Films and the critics who hate them

2410   5.8   5.8 

A fairy tale with the soul of a rerun.

- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Once the audience has become inured to the wide-eyed protagonist and impressive digitized effects, there's little sense of wonder or awe to be found.

- Brian Lowry, Variety

Jamie M.'s rating:

158   6   5.8 

Let's leave the poking fun at Canadians to those who do it best - Canadians.

- Ryan Cracknell, Movie Views

Jamie M.'s rating:

286   4.3   4 

It's sledgehammer whimsy, and it's not talking to me.

- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Jamie M.'s rating:

115   5.9   5.8 

Brian De Palma's cruel joke on his fans.

- Jeffrey Westhoff, Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, IL)

Still, the failure to go beyond implication blunts the movie's power and leaves De Palma stranded. As a result, the film becomes merely a scary prank. It's as if he forgot why he was making the movie in the first place.

- Hal Hinson, Washington Post

Jamie M.'s rating:

4249   8   8.7 

One would think that a collaboration between Steven Spielberg and George Lucas would produce something better than this giggly pastiche of a Republic serial...

- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

The thrills are fully consumed while you're seeing this movie, and it's totally over when it's over. It's a workout. You feel as if you'd been to the desert digs: at the end your mind is blank, yet you're parched, you're puffing hard -- you want relief.

- Pauline Kael, New Yorker

Jamie M.'s rating:

3362   7.2   7.6 

Pic comes on like a sledgehammer, and there's even a taste of vulgarity and senseless excess not apparent in Raiders.

- Todd McCarthy, Variety

The film betrays no human impulse higher than that of a ten-year-old boy trying to gross out his baby sister by dangling a dead worm in her face.

- Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Jamie M.'s rating:

3760   7.7   8.3 

The final section, in which Indy must claim the Grail and save his father's life, is imbued with a turgid, pop-mystical tone.

- Hal Hinson, Washington Post

The fast pace and force-fed wisecracks are as seamless as ever, but rarely has audience laughter sounded as hollow.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Jamie M.'s rating:

5356   7.2   7.9 

More than the work of any other filmmaker, Spielberg's output seems uniquely designed to induce in me this queasy false-memory syndrome.

- Don McKellar, Village Voice

Jamie M.'s rating:

3174   8.3   8.8 

Colorful but dramatically unsatisfying.

- Joseph McBride, Variety

Jamie M.'s rating:

639   7.2   7.5 

The Fisher King is a disorganized, rambling and eccentric movie that contains some moments of truth, some moments of humor, and many moments of digression.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

If The Fisher King proves anything, it's that Terry Gilliam may finally be too idiosyncratic to go Hollywood, even if that's what he thinks he wants.

- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

Jamie M.'s rating:

4266   7   7.6 

The conceptual side of the movie--two rather sick two-sided antagonists having it out in a black and sordid context -- lingers.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The wit is all pictorial. The film meanders mindlessly from one image to the next, as does a comic book. It doesn't help that the title character remains such a wimp even when played by Michael Keaton.

- Vincent Canby, New York Times

A triumph of design over story, style over substance - a great-looking movie with a plot you can't care much about.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

In the end, one's reaction to Burton's blockbuster is little more than that of the Joker to Batman: 'Where did he get those wonderful toys?'

- Time Out

Jamie M.'s rating:

3630   6.7   7 

More of the same, but nowhere near as good (funny, disturbing, obsessive) as the uneven original, revealing arrested development on every level.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Bigger, louder, more relentlessly action-packed than its predecessor, Batman Returns batters its audience into submission.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Like a hyperactive 11-year-old, the director seems both uncomfortable with adult emotions and unable to focus on the overall portrait.

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

Odd and sad, but not exhilarating.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

3260   5.3   5.4 

As for Kilmer, he gamely steps into the dual Batman/Wayne role but can't get much traction, finding, as Michael Keaton had, that beyond a stern jaw there's not much to be done with it, since the suit does most of the work.

- Brian Lowry, Variety

Joel Schumacher submits to the Wagnerian bombast with an overly busy surface, and the script by Lee and Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman basically runs through the formula as if it's a checklist.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Jamie M.'s rating:

2990   4.3   3.6 

[Schumacher's] storytelling is limp, and the characters lack energy.

