Liam Lacey

Compellingly artful if dramatically blunt, The Settlers is Chile’s entry into the best International picture Oscar race, a kind of Western that critiques the reasons for the genre.

It’s a forgivable fault for a first feature such as Before I Change My Mind to try to do too much, especially at a time when gender issues have become so politically contentious. The film can plausibly be understood as a protest against the kind of new more restrictive youth gender laws introduced in several jurisdictions, including Alberta earlier this year.

Deft and ironic, mixing banal reality with poignant metaphor in a typically Iranian style.

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.

Bridges's big performance takes place in the context of a relatively minor movie.

Given all the on-screen risk-taking, Mission: Impossible - Fallout plays it pretty safe. What you get is essentially an action movies greatest hits package.

The script by Richard Kaplow, who wrote Linklater’s 2008 film Me and Orson Welles, feels as though it were adapted from an off-Broadway play, with the action mostly in one location over the course of one night, March 31, 1943, the opening night of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Oklahoma!

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.

Mrs. Brown will not overturn Queen Victoria's prim reputation, but it reminds us that there was more to the woman than that famous plump cameo that has become the symbol of a more modest era.

This is a movie about draining, tenderizing and chopping up the audience emotionally.

Adoring, appropriately offbeat documentary.

Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.

While the movie is narrow, it has a deep, melancholic resonance.

The narrative here may be strictly nuts and bolts, but as an achievement in graphic design, Steamboy is first class.

Yun, a veteran Korean actress, gives a splendidly layered performance.

The emotional tone here is sympathetic and elegiac, and since both men have a way with words, often absorbing. Though there is little here that won’t be known by fans of the writers, the format of the interviews is striking.

Now if that isn't an inspirational story, it's hard to know what is.

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.

Over all, A Field in England aims to confound. The filth-encrusted characters aren’t easy to keep apart, and the narrative is too fragmentary and freakish to grasp (the sun turns black, a character vomits rune stones).

The winner of this year's audience award for best documentary at Sundance has it all: heartless media, art fraud and a four-year-old painting prodigy.

Paprika is a creatively dizzying and visually dazzling allegory about alternative realities.

Arguably, Lost in Translation is the American answer to Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece, "In the Mood for Love," though less about history, more about infatuation.

Though Revolutionary Road is a less stringent work than Yates's book, it also feels like a more tolerant and humane one.

The film is too slapdash and self-serving to take seriously (it’s release is timed to the precede thesame-named album’s release next month), but it’s a casually entertaining trip, aimed at fans of the charismatic rapper and his recreational substance of choice.

Two parts pain, one part pleasure, a masochist's life with cystic fibrosis results in a weirdly tender documentary. [14 Nov 1997, p.D4]

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

The phrase in the title "wanted and desired" is offered by a producer friend of Polanski's who describes him as "wanted" in the United States, but "desired" in Europe, where sexual behaviour is treated more honestly and artists' dark sides are celebrated.

Argo is a movie of many parts, the sum of which can probably be best described as enjoyable Hollywood hokum.

Like the comic stars of the silent era, Mr. Bean's character transcends language barriers.

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.

This is one of the director's small, experimental, semi-improvised provocations, and if it doesn't push too deep, it's pointed enough to leave a mark.

A kind of stealth political film that confronts issues of ethnic tension and American xenophobia.

Even with new information provided in the film, however, his personality remains not so much elusive as cantankerous, particularly in contrast with the expansiveness of his songs. That gap gives I'm Not There something of a hollow centre.

In the end, Hill is inclined to land closer to the heartfelt teen dramas of S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders, Rumblefish) than the docudrama grittiness he affects.

Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish.

For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.

Too loud, too long and too busy but – here’s the good part – also wonderfully silly.

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

Enough Said confirms filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s status as one of America’s best stealth satirists.

This witty, star-packed and visually splendid kids' movie provides a small-is-beautiful message served on a parodoxically epic scale.

The Informant! may be a gadfly of a movie, but it's not without bite.

Like the writings of William Burroughs or Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Watchmen falls into the category of what might be called meta-pulp, a multilayered fiction that serves as a parody and commentary on our collective bottom-feeding fantasies.

There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.

Shows how our family fictions sustain us, and how some truths are better left unspoken.

The value of Amandla! is that the film helps the rest of the world understand, both with our ears and minds, where South Africans have come from.

