Liam Lacey

Overall, The Salt of Life has more bite but less charm than "Mid-August Lunch."

The Runaways captures the sleaze and innocence of the era and has some still-relevant things to say about the conflict between girl-rocker empowerment and exploitation.

The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.

Certainly, this imagineered version of P.L. Travers’s life provides an orderly drama, but it’s uncomfortably reductive. It may be a small world, after all, but it comes in a lot more shades than Saving Mr. Banks suggests.

Somehow, within this roiling pot of fancy costumes, class hatred, vicious misogyny and official corruption, we are supposed to discern the poisonous seeds of the violence that would wrack Europe. The connections are somewhat fuzzy.

The background designs are beautiful and there are plenty of lively sight gags, but magic isn’t in the cards.

The documentary, Goodnight Oppy, is the sort of film you expect to see at your local museum or science center for school-age children. It’s a real-life Wall-E story, that’s easy to follow, full of emotion and Hollywood budget, and intended to elicit wonder and admiration for the National Aeronautics and Space Association.

In the end, the commercial necessity of wrapping up a family comedy in less than 100 minutes seems to have trumped anything real about Dan's life.

Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada, based on Russell Banks’ final novel Foregone, is a confined affair, suggesting the art of constructing complicated toy sailing ships in small bottles. Confined, but complicated.

One of the more ingenious and fresh surprises of the summer.

At best, it’s no more than a puny version of David Fincher’s Fight Club.

Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.

Begins audaciously but goes to extremes to assert conventional wisdom about grownup life, that what is called "normal" is about just holding on.

Feels a little like the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- a similar wet fizzle of a sequel for sequel's sake -- but what do we know?

All in all, it’s something of a merry mess, barely held together by Eigenmann’s wary, steadfast performance as Joy, an illegal immigrant mother whose life is a nightmare even before the movie turns into one.

Of all this year’s loud, over-long summer action movies that, in various ways, simulate the experience of having a tin bucket placed over your head and being struck repeatedly with a stick, it must be said that Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim is by far the most entertaining.

A film whose limitations are the same as its appeal: It's a bauble. Running at barely more than 80 minutes, the film is both a travelogue and a commercial for swinging polyglot Europe.

If the action is graphic and immediate, other aspects of the movie are inexcusably bad.

Roughly-made but illuminating, the Iraq documentary In My Mother's Arms is a brief immersion into life in a Baghdad boys' orphanage.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

Please Baby Please has one thing going for it: A chance to watch gifted actors do some daredevil freestyling. In moments, it’s almost enough.

For better and worse, the script has a clear depiction of contemporary good and evil and an efficient movie-of-the-week purposefulness, to the point where you half expect to see a helpline number before the closing credits.

This visual memoir paints a picture of a woman who, while leading a rich professional life, was plagued by personal demons.

Certainly spectacular -- an elaborately designed combination of animation and computer-generated imagery -- but at times it's a spectacular bore.

As effective as Enforcement is on a visceral level, it comes up short in any deeper reflection on the social crisis of its premise.

Written and directed by first-time Danish director, Gabriel Bier Gislason (the son of Susanne Bier), it’s a moody low-key psychological affair, free of schlock and gore, and ultimately, more of a romance than a scare fest.

This is a guy movie, a gothic creepshow.

Though there are moments when the drama turns into intellectual debate, the film is also emotional, moving with a fluid, mounting tension and moments of anguish and strange, startling humour.

Unlike "Being John Malkovich," which JCVD sometimes resembles, there is no secret portal to the star's head; instead, the audience gets a fleeting glimpse through the smeared window of his soul.

A potentially appealing story about a rescued disabled dolphin gets smothered with inspirational family values guff.

Anyone expecting another dark satiric film in the same vein of Harron's earlier movies will be disappointed. Perhaps as befits a bondage-themed picture, The Notorious Bettie Page is very restrained, even a little starchy.

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

Essentially Masterpiece Theatre comfort food, a chance to watch fine actors act without too many complications.

While Big Bad Wolves delivers the Hostel-like torture jolts with ruthless precision, the movie is also a rudely funny satire of a macho, paranoid culture where the protection of children is used to justify any conduct.

Both Smith and his son are appealing presences, but The Pursuit of Happyness seems to take place in a sociological vacuum. Gardner's insight into his difficulties begins and ends with the thought that, in the pursuit of happiness, there's a lot more pursuit involved than happiness, and unasked political questions seem to dangle ominously over the entire movie.

