Again, as with "Star Wars," the interest lies at least as much in the set design and costumes as the narrative.

A film that should be shamelessly soaked in passion and thrusting erotic delirium is instead posed and prettified, to the point where “camp” comes to mean more than the place where lumberjacks work – it’s also the movie’s defining vibe.

We've got the trademark elements but not their magical bonding, and the result is a selection of scenes in search of a movie.

Creaky in its plotting, occasionally electrifying in its direction, We Own the Night is even more of a throwback to old-fashioned crime dramas than Martin Scorsese's "The Departed."

The movie delivers, if you're looking for a big-screen, big-stunt, action blockbuster that happens to have the Bond brand name on it. If you're looking for a movie with narrative coherence that recreates, or develops, the Bond mythology that first came to screen in the early sixties, go back to your video store: The current Bond franchise is a Van Damme movie with a bigger budget and British accents. [19 Dec 1997, p.C6]

The achievement of Educating Rita is a function of the distinguished performances, the agreeably archetypal situation and the scissor-sharp lines. [23 Sep 1983]

Gospel music not only saves Darrin's plastic yuppie soul -- Praise the Lord -- it also gives an otherwise wasted hour and a half some warmth and buoyancy.

Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

It’s humanizing and heartbreaking.

The fact that these atrocities are not well known in the West is a good reason for this film to exist.

Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

It's a rom-com, it's a road movie, it's "Cars" without the animation, it's "A History of Violence" played for yuks. It's all that and less because, really, Hit & Run is awfully hit & miss.

Scarface is a B- movie with singularly silly psychological pretensions: its neo-primitivism is to the complex moral cosmos of Francis Coppola's "Godfather" saga as Disney is to Dickens. [09 Dec 1983]

Inasmuch as Cholodenko has an agenda in her two movies so far -- what appears to be a lesbian-positive theme of openness to experimentation and its accompanying emotional costs -- she's found a model in McDormand's portrayal of Jane.

Very charming but very slight.

Moderately witty children's entertainment.

A few plot contrivances aside, the unspectacular Bad Samaritan is tense and disturbing enough, and worth its weight in popcorn.

The film is small-scale, cleverly crafted and feels like a more expensive version of the sort of "dramedy" they produce by the truckload at the BBC.

The first half hour of the film, showing the school auditions, is superb. But it's hard to care when every tear-stained monologue is no more moving than an audition piece. Michael Seresin's photography is so beautiful that everybody in the film looks as if they could be famous, and the surface glossiness serves only to falsify the emotions further. [23 May 1980]

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

This is a contemporary war-is-hell account in which hell burns so intensely that it scorches the firewalls of the mundane world around it. But it doesn’t burn them down.

Aster’s considerable discipline in matters of plot, acting, and exactingly manicured mise-en-scène resulted in a film that, for all its shocks and bravura performances, felt a little too controlled, as if its borderline braggadocious style was compensating for a lack of genuine terror.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.

Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry. This doesn’t mean Heaven Knows What is a failure – just hopelessly complicated.

It's your standard coming-of-age tune set to a top-40 beat. [24 Oct 1997]

For all the talk of Smith’s strong performance, one wonders if the subject matter couldn’t have been tackled with less sentimentality and heartfelt biography.

Semi-wonderful at best.

At its best points, Sharp Stick functions like a cinematic mixtape of every Taylor Swift song, presenting romantic clichés and immediately pulverizing them into dust. At its worst points, Sharp Stick is a twee, porn-ified Napoleon Dynamite, humiliating the very heroine who we should empathize with the most.

So why does the thing play like a mediocre sitcom stripped of its laugh-track?

Fans expecting more than a routine coming-of-age story had better prepare for a paper movie.

It borders on deification. Yet Tupac: Resurrection is still a strong film, with some genuinely revealing insights into the life of its charismatic and paradoxical subject.

A zany mix of dark comedy, slapstick, and high-concept adventure, The Lovebirds moves fast in the hopes that no one notices how messy its construction is.

The story of the colony’s exile and return feels like a dull sermon, but the animals themselves, with their expressive faces and Moe Howard hairdos, can switch from slapstick to pathos faster than Charlie Chaplin.