- Jeff Strickler, Minneapolis Star Tribune

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

- Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

By now, the dispatching of various comic-book meanies is the least satisfying part of the deal, no matter how many disco scenes or gizmos are thrown onto the screen.

- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Loud, uninspired, and interminable.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The villains, Arnold Schwarzenegger and especially Uma Thurman in this instance, remain the highlights here, as the rest of the gargantuan production lacks the dash and excitement that would have given the franchise a boost in its eighth year.

- Todd McCarthy, Variety

Jamie M.'s rating:

5929   7.5   8.3 

No fan of cult director Christopher Nolan is going to regard this respectable effort as anything but a comedown from 2001's Memento.

- Mike Clark, USA Today

Apart from the lumbering pacing and embalmed tone, the movie is densely forested with oaken dialogue, wasteful in its casting...and incoherently over-edited in its action sequences.

- Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

Maybe, now that this version of the franchise has drained itself of explanatory residue, the next chapter will have more bounce.

- Gene Seymour, Newsday

It's still an old-school superhero summer movie, the plotting tortuous, the characters relegated to one-scene-one-emotion simplicity, the digitized action a never ending club mix of chases and mano a manos.

- Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

For all the hype about exploring Batman's damaged psyche, Nolan and Goyer haven't added much beyond a corny opening in which he falls down a well and is attacked by bats.

- J. R. Jones, Chicago Reader

When you shine too much light, you take away the shadows. And without those, the Dark Knight is just a guy in a rubber suit mugging muggers.

- Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel

There is talent and cleverness here, but not much excitement.

- Todd McCarthy, Variety

[Nolan's] effort is not dishonorable, but what it needs, and doesn't have, is a Joker in the deck-some antic human antimatter to give it the giddy lift of perversity that a bunch of impersonal explosions, no matter how well managed, can't supply.

- Richard Schickel, TIME Magazine

Jamie M.'s rating:

5954   8.4   9 

This movie is too in love with itself to make you love it.

- Marshall Fine, Star Magazine

The generation of consumers who swallow this pessimistic sentiment can't see past the product to its debased morality. Instead, their excitement about The Dark Knight's dread (that teenage thrall with subversion) inspires their fealty to product.

- Armond White, New York Press

It's jam-packed with flawlessly designed set-pieces and skullduggery, sure, but it's also shrouded in grim portent, overlaid with a filigree of despair, and, for good measure, covered in a patina of dire consequence.

- Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle

[Ledger gives] a fine performance regardless, and I wish the movie around it were more deserving.

- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

It's the standard-bearer for the school of comic-book movies that confuses pompousness with seriousness and popular mechanics for drama.

- Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun

The plot is often impossible to follow. And the film, though dark, isn't as deep as some have claimed.

- Christopher Tookey, Daily Mail [UK]

This movie is grim and jammed together. The narrative isn't shaped coherently to bring out contrasts and build toward a satisfying climax. The Dark Knight is constant climax; it's always in a frenzy, and it goes on forever.

- David Denby, New Yorker

Christopher Nolan's latest exploration of the Batman mythology steeps its muddled plot in so much murk that the Joker's maniacal nihilism comes to seem like a recurrent grace note.

- Joe Morgenstern, Wall Street Journal

Visually impressive, but any hack can do a halfway decent job with trailer-ready tangents. Not everyone can push the genre forward, and the fact that Nolan's padded popcorn flick isn't the streamlined masterpiece it could have been is a real buzzkill.

- David Fear, Time Out New York

Jamie M.'s rating:

2228   8   8.6 

At times, the action is so massive and thunderously clunky that I might as well have been watching one of the Transformers movies.

- Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

This is the problem when you're an exceptional, visionary filmmaker. When you give people something extraordinary, they expect it every time. Anything short of that feels like a letdown.

- Christy Lemire, Associated Press

The history of Batman's burden is, however, increasingly cumbersome, and it's Mr. Bane who finally makes the pertinent point: "Gotham is beyond saving and must be allowed to die."

- Nick Pinkerton, Village Voice

Pompous, oppressive, without humour or humans: a sort of giant plinth for which no one has remembered to make a statue.

