Rick Groen

Ghostbusters for the pre-teen set, a cartoon of a cartoon. Is there some residual charm? Not much. Are the special effects special? Not too. [19 Aug 1987]

With its confined setting and its existential predicament, the picture owes an ostensible debt to the likes of Pinter and Kafka and Pirandello -- you know, Six Characters in Search of an Author, or, failing that, just getting the hell out of this weird place.

The process of remembering that drives the book is gone from the film, boiled away until all that's left is the mundane residue of memory - mere incidents strung together as plot.

If you feel you might already have seen City of Ghosts, but can't quite place it, you'd be forgiven. Hollywood, never afraid of working a cliché to death, has turned out dozens of "City of . . ." films over the years.

Jane Campion makes a beeline for the repressed sexuality, and loses the nuance. [17 Jan 1997]

Has a refreshingly different twist: What we have here is a "what if" comedy.

Sorry, this one doesn't really work at all, but don't blame the workers.

What we have here is a pretty good TV show huffed and puffed into a rather mediocre film.

The Devil's Advocate is a dull morality tale, but a number of bright moments come courtesy of the Prince of Darkness.

The overstuffed farce remains, but the caustic leanness and meanness of the original are gone with the Mississippi wind. That leaves us to settle for occasionally funny moments in an otherwise uneven picture.

It's better than 2, but not nearly as good as 1. On the slippery slope of sequel-land, that's an okay average. [15 May 1992]

The climax also comes with a nifty little kicker.

The ensemble is unwieldy and the attendant yarn much too cluttered.

So the promise of a proud director comes to nothing, and all my rooting goes for naught. Maybe, sadly, the metaphoric night that falls on Manhattan has finally begun to descend on Lumet -- and he's going gentle into it.

So the interrogative title is left to hover over the ending, as it does over all those tension-filled places near and far. Speaking as a foolish man, I had high hopes for these wise women – given the historic alternative, I still do.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

Juice takes a black director, a black cast and a black theme - ghetto youths come of age - and turns the whole exercise into a white-bread,middle-of-the-road film. You root for it to rise to the challenge, to be better than it is, but it sticks to the straight course - polished enough yet steadfastly predictable, just another sentimental slice of mean-street life. [22 Jan 1992]

Amounts to a complete misreading of Wilde, who used the conventions of artifice to lampoon artificiality. Parker totally misses the point by tacking on such cinematic curlicues -- apparently, in his eagerness to seem movie-friendly, he's too hung up on the importance of not being earnest.

Sometimes, a strong premise makes for a weak movie, which ends up drowning in its own clever conceit.

This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.

Notorious isn't, not even remotely.

Nominally set in some rural American backwater, The Neon Bible is a hellishly muddled reprint of Davies' personal canon - muddled enough to turn all his past virtues into present transgressions. [19 Apr 1996]

Things you will not find in State Of Grace: a script that makes a modicum of psychological sense; a performance that isn't either desperately overwrought or numbly underplayed; and anything resembling grace. [18 Sep 1990]

If this were funny, The Heat would add up to your average buddy-cop comedy. Except that it’s not funny, at least not very and not often.

Although much of the bloat can be traced to the script, via the Jennifer Weiner novel, let's not absolve director Curtis Hanson from his fat share of the blame.

Once again, then, impeccable visual detail and uniformly strong performances combine to create a polished, if slightly airless, result. [14 Aug 1998]

As the title more than hints, Love Is All You Need is no stranger to formulaic clichés, but it’s still a Bier film. There’s a sprinkling of vinegar in the treacle, a bit of ballast in fancy’s lightweight flight, and, of course, the triumph of optimism that can seem unearned in her dramas is made to measure in a comedy.

Too often, Levin confuses passion with focus, intensity with clarity, and deflating lies with discovering truths.

No longer content with simple conservatism, this horror is downright totalitarian.

The result, as a colleague once so aptly put it, is less film noir than film beige.

Using a kidnapping plot to call up some old-fashioned suspense, it doesn't even get a dial tone.

As well-meaning elegies go, especially ones to working stiffs prematurely ripped from their subterranean roots, Brassed Off is the pits: It's a miner opus in a minor key.

Our time is plagued with primitive directors toiling in the name of entertainment, and protected by an industry that rewards competence over excellence. They're the reason why this movie is simply average, and why all the Red Dragons look so uniformly beige.

Clearly, the screenplay is looking for some black comedy here, but Foster's direction is too earnest to locate it.

Here, Soderbergh's visual additions -- gimmicky lighting, surreal backdrops, all cued to the monologue's changing rhythms -- are more distracting than enhancing. Or maybe not. In a way, the camera's empty gimmickry points to the same tendency in Gray's verbal canters -- diverting enough but, ultimately, isn't it just sleight-of-mouth? [18 April 1997, p.C5]

But there's still Murray, who drives the idea further than it has any right to go. He energizes the loony schtick of the opening scenes. [17 May 1991]

Soul Surfer is a true story that plays like bad fiction.

Nell is a good movie made great by the lambent presence of Jodie Foster. [23 Dec 1994]

An amiable action-comedy, amiable enough that the laughs come in a steady drizzle if not a torrent, and that the action is something blissfully less than the usual full-out assault on our battered senses.