This latest entry in the White House genre is polished, but formulaic suspense.

Ultimately, the result is identical to Mills's debut effort in "Thumbsucker." Once again, clever insight vies with misty-eyed sentimentality, honesty with artifice, real humour with bogus gravity, the genuinely affecting with the merely quirky. But "Thumbsucker" was at least a promising start; Beginners is just a frustrating continuation.

Varying the pace, altering the tone, Ruben definitely keeps us off balance. Not as good as it could be, a far sight better than it might have been, this is a movie that puts the lie to the computer's stern dictum: garbage in, passable entertainment out. [08 Feb 1991]

Morally simple, action packed and explosive.

Black Rain is really an extended exercise in pure style, a pretty picture in constant motion painted by a very commercial artist. In fact, the style is so uncontaminated by substance that everything here - plot, character, theme - gets subordinated to the glitzy sights and ambient sounds. [22 Sep 1989]

Though Little Miss Sunshine is consistently contrived in its characters' too-cute misery, the conclusion, which is genuinely outrageous and uplifting, is almost worth the hype.

In this fitfully engaging, but often patience-straining preamble to Hobbit adventures to come, there is one transporting 10 minutes of screen time. It happens when Bilbo meets the freakish, ring-obsessed creature Gollum.

So the questions arises: Why bother watching the contrived fiction when the eye-popping fact is readily available? Answer: Why, indeed.

Always stylish and occasionally thrilling and never thoughtful.

Are these enlightened critics or dark nutcases themselves?

Ezra Miller's sneering, absurdly precocious evil-child performance makes him just another bad-seed horror villain.

Lyrical, dreamy and too complicated for its own good.

An enjoyable time-waster, distinguished by an unexpectedly sharp comic turn by McConaughey, lots of boisterous horseplay and some stirring emotional clinches. All in all, an entirely serviceable night out for buddies looking to locate hidden feelings.

Taken for what it is – a fluffy, intergenerational farce as a frame for some seventies musical nostalgia – Mamma Mia! just gets away with it, in spite of director Lloyd's lack of cinematic inexperience.

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.

This summer has given us two Supermen to choose from in our own distemperate times: "Superman Returns" was for the starry-eyed idealists, Hollywoodland is for the bleary-eyed cynics.

Icy landscapes, the cozy tones of Queen Latifah and a walrus-farting scene that rivals the campfire bean-fuelled explosions of "Blazing Saddles" help make Arctic Tale, a new wildlife documentary, a fun family indoor excursion.

"It's one of the problems I have with Hannah. I feel I haven't gone deeply enough." Should Woody Allen ever tire of making movies, he can take up criticizing them.

The film is a popcorn-crowd pleaser, but a “yippee ki-yay” or two away from something more memorable.

The culminative effect of the cinematography is inconclusive as the character remains trapped in grief.

Yes, a Terence Malick film remains an event, but he appears awfully disoriented in The New World -- less a seasoned traveller than a perplexed tourist, content to mask his confusion by reaching for a camera and snapping relentless pretty pictures.

Lawrence Michael Levine’s film, though, is only sporadically clever enough to pull off its central trick. Mostly, we’re stuck with a group of rather unpleasant people doing rather unpleasant things. To what desired end, it is never quite clear.

Once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.

The most endearing aspect of D.E.B.S., a sweet-spirited spoof, is that the lesbian romance is played for real, with no nudge-nudge wink-wink irony.

Director Martin Ritt (Hud) keeps the movie powerful and tense until the ending, which is crudely manipulative. [22 Aug 1998, p.11]

A first film from director Mark Palansky, written by sitcom veteran Leslie Caveny (Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You), and the two are obviously indebted to the fanciful imagination of Tim Burton.

Cat People, a remake by the not noticeably gifted director Paul Schrader, of a 1942 RKO mood piece about a lady who thought herself capable of turning into a panther, is many things, not every one of them bad: as a B-movie, this fantasy of a young woman who develops the distressing habit of changing shape after sex is moderately entertaining. [05 Apr 1982]

Fortunately, writer-director Craig Brewer manages to conjure a world so rich and believable that we barely notice the Hollywood predictability of the plot.

