A more inspired director might have salvaged something else, but Dante's point-of-view camera and consciously quirky angles just don't cut it. His horror-genre shots are stylized but not stylish, a by-the-numbers parody without any redeeming individuality. [17 Feb 1989]

The doc, similar to the Oscar-winning The White Helmets but a subtler portrait of heroism, reveals accurate information as the first weapon of resistance.

Blame It On Rio is still a lot of fun. The colorful locations help out when the situations in them begin to pall. [17 Feb 1984]

Whoopi Goldberg can make you laugh and make you cry, and she's attractive and kind of come-hithery in her own bug-eyed way. [10 Oct 1986, p.D1]

There is a terrific little movie making the rounds, Repo Man, that demonstrates what can be done with vision, no money and faith in the audience; Buckaroo Banzai demonstrates what can be done with a lot of money, no faith in the audience, and a vision that begins and ends in the cash register. [13 Aug 1984]

This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

If this is the film that is destined to divide the movie business, it’s as weird and imperfect a choice as could possibly be.

No character goes unscathed in this brutally violent movie, but Amirpour is especially careless with her black subjects – a painful misstep in an otherwise clear-eyed, unflinching critique of American despotism.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

The best thing about the film is the bromance between Lee and his weed dealer, Jeremy (Nick Offerman), which deepens into loveliness in one memorable scene.

There are some tense moments, and Moore and Holt’s performances are about as good as could be hoped for considering they are behind scuba masks most of the time. But even at 89 minutes, you can feel the oxygen running out of this movie.

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

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.

Tropes are necessary for comedy. But tropes alone aren’t funny. What’s funny is a singular point of view that rises up to show us what’s absurd about our embedded expectations. Until more movies starring women are allowed to be truly audacious, we’re in for a lot of rough nights at the cinema.

A cheap, lazy exercise in myth-making. The goods, as it were, will have to be found elsewhere.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

This story soon turns excessively maudlin.

What it is, is a delicious black-widow mystery, in which the deep-gazing actress Rachel Weisz rocks the veil.

The script, written by neophyte Alex von Tunzelmann, is appalling, its plot simplistic and its dialogue alternating between misplaced bits of contemporary psycho-babble and improbable grandiloquence.

Its pedestrian execution and the general sense that you’re watching a facsimile of something so much better is overwhelming – meaning it’s beyond underwhelming.

Unfortunately, the film also wants to show us what happens to veterans, both human and canine, when they return home and here it loses its way. The stateside scenes meander so much, you’ll find yourself in the unlikely position of wishing we were back in Iraq.

And the living are pretty lifeless themselves. As led by the often wooden Tom Cruise playing the U.S. soldier who inadvertently wakes the dead, and directed by an indecisive Alex Kurtzman, the cast is offered some passable action sequences but struggles with weak dialogue and uneven comedy.

Scored intensely and photographed vividly, the electric film imagines a small slice of doomsday with horrific believability.

The film’s director, who would make an excellent character witness for the defence, raises the questions but frustratingly doesn’t answer them in an otherwise compelling documentary.

Played adroitly by Patrick Sabongui, this guy wouldn’t hurt a fly. Or would he? A couple of nice plot twists overshadow the predictable sound-of-sorrow ethnic wail that closes the film.

The plot depends on an improbably interdependent set of acquaintances and events, but the cinematography, the dialogue and the performances, especially Adrian Titieni’s as an earnest and anxious Mr. Fix-It, are impressively naturalistic.

A classic private-eye tale updated for a multicultural London, director Pete Travis’s noir is entirely watchable, but it’s only because of to Ahmed’s captivating presence.

Charming, ingenious and absurd tale of friendship.

There’s one big problem: Anne doesn’t drive her own journey. She spends scene after scene passively letting Jacques tell her what to do, eat and think. And there’s no detouring around that.

Nevertheless, as the sort of rote horror movie that’s fun to laugh at, The Recall has its moments.

Wonder Woman may not qualify as a particularly suspenseful First World War movie and it may not feature enough globe-spinning special effects to satisfy hard-core superhero fans, but it certainly is an intriguing combination of the two genres.

Stewart does an intriguing job creating a paradoxical character who explains herself without giving of herself, her very persona exposing the false promise of personal exposition.

A modest, hard-faced film, offering a nervous study of humanity and civil disobedience in a societal-bullying era.

Director Azazel Jacobs has written (with Winger in mind) an unapologetically adult movie, in which it’s assumed that people in their 50s are as sexual and screwed up as people in their 20s and it’s a given that yearning never ends.

The most engaging performance is Javier Bardem’s solidly nasty Captain Salazar, the undead commander of a ghost ship. His disintegrating skin and holey crew are fabulously rendered as evaporating digitizations: It’s the special effects and swelling action sequences that make the movie palatable.