So that great start turns all clunky and dull and, you know, mediocre. Still, you'll love Emma. Emma is about as cute as a kid can get.

The main flaw is an over-abundance of villains, a bout of narrative greediness that sees them marching out of their lairs like so many evil-doers-on-parade.

In keeping with the purloining spirit of sequeldom, Woo plunders his own past. [24 May 2000, p.R1]

Farrell looks so stymied we feel for the guy -- and when the door closes on A Home at the End of the World, that's the only feeling in town.

Untamed Heart is a gentle fable, a contemporary re-working of myths that will always cut close to the bone - myths about love and magic, about the silence that speaks volumes and the peace that surpasses understanding. It's certainly not a perfect film, but there's a sweet integrity to the writing and a stern refusal to compromise itself, to bow to the dictates of formula. [12 Feb 1993]

Don't Move comes to seem as static as its title -- we just don't learn enough to compensate for feeling so little.

Park is busy treating every frame like a runway model, dressing it up in self-conscious layers of cinematic haute couture. It’s gorgeous to gaze upon but otherwise dessicated – listless, juiceless and ultimately pointless. For all his exemplary camera work, there’s no motion, or emotion, in the picture.

Most of the cast (along with director Joe Mantello) have been recruited from the stage play, and they all do a fine job of trimming their performances for the screen.

What a sprawling, befuddling, fascinating, frustrating mess of a movie. Usually the tautest of directors, Clint Eastwood has gone all slack here, allowing his subject to get completely away from him.

In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the times may be hard but the apocalypse is soft. Welcome to the anti-"Melancholia."

In the final frames, and the final analysis, Alien gets the worst of both worlds - it's boring and it's messy. The title may be "cubed," but the movie looks awfully square. [22 May 1992]

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

Definition of redundant: A formulaic Hollywood pic that calls itself Déjà Vu.

Mr. Holland's Opus is all heart. I suppose a brain cell or two might have helped to win over laggards such as me, but no matter. It sure means well and, in a note-perfect world, strikes its basic chords with a naif's true conviction. [19 Jan 1996]

Simultaneously a spectacular act of movie-making and a slight movie. Or is that impossible: When the means are so gloriously abundant, can the end ever be merely trivial?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make heads or tails of this Byzantine thing. [22 May 1996]

Emmerich succeeds only in making his previous venture, the marginal Stargate, look positively inspired by comparison.

Ultimately, Sliding Doors becomes a victim of its own cleverness, shutting down all that early promise.

There will be occasional tears, there must be frequent laughs and the whole contrived structure has the calculated quaintness of Ye Olde Pub at a EuroDisney theme park.

This time the script makes scant metaphoric use of the mall. In fact, metaphors are generally in short supply here. Scares too.

Add it all up, including the nifty twist at the end, and what we have here is a fun Hollywood flick with a good head on its shoulders.

A happy, healthy, bouncing baby of a movie. [23 Nov 1994]

Intended as food for thought, but all we really get is a light snack -- the kind that's heavier in presentation than in substance.

A movie of its kind and of its time -- functional, professional, slickly manufactured and slouching toward consciousness -- I, Robot is a perfect slave to mechanical convention.

Saddled with this hollow script, Stone pads with elaborate set pieces.

More Than a Game is less than a movie.

THE Lover is lyrical and sensuous, very pretty and strangely hollow. Deliberately hollow, I think - the flatness at the centre of this film is meant to correspond to the emptiness at the heart of its young protagonist. And the audience is supposed to fall into that void and hear its echo, feel the residual ache. Yet we don't - we're content to comprehend the theme without feeling it. Our emotions are spared, and, as a result, we watch the proceedings at a safe remove - appreciative yet detached, admiring yet unmoved. There's much to love about The Lover, but not enough to love passionately. [30 Oct 1992]

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to guess which gal became the wife, which gal should have become the wife and which gal is there just to play with our heads. It's exactly like that old shell game – mildly diverting, pea-sized and otherwise hollow.

Never as spectacular as it promises, often funnier than it intends, Clash of the Titans is a harmless diversion - neither bad enough to annoy nor good enough to admire. [15 June 1981]

Apatow rescued big-screen comedy from its lengthy wallow in the trough of dumb-and-dumber – we have good reason to thank the guy. Until now. In This Is 40, his fingerprints are still identifiable, but not nearly as crisp. They're starting to look smudged.

As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.

Judi Dench is much more of a challenge. Drenched in powder and pomp, the grand old Dame pops up in a London carriage. She's there in a flash and then, as quickly, gone, and her fleeting presence is exactly like the fleeting merit of this fourth galleon in the portly franchise: It prompts stirrings, not quite all the way to feelings.

First a bit about the movie, which really isn't one -- more like a 48-minute press release promoting the glories of NASCAR.

This is the one Murakami work that would seem an ideal candidate for the leap from page to screen. It should be a good movie. But it isn't.

If you like your skiing extreme but your documentaries safe, then carve a sharp turn over to Steep.

Only an actor of Moore's calibre could begin to add a bit of credible flesh to these hallowed bones.

