Oliver Lyttelton

From the cloying, ever-present score to the complete lack of narrative momentum, it all adds up to a film that's easily Van Sant's worst, and is a sad black mark on McConaughey's mostly excellent recent run. Ultimately, Sea Of Trees feels like an entirely appropriate title: it makes you feel like you're drowning, and it's full of sap.

A sour, tedious and derivative film that doesn't just prove disappointing in its own right, it actively makes us resent the first film retroactively for inspiring it.

The film isn't bad enough to be some kind of potential cult classic: it's tedious, with even the stranger moments and plot developments failing to raise the pulse.

Rarely competent, unintentionally hilarious and borderline reprehensible in both its politics and its take on gender roles.

One can’t fault Hazanavicius’ motivations too much, especially given the lack of attention given to the events in Chechnya over the past fifteen years... It’s just a shame that he does it such a banal and trite way.

The film, like the original, feels very haphazardly structured, a hotchpotch collection of scenes rather than a unified whole. There's also no tonal consistency, with Webb lurching awkwardly from quippy comedy to brooding drama to high tragedy in short spaces of time, undercutting all three modes as a result.

Leconte’s never been the edgiest of filmmakers, but A Promise is so free of anything close to an edge that it’s like watching a beige sphere for ninety-odd minutes—and it feels much longer.

The whole thing feels sort of tossed off, like it was made by film students over a couple of weekends.

There's a pleasing egalitarianism to the film's history-through-the-eyes-of-the-ordinary-man concept, but the script rarely makes the case that their versions are compelling enough to warrant a film.

Kiefer Sutherland feels somewhat miscast as the mentor, but nowhere near as badly as Hudson is as the love interest. In all fairness, it’s a nightmare of a part, an artist (whose art is, as it turns out, is terrible) haunted by the recent death of her boyfriend, and seemingly unable to read basic human feelings and emotion. But Hudson doesn’t really help things, coming across more often than not as unintentionally funny.

Perhaps hardcore Jet Li fans will be able to get some joy out of it, but we'd suspect that even they will struggle with this one.