The lack of genuine slaughter in Badlands isn’t the film’s only problem. While it flips the franchise’s history by making the Yautja a hero instead of a villain . . . there is not nearly enough tension or world-building on display to become invested in this particular game of kill-or-be-killed.

I am, admittedly, its ideal viewer – I own enough books to last me several lifetimes – but that doesn’t change the fact that The Booksellers is a lovely documentary – contemplative and captivating. I finished the film and felt compelled to turn off the screen and pick up a book.

A satisfying adventure story with allegorical manifest-destiny allusions, The Hidden World reminds us that if butterflies were the size of horses, humans would surely ride them. And wouldn’t that be an awful thing? ​

I meant what I said And I said what I meant A flick pretty faithful 'Bout 80 per cent.

Does every generation of moviegoers get the Emma it deserves? If so, we are in a lucky moment.

Even in a season of apocalyptic films, these facts are really, really scary.

YET another movie about a woman who is Trouble, French director Louis Malle's lushly shot Damage wants to be Last Tango in Paris for the nineties, but it is structurally and psychologically so unsound - despite several excellent performances - that it is less arousing than soporific. [22 Jan 1993]

The characters in Wonderland show an intelligent complexity and sharpness of contemporary observation that transcends romantic-comedy clichés.

Warrior is a weirdly affecting hybrid, a 100-proof melodrama that's two-thirds Sylvester Stallone and one-third Eugene O'Neill. Think Rocky's "Long Day's Journey into Night."

Feels like a missed opportunity to do a country romantic melodrama in grand style.

Delightful as it often is, the picture suffers fom the same structural and thematic tidiness, even smugness, that it nominally opposes.

A funny, strange and wondrous little film. [31 May 1988]

Separate Lies is deceptive in more ways than it intends. Because the acting is so uniformly superb, we're almost fooled into believing that the movie is as good as the cast. It isn't, not by half.

Less an adaptation of its source material than a therapeutic response to it.

Much to an audience's discomfort, Ingrid's desperation to bond with the phony Taylor soon breaks the bounds of sanity – until the film rebukes her warped world view with a highly moral ending. The critique is clever but the limit is the one so common in satire: it's hard to care about the fate of a character this exaggerated.

No doubt, Blood Brother is narrowly focused on Braat’s needs and evolution, but in contrast to social-issue films filled with talking-head experts and bullet-point graphs, this is a portrait of a caregiver that goes to the core of motivation – in this case, the need to share love.

In RBG, a lionizing biography of the U.S. Supreme Court judge, Ginsburg emerges as a woman of remarkable intelligence and fortitude – who can get by on very little sleep.

A sprawling prison drama that seeks, by turns, to endear itself and then traumatize its audience.

The first half is exhilarating, and the rest is a tolerably honourable surrender to Hollywood conventions.

It’s a long film, and the payoff might not be enough for some. But as a moody story about moral dilemmas and moving beyond the past, The Survivor outlasts its 129 minutes.

There is both a sense of disappointment and relief when House of Sand and Fog crosses over into improbability, when the viewer can sit back, breathe easy again. All this trouble over the failure to open an envelope.

This is an adaptation that must have been hard to screw up, yet screwed up it has been. If the movie is far from dreadful, it's even further from the searing experience it could have been.

Euthanizer shocks from the outset, and nauseates by the conclusion. Exactly what fans of this gut-churning genre sign up for.

The performances are pristine in their theatricality, Raul Ruiz Anchia's lighting is neo-classical in its velvety richness, and the script (by Mamet and Shel Silverstein) is unfailingly intricate and consistent, for all its flamboyant use of coincidence. But it is the art of Don Ameche's courtly, charismatic characterization that lifts Things Change above the level of a crafty, enjoyable stunt.

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

Mini-gems of comic editing grace the narrow, claustrophobic world created in Manhattan Murder Mystery. It's a safely escapist film that's vintage - albeit mid-level - Woody Allen. [20 Aug 1993]

A home invasion story that is as artfully terrifying as "Home Alone" was entertainingly hilarious.

There's an easy familiarity and charm in the creased, middle-aged faces of Nimoy, Shatner and DeForest Kelly (the perpetually irascible Dr. McCoy), all of whom now play their parts with an ever-present twinkle. Their behavior rarely has anything to do with the motives provided by the plot; rather, they wear their characters like old habits, as they boldly go where they've always gone before. [26 Nov. 1986, p.C5]

There is too much dead weight to this particular game – and there's an extremely queasy undertone of Sorkin-penned daddy issues that lace Molly's motivations.

So how does this documentary play now, a year into the scandal, when the urgency has cooled, at least in Hollywood, and the information feels familiar rather than shocking? Well, guess what, it’s still shocking, in its sheer volume and detail.

