Rick Groen

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

Men may be gay by nature, but women are lesbians by choice -- for them, it's a simple matter of trading up. Such is the implied message of Kissing Jessica Stein.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.

Superman returns, and he's far from inconsequential yet considerably less than super - just a demi-god content to forfeit our love for our like.

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

Norman is the "freak" bullied and ostracized and otherwise degraded by the alive-and-well crowd. Such is the outcast fate of most heroes in the best children's tales. And ParaNorman, a ghoulishly delightful exercise in stop-motion animation, is a very good children's tale indeed.

Inevitably, all this seems just too diffuse, and a set of uniformly adept performances (even Harrelson puts a leash on his usual histrionics) tends to be wasted in an only intermittently engaging movie.

It's a treat because, making no apologies for the source material, director Guillermo del Toro lets his picture gorge on power bars of pop energy, sugared with sprinkles of playful humour, and, at least twice, laced with a visual style so piercingly keen that horror morphs into beauty. Not bad for a pulpy outing.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

This film and Salinger's novel differ greatly in the details of narrative and character. Yet, there's no mistaking the similarity in tone and sensibility and, particularly, in the capacity to split an audience into warring camps fighting on shared ground.

Call me biased, but I'm quick to put out the welcome mat for any movie – good, bad or indifferent – that resists easy categorizing. That's certainly the charm of Safety NotGuaranteed, which flirts with two very different genres yet never goes steady with either.

A bland Shaun Evans is woefully miscast as the brash American.

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

Even hardened cynics will embrace the cliché – yep, you will laugh, you will cry.

The plot makes the casting look inspired. More than inane, it's offensive. [14 Dec 1982]

All the kids here are terrific, significantly better than the actual movie that surrounds them. Although ostensibly fashioned by Abrams, it's really a summer-weight Spielberg yarn.

The structure of the film mirrors the changes in the joke which in turn reflect the moral of the story -- hey, it's all a matter of perspective.

It's definitely a Diablo Codyesque cut above the norm – the wit can sometimes feel contrived but at least there's wit to be found.

A tender tale of semi-triumph.

Should be a brilliant picture, one last testament to the intertwined sensibilities of two brave artists. Should be, but isn't.

While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.

The embodiment of the very message it so modestly conveys -- it's the accomplished little guy we fervently root for.

Dial your expectations to moderate, burrow in for the duration, and you won't be disappointed - it ain't exactly springtime, but there are worse things than an amiable outing on a winter's night.

The film manages the extraordinary feat of forcing us to empathize simultaneously with both the potential victim and the potential villain.

This is an affecting picture that leaves the viewer as wrung out as the protagonist. No doubt you'll be seduced but, in the end, you may also feel abandoned.

Normally, such saccharine inspiration only manages to clog the heart, not warm it. But there's a true original in this den of clichés and her name is Keke Palmer.

Mainly, it's a clever gimmick, cleverly wrought, offering further evidence that you can dress up the student body in all manner of garb for all types of genres.

Take a funny, touching, complex play that moves at a breakneck pace, filter it through the huge (if often underrated) talents of director Fred Schepisi, and you've got Six Degrees of Separation. Such a rare gift - a film that treats language with infinite respect and ideas with cultivated precision, a film that challenges us to keep up and rewards our efforts with a bittersweet comedy of manners. [24 Dec 1993]

It's silly, it's serious, it's outrageous, it's mundane, it's blowsy, it's lovely. Yet this fickle film has a constant heart - warm and very likeable.

If the cinematography lacks the up-close-and-personal drama of "Blue Crush," it's still adequate to the occasion -- after all, like any star worth her salt, the ocean has yet to meet a camera she doesn't like.

The effect is Chaplinesque if Chaplin had the latest in gadgetry, because the entire picture is also shot in 3-D that, for once, puts all 3 of the Ds to imaginative use.

Although director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) does a workmanlike job of stirring in the grimy New York atmosphere, the picture only surges to life when Cage strides on camera. [21 Apr 1995]

Yes, Mikhalkov has set himself quite the agenda, but in the end the film is too much of a piece with its topic, intensely fascinating yet seriously flawed. The verdict? Guilty, with extenuating circumstances.

