Liam Lacey

In his directorial debut, comedian and Flirting with Disaster star Ben Stiller struggles to filter out a coherent story line around a fibre-optic-thin plot line and the expansive, anarchic comic talents of Jim Carrey. Too often the movie ends up lost in the snow and static between two films fighting for the same bandwidth. [14 June 1996, p.C1]

There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle.

Even the visions of attractive half-dressed bodies lolling about in various Madrid bedrooms or leaping into spontaneous music videos don't prove compelling for long.

A cornball charmer of a film with some beautiful birds and homespun wisdom.

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

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

A talented cast and moments of brutal violence can't dislodge a sense of ho-hum predictability in Pride and Glory.

By the time the film reaches its big mushy climax, in which the slackers discover their inner caring during a dopey medieval role-playing battle, the movie starts to feel something like a pleasure again.

A well-cast drama that switches between sweetness and menace, the film goes down easily, thanks to a talented cast.

Too long by about 20 minutes, and arguably too obsessed with the lineage of names only of interest to other surfers, this is a vicarious kick.

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

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.

Julia Jentsch offers a brilliant example of what actors call "not playing the ending," and the awful suspense of the piece is watching as she realizes, in increments, that this is all much worse than she thought.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

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

It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.

One of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results.

Iraq in Fragments already stands up as a classic war documentary, in its unusual poetic form and by its extraordinary access to the lives of ordinary Iraqis.

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

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

The question is, is the interspecies wrestling match really worth the ineptly acted spy antics, the big flatulence jokes and Steve-o's endless grandstanding? Not without a handy remote control with a mute button, it isn't.

This is a comedy at cross-purposes -- by turns low-key, bombastic, mildly amusing, manically slapstick. At least there are the fart jokes as a connecting thread.

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

Compelling, disturbing.

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

There's a surprising sweetness in the bond between the two cops. The gay subtext of the partnership is used for humour but it's never sniggering or mean.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

Suffused with clever lines, characters with neurotic tics and a pervasive, jocular black humour, The Savages is more about craft than art, but the craft, especially in the writing and acting, is at a high level.

Ultimately, the best thing about (500) Days of Summer isn't its gimmicky script. It's the constant performance of Gordon-Levitt, who shifts, scene-by-scene, from moments of ebullience to abject dejection.

Watts evokes a classic Hitchcockian virgin-whore duality.

An ultra-cheap movie, ingeniously promoted through the Internet -- is notable primarily as a model of guerrilla-style niche-marketing.

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

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

Narrative-driven and determinedly unpredictable, The Disappearance of Finbar is true to its mandate as a mystery story to a fault. [18 Jul 1987]

With less expensive actors, it might just have been called Chase Movie, and played for laughs.

Truly strange, and often captivating.

The movie is dramatically limp, running out of narrative steam long before the set decorator runs out of colours.

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

Broad, loud and crammed full of costumed characters and stage asides about the poverty of the script, it's typical pantomime, with a thin plot on which to hang the over-the-top performances and light-hearted musical numbers (by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). [16 Feb 1996]

There are so many events here but no real story. Perhaps that is what's making the drowned kabuki ghost so irate: She's desperate to find a coherent script.

Cynical, hip, politically opportunistic and loaded with kick-ass comic action.

A movie so hysterical it worked best as a black comedy.

Trying to pick faults with a sound-and-spectacle juggernaut like Armageddon is like taking an ant gun to an elephant: All the movie's staggering conventional weaknesses -- ludicrous plot, weak characterization, incomprehensible staging and ambient racket -- are irrelevant.

Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.

Certainly spectacular -- an elaborately designed combination of animation and computer-generated imagery -- but at times it's a spectacular bore.

Though superior to the original Blade, the superiority is mostly in the myriad ways the "suck-head" enemies can be blown up, melted and dismembered.

By the time Inland Empire, David Lynch's three-hour digital epic shot on a home video camera, takes you through its tour of the contents of the director's febrile imagination, it's probably the bunnies you'll most remember.

Both Mirren and Walters are successfully cast against type.

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.

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."

