The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 has the technical polish and competent acting of the four-film series, though less intensity. It contains no surprises and ends with an anticlimax I have heard is faithful to the book, though it doesn’t amount to much onscreen.

Damon, trapped in an inert character, shows little inner turmoil.

It's slickly executed, handsomely acted for the most part and utterly easy to forget.

Writer-director Ben Younger has sketched the foreground of this picture but never gets around to filling in the details.

The story was primitive, the characters unmemorable, the direction unsophisticated, the writing cliched, the photography and music drab, the pacing uneven, the acting varying from adroitly funny to exaggerated.

On the positive side, the four Worm Guys haven't lost their squiggly charm, and Rip Torn is always welcome as MIB mastermind Zed. On the minus side, you get two Johnny Knoxvilles, one of them a tiny head that protrudes from the big one's shoulder.

Demolition is a rarity: A film with a profound emotional truth at its heart that lies to us, scene by scene, from start to finish.

The acting is solid.

Molly Shannon's peachy-keen attitude and spunky patience win us over to the side of Mary Katherine Gallagher.

Kids might get a charge out of the mayhem. I got the vapors.

Miller gives the film's one genuine, focused, committed performance, and you can see why she might even reform a rake of Casanova's standing.

Predictable but agreeable time-waster.

Offers an amusing break to the undemanding.

The Observer won't let me get stoned before a review, so I'll never know what How High would be like after a big fat blunt. Without one, it's sloppy, broadly funny in spots and chaotic.

Inside this film, a poignant and personal story is struggling to get out. But it's couched in such awkward sentiments that it can't emerge.

Leaving the book aside, how well does the picture fare? Middingly, and in fits and starts.

One Fine Day is a fluffernutter. Half of it is as down-to-earth, satisfying, even nourishing as peanut butter. The rest of it is gooey, dense and indigestible. [20 Dec 1996, p.4E]

A well-intentioned but obvious, often clumsy picture.

The last 40 minutes descend further and further into nonsense, until we're in an underground grotto where Jeremy Irons plays a furry, cannibalistic albino with psychic powers and super-strength.

Can I admit XXX is as deep as a Petri dish and as well-characterized as a telephone book but still say it was a guilty pleasure? Because I have to confess, when special agent Xander Cage tossed two detonators onto a mountainside and outran the ensuing avalanche on a snowboard, I was digging the action.

The film is a straight concert appearance: No backstage material after a brief introduction, no footage of him in any other context. He's certainly smooth, engaging and likeable onstage, but you won't learn anything about him you didn't already know.

I think the movie intends to empower all of its female characters, but it ends up chaining them to stale, timeworn ideas.

Brooks has long since mastered his whiny/neurotic persona, and Douglas does a passable version of giddy craziness. The young folks get lost in the shuffle, which leaves Suchet to steal the show with his fey, moist-eyed delivery. In this case, that's petty larceny.

There’s nothing much wrong with the film’s pacing or characterizations. We’ve just seen it all in fresher and funnier forms, from Donkey’s sassy backtalk to Puss in Boots’ eye-widening charm.

Henry James' tangled, turgid prose always seems to me like a thicket of thorn trees -- so I should be grateful when somebody does the job for me on film. But I'm not - at least, in the case of The Golden Bowl.

Gyllenhaal and Hathaway exert considerable powers of hangdog charm and fierce independence, trying to give firm shape to the saggy script. But if you want to watch these two struggle through an up-and-down screen relationship, rent "Brokeback Mountain."

Randolph and Parker play fair with us, setting up a motive early and clearly. Yet whether you buy the motive or find it far-fetched, it almost immediately tells you who's responsible for the death.

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.