The cast is delightful top to bottom, although Arterton's role is chiefly defined by seductive smiles and the rise of her cut-off shorts. Allam and Cooper are standouts, creating hormonally despicable characters getting more of Tamara's attention than they deserve.

Hysteria is a one-joke movie, but when a joke is told this well, it doesn't matter.

It's a movie that grows on you, after grating your nerves while viewing it.

Bridesmaids is a bit of a groundbreaker... Not exactly a banner for feminism but equal time is overdue.

Franco doesn’t ask viewers to reconsider bad art but to respect the artist behind it. Sage advice from someone who, after a few career disasters, can still shape a movie this good.

Some of the more tender moments - Farmer and Marron dancing at a country bar and gently probing each other's secrets - are particularly affecting. Less successful is a sequence purportedly set at the Academy Awards that wreaks of artificiality. The utter fecklessness of the segment is so jarring that it isn't until the climax that The Bodyguard pulls itself together.

Fast Five is brawny dumb fun, nothing more but that's enough.

A shocking and outrageous comedy that gets under your skin. Landis doesn't always know the difference between a laugh and a nervous giggle, but you can't just sit there unaffected. [25 Sept 1992, p.10]

If only City Slickers II possessed the heart of the original, a quality it might have recouped at its climax. Yet, instead of a gentle lesson on the true value of life, the screenwriters tack on a Las Vegas epilogue that exists to present one more Palance zinger and a set-up for another sequel. [10 June 1994, p.8]

Technically dazzling but emotionally empty. [22 Oct 1993, p.5]

It's a capable Sunday school lesson with little for anyone to challenge and practically nothing that offends.

Elysium proves better at social polemics than escapism, a balancing act Blomkamp managed well in District 9, with its allegory of South Africa's apartheid era.

It's a quiet story, without many emotional outbursts and no villains. Parts of Higher Ground are dull, honestly. But the movie always feels honest about its subject.

Anyone of any age can get a kick out of watching penguins slide down the spiraled interior of the Guggenheim Museum, or seeing how one of these flightless birds manages to buck nature.

Conveying a visceral sense of warfare's terror is what Berg chiefly seeks, and on that level Lone Survivor handily succeeds.

Certainly this could've been a bolder, angrier movie than what it became. After so much grimness in movies about U.S. military actions in the Middle East, it's good finding one dedicated to the kind of humor getting a lot of folks through over there.

The Little Hours is less than the sum of its many comedy parts but some of those many are hilarious.

This Must Be the Place is a movie existing in a zonked-out realm where reality smashes head-on with a train-wreck hero too strange to be real, unless you're the love child of Ozzy Osbourne and the Cure's Robert Smith.

Early Man proudly retains Park’s simple/not simple Plasticine pleasures.

Casper often resembles a blueprint for the next Universal theme park ride, but it serves well as the summer's first family treat. This movie should make children happy, at least for another month, until Disney unleashes its Pocahontas punch. [26 May 1995, p.10]

The Jungle Book is rich with stunning sights and impossibly lush features. [23 Dec 1994, p.16]

Wan in particular is pacing today's movie horror by reverting to the past. There's a touch of Hammer Films in his haunted house atmospheres, and Roger Corman in his groaning comic relief from the dread.

Lincoln is like a thoroughly researched poli-sci term paper come to life, with interesting personal material about the participants relegated to footnotes.

A movie as fun as it is flawed.

The Magnificent Seven had me smiling throughout, tapping into Saturday matinee memories without seeming entirely old-fashioned.

A bit dated in its feminism, making some jokes even funnier. [08 Mar 2001, p.17W]

The IMF workings are still complex, but without Brian DePalma's artistic indulgences (Part 1) and John Woo's poetic distractions (Part 2). Abrams cuts to the chase whenever the option arises, and the results don't leave much time to question logic or motive. [4 May 2006, p.6W]

For the most part, however, Southpaw is a terrific boxing movie, with choreographed violence emphasizing the sport's speed rather than its poetry in slow motion.