This remake is distinctly a Farrelly brothers' flick -- sentimental, rambling and raunchy.

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

Jumping the Broom also benefits from a great soundtrack (Al Green, Aretha, El DeBarge, Curtis Mayfield).

Allen's best effort since 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown," but that's not saying a lot.

At no time is Urban Cowboy especially well-directed - Bridges, director of The China Syndrome and The Paper Chase, has yet to learn where to put a camera and when to move it. But the performances are so fresh, the dialogue so prickly and arid, and the milieu observed with such accuracy, that one's reservations regarding the cinematography, editing and a raft of other technical matters are held in check. [07 June 1980]

The Greatest Game Ever Played is far too inconsistent to be great, but at least Paxton has made an honourable attempt to treat this piece of sports history with the gravity it deserves.

This is a monument that should be visited, but it is a monument of importance only as a reminder of the thing it seeks to memorialize. Gandhi may not be a hagiographic embarrassment to its subject, but it's a waxworks movie, a victory for British reserve. [08 Dec 1982]

It is fun, though, to spot the differences a female director brings to the genre.

It's a shame that Levinson's pace is so stately and that his staid directorial choices fall short of the risky work undertaken by his actors and scriptwriter. Bugsy's life cheated his own genius; this movie cheats the genius who would embody that life. [13 Dec 1991]

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

The background designs are beautiful and there are plenty of lively sight gags, but magic isn’t in the cards.

The plot's larcenous resolution is something of a cheat, tying things up dramatically if unethically.

Occasionally feels like a Neil Simon rewrite of "In the Bedroom," as it see-saws between hard truths and quirky humour.

That's not to say Terminator 3 is terminally awful -- just banal, merely humdrum, more conventional horror flick than science-fiction myth, and a whole lot less than what came before.

Ultimately, the movie is a perfect mirror of its star -- looks great, seems empty.

Director Dan Algrant’s conceit here is to take an actual event – a tribute concert for Tim held at a Brooklyn church in 1991, the concert that sparked Jeff’s own career – and wrap a fictionalized drama around it.

While the gender-based farmhouse siege is suspenseful and bloody, director Daniel Barber weighs in too heavily with extended silences that slow down the goings-on of a film that has darkly lit tension, lovely scenery and fiercely presented ideas on feminism.

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

Whedon can’t quite work the same miracle twice. Age of Ultron also bears the familiar stretch marks characteristic of middle movies in franchise series.

A film in which every single character is despicable, but some are more despicable than others, could have run into a sympathy problem. Yet thanks to J. Blakeson’s zippy direction and a chillier-than-thou lead performance from Rosamund Pike, the movie is immensely watchable. Just not especially memorable.

It's not so much a movie in three acts as three movies stuffed into a single casing, and often showing the strain.

Anyone who has ever watched a movie about young love and the C-word (no, not Clouds) will know exactly where the film is headed, as well as the obligatory narrative beats that stretch out the inevitable. But for a sob story, Clouds is not nearly as watery as it could have been.

The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980]

The promise is dangled yet never developed. Rather, the narrative slips into a backstory that alternates between confusing and contradictory.

Though Radcliffe occasionally seems too stiffly callow to be completely convincing in this grown-up role, the movie is a proficient thriller with a potential appeal beyond the star's fan-girl audience.

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.

Eventually, Typhoon succumbs to the usual special-effects bombast and plot overkill.

When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.

Vivarium is an exercise in wringing dry the audience’s emotions until we’re nothing but husks. For some, that could be appreciatively cathartic right about now. Myself, I felt little other than a deep and nagging depression.

Luckily for us, the flawed but charming Mr. Malcolm’s List has Indian actress Freida Pinto as a winsome romantic lead, finally receiving her flowers in a perfectly matched role.

Blend sound with sight, though, and the package becomes more difficult to take.

Although filmmaker Pan Nalin is a believer in Ayurveda,there is little in the film to convince anybody else.

The creative and experimental use of sound and photography are a big part of what makes November an intriguing film.

Trishna, in short, seems to occur at too much of a remove; it's too fate-filled.

Nothing classes up a teen movie better than the classics.