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.

Cheney remains an enigma throughout, less a character than another anonymous object for McKay to smash in his cinematic rage room.

A patchwork quilt of clashing colors, but it's cozy and warm. [10 Oct 1981]

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.

At its simple core, Sleeping Beauty is a perfectly pitched chamber piece about the menace of voluntary oblivion.

This is the funniest teen movie I've seen in eons.

One of those purposefully glum studies in alienation that Hollywood occasionally produces as blue-state specials for disenchanted liberals.

WHEN you go to see a film by those wild and crazy filmmakers who brought you Airplane!, Police Squad!, The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2, you pretty much know what you're going to get: puns visual and spoken, sight gags and pratfalls, parodies of other films and mockery of film conventions. It's just a question of how well they do it this time, and in Hot Shots!, which opens today in theatres across Canada, the answer is: not bad, not bad at all. The plot is the usual silly trifle, but the actors are good and the production is slick.[31 July 1991]

Traitor becomes too busy, ultimately frustrating, and never delivers on its tantalizing promise of offering a little insight into terrorists' motives – and it's even got an inside man.

The laughs may not be as strong as they were the first time, and the sense of discovering something fantastically illicit may have faded to mellow, familiar charms that come with the occasional giggle fit, but that's life as a stoner comedy.

Frankly, with so much to feast my dazzled eyes upon, I barely noticed that the plot was missing in action. And that's because the action itself is so pure.

Beijing Bicycle is a good film that owes a huge debt to a better film. And that, of course, is Vittorio De Sica's "The Bicycle Thief."

Filled with a sweet, loopy sensibility and some fresh comic turns, Welcome to Collinwood is a low-budget American film that falls into the good-but-slight category.

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.

Freed from the tiresome constraints of plot and character, Rumble in the Bronx is the distilled essence of action entertainment. [27 Feb 1996, p.D1]

As a statement on capitalism or anything else, Capitalism: A Love Story is often embarrassingly simplistic, self-contradictory.

When the movie climactically reproduces that exhilarating Belmont, the fiction is just a pale shadow of the fact, and the realized myth that lives in our memory dies on the screen.

It definitely seems attractive on paper, what with a sterling cast to gaze upon, a script by none other than the late and legendary John Cassavetes, along with direction courtesy of the legend's son Nick. But up on the screen, under the glare of the lights, the film never really captures our eye or our interest. [29 Aug 1997, p.D3]

There's a Faustian bargain in Angel Heart, and not only on the screen. Undeniably, Parker is hobnobbing with the false gods of Style. But isn't it just the damnest thing: he's having (and giving) a hell of a good time. [07 Mar 1987]

Volume 2 picks up the story with an older Joe, now played by Gainsbourg, with her watchful sad face showing the character’s unsatisfied hunger. It seems more von Trier’s script than any great social taboos that cause Joe to go into free fall in a world that becomes more kinky and sinister.

About as gripping as its title.

The post-end-credits introduction of another bullet-headed genre-flick icon as the possible villain for the next instalment (already slated for production) means that Johnson may finally get a worthy foil. So: Same time next year, then?

The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.

A delightful family movie that packs an emotional punch.

Since "To pay or not to pay" is banal, the plot takes the popular path of excess to a brain-boggling twist (to be specific would be to ruin what fun there is), then spirals off in a series of ever more unlikely gyrations, until a heretofore decent picture has gone completely south into fantasy-land.

Take 13 Tzameti for what it is: a tightly screwed shocker, a suspense tour de force that proceeds through a harrowing chain of events with alarming confidence.

A larger discomfort with Extract is an ambivalent attitude about comedy and social class. Mocking an officious middle-manager is always fair game; ridiculing blue-collar workers who resent their mindless jobs just feels mean.

Abominable has charms to soothe the savage child.

By the time the film reaches its big mushy climax, in which the slackers discover their inner caring during a dopey medieval role-playing battle, the movie starts to feel something like a pleasure again.

The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.

Jacobs is a competent director but he doesn't bring anything extra to this shell game of a narrative.

A lot of things are said; a lot is not. It was a dark and stormy night. An audience walks into a film – and stays for the whole 90 minutes, because it is worth it.

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

Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.

This Altman-esque drama about the rise and fast fall of the 1988 presidential hopeful has a lot on its mind – morality in public office, the state of journalism, the often paradoxical nature of running a campaign based on lies – but spends too little energy dissecting those thoughts.