This remarkable analysis of a decade when American society lost its moral compass is both brutally honest and lyrically compassionate.

Is there an admired British thespian who hasn't toiled in Potter's field?

Always engaging and often compelling.

The wonder is that the cast -- a terrific ensemble with talents honed on such hallowed stages as the Abbey Theatre -- brings it off with far more verve than the slight tale deserves.

There's fun to be had in watching these losers drift without a compass.

It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia Chronicles."

The verdict? Green passes with flying colours -- his is a huge and hugely impressive talent.

It's a pinball arcade of a flick -- the Coens invent a bunch of wonderfully flaky characters, stick them into a Plexiglas narrative, and let them bounce off each other.

This is Romero at his best - a set-piece of sustained chills all precisely shot and rhythmically cut, good enough to make us forgive (if not forget) the cast that is merely competent, and an ending that is downright tepid. But even at half-throttle, Romero can quicken the pulse. Worse than it could have been, Monkey Shines is still better than most. [29 July 1988]

Embracing such depths, Bukowski somehow made his art. Simulating them, Factotum just makes us queasy.

The Good Girl isn't really the title of this movie at all. Instead, it's now widely known as The Movie That Proves Jennifer Can Act.

Tropic Thunder is an assault in the guise of a comedy – watching it is like getting mugged by a clown.

Both smart and shrewd -- it wraps that same comforting message in a thoroughly entertaining package.

Not quite a comedy, not really a drama, Mad Dog and Glory throws your equilibrium but keeps your interest high. [5 Mar 1993, p.C3]

Sitting through Red Eye is like watching a master carpenter at work on a custom bookcase. No one would call the result art, but you're sure bound to admire the sheer craft of the thing, the clean lines and seamless joints and meticulous attention to detail.

With its intricate design, sly humour and timely theme, Travellers and Magicians is a lot more than just a travelogue.

Great title, and the whiff of existential loneliness that it conjures up – brothers locked not in solidarity but in solitude – permeates the entire movie.

There's a line near the end of Without Limits that's meant to sum up the tragic flaw of the movie's hero: "He insisted on holding himself to a higher standard than victory." The same might be said of the movie itself, which refuses to adhere to the basic success formula of the sports bio-pic -- the familiar arc that moves from early success through character-forming struggle to eventual triumph. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]

Postcards From The Edge, is long on witty one-liners but woefully short on coherent structure. [13 Sep 1990, p.C5]

The considerable charm of Mad Hot Ballroom can be traced directly to its choice of subjects. They happen to be 11-year old kids, and the lens loves every precious one of them.

Bronson is one of those “based on a true story” dramatizations where the theatrically staged drama only gets in the way of the more interesting truth.

I meant what I said And I said what I meant A flick pretty faithful 'Bout 80 per cent.

Delightful as it often is, the picture suffers fom the same structural and thematic tidiness, even smugness, that it nominally opposes.

Separate Lies is deceptive in more ways than it intends. Because the acting is so uniformly superb, we're almost fooled into believing that the movie is as good as the cast. It isn't, not by half.

This is an adaptation that must have been hard to screw up, yet screwed up it has been. If the movie is far from dreadful, it's even further from the searing experience it could have been.

Mini-gems of comic editing grace the narrow, claustrophobic world created in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It's a safely escapist film that's vintage - albeit mid-level - Woody Allen. [20 Aug 1993]

What Happens in Vegas should damn well have stayed in Vegas.

What benefits the picture early on, giving it a casual air, becomes cloying in the later going, making it feel like a smug exercise in mutual admiration.

This is a film that dearly wants to be important, that wants to do for Holland what Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Française" does for France - examine the German occupation through a prism of painful honesty. Yet the lofty ambition comes dressed in cheap attire; Verhoeven can't seem to stop himself from shopping downmarket.

A cinematic homage as flawed as its subject. Flawed, yet with a peculiar fascination of its own -- what we have is a genuine artist paying sincere tribute to an unapologetic mediocrity, and stooping awkwardly to the task.

