Liam Lacey

The Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that's almost akin to being in high school again.

Unfortunately, Siemaszko's performance is less tour-de-force than schtick-de-sitcom.[9 Oct 1987]

Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.

Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.

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

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

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

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

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

Over all, the movie is just funny enough to make you wish it were much better than it is.

The story, of course, is a line on which to pin the comic set-pieces, and that's where Pink Panther 2 comes up lustreless. Zwart has no discernible sense of comic rhythm, beyond managing to punctuate scenes with a wall crashing in.

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.

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

You leave Stolen Summer with the feeling that you have watched acrobats stumble on a tightrope with no net below. Not a great show, but at least nobody got badly hurt.

Suggestive of "X-Men," "The Matrix" and the television show "Heroes," Push is one of those time-mangling thrillers that manages to seem both complicated and superficial.

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

The best way to appreciate The Affair is to sidestep its pot-boiler pretentious and think of as an exceptionally elegant episode of House Hunters International.

Everyone in the movie, of course, is anxious to see these comeback seniors beat each other up, except, perhaps, the viewing audience.

Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

The real weak point is Reiner's listless direction, with too few scenes that almost gel and too many that fall flat.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

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.

This one is headed straight for star Tommy Lee Jones's career-blooper reel.

Like Frankenstein's monster before the lightning strikes, it's all recycled cold flesh and bolts, without a twitch of originality.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

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.

The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.

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.

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

This time out, writer and director Mark Steven Johnson has bounced back with a movie so full of camp spirit it should come with tents and a marshmallow roast.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

The missing ingredient, of course, is script.

Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.

Isn't just ordinarily lame, it easily exceeds any normal requirements for witless sleaze.

In theory, it should be possible to have a comedy about a competition between an elderly man and a child to injure and humiliate each other, but it would need to be substantially sharper than The War with Grandpa to make the case.

Wayans will do anything for a laugh, and twice if necessary. If Carrey wears a broken front tooth in Dumb and Dumber, Wayans has two front teeth capped with gold. If Carrey sells a dead bird to a blind child, Wayans shaves the heads of a blind boy and his seeing-eye dog. [24 March 1995]

Riding that fine line between misjudged and deliberately anti-p.c., Get Hard is lewd, crude and rude but, despite its disastrous reception at SxSW, not entirely unfunny.

Perhaps the best that can be said for Year One is that it aims low and hits the mark.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

For those who are looking for a Capracornish sentimental tale about the Christmas spirit lost and re-discovered in the harried modern world, this holiday film is far too acerbic and frantic to play the heart strings. [22 Nov 1996, p.D6]

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

A formulaic thriller, treated in a style that's just shy of outright parody.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

This is a movie fantasy, folks -- like James Bond, without the smarm and martinis.

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.

The Real Cancun is no crime; at worst, it's a kind of staged tribute to "Porky's" done by amateur actors.

Critic-proof, devoid of plot or acting, and quick to mock anyone who might make something of it.

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.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

Morally simple, action packed and explosive.

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

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

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.

Instead of a madcap farce, the movie grinds along into a series of laboured comic bits.

The bafflingly unfunny and terrifically irritating new Disney version of My Favorite Martian is so empty that it makes the original TV show look like a lost work from George Bernard Shaw. [12 Feb 1999, p.D2]

With a couple of more drafts to mend the plot holes and restructure the middle act, Awake could have been saved.

Most of this is blandly palatable, at least for the first half. Cyrus, though she seldom strays from her two primary modes, pouting rebel or toothy girlfriend, has a winning on-screen presence, if only for her enjoyably abrasive edge in this deep well of pathos.

The dramatic justification for all this careless maligning of gypsies and lawyers remains as enigmatic as the film's title. The only sure thing about Stephen King's Thinner,in the end, is that Stephen King's bank account is fatter.

Strictly a middle-aged comedy, which consists of more easy lobs than sharp smacks, but manages to get the job done.