Pretentious, which might be defined as a showing an excess of ambition, is a modifier that clings to Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria — a remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 Day-Glo horror classic — like a wet leotard.

Avenue Montaigne is not a film to be taken too earnestly, but it would be a mistake to miss its bittersweet undertones. The movie is as airy as a spun-sugar dessert, but Thompson's observations on the artistic life are both affectionate and knowing: Beauty and wealth, though inevitably compelling, are appreciated as means to humane ends, not goals in themselves.

Adoring, appropriately offbeat documentary.

The new version is mildly entertaining with some fun performances.

The whole package — written by Sarah Henderson and directed by her husband Curtis Vowell — has a casual, episodic vibe, mixing sardonic banter and broad physical comedy.

Broad, loud and crammed full of costumed characters and stage asides about the poverty of the script, it's typical pantomime, with a thin plot on which to hang the over-the-top performances and light-hearted musical numbers (by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). [16 Feb 1996]

Give it an A for concept -- a bizarre marionette version of a Jerry Bruckheimer-style action movie; B for its occasional moments of convulsively funny comedy; and D for the politics, for pandering to exactly the kind of reactionary sentiments it purports to satirize.

You Kill Me is not so much a bad film as one filled with missed potential and marked by the seams of compromise.

A stylish, brutal affair that delivers grim atmosphere and punishing violence but loses impact in telegraphing its political punches.

Overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat.

Surf's Up is that rarity in a children's movie, a comedy that's actually exciting.

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

At its most interesting when it shows the lives of women and children prisoners, the film has the feel of a movie-of-the-week cliché when it returns to Julia's improbable crime.

While a lot of geography is covered, as a concert film, Conan O'Brien Can't Stop is decidedly thin entertainment.

The movie's title proves to be not entirely a case of bait-and-switch. The film really is a homage to vintage Hollywood comedy.

That makes Mockingjay – Part 1 an experience to be endured, like a prison sentence, rather than enjoyed. By all means, bring on the revolution: It has to be more exciting than this.

This parade of admiration is almost as exhausting as the experience of a Motörhead concert.

The movie does offer one historical first: Ferrell, who previously appeared with comedian Sacha Baron Cohen ( Borat) in "Talladega Nights," now appears with skater Sasha Cohen (one point).

What’s mildly interesting about The Beach House, the low-budget debut feature from Jeffrey A Brown is that, while human beings have their struggles and conflicts, the universe doesn’t much care.

Here’s how good an actor Bill Murray is. He does such a bristly, entertaining turn as a boozy curmudgeon in St. Vincent, that he saves first-time director Theodore Melfi’s obvious dramedy from sliding into a burbling sinkhole of schmaltz.

The fact that these atrocities are not well known in the West is a good reason for this film to exist.

The combination of DiCaprio's soulful, self-effacing work in Scorsese's "The Departed," and this unexpectedly complex portrait in a simple-minded movie, make it the best year of his career since the big boat crash of 1997.

There's little doubt a person can get a little pent-up looking for a good romantic comedy -- but you might want to save yourself until something better comes along.

At best, the film makes a more convincing case for the adventure of artificiality: Take Billy Crudup, add a little rouge to his cheeks and suddenly: Voilà, the guy can act.

Have you ever seen a movie you half-liked a lot?

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

The Traitor is a pleasure to watch. Working with cinematographer Vladan Radovic, Bellocchio blends sweeping camera work and flurries of action with painterly lighting and often ironic musical cues. The story itself is somewhat over-stuffed — the time-jumping narrative (Bellochio and three other writers are credited) and an onscreen counter of murder victims — but this is still a welcome chance to see a great old school European auteur at work.

While the gangster genre over the past 50 years has been the specialty of Italian-American auteurs (Coppola, Scorsese, DePalma and The Sopranos’ David Chase), Mafia Inc., directed by Quebec director Daniel Grou (a.k.a. Podz), stands up surprisingly well.

Rather than build on the new momentum, this one's a bit more of a cruise-control effort.

Lush, loud and sparkling, and not nearly as innocent as you might imagine.

Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.

Sure, it's a bit mechanical, but what did you expect? The important thing is that the characters and jokes don't prevent you from grooving on the pleasures of the moving parts.

Though The Apprentice does not really explain Donald Trump as a psychiatric or political phenomenon, it justifies its existence as pitch dark comedy with some terrific performances and a reminder that even the Orange Menace was once someone’s darling boy.

A mildly enjoyable if toothless adaptation of a much better book.

