Liam Lacey

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

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

What should have sizzled fizzles.

Falling in the pillowy cleavage between mildly awful and slightly entertaining, Burlesque is a clichéd rags-to-diva story that culminates in a series of Christina Aguilera videos.

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

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.

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

Shiver-making moments aside, in a important way 127 Hours suffers from the filmmaker's lack of nerve, a reluctance to let the audience taste Ralston's dread and the expectation of a slow, absurd death.

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

The more compelling performance comes from Watts as Valerie.

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.

A preening terrorist for the Me generation, his primary drive was vanity and his main professional asset an absence of empathy.

Hereafter is unpredictable enough to be consistently watchable.

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

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

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

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

At the end of Courage Under Fire, you feel torn between admiration and annoyance with the filmmakers.

A glum meditation on isolation and romantic malaise.

In set design, choreography, performances and music, The Wizard of Oz is a brilliant bauble of collective filmmaking, in what may have been Hollywood's greatest single year. [06 Nov 1998]

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

A redemption allegory so poker-faced you might forget that redemption is supposed to be a good thing.

An impressive film accomplishment, a combination of technique and extremely specific detail that reminds viewers how potent a rhetorical force the medium can be.

Mixing bravura filmmaking with flat clichés in about equal amounts, The Dark Knight is all about dualism. Appropriately, the movie's half-inspired, half-frustrating.

A film rich in paradoxes. Much of the film's style is dreamy, from the snow-covered Ontario landscapes suggestive of a blanket of forgetfulness, to Julie Christie's pale, intoxicating beauty, to the ambient musical score.

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

For all these references to the fairytale, Sydney White soon takes an easier path, recycling familiar "Mean Girls" and "Revenge of the Nerds" scenarios.

Mixing Chaplinesque delicacy with the architectural grandeur of a Stanley Kubrick film, director Andrew Stanton recycles film history and makes something fresh and accessible from it without pandering to a young audience.

The story is shockingly ordinary. The movie plays like an extended mediocre episode of the X-Files TV show or, for that matter, even a contemporary crime series such as CSI.

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.

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

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

The resolution includes an overlong and underfunny chase scene.

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

The acting throughout is exceptional, rooted in observed realism, but suggestive of more mythical agents at work through the lives of human beings.

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

It's one modern film worthy of being called a contemporary classic. [2002 re-release]

In the end, Eagle vs. Shark represents a convincing triumph for Dumb.

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

Bad history it may be, but Elizabeth is a movie that makes you want more, as it plays to the myth of history's great actress-monarch, a character who puts today's tinselly political heros and heroines (royal and not), to shame.

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

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."

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

Leatherhead's a comedy of stock setups and kooky digressions in which nothing really comes to a head, and running at close to two hours, it lacks the essential brevity of the form.

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

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

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

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

An uncomfortably fascinating document of a man whose bipolar disorder and artistic ambitions are inextricably connected.

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.

Ultimately, Next is just the next Nic Cage vehicle, another quirky story that allows him to do his patented neurotic balancing act in an askew world. The problem here is not just that Cage's shtick is wearing as thin as his hair; the role is a bad fit.

Grandly overblown and deeply cornball.

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

Though not as instantly charming as The Little Mermaid, nor as cheerfully revisionist as Beauty and the Beast, Hunchback rates as one of the best animated Disney features of the past rich decade. [21 June 1996, p.C1]

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

As directed by Bob Giraldi, well-known for his work in rock videos, Hiding Out manages to offer a brief catalogue of the cliches from both genres, before allowing the teen flick to take over. The film is essentially a series of comedy bits in the service of an MTV soundtrack. That soundtrack, which includes the first revelation of K.D. Lang and Roy Orbison's duet on Crying, may be the film's only creditable achievement. [10 Nov 1987]

This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.

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

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."

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Ghoulishness and innocence walk hand-in-hand in Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, a movie that digs into Hollywood's past to resurrect the antique art of stop-motion animation and create a fabulous bauble of a movie.

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

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

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

The goal is apparently a double exercise in heartfelt lessons and deep hilarity, but it's hard to tell because the pace feels so lethargic. Director and screenwriter Wil Shriner is a TV-sitcom veteran (Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond) whose idea of directing a movie is to make another sitcom, only four times as long.

Polanski's view of life is like that of Greek tragedy, with the same cold comfort that tragedy implies; from the larger perspective which art gives us, we know even horrors eventually pass.

The fun of Biker Boyz should be in the racing, and though director Reggie Rock Bythewood throws around a lot of techniques, nothing really ignites.

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.

A meditation of life, death, reincarnation and biblical symbolism that feels peculiarly like a head-shop poster, blown up to feature-movie size.

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

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

The exiled Tibetans who are interviewed display a lack of bitterness, a sympathy for their enemies and hope for the future that is inspiring.

What makes Crude worthy of the overused term “epic” is the way the case symbolizes a host of contemporary issues: the iron-fistedness of multinational corporations; environmental despoliation; the disappearance of indigenous cultures; and the power of celebrity and the media to influence justice.

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.