Within this bloated fantasy hodgepodge, there are few grace notes: In the role of the creepy fortune teller, Madame Dorothea, CCH Pounder is evil fun. And a few special effects, including a Rottweiller who turns into a skinned hellhound, leave an impression. Otherwise, Mortal Instruments manages to occupy 130 minutes of frantic, numbing, activity.

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

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

Apart from the overall endorsement of women’s friendships — and the credible warmth between the two likeable stars — the script’s feminist message is hopelessly muddled.

At least Adams and Goode are always watchable, even when you occasionally feel embarrassed for them.

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."

There’s a scene in a members-only club where Wyatt and Goddard meet, giving the two veteran actors the chance to go eyeball to eyeball for a couple of minutes of barbed dialogue. It almost makes the movie worth it.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

After 90 minutes of diligently searching the premises of ACB2, no evidence of mass entertainment can be found. Recommend cancellation of all future similar missions.

The mould for all these stories of hot lust and burning cities, creamy-skinned rich girls and their bitter lovers is that grand and grotesque cinema monument, was "Gone With the Wind." You can't go there again and you shouldn't want to.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience.

The contrived script is stretched to the breaking point by Reiner's listless direction.

Anyone interested in the contemporary debate between atheists and religious believers will gain nothing of value from the documentary The Unbelievers.

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

A funereally unfunny comedy.

Returning director Patrick Hughes and screenwriters Tom O’Connor, Phillip Murphy, and Brandon Murphy count too much on star charisma and action set-ups to carry the narrative. The result is that the smirks are mild and scattered while the bloodshed, gun fights, and explosions are relentless.

The obvious question about Repo Men: Why bother?

Given Waller's experience and budget, one might expect he could upgrade the B-movie acting and stock situations. He doesn't. The pay-off comes not in the story or acting, but the camera play and movement.

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.

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

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.

Even with its decent performances and polished production values, Persian Lessons never clears the hurdle of its improbable premise, an idea that could serve as the setup for a bad-taste Mel Brooks’ sketch.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

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

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

This is an excellent movie for watching Jolie, one of the more entertaining sidelines in recent Hollywood movie going. There are two firsts for her here: Angelina does blonde and, more importantly, Angelina does comedy.

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

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.

Torching “witches” is the one part of the story that has some historical basis, and adds an uncomfortable edge of misogyny to this otherwise empty fantasy.

Though The Cave really, really tries to be scary from as many directions as possible, it fails to hold much in reserve and never manages to build suspense.

What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks.

Director Adam Shankman pushes together scenes with little rhythm or flow. Writers Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant ignore credibility, throw in pointless sight gags, treat humiliation as comedy and use tiresome ethnic stereotypes. In short, Diesel doesn't get the help he needs.

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

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 devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

Filmmaker Evan Jackson Leong, who began following Lin when he played for Harvard, also emphasizes the importance of Lin’s tight bonds with his family and the importance of his evangelical Christianity (“I only play for God,” Lin says).

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.

The trouble with Undiscovered isn't that it's actively annoying but it's so dramatically listless it seems determined to become Unremembered.

The 3-D is a pain, and the excitable editing, slo-mo and speeded-up action frustrate attempts to watch the athleticism on display, but the last half-hour takes it up a notch.

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

Pathfinder is aimed more at the action-figure crowd than the history buffs.

Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

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.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

The movie is, however, generous in its condescension: Given enough tolerance, cash and a good sex manual, it says, even the mentally handicapped can be just as middle-class and cute as you or me.

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.

The movie is so relentlessly self-congratulatory, you can't help becoming thoroughly sick of it.

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.

Veers between crude and cloying.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos , the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

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]

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

The movie features Eddie Murphy as a vampire who is both cool and sucks. The same evaluation might apply to the entire film, which is neither as good as it might be nor as bad as you might expect. The long- in-the-tooth Dracula story, which has been updated and set in the black community of contemporary Brooklyn, is a pulpy mishmash of horror and comedy, equal parts the product of its comedian star and its creepshow director, Wes Craven. [1 Nov 1995, p.C2]

If you are expecting a pleasant evening of escapism, you will be cruelly fooled. The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius.

