Liam Lacey

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

Human Nature's zigzag ingenuity wears out some time before the farce bounces slowly to an uneven conclusion. For all its highfalutin title and corkscrew narrative, the movie turns out to be not much more than a shaggy human tale.

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

Jacobs is a competent director but he doesn't bring anything extra to this shell game of a narrative.

Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.

Invincible lacks Herzog's usual visual and intellectual panache, and is afflicted by weak English-language acting, which makes it more of a career curio than a major work.

It's a cop movie that refuses to cop out in the usual way.

With all due respect to Japanese animation fans and pop-culture enthusiasts, life may be just too short to plunge into the busy world of Cowboy Bebop.

It tries too hard too early.

Rather than another oppressive film about poverty, it's a revealing experiment in perspective.

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

If Ocean's Thirteen were compared to a gem, it would have to be considered something of a flashy fraud: Initially impressive for cut and colour, it lacks either clarity or weight.

Estela Bravo's film Fidel, The Untold Story has the kitsch appeal of a farm implement on a restaurant wall, or an Andy Warhol Mao poster: Interesting, but not for its original purpose.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

Seems overstuffed and, in its own way, preachy.

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

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

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

Here's a vote of gratitude for Samuel L. Jackson, who has become a specialist in making mediocre movies far more entertaining than they should be.

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

Boisterous, cloying, simultaneously raunchy and innocent, hip and klutzy.

Highly entertaining.

The wildly ambitious but flawed biographical film about the English cellist Jacqueline du Pré.

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

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

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

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

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

Rohmer doesn't attempt to create any skepticism about Grace's perspective on her experiences; we are shown them as she saw them, and seeing is the real pleasure of The Lady and the Duke.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

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

Shot mostly at night, in high-contrast images, punctuated by rock-video collages, Intacto is nothing if not hip, but its questions are more coffee-shop hypothetical than genuinely profound.

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

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

Once again, perhaps the most impressive effect is Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, using his Shakespearean training to make long mouthfuls of nonsense sound almost persuasive.

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

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

Too silly to be taken seriously, it's not silly enough to overcome skepticism.

Unassuming only in its title.

An intense story about an all-powerful Chinese crime lord and his extended family. [26 Jan 1996]

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

Price has written a screenplay that may be complex and ambitious to a fault.

A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.

What's fun about Benson Lee's documentary Planet B-Boy isn't just the amazingly athletic displays of B-boys he puts on screen, but the film's sense of cultural discovery.

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

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

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

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

The best American movie so far this year.

By the time the last jerk on the comic premise has been tugged, you might find yourself muttering an age-ist dismissal: this Grumpy Old Man thing (or, in this case, Soggy Old Men thing) is getting kind of old. [03 July 1997, p.C3]

The Wackness is one of those Sundance coming-of-age films, with all that implies: a surfeit of forced edginess, kooky characters, cynicism-coated sentimentality and self-absorbed angst.

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

The music, at least, is welcome.

A trite but sturdy offering, a showcase for popular young Czech actress Anna Geislerova, as well as the beautiful Moravian countryside, shot in glowing earthy tones.

He [Salles] has managed to create a movie that's pretty bleak for a Hollywood -- especially Disney -- thriller. His theme, as a director, is the indignities of poverty and, in his way, he pays more attention to that agenda than he does in generating any real thrills.

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

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

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

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

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

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

Hercules is a lot of fun -- not a masterpiece, but engaging, clever and bright. [27 June 1997, p.C1]

Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill.

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

One of the more ingenious and fresh surprises of the summer.

The trouble is that the plot is so elliptical to be almost unfollowable (though it helps to have seen the trailer).

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

Less satisfying are the moments when the film concedes to American horror conventions, especially the scuttling vampire effects, which pull us out of the haunted world of these lovely damaged creatures into a place that, while not of this world, feels entirely too familiar.

A trifle compared to Robert Altman's great films -- But it's a very assured trifle, and an unusually good-natured Altman film.

Without either the effect of a full concert spectacle, or up close and personal backstage intimacy, This Is It is neither one thing nor the other.

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

A former mental patient and her family spend a summer on an isolated island, in a classic Bergman portrait where family dysfunction and existential terror meet. [31 Jul 2007, p.R1]

It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]

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

Give Quarantine credit: Without resorting to computer-generated monsters or supernatural explanations, it uses consistent logic and confinement to find new ways of being scary.

