Rick Groen

It's a nifty caper flick that also ponders the aesthetic nature of deception -- in other words, a solid work of craft that doubles as a little meditation on art.

Was it worth slogging through the nearly two hours of damned muddle to get to those last affecting moments? Not often in movies is the destination so much better than the journey.

The upside? Visually polished, credibly acted and competently directed courtesy of Ridley Scott, the film is always likable. The downside? Well, it's never anything more than likable.

Most movies have music, some movies are musicals, but very few movies combine the two with the grace and pure eloquence of Once.

It's one of those imperfect pictures that manages to command and hold our attention straight from the opening frames.

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]

Dull moments, so much the rule in most genre comedies, are the exception in Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it does run long, but it mainly rollicks.

This is well-crafted retro horror, too familiar to be really scary but smart enough to be fun. And funny too, with the kind of pure laughs that grow organically from the script, untainted by the chemical spray of irony.

The setting is unique, the cast is terrific, the dialogue crackles and, if only there were a plot worth believing, In Bruges might have been a fine film.

Although Lumet has a reputation for letting his actors run wild, he keeps the reins tight here, and we're rewarded with a series of superb performances. [16 Sep 1988]

There are a few laughs at the start of This Is the End, and a couple more at the end of This is the End. As for the endless middle, it’s middling.

Single-handedly, Bridges gives the film what it otherwise lacks -- energy and emotion invested in this damaged man, naked beneath his ballooning caftan, at once sadly ridiculous and ridiculously sad.

Fatal Attraction becomes as seductive as the seduction it depicts. In the always stylish, sometimes careless hands of director Adrian Lyne, the film lures us in with an artful blend of stately pacing and caressing close-ups and brooding silences. [23 Sep 1987 p.C7]

Aesthetically, this isn't a great documentary, although, during the first half, there are great moments in it. But the latter part is scattered and frenzied, rather like an excited dog tearing off after too many rabbits at once -- a thematic hunt that's all chase and scant context.

Here, there's not much that's funny, there's too much that's too clever by half, and there's not a damn thing that's lively - this is a film about Life whose sin is its lifelessness.

Takes a kernel of truth and roasts it into a popcorn movie. There's terrific fun to be had, and much wry comedy too. What's missing, surprisingly given the subject matter, is any real sense of gravity.

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

The result is a movie that seems not quite real and yet never false but somehow partakes of both -- rather like the prospect of death.

In the Scotland of Young Adam, love is getting dragged through the mud.

Because it's a well-crafted and superbly acted sweet little tearjerker, we're content too -- it's a mild pleasure to watch.

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.

Initially, the quick dialogue and strong cast obscure, at least partly, the fact that the plot is itself a dirty trick, a bit of a con game. Once the deception is seen through, the movie ends up inadvertently mimicking its subject matter: Like politics, it too leaves you disillusioned.

What is it that sets this film apart from assembly-line animation - all the bright baubles that are momentarily diverting and instantly forgotten (Rock-A-Doodle is a recent example)? The most obvious, and important, difference is the story line itself. FernGully has the deceptive simplicity of all good fables. [18 Apr 1992]

Here, in orderly fiction, the reverberations bring about the alignment of cultures, the meeting of minds and the comforting assertion that "our lives aren't that different." Maybe so, and the film deserves full marks for trying, at times movingly, to convince us. In the end, the argument is a little too neat to accept, but far too poignant to ignore.

Most British actors are awfully good at underplaying the overwritten, and this group, headed by Matthew Macfadyen, Rupert Graves and Daisy Donovan, is no exception -- where others would mug, they demitasse.

With a track record that stretches from "Monster's Ball" all the way to "Finding Neverland," Forster is clearly a director at ease with a wide range of material. He's found confection-land here, setting his beater on ready-whip and mixing the dough just fine.

This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.

The movie itself seems more familiar than fascinating, more innocuous than inflammatory, and, at 2½ hours, more tedious than anything else.

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.

As always with Anderson, the comedy is neatly embedded in the jaded banter, where the insecurities and rivalries bubble up -- here, all within the bell jar of that shared sleeping compartment.

What an impeccably crafted film this is -- slightly impoverished in theme, perhaps, but so rich everywhere else that it seems rude to notice.

That level of acting-without-words demands the likes of a Bruno Ganz or a Klaus Maria Brandauer, not a Clooney. Even when flashing his bare derrière in a sex scene, he isn't revealing nearly enough -- his work is just skin deep.

The result takes the audience on a screwball odyssey that mixes engaging twists with off-putting turns -- often fun, always watchable, but never quite as good as it could be.

The Unbelievable Truth is just that - epistemology served up with pop panache and a comic twist. [27 Jul 1990]

It can definitely grate on your nerves but, at best, it also gets into your mind, and sticks fast.

And the climax, where fake tears suddenly become real, doesn't ring true. By then, nothing does, leaving the film's successful deception to double as its eventual failure -- cast adrift in this fog of appearances, we appear not to care.