Credit goes to Gibbs for the courage to question the comfortable consensus. But to present a crisis with no resolution feels like a job half-done.

For all its generally judicious choices, there's one device in The Boys Are Back that may test the patience of some viewers. Every once in a while, the late Katy pops up in a scene to offer Joe wifely advice.

The Invisible Woman is, fair warning, leisurely in its pace.

The S in Robert S. McNamara stands for Strange, which is an unusual middle name and perhaps an apt description of the man at the centre of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's gripping character study, The Fog of War.

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.

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.

On the Job feels marinated in hardscrabble reality. Action scenes throughout are unnervingly frenetic, with the tension amplified by the sheer density of the crowds.

With its bold screen-filling imagery, this is definitely a movie to be relished on the big screen.

Not too surprisingly, Fincher doesn't bring his auteur A-game here, though his crafty B-game is better than most. As well, the break-out performance of Rooney Mara as the semi-feral computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, gives the film a residue of authentic anguish.

The film is not about the audience's shared experience, and a lot more about how cool it is to have a backstage pass.

Assembled by first-time French director and Callas devotee Thomas Volf, this adoring clip reel has both pros and cons.

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

Once again, [Pugh] brings a determined energy to her performance that almost compensates for the often unpersuasive, sometimes stilted, film built around her.

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.

More honourable than "amazing," the latest reboot of the Spider-man franchise brings Marvel Comics web-slinging super-hero down to earth, in a mostly satisfactory way.

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.

It feels unbalanced, a collection of often-compelling sequences stitched together in a way that is unpersuasive or sometimes simply puzzling.

Peter Fonda's the bee's knees in the performance of his career.

Palestine ‘36 is at its most moving in the scenes of archival footage, and most provocative as an illustration of how England’s imperial tactics of pitting national groups against each other and terrorizing civilians (characters refer to similar approaches India and Ireland) became the template for Israeli’s ongoing military domination of the Palestinian territories. The argument is unlikely to change fixed hearts and minds, but it is difficult to ignore how familiar it seems.

It's a cop movie that refuses to cop out in the usual way.

The somewhat awkwardly titled documentary, The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile, turns out to be an accurate summary of a film that celebrates two women.

Rather than another oppressive film about poverty, it's a revealing experiment in perspective.

It’s a hybrid drama/art-history essay about how looking at art recasts our experience of looking at the world.

The Hunting Ground’s film’s biggest journalistic “get” is the first on-camera interview with Erica Kinsman, the Florida State student who accused star quarterback Jameis Winston of drugging and raping her.

Boisterous, cloying, simultaneously raunchy and innocent, hip and klutzy.

Highly entertaining.

The wildly ambitious but flawed biographical film about the English cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

Rohmer doesn't attempt to create any skepticism about Grace's perspective on her experiences; we are shown them as she saw them, and seeing is the real pleasure of The Lady and the Duke.

Audaciously whacked-out and never less than entertaining, Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan mixes a backstage dance drama with a Freudian psychological thriller that's indebted to Roman Polanski's studies of shattered feminine psyches and David Cronenberg's movies about repressed bodies in rebellion.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

At times, these singers’ versatility has kept them both regularly employed and deliberately anonymous.

An intense story about an all-powerful Chinese crime lord and his extended family. [26 Jan 1996]

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

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.

An innovative romantic comedy that is a mixture of British spice and American sugar.

The most compelling performance here belongs to the Indonesian actor and martial artist Iko Uwais, who became famous in The Raid movies. Here, he plays the “asset” who must be taken out of the country. Uwais’ hand-and-foot battles are genuinely explosive and when he’s not fighting, he doesn’t say much, which is a welcome relief from all the rest of the babble.

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

A solid, if not revelatory portrait of contemporary Russia through the story of exiled oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

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.

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

Beauty and loss hold hands in Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel, an intimate and impressionistic documentary about New York’s storied Chelsea Hotel from Belgian filmmakers, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier.

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.

Less satisfying are the moments when the film concedes to American horror conventions, especially the scuttling vampire effects, which pull us out of the haunted world of these lovely damaged creatures into a place that, while not of this world, feels entirely too familiar.

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 trifle compared to Robert Altman's great films -- But it's a very assured trifle, and an unusually good-natured Altman film.

A former mental patient and her family spend a summer on an isolated island, in a classic Bergman portrait where family dysfunction and existential terror meet. [31 Jul 2007, p.R1]

It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.

