At best, the film makes a more convincing case for the adventure of artificiality: Take Billy Crudup, add a little rouge to his cheeks and suddenly: Voilà, the guy can act.

Frankly, if I were Mrs. Claus, I might be looking for Santa Clause 3, outlining the grounds for annulment.

The movie is less a sequel to the original, in fact, than it is a remake - a more energetic, more absurd and possibly more entertaining remake. [17 Dec 1980]

Despite the tiresome story, it’s a hard film to dislike.

It's clear that Burn After Reading is a wannabe cult favourite -- some viewers may embrace it; many more will just want to burn after watching.

Perhaps a better name for Marc Abraham’s well-crafted biopic would be His Cheatin’ Heart, for this motion picture concentrates on the marital distress between a philandering Williams and his flat-singing wife (played with vibrancy by Elizabeth Olsen).

Apparently intended as a blend of "Bridesmaids" and "The First Wives Club," it’s often oddly engrossing, almost despite itself, largely thanks to the performances and the free rein the director gives his stars.

No one is likely to mistake Excess Baggage for a great movie, but it is an intriguing piece of pop sociology.

As is the case with such movies – where every character's passing glance hints at a dark secret – everything is not as it seems, and the story quickly collapses into itself.

Where it stumbles is in the script by Matt Healy, which is often clever, but never quite takes hold.

Pure blockbuster gloss – perfectly fine for a Saturday afternoon matinee, but instantly forgettable once you’ve emerged from the dark of a multiplex.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.

Murphy's brand of crude is studied and sleek, all high-polish and sheer calculation. As a performer, he's stylishly smooth; as a comic, that very smoothness is both his greatest strength and his abiding weakness. [22 Dec 1987]

Love, Gilda reveals this but does not probe it. With various soft and admiring interviews, it relies mainly on Radner’s own words to hint at how dark things got.

Some performances carry a picture, this one bench-presses it. Sean Penn's work here is so mesmerizing, so intense, so guaranteed to put him front and centre when Oscar reads out the nominees, as to almost obscure the multiple failings of the misguided movie around it.

Some books just aren't meant to be movies -- what once was confidently distinguished now seems merely average and a tiny bit desperate.

A display of old-school muscle-buddy connivance that’s as flatly preposterous as it is shamelessly entertaining.

After a decade of silence, surely Hollywood can do better.

As an epic action movie, Mongol is satisfying enough. Think "Braveheart." Think "300." Just don't think too much.

Looking like some gorgeous fan painting come to life, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter . . . and Spring is pictorially spellbinding.

Every hero needs to be revitalized by a little humiliation, and for at least the first 40 minutes of Die Another Day, Bond's dressing-down seems to do him and the movie franchise a world of good.

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

A revealing portrait of outsider music nerds.

How do you get revenge on an inanimate object? That’s the quandary facing the characters in Oculus, a deeply silly and mildly effective horror movie.

But then, just as quickly, Jesse is back in the present-day trying to build an escape route to a new life. Without Walter, he is just another manchild with a gun and a pile of money in a garbage bag. Sometimes, the past is the past and it really is dead.

The actors are all better than the material, just as the script's occasionally amusing tangents are far superior to its mundane narrative arc.

A formulaic thriller, treated in a style that's just shy of outright parody.

As a stoic and weathered middle-aged ballet teacher, who lives in a cramped apartment and maintains a tender and dignified devotion to his craft, Fiennes gives the film’s best performance.

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

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

Although overplotted and underexplained, the movie is rich in memorable lairs.

While thoughtfully done, the entertainment value of this sombre scare fiesta isn’t high. It’s about life’s paths taken and the rituals (and fears) we submit to.

A laugh a minute? Liar Liar Jim Carrey's forced truthfulness means a lot of mildly funny facial gyrations.

By the time The Hunter jettisons its narrative ballast altogether and embraces its elemental appeal, it's too late. The near-mythic grandeur of its final scenes is less a welcome payoff then a suggestion of the truly striking film that might have been; it's ironic that a movie about a man who sets traps for a living would itself end up ensnared by formula.

The man (Affleck) is something of a force of nature himself, and it ain't pretty.

The best fake trailer, and Grindhouse's high point, is Edgar ( Shaun of the Dead) Wright's tone-perfect parody of inviting taboos, entitled "Don't."

What a sprawling, befuddling, fascinating, frustrating mess of a movie. Usually the tautest of directors, Clint Eastwood has gone all slack here, allowing his subject to get completely away from him.