It's the sort of big thought that makes a small point, which is precisely the problem with Life in a Day. A documentary that looks to give this notion visual form, it strives awfully hard for depth but, more often than not, comes off too shallow.

Hawking is as much a phenomenon as the phenomena he explores. Knowing that, A Brief History Of Time has the deceptive simplicity of an elegant equation - it merely sets up the parallels and permits us to wonder, gazing upon the heavens above and the mysteries within. [28 Aug 1992]

I wouldn't say this is laugh-out-loud risible, but there are definitely moments. Still, you might want to consider sitting through the uneven thing just to get to the ending, because that's quite something. You may love it, you may hate it, but forget it you won't.

This is filmmaking as a minor feat of engineering, the kind where even the gossamer emotions seem like prefab components -- charm, whimsy, serendipity, all so many discs plugged into the hard drive.

The result is a war picture that, trying to pass off fidelity to the book as objectivity, sacrifices any voice of its own, and ends up not knowing what to think.

In its component parts, then, Love Liza is essentially a battle between opposing clichés.

Disclosure is a well-acted, slickly directed shell of a picture. The veneer is so polished that you look on with something approaching genuine satisfaction, and only after the final credits roll do you begin to feel the void.

So much cinematic majesty perched precariously atop so little common sense. But, hell, maybe Quentin's right; relax, enjoy -- a castle with a shaky foundation is still quite a sight.

So why, despite everyone's best efforts, does all this bigness seem so small and unfocused and simply not up to the task?

Ultimately, Benigni's comic refinery merely transforms the banality of evil into a lesser sin -- the evil of banality.

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

In its defence, the movie means to incorporate Jet's conversion into its theme, serving up his new pacifism as a choice morsel of irony. But it doesn't taste ironic, just bland, and we aren't biting either.

In this vast balloon of a film, Bardem is the ballast – that Manichean face is a movie onto itself.

A sequel that immediately picks up the plot of its predecessor, and then proceeds to drive the redeemed franchise right off the deep, dark end.

The narrative meanders on occasion, the conceit can seem repetitious, the editing is loose. Nevertheless, buoyed by the naturalism of its exclusively young cast, the picture effectively gets into your head and under your skin.

Any one of these narrative components might have made for a worthy picture. But that would have taken a more imaginative writer than Charles Leavitt and a more sensitive director than Gary Fleder.

En route, the plot gimmick degenerates from clever to dumb, then gets forgotten entirely, and the last act simply poops out - the climax is a Bigger Bang that plays like the saddest of whimpers.

Delight, a modest yet palpable measure of the stuff, is restored.

This is just another generic war movie of the kind that revels in combat's greater glories. You know the type - the camaraderie that never quite rings true, the plot that never once makes sense. In short, the whole bombs-bursting- in-air, truth-through-the-night jive. [21 Oct 1988]

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

Can't find it in your vast collection of Fleming first editions? Not to worry. Seems the producers - a.k.a. the Cubby Broccoli Cottage Industry - have run plumb out of titles. And everything else too. [14 July 1989]

The only thing majestic about Shrek the Third is the title.

Isn't unequivocally bad. Rather, this is what's known in the boxing world as an "opponent" -- shows up on the weekend just to fill out the card, to do battle with its betters, earn a little cash and be completely forgotten come Monday morning.

Ocean's Twelve lacks the courage of its star-driven convictions. Next time, Steven and George and Brad and Matt should ditch the hypocrisy and just shoot themselves shooting the breeze, poking fun at each other from within the smug sanctuary of their precious celebrity.

If the facts of the story are essentially true, their presentation is as formulaic as ever.

Director Cameron Crowe who, not having made a dramatic feature since his 2005 stinker "Elizabethtown," seems bound and determined to crank out a crowd-pleaser here.

No, the trouble isn't with them but with a screenplay (by Angus MacLachlan) that loads their characters with too much symbolic baggage and then points them off in obscure directions.

The humour may not be wickedly black, but once in a while it’s amusingly beige.

The symbolism is about as subtle as a fang to the neck. Really, Daybreakers is more fun than foreboding; it's fright-lite, yet that's par for the bloody course in these busy apocalyptic days.

The Woman in the Fifth is an interesting chameleon until it runs out of disguises, and all that was transitory just looks transparent.

Despite a few wrong turns early on, the movie gathers graceful momentum and heads straight to the warm heart of the book - that fond spot located just on the safe side of sentimentality, a feel- good place that doesn't leave any feel-stupid fallout.

Alas, the news is mixed: Thor ain't much of a movie but it's a great career move. Both movie and move belong to director Kenneth Branagh.

Instead, you get a nominal character study that boasts a single mighty performance and one nifty scene; alas, both performance and scene exist in a narrative vacuum - the plot is non-existent and the pace makes the ice age seem hasty.

Don't think for a second that Hollywood has cornered the market on formula flicks. Ever since the prototypical success of "The Full Monty," those crafty Brits have been running their own mimeograph machine.

Quaid doesn't have much to work with, and so deflects the portrayal away from the mind toward the body – consistently giving the coot a hunched, pigeon-toed gait. Nice try, but that bird won't fly.

