Missing packs in enough mystery and intrigue that the film never feels boring. It ends up working as good, light and thrilling entertainment.

If the lines in the script were as keenly etched as the ones in her face, Keaton would have had something to work with. Instead, during an especially lovelorn sequence, she's asked to indulge in a crying montage so painfully extended that it has us in tears too -- weeping from embarrassment for her.

This intimate portrait of the so-called godmother of punk is aimed at viewers who are keenly fascinated by Smith.

This is one of the director's small, experimental, semi-improvised provocations, and if it doesn't push too deep, it's pointed enough to leave a mark.

This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.

If Mel Brooks went insane, he would make Sausage Party.

In Hollywood terms, Beverly Hills Cop harks back to the semi- good old days, to the studio era when stars were not always relied on to fix everything - this is unquestionably a star vehicle, but the star, an employee of his own production company, has been smart enough to surround himself with other, by no means lesser lights. [4 Dec. 1984]

Ultimately, Ponti’s film survives on the one surprise that’s not much of a surprise at all: the power and majesty of his lead actress. And how did the director score such a casting coup? You’d have to ask his mother ... Sophia Loren.

There are zombie movies and then there are George Romero films.

When the bloody finale does eventually arrive, though, you’ll be thankful that Leigh is at the helm. Once again, the director proves himself to be a master of basic human conflict, on whatever scale is necessary.

White Hunter, Black Heart is a beautifully made elaboration of a thesis that has thankfully lost its antithesis to time. [15 Sep 1990]

Yossi is an early spring breeze of a film – too delicate to be substantial but definitely holding the promise of warmth.

The film may not shed any new light on Hamilton, but the footage of him riding 100-foot-high waves is nothing short of awesome.

A masterpiece, but of a unique kind... A gorgeously filmed, supremely well-acted, intricately written film noir about now.

Vacillating between sappy and snappy, Stuart Little 2 is featherweight family fare, perfectly timed for viewers with short attention spans.

When the bloody climax comes, we look on apathetically, as desensitized to the violence as a pornographer is to sex.

Dillard takes every opportunity to interrogate Hudner’s narrative and what it means to be an ally. Whenever Hudner speaks up for Brown or throws a punch on his behalf, we get a revelatory moment observing how self-serving those actions can be.

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.

The cinematic equivalent of a "good read" - pick it up and you can't put it down; put it down and it's gone forever.

Pink Ribbons, Inc. is unabashed advocacy filmmaking. In spite of improved mortality rates and scientific advances, few women in the film will acknowledge that pink-ribbon-financed research has done any good at all.

Whatever you normally do during the rousing finale of a Rocky movie. It will feel familiar, but just go with it.

It’s an interesting twist on the usual addiction drama – it’s not the downfall, it’s will he stay clean? – and it works. If you’re not invested, you’re not watching.

Overly sensitive pet owners, however, would be advised to take a walk.

Well, I didn't exactly leave the theatre barefoot, but there's a lot to like here -- the result is pretty darn cute and hardly ever cloying.

As limp and cold as The Founder is as a movie, it contains one of the finest Keaton performances of his entire career, maybe the one he’s been working his whole life toward.

Sumptuously designed, brightly costumed and shot with an eye toward epic grandeur, the new film is simply gorgeous to take in, no matter the size of the screen. Less pretty is the script, which took four screenwriters to conjure even though there’s perfectly good source material just sitting there, waiting for a photocopy machine.

There might be a pretty good film lurking in this latest dramedy from the veteran Scottish directing-writing team of Ken Loach and Paul Laverty. I use the conditional because at least half the dialogue is delivered in a Glaswegian Scots so thick, it might as well have been Urdu.