A deceptively light and impeccably structured comedy that owes a clear cinematic debt to others -- Ernst Lubitsch, Woody Allen and Whit Stillman among them -- yet still manages to speak with a fresh and distinctive voice. [21 Aug. 1998, p.D4]

There are multiple endings of various potency, secondary characters who bizarrely drop out of the proceedings, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the real-life tension that drove so much of the trial’s backroom machinations, with the most fascinating element of the central Goring-Kelley relationship reduced to a quick line of end-credit text.

Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.

An amiable crowd-pleaser, nothing more, nothing less. [27 Nov 1987]

Representation is the crutch this latest limp and derivative comic-book movie leans on – a reason for critics and audiences who want to champion diversity to simply overlook how dull and hideous-looking this latest franchise (of many) is.

Munn’s exquisitely readable face, which cycles through emotional states with delicate flickers, is Bateman’s strongest asset. Her weakest is her storytelling.

The actors do their darndest but the script puts few psychological thrills in the thriller, leaving them to work in a vacuum. [27 June 1992]

Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.

Adolph Green always said that they based the warm, maternal and loyal main character on Holliday herself; perhaps that's why she manages to more than save it, she makes it very worthwhile to watch. [21 Jul 1990]

If this review had to be in pantomime, it would be me head-banging and busting out some gnarly air guitar for an hour straight – and loving every minute of it. That’s how much fun this concert film is. But be warned: If you’ve never rocked-out to a Metallica song, or don’t even know what throwing the horns is, this movie is not for you.

Ultimately, the movie suffers from the same fate as its characters. That first explosive scene creates a state of shock, leaving everyone and everything to drift about in a numbing vacuum.

Although the subject, school bullying, is as fresh as today's headlines, the treatment isn't. Despite the efforts of an impressive cast, the film starts out stale and then just gets tedious.

Individually, Dawson and Cassel each generate plenty of screen heat, but, together in that one bedroom scene, their chemistry is downright explosive, so much so that it seems we have strayed into a whole different movie, and dearly want to stay there.

This is a movie guaranteed to turn you into a vacillating commitment-phobe, embracing it passionately one moment and then backing off cautiously the next.

Some kind of mess...terpiece.

Unfortunately, despite Egerton’s most dedicated efforts to pump some life into his hero, Rogers is the blandest kind of capitalist hero. Meanwhile, the various Soviets and Brits caught up in the Tetris antics are just one graphics card away from being Super Mario Bros.-ready boss-level villains.

This picture will linger, stuck in those corners of the mind you may not care to visit, where the stranger you meet lies in the bed beside you, or stares back from the mirror before you, and where the comfort offered is nothing but cold. [14 June 1991]

Velvet Buzzsaw is ultimately a matter of taste – and mine was to spit it right back out.

So Dead Snow fulfills one zombie-movie prerequisite. It's different.

Perhaps a first-time director can be forgiven, like those teenage puppeteers, for not knowing how to get a message across without wearing it on his sleeve.

If nothing else can be said of Dogville, it's a film that is like nothing else.

While the film’s ending expects audiences to untie some impossible fan-theory knots, the climax is also packed to the rafters with murder and mayhem and even a little on-the-nose movie-theatre nostalgia, resulting in moments that demand fits of laughter, gasps and, of course, screams.

What remains “indie” about At Any Price is that this is an unabashed social-message film – one that plays out like a cross between the agribusiness exposé "Food, Inc." and Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman."

Bourne fans will find much to enjoy about The Bourne Legacy, even if they are forced to do without the title character.

One of Blomkamp’s most unlikely conceits is a machine – apparently standard-issue in all of Elysium’s made-to-order McMansions – that can heal all injuries and infections at the flick of a switch. He could have used one to fix Elysium’s battered and broken screenplay.

No one can doubt there's a consistency of vision in Russell's work, though at times it seems more the vision of a great set designer than a great film director. [8 Oct 1988]

There are individual sequences alternately amusing and touching. [08 May 1984]

An hallucinatory mix of the imagined and the real, all revolving around the mystery at the cold heart of the tale.

Army life sugar-coated in self-serving memoir. [25 Mar 1988]

Ghostbusters for the pre-teen set, a cartoon of a cartoon. Is there some residual charm? Not much. Are the special effects special? Not too. [19 Aug 1987]

At times the film seems like a horrifying Nancy Drew story or a more sophisticated Scooby-Doo episode without the dog and with a face full of spiders.

