Reportedly, after seeing the film, rapper Eminen is anxious to play a wheelchair athlete in a coming movie.

The song playing sombrely over the tail credits is Afraid of Everyone, which is a hell of a way to die, but an even worse way to live. There is no cheer to Transpecos.

There is also a parallel subplot following the fate of two Ukrainian girls caught in the sex-slave ring Kathy targets. This storyline isn't dramatically satisfying, but it does provide context and ensures the victims in this story are not portrayed simply as faces in the dark.

Gareth Evans’s sequel to his surprise 2011 hit takes the original’s basic formula – lots of people pounding on each other in close quarters – and simply stretches it over a much longer running time.

Living in a part of the world where politics, and the pursuit of politics by warring means, are the rule, director Elia Suleiman is the exception.

Payback is nothing if not brave. It's a documentary attempt to give concrete shape to an abstract discussion, using the medium of film to transplant a nuanced thesis – on the concept of debt – from its natural home on the printed page.

So for now, I’m going to go lay down, chuckle at the film’s inventive ridiculousness and try not to think too hard about anything at all. It’s what Hobbs and Shaw would want.

For such a mush-ball teen movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants carries a welcome amount of grown-up emotional truth.

The film will make highly informative viewing both for those who get it – and for those who don’t.

It’s naive to blame the current cancerous state of American politics on a single carcinogen, but don’t let that stop you from pointing fingers at Roger Ailes.

Horror fans anticipating grisly laughs are in for a jolt. Because the new Last House, though terrifying, is never, ever fun.

Still, once the end credits rolled – including superfluous “bonus” scenes wrapping up various narrative threads – I couldn’t help but empathize with that talking spork. Freedom, sweet freedom! For now.

Nashef is a sombre Roberto Benigni in his role as a sincere bumbler, defusing situational bombs with hummus-based subterfuge and desperate diplomacy. This satire in Hebrew and Arabic is an answer in an allegorical and comical way, about a mad circumstance and a man in the middle of it. A tense and painful backdrop, sure, but there’s no stick up Zoabi’s butt, just an olive branch.

As pleasant and sincere as his film is, it’s a touch too timid. We never hear about Lennon writing Yer Blues at camp happy: “Yes, I’m lonely, wanna die.” Saltzman balances his own story with the Beatles scenery successfully, but he left some drama on the table.

As the young hero at the centre of the tale, Guillory displays astonishing depth and heart. To summarize: Run, don’t walk.

This is a sewer blessedly free of actual sewage, which makes Flushed Away more kid-friendly than, say, the average "South Park" episode.

Spry, entertaining documentary.

Throughout, Sachs is quietly observational – the film’s emotional power coming from its rich but unshowy performances.

Hauser is just as skilled and invested an actor as any of the more critically certified players alongside him here, including Sam Rockwell as Jewell’s anti-authoritarian lawyer and Kathy Bates as Jewell’s overprotective mother.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't voluntarily go to this flick. But for those with a greater gross-out threshold, it's a better film than anyone should normally expect in this genre.

The Class is simultaneously old school and new, familiar in its themes but unique in design and, at its best, riveting in execution.

In a movie about an ant colony, perhaps it's futile to complain about a superfluity of characters. Yet this need to cover every permutation of cuteness is one major drawback to the cast of A Bug's Life.

This sexy, pulpy, very grown-up film is not your usual best animated feature material.

The film -- written as well as directed by Arteta -- has plenty of raw energy, a strikingly fresh Latino viewpoint and successfully contrasting moods of dark humour, high drama and deep despair. What it lacks in finesse, Star Maps more than makes up for in gutsy creativity. [29 Aug 1997, p.D4]

Cabin is a meta-horror-comedy mash-up that, at least for two-thirds of its running time, holds together smartly.

A film that is touching in a clumsy, boyish way that adults will understand and may even applaud.

Rare is the movie that arrives without fanfare -- that sneaks between the cracks, pops up relatively unheralded on the big screen, and takes the viewer by delighted surprise. Well, check the moon for blue because Birthday Girl is just such a picture.

All Day and a Night offers renewed hope for Wright acolytes, all while reaffirming a new star in Sanders.

Letting Shrek get grumpy again has freshly animated this cartoon series.

Ultimately, She's The One is about less than it seems -- Burns is quite willing to trade off emotional credibility to an easy gag and a neat resolution. Yes, the film's apparent sensitivity comes with a high commercial gloss, but so what -- the lightness is breezy enough to cool our objections. Burns may well be an unabashed entertainer in the guise of an auteur, yet that's an awfully potent combination. Just ask a certain Woody Allen. [23 Aug 1996]

Black Panther fights constantly and bitterly against the familiar constraints of Disney's superhero industrial complex. At every turn, the expectations of the genre, the bland sameness that breeds cinematic comfort for the millions who line up to fill Marvel's coffers, are met by the director with resistance and creative intensity.

Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.

Essentially a love story, as stripped of sentimentality as the landscape is shorn of green, yet an extraordinary love story nonetheless – powerful and poignant and, even in the midst of hope's imminent extinction, hopeful too.