THE BOND by which to compare all other Bonds is Goldfinger and by that standard Moonraker, the 11th chapter in the exploits of Agent 007, is second-best. But, by the standards of most of the other candy served up as summer fare, Moonraker is marzipan - it's so insubstantial it melts in your mouth, but its flavor is distinctive and you can't get enough of it. [30 June 1979]

The sentiment of being thrown to the margins of an industry that seemed predestined to carry you is certainly an interesting point of departure, but the resulting film often feels stagnant, unable to square its romantic impulses – as a frustrated Shelly puts it in one scene, “this is breasts and rhinestones and joy!” – with the fraught realities of these characters.

It is riveting, deeply depressing stuff – and would be more engaging if co-directors David Darg and Price James had decided to explore the many similarities that movie-making and wrestling share, such as their devotion to putting on a highly fictional show.

Polanski has always inspired comparisons to Hitchcock, back to Cul-de-Sac and up to Rosemary's Baby and beyond, but this is the first time he has intentionally set out to replicate the thrills, chills and laughter of Hitchcock's best work. He succeeds, but with a difference: the last half-hour, at once improbable and horrible and self-referentially satiric, is pure Polanski. [27 Feb 1988]

The 131-minute, car-racing film is adolescent guy date histrionics – screaming tires, snappy putdowns and, because we're in Rio, an occasional influx of bodies beautiful in Band-Aid bikinis.

In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.

Gass-Donnelly is good at capturing stalled rural lives, from church hymn-sings populated by the elderly, their voices fragile as April snow, to dead-end afternoons at corner cafés, where bored patrons stretch lunch hours with coffee and gossip.

Stripped of its parts, Bumblebee (as annoying to type as it is to say!) is just another needless franchise extension that should’ve been junked years ago.

There are several ways to make a serial killer movie, and in the sometimes compelling and sometimes repellent Holy Spider, filmmaker Ali Abbasi has chosen all of them. At once exploitative and contemplative, thrilling and disgusting, the film makes a bloody mess of itself before coming close to solving its own case.

The narrative here may be strictly nuts and bolts, but as an achievement in graphic design, Steamboy is first class.

Adults should get a kick out of Phantom Boy’s sly humour but the story and the action is for the kids.

American Me is a graphic and honest effort that, unfortunately, becomes a catalogue of other films on similar subjects. Its depiction of prison life is much too slow, too long, too repetitive and too familiar. [13 Mar 1992, p. C3]

Instead of connecting the film's action with Murphy's personal crisis, director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever) gives us several aerial dogfights which seem to be drawn out only for the sake of giving the audience a bigger bang for its buck. The pacing and camerawork are gripping, to be sure, but in the end Blue Thunder achieves only the excitement of a good action movie. [14 May 1983]

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.

How do you make a movie about shallow people in a shallow culture and not end up with a shallow movie? For writer-director Sofia Coppola, the answer is to dramatize a story “based on actual events,” then to step back and present it as a case study in pure anthropology.

Those yearning for aesthetic verve had better look elsewhere; much of The Report takes place inside cold, concrete government buildings. The occasional backdrop of mahogany wood panelling is the closest to warmth you’ll experience in two hours.

Maybe arguing the merits of a quote-unquote bad movie through the means of an imperfect documentary is the only option that makes sense. I have the distinct feeling, though, that somewhere in Europe, Verhoeven is laughing his ass off.

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]

If Lumet is travelling familiar ground here, the journey is still worthy because the ground is still muddy. And, as always, he travels it bravely - his Q's are many and far-reaching, his A's few and unsparing. [27 Apr 1990]

Writer-director David Koepp shows a talent for presenting neat sequences, but they fail to come together in a satisfying whole. [30 Aug 1996, p.C9]

The Informant! may be a gadfly of a movie, but it's not without bite.

Guillermo del Toro’s latest dive into the darkness is a sumptuous, beautifully constructed tale that feels both archaic and inviting.

Wright has created a truly rich and vibrant world, full of dramatic sets. Most importantly, the film is genuinely fun, with enough of an emotional pull to justify some of its bigger swings.