Whether or not this flies in the unforgiving fan world remains to be seen. But for those less intemperately invested, The Wolverine will come as a welcome and bracing surprise: An almost human-scaled superhero movie about a guy who goes to die in Japan and ends up beating his way back to life.

This is a much more conventional film with fewer pretensions to high art. Violence exploited for mere entertainment is so commonplace it hardly seems worth noting.

Smith’s charisma isn’t always an asset to the movie though. Unlike the unknown Macchio in the original Kid, there’s nothing vulnerable about Smith except for his diminutive size, which is its own problem.

With its confined setting and its existential predicament, the picture owes an ostensible debt to the likes of Pinter and Kafka and Pirandello -- you know, Six Characters in Search of an Author, or, failing that, just getting the hell out of this weird place.

The movie has a great Duke Ellington score, and director Martin Ritt tries for a Beat sensibility that's not authentic, but is acceptable. [30 Dec 1995]

Once the riffs are over and put into place, Mo' Better Blues is approximately one-third fabulous, one-third boring, and one-third infuriating. [06 Aug 1990]

The narrative is tightly written, fast-paced and delivered with a scorching, emotional intensity by the actors. The timeline – which moves from the dank cellars of wartime Poland, to concert halls in 1970s Berlin and Sephi’s staid music academy in Jerusalem, is smoothly interwoven. Still, the drama seems overwrought at times, even cliché.

A lively, dashing and amusing motion picture that smartly spoofs and slyly celebrates the James Bond spy-film franchise.

Underneath this clangy, pounding, speedy, thin, energetic confetti-shower of a movie is a collection of missed opportunities begging to be noticed.

I won’t presume to understand what passes for popular taste. But seeing an audience in the tens of thousands lose their mind for Hart’s jokes about hating his family and the hypothetical perils of dating a woman with only one shoulder, I can’t help but feel skeptical.

The process of remembering that drives the book is gone from the film, boiled away until all that's left is the mundane residue of memory - mere incidents strung together as plot.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Apatow wants to be taken seriously. Funny People is the attempt to raise his game a notch – and it fails.

Stripped of absolutely everything Absolute Beginners has borrowed from absolutely everything else, the entire film would fit absolutely snugly into a cockroach's shoe. [19 Apr 1986]

What the protagonists do is simply wrong, and their attempts to fix it are first tepid, then unpleasant.

Jane Campion makes a beeline for the repressed sexuality, and loses the nuance. [17 Jan 1997]

Director Bharat Nalluri sets a pace as punishing as the title character's – the film is mainly a quick romp – even if he does indulge in some unnecessarily Dickensian melodrama along the way.

Has a refreshingly different twist: What we have here is a "what if" comedy.

Nearly everyone in this movie, and nearly everything that happens in it, is awful. Vile. Nasty. But it is a nastiness that sticks.

The Lost City believes it is a lot more fun than it actually is. The movie isn’t a guilty pleasure so much as a pleasure-lite guilt trip – a relentlessly and eventually exhausting middle-ground effort that is made all the more frustrating because it is so very close to reaching the platonic ideal of shlock.

Sorry, this one doesn't really work at all, but don't blame the workers.

What we have here is a pretty good TV show huffed and puffed into a rather mediocre film.

What elevates Foy's impressive first feature (he also served as editor and composer of the dark, whimsical score) above, say, your average "unsolved mystery" TV episode, is the emotional connection he gradually builds between Duerr and the elusive creator of the Toynbee tiles.

The problem is it’s not that bizarre a love triangle and the interesting tangle of supporting stories and complications get short shrift by focusing there in the second half.

The Beautiful Game shines because of Nighy.

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

A Bond movie is all about delivering on expectations: to enjoy it you have to be pleased rather than frustrated by its predictability. In that regard, Spectre, Daniel Craig’s fourth outing as Bond and the second directed by Sam Mendes, can be deemed a solid success: not as darkly stylish as "Skyfall" but not as stupidly grim as "Quantum of Solace" either.

Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody.

Tireless, ultra-talented and exceedingly charismatic, he emerges as a survivor in a film that spends too much time on his accolades and not enough on deciphering what makes this treasure of an octogenarian tick.

The ironic twist at the movie’s end is a nice touch. The Invisibles, about humans as living ghosts, needs to be seen, and believed.

What I see is a social media influencer before social media, a person who did whatever it took to keep us looking, especially if that meant she didn’t have to look too deeply at herself.

The climax also comes with a nifty little kicker.