Rick Groen

How's this for a ringing endorsement: Watching Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in nearly a decade, is like taking a philosophy exam. A really tiring philosophy exam, where the questions are elegantly phrased but damn confounding and not really conducive to right answers.

Around about the third act, the picture does what no self-respecting virus ever would -- relents, turns confused, and lets our immune system fight back with thoughts of its own, with distracting cavils about the logic of the plot and the slightness of the themes.

At one point, Downey's character is asked, "What are you gonna do with all this rage, this hate?" and he snaps back, "I'll probably just write serious literature." On TV, where the material seemed both serious and literate, that bit of black humour felt prophetic. On film, it's just a good joke.

This isn't a movie so much as a marketing strategy -- a moving poster loosely disguised as a motion picture.

Raimi doesn't make the mistake of over-thinking the flimsy psychology of the genre. All this conflicted-hero stuff isn't meant to be profound; instead, it's there for the same reason as everything else -- to give the action (the interior action in this case) a healthy shot of pop energy.

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

A laugh and a half, a genial crowd-pleaser.

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Alec Baldwin, star of The Shadow, looks great in his tux, and maybe he can even act, but the script doesn't give him the chance. It can't decide whether it's in the humour department or the thrills business. [01 Jul 1994]

The love that blooms is essentially between the boys. They both have some considerable growing up to do, but theirs is a true romance and it's awfully sweet. Funny, too.

Both more and less of the same -- more of that hot-pink couture, a whole lot more of that diminutive doggie, less reason to laugh even if you're a tank-topped 16-year-old.

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.

Given the predictable scenario, this picture needs passion, and all it gets is his workmanlike precision. What he's constructed is worthy enough, and certainly navigable, but you need more than the bricks of craft to build a road to paradise.

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.

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

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

The climax also comes with a nifty little kicker.

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]

The result is a good movie that falls short of greatness by aping too well the behaviour of its subject – occasionally brilliant, sometimes mundane.

As flicks go, She's All That ain't very much. But as high-school flicks go, this thing is a trite classic. [29 Jan 1999, p.C3]

Other than a few gratuitous montage sequences, plus a patently clumsy echo of the shopping scene in "Pretty Woman," Marshall refuses to pull his share of the load, forcing his beleaguered cast to fend for themselves.

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.

By refining both the plot and the theme, the film redeems the clunkier aspects of the book. The blatant foreshadowing (doomed mice and rabbits and puppy dogs everywhere), the unadulterated villainy (that nasty Curley, the boss's son), the calculated repetition and the oh-so-pat parallels - it's all here, but less obtrusively than in most adaptations. Sinise is intent on not allowing the mediocre poetry to get in the way of a great parable, and the climax is a testament to how well he succeeds. Because, there, the poetry is genuine. You know exactly what's coming and it still hits you hard, simultaneously laid low and buoyed up - felled by the certainty that none can prevail and cheered by the knowledge that some will endure. [2 Oct 1992]

Free Willy (for some strange reason, that tiny imperative just gives me the giggles) is a family picture that stays safely within the haven of a cozy formula, yet does a whole lot of inventive work in the process.

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

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