Solitary Man makes too good on its title – it’s a fascinating character study isolated within a mediocre film.

Just sit back, plug in, and enjoy the shocks - so adroitly administered, so sweetly sensational. [24 Feb 1995]

Semi-decent, somewhat okay, not-half-bad.

Ultimately, Little Voice comes to us from an indeterminate place that is no longer the theatre but not quite the movies. Let's call it music videoland -- best just to sit back and enjoy golden-oldie tunes belted out by a quicksilver mimic.

A stylish, sharply observed erotic mystery.

The problem is, the last section of the movie doesn't follow the career path of Greene: It traces the blander character of Hughes. Cheadle, who galvanizes the first half of the film, fades from view, and the best part of the conversation in Talk to Me goes with him.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

Arthur constantly flirts with the trite and dallies with the excessive. But it goes steady with neither, and so makes for a very pleasant companion on a warm summer eve. [17 July 1981]

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.

It's all a bit too schematic, yet the ambition is admirable and the message powerful: Today, no less than yesterday, the weak must be strong to survive, and their strength is endlessly tested.

There's one, and only one, good reason to rent this movie - the music. [08 Sep 1990]

Although the film doesn’t fully deliver on the political-thriller element, it asks some powerful questions: How does violence become intimate, blurring the line of morals and ethics?

In five years’ time, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Far from Home ranked near the bottom of everyone’s favourite MCU efforts – the film evaporates, Endgame-style, immediately after viewing.

The film is a vertiginous experience of hanging 350 kilometres above the Earth.

The whole caper loses its rhythm and its direction around the two-thirds mark. By the finish, the punch has left the lines, and the once-purposeful energy goes mindlessly manic - gone are both the point and the parody.

Geller and Goldfine keep the story taut and engaging, except when they get distracted by the current inhabitants of Floreana, who say mostly unsurprising things about living on a remote island.

Live Flesh is an often surprising assemblage of attractive parts that never seems to earn a full emotional response. [06 feb 1998]

Berg also creates one scene that should stand as an all-time classic: a residential street standoff between the Tsarnaevs and members of the Boston and neighbouring Watertown police departments.

It's unclear as to how we are supposed to feel about these monologuists, the majority of whom are twentysomething; nothing is how I felt about them, but perhaps I was tired. [27 Sept. 1991]

The music’s evolution and crisscrossing pollination is explained well – Mr. Tambourine Man inspired Rubber Soul which influenced Pet Sounds which begat Sgt. Pepper’s – but why are we watching the randomly selected couch full of Cat Power, Regina Spektor and a catatonic Beck sift through old LPs?

Too bad there's also a final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the worst endings an otherwise good movie has ever received.

All in all, a fine evening of exactly what it purports to be: hot and heavy action, lightweight story-line, amusing dialogue and a nifty, science-fiction twist. [30 Oct 1987]

Fault is at heart a full-throttle, by-the-numbers tearjerker.

Because it attempts so much more than Excalibur, the disappointment of Knightriders cuts deeper. Romero wants to tell the tale, to comment on it and to relate it to the present; he wants to bring contemporary satirical life to the myth, a service he performed cannily for the Dracula legend in Martin. [18 April 1981]

A try-anything, fitfully amusing muddle that wears its mocking cynicism a bit too proudly.

Fortunately, Greener Grass is as enticing as it is bizarre, and even if you don’t immediately find yourself frolicking amidst its braces-wearing populace, give it time: you’ll eventually be lured in by their take on suburban normal.

Disappointingly unique.

But while first-timer mistakes abound – everyone except the three leads deliver performances so stiff I wondered if they were deliberate – Selah and the Spades is more than just a slick calling card. It’s impassioned, informed and sometimes furious work that could find Poe being name-checked herself not too long from now.

The more compelling performance comes from Watts as Valerie.

The film is not quite a medallist. But it’s certainly a spirited contender.

This is a show that adults can more than merely tolerate; I am happy to binge-watch it with my nine-year-old.

The interest here is about watching Hardy, bouncing off Gandolfini and the other cast members, as a quiet man who has turned being underestimated into his primary survival skill. And all the while we wait for the moment when Bob the puppy grows into Bob the pit bull.

The film itself struggles to do justice to each victim. Turns out three stories are two too many. The Company Men should have been downsized.

Moderately witty children's entertainment.

Simultaneously a spectacular act of movie-making and a slight movie. Or is that impossible: When the means are so gloriously abundant, can the end ever be merely trivial?

Throughout it all, Winton remains a cypher. There’s no curiosity here about him or the people he dedicated his time to. There’s no emotional journey to help us understand him and the stubborn modesty that made him so reluctant to share his story.

English director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), takes the approach that movies have been far too reticent. His new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is as vibrant as a cluttered wall of graffiti, jumpy enough to risk retina damage.