It’s a shame the Morrises don’t include more of Nureyev’s performance footage and opt, instead, to use long segments of contemporary dance reconstructions choreographed by Russell Maliphant. The segments look a bit garish and out of place, not necessarily because of their poor choreographic content, but as they have little aesthetic or conceptual continuity with the rest of the film.

The movie trots pleasantly along, but it never races.

Viewers will be entranced by Louis Ashbourne Serkis, son of Andy Serkis. He’s one of the greatest child actors to grace the screen in some time, whose golden lion-hearted essence shines through even when facing indecision and doubt. If perfect casting is looking for the one actor who can pull the sword from the stone, Cornish has found the Webster’s definition of a hero.

The result is a film where blisteringly naturalistic drama bumps up against sentimentally arch melodrama (that's the biggest collision in Crash). Haggis showed the same tendency in his script for "Million Dollar Baby," yet there it was better hidden under a simpler narrative. Here, the tendency has gotten magnified right along with his thematic ambitions.

The overall results are unusually wholesome – and satisfyingly funny. Game Night is the kind of harmless comedy you rarely see these days, as happily entertaining as a good game of Pictionary.

What becomes increasingly apparent is that Gordon-Levitt hasn’t exactly decided what Jon’s problem is, in a character that seems partly an expression of male wish fulfilment.

White Palace starts out raw and realistic, fraught with danger, but soon metamorphoses into a soft and sugary romance. A gulp of vinegar and a Kool-Aid chaser. [19 Oct 1990]

Conventional and erratic in tone as The Eye is, the film has some real visual (and auditory) style going for it.

Energetic, eager-to-please culture-clash comedy.

[Nolan is] back in the fine engineering business, crafting a story as intricately designed as a magician's lock, tightly packed with tumblers of deception and issuing a fun challenge to any volunteers in the audience: Just try to pick it.

The problem is that the film, despite an attempt to examine the intellectual pollution of pervasive marketing, can't help coming off as one big smirk.

This is one of those solo turns where the star performance matters more than the story, and Renee Zellweger, playing the legendary singer Judy Garland in her sad last months – broke, anxious, drunk, rueful, but still in it – gives it everything she’s got.

Although the screenplay by Andy Breckman and Michael Leeson is wittier than most, it overshoots its screwball target by a wide margin, and what was initially blithe and charming ends up as merely silly. [24 Dec 1994]

An ambitious but ultimately sloppy time-travel epic, Good Luck wants to deliver an incendiary critique of artificial intelligence and our reliance on big tech. Yet it ends up being so exhausting and weirdly dull that it will force audiences to pull out their phones out of sheer restlessness.

Restoration is a middling thing, indifferent good, albeit much enlivened by Robert Downey Jr., who did act Merivel with the full vigour of his profession. [31 Jan 1996]

Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.

The documentary is an inspiration to women – not just in the Middle East – who are determined to rise to the top of their professions, despite the odds being stacked against them.

Condescending, self-righteous and sloppy, Truth is simply a bad film for which there are no excuses.

Beautifully shot, the film is at its best when it’s unclear whether Vincent is intensely paranoid or highly perceptive.

PARENTS defies all categories but one - it is a virtuoso display of movie-making, a multi-textured and pyschologically intense work unimaginable in any medium except film, a tale fantastic in style yet deadly serious in its intent and absolutely horrifying in its implications. [27 Jan 1989]

The result, Elegy, isn't a great film but it is a good one, and better for Coixet's perspective, her ability to interpret Roth's world from the other side of the gender fence.

Leaves us with is sporadic showers of laughs for kids under 10. That's a shame, because the film could have been a delight for everyone, if only it hadn't learned to behave.

The film is poetically structured and Lear is a spry, emotionally involved participant in a lively bio-doc that succeeds eulogistically and contextually.

An almost really good movie...risks leaving the viewer feeling like one of the bewildered automatons that move through the plots.

Dad’s suspected infidelity is the tension in a film that hammers its nineties setting so relentlessly it could be called Sex, Lies and Videotape (and Floppy Disks and Payphones).

