Liam Lacey

As fresh as the female perspective is, as Skate Kitchen circles and swoops through the Manhattan twilight toward its conclusion, there is a sense of missed potential, that the film could have been much richer than it is.

With its wry tone and mild emotional disturbances, In the Land of Women is less a chick flick than a chick flicker.

In a few sound bites, we get the picture and the picture's motto: the smug and selfish coast is an order of disaster-flick toast waiting to burn.

Linklater’s film is very much its own hybrid creature. While the dramatic scaffolding is lightly drawn, it becomes apparent that Linklater has organized his material along certain themes, most notably that of the passage of time and the dream life of childhood.

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

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

Rather than invoke sympathy, the technique creates annoyance with Harris's writing: Sure, these characters may be clichés, but haven't they suffered enough?

Headhunters is slick and spritely, a mixture of corporate skullduggery and low-life slapstick that plays like "The Firm" meets "Blood Simple."

What holds all this, mostly, together to the presence of Mulligan (An Education, Shame) and her own ambiguous performance.

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.

Seabiscuit is a good enough movie, in the sense that it's a well-crafted assemblage of pathos and rousing moments, solidly acted and handsomely shot -- but it's far from champion material.

Mulan is another competent effort, but it's a disappointment for anyone hoping the studio would raise the standard of the animated feature to a new level.

Rousing? Sort of. Never before, one feels, have so few given so much for so much real estate.

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.

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

Though something less than a masterpiece, The Illusionist is a rare animated film of fleeting charms rather than loud noises, aimed more at wistful adults than thrill-hungry kids.

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.

For those who enjoyed J.J. Abrams’s frisky relaunch of Star Trek back in 2009, the good news is that the new Star Trek Into Darkness is more of the same. The bad news is that Star Trek Into Darkness is, well, a bit too familiar.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

The studio set recreation of Hong Kong’s famous Bar Street, along with the gaudily delectable costumes throughout, give Master Z a dreamy heightened artifice. More than once, the film seems on the verge of breaking into a vintage Hollywood musical.

Nicchiarelli’s film makes a case that Nico’s instability and bleakness was no pose.

A very funny, very unusual ensemble comedy that falls somewhere between slapdash and brilliant, an improvised comedy with more hits than misses. It's also an oddly touching tribute to the joys of show biz.

Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.

With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

A chamber-sized display of cinematic razzle-dazzle, and convoluted political allegory filled with gallows humour and broad polemics, Pablo Larraín’s El Conde re-imagines the Chilean dictator as the 250-year-old vampire star of a 1930s horror movie.

Isn't really a dull film so much as an oddly quaint one that seems to find a comfortable perspective about drastic circumstances.

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.

In contrast to the complex psychodrama of Nolan’s opus, A Compassionate Spy is a gentle and intimate film, largely narrated by Hall’s wife, Joan, who was 90 at the time of filming. She tells a love story.

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

Continuing directly from where 2010’s "Insidious" left off, Insidious: Chapter 2 follows the further misfortunes of the Lambert family with diminishing insidious rewards.

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

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

The problem is that the movie plays down almost everything that made Cash great: the train rumble of a voice, the direct, poetic truth of his best lyrics, the invention of his outlaw image and his constant creativity.

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

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 movie is unexpectedly disciplined and enjoyable.

Still Alice is being called a career performance for Moore, and although it may be one of her most poignant roles (it has earned her a fifth Oscar nomination), the part barely scratches the surface of her ability.

Simple but engrossing.

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

The deliberate pacing, cinematographer Tómas Örn Tómasson's images reminding of the vulnerable human scale against the landscape and the skeletal narrative, bringing a refreshing purity to a classic predicament.

Compared to many of last year's documentaries (Pina, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Cave of Forgotten Dreams or The Interrupters), this film is distinctly minor league. But it does provide the thumbs-up emotional lift of a bumper-sticker message on game day.

