Liam Lacey

Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect.

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

For a movie aimed at children, Shark Boy and Lava Girl is gloomy.

Actress Kristen Stewart – coolly intense, androgynous, and intelligent – remains the series' strongest asset, as Bela, the emotional centre of the story.

Formula action films don’t come much more formulaic that this.

With its glum litany of naked corpses and mutilations, and understated actors looking bluish under the morgue's fluorescent lights, Nightwatch drains the fun out of horror. [17 Apr 1998]

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

Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.

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

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.

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

Notable for its enthusiastic abandonment of any semblance of narrative coherence.

Anyone considering a movie called American Sausage Standoff (a.k.a. Gutterbee) should expect an odd comedy, though they might not expect one quite as eccentric as this Western by Danish actor-turned-director Ulrich Thomsen.

Eccentric and misguided enough to be almost perversely fascinating, the film doesn’t lack nerve; it’s just not very good.

Director Irwin Winkler (Night and the City)is rarely better than pedestrian in handling this story. At worst, the dramatic elements are plain clumsy.

The Last Days' major flaw, perhaps, is its conventionality: It takes us over the same horrific ground in the usual way. The shock is familiar. [26 Mar 1999, p.C6]

To be very generous toward the filmmakers' intentions, Beowulf & Grendel might be seen as a misguided attempt to lend some modern nuance to a traditional tale of good and emphatic evil. But why pussyfoot? The movie is a lumbering and ludicrous mess.

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

The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.

Breezy, sleazy and a little bit wheezy, The Big Bounce combines a short running time, a portrait of island-life corruption, and a retro surf-and-scam plot. Throw in a vintage, funky-soul soundtrack and you have the ingredients of ever so many bad television shows.

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]

Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.

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

None of this is helped by Platt’s performance, with a petulant eye-roll to every impediment, as if he were the fussbudget Felix of The Odd Couple and Cindy his disaster-prone Oscar.

There is not really anything that could be called suspense in Amityville 3-D, at least, any more than the suspense involved in waiting for a pop tart to pop. [22 Nov 1983]

An Eddie Murphy comedy that's actually endearing.

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

The trouble starts with the script, which wobbles between an investigative thriller and a psychological study.

A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.

Clocking in at a brisk 88 minutes, Coffee & Kareem doesn't provide much comic relief, though it is a relief when it's over.

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

A bland, workaday detective flick that should have been much better than it is.

It’s less startling than it was when the first Sin City was released in 2005, maybe even quaint, like a black-light Jimi Hendrix poster from the ’60s.

Throughout, Terence Blanchard's score swells and sweeps, reminding us, at every moment, what we're supposed to feel. If only we knew what we were supposed to think of this trite mess.

The plot creaks along reasonably effectively and Sellers' solo sequences - the disguises, the pratfalls and the speech mannerisms - are familiar, but fun. [18 Dec 1982]

One of those comedies that is more peculiar than actually funny.

It doesn't take a foolish romantic to hope that Myles and Elisabeth live happily ever after. The world just isn't ready for 20 More Dates.

As a message movie, it's preachy without being serious; for an action movie, there's a lot of racket but not much fun.

Though there are a few annoying moments when the actors get in the way of the scenery, mostly it succeeds.

The cast is so oddly interesting you wish you could see them doing something less wasteful

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.

Every stage of the race and chase is announced on a webcast conducted by the secret impresario of the illegal De Leon race, a billionaire car enthusiast known as the Monarch, who “nobody knows.” Actually, the Monarch is clearly visible in a corner of the computer screen and he’s played, with jive-spouting brio by Michael Keaton. Hey, the movie isn’t called Need for Logic.

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

The less you know about Shakespeare, the more you're likely to enjoy Anonymous.

Redford hasn't moved too far here from an earlier political-thriller template: With its skulduggery, late-night meetings and the contemptuous political cabal out to thwart justice, The Conspirator can be thought of as "All the President's Men – The Lincoln Edition."

