We get pleasure watching two sets of likeable, convincing actors move toward their foreordained futures. The film's affecting ending proves familiarity needn't breed contempt, after all.

The film is always fun, but as Carroll might have observed, it’s not much of a muchness.

Its main feature is incessant, unimaginative profanity...Take out the cursing, and you're left with a plebeian drama about angry, aimless potheads, sloppily directed by the man who wrote it.

The special effects look like a high school science project: The giants are clearly rear projections behind the real actors, and that snake is as rubbery as a garden hose.

It's marginally possible that Nancy Drew is spoofing high school adventure movies, and I almost hope so. Otherwise, it's unwatchable on every level.

Plotting has never been writer-director Allen’s strong point, and the story falls apart. It depends on coincidences that are unlikely individually and ridiculous together.

As a film, it's flabby and utterly predictable.

As warm and reassuring as grandma's hugs.

The actors were mostly nondescript, sometimes noticeably clumsy. Stunt coordinator Dion Lam brought a bit of freshness to the martial arts choreography, but the rest of the film was as stale as a week-old carp on a fish vendor's pushcart.

There's nothing more painful than watching comics tank, and Looking for Comedy in a Muslim World is a 95-minute wince.

Is Josh Hartnett attracted to cinematic bombs, or do movies merely self-destruct once he signs on as the leading man?

An intermittently preposterous, drawn-out but sometimes entertaining story about an unstoppable ex-Marine.

Every era gets the Robin Hood it needs…Now director Ridley Scott and writer Brian Helgeland have given us an intelligent, layered story suited to our grim, patience-trying times.

Sean Bean makes a positive impression as the caring but puzzled captain of the flight, though Peter Sarsgaard flies at half-mast as a clumsy air marshal.

RocknRolla is a copy of a copy of a valuable original, and you know how faint and unintelligible those can be.

It delivers cop-genre thrills at the pace required and reminds us Omar Epps is a star in the making.

Seamless, funny and startling. Anybody who thinks Keaton always does tiny variations on the same sardonic character - making him a bit more tight-lipped, say, when donning a Batsuit - will be surprised by the variety of his skills here. [19 July 1996, p.3E]

De-Lovely gets hold of a few long-obscured facts but utterly loses the sense of life between the two world wars. I suppose that's progress, of a sort.

Nair and screenwriters Matthew Faulk, Mark Skeet and Julian Fellowes have faithfully carried most of the main characters over from the novel but have changed its point of view.

Filmmakers have presented an unvarnished drama about Marshall University and the people who love it, and the results are inspirational.

The movie feels not only calculated but tired.

Even if they're on the side of the angels, 106 minutes is a long time to keep this sermon going.

If you fell in love with the big-hearted sentimentality of Rent when you saw it onstage, the film version will remind you why. If you think Jonathan Larson's musical is ponderous agitprop, the movie won't change your view.

The movie remains quiet and deliberate, a synonym for “boring” in some minds (though not mine). In the end, it becomes an allegory for the times in which we live.

Really should have been made 60 years ago. It would have been timelier, with its tale of life in the remote north of that country during World War II. The juicy overacting, stereotypes and dramatic exaggerations would have been more in keeping with the style of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The filmmakers have a vision of the way Shakespeare can be made vibrant and vital to modern viewers, with or without the lofty original dialogue.

The summer's most anticipated film, and it gives fans what they want - then more of what they want, and more, and more, until gluttony becomes force-feeding.

An unmemorable, frenzied, characterless hodgepodge that delights the eyes while numbing the brain.