There's a whole lot of "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm" packed into Lymelife.

The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the clichés of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.

If the film’s execution doesn’t always rise to the level of its elusive ambitions, the fault is not a lack of sincerity.

Dreadful as the subject matter is, the authenticity of the performances and the skill of Schleinzer's filmmaking are difficult to deny in this portrait of a monster as the bland guy next door.

The charm and the limitations of this modestly budgeted, good-hearted trifle, set in a middle-class Scottish village, are its youthful energy and anxiousness to please. Along with the mechanically efficient tunes from the team of Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, the entire film feels as if it could have been written and produced by a group of bright theatre students.

The movie manages a couple of popcorn-spitting-funny jokes for each biographical decade the film covers, though typically it's no better than moderately clever.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

The movie espouses a kind of Unitarian ecumenical egalitarianism that has about as much to do with medieval times as quantum physics. No one should be offended except -- of course -- those who like movies that excite the mind as well as the pulse.

On Swift Horses is best admired as a visual tone poem to the era, not so much a realistic story. The conceit of casting characters who seem too splendid for their surroundings evokes the movie melodramas of the fifties, the time of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

The charm of the movie's first 20 minutes soon turns shrill and manic, as invention is piled upon invention.

If the downbeat plot is depressingly familiar, it’s partly salvaged by the quality of the performances.

A screwball comedy about the abortion issue? First-time writer-director Alexander Payne gives it a college try.

It might be called "It's Kind of a Thin Movie."

A bit thin on plot, but an unequivocal technical tour de force.

You don't have to go to the barricades for Hooper's film to appreciate it for what it is – a productive experiment, an epic-scaled weepie, an exercise in sincere kitsch, and, perhaps too easily dismissed, a rare modern movie about the wretched poor, a traditional subject of interest at this time of year.

The Summit is a mixture of the inventive and the misguided in its attempt to recreate the circumstances of the August, 2008, disaster on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, when 11 climbers were killed.

Rocky Balboa scores a split decision: A familiar start, some flat-footed middle rounds and a solid, flailing finish. And since Stallone has promised to throw in the towel on the franchise, we'll add an extra half star in honour of his diligence in the gym.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) is the real culprit here, creating a crude paint-by-numbers fiction that keeps yelling about the importance of the truth while hurtling in the opposite direction.

Sometimes, you'd swear he's (Penn) reprising his performance as a mentally handicapped man in "I Am Sam."

Like any good religious sermon, it follows its scary vision of hell with a possibility of last-minute redemption.

The movie is also banal in ways that are irritating and second-rate.

Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.

Leave it to Brad Pitt, producer and star of World War Z, to try to put the zip back in zombie.

Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.

Alpha aims to be not just a story but a transporting visual experience, which is one area where it over-reaches.

The result is a movie that's both odd and mediocre: not as bad as doing hard time, but not a particularly good time, either.

The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

As a psychological thriller, it's not so much either thrilling or psychological as it is wonderfully absurd. [25 Mar 1982]

Like Maddin's melancholic and relatively more conventional "My Winnipeg," Keyhole is about a memory house, but one that is even more fragmented, mythical and elusive.

Smart, anxious and weirdly funny, the first feature from Toronto video artist Daniel Cockburn connects a series of scenarios that gradually begin to loop into each other.

Peaches Does Herself is constantly inventive, from the Road Warrior/Rocky Horror fantasy costumes, to the hump-happy choreography.

In its corner, Baron offers the often-entertaining prospect of watching extremely large men beat each other up in acrobatic ways. The recent winner of the dramatic feature award at Toronto-based imagiNative Film and Media Arts Festival, it has a crowd appeal familiar to WWE fans, but some snappy dialogue from screenwriter John Argall and a family-friendly message to accompany the cracking bones.

Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan (Fixation, Spoonful of Sugar), working from a script by Joshua Friedlander, keeps the pace moving well and creates some undeniable fun in a shell game of the three movie genres that depend on physical reaction —comedy, horror, and erotic thriller.

To put Uncorked in wine terms, it’s not complex, but only a philistine would dismiss what’s easy and pleasing as flawed.

The craft of the re-enactment is more impressive than the script, which defaults to hackneyed dramatic moments, reminiscent of a generic disaster film, with its stock upstairs-downstairs tropes, young lovers, the cynic-turned-hero, and the dutiful subalterns showing courage above their pay grade.

Unlike Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," which was also inspired by Rackham, The Spiderwick Chronicles is more whimsical than scary.