Despite the best efforts of the cast (Cage is especially evocative in a literally confined role), Stone can't disguise the fact that his movie, like his heroes, has come to a kinetic halt, stuck between a narrative rock and an emotional hard place.

It's refreshing to have a movie assume that its viewers are also readers, yet this one takes that assumption to testing lengths. To those fearful of flunking the test, my advice is simple: Bring along the book as your cheat-sheet.

The comic spirit in this type of picture is wonderfully democratic, and so is the result.

This documentary is only partly a story of the chosen one; mainly, and more intriguingly, it's a chronicle of the choosing one, of the nervous young monk charged with the job of leading the search party.

That's not to say Terminator 3 is terminally awful -- just banal, merely humdrum, more conventional horror flick than science-fiction myth, and a whole lot less than what came before.

If the lines in the script were as keenly etched as the ones in her face, Keaton would have had something to work with. Instead, during an especially lovelorn sequence, she's asked to indulge in a crying montage so painfully extended that it has us in tears too -- weeping from embarrassment for her.

Yossi is an early spring breeze of a film – too delicate to be substantial but definitely holding the promise of warmth.

When the bloody climax comes, we look on apathetically, as desensitized to the violence as a pornographer is to sex.

The cinematic equivalent of a "good read" - pick it up and you can't put it down; put it down and it's gone forever.

Well, I didn't exactly leave the theatre barefoot, but there's a lot to like here -- the result is pretty darn cute and hardly ever cloying.

In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

How do you make a movie about shallow people in a shallow culture and not end up with a shallow movie? For writer-director Sofia Coppola, the answer is to dramatize a story “based on actual events,” then to step back and present it as a case study in pure anthropology.

If Lumet is travelling familiar ground here, the journey is still worthy because the ground is still muddy. And, as always, he travels it bravely - his Q's are many and far-reaching, his A's few and unsparing. [27 Apr 1990]

The result is a film where blisteringly naturalistic drama bumps up against sentimentally arch melodrama (that's the biggest collision in Crash). Haggis showed the same tendency in his script for "Million Dollar Baby," yet there it was better hidden under a simpler narrative. Here, the tendency has gotten magnified right along with his thematic ambitions.

White Palace starts out raw and realistic, fraught with danger, but soon metamorphoses into a soft and sugary romance. A gulp of vinegar and a Kool-Aid chaser. [19 Oct 1990]

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

Restoration is a middling thing, indifferent good, albeit much enlivened by Robert Downey Jr., who did act Merivel with the full vigour of his profession. [31 Jan 1996]

PARENTS defies all categories but one - it is a virtuoso display of movie-making, a multi-textured and pyschologically intense work unimaginable in any medium except film, a tale fantastic in style yet deadly serious in its intent and absolutely horrifying in its implications. [27 Jan 1989]

The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.

Mainly, though, it's the performers who are having the last laugh.

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.

Barely dusted off, the humourless stuff is served up straight - damned if it isn't a Hillbillies homage. [19 Oct 1993]

What you're smelling is Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" without the pathos and the punch, or John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" minus the insight and the style.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

So is the result just a case of life imitating pop art, or has the director shaped the footage to enhance the imitation?

Although there are some fluid moments, De Palma's weary direction of a once-feared mobster trying to go straight against all odds seems pistol-whipped. [15 Nov 1993]

These characters don't seem illuminating at all – just damned annoying and, ultimately, dead boring.

Nope, this picture doesn't bear thinking about, but, if you resist that nasty temptation, setting all your mental gauges at Dead Slow, the flow of the action will see you through.

View the Second World War through a child's eyes and the result isn't hard to predict: a loss-of-innocence tale. Winter in Wartime is the boilerplate version, with the already dramatic facts of the era ramped up to melodramatic levels. Little wonder it rings so false.

Kick-Ass is some kind of twisted fun.

That's the allure of the genre. Succeed, and you're artful, thoughtful, and popular all at the same time. But fail, and you're the King of New York. As failures go, this is typical enough, smugly dividing the world into good gangsters and bad ones. [9 Nov 1990]

What a fine, tender, delicate, funny, gender-bending-and-rebending performance this is.

This Hollywood movie about a gay man afflicted with AIDS is evocative, understated and ultimately deeply affecting. Hard-earned tears of truth. [22 Dec 1993, p.C1]

I love the City of Light as much as any starry-eyed provincial, but Paris, je t'aime tries even my considerable patience.

This three-hour opus, bearing only the eponymous title of Nixon, is an intriguing ramble through the social psychology of man and country alike. Indeed, the simple dialectics that both animated and marred Stone's earlier work are redeemed here precisely because they're invested in a single, complex personality - consequently, this film is more character-driven than any of its predecessors. [20 Dec 1995, p.C1]

On the byways of any bustling metropolis, here is what the combination of bicycles + cars + pedestrians is certain to produce: (1) nasty accidents and (2) ferocious debates. More surprisingly, on the silver screen in Premium Rush, here is what the same combination fails to produce: a good action movie.

Despite acting under the computer-generated encumbrances of that monkey tail and those centaur legs, Delphine Chanéac does something remarkable with Dren – she makes her a disturbingly sexy thing.

