Liam Lacey

Director Steve Oedekerk, who also wrote the script, simply provides a frame for the string of Carrey sight gags, which come fast and constantly. Some work, some fall flat, but the overall momentum is never allowed to flag seriously.

The feeling is like a warm homecoming.

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]

The movie's climax takes Harry Potter into territory that is much more like epic horror than most of what the series has seen before. There is more obvious religious symbolism and apocalyptic violence as Harry emerges into his role as “the chosen one.”

An Eddie Murphy comedy that's actually endearing.

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

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]

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

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

Feels like a bit of an emotional mugging.

Ridicule is, finally, a movie that shows it understands the mechanism of wit and hierarchy intimately, and rejects it unequivocally in favour of the more inclusive and gentle world of humour. [11 Dec 1996, p.C1]

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.

Take 13 Tzameti for what it is: a tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

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

Neither outrageous nor subtle as a religious satire, but here's the good news for modern viewers: With it's unusual Christian backdrop, this is one of the most intriguing rite-of-passage teen comedies in a long time.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

Comes alive with the more relaxed performances from its senior set.

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

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

Chloe is director Atom Egoyan’s foray into the realm of what might be called artful trash. This is a high-toned erotic thriller, handled with style and some emotionally raw scenes, aiming for an effect that’s pleasingly unnerving, if not outright arousing.

The characters are entertainingly contradictory, though in a somewhat predictable way: Nice people aren’t honest, and honest people aren’t nice.

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

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.

Although veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping ( Kill Bill, The Matrix) handles the wire action, the camera work is merely okay and the sequences are on the familiar side. Still, it's fun to see Chan resurrect his loopy, staggering "drunken master" fighting style.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

As lovely to look at as it is dramatically inert.

The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.

There's a giddy, absurd charm to the story, in which the strange setting only enhances the comfortable familiarity of the narrative and characters.

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

Though the progress of Atim's increasing empathy is predictable, the film understates its points effectively, without simplification.

Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.

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

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

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

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

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

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

But it is bright, smart, sometimes wickedly funny, and crisply performed to the point where the acting seems richer than the script.

This is Austen as chick-lit, not too deep, but with some integrity and the worthy goal of reaching a younger audience by offering a starch-free version of the story.

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

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

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

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

Very little of it works.

Dive into a masterpiece.

The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.

As an epic, American Gangster doesn't cut it. The reputations of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Brian De Palma's "Scarface," Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" or Michael Mann's "Heat" are safe. At best, American Gangster is no better than a workmanlike imitation of its betters.

As angry, deluded, vulnerable and confused as Aileen is, the character remains an enigma. Apart from serving as an opportunity for Theron's emotionally deep-dredging performance, the movie doesn't know why it exists.

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

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

Once in a rare while a film comes along that is boldly original, communicates an important idea in an elegantly simple fashion and happens to be highly entertaining. Such is the case with Moolaadé.

Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.

Fitfully daring, Pumpkin isn't quite sure what it's about -- the tone bounces between thudding satire and toothless camp parody -- but it's definitely a bad-mannered child of our times.

Though Burton's version is faithful, the filter of his sensibility has turned it into another of his necrophilic creepshows.

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

The most provocative aspect of this compulsive riddle is how it resists closure. The end comes not when we have the answer, but when the movie reaches its irresolute end.

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.

The important things first: It's always a relief to come out of an Adam Sandler movie without a case of hives, and you can comfortably attend Anger Management without prophylactic antihistamines.

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

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

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

The problem with Flash of Genius is that a windshield wiper is an awfully thin mechanism on which to hang a feature movie.

Surf's Up is that rarity in a children's movie, a comedy that's actually exciting.

The very name Orson Welles stands for genius wasted and betrayed, and the movie offers some foreshadowing of his triumphs and failures to come.

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.

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

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

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

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

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

Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.

Lady Vengeance is more than half over before we discover the object of Geum-Ja's hatred: a kindergarten teacher named Mr. Baek. He's played by Choi Min-sik, the prisoner in "Old Boy," and here he's as tepid as he was heated in that film.

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.

"You're so lucky to live in Mexico," Luisa says. "Look at it -- it breathes with life." So does Y Tu Mama Tambien, both the pant of passion and shuddering sigh of regret.

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

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

At its most interesting when it shows the lives of women and children prisoners, the film has the feel of a movie-of-the-week cliché when it returns to Julia's improbable crime.

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

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

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

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 movie is pallid, bloated and light enough to evaporate from the mind 10 minutes after you leave the theatre. [26 May 1995]

Does not disappoint expectations: This is not a case of dumbing down literature; it's mediocrity aimed for and successfully achieved.