Part "Billy Elliot" and part Chadha’s own underdog hit "Bend It Like Beckham," Blinded by the Light is a feel-good coming-of-age movie that often feels way too good about itself.

What benefits the picture early on, giving it a casual air, becomes cloying in the later going, making it feel like a smug exercise in mutual admiration.

Baker proves himself a talented director; he manages the rolling rhythms of his waves and his story with skill – especially a montage around Pikelet’s sexual awakening, which is at once funny, steamy and poignant.

A taut, gorgeously filmed and enjoyably wicked cinematic treat.

Almost everyone is scum. The venality spreads from the slums or favelas, up the ranks of local militias, crooked police and pandering politicians.

This is a film that dearly wants to be important, that wants to do for Holland what Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Française" does for France - examine the German occupation through a prism of painful honesty. Yet the lofty ambition comes dressed in cheap attire; Verhoeven can't seem to stop himself from shopping downmarket.

There is no raunchier, more raucous, filthy and truly crass movie out this summer than Girls Trip – and I loved every minute of it.

A cinematic homage as flawed as its subject. Flawed, yet with a peculiar fascination of its own -- what we have is a genuine artist paying sincere tribute to an unapologetic mediocrity, and stooping awkwardly to the task.

Standing back a step from A Walk on the Moon's dippy charms, the movie delivers less than it initially promises.

A jagged slice of life, What Happened Was ... converts an ordinarily clumsy date into an extraordinarily touching encounter, without the aid of melodrama and with no loss in credibility. For us no less than the star-crossed characters, it's a leap into a shallow end that turns perilously deep. [30 Sep 1994]

As fine as Streep is, however, it’s Grant’s movie.

Dragonslayer documents what happened when California stopped dreaming.

“Who would we be without museums?” Aleksandr Sokurov wonders as he narrates this challenging philosophical essay, and sifts materials back, forth and around in the Louvre’s history.

It’s short on personal details and instead focuses on the performer’s vocation. And when the concert footage slows the doc’s energy down, Mavis’s zest adds buoyancy to the proceedings.

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

Not much happens in Drinking Buddies, which, frankly, is refreshing.

Even if you were never the sort who cared what goes on behind others’ closed doors, the Hawkings’ drama is catnip. And if you’ll excuse the pun, you could say it was only a matter of time before Hollywood came calling.

For those who like their horror served straight up with no ironic chaser, The Descent is a tasty cup of torment.

A Perfect World is perfect indeed - for the initial 15 minutes. After that, the fault-lines start to emerge, widening, widening, until the thing cracks open and falls apart. [24 Nov 1993]

The naively amenable character is wonderfully observed by Fonte, and early scenes show delicious whimsy and black comedy...but as the film’s numbing brutality takes hold the character’s passivity makes the action drag in places.

Any culture that can create the kind of self-criticism exemplified in work of the Pittsburgh horror master is far from a lost cause. [29 June 1979]

While Mesrine: Killer Instinct certainly deserves a place among memorable French gangster films, Richet never delivers a clear theme here, let alone a plot.

Where the film fails is in its fizzled, melodramatic ending. The problem is that Brown the man had no resolution – no third act.

While it may depict events of the past, its relevance to the present couldn’t be more striking.

The result is infotainment dressed up as an art flick. Turkish society is fascinatingly complex and its East/West tensions give rise not to easy allegories but to hard ambiguities. To explore that truth, read any novel by Orhan Pamuk. To escape it, watch Bliss.

Sure, the film’s a bit of a hit job. But hey, as Bannon himself tells us, “There’s no bad media.” Sadly, he’s probably right.

That’s what Shazam!, and all these endless superhero action epics, amount to: hollow toys smashing against other hollow toys.

Judged by the standards of the comedies that preceded it (and only by those standards), Ghostbusters is relatively sophisticated: it substitutes the silly for the gross, and even manages at the odd moment to take silliness into the sublime. [9 June 1984]

The picture is as tastefully pretty as its girls, and just as motionless.

Into the West has its admirable side - it tries oh-so-hard to be a healthy treat for the whole family, and never plies us with cheap sentimentality. [01 Oct 1993]

Ultimately, it all becomes too strained to take seriously.

Bolstered by a solid premise, this film starts out impressively enough - it looks to be a worthy character study. But it soon stops dead, wheels spinning badly, and then, hungry for momentum, lurches off in a completely cockeyed direction. [16 Oct 1992]

This unrealized focus is not to say that The Music of Strangers is not worth seeing. It is, for many reasons, not the least of which is Neville’s pacing and the beautiful camerawork, as well as the many fine performances.