These questionable narrative kinks aside, Lee still features one of the year-to-date’s best performances, honouring a woman who needs to be remembered, along with a sober consideration of the roles of women in wartime.

The return to an Errol Flynn-style hero, who can swing from chandeliers, fight with two swords at once and ride a horse backward, recalls a movie era both sexier and more innocent.

The real question for audiences isn’t whether Tony Stark/Iron Man defeats the latest supervillain (of course he does), but whether the movie itself rises above the dreaded third-in-a-sequel torpor of "Spider-Man" and "The Dark Knight." Spoiler alert: Yes, mostly, it does.

This summer has given us two Supermen to choose from in our own distemperate times: "Superman Returns" was for the starry-eyed idealists, Hollywoodland is for the bleary-eyed cynics.

The film loses momentum as it settles into movie-of-the-week familiarity, detailing the activities of the Jane collective, some of which seem hardly credible, though historically accurate.

Yes, The Voice of Hind Rajab is both emotionally distressing and ethically uncomfortable, brutally so, as it was intended to be. But for all the reviewers’ gut-wrenching adjectives, the critics were physically safe from harm.

Morse, with his hulking frame, baby face and soft voice, has probably done too many of these villain roles for his own good. But how could you avoid casting him when he manages to present someone who's screamingly insane in the mildest, most pleasant way?

Lewy’s script doesn’t cop out with any sentimental redemption, but neither does it establish why the self-destructive Lachlan deserves our sympathy.

Co-directed by James D. Stern (who made another NBA promotional documentary, "Michael Jordan to the Max") and Adam Del Deo, the story of the Americanization of Yao is determinedly upbeat.

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

A glum meditation on isolation and romantic malaise.

It’s jittery in its pacing, the characters thinly drawn, and the youth crime drama elements formulaic...At the same time, the film feels emotionally original in its discordantly tender moments.

If Ocean's Thirteen were compared to a gem, it would have to be considered something of a flashy fraud: Initially impressive for cut and colour, it lacks either clarity or weight.

Myers's sheer fertility of invention is of a different order, and even if he misses as often as he hits, he's definitely a swinger.

Excellent in flashes, unintentionally absurd and lead-footed at other moments, the movie stumbles under the weight of its own grandiose intentions.

The movie is directed by Mark Waters (responsible for the indie black comedy, "The House of Yes") and mostly, he's workmanlike, but smart enough to get out of the way of the nicely balanced two lead performances.

Though rich in visual style, the movie is unbalanced in performances and script, ranging, from scene to scene, from go-for-baroque grandeur to strident excess.

Director Scott, flashy, fluid and at his best in the steely-blue claustrophic battle-training scenes, immerses the viewer in the process.

The urge to find hope in tragedy is as inevitable as the one to recognize shapes in clouds. But Funny Boy leaves an unsettling chasm between this one slender story and the grim history it represents.

An animated sequel that, despite not achieving the inspired lunacy of the first movie where Gru literally steals the moon, is smartly calculated to deliver squeals to kids and amusement to accompanying adults.

With all due respect to Japanese animation fans and pop-culture enthusiasts, life may be just too short to plunge into the busy world of Cowboy Bebop.

Though Radcliffe occasionally seems too stiffly callow to be completely convincing in this grown-up role, the movie is a proficient thriller with a potential appeal beyond the star's fan-girl audience.

Neither outrageous nor subtle as a religious satire, but here's the good news for modern viewers: With it's unusual Christian backdrop, this is one of the most intriguing rite-of-passage teen comedies in a long time.

A lot more cutting would have made this movie much funnier – but it should have taken place in the editing room, not on the screen.

Intermittently witty, technically impressive, Free Guy sheds points in its second half, with pandering (Star Wars and Captain American references) and a series of numbing narrative loops, celebrating originality while practicing the opposite. And all of this with the usual alibi that none of this is meant to be serious.

Like its characters, I Want You Back, is likeable but somewhat unambitious and complacent.

There's a generosity of spirit to Stuck on You that is a pleasure, even when the movie is slipshod.

The film suffers from the over-interpreting mental “glitch,” eagerly connecting coincidence, mental illness, drug experiences, religious awe, computer gaming, and science fiction movies in an over-arching pattern.

Unfortunately, the script, based on Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel "These Foolish Things," might better be described as pure British stodge: high-starch English comfort food of more sentimental than nutritional value.

There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle.

Lucy, you may have twigged, is named after our 3.2-million-year-old hominid ancestor.