Hackman is unexpectedly hilarious. With protruding top teeth and a professorial beard, he's a motormouth, badgering and abusing one minute, wheedling and fawning the next.

Except for The Fat Boys, who have some deft comic passes, nobody is required to act, or seems capable of it. But for what Krush Groove is - an unambitious film directed at a black teenage audience - it has its good points. [26 Nov 1985]

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

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

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

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

A rollicking good story set a millennium ago among Australian aborigines, Ten Canoes is one of those cultural-building exercises that genuinely entertains.

In the end, the commercial necessity of wrapping up a family comedy in less than 100 minutes seems to have trumped anything real about Dan's life.

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 major problem with Around the World is that there's just not quite enough Chan, or at least the Chan we want to see, which is the acrobatic clown.

Throughout the film, Cheadle's eyes are constantly scanning his environment for opportunities or anything that may be amiss.

Not until the final shot does Noyce rise up to the potential of the history: There's a sudden shiver of recognition, that, my God, these people really lived this.

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

Overnuanced, a world of delicate cruelty, where most of the wounds take place without breaking the skin or even a sweat.

The lanky action star of the cult television series "Alias" is assigned a tired playbook in this film, but she finds room to manoeuvre in a performance that exceeds expectations.

White Chicks could and should be a much more mischievous movie. A half-dozen writers have managed to create a succession of thin sketches that add up to "Some Like It Warmed Over," with a touch of stink.

Everything about Mid-August Lunch is simple and unpretentious, from the black-out scene transitions to the folk-dance score, as the four isolated, elderly women, over a couple of days and meals, become a circle of companions.

Again, as with "Star Wars," the interest lies at least as much in the set design and costumes as the narrative.

The title – Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel – is fine as far as it goes. But if you leave out "octogenarian mammophile" and "calendar fetishist," you leave something essential out of the story.

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

Most of the cast range from tolerable to appealing (especially Molina and Pena), with a conspicuous exception. Debra Messing, as the career-driven outsider, is consistently stilted.

At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses with a series of swing-and-miss gags, often with an abusive twist.

Creaky in its plotting, occasionally electrifying in its direction, We Own the Night is even more of a throwback to old-fashioned crime dramas than Martin Scorsese's "The Departed."

The one thing that’s briefly enjoyable about From Paris with Love is John Travolta’s appearance. In a black leather jacket, with a shaved bald head and a goatee and a perpetual scarf to hide his jowls, he looks like a well-fed pimp or a gay bear.

The movie delivers, if you're looking for a big-screen, big-stunt, action blockbuster that happens to have the Bond brand name on it. If you're looking for a movie with narrative coherence that recreates, or develops, the Bond mythology that first came to screen in the early sixties, go back to your video store: The current Bond franchise is a Van Damme movie with a bigger budget and British accents. [19 Dec 1997, p.C6]

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

Animal Kingdom isn't perfect: Some performance moments are over-ripe, and there's an episode of arbitrary cruelty that's excessively creepy.

Gospel music not only saves Darrin's plastic yuppie soul -- Praise the Lord -- it also gives an otherwise wasted hour and a half some warmth and buoyancy.

Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.

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

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

Myers's sheer fertility of invention is of a different order, and even if he misses as often as he hits, he's definitely a swinger.

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

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.

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.

Precious is a bit like having a piano dropped on your head: messy but memorable.

The questions the movie raises have less to do with science than movie execution: Do the actors sound so robotic because they are playing robots well or humans badly? And did a machine write this dialogue? If so, could we please apply for an upgrade?

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

The fact that these atrocities are not well known in the West is a good reason for this film to exist.

Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

Simultaneously salacious and sugary.

Inasmuch as Cholodenko has an agenda in her two movies so far -- what appears to be a lesbian-positive theme of openness to experimentation and its accompanying emotional costs -- she's found a model in McDormand's portrayal of Jane.

In the end, the spectacular martial-arts epic seems to signify nothing much more than its own beauty, as brilliant and ephemeral as a fireworks display.

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

Moderately witty children's entertainment.

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.