Almost a comedy, though not an entirely successful one: It's too acerbic to be funny and too detached to be really moving.

An entertaining takeoff and a high-altitude ride eventually runs into some bumpy weather and a clumsy landing in Mike Newell's new comedy.

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

Cluttered, improbable, brash, silly and over the top, the film is far more fun than it should be. [19 July 1996, p.D1]

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

By its third act, Okwe has found his solution and Dirty Pretty Things comes across as both clever but a little pat, another British drama about the misfits who pool their resources to defy the oppressive system, though it does not precisely leave a warm glow.

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

Hathaway may be in a royal rut, but the tiara seems to fit.

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

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

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

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

Like a lot of well-staged parties, though, the affair peaks shortly after the introductions, and then devolves into intrigues, fights and mayhem.

With his trademark spare, unfussy direction and jumping into the story approach, Eastwood subtly establishes the themes of faith, loss and love and then he raises the drama to a different level.

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

The director veers off course and heads straight for mediocrity. It's a disappointing ride.

Smart and youthful, with a well-balanced package of humour, romance, crisp action and character-based drama, Star Trek gives popcorn movies a good name.

It still stands up as astonishingly sleazy entertainment. [15 Jun 2002, p.R1]

Even a politically naive film critic can see that An Inconvenient Truth isn't only about science or economics; it's also about ideology.

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

At 128 minutes – Almodovar's longest film to date – Broken Embraces is an easy film to bid farewell to.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

One of those non-stop jabbering cartoons in which most of the lines sound like the spontaneous riffs from a couple of comics sitting around a diner.

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

Musically, it's a mixed bag -- The concert remains more of an historical curiosity than a must-see rock film.

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

Both the most bewildering of the three movies and also the most brutally compelling.

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

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

The combination of DiCaprio's soulful, self-effacing work in Scorsese's "The Departed," and this unexpectedly complex portrait in a simple-minded movie, make it the best year of his career since the big boat crash of 1997.

Bridges's big performance takes place in the context of a relatively minor movie.

By far the most horrifying moment in the horror film Bride of Chucky comes at the end, when you look at your watch and realize you're 90 minutes older than when the movie began. Beyond that, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a film about two killer dolls on the lam, racing from Niagara Falls to New Jersey with carnage, voodoo and Martha Stewart on their minds. [19 Oct 1998]

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

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

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.

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

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

Mrs. Brown will not overturn Queen Victoria's prim reputation, but it reminds us that there was more to the woman than that famous plump cameo that has become the symbol of a more modest era.

This is a movie about draining, tenderizing and chopping up the audience emotionally.

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

No political tract, but it can be surprisingly bold.

Adoring, appropriately offbeat documentary.

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

Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

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

Whatever the narrative shortcomings, these characters have the warmth of antique painted storybooks, unlike the eerie plastic simulation of Pixar characters.

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

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

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

All the silliest racist cliches are perpetrated: the dark people with their dark magic; British actress Cathy Tyson, as a Haitian psychiatrist who is occasionally possessed by demons and lapses into frenzied love-making; evil third world politics hand-in-hand with black sorcery. [5 Feb 1988]

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

The Corruptor is visually lively and filled with gratuitous destruction. [12 Mar 1999]

The results are not monumental, but they are a variety of sober responses to the tragedy that help place the event in a global context. Some of the films may be, as has been suggested, anti-American in tone, but none come anywhere near defending the attacks.

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

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

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

The winner of this year's audience award for best documentary at Sundance has it all: heartless media, art fraud and a four-year-old painting prodigy.

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

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

With more superheroes, more action and more stuff blowing up than ever before, X-Men: The Last Stand has the climactic oomph that suggests a finale, though not the gravitas to suggest a resolution.

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

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

Paprika is a creatively dizzying and visually dazzling allegory about alternative realities.

Arguably, Lost in Translation is the American answer to Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece, "In the Mood for Love," though less about history, more about infatuation.

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

The trouble is, once you get past the historical information and chummy interviews, you have to put up with the inevitable risk of any ad-hoc jam session: It Might Get Boring.

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

One of the most original, good-hearted comedies in a long time, Rushmore is the sort of movie where the strangest sequences of discords somehow keep managing to reach giddily improbable resolutions.

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

Slick and slight.

Veers between crude and cloying.

Two parts pain, one part pleasure, a masochist's life with cystic fibrosis results in a weirdly tender documentary. [14 Nov 1997, p.D4]

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

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

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

The phrase in the title "wanted and desired" is offered by a producer friend of Polanski's who describes him as "wanted" in the United States, but "desired" in Europe, where sexual behaviour is treated more honestly and artists' dark sides are celebrated.

Like the comic stars of the silent era, Mr. Bean's character transcends language barriers.