A jagged slice of life, What Happened Was ... converts an ordinarily clumsy date into an extraordinarily touching encounter, without the aid of melodrama and with no loss in credibility. For us no less than the star-crossed characters, it's a leap into a shallow end that turns perilously deep. [30 Sep 1994]

For those who like their horror served straight up with no ironic chaser, The Descent is a tasty cup of torment.

A Perfect World is perfect indeed - for the initial 15 minutes. After that, the fault-lines start to emerge, widening, widening, until the thing cracks open and falls apart. [24 Nov 1993]

The result is infotainment dressed up as an art flick. Turkish society is fascinatingly complex and its East/West tensions give rise not to easy allegories but to hard ambiguities. To explore that truth, read any novel by Orhan Pamuk. To escape it, watch Bliss.

The picture is as tastefully pretty as its girls, and just as motionless.

Into the West has its admirable side - it tries oh-so-hard to be a healthy treat for the whole family, and never plies us with cheap sentimentality. [01 Oct 1993]

Bolstered by a solid premise, this film starts out impressively enough - it looks to be a worthy character study. But it soon stops dead, wheels spinning badly, and then, hungry for momentum, lurches off in a completely cockeyed direction. [16 Oct 1992]

The Last Circus is a bizarre, surreal, grotesque, fascinating, demanding, disappointing and ultimately exhausting political allegory that plays like a waking nightmare.

Individually, Dawson and Cassel each generate plenty of screen heat, but, together in that one bedroom scene, their chemistry is downright explosive, so much so that it seems we have strayed into a whole different movie, and dearly want to stay there.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

Ushpizin takes us to a fascinating place, and hands out the sort of brochure that tourists always need but seldom get -- the charming kind, fun to ponder and rewarding to browse.

In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.

Well-acted, nicely shot, slick and certainly sexy, Swimming Pool may be all foreplay and no climax, but what the heck -- there are worse ways to be teased.

The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.

Watching this, we should feel an immense amount, but don't, and somehow, decades after this horrible event, that void only seems to compound the tragedy.

Gotham gives way to Gaudi and the Met to Miro, but the sensibility is the same, the city as a precious treasure, and so is the message: Life may be hard and short, love may be flawed or doomed, but, my, aren't we blessed with lovely distractions.

The result is the kind of feel-bad/feel-good movie that brazenly manipulates our response and leaves us grateful for it -- so relentlessly dark is the premise that, by the end, we just need to believe in the prospect of light.

Great satire (read most anything by Swift) must be capable of doing more than preaching to the converted, and, measured by that lofty standard, Bob Roberts may fall a bit short. [18 Sep 1992]

A film of deceptive narrative wisps and intricate thematic curls.

If you like your archetypes writ large and your sentiment over easy, then Unstrung Heroes is the flick for you. [15 Sep 1995]

Pick your cliche - searing, rivetting, haunting - Keitel delivers a performance to rival Brando's in "Last Tango In Paris."

This is a flick whose failures are at least as interesting as the successes.

Whatever The House of Sand may lack in curb appeal, that view from the roof will have you gasping in wonderment.

Sophisticated and unsentimental political film.

A drama that's often insightful and occasionally powerful but is still, at heart, a piece of television and not a work of film.

For a few fleeting hours, they unlearned those lessons of childhood, laying down their arms to pick up their common humanity.

A movie about con artists that turns out to be a con job, and guess who's getting played for a sucker?

EXistenZ, unlike existence, just lacks that certain mystique.

Sorry, but this level of insight is readily available from daily news reports.

Gone from the glittering original are most of the charm and all of the humor, deflating a bright balloon into little more than the rubbery flatness of a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Is it, the debate asks, a truly substantial work or just a stylish cop-out? Well, for once, I'm voting with the French.

This movie sticks.

A laugh a minute? Liar Liar Jim Carrey's forced truthfulness means a lot of mildly funny facial gyrations.

Rippling with resonance, Dead Calm is Jaws in a human form, a shape profoundly complete and completely disturbing. [07 Apr 1989]

Good ain't the half of it in this case - it's funny, it's endearing, it's strangely touching. [19 Aug 1994]