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.

Neeson maintains a certain doleful dignity as an action star who apparently takes no pleasure in his gift for violence, but Blacklight has little else going for it.

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.

Very little of it works.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

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.

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

A family movie with lots of CGI-talking animals and star Robert Downey Jr. hiding his charisma, Dolittle is a tiresomely chaotic concoction.

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

If the external threat in the plot were a little more credible, this would be an annoying distraction. But in the context of the rest of Gloria, it's a safe strategy: When not watching Sharon Stone act, audiences can fall back on just watching Sharon Stone.

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

Perhaps the major disappointment of Silver Bullet is that it never gets as bad as the beginning promises. From playing on the precipice of so-bad- it's-good, Silver Bullet bobs up to the level of conventionally mediocre- bad, and remains there until the closing credits. [12 Oct 1985]

So intent are the Strausses on showing off their visual chops, they leave the film's story, dialogue and acting in shambles.

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.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

Forget about "Saw," "Hostel" and all the other films in the new, notorious torture-porn genre. If you're looking for a really sick movie, check out License to Wed.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

Wilder's created world is alive with his erudition, his sympathy for his characters in their loneliness and flawed goodness. This film doesn't do him justice but it's a gesture in the right direction.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

To be fair to Curtis, Off the Rails is more like a Richard Curtis make-your-own-dramedy at-home game, with each character’s personality stamped on a card and they roll the dice to see which complications ensue.

Without Spielberg's technical pizazz, and with a gummy mixture of homage and spoof, Congo chokes on its own tongue in cheek.

A farce that fizzles, a satire that sags, and a dead-end for its gifted cast, Breaking News In Yuba County at least starts well.

Jawbreaker breaks ground in one way. The movie is notably unpleasant, not just because it's morally offensive, but because it strives for this arch, artificial John Waters tone without any accompanying pay-off in wit.

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]

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

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]

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

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.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

The Lost Skeleton also reminds you that real filmmaking -- the illusion of one event following another -- is actually a skill.

A lazy, hasty effort that offers little beyond a few jack-in-the-box startles and a high body count, including Hewitt's bouncing about in a shirt half-unbuttoned over a bikini top.

Dopey.

It's outstandingly obnoxious.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Grade Underclassman an "Unacceptable effort," and "D" for derivative.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.

At first so-bad-it's-good, then merely it’s-so-bad, Replicas’ source of interest is primarily forensic. How did director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and writer Chad St. John (London Has Fallen) think they could get away with it?

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

[Lange] does give the movie the only excitement it possesses -- the frisson of a hideous thrill -- but it's still an excruciating embarrassment.

Not funny, suspenseful, moving or even offensive enough to want to torpedo. Just devoid of any conceivable value. [19 Apr 1997, p.C13]

Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.

Fewer heads in the film and more evidence of one on the director's shoulders might have squeezed a legitimate laugh or two out of this contrived juvenile carnage.

Death Wish 3 is a little like granddad yelling, You kids better get out of my yard, and then following up his threat by tossing a grenade onto the patio and turning the kids into human hamburger. [01 Nov 1985]

Anything but a seasonal treat. This special-effects-heavy, big-budget musical from expatriate Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train, Tango & Cash) ranks as one of the most misguided children's films ever made.

Every actor and actress involved seems to have been instructed to act as guilty as possible and, in this at least, they're entirely convincing. Not guilty of murder, perhaps, but of a really unfortunate career choice.

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.

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

There's potential here for a macabre cult favourite touching on themes of technology and the body-mind split, but the movie's progression into rambling incoherence gives new meaning to the phrase "fatal script error."

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.

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

Horror at Christmas might work, but tedium doesn't.

A vigorously cross-marketed product, with comics, collectable cards, games and a television series.

Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.

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

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

Before immediately handing the movie an F and sending it off to summer school, give the filmmakers, and especially co-star Jason Schwartzman, credit for their anarchic willingness to try anything to shock a laugh loose from an audience.

Date Movie is a good date movie in one sense: If you're still speaking to the person who brought you to see this, you just might have a future together.