For audiences tired of summer sequels that grind through the familiar motions, Stardust provides a dizzying antidote.

May be anticorporate, it's by no means hype-free.

Mainly, though, it's the performers who are having the last laugh.

Even when their material is not much more substantial than a punchline overheard in a playground, Cheech and Chong, in their routines together, make being funny look as effortless as Ella Fitzgerald makes singing sound.[23 July 1980]

The effect of watching these viral videos as a "movie" feels genuinely singular – suspending the viewer somewhere between reality and documentary, between the dash-mounted long takes of Abbas Kiarostami's "10" and the combustible vehicular carnage of Michael Bay's "The Island," between cinema and something else.

This low-low-budget movie tells its little Romeo and Juliet story without pretension or condescension. In scratching at the surface of youth trends, Valley Girl manages to reveal the perennial innocence of teenage romance. And that, in the wake of such sexist teenage fare as Porky's and Spring Break, is a fresh and sweet achievement. [24 May 1983]

Apart from the ideology of the film, Pretty Baby is exquisitely executed. Shields, Sarandon and Carradine all give substantial but generally low key performances. [11 Apr 1978]

It is emphatically not for people who like either Twain or the more sophisticated manifestations of the Arthurian legend (the Camelot musical or Thomas Berger's Arthur Rex) but it is a well-directed, nicely acted bit of slapstick that has young audiences squealing with delight. [13 Aug 1979]

What you're smelling is Ang Lee's "The Ice Storm" without the pathos and the punch, or John Updike's "Rabbit Redux" minus the insight and the style.

There are performances that shock you, that ground you, and that break you apart before building you back up. It is not often when an actor is able to deliver all of those reactions and more in the span of two hours, yet here is Vanessa Kirby proving herself as one of the most capable and ferociously talented stars of the moment.

Strange Days, then, isn't nearly strange enough. Once the premise has lost its promise, and Fiennes's brave attempts at characterization are sacrificed to pseudo-dazzle, everything appears awfully humdrum and, yes, distinctly dated. So dated that in the crowded and pat climax, as the ball drops on the year 2000, all that's missing is Dick Clark himself - damn, it's out with the old and in with the older. [13 Oct 1995]

So is the result just a case of life imitating pop art, or has the director shaped the footage to enhance the imitation?

Although there are some fluid moments, De Palma's weary direction of a once-feared mobster trying to go straight against all odds seems pistol-whipped. [15 Nov 1993]

Female-forward and class-conscious, allegorical and adventurous, Byzantium is almost the anti-Batman.

The Dark Crystal sees through a dark crystal: There is much to marvel at, but there is much that is obscure, and much that may not be there at all. [17 Dec 1982]

Flashy Talk Radio offers little but babble: A mindless, hollow look at a sad symbiosis. [21 Dec 1988]

Nope, this picture doesn't bear thinking about, but, if you resist that nasty temptation, setting all your mental gauges at Dead Slow, the flow of the action will see you through.

These characters don't seem illuminating at all – just damned annoying and, ultimately, dead boring.

These confident women care less about what comes off the runways – ‘money has nothing to do with style,’ says one – than with what can be assembled from thrift-shop finds, homemade items and imagination.

There is a distinct, and welcome, lack of sentimentality here, too, with Baumbach able to swerve the tone into a more cerebral version of National Lampoon’s Vacation franchise, of all things. Imagine if Clark Griswold studied fascism and carried around a teeny-tiny pistol, and you’ll start to get the idea.

View the Second World War through a child's eyes and the result isn't hard to predict: a loss-of-innocence tale. Winter in Wartime is the boilerplate version, with the already dramatic facts of the era ramped up to melodramatic levels. Little wonder it rings so false.

The new Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers movie is a delightful, zippy and genuinely fun thing

May not be the most scary or the grossest horror film you've ever seen, but it has one distinct feature: it actually talks up to the audience. By the conclusion, you won't be shaking in your seat, but you may enjoy the status of someone who has earned a Master's in Slashology.