudgens or want to take an early peek at Hutcherson, who will soon be seen as Peeta in "The Hunger Games." He was great as a sulky brat in "The Kids Are All Right" but in Journey 2 he comes across as wooden, dull and though not yet 20, too old for roles like these.- Posted Feb 9, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
This sugary sweet chick flick is so rich in its ripeness and full in its foolishness that I look forward to groaning in happy horror when I inevitably see it again, whether while drinking or when laid low by the kind of flu whose symptoms include a desire to watch Meg Ryan rom coms on cable.- Posted Feb 13, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Technically, movies don't give off a scent, but This Means War is so smarmy that it seems to reek of cheap cologne.- Posted Feb 16, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
All three give performances that would suit a better movie than this pallid shocker with little heart and no bite.- Posted Apr 23, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Five-Year has comic bloat. Virtually every character gets their own moment of stand up, but in most cases, the bits aren't funny enough to warrant the screen time.- Posted Apr 26, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
He's neither a fun villain or a secret good guy; the movie feels like a senseless venture because, even with his pants down on top of Clotilde or manhandling Virginie, he's the dullest scoundrel around.- Posted Jun 7, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Watching this is like flipping channels randomly between a Masterpiece Theatre drama and a splatter film on Cinemax. If you're like me, you'll stick with the splatter.- Posted Jun 21, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
The frenetic pace masks an emptiness; this Ice Age is just a collection of slapstick moments and fisticuffs.- Posted Jul 12, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
The steady wink wink of Queen of Versailles is wearing. I'd say Greenfield is exploiting a narcissist's willingness to talk endlessly about herself, but I think it just as likely that Jackie is exploiting Greenfield's willingness to listen. And to keep that wonderful mechanical eye focused on her.- Posted Jul 19, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
You're unlikely to laugh much, and you may get an unexpected case of the non-art-imitates-bad-life creeps.- Posted Jul 26, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Four minutes of Bush on SNL is just right, but 85-minutes of Cam Brady feels like a lot, even with a strong supporting cast that includes Jason Sudeikis as Cam's campaign manager and Katherine LaNasa as Cam's picture-perfect, but mean-as-nails wife.- Posted Aug 9, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Whatever director Peter Hedges' intent, the movie itself, a sentimental blend of magical realism and saccharine emotions, is oddly false. It made me want to go on a sugar cleanse.- Posted Aug 14, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
For a tale of thieving, The Words plods along. Not that a literary heist is as exciting as a bank robbery, but there's a remarkable lack of tension in this story.- Posted Sep 6, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Hotel Transylvania isn't a complete stinker. Sandler, speaking in a pitch close to his Opera Man routine from his days on Saturday Night Live, is less obnoxious than usual. The visuals are consistently enticing - the castle/hotel is artfully rendered...And there are some bright and funny lines.- Posted Sep 27, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
If "Waiting for Superman" was intended to make audiences think, Won't Back Down is supposed to make them feel. It made me feel more annoyed than outraged.- Posted Sep 27, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
The movie is full of feints, shocks and scenes of particularly perverse violence, but nothing about it is fresh enough to haunt you in the night. It's predictable.- Posted Oct 11, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
There's a point at which movies become only merchandise, and the Paranormal franchise may be heading for that nexus, that nadir.- Posted Oct 18, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Painful, and not in a good way. A glimpse into the '60s should give us not just the warm bath of recognition but the shock of the new, as least as it felt in days of old. That doesn't happen, in a movie that evokes less empathy than apathy.- Posted Dec 20, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
I can't deny I did feel fonder of my own family afterward, mostly because I know none of them would ever make me sit through Parental Guidance.- Posted Dec 26, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 40
Left-wingers in the mainstream media - by which I mean me - are supposed to lap up a movie that plays to our farm-loving, tree-hugging prejudices. But even we know that well-meaning does not automatically equal good movie. Some organic life is needed. And the only crop Promised Land harvests is Capra Corn.- Posted Dec 27, 2012
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
Mama is clumsily written and choppily edited, but Chastain doesn't have a bad scene in it, and you can see why she chose to be in this supernatural ghost story.- Posted Jan 17, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