The film is small-scale, cleverly crafted and feels like a more expensive version of the sort of "dramedy" they produce by the truckload at the BBC.

At this point, the effect of Myers' one-man Sixties love-in already feels less shagadelic than just shagged out.

A beautiful, probing art documentary.

Lions for Lambs appears to have taken its inspiration from Al Gore's stolid "An Inconvenient Truth," using the stage lecture and Power Point presentation in lieu of dramatic momentum.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

The movie is pretty damned funny in its insubstantial, gratuitously violent, gratuitously everything way.

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

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

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

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.

Here is a psychological twister with an implausible and hard-to-follow plot. All of this is more than compensated for by terrific performances, a seductive colour palette that is greenish and glassy, and a minimalist style reminiscent of Michael Mann.

Morally simple, action packed and explosive.

Though Little Miss Sunshine is consistently contrived in its characters' too-cute misery, the conclusion, which is genuinely outrageous and uplifting, is almost worth the hype.

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.

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

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.

Like a lot of things about Zack and Miri, the porn title feels like it's trying too hard.

Though Three Monkeys feels conventional compared with Ceylan's other work, it maintains its auteurist imprint, especially the rich colour palette and suggestive HD camerawork that helped Ceylan take the best-director honours at Cannes this year.

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

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

Much of what happens in Silent Light can feel painstakingly mundane: milking cows, harvesting wheat, a long drive at night in and out of shadows. Yet throughout, there's a sense of something ominous impending, and while it remains gentle, the ending is genuinely startling.

Crude, rude, nasty fun.

A lazy and mediocre movie, a sort of tepid parody blend of "The Breakfast Club" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

This one's just painful.

Good Night, and Good Luck may be simplified history, but it's almost consistently well-crafted.

A plot so preposterous it could only have emerged from the underground comic world.

Lyrical, dreamy and too complicated for its own good.

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

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

Taken for what it is – a fluffy, intergenerational farce as a frame for some seventies musical nostalgia – Mamma Mia! just gets away with it, in spite of director Lloyd's lack of cinematic inexperience.

Obviously, this is no easy sell, but give writer-director Siddiq Barmak full credit for portraying his country's social catastrophe with restraint, concision and some real beauty.

What doesn't work so persuasively is Elkoff's script, particularly the overuse of voice-over.

These Stooges-like antics are more about showing what good sports his stars are than honing any real satiric edge.

Too often, the script collapses into what feels like improvisation, in which the characters find a kind of common ground: Infantilism.

No one can doubt there's a consistency of vision in Russell's work, though at times it seems more the vision of a great set designer than a great film director. [8 Oct 1988]

This summer has given us two Supermen to choose from in our own distemperate times: "Superman Returns" was for the starry-eyed idealists, Hollywoodland is for the bleary-eyed cynics.

Even when the plots of sexual confusions, transgression and tragedy became absurdly complicated and arbitrary, there was always the mise-en-scène to die for.

Feels like one of those misguided high-school-teacher exercises in making literary history sound contemporary.

All in all, Australia is so damnably eager to please that it feels like being pinned down by a giant overfriendly dingo and having your face licked for about three hours: theoretically endearing but, honestly, kind of gross.

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]

A first film from director Mark Palansky, written by sitcom veteran Leslie Caveny (Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You), and the two are obviously indebted to the fanciful imagination of Tim Burton.

This remake is distinctly a Farrelly brothers' flick -- sentimental, rambling and raunchy.

The [final] battle is vast, and undoubtedly required thousands of hours of matching puppetry, robotics and computer code, but it is not without tedium.

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

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

Allen's best effort since 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown," but that's not saying a lot.

The plot is stale though some of the moves are fresh.

Avenue Montaigne is not a film to be taken too earnestly, but it would be a mistake to miss its bittersweet undertones. The movie is as airy as a spun-sugar dessert, but Thompson's observations on the artistic life are both affectionate and knowing: Beauty and wealth, though inevitably compelling, are appreciated as means to humane ends, not goals in themselves.