The dread in the film is so quickly forgotten. What remains is an urge to fly to Italy, rent an apartment in a medieval city and invent your own adventure.

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

Does not disappoint expectations: This is not a case of dumbing down literature; it's mediocrity aimed for and successfully achieved.

The results are not monumental, but they are a variety of sober responses to the tragedy that help place the event in a global context. Some of the films may be, as has been suggested, anti-American in tone, but none come anywhere near defending the attacks.

It's a screwball comedy, with a possible debt to Preston Sturges's 1942 film, "The Miracle of Morgan Creek," a movie inspired by the Dionne quintuplets, and similarly set in a small town turned upside down by media and political showboating.

Kenneth Lonergan's new film, Margaret, finally released six years after it was shot, now seems destined to become part of film history as one of the more stunning examples of a filmmaker's sophomore slump.

There are too many moments in Ice Age when you find yourself thinking: less bonding and fewer anti-Darwinian life-lessons please; more of that anarchist Scrat.

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Karl Marx said. That might explain the possibility of even making a movie such as Stuck.

The Wackness is one of those Sundance coming-of-age films, with all that implies: a surfeit of forced edginess, kooky characters, cynicism-coated sentimentality and self-absorbed angst.

Typical of a certain kind of Sundance feelie comedy, Before You Know It is both promising and exasperating enough you’ll probably leave the cinema thinking of ways it could be improved.

The arc of Nazneen's character, from drudge to feminist heroine, is predictably saintly. Chanu is a far more intriguingly human figure, the redeemed fool.

A lazy and mediocre movie, a sort of tepid parody blend of "The Breakfast Club" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

What keeps the energy percolating is DiCaprio’s performance, in the loosest and most charismatic turn of his career.

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

These images are intriguing and intermittently beautiful, but the technique gets repetitive, and the gap between the visual lavishness and the so-so script is distracting.

Apart from the relief of seeing a conclusion to a long story, there’s scant pleasure to be found in the long-winded and jumbled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

As a drama, The Soloist is stuck before it starts.

The White Crow is really “Nureyev before Nureyev,” and it’s a struggle to sort out its purpose.

At its simple core, Sleeping Beauty is a perfectly pitched chamber piece about the menace of voluntary oblivion.

Walter Hill’s new film Dead for a Dollar is in some ways your grandpa’s Western, a big-sky drama full of horses, hats, guns, hairpin plot turns and an ensemble of colourfully drawn characters.

Respect, the new movie starring Jennifer Hudson as the late soul singer Aretha Franklin, proves once again that musical biopics have become the tribute mediocrity pays to talent.

Inasmuch as Cholodenko has an agenda in her two movies so far -- what appears to be a lesbian-positive theme of openness to experimentation and its accompanying emotional costs -- she's found a model in McDormand's portrayal of Jane.

Filled with a sweet, loopy sensibility and some fresh comic turns, Welcome to Collinwood is a low-budget American film that falls into the good-but-slight category.

Freed from the tiresome constraints of plot and character, Rumble in the Bronx is the distilled essence of action entertainment. [27 Feb 1996, p.D1]

As a statement on capitalism or anything else, Capitalism: A Love Story is often embarrassingly simplistic, self-contradictory.

Volume 2 picks up the story with an older Joe, now played by Gainsbourg, with her watchful sad face showing the character’s unsatisfied hunger. It seems more von Trier’s script than any great social taboos that cause Joe to go into free fall in a world that becomes more kinky and sinister.

If you're going to a no-frills action film, though, at least you want the action to be entertaining, which is where Transporter 3 falls down.

The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.

Take 13 Tzameti for what it is: a tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

A larger discomfort with Extract is an ambivalent attitude about comedy and social class. Mocking an officious middle-manager is always fair game; ridiculing blue-collar workers who resent their mindless jobs just feels mean.

By the time the film reaches its big mushy climax, in which the slackers discover their inner caring during a dopey medieval role-playing battle, the movie starts to feel something like a pleasure again.

Jacobs is a competent director but he doesn't bring anything extra to this shell game of a narrative.

The filmmaking is taut and skillful and Petzold largely succeeds with his double-track gambit: As a nightmarish but somehow comfortingly familiar thriller about fear, persecution, and mistaken identity. It also disturbs as a prophecy of the consequences of Europe's resurgent neo-fascist politics and anti-immigrant politics.

Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.

Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.

Some kind of mess...terpiece.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

What remains “indie” about At Any Price is that this is an unabashed social-message film – one that plays out like a cross between the agribusiness exposé "Food, Inc." and Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman."

