To its credit, Heart and Souls aspires to being nothing more than a standard bauble of summer movie entertainment, funny a lot of the time, heart-warming some of the time, sad once or twice. And unless you see it in a sour mood, you will be entertained. [13 Aug 1993]

While it’s not as much of a slow-burn of psychological torture as Bertino’s original, Chapter 1 sticks to the course and doesn’t let up on its lead characters once.

[Buckley's] all-in performance is riveting, and well balanced by Paul Mescal’s quieter intensity as the Bard, making the film worth watching – but never rescuing it from the cheap biographical determinism of its third act.

The film is all the more frustrating an experience given that it inches so close to greatness.

September 5 splices together its thoroughly researched dramatic recreations with the actual programming ABC aired, an initially nifty back and forth that quickly wears thin.

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

The viewer is left feeling like they’ve been sitting in a double-decker tour bus: You’re exposed to a lot, but it’s all surface level.

The movie bites off way too much. It lumbers inelegantly between confrontations with grief and fascism. The performed seriousness of it all stifles most attempts at having fun, which makes this an even harder prospect for young audiences.

It’s a shame that both Umair Aleem’s script and Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s (The Huntsman: Winter’s War) direction ultimately feel rote because both Winstead and Martineau’s performances are fun to watch. Their playful, natural chemistry keeps the film from dragging on and lends a necessary levity and wit to the movie’s 106 minutes.

Disney and Pixar’s latest outing delivers on some frontiers, but puzzles on others.

It is the kind of screenplay that erases itself with one minute of second thought.

The dead-seriousness with which Sims-Fewer and Mancinelli approach their subject is admirable, as is the former’s unsettling lead performance. And you won’t find another film this year that subverts the male gaze in such a brutally naked manner.

Despite its shortcomings, Beckett manages to be a semi-effective thriller, with Washington holding enough attention to get the audience to root for his titular protagonist, but the lack of character development means viewers are never fully invested in his story.

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

The performances nearly save the film from itself.

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

Exceptionally overlong, crammed with miscast performers putting in half the effort they should, and so overly pleased with its various (and rather middling) twists that it leaps from “clever” to “pompous” in one fell swoop, Wake Up Dead Man represents a hard and rough fall from grace.

If we’re ranking those films, the latest lands somewhere between the ‘80s-set prequel Bumblebee and Michael Bay’s 2007 original, which is pretty much as good as it gets. Rise of the Beasts splits the difference between the former’s Steven Spielberg-light likeability and the latter’s alternately thrilling and mind-numbing spectacle.

Hey, Viktor!, a raucous mockumentary, is a mixed bag, veering wildly from self-deprecating humour and a downright cringefest to moments of heartfelt candour.

To give filmmaker Russ Meyer his own due, the women here are freed up to love sex as much as are the men, although it's pretty obvious his message was less directed at 1970s feminists than at horny guys hoping beyond hope that chicks want 24-hour-a-day fornication. [31 Jan 2004, p.48]

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

Perhaps fittingly, the directors’ big foray into Hollywood is saved by the star power of the two industry legends headlining the film. Bening and Foster are absolute delights from beginning to end.

Hausner is clearly talented, and I’m all for a film without easy answers. But I wish this one was less insistently opaque.

It is a constraint of cinematic vision that flattens the potential of the figures, the speech, and the movements of Women Talking. It is less about what is being said here – flawed yet fierce as it is – and more that, in order to realize the full impact of its meaning, what is being said needs to fight through the film’s own lacklustre veneer to be able to convey itself with any sense of spirit.

Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

While the new doc was spurred by Roher’s own existential anxiety about what kind of AI-dominated world he would be bringing his unborn son into, the resulting film feels so determined to walk the middle road between doom times and boom times (hence its cheeky title) that its message cannot help but land as something almost algorithmically mushy.

A compelling, if ultimately predictable, coming-of-age drama.