question: Ambitious and visually stunning, Tomorrowland is unfortunately weighted down by uneven storytelling.

numbered reviews: 1. Visually exciting sci-fi adventure has unexpected violence.
2. ... has a futuristic vision that is stylishly and sometimes spectacularly rendered, but without much substance beneath the spectacle.
3. It's more of a heartbreaking disappointment than an expensive disaster.
4. The plot of Brad (Ratatouille) Bird's Tomorrowland is an incomprehensible muddle. A Wachowski screenplay reimagined by William Burroughs would be easier to follow.
5. Has so much going for it that you wonder, as you watch it stretch past the two-hour mark, why it isn't actually going anywhere-or anywhere you feel able to go with it, anyway.
6. So many of the disparate elements of Tomorrowland work that it's kind of heartbreaking to see it saddled with an inconsistent script.
7. Tomorrowland is a poorly executed great idea. Funny always makes these movies click. The humor in this one fails miserably.
8. An incredibly maudlin, preachy, annoyingly mercantile public service announcement aimed squarely at eight-year-olds.
9. Shouldn't a magical destination be, well, magical? Instead of leaving our jaws agape in wonder, Tomorrowland's architecture looks like a cross between Disney's Epcot Center and a high-end shopping mall.
10. When a film that's supposed to be trying to do something different ends with yet another climax featuring a hero and a villain fighting as a doomsday machine clicks down to zero, it's kind of depressing.


question: Thanks to Emmy-worthy performances from a reputable cast, The Normal Heart is not only a powerful, heartbreaking drama, but also a vital document of events leading up to and through the early AIDS crisis.

numbered reviews: 1. There is less reporting on poverty in America than on any other major societal issue. So it is with AIDS. That alone makes The Normal Heart an important film.
2. Although The Normal Heart is a work of fiction, the stories it tells about the emerging AIDS crisis in America are honest and heartbreakingly real, thanks to deeply affecting performances.
3. Despite its flaws, this iteration of The Normal Heart also exhorts us to remember.
4. If anger and suffering were all there were to The Normal Heart, watching it would be torture. Luckily, it has heart to match its guts.
5. proves that, sometimes, art does a better job of understanding history than the actual record
6. Larry Kramer's blistering cri de coeur about the early days of the AIDS plague gets a solidly respectful but flawed treatment from Ryan Murphy.
7. It's an impressive, relevant, and moving ensemble drama that I can't recommend enough.
8. The collaboration between Murphy and Kramer seemed like a natural from the moment it was announced, and now we have the proof of that sensible decision -- in all its incendiary, heart-wrenching magnificence.
9. Buoyed by A-list star power, The Normal Heart beats erratically for more than two hours, yet delivers a gut punch in its climax.
10. Absolutely retains its significance, it's the execution from director Ryan Murphy that's worthy of dismissal, allowing a heavy-handedness to drive the provocative material into frustrating repetition.


question: Terrence Malick's debut is a masterful slice of American cinema, rife with the visual poetry and measured performances that would characterize his work.

numbered reviews: 1. Achingly evocative of a time when Hollywood had the courage to invest in complex and morally ambiguous films and an indisputable masterpiece of American cinema.
2. Makes for classic, troubling yet fascinating cinema.
3. The superb performances from Sheen and Spacek are as memorable as Malick's vision of something akin to hell.
4. The unique, lilting music would subsequently crop up in True Romance, though Tarantino's generation has yet to dethrone Badlands as the most haunting of all couple-on-the-run movies.
5. Malick's film, full of striking cutaways to the burning-sun horizon and the harsh landscape's solitary creatures, comes to operate at an overpoweringly chilling remove.
6. Days of Heaven put Terrence Malick's intuitions into cogent form, but this is where his art begins.
7. Terrence Malick's first masterpiece. Essential viewing.
8. This first, magnificent, outpouring of the sporadic genius of cinema's equivalent to JD Salinger, Terrence Malick, still seems terrifically modern.
9. An unmissable reissue for Terrence Malick's gorgeous and troubling debut.
10. Terrence Malick's thriller Badlands (1973), is rightly revered as one of the most astonishing debuts in cinema. Its reissue is a wonderful chance to discover why.


question: It doesn't probe as deep -- or tell as many hard truths -- as it could have, but Don Hahn's look at Disney's rebirth offers a fascinating and surprisingly candorous glimpse into the studio's past.

numbered reviews:
1. A documentary about the lucrative rebirth of Disney's animation arm between the years 1984 and 1994, it's a warts-and-all tale of clashing egos and the eternal war between art and commerce.
2. The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary about how Disney, against all odds, revived the art of feature-length drawn animation.
3. Just extraordinary enough to make you really long for all the stuff that it's too-short running time and too-tight focus had to leave out.
4. The entire story is worked into a perfect success story package, concluding right before the studios more controversial period begins, which just goes to show, you can always have a happy ending, if you know where to stop the story.
5. The film feels too often as though it is pulling some punches so as not to enrage its corporate parents.
6. A few too many industry asides, but filled with behind-the-scenes moments.
7. Waking Sleeping Beauty will matter only to those who grew up on Walt Disney's animated films. In other words, all of us.
8. It's a not-so-great movie about some great movies.
9. It's a must-see for any Disney purist, but is also an emotive, stunningly valuable documentary in its own right.
10. Feature animation had an explosively great year in 2009, so it's startling to be reminded in Waking Sleeping Beauty that it was all but dead 20 years ago.