Though Mazer’s ambition is laudable, he has not yet integrated the comedy of manners into the comedy of no manners.

Stark eye candy of the first order, the film is saddled with the oldest story this side of "Blade Runner." Still, comic-book fanboys and graphic designers with time to kill should feel no shame in checking this one out.

It's a treat, nevertheless, to watch the daughter of Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni in a rare leading role. Chiara Mastroianni has her mother's hair and face with her father's sorrowful eyes stuck smack in the middle, and she moves as if conscious of the weight of her genetic splendor.

The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.

Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.

It's a good movie for its type, but it rarely stops to let us marvel at the world it creates.

Nicely shot and edited, but the movie is a narrative mess, which wouldn't be so bad if all it were up to was depicting Lucia's ups and downs. But the film takes too many illogical detours to be of much use.

T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.

According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.

Whenever Ronan’s not on the screen, “See” seems to lose something. It’s no mystery why.

Once again, the most resonant drama here is all about conveying a self-loathing born of inescapable circumstances.

Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.

It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.

Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.

You keep waiting for it to go into orbit, to be really fizzy and outrageous, like the screwball farce it wants to be. Instead, the film settles for the merely serviceable.

My Salinger Year isn’t much, but it isn’t phony.

The movie flaunts its ridiculousness and offers a relentless string of jokes about blindness, groin-bashing, and bodily odors.

Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.

At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.

Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.

Neeson is much better suited to the loneliness and self-doubt of Martin's crisis than he was for the thuggery of the previous movie.

It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.

Director Kevin Reynolds has difficulty stitching his material together and imparting to it a workable rhythmic scheme, making it more than once seem earthbound. This isn't the Robin Hood it could have been. Its pulse is too erratic. Still, it does give us a handsome and often entertaining new take on Sherwood Forest's most famous straight arrow. [14 June 1991, p.29]

I almost wish A Mighty Heart were about the Captain, and I'd bet director Michael Winterbottom does, too. The character contains all the contradictory impulses of this region of the world that the West tries and miserably fails to boil down to black and white.

Love Wedding Repeat isn’t more than the sum of its fairly foolproof parts, and it suffers from a leading man who’s likable but who lacks the mad gleam of a true farceur. The rest of the cast pulls their weight.

It’s a strong story with devastating implications, but also one told at an artistic remove that renders its meanings less subtle than diminished. There’s a fury underlying this film that goes unexpressed to the point of almost going unacknowledged, and it saps The Third Wife of a strength and momentum it could use. If Ash Mayfair ever taps into that fury, she may become a filmmaker to reckon with.

There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.

For kids strung out on Anthony Horowitz's 007-lite adventure series, this maiden adaptation is a pleasant enough diversion from having to flip the pages.