Elf is jolly but could have been jollier, funny but could have been funnier, charming but ... well, point made.

The movie makes for quite a hike. It's also, at times, a bit of a slog.

In a virtuoso turn, Tommy Lee Jones delivers an over-the-top performance, but it works for the obvious reason that everything about Cobb is oversized. Except for one commodity - there's not an ounce of sentimentality on the guy (nor in this film - it too is unlikely to please the crowd). [23 Dec 1994]

If you have an appetite for well-made treacle, then Bella should go down a treat.

Earth Girls Are Easy is a 100-proof hoot, an intoxicatingly inventive movie that spins a fresh variation off a familiar theme. It's a high-octane frolic, pure and simple (but never simple-minded), a flick that owes more to ALF than to E.T., and far more to Busby Berkeley than to Rod Steiger. A wacky journey into the cinematic beyond, it defies every label but one: Fun, Fun, Fun. [12 May 1989]

Scrape off its grimy exterior, and it too is a fairy tale, but one with ambitions of realism, one that tries to co-exist in our world, one that pretends to be something it isn't. Frankie & Johnny ends up lost in limboland, stumbling onto a whole new genre - call it kitchen-sink unrealism. [11 Oct 1991]

Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle is a bunch of bon mots in search of a larger theme. Happily, the mots are so very bon that the two hours breeze by quickly enough.

Sea Of Love has got a lot of things going for it: it's got two strong lead performances; it's got some down-and-dirty dialogue and a few sexy scenes and a couple of yuks and a nifty title tune. What it ain't got is plot, and thus suspense, and thus thrills. [15 Sep 1989]

Yes, this is the fascinating stuff, a rare (in pop culture) look at the complex nature of the love-sex equation – when it's too direct, when it's too vague, when it breaks down completely.

Odd but engaging film.

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.

Tremors is never earth-shattering, but always competent. Modest in intention, fine in execution, it just wants to make a body smile, to stick a happy face on the monster movie. There are worse faults. [20 Jan 1990]

The pedigree is impressive and so is the start, but in the long run, White Men Can't Jump lives down to its title - it doesn't even get off the ground. [27 Mar 1992]

Unfortunately, as the phone battery wears down, the plot's theatrics heat up to pot-boiling degrees of incredulity – a senile mother, a vicious personnel director, even a coiled serpent, all vie to raise the ante. Talk about your bad day.

What they've created is a movie that, lacking any resonance, is a soulless clone of a more vibrant original. [04 Feb 1994]

Despite Marber's sardonic wit and Nichols's intelligent direction, the film winds up in the ironic position of practising exactly what it preaches: Closer invites and even gains our intimacy, only to finish by driving us ever farther away.

In the Valley of Elah dearly wants to be the Iraq war's counterpart to "Coming Home," documenting the tragic domestic legacy of a misguided foreign conflict. Wants to be, but isn't.

Political thrillers with flawed heroes demand a different potion, one that mixes the grit of reality with the seeds of excitement until they reach a critical mass and explode. In that sense, for all its strengths and good intentions, The Debt owes a debt to the wrong genre – Birkenau wasn't fantasy; too often, this movie is.

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

Ultimately a disappointment – this is a movie easy to watch and even easier to forget.

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.

Always stylish and occasionally thrilling and never thoughtful.

Adapting a great short story, like Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," into a movie poses a dilemma: How to flesh it out to feature length without destroying what made it great in the first place?

Martin Scorsese, meet Djo Tunda Wa Munga, because you obviously have a lot in common. Viva Riva! is nothing less than the Congolese Mean Streets, oozing sexual heat and brute violence and powered by a locomotive's worth of raw kinetic energy.

As the plot moves toward the climax, where each girl is forced to make a hard choice dictated by her unique "circumstance," that feeling of compression, of so many contradictory urges and needs vying for attention, grows almost overwhelming. Such is life among the young in present-day Tehran, up on the screen for all to see – all but those who most need to see it.

The acting is superb, the settings are beautifully recreated, the dialogue crackles with occasional wit, but where's the juice? Although lovely to gaze upon, the whole thing feels a bit precious and porcelain, more teapot than sexpot.

Conducting another symphony in action, Spielberg seems a bit bored – always competent but never inspired – and who can really blame him? He tries to fire his interest by swiping a few tropes from the fifties pop bin, not-so-sly allusions to teen-trash movies and those McCarthy-era horror flicks. After that, there's really nowhere to go but inwards, which is when Spielberg starts looting Spielberg.

The story in Japanese Story grabs you precisely because it's so wonderfully hard to define.

You don't mess with a sure thing. So Smokey and the Bandit II is carefully designed to cash in on the same box office bonanza as its namesake. The plot - about transporting an elephant to the Republican Convention - is obviously just an excuse to get this cartoon show on the road, where the cast can ham it up unashamedly.

What's missing, in the direction no less than the script, is any real sense of dramatic urgency.

This time out, with a few exceptions, the inspiration feels solid and earned, not saccharine and contrived.

And, in a pointless riffing on the title, there are ginger kitties galore -- this flick has enough cats to launch a Broadway musical.