Thematically, structurally, narratively (hell, pick your adverb), this effort goes way past thin - Flesh And Bone is anorexic. [05 Nov 1993]

On the flimsy wings of this familiar fairy tale, Linklater tries to fly himself a movie, dressing up the quartet (and the strapping he-men cast to portray them) in the audience-friendly vestments of picaresque charm.

If you like your sentimentality sweet and sticky, then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely your jar of honey.

With its tasteful palette and twee charm, Miss Potter is the china plate of movies, a Peter Rabbit collectible entirely suitable for mounting on the nursery wall.

Credit Madagascar with negotiating a hopeful truce in the ongoing battle between the computer and the animation. Judged merely by appearances, its look is a lovely compromise. Too bad everything else has been compromised right out of existence.

At least The Infidel is an equal-opportunity blasphemer, and God bless it for that. Otherwise, this thing plays like a cheeky Brit-com blown up to feature length, with a thin coat rack of plot to hang the ethnic humour on, and a wish to offend without being offensive.

Typically, this sort of film is an earnest tear-jerker with moments of levity. Instead, what we have here is a raucous rib-tickler with occasional pauses for a little dramatic relief.

The Arthurian legend has received a wide variety of treatments over the years, but this safe, sanitized American version drains the juice smack out of a notorious romantic triangle. [07 Jul 1995]

Well, the movie suffers slightly from that tendency -- the portrait shows definite signs of airbrushing. But it's rendered with enough intelligence, and performed with sufficient grace, to offer us an occasionally compelling, curiously upbeat look behind the lacquered image and into the complicated self.

Yes, there are many splendid reasons to see Snow White and the Huntsman – enough, maybe, not to care that neither Snow White nor the Huntsman rank high among them.

Director Dan Algrant’s conceit here is to take an actual event – a tribute concert for Tim held at a Brooklyn church in 1991, the concert that sparked Jeff’s own career – and wrap a fictionalized drama around it.

Match your expectations to the level of the humor - measurable at about knee-high to a snake's belly - and you just might enjoy Who's Harry Crumb? I mean, we're talking low comedy here, boasting more pratfalls than another losing night at the Gardens. But there is a redeeming factor in this manic equation, a high-flying blimp by the name of John Candy. [08 Feb 1989]

When [Jackcson]'s not on camera, Coach Carter feels like the two-hour opus it is — too long, too banal, a bit ridiculous. But when he is, nothing else seems to matter, and how sublime is that.

With barely a laugh to be found, Confetti takes the "mock" right out of the mockumentary, and you can guess what's left. Yep, a Umentary, a brand new genre best defined by what it's not -- not real like a doc, not funny like a mock, not this thing or that thing or much of anything.

Actor-turned-director Tony Goldwyn elicits solid performances from the cast, then undercuts them by resorting to a trite montage or a clunky set-piece, inevitably scored with an obtrusive rock tune telling us what to feel and when to feel it.

In The Company You Keep, old radicals never die – they just turn into old actors.

A middling documentary but a magnificent indictment.

The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

This is wish-fulfilment fantasy, where the laughs lie in sorting out an embarrassment of riches.

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

In the end, then, just Vanessa Redgrave and Terence Stamp and those voices – their solos contain this picture like carved book-ends, vintage and lovely and still so profoundly of use.

It marks the first time in a decade that Sidney Poitier has worked in front of the camera. Well, after such an extended absence, maybe he wanted to limber up slowly, just a little light stretching to iron out the kinks in his actor's reflex. If so, the guy made the perfect choice. As flicks go, this is definitely a low-impact workout. [12 Feb 1988]

This is potentially compelling, but truncated flashbacks are far too crude a mechanism for exploring not only the intricacies of that tumultuous period in Kenyan history but also its ongoing legacy.

Eraser may lack the chameleon wizardry of the the "Terminator" duo, or the imperious mechanics of "True Lies", but the bang-for-the-buck ratio is high enough to appease even the thinnest wallet.

As a motion picture, Fever Pitch is merely competent.

The bloody narrative has an oddly bloodless effect. But that's not surprising – not when a film is so eager to double as a lecture.

This much is inarguable: In the more than two flamboyant hours of Across the Universe, Julie Taymor doesn't cheat us for a single second.

Harsh Times opens with a deadly nightmare and ends with a vast bloodbath -- in between, things get a little gruesome.

In every way but one, A Knight's Tale is a bouncy pop song of a movie, the snappy/happy kind that puts a grin on your face and a tap to your toe, shifting the heart into high and the mind into neutral. [11 May 2001]

FALLING Down is a nasty bit of business, a two-faced manipulator that condones what it pretends to condemn. Cluttered and often downright silly, it's not much of a movie, but it is a fascinating sign of the times - a litmus test for every prejudice and fear harboured by the white middle class in ailing, urban America. [26 Feb 1993, p.C6]

Dogs of War takes its title from Julius Caesar but its cue from Julia Child. Based on Frederick Forsyth's novel, the film is meant to be an intimate study of soldiers of fortune. But it ends only as a shallow, pseudo-elliptical lesson in how to whip up a frothy coup when time is pressing and the guests are about to arrive. [17 Feb 1981]

As returns go, Return To Paradise falls short of heavenly, but it does get to the stars -- at least three of them.