Eventually, Toy Story 3 finds its way back to that theme of the power of childhood play. There are a few worrisome moments en route, though, when not only the characters but the filmmakers seem to have lost their way.

The movie, which is roughly as predictable as the attraction of flies to dung, is a hackneyed mix of sentimentality and anarchic comedy.

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.

The movie is unexpectedly disciplined and enjoyable.

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

This is a remarkably good-looking near-corpse of a film, with a pulse that fades in and out.

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

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

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

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

This is B-movie material all the way, yet it's not only watchable, it's engrossing. That's because the material is in the hands of an A-talent director, who knows, as few of his contemporaries do, how to manipulate the plastic qualities of a film: the lighting, editing, composition, camera movement and production values.

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.

In the world of pulp movies, where horror, westerns and Asian exploitation borrow and blend with each other, there's a point where the cross-genre mishmash begins to feel like gobbledegook. That's definitely the case with Sukiyaki Western Django.

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

There's a scientific law to be discerned here that producers would be well to heed: Mediocre movies start to drag as soon as the action speeds up; when the explosions start, they fall to pieces.

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

The story may stretch credibility until it's ready to pop its seams, but Patel conveys the simple confidence of a prodigy who has learned everything important in life, except how to lie.

There’s little here to improve upon the stilted quality of the original, and it’s even more cumbersomely plotted.

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

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

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

At heart, though, every moviegoer can recognize a love story, no matter how unusual the context.

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.

On the positive side, it's still four back-to-back Simpsons episodes, which is still better than most of what either television or the movies have to offer.

Rude, lewd and occasionally in the nude, The Hangover brings a collection of fresh faces to the familiar raucous male-bonding comedy.

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.

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

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

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

With the two American actresses miscast, and the two young British lads behaving like a couple of "Brideshead Revisited" rejects, most of the dramatic heavy lifting is left to veteran English actor Wilkinson.

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

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

Kimberly Reed’s debut documentary, Prodigal Sons, would make a terribly contrived novel, but is a compelling and sensational real-life story.

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.

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

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

Ten may strain your patience but that's the high-stakes gamble of this provocative project.

A demanding blend of spectacle, drama and exposition of ideas.

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

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

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

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

Though Shark Tale will make waves at the multiplexes and move a lot of plastic toys at Burger King, the movie lacks real heart. It feels like a cold-blooded, always moving, profit-making machine.

This is a guy movie, a gothic creepshow.

The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.

As Whatever Works creaks along, the attention-getting nastiness of the first half dissipates and it turns into just another Woody Allen overacted sex farce. Of all the insults hurled about in the film, perhaps the worst is its pandering conclusion. What exactly does Allen take his audience for? A bunch of mindless zombies?

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

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]

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]

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.

An odd and irresistible documentary.

A high-pedigree, low-interest affair that serves mostly as an exercise in postmortem speculation: Why is a project with so many prominent names attached to it so sterile and lifeless?

A twofold story of heroic achievements and personal failings.

Both an homage to his dad and a backstage story rich in Hollywood lore.

A simultaneously realistic and absurdist examination of police work.

Mediocre movie.

Coming from writers responsible for such material as "Snow Dogs" and "The 6th Day," National Treasure is not so much a no-brainer as a brain-stunner, so audaciously ridiculous you are initially intrigued, then soon irritated by its incoherence.

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

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

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus takes us deep into the imagination of Terry Gilliam, which once was a splendid place to visit. And might prove so again. But not here, because this film is less a coherent exercise of imagination than a haphazard lecture on its importance, a lecture that eventually dwindles into self-indulgence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The excesses are easy to forgive, both for the humour and charisma of Rourke's outsized performance and Aronofsky's canny low-key direction, which make for a combination that is irresistible.

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.

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

Surprisingly touching and funny.

At its heights, James and the Giant Peach is a shock of pleasure, a juicy immersion into a world both intriguingly weird and consistently magical. [12 Apr 1996]

Somewhere between profound and ludicrous, kind of like a cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Dude, Where's My Car?"

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

A movie with a confident sense of its own worthlessness, it speeds by in a flurry of candy-coloured cars, bare midriffs, screaming engines and a pulsing rap soundtrack.

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

The voice that jerks out from Levy's throat suggests Lazarus waking from the dead.

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

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

Like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" or James Gray's "We Own the Night," The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.

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

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

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

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

McNaughton's film, which has been described as "too arty for the blood crowd and too bloody for the art crowd," is an exercise in revulsion by an often skilled filmmaker. [8 Oct 1990]

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

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

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

A great film about a good man.

A tart-coated sugar pill of a movie.

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.

Guy Ritchie's Holmes reboot feels both too complicated and too elementary, dear Watson.

Like circus acrobats who bounce up smiling, the characters end up on their feet, and you realize in retrospect that they survived because somebody, finally, stopped to think. A final thought on Go: Go.

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

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

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

The 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.

Queen Latifah's energy may be winning and her self-reliance message righteous, but Last Holiday grossly overextends her credit

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

The intriguing thing about The Peaceful Warrior is that nothing else in the movie feels haphazard.