That's partly why X-Men: First Class is such fanboy fun, as the script departs from official Marvel lore to invent a whole new "origin story" for the mutant ensemble.

Director Barbra Streisand does justice to the popular book until the two-thirds mark of the film, whereupon the script abruptly changes from a psychic history to a gauzy romance. A Prince of a movie, until the end. [27 Dec 1991]

In a sometimes misguided narrative, their scenes together are right on track -- they add lightness, even a shimmering hint of humour, to a symbol-laden drama. Theirs is a unique romance that has a sparrow's frail beauty -- it beats with a trembling, fluttering heart.

Never as good as you'd hoped or as bad as you'd feared, The Matador is one of those of up-and-down experiences -- here a sharp pica of wit, there a welcome veronica of absurdity, but, now and then, just a bit too much bull in the ring.

Generally makes good on its promise. There are shivers to be felt, especially in the early stages, and there's fun to be had, including the post-movie pleasure of detecting the soft spots in the plot. The result is an always-watchable picture from a director capable of more.

In the best picaresque fashion, there's wit here, and irony, love in its many guises, and even a glimpse of transcendent hope. Despite (or maybe because of) the specifically gay characters and themes, the film resonates far beyond its particulars - indeed, in many ways, it goes directly to the divided heart of contemporary, ailing America. [21 Aug 1992]

There's almost a perverse pleasure in watching occasionally weak performers mar an essentially sound screenplay. That's the saving grace of Saving Face -- Wu gets the hard part right.

It's not Smith's fault that the movie can't quite pry apart the man from the myth from the metaphor. The three may well be inseparable by now and, at this point in his history and ours, that's surely the way we prefer it.

This is the story of the diminutive Coco before she became the fashionable Chanel – in other words, the whole movie is one long first act.

It's your standard coming-of-age tune set to a top-40 beat. [24 Oct 1997]

It's intriguing, appalling, savvy, nasty, grossly unsettling -- you may not like what you see, but you'll definitely be affected by the sight.

The principals are superb, with Mullan and Colman doing a masterful job of inhabiting their separate but equal prisons.

Somewhere along the way, Respiro just seems to run out of breath.

Nothing in this explicit display is remotely engaging. That's because the sex is a metaphor here. In fact, most everything is a metaphor here. Or a symbol -- the picture is a veritable cacophony of jangling symbols.

For all its merits - a lush canvas, a first-rate cast, a thoughtful director examining a theme directly relevant to his own checkered career - Vincent & Theo doesn't quite measure up. [16 Nov 1990]

So what's surprising here isn't Polanski's choice of material but his utter failure to put any distinctive stamp on it.

Still, credit Gondry, like Tocqueville before him, with at least re-examining tired clichés and scraping the rust off stereotypes.

This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]

The tale is about meeting Death and comes with this moral: When The End arrives, better to embrace it with love than to try to cheat it with avarice. Hey, if nothing else, Part 1 has got some nerve, so greedily refusing to practice what it earnestly preaches.

For devotees of the genre, the bad news is the best news: Bond is back and nothing has changed except the stuntman's canvas - it's bigger than ever, duly pumped up to Schwarzeneggarian standards.

Down in the Valley is one of those pictures you root for even when it goes badly wrong.

Give director Susanne Bier full marks: Her encasing parable is brand new and immediately provocative.

There's as much to draw us in, but far less to put us off. [13 Jun 1997]

The pilgrimage is still long but, even with the crosses they bear, these are pilgrims lite – perhaps it's the modern way.

Here's one thing about Marie Antoinette: It sure is easy to watch. And here's another: It's even easier to forget.

From its title on down, An Officer and a Gentleman (at the Plaza) is both a thoroughly rousing crowd-pleaser and a shamelessly manipulative banner-waver, a homage to the never-practiced ethics of a non-existent era. [28 Jul 1982]

That last wrong turn completely undoes a picture that had been steering a very impressive course.

Coming from a major director like Spike Lee, this is a colossal disappointment. And a surprising one.

This is a blockbuster busting out of the block; this is a Hollywood staple served up on a European platter; this is summertime fare with a wintry verve.

After a great start, Wolfgang Petersen's intelligent medical thriller is infected by some nasty germs, resulting in the all-too-common Actionitis. [10 Mar 1995]

A good film prevented from being a great film by an act of well-intentioned but misguided casting.

The utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.

Quite consciously, Sprecher has dramatized that wry riff from Frank Zappa: "Life is high school with money." [12 Jun 1988, p.C3]

Just when the movie seems set to soar, there's a drag factor -- it keeps getting weighed down, if not sunk, by an anchor of ponderousness.

One Hour Photo is two-thirds of a movie -- the last act is a bit of a shambles.

There's definite mastery here, but it's hardly a masterpiece.

Really wanting to get into our heads, 1408 tries awfully hard to play both sides of logic's boundary line -- tries and fails, and then succeeds, only to ultimately fail again. On the whole, the frights are frighteningly erratic.

We've got the trademark elements but not their magical bonding, and the result is a selection of scenes in search of a movie.