No one can doubt there's a consistency of vision in Russell's work, though at times it seems more the vision of a great set designer than a great film director. [8 Oct 1988]

If you’re already on to the more sinister stuff, this is probably an unnecessary retreat into mild ickiness.

Smith’s charisma isn’t always an asset to the movie though. Unlike the unknown Macchio in the original Kid, there’s nothing vulnerable about Smith except for his diminutive size, which is its own problem.

Purcell’s performance and ambition in reframing this foundational Australian tale are admirable. But her version of the story would be more resonant if it held more mystery and less message.

Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody.

Neither version of the film — the talking-heads documentary or the period drama — has the depth to achieve much impact.

Though predictable in its messaging — don’t be afraid to be your wild eccentric self! — the film is visually stylish and clever enough to engage sugar-jagged children and even adults for its merciful 90-minute running time.

Romanticization and exploitation often converge. Stripped of its warm memories, this could be an MBA study on turning local youth trends into global lifestyle commodities, inevitably leaving casualties along the way.

A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

Too conventional by half, the prequel betrays the boldness of the original show, though it stirs up good memories. Sopranos complete-ists, who have exhausted analyzing the 86 episodes, may want to pay it homage via this relic, like a bonus extra on the series’ box-set.

This bare-bones adaptation is more of a sop to the musical’s fans than a fully imagined movie musical.

As coy sleaze goes, the new Olsen twins' movie doesn't match Britney Spears's "Crossroads," but it comes close.

The strengths of Fugitive Pieces are its fluidity and subtlety. Emotional repression may be one of the most difficult conditions to portray honestly, and Dillane's performance of Jakob is a study in the art of creating sympathy by not asking for it.

By the final act, involving possibly the most far-fetched scheme since Dr. Evil aimed his death ray at Earth in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," the indifference has become completely contagious.

White Chicks could and should be a much more mischievous movie. A half-dozen writers have managed to create a succession of thin sketches that add up to "Some Like It Warmed Over," with a touch of stink.

Warm Bodies is for audiences who prefer stories about mending hearts to munching brains, and ideally, for girls who aren't quite sure yet if they want a slightly scary boyfriend, or a living doll they can dress up.

The trouble is not that the movie is exploitative but that it’s out of its depth. This tone-jumping jigsaw of a narrative (written by McCarthy and Marchus Hinchey along French screenwriters Thomas Bidegain and Noé Debré) amounts to several movies in one.

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

You want to escape? Well, there’s a couple of hundred million U.S. dollars up on the screen for action and special effects, and retro amusement provided by pastel-coloured shopping malls, big shoulder pads, and Sony Walkmans.

Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.

Unfortunately, this reverent and old-fashioned biopic is a prime example of the kind of inspirational movie that is, itself, uninspired.

The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.

If it earns a D for tone-deaf dialogue, The Glassworker earns an A for ambition and bonus points for the useful reminder that war destroys things and art isn’t shatterproof.

Both Mirren and Walters are successfully cast against type.

Fans of Allen, the comedian, will be glad to hear there are more chuckles here than in his last film, "Bullets Over Broadway." Fans of Allen, the plot craftsman, will find a lot less discipline and imagination in the writing. In truth, Mighty Aphrodite is mighty slight.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

This colour-drunk, sumptuous late Tang Dynasty (928 AD) drama is huge on spectacle but as devoid of delight as a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic.

5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.

In a less careful movie, with a less relatable performance, this kind of narrative clumsiness would be ruinous. Here, it’s more like a permissible flaw in someone you care for too much to give up on.

The trouble is, once you get past the historical information and chummy interviews, you have to put up with the inevitable risk of any ad-hoc jam session: It Might Get Boring.

A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Tower Heist is as over-inflated as those Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that are featured in the movie's climax. Also similarly, it's entertaining in its own predictable way.

While limited by a weak script, the film has beautiful locations, an over-qualified Australian cast, and a novel companion.

To some extent, the performances elevate the script.

The movie never actually gets to winter: The title is just a clumsy play on the family's surname.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

There is little here for parents, and not much for the kids. [17 Feb 1997, p.C3]

The script, despite doses of irreverent humour, feels manipulative, and the music is oblivious to nuance, with a spectacular misuse of Johnny Cash singing "Hurt."

Parents will get the historical jokes but are unlikely to be amused; kids won’t get them, but might laugh anyway.