- Nigel Andrews, Financial Times

Moments are stretched. Every recollection must be illustrated by a flashback. Character motivations shift on a dime, and if you understand even half of what's going on -- not generally, but specifically -- you'll be doing better than most.

- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

What worked beautifully in "The Dark Knight" seems overworked and almost ridiculously grim in "The Dark Knight Rises."

- Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

Others will see it differently, but for me this is a disappointingly clunky and bombastic conclusion to a superior series -- Nolan's biggest and worst movie to date.

- Tom Charity, CNN.com

The story is dense, overlong, and studded with references that will make sense only to those intimate with Nolan's previous excursions into Batmanhood.

- Anthony Lane, New Yorker

I'm not arguing that Rises should be Singin' in the Rain. But its Wagnerian ambitions are not matched by its material. It hasn't earned its darkness.

- Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

It's this series' version of The Matrix Revolutions, The Godfather Part III or Caddyshack 2.

- Phil Villarreal, OK! Magazine

Jamie M.'s rating:

379   7.3   7.6 

While the script and pedigree of actors are commendable, the craft level is too close to the small-screen offering to get audiences into theaters.

- Leonard Klady, Variety

The actor's voices may suit animated television characters, but on a large screen Kevin Conroy's Batman, Mark Hamill's Joker, and Dana Delany's Andrea sound flat and one-dimensional.

- Stephen Holden, New York Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

8324   7.8   8.7 

The Matrix is really about filmmaking style rather than context.

- John Anderson, Newsday

It's astonishing that so much money, talent, technical expertise and visual imagination can be put in the service of something so stupid.

- Bob Graham, San Francisco Chronicle

There's not much humor to keep it all life-size, and by the final stretch it's become bloated, mechanical, and tiresome.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The Matrix soars with its feet in the air -- the rest crash-lands.

- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Another slice of overlong, high concept hokum.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

A blast of Holly-Kong glitz that never approaches the stylistic cohesiveness of, say, John Woo's Face/Off or the charisma of that film's propulsive star John Travolta.

- Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

Jamie M.'s rating:

5325   6.4   7.1 

If you're 14 or younger in age or sensibility, you may giggle at some of the bons mots.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Worryingly, the longer this movie goes on, the harder it is to care.

- Derek Adams, Time Out

Jamie M.'s rating:

4322   6.2   6.6 

The Wachowski brothers have rendered their chronicles into banality, as if trying to imitate the qualitative tailspin of the Star Wars series.

- Desson Thomson, Washington Post

There's nothing even resembling a surprise in the third and weakest installment of the trilogy.

- Bill Muller, Arizona Republic

One of the most original concepts in recent fantasy movie history has devolved into something perfectly ordinary.

- Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star

Jamie M.'s rating:

491   6.3   6 

When the magic begins to pall, the characters that captured our imagination for the first 90 minutes revert to cartoons, and squirming begins. By the time the film ends after 2 1/4 hours, we are just plain tired of it.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

...a noble effort, original in concept if disappointing in execution.

- John J. Puccio, Movie Metropolis

The hobbits all look like Joey Lawrence -- what's up with that?

- Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com

Jamie M.'s rating:

8213   8   8.8 

It's full of scenic splendors with a fine sense of scale, but its narrative thrust seems relatively pro forma, and I was bored by the battle scenes.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Tolkien completists won't find any of this overkill, but for those uninitiates among us, less is more is still a dictum worth heeding.

- Peter Rainer, New York Magazine

Jamie M.'s rating:

7544   8   8.7 

Why, I asked myself, isn't it more interesting? My answer: length, violence and redundance.

- Jean Lowerison, San Diego Metropolitan

Given his enduring success, author J.R.R. Tolkien must have been a fantasy master. He is being massively Jacksonized.

- David Elliott, San Diego Union-Tribune

Jamie M.'s rating:

7392   8.2   8.9 

Some story strands are crudely abbreviated; others fail to develop elements that were already well-established.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Like all the other installments in the saga, The Return of the King is part of a good movie, but only mediocre on its own, full of awkward pauses and redundancies.

- Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

Jamie M.'s rating:

2242   6.5   7.1 

A surprise summer hit in the States, this is another film-making-by-numbers exercise in teenage wish-fulfillment.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Jamie M.'s rating:

1006   5.6   5.6 

Mr. Macchio gives a good, straightforward performance. He's grown appreciably older since the initial film, though the new movie, like a neurotic parent, refuses to recognize the fact.

- Vincent Canby, New York Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

755   4.9   4.6 

The pattern has so calcified that Gene Autry westerns seem like models of moral complexity by comparison.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The same director, the same writer and most of the same stars are back again - to do the same things.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

More of the same for Roman numeraloids who want their movies stamped out like Pringles potato chips.

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

You'd think that Daniel's wise old karate master, Mr. Miyagi - played with some redeeming wit by Noriyuki (Pat) Morita - would have kicked some sense into this boy by now.

- Caryn James, New York Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

522   6.3   6.5 

A well-plucked turkey, humourless and plagued by a script full of stilted mumbo-jumbo.

- Time Out

4198   8.2   8.4 

The movie feels like it's going to be terrific, but Tarantino's script doesn't have much curiosity about these guys.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Tarentino has the craft down but lacks the depth and moral wisdom to avoid merely gleeful bloodletting.

- Chris Hicks, Deseret News, Salt Lake City

Jamie M.'s rating:

6807   8.3   9 

The way that this picture has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming.

- Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic

This fictional world, though rendered imaginatively, can't sustain the movie.

- Marc Vincenti, Palo Alto Weekly

There's cleverness at work...but Tarantino's 154-minute film rambles with nihilist fantasy and pop in-jokes.

- Thomas Delapa, Boulder Weekly

Jamie M.'s rating:

2205   7.2   7.5 

For all its enthusiasm, this film isn't sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times

The flat, self-exposing dud that fate often keeps in store for the initially overpraised.

- Stanley Kauffmann, New Republic

Working from an Elmore Leonard novel, Tarantino has created a gangster fiction that is never larger than life and sometimes smaller.

- David Denby, New York Magazine

Scene by scene, Jackie Brown is amusing, but after two hours, it seems sluggish, and at that point still has a half-hour to go.

- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Jamie M.'s rating:

6640   7.7   8.2 

For the first time in Tarantino's filmmaking career, the written story -- both in word and development -- proves the least interesting part of the whole equation.

- Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times

In the wake of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Matrix series, even the recent So Close, Tarantino's movie comes off as been there, kicked that.

- Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Even more gory and adolescent than it's models, which explains both the fun and the unpleasantness of this globe-trotting romp.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Kill Bill is one long yakkety-yak about Tarantino's passions. He's the samurai who won't shut up.

- Stephanie Zacharek, Salon.com

Jamie M.'s rating:

5389   7.5   8 

I've lost my sweet tooth for slice-and-dice escapism, and perhaps this is why I feel the need to see movies that don't simply glamorize or fetishize or supernaturalize brutality.

- Peter Rainer, New York Magazine

The pop encyclopedist and video-store genius has become a megalomaniac, and the exhilarating filmmaker he might have been is disappearing fast.

- David Denby, New Yorker

Jamie M.'s rating:

1550   7.3   7.7 

Grindhouse is both impressive and disappointing. From a technical and craft point of view it is first-rate; from its standing in the canon of the two directors, it is minor.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

RR and QT do an excellent job of simulating the content of grindhouse offerings, but they don't simulate the experience or the giddy kick.

- Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer

Jamie M.'s rating:

2079   7   7.1 

No need to buckle up, Death Proof is stuck in the slow lane. Self-indulgent and uninspired, bankrollers Bob and Harvey Weinstein should have reined in Tarantino with a genuine Grindhouse-sized budget.

- Ben Cobb, Film4

Jamie M.'s rating:

4176   8.1   8.3 

It's biggest flaw, though, for those who care about such things, may be it's moral attitude. That might seem a stodgy thing to bring up in the context of a Quentin Tarantino movie, but it takes such center stage that it needs to be examined.