Each of the actors has strong moments but the relentless intensity becomes monotonous.

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.

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

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

None of it rings true, except perhaps the presence of an ambitious local TV news reporter (Kyra Sedgwick) who begins recording every macabre moment with relish.

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

The movie is a freakish creature, with lush, painterly animation inspired by Dutch and Flemish masters, attached to a convoluted, gloomy narrative punctuated with scenes of sadism that rival "The Dark Knight."

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

Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.

As the film progresses, the idea of using a school shooting as a subject for a thriller feels deeply ill-conceived, undermining the gravity of the subject it attempts to address.

The trouble is that Antichrist feels progressively symptomatic of a director losing heart.

The movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.

Sincere performances and the beautiful gold-and-grey Donegal landscape can only go so far in A Shine of Rainbows, a family film that risks drowning in its own syrup.

For all the talent involved, The Eye of the Storm is an incident-stuffed but lacklustre affair – a case of lots of sturm, but not enough drang – that reaches for a satiric sting and emotional depth it never achieves.

There’s a fine line sometimes, as "This is Spinal Tap" reminded us, between stupid and clever. Now You See Me wobbles along that tightrope for much of its running time.

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.

Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.

All of this is accomplished with buckets of blood, but almost no sense of flesh: It's hard to recall a more sexless vampire flick.

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

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

As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.

Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable, a shopworn gothic plot focusing on stereotypical characters with disabilities, with no ambitions beyond playing a simple-minded audience head game.

The updated Dickensian sensibility of writer Craig Bartlett's story is appealing.

All in all, the new movie version of Leave It To Beaver is faithful to the genial instructive spirit of the TV show, as well as to a recurring theme, Ward's constant adjustments to the Beav's underachieving ways. [22 Aug 1997, p.C5]

There's an audience for this sort of rude and rough comedy, though it might consist mostly of guys who wear raincoats a lot and prefer their women on glossy paper with staples. [13 Jun 1998, p.C3]

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

If this were a pilot for a TV series, home audiences might be willing to baby it along until it grows stronger. As a stand-alone movie, this particular mutation looks like a badly-adapted dead-end.

The whole thing has all the spontaneity of high-school morning announcements.

Audiences can watch any number of similarly talented comics on late-night television or, even better, get close to the action at a downtown comedy club.

By the conclusion, the movie turns into the ursine answer to "Free Willy," veering dangerously close to New Age parody: Free your inner bear -- and begin to heal from the last time you got mauled.

The Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.

A little less fascination with computer tricks, and a little more application of human intelligence could have done The Arrival a world of good. [31 May 1996]

Once again Anna Faris manages to be the best thing in another not very good Anna Faris movie.

Full of post-hippie fatalism and cynical macho barroom existentialism, the original film feels very much of its era, and the remake anachronistic.

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.

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

Alig's superficiality seems to have been his only talent. His banality is a problem that the film can't overcome.

For most of its duration, Suicide Kings turns into something like a hoary murder-mystery theatre piece in the Agatha Christie/Clue tradition.

Director Sarin plays around a little with the candy-coloured palette, with lots of quick snapshots and backdrops (shot in Montreal and Mexico), giving the film a sort of photoplay episodic structure. But there’s little dramatic build-up.

Relentlessly twee as all this is, Wasikowska's warmth and Hopper's off-beat timing (he's the son of the late Dennis Hopper) are appealing to watch.

Despite its grand-sounding title, The Fall of the American Empire is another trifle, a familiar harangue against human perfidy wrapped in a creaky farce.

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

Vardalos has a talent, and there is one sequence in the movie that works. In the romantic subplot, Connie falls for Peaches' brother Jeff (David Duchovny, as Vardalos's sleepy, hunk replacement for John Corbett in Greek Wedding).

Waters's rude, lewd and occasionally nude extended skit takes a simple idea and beats it limp.