Firth gives the performance his all as a man trapped in a vortex of grief, shame and hate, but as in Scott Hicks’s "Shine," which the film occasionally resembles, there’s an overtidy relationship between trauma and catharsis.

Something of an intriguing curio (the first feature film about a subject treated in song, poem, television and theatre), Lizzie has some memorable pluses and significant minuses.

An overqualified cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio and an uncredited Nick Nolte) brings more gravity than required to repeated “this is me staring you down” confrontations.

Creaky in its plotting, occasionally electrifying in its direction, We Own the Night is even more of a throwback to old-fashioned crime dramas than Martin Scorsese's "The Departed."

Shot mostly at night, in high-contrast images, punctuated by rock-video collages, Intacto is nothing if not hip, but its questions are more coffee-shop hypothetical than genuinely profound.

At this point, the effect of Myers' one-man Sixties love-in already feels less shagadelic than just shagged out.

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

Occasionally feels like a Neil Simon rewrite of "In the Bedroom," as it see-saws between hard truths and quirky humour.

So why does Savages feel so calculated, cutesy, free of suspense and trashy only in the uninteresting sense? No doubt, Stone is trying... but it all feels more like flexing atrophied muscles rather than creating a believable experience.

To give Noé’s credit, he used the Saint Laurent fashion money to practice the split-screen technique which is employed far more movingly in Vortex. He also made the only fashion ad I won’t instantly forget.

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

Jurassic World never breaks out of its own confines of homage and imitation. The movie ends up as an awkward, ungainly hybrid: large, but inconsequential.

Ranks as one of the most elaborate, stunt- and effects-filled summer movies currently in the theatres. Unfortunately for its box-office prospects, it's also in Russian, which narrows its audience to action junkies with a foreign film bent.

Though it's undoubtedly ingenious, for such a clever movie, it's a shame Rubber couldn't be more fun.

Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.

Truly strange, and often captivating.

Think of it as "Cheers" without the beer, or "Friends'" Central Perk with razors and sharper dialogue.

Possibly, no sane person could truly explain Dalí — who could account for the painter of Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano? — but Harron’s film maintains a wry compassion for these mad love birds, who have spent their lives defying convention and perhaps reality itself.

What works as edgy comedy is determined by what you can get away with. Having introduced depression and virtual incest, I Love My Dad just isn’t adroit enough to find a credible happy ending escape hatch.

There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

The first 45 minutes of this film feel like far too much normal and not nearly enough para.

Carmen, the debut film from French dancer-choreographer Benjamin Millepied, is an example of a work that flagrantly colours outside the recognized lines, blending melodrama, myth, dance and stagey spectacle. The result doesn’t coalesce into a neat bundle, but at moments, it’s peculiarly exciting.

Fortunately, director-writer Marc Lawrence (he also created the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice") manages saccharine saturation by tempering his stars' familiar appeal with enough dry wit to make this low-key romantic comedy a not-too-sticky Valentine's Day offering.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

While Bettany and Dunst are both appealing, their chemistry lacks much fizz. As it is, the pair seem less like lovers than bouncy transatlantic cousins.

A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.

A bit of a docu-mess.

The movie's last two minutes, in which they all do goofy dances and have no dialogue or script to get in their way, is easily the highlight. It's the previous 113 minutes of plot that cause problems.

Although a couple of performances here may earn Oscar nominations, by the time you’ve sat through the wreckage, you’re left with the sense that this really must have worked better onstage.

With more superheroes, more action and more stuff blowing up than ever before, X-Men: The Last Stand has the climactic oomph that suggests a finale, though not the gravitas to suggest a resolution.

The trouble with Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg's faithful-to-a-fault adaptation from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel, is that it's more metaphor than meat.

Richard Curtis, the writer of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill" and "Love, Actually," goes off-shore and out of his depth with Pirate Radio .

Along with its allegorical elements, The King is also impressively specific in naturalistic detail.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

What is puzzling is how Edward Zwick has taken an extraordinary real-life story about a handful of people who defied huge odds, and turned it into an utterly conventional war movie.

What we have is a solidly crafted reworking of some familiar Western tropes by director John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks), a Texas native who shows care for the period details, with handsome cinematography on the original Lone Star State locations.

Exist as extended videos for the accompanying soul and rap soundtrack.

Thematic issues aside, Eastwood is noted for a high level of economic craft and The Mule is no exception.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

While Baron Cohen's lanky physical slapstick and verbal manglings are funny, the movie begins to feel like one of the later, worn-out Pink Panther movies.

