The script suffers from sloppy dialogue ("alert the amphibious squadron!") and plotting (a very vague Macguffin, risible exposition, two suspenseless countdown finales). But flimsy characterisation is the biggest problem ...

| Jun 18, 2012

Lots for both kids and adults to enjoy.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2010

This debut feature by Kerry Conran is a triumph not only for its technical mastery but for its good taste.

| Jun 8, 2007

For its writer-director, Sky Captain was a labour of love. For almost everyone else -- including the wooden cast -- it's just a labour.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 1, 2006

The clincher is how the actors are reduced to puppets and ciphers; Paltrow straight-jacketed in her Hildy Johnson-style two-piece and the evidently bored Law reduced throughout half the movie to giving the gimlet eye through flying goggles.

| Feb 9, 2006

It should feel like Star Wars, yet it fails to feel like a movie at all. Conran has done his work almost too well. It's as if you're sitting in front of an outsize comic book with a speed reader as page-turner.

| Jan 17, 2006

The epitome of CGI's best and worst attributes.

| May 4, 2005

The picture seems reverse-engineered, as if, having conceived his spectacular milieu, Conran created monsters to populate it, then heroes for them to fight, then reasons for the heroes to be there, with emotional plausibility some way behind that.

Full Review | Nov 2, 2004

Pirates the best elements from classic adventure serials and combines them into an entirely new, enormously satisfying cinema experience.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 2, 2004

Alas, the finest technology money can buy can't disguise basic flaws in plotting and structure, and flatly written, blandly heroic protagonists.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 6, 2004

Such an interestingly silly movie that I found myself idly wondering what particular audience was being targeted with its peculiar conceits and infinitude of special effects.

Full Review | Oct 1, 2004

His nostalgia enabled by technology, Conran takes the ghosts in his machine seriously, and the results appear at once meltingly lovely and intriguingly inhuman.

| Sep 21, 2004

Not so much a film as a singular and joyous tribute to a vanished age when wonder only cost a nickel and played three times daily at the Bijou.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 19, 2004

Ultimately seems more like a fancy mechanical toy than a work of art we can warm up to.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2004

Sure, a new bar in computer animation is set, but if this is what the movies of tomorrow are going to be like, I'll stick with yesterday.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 18, 2004

A clever parlor trick but a dull movie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2004

With its silky textures and fluffed up fake-studio imagery, Sky Captain is like a big warm pillow that threatens to smother you in downy gorgeousness.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 17, 2004

Marvelous fun to watch.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 17, 2004

Sky Captain never exceeds the level of a clever exercise.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 17, 2004

Missing beneath its fabulous surface, however, is anything like a beating heart.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Sep 17, 2004