All this eye candy is ultimately only about as engaging as watching kids at play, which is what Sheen and Schwartzman seem to be doing. I can’t argue that this isn’t an accurate glimpse inside some man’s mind — perhaps Austin Powers?- Posted Feb 7, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Mary Pols 40
While Admission remains the story of a woman who comes to question her past choices and jeopardize her career, the movie version is lighter, fluffier and dramatically inert.- Posted Mar 21, 2013
- Read full review
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
The first Lynch film in which his motives -- to hang a haberdashery of bizarre incidents on the merest hook of plot -- are apparent... What's lacking is the old sense of delicious, disturbing mystery. [20 Aug 1990, p.63] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Maybe kids will like the movie; their lust for dinolore appears to be insatiable. But the rest of us will yearn for Robin Williams' giddy goofing in "Aladdin." -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
This is not necessarily an improvement, but it's not a total disaster either. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
What it doesn't have is a central figure you can give a hoot about. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
This is soft-gore porn, obvious in its strategies, witless in the play of its ideas, absurdist only in its pretense to seriousness. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
A grim and draggy romance in which even the clothes and sets are dismal. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
But this is a sloppy job, both in little goofs...and in the cast's gung-ho amateurism. It's like Shakespeare done by the "Fame" kids. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
You will simply want to shoot yourself by the third inning. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
So muted it disappears from your view even before it recedes from your memory. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
There's neither intricacy nor surprise in the narrative, and these dopes are tedious, witless company. Mostly you find yourself thinking, "How long until dinner?" -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
We [Farrellys'] mock, they say, because we care. But that doesn't make the film elevating or amusing. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
In the end, everything about this glum and self-important adaptation of Anne Tyler's upper-cute novel is dim. [26 Dec 1988, p.83] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
All its desperate plot maneuvers (Ben and Sandra making like Tarzan on a train roof) can't give the film wit; all the slo-mo sleet, rain and confetti can't give it style. [March 22, 1999] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Redford underacts, Gandolfini overacts, and this movie is directed with the same air of unreality, the same grim passion for cliches, both cinematic and emotional, that Lurie brought to his first film, "The Contender." -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Agresti's just out to give us a sentimental good time. Which some people, heaven help us, will have -- while the rest of us choke on the cutesiness. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Writer-director Shainberg seems to be aiming for a dark comedy, but mostly his movie is coy without being funny, ugly without being truly transgressive, stupid when it needs to be smart. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
May leave viewers emotionally disconnected from this distinctly unchipper Mr. Chips. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
A bad movie that a lot of people will like... Though director Jerry Zucker wants his necrophiliac romance to be sensitive, he pumps up its feelings fortissimo so the dimmest viewer will get the point. [16 July 1990, p.86] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Tedium overwhelms caring well before this endless film finally concludes. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
In this film we learn that it takes 8,000 lbs. of pressure to crush a car but only one credited screenwriter (Scott Rosenberg) to pound out such a lame script. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism. -
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
It's great to have the Moose back, but it would be greater still to see him in a humorous context fully worth of him. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
As rigged as a casino slot machine, preying on people's hopes but paying off only for the house. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
It's a brilliant idea, for about 10 minutes. Then the bare set is elbowed out of a viewer's mind by the threadbare plot and characterizations. -
-
-
-
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
Pretty lame. Sharkboy has an especially frantic, amateur atmosphere, with a mostly maladroit cast. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
It could be a distillation of some unaired black soap opera, so predictable are the plot contrivances--adultery, pregnancy, illness, missing money--and so cartoonishly are the characters drawn. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
The screenwriters, Randall McCormick and Jeff Nathanson, and the director, Jan de Bont, have no interest in providing their actors with stuff to act. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