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

The old carnival phrase "Close, but no cigar" comes to mind when watching The Brothers Bloom , a globetrotting heist film that starts off terrifically and then progressively deflates.

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.

For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.

Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

The differences between the two movies are, first, that Scoop is a comedy and, second, unlike "Match Point," it's not very good, as Allen also returns to pre-Match Point mediocre form.

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

With its jazzy saxophone noodlings during the opening credits and its bruised black-and-blue look, it's so quaintly and conventionally pulp that you feel like filing a report with the cliché police.

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

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.

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

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.

Feels stale, bloated and willing to get by on sheer familiarity.

All this holding back is a bad idea, especially as the subject of an entire movie.

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

Writer Andy Breckman and director Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinnie ) don't even try to recapture or eclipse the past. Instead, they offer the movie a comfortable plug-in-and-play system for their well-known comic stars to be all that they can be. [29 Mar 1996]

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

This might be tolerable if Nair hadn't missed the central point, that Becky Sharp isn't sharp like spice, she's sharp like a razor.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this greatest-hits patchwork approach or the correct racially diverse, girl-power script from Ashleigh Powell. There’s also nothing new or necessary about this jumbled, pretty mess of a movie, which barely covers the seams between its varied pilferings.

A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.

Apparently intended as a gateway movie for future horror movie fans, Annabelle Comes Home is a sex-and-death-free haunted-house tale about adventures in demonic baby-sitting.

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

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.

A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.

All in all, it’s many prayers short of a revelation.

Quaid and Whitaker, who serve more or less as the designated humans in this clockwork contraption of a film, are capable in corny roles, but otherwise Vantage Point is as stuffed with cardboard performances and expositional speeches as any seventies disaster flick.

The narrative of Lonesome Jim pokes about aimlessly, trying to mine nuggets of amusement.

Awkward in ways both intended and not, the fourth feature from author and director Rebecca Miller is an attempt at a comic change of pace for the usually earnest Miller.

The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"

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

Thanks for Sharing might best be described as being like Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, "Shame," if it were rewritten by Neil Simon at his most schmaltzy.

The premise feels so quaint it might as well be framed by Cinderella-like animated bluebirds.

The shipwreck comes too late to rescue movie from endless banalities. [02 Feb 1996]

There's plenty here to keep summer comedy fans satiated, if not entirely satisfied.

Possibly, Eat Wheaties! will age well, but at this point, there’s more cringe than comedy here. The character of Sid isn’t just endearingly awkward or amusingly fatuous, like Steve Carell’s Michael Scott in The Office. He’s just thickly insensitive.

It might better be titled The Awkward.

Though it is shaped as a woman-in-peril thriller about obsession, Cherish is about being winningly kooky, not violently insane.

Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad.

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

Feels like a period film in clumsy modern-day dressup.

With seemingly twice as much action, a whole new complex of villainy, competing Iron Man suits, robots and love interests, Iron Man 2 sequel cashes in hard on the unexpected success of the first Iron Man from 2007 and somehow loses much of its soul in the process.

Rarely have I seen a movie which made me feel more skeptically Canadian. Please -- it's not true that you can do anything. Stop trying. You might make things worse.

The script's attempt to splice together a fumbling love story with a portrait of toxic personality disorder feels incongruous, like a serving of porridge flambé au whisky.

The movie that can contain McKinnon, or the movie where she’s willing to be contained, has yet to be made.

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

Big Fat Liar becomes a progression of increasingly elaborate slapstick stunts, in the brutal, noisy "Home Alone" vein, in which the complexity of the pranks rarely yields a commensurate comic reward.

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

Though much of it is glum and muddled, it does find an anchor in Hugo Weaving (Lord of the Rings, The Matrix) as a gravely wise, ailing crime boss named Duke.

Sporadically funny, twisted for sure, it risks becoming as repetitive and shrill as the kinds of programs it satirizes.