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

The movie's title proves to be not entirely a case of bait-and-switch. The film really is a homage to vintage Hollywood comedy.

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

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

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

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

This is one of the director's small, experimental, semi-improvised provocations, and if it doesn't push too deep, it's pointed enough to leave a mark.

A kind of stealth political film that confronts issues of ethnic tension and American xenophobia.

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

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

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]

Even with new information provided in the film, however, his personality remains not so much elusive as cantankerous, particularly in contrast with the expansiveness of his songs. That gap gives I'm Not There something of a hollow centre.

As a testimonial to the powers of creativity and the imagination, Barney's Great Adventure is pretty unconvincing. [03 Apr 1998, p.C7]

The focus of [Germina's] story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic.

Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.

So blatantly contrived it could be called The Fast and the Spurious, Crank has the small saving grace of being intentionally ridiculous. The action sequences are more notable for their outrageousness than their visceral power.

For all its treacly excesses of the post- "Full Monty" era, British comedy hasn't entirely lost its teeth yet.

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

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

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

Parents of young children should be warned: Here's a family-values film that won't be much fun for the whole family.

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

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]

Excellent in flashes, unintentionally absurd and lead-footed at other moments, the movie stumbles under the weight of its own grandiose intentions.

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

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

There are too many moments in Ice Age when you find yourself thinking: less bonding and fewer anti-Darwinian life-lessons please; more of that anarchist Scrat.

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

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

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

The movie manages a couple of popcorn-spitting-funny jokes for each biographical decade the film covers, though typically it's no better than moderately clever.

It might better be titled The Awkward.

Never comes together as a persuasive whole. Instead of moral complexity, we get an overfamiliar pursuit tale and investigation story. Worse, the movie fails the first test of a thriller: It lacks any significant suspense.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

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

Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad.

Like similar English comedies, it also teeters on the mawkish.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.

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

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

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

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

Along with its allegorical elements, The King is also impressively specific in naturalistic detail.

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

This witty, star-packed and visually splendid kids' movie provides a small-is-beautiful message served on a parodoxically epic scale.

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

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

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

Like the writings of William Burroughs or Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction," Watchmen falls into the category of what might be called meta-pulp, a multilayered fiction that serves as a parody and commentary on our collective bottom-feeding fantasies.

There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.

Shows how our family fictions sustain us, and how some truths are better left unspoken.

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

The value of Amandla! is that the film helps the rest of the world understand, both with our ears and minds, where South Africans have come from.

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

Giddily impudent in its execution, pummelling in its message, To Die For is finally a comedy black enough for the tabloid television age.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

Slam is a film about rap poetry, romance and gangster culture that blends melodrama, visceral excitement -- and a lot of preaching. [23 Oct 1998, p.D3]

For all its generally judicious choices, there's one device in The Boys Are Back that may test the patience of some viewers. Every once in a while, the late Katy pops up in a scene to offer Joe wifely advice.

When the larger question cannot be answered, the lesser one -- "What would you have done?" -- seems beside the point.

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

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

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

The S in Robert S. McNamara stands for Strange, which is an unusual middle name and perhaps an apt description of the man at the centre of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's gripping character study, The Fog of War.

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.

Mixes broad slapstick and off-hand one-liners in a sometimes surprisingly funny mixture.

Not exactly a movie in the usual sense, not exactly a ride, Journey is more of a virtual theme-park simulation and possibly a milestone of immersive entertainment.

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

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

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

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

The movie's last two minutes, in which they all do goofy dances and have no dialogue or script to get in their way, is easily the highlight. It's the previous 113 minutes of plot that cause problems.

With its bold screen-filling imagery, this is definitely a movie to be relished on the big screen.

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

While both the scenery and star Diane Lane are highly watchable, the movie is pure froth, a plate-sized helping of zabaglione.

The mainstream prominence of pornography gets a shove forward with the teen comedy, The Girl Next Door, an improbably-not-terrible teen sex comedy.

The film is not about the audience's shared experience, and a lot more about how cool it is to have a backstage pass.

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.

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

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

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

The other thing that sets this movie apart from the current crop of tongue-in-cheek screamers (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream) is that it's actually perversely intriguing, rather than just clever. [03 Nov 1997, p.C2]

Actually a pretty entertaining movie, in a kick-you-in-the-pants kind of way. A relative rarity -- a solid no-brow comedy.

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

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

There are flashes of excitement in this film, mostly from the verbal play and sulphurous humour of Welsh's perspective, but there's a lot that makes you wonder why you're sitting through it.

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

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

A movie that gets wonderfully under your skin.

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

Like any good religious sermon, it follows its scary vision of hell with a possibility of last-minute redemption.

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.

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

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