If anything, this film is a cautionary tale for those who clamour for the driverless car.

It’s tricky to give such a layered glimpse of high school in a movie that keeps its pace at a decent click. And while Moxie is just a small snapshot of those weird and wonderful years, it gives viewers a decent lesson in how to be an ally, without being preachy about it.

Knives has just enough expensive style, steamy sex, and wild plot contrivances to hold your attention.

Alice, Darling does so much right that it is acutely painful when it goes wrong.

Clocking in at a severely bloated 165 minutes, Chapter 4 is both a thrill and a slog, an all-you-can-eat buffet that insists on stuffing your guts before it spills them.

This Is Elvis could have been called This Is America: it's a portrait of a face full of wounds, warts and wonders. [09 May 1981]

There is only one Spielberg, so the result is an adventure that sands away the edges of its own taste for danger, with the destination – those gobs of cash – mattering far more than the journey.

Ultimately the film struggles to balance its various commitments, with a screenplay that never seems sure of whether it wants to be a pure comedy, a lore-packed adventure or a peppy children’s film that shuffles kids straight to the toy aisle.

While Lawrence and his producing partners got deserved flak for breaking up Collins' third novel, Mockingjay, into two films, they've learned the wrong lessons here, compressing what should have been either two films or a miniseries into one excessive production.

Berger’s film is a sometimes zippy, frequently ridiculous drama.

Perhaps sensing that the film needs all the toe-tapping energy it can get, Spiderhead’s cast make the most out of their thin material.

In writer-director Keith Thomas’s bid to add a layer of thematic novelty to a familiar genre, he has come up with a mish-mash that will satisfy only those with extremely acquired tastes.

Certainly, it’s fun to see Schafer, best known for her work on HBO’s teenage-wasteland series Euphoria, match wits with Stevens, including a gnarly sequence of knife play. But neither actor can figure out where their director is going with all this madness or where he might want to be at any given moment, tonally and thematically. It’s enough to drive anybody, even the king of kook Stevens – well, you know.

It is a lot, and Ascher only has so many stylistic tricks up his sleeve – including a unique, if eventually exhausting, spin on talking-head Zoom footage – to delay the sheer weight of his subject matter from crushing his film into multiverse-ready dust.

Supernova feels less like a film to cherish and more a tweet to favourite.

As for who’s the cat and who’s the mouse, that’s easy: Filmmaker Campbell is the former and we’re the latter. The Protégé plays with its viewers – if one is up for the game, there are worse ways to spend 109 minutes.

Renegades is not just another silly action flick; it's a well-made silly action flick, a superior brand of cotton candy. If you have a taste for the stuff, this should go down just fine. [02 Jun 1989]

Statham is as enjoyably stern and semi-serious as ever, but his sturdy presence cannot enliven a weirdly buttoned-up exercise in mercenary mayhem.

Ultimately, Thor: Love and Thunder will leave you feeling sad, empty, deadened. Which is what frequently happens in the MCU these days – it is an enterprise built with an Axl Rose-sized appetite for destruction, but no stomach for genuine risk or imagination.

Carmen is a wild and unrestrained attempt to empty its director’s entire brain onto the screen, and for that it deserves recognition. But the ultimate result slips too easily between heroic effort and hot mess.

Annette’s failure to ignite is especially frustrating because, not infrequently, Carax delivers images and moments that verge on the indelible.

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

The thrills here are both cheap and oddly, comfortingly captivating. Of course nothing can ever kill Liam Neeson, but it is a whole lot of no-brain-necessary fun to watch everyone and everything try.

House of Gucci is a movie about a family at war with itself – yet Scott’s film is engaged in its own distracting skirmishes, with battles messily waged over tone, genre and performance.

Conceived as a climate-change metaphor, but given an oily new layer thanks to the pandemic, the film’s conceit could be sharply effective, in careful hands. But McKay knows only of punching down with meaty fists, so the result is a messy, smarmy assault.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

Through it all, Smith’s performance grounds the horror in a place of courage, heart and soul.

Once Land of Bad establishes its stakes – one man versus an army – the film settles all too comfortably into war-machine territory, minus any particularly inventive kills or sense of style.

The Roses is not nearly acrimonious, or funny, enough to justify its peculiar existence. If DeVito’s original was the cinematic equivalent of going through the divorce from hell, this new break-up feels more like a trial separation.

At around the hundred-minute mark, everything in Gunn’s perfect little cinematic galaxy falls apart in a magnificently depressing fashion. It is as if the MCU higher-ups got wind of what was going down and quickly engineered a black hole of studio notes to suck the Guardians into a tesseract of meaningless set-pieces and prolonged B-plot detours.

Despite strong performances across the board – most notably Wright, who has never before been able to flex such leading-man magnetism – there is an overriding flatness to Monk’s personal life.