From time to time, as Alexandre Desplat's insistent score surged yet again while the characters rushed by, I found myself wanting the movie to slow down. Some of these images are too beautiful to disappear so quickly.

Both the Arctic survival story and the spaceship drama are derivative, and while action sequences are well done in isolation, they never develop a convincing momentum.

Shot in country fields and interiors of fading Georgian glory, Easy Virtue has enough traces of Coward's wit to keep you hoping for the first hour or so, but then the film collapses under the weight of too many misguided innovations.

The movie becomes an American salute to military patriotism, anybody's military patriotism. Think of it as "A Few Good Reds."

When the larger question cannot be answered, the lesser one -- "What would you have done?" -- seems beside the point.

With the bigger story and more fully developed relationships than the previous films, this is the first Twilight film that feels like a real movie in its own right.

These images tantalize, but without satisfying, like a trailer for a narrative that would work better as a long-form series.

The whole affair seems curiously bloodless and often more torpid than torrid.

What makes Cry Macho fascinating to watch, even in an uncomfortable high-wire act way, is Eastwood — stoop-shouldered, sometimes pausing in his dialogue, but determinedly taking on a character he probably should have taken on back in 1988 when he was first approached about doing the part.

Spiritual V-8 juice.

Actually a pretty entertaining movie, in a kick-you-in-the-pants kind of way. A relative rarity -- a solid no-brow comedy.

The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.

It attempts to take local history of the illegal whisky trade and raise it to the level of myth.

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

It tries too hard too early.

Prime seems aimed at prime-time television, with endless iterations on the same theme of "frustrated relationship" that will finally get resolved during sweeps week in the season before cancellation. Call it: My Mama, the Shrink.

The Rock is just typical big American dumb fun.

Musically, it's a mixed bag -- The concert remains more of an historical curiosity than a must-see rock film.

In this fitfully engaging, but often patience-straining preamble to Hobbit adventures to come, there is one transporting 10 minutes of screen time. It happens when Bilbo meets the freakish, ring-obsessed creature Gollum.

By the time we reach the climactic ending, the script clearly calls for an exorcist with a chainsaw to trim back this metaphor run amok.

The movie begs for a a third-act showdown but, instead, the dramatic tension is allowed to leak away.

The praise for the film — a one-man show by a Korean-American filmmaker at a time of heightened anti-Asian racism and a focus on unjust immigration policies — is understandable. But the film itself is a disappointment, a message film that relies far too much on artless, melodramatic contrivances for its emotional impact.

There's something genuinely exploratory and original here in the depiction of people being pushed into adulthood before they're ready.

The film, shot in black-and-white at canted angles, suggests an R-rated Twilight Zone episode with a twist of Fellini-lite, in a trite film school kind of way. Mickey Mouse is unlikely to be shaking in his big yellow shoes.

Kawase’s attempt at a healing, nature-loving cathartic conclusion comes across as campy, as if a scene from The Blue Lagoon was accidentally attached to a Japanese nature documentary.

The Indian in the Cupboard unfolds with absorbing logic to tell a tale in the best of children's story tradition. [17 July 1995]

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

The result is an erratically funny but often frustrating comedy, with an interesting premise hobbled by internal inconsistencies and uneven writing.

So blatantly contrived it could be called The Fast and the Spurious, Crank has the small saving grace of being intentionally ridiculous. The action sequences are more notable for their outrageousness than their visceral power.

The movie ends up exactly what it sounds like: a good film for filling the midnight slot at a review cinema or genre festival.

Some of the later scenes capture the spirit of majestic sweetness of "Close Encouners of the Third Kind" and "E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial" period, but the elevated moments don't last. They're relentlessly undermined by the f-bombs, groin kicks, and anal-probing jokes.

It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.

The Laundromat consistently feels as if it’s intended to be funnier or more poignant than it actually is.

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, is still offbeat, but more in the sense of unco-ordinated than syncopated.

The sickly feeling that Body of Lies leaves at its conclusion isn't just about the brutality of its subject; it's the realization that real-life barbarism translates so easily into adrenaline kicks for the multiplex.

In the rap-music, slam-dunk, hysterical tumult of visual clutter that makes up most of Space Jam, the traditional Warner Bros. 'toons get scant attention. In this marriage of corporate logos, the manic little characters serve simply as more names to be dropped. What Space Jam really lacks is respect for an irreverent tradition. [15 Nov 1996, p.C4]

A tart-coated sugar pill of a movie.