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

The juxtaposition of Loretta learning how to be a good capitalist and the historical flashbacks to her ancestor on the block at a slave auction rings unintentionally awkward. The good intentions, though, aren't in doubt: For the sake of the generations who have made sacrifices before her, Loretta has an obligation not to waste her life. [24 Dec 1998, p.D6]

There's something genuinely exploratory and original here in the depiction of people being pushed into adulthood before they're ready.

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

The plot's larcenous resolution is something of a cheat, tying things up dramatically if unethically.

Occasionally feels like a Neil Simon rewrite of "In the Bedroom," as it see-saws between hard truths and quirky humour.

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

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

Though complete redemption of Brown's fiction may not be possible, Howard's new film at least represents an upgrade from a mortal to a venal movie sin.

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

A painfully predictable movie.

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

Funny, fascinating, utterly unclassifiable film.

Eventually, Typhoon succumbs to the usual special-effects bombast and plot overkill.

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.

Providing expectations are kept low, there’s some fun to be had in the elaborately preposterous action set-pieces, and especially Jason Patric’s campy performance as the movie’s villain.

Skip work to see it at the first opportunity.

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.

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

The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.

Fortunately, there's always the fascination of watching actor Toni Servillo, who does a brilliant job of playing Andreotti (known as Beelzebub) as a kind of devil with a clown's exterior.

Working "lobbed" and "scimitar" into that same sentence hovers near the empyrean of genius.

Most of the personality work in the film is left to Steve Zahn.

Having seen the TV series "Hogan's Heroes," we already know that a German prisoner of war camp can be cartooned; Hart's War goes further as a cartoon that takes itself seriously.

May not have the most sophisticated narrative, but it is one of the most spectacular and masterly demonstrations of animation in screen history.

A little like speeding through the digestive tract of some voracious beast. There's bite, acid, digestive churning and an expulsive conclusion. If the metaphor seems unsavoury, well, wait until you see the film.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

Duke rarely operates at more than a TV movie-of-the-week level of originality, but Hoodlum is still an easy movie to enjoy.

Smartly cast, in the sense that Reeves, gloomy and pained, and Harrelson, confused and explosive, both seem befuddled while Downey, as the devious, intellectual Barris, is befuddling.

As it exists, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny is strictly for the tenaciously devoted.

The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.

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

Gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting personality of its own.

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.

In a film that offers itself as a Gump-esque moral fable, Phenomenon could serve as a case study of When Smart Films Fail.

Great cast, too bad about the movie.

The first 20 minutes of the South Korean film The Host represents one of the most entertaining movie openings in memory. It's the same kind of pop-culture thrill provided by Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," with the same sense of astonishment, fear and pleasure at something genuinely new.

Almost everything about this starring vehicle for Katharine Heigl feels borrowed from some previous romantic comedy.

A horror movie based on history, offering some of the most spectacularly brutal, viscerally intense battle scenes ever brought to a Hollywood movie.

In many areas, Food Inc. could be accused of being a fast-food version of a documentary – it's everywhere at once, skipping across the surface of a vast subject, and adding nuggets of sweetness to the scary filler.

The same didactic instincts that sometimes mar Lee's fictional filmmaking serve him well as a documentarian and eulogist, both with Four Little Girls and this film, a record of the worst natural disaster in American history.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

The film is an attack on religious hypocrisy, mixing melodrama and black humour in a volatile blend.

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

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

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

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

Smart, serious and deftly composed, New York director Jill Sprecher's jigsaw anthology film, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing, is the kind of work you want to applaud just for its ambitions.

A screwball comedy about the abortion issue? First-time writer-director Alexander Payne gives it a college try.

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

[The soundtrack] manages to serve up new rock, eighties dance music, rap and Barry Manilow -- a combination custom-made to annoy audiences of all ages.

Hornby is a fine craftsman and his dialogue sparkles, though occasionally the scenes are too calculated.

The larger shell game here is that Edge of Darkness is offered as a political thriller, but with real-world politics removed. What we’re left with is a familiar mechanism for delivering a vicarious, violent, wish-fulfilment fantasy, with Mel in a familiar position, in the driver’s seat, pedal to the metal.