There's evocative atmosphere in the period detail and perky faux-'60s tunes. A pity these are wasted in a movie that, like many a pop tune, has a cute idea but a simpleminded lyric. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Jennifer Jason Leigh's draggy performance as Parker is all studied accent (something vaguely mid- Atlantic but never before heard on Earth) and equally studied self-pity and it cannot sustain our sympathy, or our interest in this inept film. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
This is, or was, a true story, but invested as it is with relentlessly cliched emotions, it plays like cheap fiction. -
-
-
Critic Score 30
In his first big Hollywood film, French superstar Gerard Depardieu cheerfully goes slumming with sex, lies, and videotape's Andie MacDowell. Peter Weir's comedy offers a little charm, less story and virtually no movie. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
His is a dispassionate sensibility, and he is not a strong enough actor - nor has he a strong enough intelligence - to fight his way out of the false analogy he has drawn between moviemaking and tragic history in the making. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
The Coens have deliberately cut themselves off from their best subject. Try as they will to create a vision of corporate (and urban) hellishness through sheer stylishness, theirs is a truly abstract expressionism, at once heavy, lifeless and dry. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplay is less a response to its source than a careful college outline of it. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
Like Saturday Night Fever and, for that matter, the Rocky films, Flashdance has made it big by taking experiences of black youths and playing them in whiteface. But unlike its grittily romantic predecessors, Flashdance is pure glitz. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
The problem is that the high-pitched whine of Allie's character finally vitiates not merely the viewer's sympathy for him, but sympathy for the movie he dominates, despite the care and courage that went into its making. -
-
-
Critic Score 30
Director Adrian Lyne has encapsulated the cliches of three decades in a single dreadful and hysterical movie. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
It's a startling, exhausting spectacle - and, like the rest of Leigh's performance, very, very bad. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
The canniest moments in the three-plus hours of Nixon, Oliver Stone's dense, ultimately disappointing biopic, capture Nixon at his most pathetically endearing--the Commander in Chief as klutz. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
Alas, The Outsiders is not quite a good one. Because it falls in with the undulating rhythm of the life of its heroes, for whom a fatal fight and a quiet night have almost equal importance, the picture never manages to reach the peaks of satisfying Hollywood melodrama. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
The film is basically a drag, and not helped by Christopher Cain's stand- around direction. And one's thirst for the clear, cool taste of traditional narrative -- motivated movement, defined antagonists, building suspense -- soon reaches maddening levels. A grownup could die in this wasteland. [5 Sept 1988, p.63] -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
There are, of course, low cunning, high explosives and much running around without a shirt, punctuated with other familiar gambits: torture scenes; the self-cauterization of, and instant recovery from, a wound large enough to stop an elephant; and a grimly preposterous two-man stand against a tank-led army. What few are likely to find amusing is Rambo III's story line. [30 May 1988, p.64] -
-
-
Critic Score 30
Though the freckle-faced Reno and Mickey Rooney (as the horse's crafty old trainer) are well cast, then-scenes together are perfunctory and impersonal. Emotions are provided in stead by a busy and overbearing musical score. The film's story begins to move in fits and starts. -
-
-
Critic Score 30
By the time Scenarist Allen and Director Fosse have wrung them out, what's left - with one exception - is mostly slack and sour. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
Rarely have so many gifted women labored so tastefully to bring forth such a wee, lockjawed mouse. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
If you consider what the exalted quartet of Branagh, Pinter, Caine and Law might have done with the project, and what they did to it, Sleuth has to be the worst prestige movie of the year. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
This is moviemaking for people who don't much like movies unless they are -- you know -- "serious." It is visually inert. It appears to be taking up small-scaled, yet emotionally resonant issues, but does not actually define them sharply or bring them to firm conclusions. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
Jumper is so lame -- undernourished in its characterizations, stillborn in its action scenes -- that it inevitably leads the idled mind to wondering how this movie got past the pitch stage. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Corliss 30
Either the Coens failed, or I didn't figure out what they're attempting. I must be like Harry or Osborne, pretending to a sophistication I lack. Burn After Reading is a movie about stupidity that left me feeling stupid. -
-
-
Reviewed by
Richard Schickel 30
The result is a mess. Kym, in Hathaway's unsympathetic performance, is an annoyingly sour observer of the proceedings, a time bomb everyone hopes will not explode before the marriage is completed. -