If physical appearance creates its own class system (in high school and beyond), then Qualls is perfect for this proselytizing role. He has that rarest of movie-star faces -- one that over comes the tyranny of beauty.

Once it becomes clear that the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an equal-opportunity offender, and that it is the politically correct modern family that is being picked on, rather than young Greg, the film becomes cheerfully mischievous fun for everyone.

Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeve with 9-year-old actress Drew Barrymore: the movie might easily be retitled The Scene Stealer. Barrymore's performance as Charlie McGee has something of the pint-sized coquetry of a Shirley Temple, and something of the shoulders-back, chin- in-the-air hauteur of a Bette Davis, but she seems incapable of hitting a false, precocious or calculating note. She virtually acts her co-stars off the screen. [14 May 1984]

Truth be told, the full 99-minute movie does not entirely hold water; it feels like three or four good episodes connected with plot padding. Aesop probably wasn't too hot at long-form fiction, either.

Plays like an easy-listening hit.

This colour-drunk, sumptuous late Tang Dynasty (928 AD) drama is huge on spectacle but as devoid of delight as a Cecil B. DeMille biblical epic.

Yes, The Mysterious Island is everything a 12-year-old boy could want – endless adventure involving a reckless adolescent hero, with a pretty girl in a clinging T-shirt around to watch him struggle.

The result is the kind of picture you can sit through quite contentedly, the cinematic equivalent of an innocuous seatmate on an airplane trip -- it neither bores nor insults you, and, when the ride's over, is promptly gone and forgotten.

Win Win is a paragon of truth at a slow jog, but that upbeat sprint to the finish feels like a big cheat.

Where it falls short is that the film’s most compelling characters – Patel and Singh – are faintly unfinished and underexplored. It may well have worked better as pure documentary, and it will send many moviegoers on a mission to Google, where they will learn more about the real stars of the picture.

This is not a spoiler alert; it’s a tip: If you go to see American Ultra, stay for the credits, right to the end. They are animated and provide a mini fourth act for the film, a little action movie starring a super simian and a beautiful (human) damsel; they are an amusing addendum, but mainly they tell you a lot about where American Ultra’s heart lies, deep in comic-book territory.

Savini seems to lose his grip in the second half, and what began as exhilaratingly horrendous settles into comfortable predictability. [24 Oct 1990]

Virtuosity never lacks for energy, its pacing is appropriately breakneck, its bangs are as big as Nagasaki - but finally it can't escape its limitations as a genre picture. [5 Aug 1995, p.C11]

It's a mini-masterwork of acting. Stahl is definitely one to watch closely -- he's the real deal. But the emerging plot isn't.

The result, which could be entitled There's Something About Curly, is an unabashedly moronic celebration of slap shtick.

Firth gives the performance his all as a man trapped in a vortex of grief, shame and hate, but as in Scott Hicks’s "Shine," which the film occasionally resembles, there’s an overtidy relationship between trauma and catharsis.

A welcome antidote to the usual seasonal sweetness.

That last wrong turn completely undoes a picture that had been steering a very impressive course.

Inevitably, the one ingredient that does remain constant are the performances -- once again, there aren't any (the lone exception is Gloria Foster's mommy Oracle, although, even here, the shine is off the joke). Of course, for the hyperactive principals, this gig isn't about acting -- it's about athleticism, which suits Keanu Reeves's talents just fine.

As rock-and-roll flicks go, director Joan Freeman's Satisfaction , is a real bar band of a movie; it's derivative, unambitious and uneven, but it's also not half bad. If you bend your mind around its most awkward moments, it also offers at least some of what the title promises. [19 Feb 1988]

The actor offers an incredibly committed and determined performance, but by the film’s end, you wish he’d be able to get back to doing what he does best: eating.

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

Two things do redeem the film somewhat. One is the near-uniform excellence of the cast, led by Tatum, who has a compelling, eminently watchable aw-shucks charisma, and newcomer Horn as the cute, concerned sister. The other is the easy, naturalistic flow and ebb of Reid Carolin's dialogue, which gives none of his characters a vocabulary or insights above his or her station.

Hanks is sturdy as ever, grounding the proceedings in a warm sense of familiar, fatherly comfort. But the rest of the film feels weightless, and at parts unbelievably dumb. One mid-film shoot-out in particular is executed with such listlessness that it’s a wonder Greengrass was able to stay awake while filming it.

As a psychological thriller, it's not so much either thrilling or psychological as it is wonderfully absurd. [25 Mar 1982]

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.