If you had to be an alcoholic, you'd want to be like Kate, the young drunk played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the new movie Smashed.

As a thriller, it's only fitfully suspenseful, and despite the ticking bomb premise, meanders a good deal in its plot convolutions. As a portrait of the absurdity and humiliation of life under occupation, the story is heartfelt but predictable.

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.

Tuned in to the anarchic wisecracks and slapstick humour of traditional Warner Bros. cartoons. In contrast to the computer-generated characters and slick script of a movie like "Shrek," Lilo and Stitch still feels like a cartoon aimed at kids, not their parents.

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.

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

A movie about a robot policeman given a childlike conscience, Chappie is one of those incongruous Franken-films that’s simultaneously bombastically brutal and treacly. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial crossed with Transformers, or RoboCop starring Jar Jar Binks, it’s a recipe guaranteed to produce aesthetic indigestion.

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.

A movie that feels a bit like digging a hole in the ground -- an exercise that may build character but doesn't seem to accomplish much else.

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

The focus of Invictus is less on Mandela's psychology than his willpower and political astuteness.

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

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.

Mostly, it's a Coen brothers movie so slick, so careful in rationing its darkly perverse and personal elements, that it seems suspiciously sweet. Intolerable Cruelty feels like the Coens' peculiar new way of being cynical, by pretending they're not.

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

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

The film extends Jackie's fame beyond her allotted New York 15 minutes and keeps it alive 30 years later, thanks to a mixture of fond high-profile interviews and grainy archival clips.

There’s one illuminating segment in Alexis Bloom’s documentary, Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes, which might have made a fascinating stand-alone short doc.

In a series of mini-rants with insights that range from the ho-hum to the profound, the sixtysomething Žižek, paunchy, bearded and bobbing his hands like a squirrel’s paws, rummages through what he calls the trash can of ideology.

Plays precariously close to an unfunny sociopathic case study.

You probably have a better chance of stuffing an octopus into a tea cup than capturing one of Dickens's fat novels in a two-hour movie.

The problems with The United States vs Billie Holiday aren’t about Day’s creditable performance, but pretty much everything that happens around it. That includes Pulitzer-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’ time-hopping, confusing script and Daniels’ direction, which is both feverishly pulpy and stilted and laden.

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.

As a leading feminist voice in post-War German cinema, Von Trotta’s devotion to Bergman, the archetypal self-absorbed male genius, seems unfashionably but refreshingly forgiving.

Mamet's stylized dialogue, elaborate plot puzzles and the angry cleverness of his characterization makes for an invigorating, if not exactly likeable, mix.

The lack of clear identification of interview subjects and amorphous shape of the film can be frustrating. A segment on the history of book-burning, for example, feels gratuitous but, for the record, everyone in the film is against it.

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

There’s enough of Austen’s generous social vision and her character-revealing dialogue to make this watchable but Emma. takes a long time to connect emotionally.

The characters in Wonderland show an intelligent complexity and sharpness of contemporary observation that transcends romantic-comedy clichés.

Feels like a missed opportunity to do a country romantic melodrama in grand style.

Less an adaptation of its source material than a therapeutic response to it.

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]

No doubt, Blood Brother is narrowly focused on Braat’s needs and evolution, but in contrast to social-issue films filled with talking-head experts and bullet-point graphs, this is a portrait of a caregiver that goes to the core of motivation – in this case, the need to share love.

A sprawling prison drama that seeks, by turns, to endear itself and then traumatize its audience.

The first half is exhilarating, and the rest is a tolerably honourable surrender to Hollywood conventions.

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.

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

There's an easy familiarity and charm in the creased, middle-aged faces of Nimoy, Shatner and DeForest Kelly (the perpetually irascible Dr. McCoy), all of whom now play their parts with an ever-present twinkle. Their behavior rarely has anything to do with the motives provided by the plot; rather, they wear their characters like old habits, as they boldly go where they've always gone before. [26 Nov. 1986, p.C5]

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.

