It's a rather lifeless re-telling of the Nativity, with greeting-card imagery and stiff performances.

It's difficult to imagine the target audience for this film. Gangbangers, perhaps?

Ultimately, forgettable, but for most of the way it's a pleasant little vacation of a movie.

The sole bright spot is Christopher Walken playing a benevolent Mafia don.

Easy Virtue has aspirations to be much more than a comedy. It wants to flay, if only with a penknife, the entire British class system.

I haven't heard this much shouting in a movie since the first hour of "Full Metal Jacket."

It's kind of fun, and Australians apparently love it, buying enough tickets to make it their country's all-time champ at the box office. But anybody much older than Star Wars - the movie that definitively replaced horses and six-shooters with rockets and ray guns - has seen it all a million times before. [03 Feb 1983, p.18]

It's not only Phoebe whose daydreams go out of control. Daniel Barnz, the writer-director, also goes a bit flooey. There's a lot more perspiration than inspiration.

Even the "surprise" appearance of Keith Richards, as the scurvy father of Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow, has already been hyped to death in the advance press.

Even the humor is played too broadly – another notch and we'd be in "Monty Python" territory, though not half as witty.

See the film, if you must, for Mara, who will be starring in the upcoming Hollywood remake of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." She's a sharp, vigilant actress whose career bears watching.

The movie keeps up for a while, then falls into a slump, dwelling too long on the tangled emotions in the heroin's tangled marriage. Since the musical numbers aren't especially lively, either, the energy level sags dangerously low. In its best scenes, though, Yentl entertains with its crisp performances and invigorates with its sturdy feminist perspective. [22 Dec 1983, p.19]

The Iron Lady is too bland to be controversial, too antiquated to speak to the present.

The film is gracefully directed around the edges, but the core story, a kind of existential murder mystery, is swallowed up by a series of increasingly outlandish plot devices involving drug runners and Tarantino-esque shootouts.

It's a moderately enjoyable escapade that isn't quite clever enough for adults and not quite imaginative enough for children.

A few of the performances, especially Nicole Kidman’s, as the lady in charge, and Kirsten Dunst’s, as the teacher pining to flee with the corporal, have some bite, but not enough to make much of an imprint in this brittle, vaporous chamber piece.

There is barely a whiff of genuine transcendence in this grand-scale extravaganza. The special effects are courtesy of Industrial Light and Magic, but the magic here is largely industrial.

When a great movie subject results in a middling movie, the loss is double.

It's a well-meaning picture, but it doesn't have enough imagination to become as involving as it would like. [22 Jan 1993, p.11]

It has its modicum of suspense, and Brendon Fraser, who stars as intrepid professor Trevor Anderson – who does indeed journey to the center of the Earth – is his usual heroically affable self.

Cruise gives his energetic all to the role, but he, too, doesn’t seem to be quite aware that Seal was morally compromised far beyond the shallow confines of this film.

Director and co-writer John Krokidas doesn’t have a very fluent gift for period re-creation – everything seems stagy – and most of the actors, playing divas of various stripes, overact.

If writer-director Marc Lawrence had stuck with Alex's faded glory, Music and Lyrics could have been terrific. It could have been about something. Instead, he's confected a curdled valentine.

Ritchie is so adept that the film is compulsively watchable, but it’s watchable in the same way as a massive train wreck or the slow-motion demolition of a high-rise.

Despite some occasional moments of real sadness and terror, the turmoil in this movie is decidedly on the upbeat.

Director Chris Wedge falls into the common animator’s trap of making the “human” characters a lot duller than the nonhuman creepy-crawlies.

Beautiful geishas flit and whoosh through the equally beautiful scenery. Their kimonos are artworks-in-motion. So why is the film so boring? It could be because director Rob Marshall is so transfixed by all the ritualistic hoo-ha that he never brings the story down to earth.

This is one of those radical change-your-image performances that tries too hard to defy our expectations. Kidman has indeed proved in the past to be quite versatile, but this muddled, scabrous, neo-noir procedural does her no great favors.