- Jonathan F. Richards, Film.com

Jamie M.'s rating:

39   5.3   4.7 

Even the fish lack personality in ''Deepstar Six,'' a film that makes the exotic undersea world not much more interesting than the average bedroom closet.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

118   5.7   5.5 

The latter half of the film is one long feeding frenzy, guided by a familiar horror-film principle: survival of the best-looking.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times

Leviathan is intermittently interesting, but it's a bad sign that the movie starts losing its punch when the monster shows up.

- Richard Harrington, Washington Post

Jamie M.'s rating:

526   6.2   6.6 

A long shaggy dog story.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Although it initially flares up on high-concept firewood, this caper about nasty neighbors and curious klutzes gradually dies down into isolated crackles, sputters and phuts.

- Desson Thomson, Washington Post

For a while the movie threatens to become a minor plea on behalf of people who do not conform.

- Vincent Canby, New York Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

792   7.2   7.3 

It's inanities and glib pretensions are so thick that it mainly comes across as tacky and contrived.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

For a long time, we're not even sure of the point of view: Is this a black comedy about murder or just a cynical morality play? The traveler in the foreign country is not sure, but he knows the film inspires thought.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

220   5   5.1 

In Boomerang Eddie Murphy straitjackets himself in an ill-fitting comedy vehicle that's desperately in need of a reality check.

- Lawrence Cohn, Variety

There's something paradoxical about the ease he radiates in playing a man who is supposed to be a smashing success. As an underdog, Mr. Murphy worked much harder.

- Janet Maslin, New York Times

271   5.8   5.5 

"Dying Young" doesn't really feel any of its emotions - it's a cynically constructed tearjerker that's so artificial and contrived I felt embarrassed watching it.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Dying Young isn't a shameless weeper, but that's not necessarily to it's credit. In a genre like this, sometimes ''tasteful'' just means confused.

- Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

If "Dying Young," with Julia Roberts, seems familiar, that's because it's basically "Pretty Oncology Nurse".

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

"Dying Young" promises a wallow and gives us an ankle-deep wade in tepid waters.

- David Ansen, Newsweek

Jamie M.'s rating:

180   6.7   6.7 

I wonder how many laughs there will be when the movie does go public. It's routine, predictable, and dumb - real dumb.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Moments of off-centre humour, but an hour and a half of parodist Weird Al is a severe test.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

The dumbness just never stops -- just buying a ticket lowers your IQ.

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

Jamie M.'s rating:

708   6.5   7.5 

Despite a lovely cameo turn by Burt Lancaster, Field of Dreams is the male weepie at its wussiest.

- Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

The movie may steal a base here and there, but there are no homers.

- Desson Thomson, Washington Post

Jamie M.'s rating:

1091   6.9   7.6 

The attempt to extract the essences of several genres (cold-war submarine thriller, love story, Disney fantasy, pseudomystical SF in the Spielberg mode) and mix them together ultimately leads to giddy incoherence.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

I'd sooner believe that Moby Dick could swim up the drainpipe.

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

This overlong concoction is scuppered by dire dialogue, histrionic performances and maudlin sentimentality.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Jamie M.'s rating:

932   6.8   7.1 

The big budget can't conceal the fact that this fiction is fallow, more rootbound than spellbound.

- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

Though children will mostly be enthralled by the spectacles, even they might notice the weak story protruding through the industrial magic.

- Desson Thomson, Washington Post

At the story level, Willow is turgid and relentlessly predictable.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Jamie M.'s rating:

2999   7.2   7.7 

The opening cartoon upstages the movie that emerges from it.

- Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

Jamie M.'s rating:

703   7.5   7.8 

Lee cagily provides a litmus test for racial attitudes in 1989, but he does so by destroying the integrity of his characters, black and white.

- Richard Corliss, TIME Magazine

Jamie M.'s rating:

20   7.3   7.1 

Unsatisfying, humorless documentary on the stalwart Irish band.

- Jon Niccum, Lawrence Journal-World

R&H exists as it does simply because U2 had “planned” too much ahead of time, the antithesis of spontaneity and the killjoy of documentary filmmaking.

- Collin Souter, eFilmCritic.com

- They're the biggest band in the world; you'd think they'd at least have something interesting to say.

- Rob Vaux, Flipside Movie Emporium