That the movie also inspires more wholesome feelings is entirely thanks to Ferreira (Euphoria), whose character communicates enough warmth, energy and emotional fragility to make even a doubtful curmudgeon soften a little.

Almost everyone is scum. The venality spreads from the slums or favelas, up the ranks of local militias, crooked police and pandering politicians.

Standing back a step from A Walk on the Moon's dippy charms, the movie delivers less than it initially promises.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

Not much happens in Drinking Buddies, which, frankly, is refreshing.

Dogman is essentially one long, twisted fuse burning toward an inevitable explosion. If the results are too conspicuously manipulated to feel cathartic, there’s no denying a certain dark poetry to this old-fashioned film with its whiplash of modern violence and bitter futility.

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.

The reward of the film is watching these two consummate performers playing off each other. Moore is characteristically empathetic and sincere. Swinton, by contrast, is enigmatic and controlling as they wrestle with their different agendas and find mutual consolation in their friendship.

Subtly crafted and compelling, but it suffers from a case of split personality.

The ironic, cheery-bland tone, the two-dimensional characters and episodic structure, say "comedy," while the events in the script say "bipolar depression."

All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings.

Thomas von Steinaecker’s documentary, Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, offers an enjoyable, if fairly light portrait of the German filmmaker and survey of his 60-plus year career.

Both Rudd and Segel have splendid comic timing and their improvised scenes leap out from the script.

As a film about intellectuals, The Barbarian Invasions can sometimes seem maddeningly scattered and contradictory.

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

Like the Irish film "Once," it’s a drama about the lives of musical performers who sing songs within the film to illustrate the emotional journey of a relationship. Broken Circle, though, is painted in much darker hues.

Who really wants to go to an escape movie and have to work this hard to figure it out?

The subject may be glum but there is something consistently pleasurable about Mouthpiece, a film that is both audacious in execution and relatable, even for those of us who don't live in women's bodies.

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.

Perhaps the most regrettable crime here is the way that Mann, trying to do too much, robs himself of a great opportunity. Here was a chance to capture the drama of the Thirties.

The best thing about the movie is the performance of Stephen Fry, who makes you hope that the real Wilde was like him. [05 Jun 1998, p.C5]

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.

An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption.

With her high forehead, pale eyebrows and solemn face, Stiles could have understudied Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth -- another dignified smart girl surrounded by conniving idiots.

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.

A movie that is often as awkward and as filled with mixed impulses as the age it documents.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

A light, slight, wry look at the beautiful and besotted, which gets away with not having much to say, thanks to its charm and excessive good looks.

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.

Perhaps the film's biggest weakness is that all the characters are so naive and petty you can't really work up much fervour about who sleeps with whom. That would never be a question in a movie like "Casablanca."

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.

Wong returns once more to what he seems to know best - the visual poetry of the urban Asian night, a world of characters on the move, coming and going, never really getting anywhere. [5 Dec 1997]

Deft in its playful mockery of the broad acting and absurd plot twists of the soap genre, it somehow maintains a genial tone, despite references to terrorism, war, and daily humiliations of the occupation.

The movie meanders on and on, like a bad sexual dream, until you finally wake up mumbling: Stella, please: leave that groove thang alone.

One of the most original, and certainly among the best-acted films this year, 21 Grams focuses on people on the verge of dying, having survived death or grasping at the slender threads of new lives.

The most unexpected thing about the Lebanese film Caramel is its predictability.

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.

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.

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.

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

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.

Carlos López Estrada, who directed 2018’s Oakland-set Blindspotting, developed this original “spoken word musical” from the work of young Los Angelean poets into a sort of contemporary version of Fame.

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

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.

This is the reliable raunch-plus-sweetness comic formula that goes back through the Farrelly brothers, Adam Sandler's comedies, "Revenge of the Nerds," "Porky's" and "Animal House."

