The first Guy Maddin movie that feels as if it got only halfway out of the director's head and onto the screen.

The Phantom of the Opera was never a brilliant movie, but it remains great, ghoulish fun, with Chaney tiptoeing the line between sympathy and shudders.

The "troubles" in Northern Ireland would seem to be an excellent dramatic vehicle: tension, violence, a people torn apart by religious, political, and economic differences. But writer-director Tony Luraschi turns it into a polemic. Speeches replace action and the dialogue is wooden. [14 Feb 2014, p.G31]

Bubble is a stunt in search of a movie, and it almost finds one.

Is ATL even a hip-hop movie? There's hip-hop in it, certainly, but unlike the recent vehicles for Eminem and 50 Cent -- respectively, ''8 Mile" and ''Get Rich or Die Tryin' " -- it does not have a rapper hero.

The Lost Boys is schlock, but it's juicy schlock. [31 Jul 1987, p.34]

There are some good, sharp, surprising laughs in Youth in Revolt. So why does it feel so dreadfully familiar?

Both leads are excellent; you expect as much from Vance but the surprise is the quietly charismatic Athie, who gives his role shades of geniality, ambition, frustration, and pig-headedness.

The movie’s electrifying without being completely satisfying. Zonca and his star don’t play by Hollywood rules, which is both good (keeps us off-balance) and less so (at times the film doesn’t seem sure where it’s going).

What sets Tequila Sunrise apart is its layering, its existential dimension. The characters played by Gibson and Russell have been sanded down by a kind of fatalism we normally associate with characters in French gangster movies. There's more than one facet to them. They're entertaining. And urgent. Even when they're just going through routine genre moves, they put laid-back spin on them. [2 Dec 1988, p.29]

The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.

Maras and his cast craft such a chilling, narratively grueling dramatization of the episode — chaos worsened by the lack of tactical response forces in Mumbai — it’s tough to view quietly-played everyman heroics as the story’s takeaway. These striving unfortunates are just too hopelessly, fatally overmatched for that. Audiences are likelier to leave horrified or, at best, numb.

Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.

Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.

I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.

The real villain is a cowed and lazy citizenry. Meaning all of us. Disappointingly, V for Vendetta makes this point early and moves on, at some point turning as shallow as what it protests against.

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

As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.

Misbehaviour is intersectional to a fault, and keeping all those balls in the air is almost more than the movie can handle.

Youth recedes, the body decays, life is a compromised thing: These are truths. But they're not fresh truths, and Moss's riverdogs are hardly the first to have discovered them.

Take away the storming music and grand vistas, and it's all a standard sword-and-sorcery adventure; director Andrew Adamson is more than a journeyman but much less than the visionary Peter Jackson is.

Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.

Dreams Rewired is scattered by necessity and intent, and it throws off enough sparks to set your brain reeling.

It's one of the year's most unforgettable exercises in pointlessness. [16 Sept 1994, p.62]

The best scenes are when Stark just cuts impatiently through the claptrap.

Hollywoodland has scraps of old movie glamour. It also has shades of later movies that sullied all that class and refinement with a lurid touch, namely Roman Polanski's "Chinatown." But that's all Hollywoodland is: scraps and shade.

Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.

Although perhaps inescapably derivative, the film rides its cast's warm and vibrantly meshed energies - to say nothing of its gender novelty. It's filled with heart and muscle as the women tired of being scammed, slammed and rammed deposit the exploitation film in new realms of payback. [06 Nov 1996, p.D1]