Identity opens with its mind nicely intact, suffers a major crisis about 30 minutes in, then bad turns to worse.

The cast is equally strong (especially McDonnell), but the vast subject and the shifting settings force Kasdan all over the map. [10 Jan 1992]

So why does the thing play like a mediocre sitcom stripped of its laugh-track?

Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.

Really, Young Victoria is just a lot of costumes in fond search of some drama. And finding precious little.

Essentially a love story, as stripped of sentimentality as the landscape is shorn of green, yet an extraordinary love story nonetheless – powerful and poignant and, even in the midst of hope's imminent extinction, hopeful too.

On the whole, the film is content to lumber awkwardly between the condemned man on death row and the intrepid reporter on his save-a-life beat -- there's about as much rhythm in the style as there is sense in the plot.

This feeble documentary ends up perpetuating the very hypocrisy it means to probe.

Speaking as one of the mourners, did I mention how pleasant it is to revisit footage of John Lennon? And to listen to his music which, in this case, comes either in taped performances or laid onto the soundtrack, no fewer than 40 songs drawn almost exclusively from the post-Beatle, pro-Ono phase of his career.

Those Hollywood tricksters have managed to shorten the story while slowing the pace -- all of a sudden, minutes are passing like hours.

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

It's a downbeat flick forged by an upbeat talent - despite the angst in the frames, you can feel the joy of the framer. [23 June 1995]

Perversely enough, the comedy is what keeps the picture rolling; it's the so-called action that persists in bringing the thing to a screeching halt.

Appaloosa wobbles and wanders, promising to take a fresh look at those old myths, only to lapse back into weary convention.

In the recent "Half Nelson," a similarly themed classroom pic, liberalism struggled to balance its lingering hopes with its systemic despair. That film was pure fiction, yet felt absolutely true. This one is apparent fact, yet seems abjectly false.

Worse still is his idiotic tampering with the so-called "Happy Ending" -- in print, it's bleakly ironic; on screen, incongruously sentimental.

Not just bad, but weirdly, fascinatingly bad.

TERRIFIC cast, imaginative direction - Patriot Games is such an enjoyable film that you keep hoping it will go the extra mile, that it will transcend the action-genre and progress from an intelligently made picture to an intelligently themed picture, That it doesn't - not quite, anyway - is mildly disappointing but easily forgiven; there's a lot to be grateful for here. [9 June 1992]

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 result, like so many stout travellers from stage to screen, is respectable. Stolidly, bloodlessly, yawningly respectable.

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.

Jack Goes Boating barely stays afloat – it's a deep disappointment.

YOU'VE gotta love the casting. Defying the skeptics, The Great Gonzo keeps his furious urges in check and transforms himself into none other than the prolific Charles Dickens, popping up on camera to act as our narrative guide through his Christmas Carol classic. For the feisty one, it's a remarkable stretch. [15 Dec 1992]

Designer babies rule dystopia in stylish SF thriller filled with recycled plot devices.

The film lacks flow, unfolding in a rat-a-tat series of short, artfully lensed scenes -- individually nice but collectively jerky.

At his best, Clint directed as he acted -- sparely, laconically, but concisely, with a clean precision. There are flashes of that trademark style early on, but it soon degenerates badly.

Not that The Nutty Professor should ever be confused with a good movie, but it is a perfect vehicle for the redisplay of Murphy's neglected talents, steering him away from the smug persona of his recent disasters and whisking him back to the cozy locale of his Saturday Night Live roots.

Water's kinky view of the world has simply been overtaken (hell, swallowed up) by the sheer warp of reality. [13 Apr 1994]

No one can dismiss 16 Blocks as a mere formula flick -- it's a mere two or three formula flicks all fighting for top billing.

Thrown into exalted company, Zellweger easily holds her own in the film's most difficult role.

This is amusing, and even poignant in the final moments.

Since life's infidelities have a way of ending on a messy note, it becomes art's responsibility to impose order upon the mess, to give it an aesthetically convincing shape. And that's exactly where Lyne falls short.

Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.

Waydowntown may not be perfect, but it is perfectly astute in the target it selects and in the questions it raises.

Out of Time is severely out of whack, and the problem isn't hard to locate: It's all that flab in the thriller. It's a suspense flick so pillowy soft that the star gets bumped from the centre of the frame and the comic relief sneaks in to swipe the picture.

The movie isn't painfully bad, something to be "fully experienced"; it's just tediously bad, something to be fully forgotten.

As a captivating bauble, a tribute to a romantic legend, Don Juan DeMarco shines. But as an exercise in performing artistry, a gift from a living legend and an heir apparent, it positively glitters.

What began as quick and engaging, Hollywood craft at its most proficient, ends as dull and predictable, Hollywood product back in formulaic mode.

A lean, stripped-down and unapologetically cinematic take on Shakespeare's work, an adaptation designed at each turn to diminish the mechanics of the comedy and to explore the depths of the pathos.

If you ever doubted the power and scope of silent film, watch The Way Home. The narrative arc is as broad as any chattering feature, the emotional depth is greater than most, and it's all achieved with virtually no dialogue.