Posse wants to be a 'classic Western' but its definition of classic is consistently cliched. Yet it has such grace and such an abiding belief in its message that you can't help but smile approval. [14 May 1993]

More rant than rollick, it's just ain't funny enough.

Popped in the oven and marked with a predictable P, The Family Stone is the Christmas cookie of Christmas movies -- this thing is so pat it should come with the recipe attached.

It’s been not so much remade as restrained – tamed and dumbed-down and with any sharp political edges safely filed off.

The dogs and the snow and the flag-waving and the choo-choos are all reduced to TV-sized portions. Just as well, I suppose - think of it as audio-visual aerobics, forced training for next month's big bout in our living-rooms. [14 Jan 1994]

So this is a first-level, unironic fright film, the sort whose tongue is removed from its cheek, coated in gore, and pointed right at the audience.

Director Walter Salles, who knows a thing or two about picaresque journeys – in "The MotorcycleDiaries," even in "Central Station" – does make an honest effort here.

This is a formula film with panache.

So the questions arises: Why bother watching the contrived fiction when the eye-popping fact is readily available? Answer: Why, indeed.

The lows never last too long - something invariably jumps out to recapture our interest or prompt a chuckle.

It's all picture and no motion, as wooden as its framing. Lovely and lifeless, the result is a traditional portrait of two defiers of tradition.

OH DEAR, what grade to assign The Rachel Papers? Hmmm, seems this is a British coming-of-age flick that turns out to be a whole lot like the U.S. coming-of-age flicks we've seen a whole lot of. Sure, better cast, earthier language, niftier accents, but the same paint-by-number formula punctuated by the same tacked-on "be true to yourself" moral. Heck, let's be generous: passing, barely passing. [12 May 1989]

An acquired taste that you may not acquire. I did, but it took me a while.

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

A sputtering marathon of a movie. It starts, it stops, it sprints, it stumbles, occasionally following a straight narrative line, frequently darting off on colourful if pointless tangents, often commanding our attention yet never sparking our imagination.

The result is a fairly co-ordinated effort that, despite a few miscues, yields a consistently watchable film.

All that starring talent isn’t exactly wasted here; it’s just diluted, watered down enough to demote “really funny” to sort of funny, now and then, here and there, some of the time. Hey, it’s the movie biz.

Sylvia the movie competently shows us how; but, as always, it's Sylvia the writer who brilliantly tells us why -- then, now and tomorrow, her foreboding words are her finest legacy.

A maniacal, hallucinogenic dip into the bloodbath drawn by a pair of mass murderers, it's the quintessential Stone opus - topical, testy, and wildly controversial, as brilliant or egregious as you wish it to be. [26 Aug 1994, p.C1]

Minghella is a smart guy with splendid intentions but, ultimately, he's a victim here of his own liberal contrivances.

At his best, Spike Lee is too brave to be subtle.

CQ has a modicum of IQ and a dash of style -- the jury's still out on the extent of the inheritance, but the kid clearly learned something at his pater'sknee.

Can't spoil the ending, except to say that it spoils itself.

All costume and scant drama, the result is a curiously flat spectacle, neither offensive nor compelling.

Simply put, Touch dies, with nary a resurrective hand in sight. [14 Feb 1997, p.C5]

Ghostbusters II is a comfy experience for all concerned - easy bucks for the producers, easier yuks for the consumers; nothing ventured, money gained. [19 Jun 1989, p.D9]

As box-office packages go, My Girl may well become a big hit. The wrapping is colourful, even charming in spots, and that circle of black ribbon is a gravely clever touch. Get closer, though, and it's like those Christmas presents stacked around the department store tree - apparently real but really empty. [28 Nov 1991]

Not even Pacino can save it.

Even though Frank Marshall's latest film Alive is based on a true story of survival, it lacks the very qualities it means to celebrate - spark, imagination and spirit. [16 Jan 1993]

Black Rain is really an extended exercise in pure style, a pretty picture in constant motion painted by a very commercial artist. In fact, the style is so uncontaminated by substance that everything here - plot, character, theme - gets subordinated to the glitzy sights and ambient sounds. [22 Sep 1989]

Despite the 3-D gadgetry, there's a musty odour to the script.

None of it is new, nor is the recycled stuff presented in a newly revealing context.

Sometimes sensitive and often silly but really, essentially, beneath his pallor and her panting and their intertwined frustrations, it's just two long hours of coitus interruptus.

The whole film occupies pretty much the same continuuum -- glimmers of intelligence followed by moments of outright hysteria punctuated by bouts of sheer haplessness.

This is an Affair to forget. [21 Oct 1994]

A movie that tries to do to real estate what Fatal Attraction did to adultery. It fails - the script isn't half as convincing or the suspense nearly as taut, but the aim is the same. [28 Sept 1990]

If nothing else (and there isn't much else), Part III rises above the wholesale clutter of its immediate predecessor, then contents itself with settling into an easy commercial groove. What remains is amiable kid's stuff, as sweetly forgettable as an orange Popsicle on a summer's day. [25 May 1990, p.C4]

Nothing more or less than an outright bodice-ripper -- it should have ditched the artsy pretensions and revelled in the entertaining shallows.