It is mighty impressive, in a stupefying way, just how close Cruella’s filmmakers get to pulling the dang thing off. This isn’t to say that the movie is a success – it is embarrassing on many levels, and seems to be frequently at odds with its presumed family-friendly audience – but as far as movies that have no business existing outside sketch-comedy land go, it could’ve been worse.

The talented performers are ultimately overmatched by a janky script that telegraphs every emotional swerve and narrative beat as if audiences are not to ever be trusted.

All the magnificent little elements add up to a whole lot of not-enough this time around, resulting in a creaky and exhausting pastiche of Andersonia rather than the real deal.

Short, flashy and about as complex as a beer belch, Men in Black II is also brisk. The film clocks in at 88 minutes total running time, and it's loaded with new special effects and monsters.

The result is messy, zippy and smart-alecky. But never boring, and occasionally funny enough to warrant a spit-take or three.

Though the animation is solid and the writing reasonably clever, Over the Hedge is clearly more about packaging than freshness or substance.

There are several scenes in There's Something About Mary that are so absurdly original and outrageous they will leave audiences talking about them for weeks.

How's this for a ringing endorsement: Watching Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in nearly a decade, is like taking a philosophy exam. A really tiring philosophy exam, where the questions are elegantly phrased but damn confounding and not really conducive to right answers.

The movie is directed by Mark Waters (responsible for the indie black comedy, "The House of Yes") and mostly, he's workmanlike, but smart enough to get out of the way of the nicely balanced two lead performances.

At one point, Downey's character is asked, "What are you gonna do with all this rage, this hate?" and he snaps back, "I'll probably just write serious literature." On TV, where the material seemed both serious and literate, that bit of black humour felt prophetic. On film, it's just a good joke.

The Final Frontier is the funniest - okay, the most intentionally funny - Star Trek yet. [9 June 1989]

The movie ends up exactly what it sounds like: a good film for filling the midnight slot at a review cinema or genre festival.

Bullock is firm as the preternaturally self-assured Debbie but little more than that; her performance as the con artist is reined in so tightly that she only finally appears to be having some fun when she gets to don a blond updo and German accent on the night of the ball.

In 5 x 2, the 2 are terrific; it's the 5 that needs work.

Brooks' bravery is spiriting; in his debut he has written an unlikeable character doing unlikeable things to likeable people. One wishes his talent as a director matched his chutzpah. [17 Mar 1979]

When it comes to rude comedy, one person's caviar is another's smelly fish gunk. A case in point is Strangers With Candy.

The script is taut, the actors perform their roles well and some neat visual and sound design elements add texture to this portrayal of rising India. Bahrani’s spin on the novel brings the story alive – even if the voiceover grates occasionally.

The combination of less-experienced actors with a deadpan script is hit-and-miss. The naturalistic performances give the feeling of real high-school students, but at times that vibe veers more toward high-school drama production.

"The Road" meets "Leave No Trace" with a sprinkling of another half-dozen sharper films, Light of My Life is Casey Affleck’s ode to the power of storytelling. Namely, Casey Affleck’s brand of storytelling: glacial, meandering, but not entirely ineffective.

Given the predictable scenario, this picture needs passion, and all it gets is his workmanlike precision. What he's constructed is worthy enough, and certainly navigable, but you need more than the bricks of craft to build a road to paradise.

It mostly all comes together in the end, but you still cannot help but watch the film and wonder why the need for just so much of everything.

The reign of the last emperor, a reign in name alone, was an exercise in style over substance; it is perhaps fitting that his cinematic biography should follow the same incarcerated course. [20 Nov 1987, p.D1]

Jamie M. Dagg's new film, Sweet Virginia, is a lot to take in – too much, really. It's a revenge movie, a crime thriller, a gentle and low-key romance, and a dusty drama about the pains of leaving the past behind. It doesn't succeed at being any one of those things, too muddled is the script and too unsteady is the direction.

The content is eminently forgettable but the thing has definitely got style.

There's little doubt a person can get a little pent-up looking for a good romantic comedy -- but you might want to save yourself until something better comes along.

The Moneychanger has fun on its road to a predictable ending. You won’t feel cheated, but you might think you overpaid.

If the scariest thing to you is David Duchovny in a tight black T-shirt lecturing a group of 15-year-old women about how men need to take back their power, then The Craft: Legacy is a success.

The resolution includes an overlong and underfunny chase scene.

The filmmakers make excellent use of the Manitoba shooting location (perfect for an eerie mood of societal isolation) and the story's key theme – can we be responsible for things that are out of our control? – is a compelling one. Unlike its lead characters, you can safely, if not eagerly, approach Radius without fear of dying.

It's a kaleidoscope of ideas that range from exciting to silly and gaudy.

When the film’s pace slows down every now and then, and Cohen gets room to breathe, the film is a genuine riot.

Over all, the food porn was played down, the series is getting a little road-weary and who knows what happens with these guys next. If they’re thinking about heading to France, a horny Frenchman has some good advice: Paris can wait.

