It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

As a consumer, it is simply your responsibility to see it, just so that many more Love, Simons can be made. There are worse things to spend your money on than this adorable teen gay comedy whose worst quality is its boring straight man.

Lanthumos's accomplished and fascinating Dogtooth pushes the notion of parents screwing up their kids into seriously disturbing and darkly comic terrain.

Absurd fun with a tortured relationship, Prick Up Your Ears follows facts with farcical fidelity. [01 May 1987]

There is a semi-frustrating sense that Frias hasn’t quite made the movie that he wanted to – that either time was not on his side or that he fussed too much in the editing booth.

Gold is important because Gold is a great writer. No further argument necessary.

It is a highly entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is unapologetic in both its self-awareness and sense of humour.

Against all odds and historical improbabilities, God Grew Tired of Us is a pleasant, uplifting documentary about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Men may be gay by nature, but women are lesbians by choice -- for them, it's a simple matter of trading up. Such is the implied message of Kissing Jessica Stein.

Seabiscuit is a good enough movie, in the sense that it's a well-crafted assemblage of pathos and rousing moments, solidly acted and handsomely shot -- but it's far from champion material.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.

Tender, topical and well-crafted, No Ordinary Man is no ordinary film.

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

Ultimately, Weekes’s story, which pivots on a minor-key twist that doesn’t quite earn its intended gasps, falls just short of justifying its feature-film length. There is an excellent short film hiding in the corridors of His House – it just needs a slight renovation.

By hiring James Earl Jones to narrate, Disney has prepared youngsters to understand that man is equally capable of heroism and villainy.

There’s no doubt that the world needs more iconoclasts, whistle-blowers and anti-authoritarian rabble-rousers. But it deserves better than Julian Assange.

The film’s many tiny dramas add up to a thoughtful, though sometimes shaggy, study of hopes and regrets, aspirations and reality. It is not groundbreaking, but it is funny and sad and completely relatable.

There is one thing you can say for the new horror film Phantasm (at the York): it certainly has its moment. [5 May 1979]

Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations.

Belkin floats the notion that Wallace’s sharp-tongued style paved the way for the lying loudmouths who now populate our fractured media landscape (he flicks at Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones and the U.S. President), but it feels like a half-hearted bid for contemporary relevance. At least his prickishness had purpose.

Superman returns, and he's far from inconsequential yet considerably less than super - just a demi-god content to forfeit our love for our like.

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

There are so many elements that seduce and beguile – including the rusted-out Brutalism of the Li Tolqan prison where the cloning procedure takes place, and Goth’s supremely unhinged work as James’s seductress, a performance more Looney Tunes than human – that the entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.

The treatment of the Sioux is not only sympathetic, it's ethnographically exact. Neither Noble Savages nor Red Injuns, the natives in Dances With Wolves are differentiated human beings about to undergo cultural genocide.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

Good Hair is also about how African-Americans spend $9-billion annually chemically treating and straightening their hair, buying 80 per cent of America's hair products. It's such a fascinating, complex tale that you hope one day some probing filmmaker will make a conclusive documentary on the subject.

Pakula has staged Presumed Innocent with gravity - reverence, almost - and makes the most of the darkly elegaic images provided by cinematographer Gordon Willis. The careful, classical stateliness of the movie, with every picture planned and in its place, is in sharp ironic contrast to the legal chaos it exposes. [27 July 1990]

It's impossible not to feel a strong sense of nostalgic amusement, if not sheer delight, at the comings and goings of all these characters.

Norman is the "freak" bullied and ostracized and otherwise degraded by the alive-and-well crowd. Such is the outcast fate of most heroes in the best children's tales. And ParaNorman, a ghoulishly delightful exercise in stop-motion animation, is a very good children's tale indeed.

More entertaining than a dozen Major League Baseball games stacked on top of one another.

In truth, there is not much this film does not cover; every minute of Luce is saturated with the organicism of its sharp lines of inquiry and its actors here are at their best in their handling of their given materials.

Although no single documentary could give a comprehensive account of the Roma’s culture and history, Yeger’s doc offers a sobering, often harrowing understanding of a people and the workings of genocide.

Inevitably, all this seems just too diffuse, and a set of uniformly adept performances (even Harrelson puts a leash on his usual histrionics) tends to be wasted in an only intermittently engaging movie.

