On Screen

...Molded after the Lord of the Rings and Narnia cycles, the film nevertheless rejected those earlier series’ reinventions of the fantasy novel as an exercise in warfare...

...I am nevertheless astonished that this film received better notices than the 2006 Find Me Guilty, a colorful and darkly comic reinvigoration of the courtroom drama...

...Carter, who is Burton’s wife, behaves as if she were coerced into playing the par t against her will...

...The intense romanticism of “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is thrown on the trash heap with the anger of “Like a Rolling Stone” and the apocalyptic despair of “Man in the Long Black Coat...

...Haynes dramatizes key moments in Dylan’s life, but he is chiefly interested in Dylan when he was at his most popular...

...Ben Whishaw offers the strongest impersonation of Dylan from about the same era...

...The movie seems poised to end at half a dozen points before it finally peters out after 135 excruciating minutes...

...On the other hand, the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, made by genuine professionals, was formally beautiful and successfully defeated expectations...

...The new movie gives away all the secrets of its simple and tragic plot early on, only to continue recycling the details through flashbacks from different perspectives...

...Long before the end of the film’s 158 minutes, I grew weary of his absurd efforts to uncover the identity of someone who no longer posed a threat...

...It is not simply that they are 15 years too young...

...Haynes appears to believe the words he has crammed into his fictionalized Dylans’ mouths...

...For him, the enigma of Dylan is not the mystery of his music but the assorted “looks” he put on to sell records...

...The basic “sound” of Dylan’s tunes is important, but it is the least substantive thing about him...

...Though it simplified the book, The Golden Compass made a valiant and often successful effort to retain the integrity and complexity of its characters and the momentum of its plot...

...Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Richard Gere make little attempt to look or talk like Dylan even as they clearly impersonate the folk artist of the early 1960s, the mournful troubadour of the early 1970s, and the aging loner of the same period and the early 1980s...

...By contrast, Grindhouse puts well-known actors and expensive effects in the hands of filmmakers bereft of originality...

...During her two big solos she comports herself with listless distaste, as if she would rather be doing anything than acting in this movie...

...whenever a character refers to a past event or someone not in the room, the director cuts away to the scene in question, as if the audience were incapable of imagination...

...Poor Marisa Tomei, an excellent and underappreciated actress, was apparently instructed not so much to perform as to vie for the Maria Schneider Award for Hanging Around Naked in Hotel Rooms...

...The real energy of the picture is devoted to re-creating imagery from various album covers...

...Perhaps those who did not know the show beforehand attributed the originality of its premise to the director rather than to the creators...

...Marcus Carl Franklin, an African American, plays the singer as an adolescent...

...Derivatively alternating between blearing violence and pointlessly tedious dialogue, the film insults the lowbrow genres it fails to imitate...

...The picture traffics in the fantasies of those who would be cruel to their friends and lovers without suffering the consequences of their surliness...

...Where contemporary singers are heard covering the songs, they freely alter both melody and lyrics...

...Even after decades pass (in the characters’ lives and, seemingly, for the audience), Graysmith is still waking people up in the middle of the night and banging on the doors of closed office buildings as if the case couldn’t wait until tomorrow or next year...

...Repetitive, overlong movies that offered slight breaks with convention, larger than usual doses of visual excess (usually exhibitions of violence), and eccentric premises dazzled many reviewers, blinding them to the emptiness at the core...

...The director turns his back on some of the more controversial personas he adopted, including the country artist (1968-70), the clown-faced stadium singer (1975-78), the born-again Christian (1979-82), and the member of an all-star band (1985-90...

...When we hear Dylan’s voice on the soundtrack, his songs are digitally butchered: Verses are slashed or truncated beginnings grafted onto endings, and the empty dialogue of the film’s characters drowns out even those fragments...

...Drawing on extraordinarily rich material, they drained their sources of complexity, subverting them to the petty signature of filmmakers who are as flamboyantly selfaggrandizing as they are limited in talent...

...Although he looks nothing like Dylan, Franklin beautifully imitates the wry, shy smile and easy manner seen in early photographs of the artist...

...For a film industry increasingly hostile to genuine creativity and fresh, risky entertainment, the truncation of film reviews in the press and on the air—and the corresponding devolution of the critical establishment into a monolithic herd—may be the luckiest thing that has happened in recent years...

...TO HEAD OFF the accusation that my dismissals are perfunctory too, let me examine in greater depth some of last year’s more interesting failures...

...In a career now spanning five decades, Dylan has drawn upon the seminal forms of American popular song and invested them with a sophisticated poetic sensibility...

...Burton has probably ensured that a true film of Sweeney Todd will never be made...

...The real fault of I’m Not There, however, isn’t that it fails in the Herculean task of presenting a full vision of Dylan but that it doesn’t offer any real sense of him at all...

...Film after film that garnered glowing reviews left me cold...

...In this environment, the movies I found most enjoyable were those whose pleasures were entirely on the surface...

...But in rehashing motifs from Blood Simple and Fargo without much of their trademark wit, the Coens produced an eerie and well-acted exercise too void of depth to justify its terrifying violence...

...The schlock flicks to which it pays dubious homage were made by maverick directors working with limited budgets...

...Director Todd Haynes, purportedly highlighting the chameleonlike nature of his subject, cast six actors to play Dylan at various stages in his career...

...That their love grew out of her decision to have the baby they drunkenly conceived was less a narrative innovation than a cynical contrivance...

...For me, it was two hours of unpleasantness...