Otherwise, Brody, Scott and Jenifer Lewis (as Montana’s imperious oft-married mom) give this formulaic material maximum comic spin.

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

Reiner’s attempt to create Spotlight-like docudrama of newsroom courage and stoke fresh outrage about government lies is undermined by clunky old-fashioned filmmaking and Joey Harstone’s exposition-clotted script.

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

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

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

You may want to see Capone — a film so stylized and perverse it makes Todd Phillips’ Joker look like Downton Abby — but not for insight or amusement.

Makin has a knack for comic jolts, and, apparently, little interest in the longer narrative arc that movies, no matter how unorthodox, require. [13 Apr 1996]

Bedtime Stories does divide into two types of comedy: There's the story comedy, in which Skeeter dresses in costume when he performs slapstick and insults people, and then there are the real-life scenes, when he does the same things in regular clothes.

A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.

The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

Mangold's larger problem is trying to hold together a movie that jerks about in tone as much as it does location, veering between grisly humour and cutesy sentiments.

Marks the emergence of a talented young actress. Not Britney -- who has the amateur's tendency to stand looking awkward after delivering her lines -- but Manning (Crazy/Beautiful), who plays Mimi with the gusto of a young Holly Hunter. Though she has little competition here, when she's on the screen she pretty much owns it.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is not the heart-warming, life-affirming, feel-good hit of the summer. Let Pocahantas and Casper provide the hugs and lessons. The Power Rangers, as usual, are on hand to kick intergalactic butt. [30 June 1995]

Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

The result is that, rather than tragedy, this unfolds like a plodding morality tale in which Wrath and Cowardice play out their respective parts.

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

Big, lavish and dumb as camel spit -- is proof that sometimes it's better to let sleeping genres lie.

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

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

Running Scared's relationship to "The Cooler" is roughly that of industrial metal to a quaint torch song.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

After the first hour or so of strained puns and wisecracks, you start feeling that the sooner the ending comes, the happier it will be.

Audiences looking for a so-bad-its-good bit of kitsch catharsis will likely be let down. The Meh – sorry, The Meg – is so calculatedly flattened out for international markets, especially its Chinese financiers, that even the dialogue feels as though it’s in translation.

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

Hereafter is unpredictable enough to be consistently watchable.

It tries too hard too early.

A paint-by-numbers vigilante movie with the usual rogue cop, murdered wife and trail of vengeance.

Seems overstuffed and, in its own way, preachy.

Love Ranch bounces between tongue-in-cheek wackiness and soapy melodrama while rarely hitting a true note.

As for De Niro, he seems to have licence to do what he wants here, without much help from the writers.

Plays out like a 1950s B-movie with a fat special-effects budget. Brain-numbing dialogue, incoherent action and glaring improbabilities aside, it's a bearable combination of sci-fi paranoia and historical fantasy that drags modern viewers, and the robotic hero of "The Fast and the Furious" movies, Paul Walker, back to the centre of the Hundred Years War.

Exuberantly campy.

Though competent in its B-movie way, Terminator Salvation lacks the humour, heart-tugging moments and visual pleasure that made the first two movies of the series modern pop masterpieces.

The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

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

Like its characters, That Awkward Moment has commitment issues: It lacks the courage of its bad taste.

An efficiently engineered piece of studio product, enjoyable enough at times, but with an unmistakable assembly-line quality.

The French director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, "The Artist," is everything "The Artist" was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

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

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

I can’t pardon Labor Day’s mush, not just because it’s mush, but because it comes with an unappetizing side order of condescension and contempt.

Unassuming only in its title.

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

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

Director David Dobkin, best known for comedies such as "Shanghai Nights" and "Wedding Crashers," demonstrates his serious intent mostly by paint-by-numbers psychology and a ponderous pace.

The Kingdom is a barely coherent compendium of Middle East fantasies, fears and doubts.

Except the real Nazis, every character in The Aftermath has good intentions, marred by some moments of poor impulse control. And they are a little dull.