At just under two-and-a-half hours and spanning three decades, The Eight Mountains feels thorough, as well as sensitively acted and moving. Its weakness is a tendency toward grandiosity, treating an anecdotal drama as though it were an epic.

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]

Barnaby puts a mythic frame around a grim history, shaping it in a way that feels always like a creative adventure, not a duty.

An absorbing and not-too-uncomfortable experience, so long as you remember there's a camera lens and a big distance between you and the film's violent subject.

Hackle-raising in its intensity.

At its best moments, Our Nixon captures the split-personality of the times, and the apparently innocent face of corruption.

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.

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

There is both a sense of disappointment and relief when House of Sand and Fog crosses over into improbability, when the viewer can sit back, breathe easy again. All this trouble over the failure to open an envelope.

The night scenes are particularly resonant, mixing humour, suspense and textured visuals. This is the kind of film dream from which you feel reluctant to wake.

Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.

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.

Very light-hearted and glamorous. [09 Nov 2002, p.R24]

The Motown musicians today are in their 60s and 70s but they remain inspiringly colourful, funny in their stories and assured in their musicianship.

No doubt, there is an uncomfortable number of logos being marketed to kids in the The Lego Movie, along with the obvious one that’s in the title, but the film as a whole is very much in the spirit of Cloud Cuckooland: It’s a place where the use of X-Acto blades and Krazy Glue breaks the rules but almost everything else goes.

With the words, the coffee-table monochrome images of the aged troubadours hard at joyful labour, and the moody drone shots of the snow-covered New Jersey woods, Letter To You is an opportunity to listen to the new album at a bargain.

What really distinguishes it from the art-film crowd is that it’s also food-spittingly funny.

Ex Machina is a clever film with one indelible performance from Isaac.

A celebration of Hong Kong action cinema that mocks gravity, both emotional and physical.

Imperfect, but certainly provocative.

The screenplay by Seth Grossman and Israeli-American director Yaron Zilberman is old-fashioned and melodramatic but stirring in its portrait of people struggling with individual egos to produce something nobler than themselves.

Not just a 3-D novelty to amuse school groups, but also a memorial.

Little Fish is a small film about one family and drugs, but it succeeds in standing for a larger social catastrophe.

A high-school talent show, no doubt, but, at its best, well worth glorifying.

The 11th Green is presented in a deadpan, naïve tone of a fifties’ B-movie or a low-budget X-Files knock-off. The smeary sci-fi effects are deliberately hokey, in contrast to the authentic home movies and newsreel footage. Indeed, the sci-fi story is a kind of feint.

For all its emphasis on doomed honour and grim death, Letters from Iwo Jima is also sentimental.

George W. Bush is hammered for doubling the debt load with his high-spending, low-taxing ways.

Perhaps the movie might have made more sense if the actors could have taken each other's roles: Pitt always seems light and ageless, while Blanchett never seems to have been young.

Waitress is sweet, uneven and, ultimately, a heartbreaker.

Because the potential is extraordinary, it’s a surprise that the film, co-directed by Herzog and Andre Singer, is so conventional and enthusiastic, bordering on adoring.

Actors Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro are the kind of startlingly good-looking, glamorous stars that evoke classic Hollywood adventure films.

In a streaming universe glutted with accounts of bizarre and brutal crimes, Rosemead risks being just another example of the terrible things that people do and have done to them.

The payoff is the revitalization of Bond by making him closer to what Fleming envisaged: a sociopath who, fortunately, is on our side.

There are plot turns, double crosses and, appropriately for the online world, threats of live streaming torture and echoes of video battle games. But there’s at least a half-hour too much of it.

An unabashedly schlocky, expertly executed blend of jack-in-the-box jolts and humour.

Yes, at its best, Birdman soars, swoops and flutters with life and invention, but it parrots more than it speaks. You long for a writer as reliably, elegantly witty as Tom Stoppard, whose dramas are typically “backstage,” or if not Stoppard, at least a verbal speed-puncher like Armando Iannucci, or if not Iannucci, someone as relentlessly inventive and obsessive as Charlie Kaufman to make you feel like somebody is trying to say something, rather than a writing team filling in the intelligent-sounding words to support the boisterous performances and the virtuosic camera dance.

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.

Unclassifiable and wildly original, it is almost wordless but teeming with sound.

Reservations aside, Clemency has moments of shivering gravity. Almost all of them involve complex emotions registered in Woodard’s extraordinary face, her dignified resistance to a turmoil of emotions within her, and her agonized need for forgiveness.