...There is a growing contempt for character and plot, marked by a corresponding increase in satisfaction with rather modest formal innovation...

...The muchadmired supporting cast was a handful of snitty grouches, flat and plastic, their dialogue marshaling all the wit of a Kevin Smith outtake...

...The cinematic imagery is equally literal...

...That critics almost universally despised it, comparing it unfavorably to martial propaganda passing itself off as family fare, is further evidence of the wayward trend that has gripped too many reviewers...

...His style constantly evolving, Dylan averaged an album a year from 1962 until 1990, when he abandoned rock’n’roll almost completely...

...Another much praised crime drama was Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead...

...unfortunately, he enjoys the least screen time...

...If director Tim Burton had set out to deliberately strip the extraordinary musical by Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim of its power, he could not have done a more thorough job...

...Knocked Up, touted as a cutting-edge romantic comedy, struck me as both moth-eaten and chaste...

...Yet limp as they were, those movies at least mounted races against time that generated passable climaxes...

...Despite his meticulous and expensive production, Haynes is invested in everything about Dylan except the content of his songs...

...The actors look unhappy...

...Besides Adam Shankman’s vile remake of John Waters’ Hairspray, next to which the buoyant original appears grave, more “serious” and less commercial films like I’m Not There and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street proved equally reductive...

...We are given shot after shot of arterial bleeding, and the camera lingers obsessively over the grotesque spectacle of bodies being ground into pie filler...

...The songs in musicals are almost always recorded before the shoot, yet even though Burton’s performers croon their own parts, the dubbing is atrocious...

...Children’s pictures like Ratatouille and Enchanted were light and diverting, memorable at least as earnest entertainments...

...DIS TRESSING as I’m Not There is, Sweeney Todd was, for me, the most painful debacle of 2007...

...We continue to bounce haphazardly from one era to the next, learning nothing more about the protagonist than what we have seen at the outset...

...Today newspapers, magazines and newscasts prefer sound bites to thoughtful analysis and allow writers only the space to offer a general impression...

...For a similar storyline in films released just this year, see Juno and the bizarre Paprika...

...I did not expect much from Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s latest exercise in bloodlust and misogyny, yet I was aghast when I read that it is a great film...

...Cate Blanchett, in an androgynous black suit and a kinky wig, is more mannered as she plays Dylan circa 1965-66...

...Few are able to defend their points, even if they possess the patience or the energy to do so...

...Aside from one song where he imagines himself executing passersby on the street, Depp sleepwalks through his role, transforming the musical theater’s great bloody avenger into a figure of petulance...

...I’m Not There is the first narrative film to celebrate the life and work of Bob Dylan, perhaps our greatest living songwriter...

...His subsequent sporadic releases are suffused with his first loves, folk and blues...

...I was vexed by the poor reception of The Golden Compass, which failed to meet its studio’s blockbuster ambitions...

...Even by contemporary standards, 2007 had seemed particularly mediocre: Its brightest lights burned dimly...

...Haynes gives short shrift to these periods and their music...

...Sitting in the theater watching Burton butcher Sondheim more violently than Todd slaughtered his victims, I was overwhelmed with the sense that this numbing film had no reason to exist...

...The original musical built dark humor into the basic story of a vengeful barber who murders his customers and sends their bodies to the shop below, where they are chopped up and served as meat pies...

...I congratulate director David Fincherfor finally doing away with the vomit-green filter through which he shot thrillers like Seven, Fight Club and Panic Room...

...Burton’s version takes the tongue from the cheek, removes the social commentary, and sees everything at face value...

...Because no lives are at stake, the urgent need of Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) and his cohort to prove their theories seemed merely academic...

...Once the sparkle of the film’s premise wears off, it becomes apparent that Haynes has no story to tell...

...Others found excitement in hearing the inevitable reiterated with slight additions, but the film’s structure did not convince me that its characters were anything other than contemptible charlatans who deserved worse than they got...

...Nowhere is the contemporary rage for superficiality more striking than in 2007’s musical adaptations...

...It recycled the oft-depicted fantasy of the deadbeat beerbellied loser successfully romancing a smart, elegant beauty who in real life would never take a second look at him...

...His affection for his subject is diluted love—Dylan in a blender...

...Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter seem fully aware that they are utterly unsuited to play Sweeney Todd and Mrs...

...And for the opening 30 minutes it is fun to watch the cast capture his various miens...

...This is a musical that cries out for a full-bodied cinematic adaptation...

...Another tiresome picture inexplicably lauded for its alleged sharpness and innovation was Zodiac...

...Like all the pictures I have mentioned, Sweeney Todd received generally positive reviews...

...My chief objection, as I have noted in these pages previously, has been to the privileging of “style” over substance...

...Lovett, the proprietor of the pie shop...

...True, it depicts the weirdos hunting the madman as even more obsessive, but I’m of a school that believes generic innovations ought to be compelling...

...Almost every time one of the six Dylans talks about his art, especially in the Blanchett scenes, he denies that his work has any meaning, that he is worthy of interpretation...

...Though diverse, these films share a flash-in-the pan superficiality that will appeal most to critics given only a few paragraphs or a moment of air time to express their opinions...

...Adapting a work full of gorgeous melodies and striking harmonies, Burton removed all the choral numbers and cast actors who could barely sing...

...Zodiac is about a hunt for a serial killer who hangs up his spear before the film has ambled through its first third...

...For me, this was the year’s biggest disappointment...

...It grieves me to say anything negative about one of my favorite living filmmakers, still active at the age of 83...