This is a fairly well-made picture that's just been fairly well-made too many times before, a knock-off of a thousand other knock-offs.

Marshall treats everything, from the feminist themes to a soundtrack that features period chestnuts redone by contemporary singers, with a unique mix of the furiousand the subdued - a broad knee-slapper one moment, a delicate caress the next. No wonder we root for it. With the count full and our hopes wavering, A League Of Their Own smacks a stand-up triple and dares us not to cheer. Go ahead - give in and be a fan. [3 July 1992]

It doesn’t all hang together, but its furious, ramshackle energy does the job, and maybe that’s all that matters: Outrage, after all, aims to spur action, not land four-star movie reviews.

Finally, a big and shiny studio-backed holiday movie targeted to queer audiences that is just as sappy, cheesy and predictable as the many groan-inducing films that have been chucked toward straight moviegoers all these years.

Doff has created a film that bursts off the screen more often than not, albeit in that ultra-extreme Joseph Kahn kind of way. Your mileage may vary, but it’s a good enough game to play these waning summer days.

While there is an early sense in Joynt’s film that it is simply fun to ape the environs of bygone television eras, the re-enactments ultimately work on a narrative level, too. There are intersecting layers to Joynt’s film whose thematic and contextual conversations with one another would be lost were he to simply line one conventional talking head up after another.

The Outfit is not, strictly speaking, a movie about magic. Yet the gangland thriller pulls off a number of nifty tricks, with first-time director Graham Moore playing his hand with equal parts sleight and might.

S#!%house genuinely engaged with the complexities of insecure, imbalanced romantic relationships, and the flawed men who pursued them. Cha Cha Real Smooth settles for a sickly sweet sitcom approach. As Andrew might sigh during a bar-mitzvah shift: oy vey.

Fittingly, given that the film from Broomfield (who was also a former lover of Marianne’s) is nothing if not a love letter itself. So long, Marianne. So long, Leonard.

Your basic and basically predictable by-the-numbers picture.

The film version, competently directed by Clint Eastwood and beautifully acted by Meryl Streep, isn't about to mess with a popular formula - this is a straight-up adaptation as faithful as a fawning spouse.

A beautifully shot, modest little fable about the misunderstandings between people.

By the end of the Stoked, the viewer is left with a lot of trivia about the history of skateboarding, and scant insight.

Definitely erratic, this thing -- all in all, it's the sort of commercial vehicle you might want to stay well back of.

Among the lessons that Monsieur Ibrahim conveys to Moses, and the most appealing aspect of the film, is to delight in sensual pleasure.

It’s in his cozy kitchen — wallpapered with photos of his five kids, grandchildren and his wife of a half-century, Toby – that we get to know the man: the jovial grandfather, the joke teller, the dedicated husband, the patient teacher and loyal friend, who is as excited as a child as he makes his famous “garbage” soup for his long-time pal, Alan Alda.

A thinly plotted, amateurishly acted, cartoonishly violent and hugely entertaining array of jaw-dropping stunts and corny slapstick.

While Atkinson’s intentions are good, his methods are shaky, resulting in a surface-skimming film that raises issues without ever approaching a solution. What’s worse is his shaky narrative framing and rookie pacing, all of which undermine what is a deadly serious issue deserving of a polished and powerful dissection.

Buoyed by its urgent yet playful references to the real-life history of the Black West, Netflix’s newest genre outing The Harder They Fall is an energetic and poppy crowd-pleaser of a film made even better by its punky indifference toward staid conventions of period filmmaking.

Compliance develops an intriguing premise intelligently, inquisitively and uncomfortably.

Thoughtful, if predictable, movie: set against the Soweto Uprising of 1976 (but shot in and around Harare, Zimbabwe), the picture proffers two families, one white and headed by schoolteacher Ben du Toit (Donald Sutherland), the other black and headed by Ben's gardener, Gordon Ngubene (Winston Ntshona). Both are devastated by apartheid, but to different degrees and for different reasons. [22 Sept 1989]

Flashy, fun, shallow, easy-going and without a hope of brilliance.

Happily, Star Trek Beyond is much more than a mere refresh. Thanks to Lin’s steady directorial hand and knack for visualizing improbable set-pieces, the new film is bold, breathless and propulsive, a distillation of the action movie to its purest elements.

The agreeable Gloria - despite the TV advertising, it is neither violent nor frightening - has three built-in audiences, none of which should be disappointed in the slightest: students of acting, children and suckers for fairy tales. [11 Oct 1980]

For all North Country's blockbuster elements, the film remains a curiously uninvolving affair.