Often more ingenious in appearance than fact. The hunter-gets-captured-by-the-game scenario is predictable and the sequence of shell games does not, when reconsidered, actually add up.

Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.

The trouble is that absolutely nothing about the movie feels like news.

Ultimately, your nautical mileage may vary as to whether Chandor and Redford achieve the philosophical and emotional impact they intend, but in a movie that is a demonstration of the importance of trying, they definitely try.

Plays like a sophisticated children's story.

The subject alone should ensure that it gets lots of attention from film reviewers and despite a jumpy, hodge-podge style, should be generally enjoyable to anyone interested in the seductive, contentious cultural phenomenon of The New Yorker’s famous critic.

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

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

The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd.

It feels like one long non-sequitur -- like closing a Charles Bronson film with a disco medley -- but there's an emotional consistency to Kitano's boisterous celebration of movement.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

A love letter to performers who put their egos and bodies on the line.

Plot, characterization and dialogue are merely the frame here for the real goods, an immersion into the Indonesian martial arts form known as silat.

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

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

It's also mysterious in fresh ways. Like Hillary, Yates and Simpson climbed the mountain because it was there -- but what strange deity sent down a Boney M song to help Joe Simpson get home?

Captures some of the spirit of the real Che.

The movie, with its misfit ensemble of kids, is an ‘80s throwback and a fitfully clever update on the King Arthur story.

Though Abrams doesn't possess a fraction of the visual pizzazz of the two previous MI directors, Brian De Palma or John Woo, his incarnation is, from a narrative perspective, better made.

Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

Simple but engrossing.

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

Once you get past the clinical mis-en-scène and the voyeuristic surprise, the story is the usual A Star Is Born showbiz rollercoaster of big dreams, success, and disillusionment.

Josue’s film is not consistently effective in bridging her personal story with Shepard’s well-known legacy, but there are striking moments that explore the limits of forgiveness.

There are some strong elements here.

The main takeaway here is that online abuse is not simply the ravings of twisted individuals, but often part of systematic campaigns of terror, designed to frighten and silence women in positions of influence and power.

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.

The film’s star Amy Adams balances relatable comedy with dramatic empathy. In practice though, Nightbitch fails to converge their talents, resulting in a film of interesting moments that drifts to a tepid conclusion.

For anyone who has endured a long bus journey with strangers, it will be no surprise that there was more conflict among the Americans than between them and the Egyptians

None of this adds up to a deep or compelling examination of the papacy. Think of it more like a wave from the motorcade on the way by.

You couldn’t call Coming 2 America a good movie or even a so-bad-its-good, but just puffed-up mediocre concoction with a few pockets of delight.

Smith’s musical performances in the film, which are big on power chords, anthemic hooks, and gravel-voiced melancholy, help fill some the film’s emotional weak spots. What primarily distinguishes this lowkey, unsurprising drama is a well-stocked soundtrack, courtesy of music supervisor Natasha Duprey, amounting to a survey of Canadian alt-country songs over the past three-and-a-half decades.

Unfortunately, Da 5 Bloods’ impassioned civics lesson is grafted on to a slapdash B-movie action plot.

If you want to dramatize a real-life celebrity fraud tale, you can’t settle for the superficial. Either go for psychological truth or camp it up to the level of the superduperficial. There’s not much of either quality in JT Leroy, a film that offers colourful performances by Laura Dern and Kristen Stewart but fails to find any urgency in retelling the tale of an early 2000s literary fraud.

Working from a script by Neil Forsythe, Marsh has created a superficially experimental if tame take on an artist of grim truths and dark comedy.

Fair warning: Tango Shalom is a broad comedy, with a thick coating of the sentimental lubricant known in Yiddish circles as “schmaltz.”

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.

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.

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.

At 74 minutes, the film has little time for deep character mining and ends up feeling more like a collection of uneven scenes and engaging dialogue riffs rather than a fully realized drama.

Though the emotional appeal of this story of resistance to brutal repression is genuinely moving, the documentary has limitations in both style and content.

While Chadha includes a few gritty nuggets about the psychological cost of immigration, the problems are mostly smothered in a warm jelly of sentimentality, a surfeit of stock characters and an exhausting succession of feel-good breakthroughs.

Relentlessly episodic and missing the taut focus of the first film, Peninsula compensates with overkill, populating the screen with long-stretches of CGI action (Yeon’s background is in animation) including nighttime car chases and oodles of zombie splatter.