Amir Bar-Lev’s excellent, definitive film on the Haight-Ashbury acid-testers is long – four fly-by hours – but there are very few wasted moments.

As it giggles away at its campy self, at least you can groan along with it.

It may not go the distance, but it’s surely worth a step into the ring.

Engrossing and not too sugar-sweet, Meghie’s movie is slightly paranoid, surprisingly fantastical and superb at translating the overwhelming stupor of first love with big, bold shots and a banging soundtrack.

Packed with stilted performances and hackneyed jokes from the road-movie playbook, it doesn’t work unless you’ve never seen another film in your life.

The problem is it’s not that bizarre a love triangle and the interesting tangle of supporting stories and complications get short shrift by focusing there in the second half.

The new film is intended to act as several things, none of them particularly admirable. It is a sequel to the underperforming and largely confusing "Prometheus"; it is a prequel to Scott’s own 1979 classic "Alien."

For a filmmaker who was frequently drawn back to the subject of suffering, and especially the anguish of the individual cast against the collective will of cruel, foolish authority, it’s a perfectly fitting farewell.

Although it’s a kick to see the rough conditions and the full-on roughhousing of old-world golf, the scenes on the links are repetitive. And while the ending takes a severe dogleg turn to soft-focus sentimentality and the soundtrack hounds us to take this thing seriously, the movie is easily resistible.

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

If you appreciate a writer/director and actor who swing for the fences and chase after big questions (Are we cogs in the machine of the universe? If so, can we alter our fate? Or is everything super random?), this has a dreamlike beauty that may catch you in its spell.

Handled by veteran Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones, Urban Hymn is an unimaginative drama, carried by solid acting – Isabella Laughland is chilling as the possessive, menacing Leanne – but let down by an unspectacular script.

Snatched piles bad ideas on good ideas and lame bits of gross-out humour on genuinely funny bits of character work, without ever building enough dramatic force or comic energy to craft a full movie from the results.

Some might find it stimulating. Others will find it bonkers. Watching Jude Law do a slow-motion howl, for example, is certainly … something.

Ultimately this political film’s sentimentality and transparency detract from its power.

The result is an oddly compelling documentary that sheds light on an important – albeit forgotten – cornerstone of modern, contemporary cuisine.

Besides psychological drama, besides thriller, social satire is another significant element in this sometimes erratic film and it’s one that, surprisingly and belatedly, rises to the top: Anyone who started out thinking The Dinner was a thriller will probably be disappointed when the evening wraps up with an ending that is more farce than denouement.

The sequel is often loud, occasionally obnoxious and so consistently convinced of its own awesomeness that it will not, it cannot, stop pointing out everything that makes it so utterly wonderful.

In a demanding role light on dialogue, Sutherland’s rangy, loping physicality serves both the character and the action well – camera and fugitive are seldom at rest, and on the move in tense, extended bursts whenever an opportunity presents itself.

The plot, for instance, doesn’t make all that much sense, what with its heroic space chimps and evil space apes and sly space foxes, all of whom don’t seem to realize what a half-baked narrative they’re operating in.

Gere delightfully soft-shoes his way through Norman, surfacing the character’s loneliness without unduly exploiting it.

The couple are the movie’s saving grace – especially Lillian, now 87, who regales in every story.

There is something of the charming first novel to Victoria Day: It's a small film focused on a teenage passage. It is intensely well observed, but somewhat lacking in drama. It is lightly nostalgic about its moment in history. It's probably autobiographical. And it doesn't have much of an ending.

Natasha is, in fact, a deceptive and delicate coming-of-age piece – deceptive because it exposes a troubling underside, delicate because it does so with a measured and quiet intelligence.

Gould’s excellent documentary captures this elasticity, stretching the spectator to consider why bearing witness to a life collectively is so very worth the trouble.

The film is simply unlike anything else to play theatres this year – a feat it will likely keep for the foreseeable future.

Slipping in references to everyone from Kubrick to Fellini, Gray creates a truly intoxicating experience, overwhelming in the best possible way. It is this close to being an all-time classic, if only Charlie Hunnam’s central performance as Fawcett didn’t slip out of Gray’s period trappings every now and then (you can’t help but wonder what Gray’s long-time collaborator, Joaquin Phoenix, would have done with the role).

No disrespect to Le Bon, who is pleasant enough, but this kind of part should be a career-definer. Where is today’s Ingrid Bergman, Julie Christie or Diane Keaton? Blame those damned superhero pics, which, in appealing only to adolescent boys, have cost us a generation of actresses.

