Rick Groen

Offers you the ostensible bargain of two movies in one -- a character study at the outset and the crime caper that follows. The first picture is intriguing, the second stinks.

Oh, it's The Return, all right. To any masochist who's been pining for all those clichéd tropes associated with Russian cinema -- ponderous pacing and arcane symbolism shot through a lens darkly -- this will seem a welcome blast from the past.

Up and down, Late Marriage is definitely rocky, but there's never a point where we lose interest and want out -- as relationships go, that's not bad.

The surprise lies in Linklater's ability to breathe so much fresh life into a tired formula...This is a picture that recollects not merely a period in time but a state of mind.

Label this one a howler, and add a postscipt to the sequel: shoo Fly II, go forth and don't multiply. [11 Feb 1989]

Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.

A little gem of social realism that makes up in polish what it lacks in consistency.

Cerebral without being dry, delicate without being dull, Mr. And Mrs. Bridge is a rarity: a drama of manners that breathes esthetic life into airless parlours, without either sentimentalizing the occupants or hyping the atmosphere. [21 Dec 1980]

How's this for frightening: The casting of the lightweight Ben Affleck as a CIA agent who holds the fate of the entire world in his pretty-boy hands. Can't deny it, that got my heart pumping like a bunny.

The reality measures up to the rep.

Altman shakes the camera like a two-bit horror director, and it seems a different sort of signature - less masterful than weary, less signed than resigned. Zero-sum, indeed.

Like a skill player who just can't score, The Damned United is all dazzle and no finish and, ultimately, damned frustrating.

In dramatizing the rigours of the ghetto, Yakin stoops to hyperbolic plot devices that tend to erode the very empathy he's striving to create. Things are surely bad, but not that bad - unwittingly, he's demonizing people who deserve better, who are better. [02 Sep 1994]

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.

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]

Two superb actors etch an unflinching portrait of a young marriage doomed never to grow old.

In this journey, [Crowe] wears the uniform, the accent and the derring-do with consummate panache. Have him strike a muscular pose on the ship's prow, which Weir does more than once, and the manly sight puts that wussy DiCaprio to titanic shame.

But the stuff looks like what it is -- trite imagery grafted over the narrative barrens, like a bad weave on a balding pate.

The result is a picture curiously yet intriguingly at odds with itself: One moment is edgy, the next is not; the cast is terrific, the direction is not; here it’s satirically sharp, there it’s sloppily sentimental; now we’re happily engaged, then we’re cruelly dumped. Some films are electric – Admission settles for alternating current.

The movie's main attraction isn't hard to find. It's essentially a character study, but one where the nature of the study is as unique as the stature of the character.

Ultimately, the result is identical to Mills's debut effort in "Thumbsucker." Once again, clever insight vies with misty-eyed sentimentality, honesty with artifice, real humour with bogus gravity, the genuinely affecting with the merely quirky. But "Thumbsucker" was at least a promising start; Beginners is just a frustrating continuation.

Mainly, though, it's the exquisite restraint - both of Cornish's performance and Campion's direction - that gives the film its power.

It's not the subject matter itself that's offensive -- pedophilia is as worthy a topic of investigation as any other. Instead, it's the subject's non-treatment -- we don't learn a thing that rings true.

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

A half-century ago, "kitchen sink realism" began its harsh existence on the British stage and then migrated to the screen where, over the years, the genre has taken up permanent residence, maturing into a gritty art...Now add Andrea Arnold to the directors' list and Fish Tank to the kitchen. It's classic low-rent realism – you can almost smell the grease on the unwashed dishes.

With Hot Fuzz, you'll just have to settle for semi-hilarity.

British humour at its eclectic best, a deliciously heady mix of dry wit and ribald farce.

Reservoir Dogs sizzles - it's dynamite on a short fuse, and you watch it with mesmerized fascination, simultaneously attracted and repelled by the explosion you know will come.