Payback is nothing if not brave. It's a documentary attempt to give concrete shape to an abstract discussion, using the medium of film to transplant a nuanced thesis – on the concept of debt – from its natural home on the printed page.

This time, though, Zemeckis has another technical trick up his sleeve – 3-D – and for once the gimmick succeeds.

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

Ultimately, even Lee appears to lose interest, flashing none of his usual visual panache and, at the end, content to forego any considered conclusion for a hunk of lumpy irony.

Great pictures are seamless; in this one, you can not only see the seams but count the stitches.

Yet the performances are just sturdy boats against the narrative current - the plot is altogether too calculated and wholly without surprises, either pleasant or unpleasant... The painting is just fine; too bad the numbers show through.

Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.

As for Daisy, her inflated role is problematic. Although at the periphery of the action, the woman stands at the centre of the film, doubling as the compromised love interest and our voice-over narrator. But even Linney can't bring her to life.

The cast is proficient, with Balk especially adroit at giving her demonic gifts a gleeful twist. And director Andrew Fleming keeps the special effects on a low boil, effective yet not ostentatious, while taking allusive advantage of the competing (and sometimes complementing) tension between the school's Catholic imagery and the girl's pagan icons. But as our heroines lose their grip, so does he. [03 May 1996]

The result isn't meant to be an historical document transmuted into fiction; instead, it's fiction turned into a fable, a dark fable.

Speaking of that deadly finale, it's easily the best part of the picture. Beautifully edited, shot in fluid slow-motion, scored to a traditional Irish ballad crooned in a child's tremulous voice, the violence of the climax is anthemic. The whole sequence is undeniably moving.

Alas, around about the third act, the idea grows tired and the whole thing gets derailed. Too bad, because it's a good ride until it isn't.

The delight of this film isn't so much in the tale as the telling.

Love the kid though, and Statham too – it takes a star with quality to be so rock solid in a crumbling yarn.

You may well watch this film and not buy into a single frame. Me, I couldn't help myself.

John Sayles's heartrending new film is a many-splendoured thing.

So I didn't Huckabees, nor did I entirely not it. Rather, when the end draws nigh and judgment beckons, I'm doomed again to dither in the tepid netherworld, that vast limbo where movies are only half-decent and movie-going is merely half-ed.

Yes, from "Blonde" to "Bunny," it's abundantly evident that the two scribes have mastered, truly mastered, the serious art of self-plagiarism.

A rarity – a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.

Powered by a Scottish writer, a Scottish director, and the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands, this is clearly a labour of love, and the passion gets right up on the screen.

Love & Other Drugs is quite the little cocktail of mood-brighteners, a movie narcotic easy to take and, since the effects wear off quickly, even easier to forget.

Despite an impressive array of acting talent, nothing quite rings true -- all those sharp pieces fit beautifully together without adding up to much. [22 Jan 1999, p.D6]

The surreal visuals are relentless, overpowering the narrative much as they do in the frames of comic books (sorry, graphic novels).

The stark direction, the brittle performances, the impoverished setting, the scatological dialogue, everything about the film screams out "Gritty social realism." Everything, that is, except the plot, which shouts "Eye-rolling melodrama."

Girotti is especially evocative, his face an alternating current that switches from emptiness to alarm and back again.

A comedy boasting a gimmick worth a peek. For, into this remembrance of time past and youth altruistic, the script injects a heavy dose of up-to-the-minute pragmatism. [16 Aug 1985]

The thing is just a clunky and tasteless and dumb scare picture, isn't it? Clunky, yes. Tasteless, for sure. But not so dumb I fear.

Outrageous Fortune is a genuine waste of talent (Midler, Long and Coyote all have it) and time (the standard 90 minutes' worth). [30 Jan 1987]

From its eccentric score (a mix of spaghetti western and funky blues) to its bizarre casting (ex-wrestlemanaic Roddy Piper in the lead role), the flick leaves us off-balance and guessing. By the time we figure out there's not much to guess at, the credits roll by and the jig is up. [5 Nov 1988]

Surviving Picasso is flat-out dull, hanging like a K Mart print in a suburban mall - a testament to Merchant-Ivory's blew-it period. [20 Sep 1996]

It’s a terrific adaptation that succeeds not only as a work of cinema but also, wonderfully, as proof of the novel’s greatness. In short, the picture rebukes the revisionists even while entertaining them.

The ads give this a Lamborghini label, but under the hood, it's just a clunker that putzes along like a suburban sedan. [26 Aug 1989]

Speaking of funny things, director Todd Phillips has been down this path before in "Road Trip." There, toiling in the same lame genre, he actually showed a hint of comic ingenuity. Here, the hint has dwindled to a hoarse whisper.

A lovely oddity.