An absorbing and not-too-uncomfortable experience, so long as you remember there's a camera lens and a big distance between you and the film's violent subject.

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

Poised, delicate, powerful, hovering between poignancy and pealing laughter, it is a feast formed by skill and serendipity.

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

Fortunately, director-writer Marc Lawrence (he also created the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice") manages saccharine saturation by tempering his stars' familiar appeal with enough dry wit to make this low-key romantic comedy a not-too-sticky Valentine's Day offering.

Think of it as "Cheers" without the beer, or "Friends'" Central Perk with razors and sharper dialogue.

May be anticorporate, it's by no means hype-free.

Though it leaves no sex and danger cliche unturned, Lassiter is a lightweight, but briskly entertaining and stylish genre film. [20 Feb 1984]

The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.

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

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

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

There's an easy familiarity and charm in the creased, middle-aged faces of Nimoy, Shatner and DeForest Kelly (the perpetually irascible Dr. McCoy), all of whom now play their parts with an ever-present twinkle. Their behavior rarely has anything to do with the motives provided by the plot; rather, they wear their characters like old habits, as they boldly go where they've always gone before. [26 Nov. 1986, p.C5]

Burton's movie is not only more faithful, complex and better cast, it has an essential ingredient: squirrels.

Director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out," "Species"), working from a script by Leslie Bohem ("Daylight"),does a serviceable job, wrapping his narrative around the big kabooms, but the real interest comes from the extraordinary barrage of sound and spectacle.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

There is both a sense of disappointment and relief when House of Sand and Fog crosses over into improbability, when the viewer can sit back, breathe easy again. All this trouble over the failure to open an envelope.

Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.

The return to an Errol Flynn-style hero, who can swing from chandeliers, fight with two swords at once and ride a horse backward, recalls a movie era both sexier and more innocent.

Very light-hearted and glamorous. [09 Nov 2002, p.R24]

The Motown musicians today are in their 60s and 70s but they remain inspiringly colourful, funny in their stories and assured in their musicianship.

[Hoffman] gives gross-out comedy a whole new depth.

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

Though rich in visual style, the movie is unbalanced in performances and script, ranging, from scene to scene, from go-for-baroque grandeur to strident excess.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

The most disturbing aspect of the movie is not the sex scenes (shot from the waist up) but her face, especially in her porn-star persona: a frozen little smiling mask that suggests a paradoxically intense vacancy.

This is like no movie you've seen before, a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level.

Give it an A for concept -- a bizarre marionette version of a Jerry Bruckheimer-style action movie; B for its occasional moments of convulsively funny comedy; and D for the politics, for pandering to exactly the kind of reactionary sentiments it purports to satirize.

The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.

A movie that feels a bit like digging a hole in the ground -- an exercise that may build character but doesn't seem to accomplish much else.

Distinctly middling, London-set romance.

A celebration of Hong Kong action cinema that mocks gravity, both emotional and physical.

Imperfect, but certainly provocative.

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

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

That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.

Not just a 3-D novelty to amuse school groups, but also a memorial.

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

Serves to champion human irrepressibility and unpredictability. It's the flip side to the defeatism of "Distant," but with parallels, both in the very deliberate pacing and moments of visual wit.

Little Fish is a small film about one family and drugs, but it succeeds in standing for a larger social catastrophe.

Dreamgirls is one of the best movie musicals in memory.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.

The terror sequences (not only animals but monsoons and earthquakes and quicksand) are scary until they get monotonous: after a while, you have a sense you're watching a clip reel from every Hollywood disaster flick ever made.

For all its emphasis on doomed honour and grim death, Letters from Iwo Jima is also sentimental.

Hoary, rather than whore-y, Irina Palm is shameless only in its mawkish sincerity.

George W. Bush is hammered for doubling the debt load with his high-spending, low-taxing ways.

Perhaps the movie might have made more sense if the actors could have taken each other's roles: Pitt always seems light and ageless, while Blanchett never seems to have been young.

The Rock is just typical big American dumb fun.

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

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

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

Low, mean and depressingly plausible.

Waitress is sweet, uneven and, ultimately, a heartbreaker.

Dopey.

