Was doing some long travelling so I've been catching up on 2 flicks I meant to see last year.

Prisoners - Amazing execution of a kinda contrived and manipulative script. Performances are all great, the lighting by Deakins is some of the best I've ever seen (Fincher ain't got nothing on this), but ultimately the movie feels very pointless to me. "Why did you tell me that story?" was my ultimate feeling on it.

American Hustle - Fun in stretches, and the 1st hour in particular is great, but this is really all over the place, unfocused, and tonally confused. The movie should be building to a tense conclusion, and that tension is almost completely absent. A lot of the characters feel caricatured, and Jennifer Lawrence in particular is grating as hell, and I have no idea why the hell she is even in this movie. You could cut her scenes in half and lose nothing. The "trying way too hard to be Goodfellas" comparison is very apt here.
Still, all that being said, it's not a bad movie at all, definitely watchable and pretty fun, just feels like it could've been something great with some revisions.

Ugh.  Labyrinth is the worst.

The craftwork, puppets, etc, are great.  Plot, acting, music, etc. are.  just.  awful.

Neverending Story can also be thrown into this category (though that story was far more enjoyable).

I love Labyrinth. Call it nostalgia all you want (because it is) but I honestly adore it. I love most of the songs and not ironically either. Henson could do no wrong as far as I was concerned.

Apart from Dark Crystal. That was a mess.

There Will Be Blood can't be judged as an adaptation of that book because that's not what it is. It uses the book as inspiration and then goes off and does its own (brilliant) thing. And anyway, movies shouldn't be judged on their faithfulness to their source material.

P.T. Anderson seems to like taking the broad strokes of a story and spinning it into his own little thing. BOOGIE NIGHTS is loosely based on John Holmes' story, but the film isn't a biopic. THE MASTER, too, is loosely inspired by L. Rob Hubbard and Scientology, but the actual movie isn't trying to tell that story. THERE WILL BE BLOOD is like that. It doesn't adapt "Oil!" so much as it rewrites it.