Not everything works that well. Despite a uniformly solid cast - the likes of Eli Wallach, Danny Aiello, Christopher Walken, even Robert De Niro (a co-producer) all appear - the script gets away from Primus in the last act, when the satire does a slow dissolve into farce. [13 Nov 1992]

This sort of flick can be fun, and there are moments here when it is, when a suddenly shifting perspective tosses us for a dizzying loop. Then again, there's such a thing as too much fun and too many moments -- at over two hours, this particular game meanders on way past its welcome.

Very well crafted and superbly acted. Whatever you may think of the idea, its execution is admirable.

Understandably, a script so obsessed with the dark doings of plot has little time left over for the study of character, and, thus, we never really get to know these people.

The results are generally refreshing. Much of the film takes place inside a theatre, as if to suggest the shenanigans of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy were a form of public entertainment.

Despite Auteuil's performance, it's a rather listless amble down the middle of the road, where the thematic ironies are too obvious and the sexual politics too smug.

For all its cinematic assets, Maverick seems a less charming vessel than the show I watched at my daddy's knee.

Watching this is a feature-length exercise in frustration - comedy that promises to be amusingly black stays uniformly grey; sentiment that looks to be credibly bittersweet winds up badly soured. We're constantly tantalized and perpetually disappointed, but don't despair - there's one terrific bonus...Toni Collette.

The cheery result is enough to renew one's faith in Uncle Walt and the boys - a family picture that transcends the cliche, a light-bright romp where the sentiment isn't cheap and where the action isn't childish. Now there's a novelty item for you. [27 June 1989]

Funnier than any movie called Hot Tub Time Machine has a right to be. And how funny is that? Not very, but a little, occasionally – just enough.

Rising above its flaws, Internal Affairs converts a genre flick into a generic study, an examination of the mean streets that even the healthiest mind travels, those dark alleys where our force is sometimes overworked and always understaffed, the places where we, too, must police ourselves. [13 Jan 1990]

No matter how strange it gets, or how distorted for political gain or refined for religious purposes, its essence is hard to pin down, even after a 2 1/2 -hour search.

The movie blows, me hearties, but don't you dare miss it...Why? Johnny Depp, that's why...This has gotta rank among the weirdest performances in the zany annals of the silver screen.

Just when you think it's going to rollick, this lazy movie rolls over and plays dead When Honeymoon's ends, it's not a moment too soon. [28 Aug 1992]

If you're looking for a screwball comedy about bipolar disorder -- and who among us is not? -- then this picture fits the bill fine. However, if you're picky enough to want a good screwball comedy about bipolar disorder, well, I'm afraid the wait continues.

There's a missing element whose absence, forgive me, I can't help but lament. This is a movie about magic that ultimately lacks the magic of movies."

It's her first action flick, and Meryl Streep ends up with a watered-down script: the metaphoric journey is without resonance and the actual journey is without thrills. The River Wild is awfully tame. [30 Sep 1994]

Green may be right to avoid the melodramatic waves of the conventional thriller. But, if so, he needs to dive a lot deeper than this -- there's just not enough under in Undertow.

As an esthetic work, the movie is dismissable. As a social artifact, however, it's intriguing. Textually and sub-textually, intentionally or inadvertently, just what is being said here? [14 Aug 1992]

Whether the film is uniquely brilliant or dismissively dumb is not the issue here. Either choice can (and will) be offered – it’s the choosing that counts.

The result is good gossip, entertainingly delivered, yet with a distinctly musty odour, its expiry date long gone.

A mix of credible sociology and tired melodrama, along with a palpable sense of déjà vu. Because the plight of boyz 'n' the hood is a global tragedy, its depiction on the screen has become a global commonplace with its own attendant danger – the tragedy is starting to feel trite.

Meant to explore anger, all this picture does is manufacture it.

Lives down to its title -- what an odd and gauzy reverie this is, a strangely muted picture that unfolds at a distinct remove from the reality around it.

Sure, this is marginal, but it's precisely in the margins that the movie excels.

Director James Cameron always works on a mega- canvas, yet he's brought off something unique here.

The plot is rich, the execution poor.

It's clear that Burn After Reading is a wannabe cult favourite -- some viewers may embrace it; many more will just want to burn after watching.

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.

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

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

In Youth in Revolt , Cera bellies up to the same table once too often. His fresh-faced act is starting to look really stale.

Compared with the recent spate of blockbuster sellouts, Severance is a worthy package, and fair compensation for time spent. Best to watch on the big screen, of course.

V for very, very ordinary.

The wee mousie is fun, all right, yet like the occasionally ragged editing, the fun just gets haphazardly wedged in.

HAT in the name of artsy pretension do we have here? That Arizona Dream is a nightmare is beyond dispute - it's the sort of murky, symbol-laden trap that European directors often fall into when they cross the pond to take on the entire social stratum of the United States. The culprit in question is Emir Kusturica - Yugoslavian born, Czech trained, and now American buffaloed. This thing makes The Red Desert look coherent. [19 Nov 1994]

Jeunet manages a terrific pass in an extended underwater sequence, but, beyond that, he runs out of ideas as we run out of patience.