The music, at least, is welcome.

A big bloated bore-o. Think of a combination of "Wild Wild West" and "Spy Kids."

As far as story is concerned, the whole thing feels like a rerun of a raucous Saturday-morning television show aimed at hell-raising five-year-olds.

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.

This mix of titillation and sentimentality can pass as family entertainment because 17 Again is so weightless, a succession of one-liners, sincere monologues and logical absurdities.

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.

What big ambitions you have, Grandma. And what a disappointingly modest follow-through.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not bad, as in the sense of inept; it's artful enough to show how truly trite it is.

The art of the classic Hitchcockian thriller is about style, pace and misdirection – and though Unknown is occasionally baffling and involves running and car chases, the film rarely manages to thrill.

Pimenthal's script consists of the scantiest storyline, framed around a succession of strained Farrelly Brothers-style gags that feel as though they were peeled off the floor of the editing room for "There's Something About Mary."

Between a string of post-Friends dismal rom-coms, Aniston has succeeded in these kinds of grownup roles every few years. Here, she negotiates the character’s quirks and contradictions competently, but nothing short of a rewrite from scratch could make Cake palatable.

Aside from Jones’s broadly entertaining performance as the egotistical Supreme Commander, the movie, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with the Pearl Earring), is a dud.

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.

The problem lies with Williamson's script, which feels as if it has been torn from different places and glued back together like a ransom note.

Pandora’s Promise is less an exploration of the subject than a well-constructed sales pitch.

The word "arachnid," as it's said so contemptuously in the movie, begins to sound suspiciously like "Iraqi," and indeed, we soon see the elite bugs are hunkered down in their desert fortress, resisting the mighty air assaults of the Federation. The conclusion of our story involves unearthing the chief bug.

It's not so much a movie as a joint promotion for the National Basketball Association and teenaged rap and adolescent poster-boy Lil' Bow Wow.

The parts of The Little Things that are good aren’t original, and the parts that are original aren’t good.

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

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

Yes, Final Destination 3 is a roller-coaster ride of a movie from start to -- well, only about 10 minutes later. The fun part is over and we settle down to watch a sadistic assembly line of characters making premature exits.

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

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]

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.

The Prom, as it progresses from camp to earnest messaging, is like a sermon you believe, but still find too preachy.

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

By the film’s end, one can’t help thinking that the story would be better served by a well-researched documentary on the real-life MFAA division (monuments, fine arts and archives.)

The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.

Distinctly middling, London-set romance.

When Queen of the Damned knows it's ridiculous, it's moderately entertaining fun; when it tries to be serious, it's truly ridiculous.

The Invisible isn't the formulaic horror film that the studio is selling it as but surely it wasn't supposed to be an accidental comedy either.

I was intrigued to find that Finding You was not produced by an AI romance plot generator, but an actual book — Jenny B. Jones’ 2011 YA novel, There You’ll Find Me.

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

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.

The Rock is just typical big American dumb fun.

This is the stage experience documented on film, from the perspective of someone sitting front row centre watching actors pitching for the back rows of the balcony.

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

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

The characters don't stay still long enough for the audience to worry about them. The high-priced actors (Freeman is especially wasted) are so much flotsam in the big water-tank action scenes.

The principle suspense is wondering when the suspense is going to start, as you scan the darkly-lit screen looking for any hint of imminent horror.

It's the same package with new wrapping.

Directed by Brian Percival, best known for his work on "Downton Abbey," the film has the similar quality of a well-appointed historical soap opera.

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

The movie is a competent formula kid flick stuffed to the dimples with movie deja vu, a sop to those Hollywood-bashing politicians who want old-fashioned family values on their celluloid. [17 Nov 1995]

Here’s yet another incident-packed, steroid-pumped, dumb airport novel of a movie, with a few flourishes of Spielberg-inspired titanic imagery (though the director is J.A. Bayona) and a wall-to-wall John Williams-like orchestral score (by Michael Giacchino), with scenes that echo from the previous Jurassic Park movies.

