Films and the critics who hate them

There is a good deal to be said about Peter Jackson's long-awaited and exceedingly long adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, most of it bad.

_ J. Hoberman, New York National Review of Books

It frequently seems as though Jackson was less interested in making The Hobbit than in remaking his own fabulously successful Lord of the Rings series.

- Christopher Orr

The tale has no emotional resonance, and the thinness of the plot (only five of the book's chapters are adapted here) and the colorless depictions of the leading characters do it no favors.

- Bruce Diones, New Yorker

Meanwhile, back in Middle-earth, everyone is displaying worrying symptoms associated with the dreaded plight known as Middle-film Syndrome.

- Leigh Paatsch, Herald Sun (Australia)

This is comfortably straightforward hokum -- which is to say that Jackson, for all his delusions of grandeur, remains a bit of a hobbit at heart.

- Jake Wilson, Sydney Morning Herald

Well, at least there won't be another one for a while.

- Tom Long, Detroit News

I don't know how a director whose central theme is the loss of humanity can be so uninterested in the minutiae of human speech and behavior.

- David Edelstein, Slate

I kept my eyes wide open all through Eyes Wide Shut and saw more control-freak unreality than visual genius around the edges of the cluttered compositions.

- Andrew Sarris, New York Observer

Finally, however, it's just a cautionary tale about some very mild, old-fashioned erotic fantasies.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

As superhero spectacles go, Zack Snyder's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a grand one, with a mondo-operatic climax and a final shot infused with quivering, exhilarating molecules of grace. It's also not much fun.

- Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is a treat for the eyes, but it will hurt your brain and break your heart.

- Scott Mendelson, Forbes

In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel duke it out and the audience loses.

- Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald

Neither thrilling nor horrific, the camera, plotting, dialogue and atmosphere are uniformly unconvincing: a conservatoire of false notes.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Hard to classify; at times you laugh raucously at what's up on the screen; at others you stare dumbly, in stunned amazement.

- Hal Hinson, Washington Post

There were more laughs in "Nine and a Half Weeks".

- Clint Morris, Moviehole

"My Stepmother Is an Alien" is a great idea for a movie, but it seems to have stalled at the idea stage.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

The film invokes the spirit of Jimmy Durante, who in a sort of indirect way saves Earth from obliteration. Wish he could have done the same for the movie.

- Hal Hinson, Washington Post

The people who made this movie should be ashamed of themselves.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

If Chuck Berry were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave.

- Hal Hinson, Washington Post

The movie makes no attempt to really imagine what it would be like to inhabit another body; it just springs the gimmick on us and starts unreeling its sitcom plot.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

On the screen, it seems to be like a walking corpse itself: jerking around malevolently, with putrefying limbs, a fixed, grisly smile on its face and absolutely no spontaneity.

- Michael Wilmington, Los Angeles Times

Stiff and boring, with only Davis giving it a burst of life.

- Jeffrey M. Anderson, San Francisco Examiner

The film tries so hard to be funny, but ends up feeling like a rejected Woody Allen script idea.

- Wesley Lovell, Cinema Sight

The endlessly tasteless juvenilia should make you ashamed of laughing yourself into a stupor.

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

Like the ZAZ lads' other films, this is a movie made for a VCR Saturday night. They supply the jokes; you bring the microwave popcorn and modest expectations.

- Richard Corliss, Time Magazine

It's an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning.

- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Literal-minded in its sex and brutality, Teutonic in its humor, Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange might be the work of a strict and exacting German professor who set out to make a porno-violent sci-fi Comedy.

- Pauline Kael, New Yorker

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

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

- Ryan Cracknell, Movie Views

The best thing you can say about this scattershot political satire is that the late John Candy's next-to-last picture is relatively funnier and less depressing than his valedictory Wagons East.

- Mike Clark, USA Today

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

- Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

All things considered, I got more fun out of the much maligned earlier attempt of bringing characters from the show to film, Boris and Natasha.

- Ken Henke, Mountain Xpress

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

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

The worst that can be said of Crystal Skull is that it won't be inspiring any youthful vine-swinging. A shame, really.

- Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

The film's joyless, going-through-the-motions mood cannot be ignored.

- Michael Joshua Rowing, Stop Smiling

I was reminded of Hackman's comment in Night Moves that watching a Rohmer film was like watching paint dry - although in this case, it's more like watching blood coagulate.

- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

An unsatisfactory mix of low-key heroics, buddy-buddy humour, and anti-war sentiment.

- Nigel Floyd, Time Out

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

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

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

I doubt if the public that fell so much in love with this cute Disney-like tale had looked too deeply at this religious parable and examined how overwrought and crude it really is.

- Dennis Schwartz, Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

Colorful but dramatically unsatisfying.

- Joseph McBride, Variety

Robert De Niro is reliably dynamic, and Joe Pesci's portrait of a gangster with a sense of humour is hideously memorable, but there's no doubt that GoodFellas fights a losing battle against numbness.

- Adam Mars Jones, Independent (UK)

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

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

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

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

- Time Out

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

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

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

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

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

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