Delivers a touching, morally outraged portrait that, in memory of Swartz, may inspire people to ask hard questions about how the new world is being shaped away from view, behind closed doors.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.

It's a treat because, making no apologies for the source material, director Guillermo del Toro lets his picture gorge on power bars of pop energy, sugared with sprinkles of playful humour, and, at least twice, laced with a visual style so piercingly keen that horror morphs into beauty. Not bad for a pulpy outing.

Consequently, Ephron is forced to shape and integrate the twin halves of the picture, and she does a splendid job - the intercutting is always fluid and never mechanical. Better yet, the script keeps surprising us, setting up stock situations and then pulling away from a stock treatment.

In short, there are an awful lot of subplots and comic characters but none of the actors in this star-studded cast is allowed to build his laughs and the Coens just abandon several of these vivid personalities along the way.

“SEE THE MOVIE THAT NO AUDIENCE CAN OUTLAST!” – after actually taking in The Painted Bird, I can confirm that the horror more or less matches the headlines.

Laurent is determined in mapping the depiction of the patriarchal violence endured under both the supposition of scientific method as well as the social order of the world outside of the institution; however, the film struggles to keep a similar pace and substance within its story world.

The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.

The result is hallucinatory and puzzling, but never anything less than captivating.

Teenmeister John Hughes, begatter of Pretty in Pink and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, has permitted Planes, Trains and Automobiles to be promoted as his first "adult" feature, but it's actually a re-run of a movie he wrote in 1983, National Lampoon's Vacation, another primitive cartoon for the kinds of adults who find Neil Simon too sophisticated. [27 Nov 1987]

This film and Salinger's novel differ greatly in the details of narrative and character. Yet, there's no mistaking the similarity in tone and sensibility and, particularly, in the capacity to split an audience into warring camps fighting on shared ground.

Call me biased, but I'm quick to put out the welcome mat for any movie – good, bad or indifferent – that resists easy categorizing. That's certainly the charm of Safety NotGuaranteed, which flirts with two very different genres yet never goes steady with either.

Hall creates a fierce, uncompromising portrait of a woman who was prescient enough to see the dark places her culture was headed – the logical end game of our “if it bleeds, it leads” obsessions – but also damaged enough to succumb to them.

For those who enjoyed J.J. Abrams’s frisky relaunch of Star Trek back in 2009, the good news is that the new Star Trek Into Darkness is more of the same. The bad news is that Star Trek Into Darkness is, well, a bit too familiar.

It is a remarkably beautiful portrait of agony, anchored by Craig’s remarkably understated performance. But it’s also a film at odds with itself.

The Great Invisible is a dense, disturbing look at the effects (personal, political, economic, ecological, macro, micro) of the disaster.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance.

The film's dramatic and thematic ends could have been served just as well, if not better, by skipping the invention and sticking to the no less gripping figures and the no less wrenching dilemmas that history actually provided. [21 Oct 1983]

But like Tasya, Possessor succeeds in getting under your skin. If this is just a taste of what Brandon Cronenberg has in store for cinema, then long live the new flesh.

Glodell never lets his creation spin out of control. Bellflower revs the engine of an exciting new maverick.

It is an entertainingly cheesy narrative, but overly comfortable for someone such as Miike, whose gonzo talents seem somehow muted here.

A bold, raw, bordering-on-manic mashup of Eyes Wide Shut, Ivans XTC and HBO’s Entourage, the new thriller-cum-satire The Beta Test is here to test your limits.

Even hardened cynics will embrace the cliché – yep, you will laugh, you will cry.

A very funny, very unusual ensemble comedy that falls somewhere between slapdash and brilliant, an improvised comedy with more hits than misses. It's also an oddly touching tribute to the joys of show biz.

What’s admirable about the film is how Driver gives the cross-pollinating forces of music, media, fashion and art such concise, firsthand exploration.

All the kids here are terrific, significantly better than the actual movie that surrounds them. Although ostensibly fashioned by Abrams, it's really a summer-weight Spielberg yarn.

Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.

Paul Sylbert's production design is handsome, William A. Fraker's cinematography is beautiful and Dave Grusin's music winning. All in all, Heaven Can Wait is a fantastic fantasy. [28 June 1978]

The structure of the film mirrors the changes in the joke which in turn reflect the moral of the story -- hey, it's all a matter of perspective.