Though Babel lacks any tragic sense of inevitability, it almost compensates with a handful of vibrant performances and the palpable physical texture of the settings.

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

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

You'll laugh, though you might hate yourself in the morning.

Well-spoken but humorously self-deprecating, Berg admits that, between the hours spent writing, rehearsing and performing, she spends more of her life as Molly than she does as herself.

For all its ballyhoo'd full access to Vogue's inner workings, the movie's cinéma-vérité approach feels perilously close to advertorial.

By turns raw, naturalistic and indebted to John Cassavetes, both stylistically and thematically.

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

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.

Alps, in spite of its title, is a very flat film, from the shallow focus photography, to the actors' monotone delivery.

More care for pacing and character development, and less focus on moment-by-moment wow-factor, would have made a less strenuous film. Still, the sheer exuberance and skill of the visual design and performances are uplifting.

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.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

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.

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

She Paradise, which runs a brief 71 minutes, is raw in more than one sense. The characters are thinly developed, and the dance sequences, as robust as they are, could be more dynamically shot. On the plus side, Nestor — with her watchful quiet manner — is persuasive as a young woman awkwardly finding her way, and the other women are forceful presence.

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 problem is, the last section of the movie doesn't follow the career path of Greene: It traces the blander character of Hughes. Cheadle, who galvanizes the first half of the film, fades from view, and the best part of the conversation in Talk to Me goes with him.

The complicated part of Huda’s Salon, and the riskiest in terms of holding the audience, is that this is actually the story of two women: Not just Reem, but that of the salon keeper, Huda.

The film is a vertiginous experience of hanging 350 kilometres above the Earth.

Live Flesh is an often surprising assemblage of attractive parts that never seems to earn a full emotional response. [06 feb 1998]

A try-anything, fitfully amusing muddle that wears its mocking cynicism a bit too proudly.

The more compelling performance comes from Watts as Valerie.

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.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

Moderately witty children's entertainment.

English director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), takes the approach that movies have been far too reticent. His new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is as vibrant as a cluttered wall of graffiti, jumpy enough to risk retina damage.

For the old fans, there are a few splashes of Moore’s caustic levity.

A beautifully shot, modest little fable about the misunderstandings between people.

Among the lessons that Monsieur Ibrahim conveys to Moses, and the most appealing aspect of the film, is to delight in sensual pleasure.

A thinly plotted, amateurishly acted, cartoonishly violent and hugely entertaining array of jaw-dropping stunts and corny slapstick.

The Harder They Fall aims for, and mostly hits the target, with a double-barreled blast of entertainment and historical reclamation.

Superficial but giddily entertaining backstage documentary.

In the current moment, with our wary physical distancing and awkward artificial socializing, Family Romance LLC’s gaze into the uncanny valley absolutely chimes with the times.

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.

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.

The effect of so much pretension and so many lovely images eventually becomes soporific.

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]

Ezra Miller's sneering, absurdly precocious evil-child performance makes him just another bad-seed horror villain.

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

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

The terror sequences (not only animals but monsoons and earthquakes and quicksand) are scary until they get monotonous: after a while, you have a sense you're watching a clip reel from every Hollywood disaster flick ever made.

Character development and plotting are rudimentary, though the tongue-in-cheek never gets dislodged while the body count rises.

Granted a rare degree of access to reporters, and later to the Minister of Health, Collective is a tribute to people who work together to uncover the truth, even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.

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.

It's not exactly radiant, but at least the movie's a little bit humble.

Although it’s not a life-affirming or audience-flattering parable, the drama feels refreshingly raw and adult.

The End of the Line's most topical hook is its exploration of bluefin tuna, which, as a sushi delicacy, is sometimes called the "most expensive meat on the planet."

The result is a beautifully designed, lyrical fable of a movie, full of God's-eye shots from on high, placing the characters against the Italian scenery and medieval architecture.