This is filmmaking as a minor feat of engineering, the kind where even the gossamer emotions seem like prefab components -- charm, whimsy, serendipity, all so many discs plugged into the hard drive.

It's this edge that saves The Science of Sleep from its own whimsy.

For all its cleverness, Elle suffers, like many a thriller, from an unmasking that proves less intriguing than the original mystery and, in its misogyny and its misanthropy, the film ultimately proves less interesting than it believes itself to be. Mainly, it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth long after the credits roll. Like Michèle herself, Elle is a nasty piece of work.

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.

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 core trio are smooth and amusing in their roles, but the larger plot is filled with painful stereotypes, from a tough female cop to various black gangsters. Meanwhile, as the sympathetic criminals try to outwit police, the social theme remains unfocused – despite heartfelt pleas for street people, especially the homeless Inuit of Montreal.

The stellar array of British talent (voicing the various farm animals) and Murray (whom one suspects has rewritten Garfield's lines to be Murray-esque) give Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties all its energy and make the human actors -- even comedian Connolly -- look and sound like square panels in a two-dimensional comic strip.

Whatever The House of Sand may lack in curb appeal, that view from the roof will have you gasping in wonderment.

The childish manner in which Glowicki plays impulsive, irresponsible Ronnie makes it hard to develop sympathy or understanding toward the character. It's a problem in an otherwise gentle diversion of a film.

In the Valley of Elah dearly wants to be the Iraq war's counterpart to "Coming Home," documenting the tragic domestic legacy of a misguided foreign conflict. Wants to be, but isn't.

Two jazz films won awards at Sundance this year. One of them was "Whiplash"; the other was Low Down, an expressive but somewhat lacklustre first feature from Jeff Preiss. Neither movie is about jazz.

It’s a solid effort. There are guts here, just not quite enough glory.

When you watch Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, there's often a sense that you're not just watching him perform in a movie, you're watching the next stage of his unfolding career plan.

Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 1984]

Though this RoboCop can’t come close to capturing the clever-silly audacity of the original, one area in which the current film easily surpasses it is in the quality of the cast.

There's a wonderfully subversive film buried somewhere in Spanglish, but it's never allowed to get out.

The movie surprises on almost every level, breaking a number of contemporary rom-com rules along the way thanks to Tiffany Paulsen’s self-aware screenplay. I don’t mean in the meta-satirical sense of, say, David Wain’s absurdist They Came Together. More like a watered down Nora Ephron project.

Up and down, Late Marriage is definitely rocky, but there's never a point where we lose interest and want out -- as relationships go, that's not bad.

It's a movie located in an interesting place, but without quite enough self-confidence really to inhabit it.

In the midst of material that's dusty and dated, People I Know somehow feels apocalyptic. How is this possible? Easy: When America's liberal conscience is in the sole care of a publicist, you just know the world's going to hell in a handbasket.

An atrocious movie. An offensively stupid movie. A movie so witless and so crammed with bathroom humour that you will be deeply thankful for the darkness that envelops you - it lets you hide the fact (disturbing as it is) that you do laugh at the antics of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, in spite of yourself.

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

Midnight meets madness in a surrealist exercise in existentialism and deft satire that will unsettle the average viewer while exciting those with freakier tastes.

The Devil's Advocate is a dull morality tale, but a number of bright moments come courtesy of the Prince of Darkness.

As sweet as the film can be (a burgeoning romance between Kitsch’s doctor and Liane Balaban’s hard-to-get local borders on the adorable), The Grand Seduction is also deeply cynical.

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

Viewers less charmed by spectacle may find the story lacking and as a result, Gemini Man can feel like the best-case scenario of watching someone else play a video game.

There are a lot of words that come to mind when watching Luca Guadagnino’s remake of Suspiria: beautiful, gross, overwhelming, frustrating, disturbing, powerful, long, gross, audacious, baffling, explicit, extravagant and did I mention gross?

Sure, this is marginal, but it's precisely in the margins that the movie excels.

Beautiful to look at, the film showcases Côté’s talents at building tone and theme through images and sounds.

At its best the movie is still innocent enough to slide past your guard, and inventive and lively enough to make the average Hollywood comedy seem to be on heavy tranquilizers.

The film’s most insightful moments come when the documentary reconnects Talley with his past as they revisit his hometown and oldest friends.

The surreal visuals are relentless, overpowering the narrative much as they do in the frames of comic books (sorry, graphic novels).

The 355 is enjoyable, go-lady nonsense that eventually exhausts itself with its ambitions to be more. It’s like watching a woman have a furious argument with herself about a man who doesn’t love her enough, only it’s about spy movies.

Listen carefully, and you can almost hear the enjoyably comic and nasty tone Harpoon was likely going for – before it drowned in a flood of unwatchable idiots.