As a history of this war of ideas and as an introduction to Jacobs, the film is essential. But it also pivots toward a great challenge: today’s global urbanization.

This is a mostly fun, over-the-top ode to the siege movie, as well as a love/hate letter to all things firearm-related.

Unforgettable presents a surprisingly conservative view of mental illness, one that would feel more at home in the pearl-clutching milieu of Leave it to Beaver rather than modern day SoCal.

On the whole, it’s fine for what it is, and outside of baby panda cubs remaining some of the cutest things on the planet, the real attraction here is a glimpse at the reclusive snow leopard in its natural habitat.

As for the winner and new champion, it has to be Kuosmanen, who never met a boxing-film cliché he couldn’t discreetly avoid.

The wry observations of precocious pal Mary (Lena Dunham) and fierce Lunch Lady Lorraine (Susan Sarandon as a gruff optimist) make for a charming – and occasionally gruesome – disaster movie.

Sharp drawing-room repartee interrogates the same decorum and morality as her poems, although the frequently epigrammatic dialogue is mannered, even for a period film.

Supporting turns by Bill Nighy, Rachael Stirling, Jack Lacy and Helen McCrory work to make Their Finest a testament to the familial nature that defined the film industry during the Second World War, as well as proof that it’s possible to breed joy in the midst of bleakness.

The heart and mind of Maudie are always in the right place.

If the fate of the Furious series is to grow somehow both wearier and dumber with age, then the eighth film is proof of a mission firmly accomplished. And there’s no shame, Vin, in hanging it all up after a job well done.

Unlike Brian De Palma, Lynch is not a natural conversationalist, so the result is a stiched-together narrative that is as curious and occasionally frustrating as the man himself.

A fine bilingual cast, haunting period detail and a provocative approach to a twisting story carry the day.

The resolution of that conflict is dishonestly implausible, thus ruining a perfectly mediocre movie. The worst of it is that Fred the one-eyed cat was probably winking at us the whole time.

Shinkai unleashes a twist early on so clever and cerebral that J.J. Abrams and Christopher Nolan will kick themselves for not thinking of it first. That twist turns things from a teen film to an adult film.

Sublime documentary.

Where Song to Song most distinguishes itself among Malick’s uniquely rich filmography is its abiding despair. It is his most pessimistic film since "Badlands."

It’s all in good fun, but it also wants to engage with children beyond hollow gags and pop songs, which are there, but kept to a tasteful minimum.

Having no emotional stakes leaves me cold, and leaves three cheeky actors with nothing to play. These characters are staring down death. They should be raging against the dying of the light, not going gently into their early-bird supper.

The film’s real triumph is in how accurately it captures the intricacies of human relationships, especially when tested.

The script by Stephanie Fabrizi is full of oddly terse interchanges that Krill and Linder deliver with a lifeless cool that feels more under-rehearsed than erotic.

For fans of horror maestros John Carpenter and Stuart Gordon, nothing fills a void like good, old eighties-fashioned gore. Which is what we get from the writer-director team of Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski, unabashed fans of Reagan-era blood, slash and goo.

As her oddly unengaged zoologist husband, the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh appears to be working in a different movie altogether.

That the plot is totally stupid is Boss Baby’s saving grace. It’s the rare cartoon that actually feels like a cartoon, propelled by its goofiness and sheer energy and rarely bogged down by boring, polemical lesson-learning.

No matter how many nifty shots he inserts of Major’s hologram-ridden metropolis, the director cannot shake the impression he simply does not care about his creation. At least Johansson makes an effort.

A work of soulless indifference. It is not so much a movie as an exercise in how to wring the life out of even the most lifeless of properties – grave robbing writ large, except the ostensible corpse was never more than a worthless bag of bones in the first place.

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds and others float around one another for an intense but spark-free 103 minutes, their characters barely sketched.

Perhaps I’ve seen one too many movies in which men who need to grow up have to wreak havoc on other people’s lives to do it. And this is that one too many.

A riveting, impossible-to-shake masterwork that leaves the audience spooked, not by its telling but by its commitment to abstract themes of grief, solitude and coming of age.

After 107 well-packed minutes, Dotan’s film (which curiously fails to mention current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) arrives at a pessimistic outlook. A settlement on the settlements is nowhere in sight.

The portrait of the artist might be a bit uncritically rosy; still, this is a compelling dance film that captures the drive and passion of a key figure in contemporary choreography.

Koreeda takes his usual languid pace to allow the story to breathe, and along the way comes across a quiet number of delicate epiphanies, each more satisfying than the last, and all aided by a strong Abe performance.

The lads from Edinburgh thrive in chaos and, for all their new-found maturity, they are still at their best when in full flight from both responsibility and time.

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