The problems with Damon's character are the problem with the movie: It's about plot mechanics, not heart and soul.

Director Halpern has described her film as a cautionary tale about the pursuit of excellence. And if Love, Charlie isn’t really that, it’s still a lively character study. What’s most interesting here is the glimpses of insight into Trotter’s unusual mind.

At best, it shows how intense sexual attraction can be a form of temporary insanity.

Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.

Land Ho! is both loose (shot over 18 days, with an improv quality to the acting) and overcalculated in its series of encounters, small revelations and life-affirming beats. The movie is pleasant and mostly forgettable, except for the character of Mitch.

If you were never interested in medieval Danish history, it’s unlikely that director Charlotte Sieling’s historical drama, Margrete: Queen of the North, will change your mind. Still, there are rewards to be found in this lavishly produced and well-acted costume drama, led by Danish actress Trine Dyrholm.

Fans of cynically funny children's entertainment in the vein of Roald Dahl or Lemony Snicket’s Daniel Handler should glean some fun out of the new Netflix animated movie, The Willoughbys, an energetic and semi-imaginative comedy about an appalling family.

Like "Little Miss Sunshine," the movie stars Toni Collette and Steve Carell in a story about a dysfunctional family trip, though like "Adventureland," it’s really about a teenager finding acceptance at a local theme park.

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

Welsh director Euros Lyn’s reality-based steeple-chasing feature Dream Horse never deviates far from the expected course. But its off-kilter humour and an ace cast, led by the ever-credible Toni Collette, brings some fresh colours to this unabashed crowd pleaser.

Though the threat of exposure and incarceration lurk behind every story, the characters' ingenuity and humour serve as impudent alternatives to authoritarian stupidity and brutality.

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.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Fittingly, it’s finally a film about transience and continuity.

An odd and irresistible documentary.

In the end, there’s insufficient emotional pay-off or psychological insight here to justify the credibility-defying tricks and narrative convolutions. But the kid is adorable and Exarchopoulos, as the hot and cold Joanne, is believable at every moment, in a film more attuned to mood and sensation than literal meaning.

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.

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

What's before our eyes suggests we share the planet with some amazingly strange beings.

No political tract, but it can be surprisingly bold.

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

Rogen’s always a dominating presence, but the doll-like Australian actress, who showed her comic chops in "Bridesmaids," comes close to stealing the movie here, in an uncorked performance full of volatile, liberating mischief.

Though it comes with good credentials, four hours feels like a lot of screen real estate for a what is essentially an elevated soap opera. For the home-streaming viewer though, The Real Thing meets the essential requirements for binge-watching: it’s undemanding to follow but sustains enough of a mystery to keep us hooked.

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

Rustin is not about the man who had a dream in front of the roaring throngs, but the man standing behind him who gave King the stage. It’s a pleasure to get to know him.

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.

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

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

Very charming but very slight.

Both original and good; the problem is the original parts aren't good and the good parts aren't original.

Edge of Seventeen is a gentle American coming-out and coming-of-age story set in 1984 in Sadusky, Ohio, and suffers slightly from a sugary after-school-special approach to its subject matter. [02 Jul 1999, p.C5]

Death, torture, humour and even budding eroticism -- now this is more like it.

Like his characters, Lin may be an overachiever and the strain of trying to do too much shows. He merges genres the way Ben juggles extracurricular activities.

Though not a deep musical dive and offering little new to Wilson’s well-documented and extreme biography, Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road is an welcome chance to spend time in the company of pop music genius. And it’s a reminder how surprisingly simple geniuses can be.

Serving as his own director of photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, Soderbergh picks his angles artfully and allows Carano to demonstrate her arsenal of acrobatic fighting tricks in extended, no-cheating single takes.

Yet, about as often as Marvin's Room strikes a chord of emotional authenticity, it hits a fistful of false notes as well.

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.