Real insecurities live deep beneath the frenemies’ cringe-worthy obliviousness, though all credit to the filmmakers for allowing their comeuppance to contain none of the empathy the girls deny everyone else.

Subtly crafted and compelling, but it suffers from a case of split personality.

The ironic, cheery-bland tone, the two-dimensional characters and episodic structure, say "comedy," while the events in the script say "bipolar depression."

All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings.

The Last Circus is a bizarre, surreal, grotesque, fascinating, demanding, disappointing and ultimately exhausting political allegory that plays like a waking nightmare.

The hardship of it is immediate, but it never feels forced or exploitative. Hepburn cares for her characters too much to force matters in such a way

Regrettably, Theater Camp doesn’t have a wide enough scope to zoom out from its extremely specific landscape to turn its inside jokes outward, nor an ironic enough detachment from the material that it’s riffing on.

The ethical fallout, the lingering fog of the so-called war on terror, is not that people don't know what's wrong or who's guilty - it's precisely that they do, and count it as the cost of doing business.

Both Rudd and Segel have splendid comic timing and their improvised scenes leap out from the script.

Where’s My Roy Cohn? is brash and relentless, much like the man himself. We won’t need to wait for a sequel. Because of the ascension of Cohn’s most eagerly unscrupulous student, we’re watching Part II unfold as we speak.

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.

As directed by Robert Zemeckis from a script he co-wrote with Christopher Browne, the film limps through its first two acts, putting in time until the big moment.

As a film about intellectuals, The Barbarian Invasions can sometimes seem maddeningly scattered and contradictory.

Roth (who reunites here with his Chronic director) manages to find a peculiar amount of pain in a man sleepwalking through life. It might be the best work of the actor’s long career – or at least the most carefully controlled.

For all its gestures toward trending conversations about our warped relationship with technology, and the entitled boys weaned on it, Companion is ultimately just a fun genre mash-up that pales in comparison to the superior movies it tends to pay homage to but elevated by its cast.

Despite the arid direction, Chalamet’s Dylan – described in the film as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” – comes from the heart.

For the conquering Sacha, no pack ice can prove too crushing nor hardened sailor too obdurate: It’s only the unusual setting and subtle animation that raise this adventure above the formulaic.

In the deck of clichés that is the typical sports movie, it at least does us the courtesy of shuffling the cards a little.

Here’s the thing: Joan and Tom do come back from it. The couples who stay together figure out how to do that. Ordinary Love is an argument that, as hard as that is, it’s worth it.

It is an anthropological drama that never cracks its subjects open – an approach that might work on paper, but feels beset by engine troubles on-screen.

It's a cop movie that refuses to cop out in the usual way.

Well-acted, nicely shot, slick and certainly sexy, Swimming Pool may be all foreplay and no climax, but what the heck -- there are worse ways to be teased.

Like the Irish film "Once," it’s a drama about the lives of musical performers who sing songs within the film to illustrate the emotional journey of a relationship. Broken Circle, though, is painted in much darker hues.

The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.

The documentarian Victor Kanefsky paints a vivid picture of an entertaining rogue, one who finally gets his due with this film. Then again, Cenedella might refuse to accept the recognition. There’s no bastard like a principled bastard.

The stunts in Hooper resemble a collection of greatest hits. It's nice to have all those great songs together but the emotional impact of the first time you heard the single on the radio is gone. [25 July 1978]

Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.

Watching this, we should feel an immense amount, but don't, and somehow, decades after this horrible event, that void only seems to compound the tragedy.

Gotham gives way to Gaudi and the Met to Miro, but the sensibility is the same, the city as a precious treasure, and so is the message: Life may be hard and short, love may be flawed or doomed, but, my, aren't we blessed with lovely distractions.

Perhaps the most regrettable crime here is the way that Mann, trying to do too much, robs himself of a great opportunity. Here was a chance to capture the drama of the Thirties.

If watching mass-murdering maniacs get absolutely destroyed on-screen is your thing – and it very much is mine – then Sisu is a perfectly depraved night out.

The filmmaker is obviously toying with what horror films can be, with what audiences expect of both cheap thrills and high-priced performers. But I can’t admire, and don’t take much pleasure in, being tossed into Semans’s cinematic sandbox along with his well-compensated cast and crew.

The result is the kind of feel-bad/feel-good movie that brazenly manipulates our response and leaves us grateful for it -- so relentlessly dark is the premise that, by the end, we just need to believe in the prospect of light.

Here's a gorgeous little film.

A mess of a movie – a sprawling PowerPoint argument that covers too much ground way too fast, dispensing Wikipedia-calibre essays on a variety of subjects, from a blurred bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb, to an unsatisfying sidebar on A.Q. Khan, the world's first door-to-door nuke salesmen.