By multiplying the number of body-swaps, the script seems to have accidentally increased its plot padding, too, resulting in a mushy mess that is only fitfully charming. But when the film does work, it delivers the kind of thank-goodness-it’s-Friday success story that will warm the heart of every long-time Lindsay Lohan fan out there (we are legion).

The ensemble is unwieldy and the attendant yarn much too cluttered.

So the promise of a proud director comes to nothing, and all my rooting goes for naught. Maybe, sadly, the metaphoric night that falls on Manhattan has finally begun to descend on Lumet -- and he's going gentle into it.

Watching 9 , we know how 8 feels. Sci-fi fans will find heaven in Shane Acker's feature-film debut.

So the interrogative title is left to hover over the ending, as it does over all those tension-filled places near and far. Speaking as a foolish man, I had high hopes for these wise women – given the historic alternative, I still do.

Made for ironicists, Turbo Kid, in its endearingly goofy way, says good things about the power reserves of our childhood – an inner superhero we can call upon when needed.

How does it all play up here in colder and more secular climes? In a word -- melodramatically.

A resonant journalistic cautionary tale gets packaged as a hokey thriller in Kill the Messenger, a movie with a message that isn’t nearly as urgent as it needs to be.

This little movie – it's only 83 minutes – seems so determined to if not avoid, then only caress the tropes of slacker films that it commits the worst sin for a comedy: It's boring.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

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.

Just like its mobile incarnation, The Angry Birds Movie 2 simply pelts you with loud, shrieking diversions. The filmmaking has levelled up, but you’re still wasting your time.

Fortunately, Midwinter Break stars two seasoned actors who are not even close to the winter of their careers. Both bring grace and gravitas to their characters, conveying their personal crises with humanity.

For most of the movie, Murray desperately throws in schtick after schtick to try to keep the film afloat (Meatballs doesn't deserve him, and he certainly doesn't deserve it), but when facing Makepeace, who isn't allowed to do anything but trade a petulant pout for a wait-'til-the-sun-shines-Nellie smile, he caves in under the sentimental good cheer and becomes a nice guy, a role he is not especially suited to play. [2 July 1979]

Juice takes a black director, a black cast and a black theme - ghetto youths come of age - and turns the whole exercise into a white-bread,middle-of-the-road film. You root for it to rise to the challenge, to be better than it is, but it sticks to the straight course - polished enough yet steadfastly predictable, just another sentimental slice of mean-street life. [22 Jan 1992]

Most everyone who watches The Perfection will instead be staring at the screen slack-jawed, dumbfounded at the gory silliness they endured.

Amounts to a complete misreading of Wilde, who used the conventions of artifice to lampoon artificiality. Parker totally misses the point by tacking on such cinematic curlicues -- apparently, in his eagerness to seem movie-friendly, he's too hung up on the importance of not being earnest.

If you're in the mood for tears and triumph, with a dash of exoticism, Together may well be the film for you.

The result is an indecisive and shapeless drama that never seems confident in the characters or situations it has created.

This bare-bones adaptation is more of a sop to the musical’s fans than a fully imagined movie musical.

Perhaps you can accuse all historical fiction of presentism, the sin of applying contemporary values to historical events. Why does the past interest us if not for the comparisons it provides with the present? But with the example of "The Favourite’s" wittily anachronistic romp through the 18th-century court of Queen Anne so fresh at hand, it is hard not to judge the earnest Mary Queen of Scots for its ignorance of the problem.

The mistake filmmakers Tucker and Epperlein (Gunner Palace) make here is assuming that fighters reveal their true characters in discussing their craft, when in fact just the opposite occurs.

Underneath all this mess there is some idea about the conflict between private love and public duty, between personal interests and those of the state, but the characters are so marginally observed by both the actors and the script there is no tension in the themes.

The strengths of Fugitive Pieces are its fluidity and subtlety. Emotional repression may be one of the most difficult conditions to portray honestly, and Dillane's performance of Jakob is a study in the art of creating sympathy by not asking for it.

Sometimes, a strong premise makes for a weak movie, which ends up drowning in its own clever conceit.

This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.

If you can divorce Lightyear’s shareholder-appeasing origins from its actual cinematic accomplishments, then we’re left with a rather beautiful, often thrilling, sometimes devastating adventure.

It’s an intense and sharp opening that would impress Spielberg, if he could hear the dang thing. Nearly the entire movie is torpedoed by its cranked-to-11 sound mix, with a good chunk of dialogue drowned out by whirring airplanes and myriad explosions.

The few parts of director Gene Stupnitsky’s film that feel new, then, don’t feel that new at all, from the ultra-shaggy plot to the gross-out gags that misunderstand the power that repetition might hold.

Notorious isn't, not even remotely.

What should have been the trickiest parts of this enterprise – elucidating the warm relationship between Essrog (Norton) and Minna (Bruce Willis), and Essrog’s Tourette syndrome – Norton handles with aplomb. The rest is a murky mess, unnecessarily dense and confusing for two hours, and then in the last 20 minutes, way too obvious.

The one overwhelmingly positive thing that you’ve heard about The Whale is true: Fraser does a remarkable job.

Warm Bodies is for audiences who prefer stories about mending hearts to munching brains, and ideally, for girls who aren't quite sure yet if they want a slightly scary boyfriend, or a living doll they can dress up.