Like an over-ambitious freshman with a term paper, Singleton raises every issue and illuminates none. And, again, this film is better when the combative heat rises, particularly when the long-telegraphed confrontation between Malik and the neo-Nazi finally comes to a (skin)head. [13 Jan 1995, p.C3]

Whereas the psychology is surreal and wonderfully fluid, the action is too real and surprisingly listless, displaying little of the kinetic zip, or the sheer lyricism, that Lee brought with such memorable effect to "Crouching Tiger."

Black comedies don't get much darker than this.

Actually, occasionally, does feel good. Now if only it had something to say.

This picture is to comedy what carpet bombing is to aerial warfare: The onslaught is so relentless that occasional direct hits on the funny bone are a statistical guarantee.

Dig just a shade beneath the surface, trade in the text for the subtext, and a more interesting picture emerges – a little richer, sadder, almost poignant. Arnie is back again, yet now, as a storied immigrant nearing the end of his tale, he's become an odd sight to behold.

Consequently, your reaction to the film will pretty much hinge on your opinion of the play. Ho-hum is my humble verdict.

Watching Attack of the Clones is like getting rapped on the head with a rubber mallet -- no lasting damage (I pray and hope), but bad enough to bring on an acute bout of dizziness and disorientation. Definitely do not operate heavy machinery after viewing -- this behemoth is brutal.

The film doesn't work, it ain't charming.

Alas, Schumacher doesn't ride on the momentum; worse, he's not an action director, and the film grinds to a dead stop every time it tries to speed up.

Like a smart-ass student clever enough to see through everyone but himself, Art School Confidential falls victim to the very clichés it wants to puncture.

Definitely erratic, this thing -- all in all, it's the sort of commercial vehicle you might want to stay well back of.

Let's just say that, when the parody looks indistinguishable from the parodied, something's gone awry.

As a movie, Blue Chips is more journeyman than star, but, once in a while, it hops off the bench and shows a surprising flash of talent.[22 Feb 1994]

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

The spaghetti western may be dead, but the noodle eastern looks to be alive and well.

Oblivion is an okay blockbuster, a multimillion-dollar exercise in competence.

Done up strictly for laughs, this might have been fine. But the picture actually starts taking itself seriously, and that spells instant yawns. [16 Dec 1989]

Murphy's brand of crude is studied and sleek, all high-polish and sheer calculation. As a performer, he's stylishly smooth; as a comic, that very smoothness is both his greatest strength and his abiding weakness. [22 Dec 1987]

Maybe Bee Movie is another ground-breaking show about nothing – a hornet's nest of hype for a fat hive of nothing. If so, pay up and get stung.

The Notebook is meant to be a romantic weepy, and you will shed tears - but only from the consistent and exhausting effort of trying to control your gag reflex. Even a body that welcomes a sugar fix will repel a sugar invasion.

In the midst of material that's dusty and dated, People I Know somehow feels apocalyptic. How is this possible? Easy: When America's liberal conscience is in the sole care of a publicist, you just know the world's going to hell in a handbasket.

This is still her (Wasikowska’s) picture. She’s its 10-foot tower, mysterious and brave and excited and withdrawn. Alice is the true magic in a Wonderland that’s mere movie magic – the happy surprise amidst everything we’ve come to expect.

Some films, like some people, wear their artsy pretensions on their sleeve, and there really isn't much going on beneath – it's just a posturing armband wrapped around a plain arm. Welcome, then, to the emptiness of Mister Lonely, a movie that goes to extraordinary lengths to say ordinary things.

If you're a five-year-old, or the mental equivalent thereof, and love Saturday morning cartoons, the more violent the better, then Mouse Hunt may just be the movie for you.

In the Mouth of Madness may leave your spine a little short on tingle (any amount of irony always dissipates the scares), but it compensates by neither insulting your grey matter nor sparing your funny bone. In a genre more brain-dead than not, that's an awfully attractive trade-off. [03 Feb 1995]

This is a dumb action flick that pretends to have a brain, a spot of affectation that plunges the audience into double jeopardy -- forcing us to traipse through not just the standard litter of bloody corpses but (oh, damn) the added trash of bloodless ideas.

Like most kiddies games, this one starts out fun and then gets tired. Inevitably, that's when Slade tries to revive our interest by upping the gore quotient.

Baby Boom has the fluffy amiability of an innocuous sitcom. In their rightful place on the shrunken sets of the small screen, its teeny characters would seem comfortably at home. But blown up to feature dimensions, they betray their flimsy origins, looking thin and transparent, just a bunch of under-considered ideas decked out in over-sized finery. [10 Oct 1987]

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.

In this tale of two lives, Being Flynn gets the emphasis wrong. The success that has many fathers is altogether predictable; it's the despicable orphan of failure who has us in his thrall.

The proverbial seems awfully pale here. Fans of Q.T. will find it patently derivative. Fans of Elmore will find it, well, El-less.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more.

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

David Lynch's eye-popping imagery is buried under an avalanche of self-indulgence.

Watching a merely adequate thriller is like eating an ungarnished hot dog - it goes down all right, but where's the spice and what's the point? Narrow Margin combines a solid cast with workmanlike direction and a decent if undistinguished script. Add it up and...you guessed it...all dog and no garnish. [24 Sep 1990]

Alas, in the third instalment of the C.S. Lewis odyssey, the devolution continues with the inexorability of a fairy tale thrust in reverse – the sublime first film morphed into the routine second and now this wispy banality.

