Word: overwrought
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Never trust anyone under 18, says this drama, which gives high school the full David E. Kelley (The Practice) treatment: big histrionics, big issues and more hot-button pushing than an attack ad. The overwrought pilot alone hits social promotion, desegregation, guns and student-teacher sex. For an encore, Kelley may have to blow up the school. The staff is well cast, especially Chi McBride, above, left, as a besieged principal and Fyvush Finkel as a charming crank. But in portraying its one-dimensional teens, a surly lot of vipers and nitwits, Boston needs remedial...
...long as it does, director Robert Zemeckis' movie goes like a (haunted) house afire--mysterious moans from the heating system, the hint of a stalking presence, even some strange initials on Claire's computer screen. Everyone--especially her gruffly good-natured husband Norman (Harrison Ford)--says Claire is overwrought...
Seen from the window of a descending airplane, a city sprawls out in astonishing intricacy, a maze-like network of stacked structures and winding, convoluted pathways. Unfamiliar in unexpected ways, it reveals the obsessive and overwrought patterns of human activity in all their inscrutable complexity. Too bad that, in the last weightless moments before touchdown, the city metamorphoses into something more pedestrian--disappearing, finally, into the invisibility with which we cloak the everyday. Up close, we see nothing...
...Neil Jordan is not a consistent director, but good or bad, his work is never ordinary. Though his last film, the turgid and painfully overwrought In Dreams, was a disaster, there have always been elements of greatness embedded in his work, and The End of the Affair is no exception. It's unfortunate that the film, like many others in the Jordan oeuvre, adds up to less than the sum of its parts...
Skilled performances and atmospheric cinematography fail to save Joel Schumacher's Flawless, a predictable array of overwrought clichs and meddling sideplots...