Equal parts clever and annoying, Wes Anderson’s latest film is akin to being locked in a holding cell with a team of cellmates suffering from florid cases of logorrhea. They might be smart, but it would be a relief if they would just shut up or at least slow down occasionally.

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.

Though it can’t match the Michael Mann-level menace and poetic rapture it aspires to, the new Atlanta-set Superfly is certainly watchable. Along with its set-piece fantasies of lavishness and violence, it features a flavourful cast of drug dealers, and stars the charismatic baby-faced Trevor Jackson.

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.

If you think Little sounds like something a 10-year-old might come up with after seeing Tom Hanks’ Big, you would be entirely correct.

Drunk Bus has some pros and cons. At its best, it evokes the freewheeling style and emotional pangs of Greg Mottola’s 2009 film, Adventureland.

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.

I Blame Society barely scrapes by as midnight movie camp; it’s much better as a form of wryly witty performance art/film criticism.

Director Nadia Hallgren’s Becoming gives us a good impression of hanging out with the First Lady without really getting us past the surface, although we get some sense of her drive.

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

The film certainly does not ignore O’Connor’s attitudes and fictional treatment of race. It just doesn’t make it particularly central to her reputation.

Watching the teen romance The Sun Is Also a Star, starring the splendid-looking young couple Yara Shahidi (Blackish) and Charles Melton (Riverdale’s Reggie)), is something like wading through fields of pink candy floss and suddenly finding a speck of grit.

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.

As a character study, the film doesn’t dig much more deeply than a news magazine episode. As a study in some aspects of police culture, though, the film has a sobering message.

While all of this is too niche for wide interest, the film touches the troublesome heart of adolescent girls’ gymnastics, which is both a triumph of art and athletics and a sport riddled with a legacy of abuse. That abuse is the secondary but most interesting theme in The Golden Girl.

In essence, a 90-minute commercial for the festival, inviting audiences to come down to “the most kickass party in the world’ and “the world’s greatest backyard barbecue.”

While most romantic melodramas and rom-coms play with the idea of destiny, the bittersweet Japanese oddity Asako I & II makes it something of a central character.

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.

The Brink, director Alison Klayman’s year-long cinema verité portrait of Steve Bannon, is unlikely to change anyone’s mind about Donald Trump’s political strategist, who helped connect the candidate to white nationalists before falling out of favour.

If the Miranda musical touches are getting familiar, they’re still a lot fresher than the script here, yet another story of a pet animal on a mission and its special bond with a lonely child.

A lavish, deeply silly movie targeted at the adolescent girl market, The King’s Daughter features Pierce Brosnan as The Sun King, Louis XIV, looking like an aging glam rock star, traipsing about the Palace of Versailles in a wavy wig and pouffy sleeves.

A good-natured and well-acted small-town drama about midlife renewal, Gary Lundgren’s Phoenix, Oregon is the opposite of topical or urgent. That’s why it can be recommended as a distraction and a slice of comfort food.

This is the sort of film that will divide audiences between those who will have their hearts torn out… and those who will want to tear out their hair.

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

You won’t find much ambiguity on these subjects in the documentary Ithaka, directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s half-brother, Gabriel Shipton. Unsurprisingly, it’s totally Team Julian.

If you can unshackle the film from its creaky thriller frame, Mr. Jones is a well-intended history lesson and one-dimensional inspirational reminder of one reporter’s moral clarity in the fight against totalitarian deception.

There’s a risk of overselling a modest movie like The Rest of Us, which feels a little pat and self-congratulatory in its resolution. But it’s generous spirited and, at 80 minutes, doesn’t overstay its welcome.

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.

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.

If the film takes the “landscape as character” conceit to excess, there are also some strong performances, especially from its two leads.

Short, flashy and about as complex as a beer belch, Men in Black II is also brisk. The film clocks in at 88 minutes total running time, and it's loaded with new special effects and monsters.

Though the animation is solid and the writing reasonably clever, Over the Hedge is clearly more about packaging than freshness or substance.

There are several scenes in There's Something About Mary that are so absurdly original and outrageous they will leave audiences talking about them for weeks.

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.

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

When it comes to rude comedy, one person's caviar is another's smelly fish gunk. A case in point is Strangers With Candy.

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.

The resolution includes an overlong and underfunny chase scene.