Ultimately, She's The One is about less than it seems -- Burns is quite willing to trade off emotional credibility to an easy gag and a neat resolution. Yes, the film's apparent sensitivity comes with a high commercial gloss, but so what -- the lightness is breezy enough to cool our objections. Burns may well be an unabashed entertainer in the guise of an auteur, yet that's an awfully potent combination. Just ask a certain Woody Allen. [23 Aug 1996]

Everyone is back for Another Stakeout but, without the laughs-and-thrills mix of the original, this sequel just doesn't work. [24 July 1993]

By happy coincidence, their names – Bitey, Loudy, Stinky, Lovey and Nimrod – pretty much double as a plot summary.

The film commands our attention again as more connections emerge -- not enough to fully solve the mystery, but sufficient to convince us that Café de Flore amounts to more than the triumph of style over substance.

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

If this is meant to look fresh while still being sensitive, it doesn't and it isn't.

So we're back on "The Road ," but this time Eli's coming – better hide your heart and, while you're at it, put your brain on hold, the easier to enjoy the action-filled sermon to come.

Never brilliant but always solid and often wry, Marley & Me is what it celebrates -- an amiable overachiever.

No matter how you judge it -- as a strict morality play or simply a psychological thriller -- Apt Pupil just doesn't make the grade.

There's probably a good film to be made about the judgmental world of figure skating, but The Cutting Edge isn't it. Nor does it try to be. Instead, it's the sort of movie that aims low - somewhere in the region of competent pulp - and pretty much hits the mark. [31 March 1992]

Along the way there are definitely some pleasing distractions, just not enough to obscure the growing realization that a much better picture could have been made, and wasn't. Many films never have a chance, but this one did – it's an opportunity wasted.

Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.

Don't expect a Caravaggio, but if your taste turns to Hallmark, this is a good bet -- a straight-up Nativity story as safe as death and taxes.

The content is eminently forgettable but the thing has definitely got style.

Certainly, whatever surgery the script doctors performed, it didn't take. The limp result is a picture that is epic in intention and Lilliputian everywhere else.

For some (okay, me), The Holiday, like the holidays, will require some girding up, and is best met halfway with a self-immunizing smile. Otherwise, the good cheer may ring false; worse, it might even seem to sell love cheap, and lovers short.

In most every frame, Hartley takes pains to tilt his camera at odd angles – in other words, he's gone literally off-kilter, and it's just off-putting. What's worse, a further hallmark of the Hartley canon, his self-reflexivity, has begun to smack of self-promotion.

The result is a minor picture with a major identity crisis -- it's sort of true and it's sort of bogus and it's ho-hum all the way through.

The wonder here is that Bateman and the child actor spark off each other quite delightfully. For a few precious scenes, when father and son are alone, the movie is actually amusing, even touching.

If you like your sports movies, especially your football movies, larded with more clichés than a politician's stump speech, Gridiron Gang begs to be seen.

We also know the last time Keanu and Sandra shared the screen together. That was yesterday and Speed. This is today and Snail. I'm not betting on a tomorrow.

Fables should be succinct, and Konchalovsky lets his run on too long.

Some books just aren't meant to be movies -- what once was confidently distinguished now seems merely average and a tiny bit desperate.

Steve Miner is no Carpenter. A directing veteran of the Friday the 13th saga (parts II and III, in case you care), he's a plodder who favours long, dull buildups to short, dull climaxes -- it's slaughter by the numbers.

Falls into the category of heart-warming sports yarns, and, if television still made movies-of-the-week, it would enjoy a rightful home.

A flashy nineties flick with a campy fifties feel -- it's playful, naive, clever, silly, often inventive, occasionally uneven and, compared to studio offerings to date, the best present under this year's cinematic tree.

The movie unreels like a depressive in a manic phase, a frenzy of lightning-fast cuts, cuts, cuts.

Ultimately, Detachment invites us to feel precisely what it warns against – detached.

Blowing up bad guys, swearing, and lots of cliches makes the The Last Boy Scout a must to miss. [16 Dec 1991]

Apparently pitched somewhere between a farce and a fable, this flick is neither. Just foolish. And frustrating. And, mostly, damned annoying.

Really, Casa de mi Padre is a skit blown up to a feature flick, amusing for a while until its welcome wears out.

As you watch -- no, endure -- this flattened-out spectacle, there's really nothing worth pondering save for a single thought: What a difference a director makes.

When the tent folds and the dust settles, the question is not whether the movie is good – sorry, not a chance – but whether it's garish enough, sappy enough, Hollywood enough to rise to the level of being likeably bad. Is it, in short, a guilty pleasure?

An action thriller with some decent action and a few thrills, but all embedded in a yarn so hopelessly tangled that even the loose threads have knots.

It's awfully hard to think of Alan Alda as an auteur. There's just nothing remotely distinctive about his feature work, except perhaps a sitcom softness at the centre - forgettably sweet to those who like that sort of thing, forgettably saccharine to those who don't, but forgettable in either case. [22 Jun 1990]