Rick Groen

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

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

Be prepared to exercise the same patience and forbearing as the Trappists, because the pacing here is all Grecian urn – so much "silence and slow time."

Wisdom lies in taking a pass on Hall Pass, but bravery demands something else, something far more instructive: Watch it, every vacuous frame, if only to measure the precise aesthetic distance from blessing to curse.

Say this for I Am Number Four: It's blessedly free of any original sins. Instead, they're all copied. Here a little "Superman," there a bit of "Spider-Man," now it's "Twilight" with aliens, then it's a spaghetti western with trucks – this thing borrows more heavily than an investment bank in an unregulated market.

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

Living in a part of the world where politics, and the pursuit of politics by warring means, are the rule, director Elia Suleiman is the exception.

To wit, stick that camera down an aquatic cave, wrap a paper-thin plot around it, slap the whole thing up on an IMAX screen and call it a movie. More truth in advertising: Call it a lame movie.

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

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

The film itself struggles to do justice to each victim. Turns out three stories are two too many. The Company Men should have been downsized.

Where the hell is the movie?

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

For a novel written nearly 300 years ago by a dour Irish cleric with a mad-on about the material world and a satiric mindset dark enough to flirt with misanthropy, it's amazing how well Gulliver's Travels travels. Even Jack Black can't ruin the thing, although not for lack of trying.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

Brooks knew how to engineer a well-crafted script. Yet on the evidence here – a stuttering two-hour outing bereft of any rhythm, a bunch of scenes in search of a movie – he's apparently forgotten.

The picture makes too many concessions to the Hollywood judges, pulls too many punches. But at least it has real punches to pull, because there's honest sweat here too, and a full complement of those archetypes that lie at the popular heart of the genre.

Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you wish to see a superb film that treats a sad topic with unflinching honesty. Don't go down this Rabbit Hole unless you believe that tragedy's grief, when transmuted through art's protective lens, can feel liberating, even joyful in its painful truths.

The plot is rich, the execution poor.

Manic with an itch.

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.

Yes, The King's Speech is a lively burst of populist rhetoric, superbly performed and guaranteed to please even discriminating crowds.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.