Truth be told, the full 99-minute movie does not entirely hold water; it feels like three or four good episodes connected with plot padding. Aesop probably wasn't too hot at long-form fiction, either.

The best sequence is a five-minute set-piece where Clouseau struggles with an accent coach to learn how to order a hamburger like an American.

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.

Wryly funny, and just a little more complicated than its familiar indie film tropes suggest, the dramedy Shortcomings marks the directorial debut of comic actor Randall Park (Fresh of the Boat, Blockbuster, The Interview).

As it dips in and out of the boys' lives, and occasionally wanders back to the contemporary Dito surveying the old neighbourhood, Saints never really integrates its two time periods.

The best one can say is that it's a smart cartoon, and a fairly exhausting viewing experience.

As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

Braff's deadpan performance and dry reactions are deft, and his ability to shape a scene to a punctuation point is impressive, but he's all over the place as a writer.

Like the blues, you feel it first, and think of the meaning later.

The triumph of a film like Upgrade, an unapologetic B-movie, is that it aims low and exceeds expectations.

One disappointment here is that Patricia Clarkson, the queen of indie film, is missing much of her usual spark. Her performance may be aiming for sensual, but too often it comes across more as listless.

Not super, but not bad, the teen comedy, Superbad, is another comic dance across the hormonal minefield of late high school.

Zathura involves a lot of yelling, a lot of explosions and a lot of flying objects -- but what else would you expect from a movie that is, honestly for a change, intended for 10-year-old boys?

A feisty domestic comedy about a curmudgeon with a heart, looking back over his misspent life.

Sometimes, the script is very funny; always, it tries too hard to please; and it never lets you forget that it has been calculated down to a smirk and a teardrop.

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

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

Without either the effect of a full concert spectacle, or up close and personal backstage intimacy, This Is It is neither one thing nor the other.

Throughout, Dorff is doggedly credible as an obtuse actor, but the richer performance here is from Fanning, and it might have been a stronger movie told from her character's point of view.

Sweetheart, a coming-of-age first feature from Marley Morrison, has a cozy familiarity to it.

What can you say about a film the comic high point of which is Dan Aykroyd standing half-naked in a bathroom while extracting hairs from his nostrils with manicure scissors? For starters you can say it's bad, as bad as a film can be that looks to National Lampoon's Vacation for creative inspiration. [17 June 1988]

Since there's no evidence in the film that Green teaches his students how to compose, improvise or experiment with the music, presumably the next wave will come from somewhere else.

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.

A typical mixture of the artful and the repellent.

Apart from a few eye-roll moments, Giant Little Ones is redeemed from coming across like a progressive after-school special by the authenticity of performances, particularly of the young actors and a refreshing open-endedness about the fluidity of sexual behaviour.

It borders on deification. Yet Tupac: Resurrection is still a strong film, with some genuinely revealing insights into the life of its charismatic and paradoxical subject.

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

A trite but sturdy offering, a showcase for popular young Czech actress Anna Geislerova, as well as the beautiful Moravian countryside, shot in glowing earthy tones.

Kasparov is a compelling film subject: suave, sardonic and as emotionally high-pitched as he is intellectually gifted.

Apart from its star, though, Emma may be the least convincing Austen adaptation so far.

Whedon can’t quite work the same miracle twice. Age of Ultron also bears the familiar stretch marks characteristic of middle movies in franchise series.

This intimate portrait of the so-called godmother of punk is aimed at viewers who are keenly fascinated by Smith.

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.

Lohan, in her third lead role in a year, is a good reactive young actress, and London, Ont., native Rachel McAdams is excellently evil, a dose of poison in a pretty lacquered container.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

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

Brainless, but enjoyably over-the-top, the retro gang melodrama, Deuces Wild represents fifties teen-gang machismo in a way that borders on rough-trade homo-eroticism.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. is unabashed advocacy filmmaking. In spite of improved mortality rates and scientific advances, few women in the film will acknowledge that pink-ribbon-financed research has done any good at all.