Cotton Club lacks the resonance of The Godfather; it's similar stylistically, but everything is coarsened, caricatured. What Coppola has achieved, however, is what Sergio Leone was after in Once Upon a Time in America when he tried to celebrate America by recycling the cliches of its gangster films. [14 Dec 1984]

Keen to be both really romantic and romantically real, the movie is neither, and falls between the cracks of its twin-ambitions. The result? Call it l'amour phooey.

Not just a documentary about Internet privacy, but a non-fiction horror flick for anyone who blindly agrees to user licensing agreements online (a.k.a. everyone).

The key problem is the figure of Naomi, clawing her way to the top and desperate to stay there. Gunn plays her as mightily determined and potentially abrasive.

A film that transforms a popular work of teen fiction not just by faithfully exploring its themes but, more important, by proving those themes have a very grown-up resonance.

Packs a wickedly satiric punch.

The third of four films teaming Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, this 1947 feature is a cinema classic. [20 Nov 2009, p.R21]

The characters aren’t compelling, the comedy isn’t energetic, and the narrative surprises that Rey throws at the screen will be obvious to anyone who has ever heard the word “Sundance.”

These days, when presidential bouquets are named Gennifer Flowers, and when we all know what Jack Kennedy did beneath the White House covers, this sort of Capra-corn, even in the guise of light comedy, just doesn't have the same taste. More salt, please, and hold the butter.

Superficial but giddily entertaining backstage documentary.

Despite his flair for trenchant dialogue, nicely complemented by Mark Isham's bluesy jazz score, Rudolph whets our appetite but then fails to deliver. The picture limps to its ending and leaves us with nothing to hold onto.

There's a lot to like in this film. As in the original, it has more than a few echoes of Animal Farm in its portrayal of humanity as the exploiter species. It respects both its child audience, by permitting Babe and his sunny decency to win out, and its adult audience, by generating more wit than the average dozen Hollywood films.

Despite a formidable effort and occasional grace, there's something cowardly about Braveheart -- it's an aspiring giant with a diminutive soul.

Invites viewers to think critically about such weighty concepts as justice, atonement and personal accountability.

Crazy, Stupid, Love seems at times like a bunch of movies searching for an identity. Happily, some of them are actually worth watching.

The overall product is so tightly assembled, and so emotionally satisfying, that any complaints end up being inconsequential.

More Tusk than, say, the goat who runs wild in The Witch. I won’t make the obvious joke and say it’s baaad. But its sheep thrills are mutton to write home about, either.

After all, it’s a movie about professional wrestling – the blows may feel real, but the match is fixed from the very beginning.

No doubt, these twin saviours are a likeable tandem, and they bear their cross lightly. Still, End of Watch suffers from no end of sanctimony. Sainthood is all well and fine but it ain't drama and, on screen at least, the question cries out: Where's a corrupt cop when you need him?

At times, it approaches self-parody, but that’s just Woo having some much-needed fun.

A lotta woe to sit through, with not much to think about and only one matter to address. After the two hours-plus have sped by with brutal alacrity, all that's left is for the survivors of the bloodbath to hose down and suss out a "new beginning." I'm still searching for mine, but you might have better luck.

Most of this is bald, and very funny; some of it is witty, and even funnier. [14 Dec 1988, p.C9]

Without its star, this picture would float off forgettably into the ether.

For 2020, though, this new and unexpected Borat is a nice surprise. Very niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiice.

Hergé was the pioneer of an even-handed style of cartooning with solid lines and no shading that became known as ligne claire, but there is a decided lack of clear lines in this erratic movie adaptation of his work.

Danny Glover delivers the most subtle and controlled performance of his life, and Freeman proves himself a sensitive and talented filmmaker. [24 Sept 1993]

It’s a sitcom-y, Sarandon-wrapped Mother’s Day valentine.

The World's Fastest Indian may be the world's slowest movie.

Crucially, Ask Dr. Ruth shows us a renegade ahead of her time.

The state of modern criticism has never been so splintered. We create harsher and harsher binaries in our online response to cinema every day, so reading Kael can make you go, “Hey, remember pleasure?” While Garver’s documentary isn’t worthy of its subject’s fascinating artistic legacy, I anxiously await the one that is.

Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid (whose debut Policeman was a critical hit) keeps us guessing. His message seems clear even if his characters’ motivations aren’t always.

Says the actor Jeff Bridges, a long-time and articulate soldier in the campaign against hunger: “It’s a problem that our government is ashamed of acknowledging. We’re in denial.”

The effect of so much pretension and so many lovely images eventually becomes soporific.

Just like a jazz tune, the film establishes an image, elaborates on it and brings it back to a more-or-less satisfying close.

While it’s true that landscape is character in most westerns, it’s also true that the character played by director/co-writer/star Tommy Lee Jones in The Homesman is landscape itself.

Hal Hartley's latest film, an odd and mentally stimulating black comedy that may or may not have a point. In any case, the ride is delectably weird and entertaining. [17 Jul 1998]