Like Maddin's melancholic and relatively more conventional "My Winnipeg," Keyhole is about a memory house, but one that is even more fragmented, mythical and elusive.

The clever and defiant Ai, who is forever filming himself and others on his phone, does in one instance capture Johnsen on camera, but mainly the doc is missing any explanation of how a dissident forbidden from giving interviews agreed to it – as well as much context about his personal life.

Moore continues another one infinitely more valuable -- the proud line that extends right back to Mark Twain, embracing all those satirists so enamoured with America at its best that they won't stand silent for America at its worst.

His story here is well-woven, with the kind-hearted voices of psychiatrists, playwrights, family members, lawyers and the gregarious McCollum himself failing to come up with a solution on how to handle an autistic, obsessive and irresponsible rail rider.

The Next Level works precisely for the same reasons why Welcome to the Jungle did. It’s never boring, it’s genuinely funny in a way that’s family friendly but still clever, and the cast’s chemistry is outstanding – it just works.

Visually, this movie is exquisite. Narratively, well, that's a more banal story.

An integrated work whose form clearly mirrors its content. Often, looking into that mirror is dreadful; but, often enough, it's also dreadfully revealing.

Well-spoken but humorously self-deprecating, Berg admits that, between the hours spent writing, rehearsing and performing, she spends more of her life as Molly than she does as herself.

Happily, in his adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies has found a setting close to his heart and a subject more nearly suited to his style.

By exploiting the raw physical power of the Indonesian martial art called silat and then emptying buckets and buckets of fake blood upon your cast for kicks, filmmaker Timo Tjahjanto has birthed a monster of a movie, as brutal as it is hypnotic.

In the script Lelio co-wrote with Gonzalo Maza, the lover's family may be conveniently ghastly and the authorities who investigate the death puzzlingly erratic (as the film flirts unsuccessfully with mystery), but a quietly honest centre never wavers.

Cross’s light-handed (but too long) film doesn’t romanticize or overcomprehend, choosing instead to concentrate on life’s non-choices.

The film is a slight but sweet ode to a particular flavour of Britannia that will leave its target audience in sentimental shambles.

The running time is efficient, the direction is clean, the story is simple but resonant, the effects are understated yet impressive, and the near-wordless star of the show puts on an acting clinic. Damned if the risen one doesn't lift us out of our seats.

But uneven acting isn't fatal here, since Andrew Bergman's screenplay is strong enough and Andrew Fleming's direction seamless enough to carry it forward.

Plot isn't what drives the picture; instead, this is a cinematic tone poem, where the dominant mood is a Faulknerian mix of sorrow and endurance.

This time, though, Zemeckis has another technical trick up his sleeve – 3-D – and for once the gimmick succeeds.

Ultimately, Certified Copy – with its unresolved loose ends – is a puzzle box without a key.

Beyond the knights and rooks, Bobby Fischer Against the World tells the story of a Jewish kid raised in Brooklyn who spent his final years in exile as a fulminating anti-Semite and a raving anti-American.

Filled with a sweet, loopy sensibility and some fresh comic turns, Welcome to Collinwood is a low-budget American film that falls into the good-but-slight category.

Being Human is just that, and it's a profound delight. [06 May 1994]

This is still her (Wasikowska’s) picture. She’s its 10-foot tower, mysterious and brave and excited and withdrawn. Alice is the true magic in a Wonderland that’s mere movie magic – the happy surprise amidst everything we’ve come to expect.

With lesser performers, too, maybe Hammer would have felt more like a gag. Yet O’Brien, fresh off a tremendous and under-seen performance in last year’s "Goalie," radiates nervy energy like it was the most natural thing in the world, while longtime character actor Patton gives his wary patriarch an urgent, unshakable sense of disappointment and unease. It’s almost worth eating your own tail over.

It's a brilliant opening, but the difficulty with the familiar plot formula wherein a special stranger wins over a difficult household is that once the spell has been cast, all the plot tension, and much of the movie magic, dissipates.

Martin Scorsese, meet Djo Tunda Wa Munga, because you obviously have a lot in common. Viva Riva! is nothing less than the Congolese Mean Streets, oozing sexual heat and brute violence and powered by a locomotive's worth of raw kinetic energy.

It is an agreeable example of how a picture conceived as "product" need not condescend to the audience it exploits. [11 Apr 1983]

THE Lover is lyrical and sensuous, very pretty and strangely hollow. Deliberately hollow, I think - the flatness at the centre of this film is meant to correspond to the emptiness at the heart of its young protagonist. And the audience is supposed to fall into that void and hear its echo, feel the residual ache. Yet we don't - we're content to comprehend the theme without feeling it. Our emotions are spared, and, as a result, we watch the proceedings at a safe remove - appreciative yet detached, admiring yet unmoved. There's much to love about The Lover, but not enough to love passionately. [30 Oct 1992]

It sure ain't the Christmas of Dickens's imaginings. Dysfunctional overachievers all, the Vuillards are a family bizarre enough to make the Royal Tenenbaums look like candidates for a Hallmark card.