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

A passable romantic dish, a good-looking, old-fashioned date movie set in an idealized Greenwich Village, evocative of the better Woody Allen films.

A funereally unfunny comedy.

It's the same package with new wrapping.

Actors Zhang Ziyi and Takeshi Kaneshiro are the kind of startlingly good-looking, glamorous stars that evoke classic Hollywood adventure films.

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

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

The payoff is the revitalization of Bond by making him closer to what Fleming envisaged: a sociopath who, fortunately, is on our side.

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

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

An unabashedly schlocky, expertly executed blend of jack-in-the-box jolts and humour.

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

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

As it dips in and out of the boys' lives, and occasionally wanders back to the contemporary Dito surveying the old neighbourhood, Saints never really integrates its two time periods.

Unclassifiable and wildly original, it is almost wordless but teeming with sound.

The best Canadian beer movie since "Strange Brew," and the best 1930s musical of the year, The Saddest Music in the World is the kind of exhaustingly delirious film that only Winnipeg director Guy Maddin could make.

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

John Frankenheimer created this eccentrically brilliant thriller, an exercise in mid-sixties paranoia. [12 Jan 2002, p.R25]

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

Though far from a disaster of Biblical proportions, Evan Almighty is a mild, sporadically funny comedy in an oversized sentimental frame.

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

Often more ingenious in appearance than fact. The hunter-gets-captured-by-the-game scenario is predictable and the sequence of shell games does not, when reconsidered, actually add up.

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

Exist as extended videos for the accompanying soul and rap soundtrack.

Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.

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

After the first five minutes of Down Periscope, though, you'll be more likely be thinking Voyage to the Bottom of the Dregs. As with Ellen DeGeneres's Mr. Wrong, this is the sort of film you expect a big TV star to do before he's successful, not after. [01 Mar 1996]

Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.

Conventional and erratic in tone as The Eye is, the film has some real visual (and auditory) style going for it.

Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."

Plays like a sophisticated children's story.

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

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

Artistic originality is not so common a commodity that you can afford to get too fussy about the details.

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

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

In a summer of low movie expectations and worse results, Fantastic Four is a not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

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

The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd.

A film whose limitations are the same as its appeal: It's a bauble. Running at barely more than 80 minutes, the film is both a travelogue and a commercial for swinging polyglot Europe.

It feels like one long non-sequitur -- like closing a Charles Bronson film with a disco medley -- but there's an emotional consistency to Kitano's boisterous celebration of movement.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

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

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

A love letter to performers who put their egos and bodies on the line.

Braff's deadpan performance and dry reactions are deft, and his ability to shape a scene to a punctuation point is impressive, but he's all over the place as a writer.

The Indian in the Cupboard unfolds with absorbing logic to tell a tale in the best of children's story tradition. [17 July 1995]

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

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

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

It's also mysterious in fresh ways. Like Hillary, Yates and Simpson climbed the mountain because it was there -- but what strange deity sent down a Boney M song to help Joe Simpson get home?

Captures some of the spirit of the real Che.

Too busy to be boring or deeply engaging, Tarzan is an efficient Disney treatment of a time-tested story. The results aren't bad, just not quite worth a chest-pounding victory yell.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

Irresistibly funny in its brightest moments. At other times, this comedy about a black-white culture clash sags until it scrapes bottom.

Though Abrams doesn't possess a fraction of the visual pizzazz of the two previous MI directors, Brian De Palma or John Woo, his incarnation is, from a narrative perspective, better made.

The movie is often both smart and creepy, but it's still a novice effort. After an initially engrossing start, it stumbles through a series of implausible coincidences and murky events, barely held together by the magnetic performance of Javier Bardem.

Sington's smartest decision was to let 10 of the astronauts speak for themselves. The film juxtaposes their personal stories, both their doubts and machismo, with the titanic achievement of the lunar landings.

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

A French rat as a master chef? Absurd. But a brilliant French chef with an American accent? C'est grotesque!

Though nothing much happens in the plot, the interplay between characters is always sharply observed, with funny, off-kilter dialogue: Whether it's a clumsy pickup attempt at a bar, a couple fighting about which of them cares more about the other, or the attempt by relatives to console each other at a funeral -- while sharing lines of cocaine -- the scenes feel both spontaneous and deftly constructed. [1 Nov 1996, p.D3]

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.