In the hallowed frames of 42, the legend is front and centre and still inspiring. Too bad the more interesting man is nowhere to be seen.

Happily, the climax races to our rescue... Beyond the grasp of most directors, this is tour de force stuff -- definitely meriting the price of admission and almost worth the three-year wait.

It's a rom-com, it's a road movie, it's "Cars" without the animation, it's "A History of Violence" played for yuks. It's all that and less because, really, Hit & Run is awfully hit & miss.

Jacob's Ladder is a cheat - but a talented, disturbing, beguiling cheat. We don't know we've been truly had until it's finally over, when the screen fades and the lights rise and we wake up with a start, deliciously unnerved. [2 Nov 1990, p.D3]

Of course, given the abundance of voice-over, Nic Cage is unburdened from any great need to act. But he narrates splendidly, delivering the stuff with an unrepentant glee laced with liberal doses of irony.

In a kind of perverse alchemy, this film manages to turn that narrative gold into dross, and reduce the daunting perils of a 4,300-mile voyage to a ho-hum checklist. Welcome to the reverse magic of the movies.

Housebroken and prettified, this boxed version of White Fang comes ready for prime-time - safe enough for the living room, docile enough for the couch. But don't let your guard down: it just might gum you to sleep. [25 Jan 1991]

Catch a Fire paints the period with a double-sided brush that gives yesterday its due and puts today on notice.

As for true-love Charles, he would ascend to the Prime Minister's office, and then rise again to even greater heights: They named the tea after him. Indeed, that may be the smartest way to see this flick, curled up on your sofa with a cup of Earl Grey -- just make sure it's as decaffeinated as what you're watching.

Canadian director Guy Maddin is an artist supreme - he steals with a liberal flourish and with enough sheer imagination that his previous films (Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Archangel) are often described as boldly original. Careful, his latest offering, is no exception - it's an honours graduate from the same school of dusted-off originality. [10 Oct 1992]

This is the brand of sentimentality that comes with a high concentration of saccharine and every taste of bitterness safely removed.

For once, the gimmick is a perfect reflection of the characters.

Didn't we just see this movie? Over in Britain, big bad governments may be outsourcing his job and rendering him redundant, but never fear -- the plucky working-class hero has definitely found a steady gig on the silver screen.

Although director Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman") handles the usually cumbersome flashbacks with impressive delicacy, he can't stop the narrative from sinking under its own melodramatic weight.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

There's plenty of humour in Comedian but not a lot of happiness -- apparently, the sad clown is a cliché for good reason.

Inevitably, the one ingredient that does remain constant are the performances -- once again, there aren't any (the lone exception is Gloria Foster's mommy Oracle, although, even here, the shine is off the joke). Of course, for the hyperactive principals, this gig isn't about acting -- it's about athleticism, which suits Keanu Reeves's talents just fine.

The whole project labours towards an importance it never earns. In Beautiful Boy, the themes are vast but the picture is small, and the ensuing emptiness is what the characters are meant to feel – not us.

Intriguing, disturbing, uplifting evocation. In fact, to watch this film is to engage in participatory art -- for better and for worse, through sickness and in health, we're drawn deeply in.

In 5 x 2, the 2 are terrific; it's the 5 that needs work.

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 film is sometimes funny and occasionally smart yet never quite what it wants to be – funny and smart at the same time.

Dragnet is twice blessed and once cursed. It boasts a nifty comic premise and a terrific lead performance, two virtues that might well have combined to make a great sketch on a good television show - SCTV comes quickly to mind. Yet, as a feature-length movie, the thing slowly degenerates into a one-note joke. A neatly produced and nicely sustained note, to be sure, but monotonous nonetheless. [27 June 1987]

With Corbett's laidback persona nicely countering Vardalos's authorial performance, the picture radiates a pure affability that's awfully attractive. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is a very slim movie that succeeds on its own modest terms without pretense or apology.

A movie deeply immersed in movie lore, and the more seasoned the swimmer the richer the experience.

Ultimately, the viewing experience is like watching a snake swallow its own tail -- that once-menacing serpent is now a clown act, all yuks and no venom.

That may be your lump of coal, but it seems a precious gift to me.

The ideal: It hopes to be a suspenseful political yarn carrying a lofty message of peace and understanding. The reality: It's just a flabby thriller that gets completely lost in translation.

The look is fine, the effects are special, the cast is solid, and Jordan (in company with Rice) makes a commendable effort to add a cerebral dimension to a visceral genre.

It has a schlocky title and a rocky start, but then something happens - The Man Without a Face finds its rhythm and its grip, seizing the audience and propelling us straight through to the dewy climax. [25 Aug 1993, p.C2]

The devil may wear Prada, but Meryl wears the crown.

Shows promise, but needs more effort, and definitely doesn't play well with others. [7 Jun 1996, p.C2]

No doubt, life is tough in the wild but, this being a Disney flick, it's loving too and even comes with a kiddie-friendly narrative that's easy to summarize and hard to dispute.