Beatriz at Dinner works well beyond both lecture or lesson because of the care and attention everyone has put into the people that play them out.

The plot's problem is insoluble: There is no honest ending for Abe other than a completely undramatic continuation of the trapped life he has lived so far. So we get narrative disjunction and a limp conclusion instead of the brilliant reversal of formula that was promised.

An animated sequel that, despite not achieving the inspired lunacy of the first movie where Gru literally steals the moon, is smartly calculated to deliver squeals to kids and amusement to accompanying adults.

It’s tempting to think Hitman undermines any beauty it musters with its habit of ridiculousness.

It can definitely grate on your nerves but, at best, it also gets into your mind, and sticks fast.

There is such a thing as being too reverential, and too many scenes – including one where a roomful of white abolitionists applaud Tubman – insist on Tubman’s greatness, instead of letting us discover it.

A tender tale of semi-triumph.

A late summer treat. And in case you are wondering, yes, there is mumbling.

Thrown into exalted company, Zellweger easily holds her own in the film's most difficult role.

The message of the film is that life throws surprises. While that is true, this predictable film itself is not one of them.

Sitting through Red Eye is like watching a master carpenter at work on a custom bookcase. No one would call the result art, but you're sure bound to admire the sheer craft of the thing, the clean lines and seamless joints and meticulous attention to detail.

New Zealand-born director Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors, Die Another Day) avoids biopic tropes, filling the screen with the jolts of a violent thriller and exploiting the few comic possibilities.

Most refreshingly, Johnny English Strikes Again is the rare secret-agent film that feels wholly unself-conscious.

Focused on one cocky white student’s foray into the world of California battle rap, Bodied is at times vile in its content and bananas in its execution. But Kahn is not a mere shock artist, and as the film progresses and twists its perspective, it’s clear the director is playing a much deeper, more complicated and extremely messy game.

Utterly preposterous but so full of enthusiasm and flashy style that it's entertaining anyway, The Brotherhood of the Wolf is like the platypus of genre films.

Part of the charm of Satin Rouge is that it avoids the obvious with humour and lightness.

There is not much more you could ask of a Canadian thriller, even if the director lets the Thailand-set portions of the film devolve slightly into clichéd Brokedown Palace territory.

Not Hitchcock's best, but far from his worst. [01 Mar 1997, p.11]

Visually impressive, splendidly performed, thematically significant, this is a movie in full possession of every key cinematic asset except one -- a solid script. Casino is a polished vehicle with an untuned engine.

Sachs manages this day in the life without cumbersome exposition thanks to the texture of this casting, all while keeping the disparate concerns of three generations moving.

Coming out of the Toronto International Film Festival last month, critics were touting McCarthy as an Oscar nominee. Her work is nuanced and insightful, though it may not be showy enough for Academy voters.

It all makes for an entertaining, occasionally delirious ride – especially the opening sequence.

There's a particular upside-down, half-masked kiss that instantly becomes one of movie history's more memorable smooches. It's the kiss to send any teenaged boy on a spinning high, as well as launching the new age of arachnophilia.

There’s lots of wisdom here, but in the Icelandic barrens, good cheer has sometimes gone missing. Yes, there’s a price to pay for being stubborn.

Equally enrapturing are the birders themselves, including the writers Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Rosen – contemplatively articulate in all their geeky birding glory – and especially Starr Saphir, who leads birding tours through Central Park.

In the end, is In America slight in its sentimentality and manipulative in its moral? Sure, but that's the job of any fable or myth.

Disney has historically peopled cartoons aimed at children with violent, gruesomely animated villains. For all its delicious whimsy, Up is no exception.

Then again, Colin Firth is enough. Every movie is a performance, but very seldom is a performance a movie.

It’s a profoundly weird film but hypnotic nonetheless.

The bottom line for this genre is that the guys are goofy and likable, the pacing is quick and there are a lot of laughs. In a dumb-California-kids movie, that's all you really need. [25 May 1992]

Voice cast member Lisa Hannigan, an Irish songstress who sings here in a Celtic-ethereal style, features on a soundtrack that is mystic, eerie and freeing. Yeats is whispered: ‘Come away, human child/To the water and the wild.’ Inviting? Very much so.

While the case could be made that Koreeda is merely replicating the world as the blinkered Ryota sees it, the disparity between the characters’ development still leaves you feeling slightly cheated, if only because you want to see more of what this truly gifted student of human behaviour might do with them.

A cornball charmer of a film with some beautiful birds and homespun wisdom.

A modest, winning comedy that overtly sneaks in its wisdom about life, worries and what really matters.

Ushpizin takes us to a fascinating place, and hands out the sort of brochure that tourists always need but seldom get -- the charming kind, fun to ponder and rewarding to browse.

These are not easy people to understand, nor to watch unravel, but they are urgent, complicated, captivating characters.

A charming oddity starring Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch, often feels like an al fresco stage play. It’s an intimate two-hander with lots of dialogue, humour and poignant revelations, set against a backdrop of rugged woodland beauty.