It's definitely a Diablo Codyesque cut above the norm – the wit can sometimes feel contrived but at least there's wit to be found.

This carefully massaged doc, with its spectacular aerial views of the landscape and the hunt, is a heartwarming story about perseverance and talent – if you believe it.

But then, just as quickly, Jesse is back in the present-day trying to build an escape route to a new life. Without Walter, he is just another manchild with a gun and a pile of money in a garbage bag. Sometimes, the past is the past and it really is dead.

The complications of its story are found in the deep complexities of emotions and family relationships.

Armadillo is a work of stunningly difficult filmmaking, going out on patrol with the soldiers and diving for cover amid the pop of bullets and blasts of artillery.

Once you overlook the laborious contrivance of Jerry's background, Down and Out in Beverly Hills is a sharp, sweet comedy of affluent manners. [31 Jan 1986]

In its attempts to revisit the original film’s discrepancies, DaCosta’s film ends up only retracing its narrative inconsistencies with full force and even deeper perplexity. Gone is the alluring entanglement of erotics and fright, replaced here by flat characters limply stumbling over a script intent on hitting us over the head with its social commentary.

Through deft editing and a keen sense of detail, Baichwal manages to compress the case of Johnson vs. Monsanto Company into a superbly paced, tightly wound thriller.

Daley and Goldstein aren’t here to reinvent. They love the tropes too much. It’s that fondness for what they mock with so much silly and snappy humour that makes Honor Among Thieves so charming. That affection is obvious especially when they punch up the familiar beats with inventive action and uncommonly stylistic direction.

Spry, entertaining documentary.

A tender tale of semi-triumph.

Should be a brilliant picture, one last testament to the intertwined sensibilities of two brave artists. Should be, but isn't.

While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.

The embodiment of the very message it so modestly conveys -- it's the accomplished little guy we fervently root for.

Isn't really a dull film so much as an oddly quaint one that seems to find a comfortable perspective about drastic circumstances.

Aster’s considerable discipline in matters of plot, acting, and exactingly manicured mise-en-scène resulted in a film that, for all its shocks and bravura performances, felt a little too controlled, as if its borderline braggadocious style was compensating for a lack of genuine terror.

Dial your expectations to moderate, burrow in for the duration, and you won't be disappointed - it ain't exactly springtime, but there are worse things than an amiable outing on a winter's night.

The film manages the extraordinary feat of forcing us to empathize simultaneously with both the potential victim and the potential villain.

In a more controlled and less punishing film, Lawrence’s deeply committed performance would be the discussion of the year. Yet she has tossed herself to the wolves here, the star provided no care or cover by her director. What is the point in going so raw, so feral, if the result is so scattered, so interminable, so irredeemably silly?

Arnett delivers something warm and genuine here, especially every time he’s paired against Dern, who perhaps knows this territory better.

This is an affecting picture that leaves the viewer as wrung out as the protagonist. No doubt you'll be seduced but, in the end, you may also feel abandoned.

Normally, such saccharine inspiration only manages to clog the heart, not warm it. But there's a true original in this den of clichés and her name is Keke Palmer.

Mainly, it's a clever gimmick, cleverly wrought, offering further evidence that you can dress up the student body in all manner of garb for all types of genres.

If that wasn’t enough, there is something even more dispiriting about Doctor Strange beyond its halfhearted visual and narrative ambitions – an issue that made a brief blip on the cultural radar when the film was first announced but has distressingly gone unheard of since: This is a movie that revels in whitewashing.

Death and the Maiden never fulfills the evocative promise of those initial frames...Beyond that, you have to settle for a craftsman working with more precision than inspiration. But Polanski at half-speed is still hard to beat. [27 Jan 1995, pg. E.1]

The most derivative but finely tuned of superhero movies to come out in ages.

An innovative romantic comedy that is a mixture of British spice and American sugar.

It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.

The film manages to make surprisingly convincing gestures toward the power of communion, and indeed pantomime, that make the world shine a bit more hopeful.

A great doc from Polsky; one more assist from Gretzky.

The problem is that the movie plays down almost everything that made Cash great: the train rumble of a voice, the direct, poetic truth of his best lyrics, the invention of his outlaw image and his constant creativity.