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

The well chosen cast helps -- no one strikes a false note.

With the release of Stop-Loss, a precedent of sorts has definitely been set. If we've yet to see a brilliant Iraq movie, the wait is over for a bad one – this is it.

Where's 007 when you need him? Neither shaken nor stirred, The Good Shepherd is a flat draft of history that looks at the Central Intelligence Agency's early years through the horn-rimmed gaze of a fictional spook.

It's Adrien Brody's turn to find himself the lone and immobilized star of an emerging new genre: Call it the anti-action flick.

All this is engrossing. Stylistically and visually, Villeneuve flashes his talent to draw us in. However, narratively and thematically, he seems to be cheating. [18 Dec 1998, p.D10]

The sounds are fine and, thanks to technology's ever-progressive march, the sights are even better. But that third S -- the story -- remains the sticking point, and ain't it always the way.

It's like an elevated form of sitcom acting, which may be inevitable because this movie, and all its quirky/heartfelt kin, are an elevated version of the sitcom itself.

So delightful it should come with a parental advisory: "Jaded adults, beware. Viewing this may pierce your shell of cynicism and spark a renewed belief in the magic of movie-making."

A story based on exceptional facts gets converted into an unexceptional movie.

Reign Over Me drizzles down on us for two full hours, persistently determined to prove that, if it hangs around long enough, a coherent movie will turn up. No such luck.

Red Heat, a terrifically funny and always frantic flick that hides a fascinating subtext beneath its commercial veneer. Very commercial - this should be a boffo hit; and very fascinating - the premise that props up the hit speaks volumes about America in the twilight of Reagan. [17 Jun 1988, p.C1]

As an examination of social psychosis, the subject is skinhead but the treatment is skin deep. [03 Dec 1993]

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

Somewhere inside Hero, there's a good movie trying awfully hard to get out, and not making it. Not even close. [03 Oct 1992]

A well-crafted, well-acted anomaly: a film good enough to raise its aim and our expectations but not to score a direct hit. So one leaves simultaneously pleased and disappointed, asking the right question - "What if?" - but for all the wrong reasons. [25 July 1981]

If the publicity release can be believed, he worked an entire year "undercover as a student to research teenage life". On the basis of what surfaces here - one stock phrase (the kids say "Go for it]" a lot) and a multitude of stock characters - Crowe might better have spent the time curled up with re-runs of Ozzie and Harriet. Give this intrepid researcher 12 months at General Motors and he might just discover the wheel.

Bursting with potential that never gets realized.

Quitting begins to seem intriguing in concept. Now comes the best news: It's just as compelling in execution.

Visually, this movie is exquisite. Narratively, well, that's a more banal story.

Frankly, with so much to feast my dazzled eyes upon, I barely noticed that the plot was missing in action. And that's because the action itself is so pure.

Beijing Bicycle is a good film that owes a huge debt to a better film. And that, of course, is Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."

When the movie climactically reproduces that exhilarating Belmont, the fiction is just a pale shadow of the fact, and the realized myth that lives in our memory dies on the screen.

It definitely seems attractive on paper, what with a sterling cast to gaze upon, a script by none other than the late and legendary John Cassavetes, along with direction courtesy of the legend's son Nick. But up on the screen, under the glare of the lights, the film never really captures our eye or our interest. [29 Aug 1997, p.D3]

There's a Faustian bargain in Angel Heart, and not only on the screen. Undeniably, Parker is hobnobbing with the false gods of Style. But isn't it just the damnest thing: he's having (and giving) a hell of a good time. [07 Mar 1987]

About as gripping as its title.

Since "To pay or not to pay" is banal, the plot takes the popular path of excess to a brain-boggling twist (to be specific would be to ruin what fun there is), then spirals off in a series of ever more unlikely gyrations, until a heretofore decent picture has gone completely south into fantasy-land.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

The novels remain a witty portrait of life; this flick is just a study in preciousness.

A deceptively light and impeccably structured comedy that owes a clear cinematic debt to others -- Ernst Lubitsch, Woody Allen and Whit Stillman among them -- yet still manages to speak with a fresh and distinctive voice. [21 Aug. 1998, p.D4]

An amiable crowd-pleaser, nothing more, nothing less. [27 Nov 1987]

The actors do their darndest but the script puts few psychological thrills in the thriller, leaving them to work in a vacuum. [27 June 1992]

Ultimately, the movie suffers from the same fate as its characters. That first explosive scene creates a state of shock, leaving everyone and everything to drift about in a numbing vacuum.

Although the subject, school bullying, is as fresh as today's headlines, the treatment isn't. Despite the efforts of an impressive cast, the film starts out stale and then just gets tedious.

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.

This is a movie guaranteed to turn you into a vacillating commitment-phobe, embracing it passionately one moment and then backing off cautiously the next.

This picture will linger, stuck in those corners of the mind you may not care to visit, where the stranger you meet lies in the bed beside you, or stares back from the mirror before you, and where the comfort offered is nothing but cold. [14 June 1991]