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

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

As a portrait of a deliciously eccentric individual, Gods and Monsters features a vivid performance from Ian McKellen that makes you think not of James Whale but of Ian McKellen.

A mildly enjoyable if toothless adaptation of a much better book.

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

The style here is much more in the spirit of the smash and slash of the Conan movies than the banter and computer-generated monsters of the Mummy movies.

Pure cinematic intoxication, a wildly inventive mixture of comedy and melodrama, tastelessness and swooning elegance, bodies with the texture of fresh peaches, and angular faces Picasso would have loved.

Undoubtedly the rudest and possibly the most inspired comedy of the summer.

It's more like a filmed allegory.

Though there are moments when the drama turns into intellectual debate, the film is also emotional, moving with a fluid, mounting tension and moments of anguish and strange, startling humour.

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

An unusually smartly written and performed American independent film.

Some kind of mess...terpiece.

One of those headed-for-cable oddities that must have sounded like a good idea at the time.

Not terribly funny. When it does strain for humour, it opts for Farrelly brothers-style gross-outs -- vomit and chewed food and blocked drains -- which makes the movie itself seem like some kind of undigested expulsion rather than a well thought-out idea.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

This fictional "rockumentary" about a mediocre, aging heavy-metal band's last tour of America is surprisingly modest, subtle and funny. Not only is this the kind of satiric treatment rock music has been crying out for, it may be one of the most original film comedies in years. [20 Apr 1984]

A bit of a docu-mess.

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

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.

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.

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

Has a subtle magnetism, and a real human pulse, especially as it concentrates on its two main characters.

The missing ingredient, of course, is script.

This is the kind of film where the audience has to sort through the sequences, like visiting the green grocer's: liked that bit, can do without those.

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

Timoner offers a resonant, often painfully funny, drama about two good friends who become enemies against the backdrop of the pop-music business.

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

Sometimes, you'd swear he's (Penn) reprising his performance as a mentally handicapped man in "I Am Sam."

There is one egregious misstep: the photographs of mutilated Vietnamese bodies which appear on the screen during the song, Time Is On My Side, which is grotesque and fundamentally dishonest. No major band has been less interested in politics than The Rolling Stones, and that's what makes Let's Spend The Night Together so infuriating. It purports to be about something momentous, but has absolutely nothing to say. In that, at least, Ashby's film captures perfectly the spirit of the Stones' 1981 tour. [11 March 1993]

The freestyle approach is an apt fit with the freestyle, spontaneous comedy, as both the playful director and affable star capture moments on the fly.

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

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]

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

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

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

While Bettany and Dunst are both appealing, their chemistry lacks much fizz. As it is, the pair seem less like lovers than bouncy transatlantic cousins.

The verdict? King Kong may be a great movie event in a "Jaws/Titanic" sense of blockbuster impact and cultural talking point, but it is not a great movie.

No film this year has offered quite the cerebral tickle, weird invention and slaphappy gusto.

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

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]

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

The problem is that director Wayne Wang seems deaf to the tonal differences between coming-of-age, magic realism and children's comedy.

The Clowns and the Krumpers have a rivalry that parallels the Bloods and the Crips battle for the neighbourhood, but fought out in moves, not bullets.

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

Ultimately, the performances carry the film.

This movie is exceptionally brutal, cruel, savage and without conscience -- and that's just the comic parts. In contrast, the violent action sequences are quite entertaining.

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

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

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

A conventional mixture of thriller and moral drama, the film is unsettling in both intentional and unintentional ways.

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]

Unlike "Being John Malkovich," which JCVD sometimes resembles, there is no secret portal to the star's head; instead, the audience gets a fleeting glimpse through the smeared window of his soul.

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 movie is a series of ever more elaborate fight sequences and increasingly more and larger opponents.

Rather than build on the new momentum, this one's a bit more of a cruise-control effort.

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

The 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.

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.

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]

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

An emotionally powerful if somewhat divided experience. The grimness, the sweat, the panic are there in Saving Private Ryan-level intensity. At the same time, you never entirely lose the sense that the movie is a formal and calculated cinematic exercise, something of an illustrated argument.