After the success of Ryan Coogler-directed Creed, an inventive series reboot, Creed II is a familiar disappointment though the "familiar" part will probably outweigh the disappointing part for audiences who enjoy the films as adult bedtime stories.

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

Writer-director David Koepp shows a talent for presenting neat sequences, but they fail to come together in a satisfying whole. [30 Aug 1996, p.C9]

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

Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject.

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

What becomes increasingly apparent is that Gordon-Levitt hasn’t exactly decided what Jon’s problem is, in a character that seems partly an expression of male wish fulfilment.

Conventional and erratic in tone as The Eye is, the film has some real visual (and auditory) style going for it.

Energetic, eager-to-please culture-clash comedy.

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

For audiences tired of summer sequels that grind through the familiar motions, Stardust provides a dizzying antidote.

May be anticorporate, it's by no means hype-free.

Gossamer thin in the plotting but playful and gorgeous to look at, it’s a warm message of midlife liberation.

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.

If the movie is essentially a study of a loving family, A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries is hampered by extraneous scenes that are simply self-indulgent on the director's part.

Sensual and scary, the movie is so visually textured you feel as though you're brushing against the screen.

The best of The Desolation of Smaug is saved for the last, when Bilbo goes to steal from the massive fire-breathing dragon, Smaug. The orange-eyed beast is voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, who, through a sludge of voice-altering electronics, seethes and preens between fiery exhalations; this scene is one of the few occasions in the film where anyone actually takes time to talk.

Low on nuance and high on body count, the movie is primarily of interest to fans of Asian action spectacles and followers of the charismatic Chow Yun-fat (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), here cast as both a dandyish villain and his idiotic double.

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.

George Huang's Swimming With Sharks purports to give us the goods on the big bad egos who run Hollywood, but it lacks both credibility and coherence. [06 May 1995]

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.

It’s a film that has some obvious parallels to Howard’s Apollo 13, a docudrama about a small group of endangered people in a claustrophobic space, with worldwide media attention on a rescue effort and a happy ending, thanks to technological ingenuity, courage, and collective effort.

For such a mush-ball teen movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants carries a welcome amount of grown-up emotional truth.

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.

Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.

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.

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.

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.

After its promising opening, I Am Legend devolves into a generic zombie slaughterfest.

Short on wrenching passion, but never less than competent, Les Misérables is merely passable. It might have been titled Les Compétents. [01 May 1998, p.C4]

In a movie world where every new release promises to be something you've never seen before, Twilight of the Ice Nymphs succeeds in being genuinely different -- even if you can't quite figure out exactly what it's supposed to be. [26 Sep 1997, p.E3]

As an ersatz arthouse pastiche, Tigertail is crafted with care. Nigel Buck’s cinematography effectively registers the different time periods and locations, and Michael Brooks’ plaintive score balances Pin-Jui’s taciturnity. On the negative side, the film’s hopscotching flashbacks can be confusing and there’s a lot of stylistic spin for what amounts to a prosaic family drama.

Billed misleadingly as a “romantic thriller,” the film is neither romantic nor especially thrilling. The characters are enigmatic to the point of superficiality, the relationships largely transactional, and the action toggles between languid and frazzled over two-and-a-quarter-hours. But with some reflective distance, away from the snap judgment of festivals, Stars at Noon proves a pretty interesting film, if a sometimes confusing one.

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.

Walks a line between didactic allegory and realistic drama.

Only a few events happen in this minimalist film, and most of them keep getting repeated through most of its running time.

On the downside, Rosebraugh’s own film is too self-righteous and his attempts to play a humour-challenged, lightweight version of Michael Moore in front of the camera is a misfire. The climate-change deniers are comforting, though obviously wrong. Greedy Lying Bastards is grating, even if it’s right.

All of this unfolds with such predictability, the title might as well be The Great Foregone Conclusion.

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.