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

The movie is like a glass of Sprite that has been left on the counter too long: transparent, sweet and flat.

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

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

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

Running at about three hours, The Aviator is long, and the momentum occasionally flags. The depiction of Hughes's first mental breakdown feels a little obsessive-compulsive itself.

Frankly, if I were Mrs. Claus, I might be looking for Santa Clause 3, outlining the grounds for annulment.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

As refreshing as it is to find a movie that leaves you smiling, it's something much rarer to discover a film that makes you think about what a commitment to happiness really means.

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

The theme could be trite or maudlin in lesser hands. Here, through the Dardennes' judiciously stylized way of telling the story, there is a real exhilaration in the film's ability to capture Igor's emotional dilemma. [6 Mar. 1998, p.C8]

Where it stumbles is in the script by Matt Healy, which is often clever, but never quite takes hold.

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]

More about Ali as media star and social figure, less about the quicksilver athlete.

There's something about this story, and this war, that brings out the stripped-down conceptual artist in her (Bigelow): Against blank canvases of desert sand and rubble, explosive wires are linked to nerve ends, and everything that matters depends on the twitch of a muscle or a finger on a button.

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]

Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.

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

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

Director Joel Schumacher has pulled no mawkish punches, wringing every drop of emotional potential from the script (adapted by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman from John Grisham's popular novel) down to the last manipulative glance and close-up. Call it A Time to Overkill.

After a decade of silence, surely Hollywood can do better.

Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!

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.

Looking like some gorgeous fan painting come to life, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is pictorially spellbinding.

In the entrancing frames of Career Girls, nothing extraordinary happens and everything is revealed. [26 Sep.1997, p.E8]

Reportedly, after seeing the film, rapper Eminen is anxious to play a wheelchair athlete in a coming movie.

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

Every hero needs to be revitalized by a little humiliation, and for at least the first 40 minutes of Die Another Day, Bond's dressing-down seems to do him and the movie franchise a world of good.

As angst-filled as if it were "Amadeus" and "Lust for Life" rolled into one.

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

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

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

Near the end of the movie, Django jokes that, after the protests, people may still not know what the WTO is, but "they know it's bad." That's a fair summation of how much insight Battle in Seattle provides for its viewers.

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

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

This is a sewer blessedly free of actual sewage, which makes Flushed Away more kid-friendly than, say, the average "South Park" episode.

Even with dyed hair, heavy makeup and a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, Portman still looks like a schoolgirl pretending to be somebody's mom.

In a movie about an ant colony, perhaps it's futile to complain about a superfluity of characters. Yet this need to cover every permutation of cuteness is one major drawback to the cast of A Bug's Life.

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

The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.

What if Holden Caulfield turned into Charles Bronson? That piquant premise underlies the lively but confused teen exploitation film, Tuff Turf.

The best fake trailer, and Grindhouse's high point, is Edgar ( Shaun of the Dead) Wright's tone-perfect parody of inviting taboos, entitled "Don't."

Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeve with 9-year-old actress Drew Barrymore: the movie might easily be retitled The Scene Stealer. Barrymore's performance as Charlie McGee has something of the pint-sized coquetry of a Shirley Temple, and something of the shoulders-back, chin- in-the-air hauteur of a Bette Davis, but she seems incapable of hitting a false, precocious or calculating note. She virtually acts her co-stars off the screen. [14 May 1984]

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.

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

Wrong Is Right shows the comic subtlety of The Jeffersons on a slow night. Everything else may be topsy-turvy in the world, but unfunny still isn't funny even in the Oval Office. [15 May 1982]

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.

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.

Gran Torino skids into the narrative ditch. By the time it jolts to an ending, followed by Clint rasping a tune to the closing credits, you're more likely to be rolling your eyes than dabbing them.

There's a risk of taking The Brady Bunch too seriously but, please, let's not think of it as funny, then or now. [18 Feb 1995]

A welcome antidote to the usual seasonal sweetness.

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]

As rock-and-roll flicks go, director Joan Freeman's Satisfaction , is a real bar band of a movie; it's derivative, unambitious and uneven, but it's also not half bad. If you bend your mind around its most awkward moments, it also offers at least some of what the title promises. [19 Feb 1988]

It's a movie about a nice guy with a lot of friends who dies. It's not really about the wider tragedy the film aspires to represent.

Superficial but giddily entertaining backstage documentary.

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.

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

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]

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

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

If Apocalypse Now was criticized in the past as a series of impressive sequences that don't quite add up to a tidy story, the new additions put this in perspective. It's a filmed epic, not a filmed drama. [10 Aug 2001, p.R1]

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.

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

As in "Taxi Driver," the protagonist is a damaged war veteran, an invisible man who travels about the city and internalizes its contradictions until he explodes.

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

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

Spiritual V-8 juice.

Utterly preposterous but so full of enthusiasm and flashy style that it's entertaining anyway, The Brotherhood of the Wolf is like the platypus of genre films.

Part of the charm of Satin Rouge is that it avoids the obvious with humour and lightness.

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

As shrill, partly-animated musicals about singing vermin go, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel really isn't all that bad.