Uneven and erratic and far too busy, its flashes of brilliance dimmed by overambitious meanderings.

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

This time out, writer and director Mark Steven Johnson has bounced back with a movie so full of camp spirit it should come with tents and a marshmallow roast.

Entanglement suffers from an unsureness in tone, somewhere between quirky and sombre.

So I didn't Huckabees, nor did I entirely not it. Rather, when the end draws nigh and judgment beckons, I'm doomed again to dither in the tepid netherworld, that vast limbo where movies are only half-decent and movie-going is merely half-ed.

The quirky romantic comedy The Tomorrow Man relies on the believability of their late-in-life love in order for the film to work. Which it does, to some degree – that degree being small-story preciousness and the simple pleasure of eating popcorn while watching Blythe Danner and John Lithgow watching television as they eat popcorn.

Never amounts to anything more than its title’s shallow descriptors.

With too much salutation and not enough action, this is a (fine) companion to the album but not a freestanding film.

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

Adapting a great short story, like Carver's "So Much Water So Close to Home," into a movie poses a dilemma: How to flesh it out to feature length without destroying what made it great in the first place?

The SFX set pieces are pretty lame, mostly involving a lot of weary running around and tense, ticking-clock urgency. What elevates Secret of the Tomb is the classicism of its humour.

To his credit, writer-director Richard Stanley, a South African native now living in England, brings his own bloody specialties to the banquet, and Hardware, although neither original nor especially thought-provoking, does serve its intended purpose by sending the hungry horror film fan away from the table satiated and nauseated. Compliments to the chefs. [12 Oct 1990]

Perversely enough, the comedy is what keeps the picture rolling; it's the so-called action that persists in bringing the thing to a screeching halt.

Yet despite the efforts of its stars and the inherent juiciness of its source material, the film falls flat when it should bounce with surreal glee. Perhaps it’s because Kelly is only telling half a story here.

As unabashedly idiotic movie comedies go, Ted goes fairly well.

Ultimately Dark Fate is nothing more than a run-duck-and-repeat production – an extraordinarily familiar, if efficiently made, exercise in Terminatorology. If the franchise pattern holds, it’ll be back.

Robocop isn't going to win Verhoeven any medals - the focus remains on action, guns and gore - but it's a flashy movie with enough wit to be more than just another dumb bucket of bolts. [17 Jul 1987]

In a big, engrossing performance that is the film’s chief delight, the reliable Australian actress Toni Collette plays Milly.

Spiritual V-8 juice.

Love & Other Drugs is quite the little cocktail of mood-brighteners, a movie narcotic easy to take and, since the effects wear off quickly, even easier to forget.

At best, it shows how intense sexual attraction can be a form of temporary insanity.

Character development and plotting are rudimentary, though the tongue-in-cheek never gets dislodged while the body count rises.

The novels remain a witty portrait of life; this flick is just a study in preciousness.

Parents will get the historical jokes but are unlikely to be amused; kids won’t get them, but might laugh anyway.

The film is never as powerful or convincing as it should be.

Eerie and unpredictable, Strangerland holds attention, even if traditional suspense tricks are avoided like they were dingos at the daycare.

There are sequences in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai’s new film, The Grandmaster, that are as gorgeous as anything you’ll see on a screen this year, or perhaps this decade.

Watanabe and Moore acquit themselves well (although the latter’s lip-syncing is questionable), but Bel Canto falls short of the operatic notes Weitz attempts to hit.

While there’s plenty of footage of Polunin executing multiple pirouettes and twisting acrobatically through the air, real ballet fans will lament the lack of evidence of emotion and artistry in his dancing.

For all its tense entertainment, Fake Blood's production values and acting levels aren't high – getting what you pay for being just another ice-pick-to-the-eye reality faced by indie filmmakers.

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

Ewan McGregor does a solid job as Danny, still shining (i.e. reading minds and performing other freaky feats of the head) after all these years, and Rebecca Ferguson is having a great deal of fun as his new nemesis, driving across the country sucking souls and finding new and inventive ways of wearing chapeaus.

The overstuffed farce remains, but the caustic leanness and meanness of the original are gone with the Mississippi wind. That leaves us to settle for occasionally funny moments in an otherwise uneven picture.

But Schneider, whose only other directing credit is the extremely low-key 2009 family drama "Get Low," finds a way to portray the nautical action with clarity and precision. You might not know what Krause and his crew are saying at all times, but you definitely know what they’re witnessing.