The narrative, cobbled together from various Pooh stories by an army of writers, is held together reasonably well by John Cleese's soothing narration.

There are scenes that may make your stomach feel uncomfortable for a moment but rarely stories that will upset your equilibrium.

This is one of those ludicrous, semi-offensive, semi-entertaining potboilers that feels as if the script were dragged out from someone's naughty-book stash.

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

World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.

Fitfully interesting, occasionally cringe-worthy, this is the sort of stagy production that mixes ribaldry and campy overacting that evokes summer theatre productions.

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

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

Throughout, Wilson and Byrne play these parts straightforward and there's an undercurrent of real anguish in the struggle of parents coping with a child's long-term care.

For a screwball comedy, it takes a long time to wind up, and Kline's Frenchman is an outright cartoon. But Ryan manages to hold attention. [6 Oct 1995, p.C2]

Whatever glimmers of cleverness Martian Child offers, it all comes to Earth with a thud in the shamelessly manipulative climax.

The stunt work is top-notch; the dialogue and drama often food-spittingly funny. I can hardly wait for Extreme Ops II, perhaps set atop a South Sea island volcano, with North Korean agents and parasailing.

Sad news for Bard watchers: Julie Taymor's adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is not such stuff as dreams are made on.

Remember Pam? Lost in the Himalayas of big egos and overacting, she's the invisible character here. If they create a special Oscar for the most thankless part in an ensemble comedy, Teri Polo is a shoe-in.

The result is a work stiff with pointed talk and chance encounters, little of which feels original. The acting, while variable, often has a stilted, recitative quality, as if the characters, rather than family members, recently met at a script readings.

With his heavy features and grimacing shyness, Dante provides the best entertainment in Swimfan.

The new documentary Mau by the Austrian brother team of Benji and Jono Bergmann offers some insight into what is termed “design thinking,” the idea that creative design process influences almost every area of human life. Unfortunately, the film is far too busy admiring its subject to offer much insight into the discipline’s real-world applications.

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

Mortal Engines, which is produced by Peter Jackson and written by the team behind the Lord of the Rings films, is grandly, majestically, epically inert, a high-concept fantasy with a wide chasm between the money we see up on the screen and poverty of the story.

Fill the cupboards and refrigerator with junk food, lock the doors, roll yourself a couple of fat ones and settle in for a couple of hours of stupor/reverie. Warning: Resist any temptation to roll the movie back to figure out what just happened; it won’t help.

There’s not even a useful exploration about the gap between ideologues’ shoddy personal ethics and big picture rationalizations. What’s left is pantomime, a Halloween costume movie about characters who are far too simple-minded to explain the Bakker’s extraordinary, dubious success.

Running a long 145 minutes, it’s bleakly cartoonish polemic with few laughs or dramatic peaks, despite a climactic mad-as-hell speech from DiCaprio, some ineffectual pantomiming from Streep, and some third-act forced solemnity.

If you have trepidation about the juxtaposition of “Holocaust orphans” against “mime,” be assured they’re justified. Venezuelan writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz’s wartime thriller is so ambitiously misjudged, it holds a bizarre fascination.

As the movie flips through familiar Bourne/Bond tropes, the dialogue by David Benioff, Billy Ray, and Darren Lemke, feels clichéd to the point of parody, with lines like “It’s like The Hindenburg crashed into The Titanic!” Or, “I think I know why he’s as good as you. He is you!” Only, let’s be honest, not as good.

Equal Standard means well, doesn’t stereotype black or white characters unduly, and offers hope instead of rage. The trouble is the movie is just poorly executed.

In sum, we have a silly Hollywood-style action movie with a Robin Hood theme, serving the ideology of an elitist authoritarian regime. In other words, a real misfit.

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