It's a kaleidoscope of ideas that range from exciting to silly and gaudy.

When you watch Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, there's often a sense that you're not just watching him perform in a movie, you're watching the next stage of his unfolding career plan.

Though this RoboCop can’t come close to capturing the clever-silly audacity of the original, one area in which the current film easily surpasses it is in the quality of the cast.

At its best the movie is still innocent enough to slide past your guard, and inventive and lively enough to make the average Hollywood comedy seem to be on heavy tranquilizers.

Brave feels like a merely good-enough children's movie.

Grandly overblown and deeply cornball.

Silly, and unashamedly second-hand, the movie is essentially a Jack Black movie without Jack Black, which is, arguably, an improvement.

Deep Impact, a triple-strand ensemble disaster flick, has a few good opening minutes, the biggest tidal wave you've ever seen in the closing minutes, and a cluster of little meandering melodramas in between.

Parents should find the warm-and-fuzzy sentiments of the movie tolerable, mostly thanks to the reliable star, Michael Keaton. [11 Dec 1998, p.C3]

Though Sandler's resemblance to a pro athlete is indiscernible, his mockery of authority and his penchant for buffoonery and slapstick violence make him more of an heir to Reynolds than might be expected.

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.

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

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.

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

With a curiously stubborn kind of integrity, Tron: Legacy follows what did and didn't work the first time – another weak story with sub-B-movie dialogue, partly compensated for by intensely conceived geometric design and special effects.

This fluffy escape flick, directed by Ivan Reitman, is a TV sitcom plot grafted onto a travel brochure.

As with his other costume farce, "Stage Beauty" (with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes), Hatcher produces more froth than zest.

May not be the most scary or the grossest horror film you've ever seen, but it has one distinct feature: it actually talks up to the audience. By the conclusion, you won't be shaking in your seat, but you may enjoy the status of someone who has earned a Master's in Slashology.

A serviceable story served up as a large animation experience for kids.

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

The new version is mildly entertaining with some fun performances.

A better, and more relevant movie, might have left us at the point of troubled introspection, but Costner is compulsive about tying up loose ends and upbeat messages. If the climax of Open Range is disappointing, the ending is almost intolerable.

A spring-autumn romance that comes with side helpings of local colour and melodramatic backstory.

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

There are moments of salty wit to its teen TV sensibility, and the story offers proof, once again, than there are few stories that can't be adapted to the theme of teenaged popularity politics.

Tilting between a teen sex comedy and a more sensitive tale about male bonding, The Wood is too anxious to please to quite make up its mind what it is.

Flashy camera work, a clattering techno soundtrack and impressive synchronized stunt work fill where the plot goes AWOL.

It's doubtful that today's children would have any patience for the stagy 1956 version, so the current animated offering, despite its flaws, at least opens a door to the music.

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

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.

An almost really good movie...risks leaving the viewer feeling like one of the bewildered automatons that move through the plots.

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.

Ray rambles on for two hours and 40 minutes, mining repetitive episodes like a TV miniseries.

A long, ambitious, fitfully rewarding movie, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is less about the gun-toting outlaws of the 1880s than the filmmaking outlaws of the 1970s.

In its second half, the movie tips into familiar Gallic farce territory before settling for a formulaic sentimental kicker. As middling comedies go, the French approach has certain virtues. If good wine and long talks with friends can't prevent the inevitable, at least they make the waiting more tolerable.

There is little chance for the movie's talented stars, Day Lewis and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) to establish and develop their characters, beyond their set-piece declarations of love.

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.

Both actors seem too callow and shallow to actually feel all those emotional raptures they are supposedly experiencing. This is a problem exacerbated by the talent of the supporting cast.

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

With a multiracial cast, an international spy-caper flick with "Mission Impossible" and John Woo overtones, and a series of comic turns, fantasy sequences and sly humour, it should be a fresh delight. Unfortunately, it's not.

While paying lip service to the spirit of invention and adventure, the movie doesn’t do much for the evolution of children’s animated entertainment.

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.

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

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

Perhaps the harshest criticism of the new German film The Edukators is that it doesn't make you feel any better edukated.

The Butler may be a sanctimonious cartoon, but it points to events in the civil rights struggle that were as grotesque and extraordinary as any fiction can invent.

In a contest between passion and pretension, Laurence Anyways reaches a kind of draw. What holds up here isn’t Dolan’s overly decorative filmmaking, but what he gets from his performers.

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