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

Great cast, too bad about the movie.

More entertaining in concept than execution. What starts as geek comedy gradually slides into a familiar morality play about the savagery beneath the veneer of civility.

Possibly no one else does "grim" with as much unsparing enthusiasm as the Scandinavians.

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

Director Alister Grierson, an Australian with numerous television and feature credits, does a decent job with the crowd and lively ring action though it's not nearly enough to make us forget that Tiger is a movie struggling to punch way above its dramatic weight class.

For the fans, Us + Them offers a meticulously constructed concert experience for a fraction of the price of a live ticket and a chance to join a chorus in yelling back at the TV. For the casually curious, be forewarned: While Waters still burns with righteous zeal, at an often repetitious 135 minutes, the film will leave your backside feeling uncomfortably numb.

A movie with as generic a title as Enemy Lines can’t really be called a disappointment, but it is a missed opportunity.

The Dalai Lama is, no doubt, intellectually curious. But the argument that Buddhism’s mental practices are consistent with scientific thinking has been around for more than a century. We also know that hosts of people, scientists included, swear to the mental and physical benefits of meditation.

While she’s not running up Billie Eilish-like social media influence, we understand that Collè is a kind of lightning rod for sexually-anxious, McJob-holding, roommate-sharing, millennial types. We also get the not-so-deep message, writ large and underscored, that sometimes transparency may be the best disguise of all.

Like the small bistro that is the film’s setting, Nose To Tail is minimal and uncompromising in the details, from the delicious tasting dishes onscreen to the retro jazzy score from Ben Fox, that propels the action forward.

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.

Although the comic scenes are well-crafted, I Propose stumbles in the over-plotting.

There’s some reward in watching good performers working to bring veracity to these awkward and artificial scenarios.

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

There are some strong elements here.

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.

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.

Bolivia’s 2019 Oscar submission for best international picture, adapted by writer-director Rodrigo Bellott, the film floats freely through different chronologies, creating a level of intellectual play that prevents the drama from sliding into earnest messaging.

There’s no doubt that spotlighting Close’s reputation in our recent cultural history is worthwhile. But the documentary is unjust in ignoring such seminal figures as acting coach and academic Violin Spolin, who developed and wrote the bible on the subject (Improvisation for the Theatre).

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.

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

Though it sounds crude to say it, Sarfaty has found an intimate hook to an almost unapproachably grim subject.

The script is a dazed, meandering, thing, involving drugs, pornography, neon-lit slo-mo, debauched starlets, car chases, soft-core sex scenes and loud gun fights.

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.

Moon Manor is in a middle ground, a fiction that claims to be “true-ish”.

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.

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.

Ukrainian director Roman Liubyi’s Iron Butterflies is an experimental film, a memorial scrapbook and a forensic documentary that revisits the 2014 downing of the Malaysian passenger plane, Flight 17.

The film Dark Windows, by Norwegian director Alex Heron, manages to work in both forms of teen-o-cide in a film that feels like a Mothers Against Drunk Driving public service announcement appended to a slasher film, though that makes it sound more exciting than it is.

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.

With no risk of over-subtlety, Uproar mixes gentle quirky comedy with a few digs at clumsy white allies and the myth of the innocent bystander.

Clennon, does a great job conveying Benjamin’s anxious reserve, and internal struggle to beg for help without having to offer lengthy explanations.

What the film communicates, along with the platonic love story, is how exhausting - morally, mentally and physically - the experience of being in a rock band can be.

Every so often, though, a film like Bau: Artist at War comes along which is so off-balance it feels, not just flawed, but embarrassing, an unintentional parody of the ethically entangled genre.

Though Who Killed The Expos? isn’t much of a mystery, it’s a good baseball story in the cry-in-your-beer tradition, of what has often been described as a “game of failure.”

Along with Schygulla’s warm performance, Yunan is elevated by the choices of Canadian director of photography, Ronald Plante, who captures the melancholic beauty of the island with its slate and blue skies, black sea and white-capped waves, and pale green fields.

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.