In a Hollywood ecosystem obsessed with brands and inoffensive genericism, there is something admirable and fresh about a movie that has nothing on its mind other than delivering 87 minutes’ worth of gory gator-chomping thrills.

Unfortunately, the new film Matthias & Maxime arrives lacking much of the emotional urgency of the Dolan who once captured the international art-house crowd, feeling provincial in more ways than one.

Costner is Coach White, in every way imaginable.

Nominally set in some rural American backwater, The Neon Bible is a hellishly muddled reprint of Davies' personal canon - muddled enough to turn all his past virtues into present transgressions. [19 Apr 1996]

It is at once highly watchable and baffling.

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

As a story, The Star Chamber is a better comedy than mystery thriller. Even Yaphet Kotto's fine performance as the coldly objective homicide detective, Harry Lowes, can't save the film from its inherent absurdity. [5 Aug 1983]

A Perfect Day, the first English-language feature from the Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, is in many ways a remarkable film: a taut, darkly comic drama about the dilemmas of international intervention in civil war, all of it neatly symbolized by one elusive length of rope. It is also, sadly, a film much marred by its sexism.

Things you will not find in State Of Grace: a script that makes a modicum of psychological sense; a performance that isn't either desperately overwrought or numbly underplayed; and anything resembling grace. [18 Sep 1990]

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

The margins of the movie are so curious: there is an entire graduate thesis to be written about how a film starring a one-time Miss Israel features a subplot about Egypt magically erecting a giant wall within its borders, or how its 1980s aesthetics are inexplicably paired with modern moviemaking bloat. But the overriding keyword of Wonder Woman 1984 is “conventional.”...Which is fine, for now. Let’s watch these superpowered gods rumble amongst themselves. We can worry about our mortal world tomorrow.

If this were funny, The Heat would add up to your average buddy-cop comedy. Except that it’s not funny, at least not very and not often.

The direction is similarly yearning; practically begging for admiration. A sequence in which Hemsworth swishes toward the camera, piece of pie in hand, grooving to the strains of Deep Purple’s Hush, is so desperate in its attempt to appear iconic that it becomes difficult to watch head-on.

Machete is a drinking man's "The Expendables."

While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs.

Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.

Although much of the bloat can be traced to the script, via the Jennifer Weiner novel, let's not absolve director Curtis Hanson from his fat share of the blame.

Once again, then, impeccable visual detail and uniformly strong performances combine to create a polished, if slightly airless, result. [14 Aug 1998]

Days of Thunder relies on charm, loud noise and a few racing sequences to print money with Cocky's visage on the bills: there can be no suspense because there can be no possibility Cocky will lose. [29 Jun 1990, p.C1]

As the title more than hints, Love Is All You Need is no stranger to formulaic clichés, but it’s still a Bier film. There’s a sprinkling of vinegar in the treacle, a bit of ballast in fancy’s lightweight flight, and, of course, the triumph of optimism that can seem unearned in her dramas is made to measure in a comedy.

Miller’s go-for-broke visuals and his stars’ fiercely committed work allow Three Thousand to speed by on wit, energy, and gushy, bleeding-heart passion.

The larger budget has given Scanners a high-gloss Hollywood look, the editing is occasionally elegant and the special effects, which consist mostly of imaginative ways of turning actors into meat, provoke from the audience the desired response ("Oh, yuk]"), but he is careful to keep the violence within currently accepted boundaries. [19 Jan 1981]

Keating’s flattery is sincere, and so is his wish to stylishly freak you silly.

Too often, Levin confuses passion with focus, intensity with clarity, and deflating lies with discovering truths.

Over the Moon is far more interesting than its animated contemporaries, if only for the parsing of its back story.

Unfortunately, this reverent and old-fashioned biopic is a prime example of the kind of inspirational movie that is, itself, uninspired.

The performances are pitch perfect; the soundtrack is evocative; the photography is artful. Nothing is overdone, and nothing is really resolved.

The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.

No longer content with simple conservatism, this horror is downright totalitarian.

Pantera mixes its many influences into a smooth spectacle so confident and patient in its assemblage that it instantly wins you over.

If you call your movie this, you’re kinda asking for it. Some rules should apply. For example, characters should make a little sense, so when they behave in “unpredictable” ways, we can tell. But Warren Beatty, back in the director’s chair after 18 years, has gone rogue.

Spartan is all good. Then it isn't. Then it isn't at all good. Not at all.

Using a kidnapping plot to call up some old-fashioned suspense, it doesn't even get a dial tone.

As well-meaning elegies go, especially ones to working stiffs prematurely ripped from their subterranean roots, Brassed Off is the pits: It's a miner opus in a minor key.

Max Manus (the title role is played by Aksel Hennie) feels so familiar that audiences watching it are likely to experience a numbing sense of déjà vu. Nothing seems particularly fresh or involving.

And yes, the super effects are fantastic. But overall, Ra.One fails to impress.

The filmmaker’s narrative and visual approach isn’t especially novel in style, but it is compassionate, detailed and persuasive in its assembly.

Documentaries show us what can be seen; fiction features, to qualify as art, should visualize for us the usually unseen. Benny's Video, in which the thought processes of the characters are never delivered to the camera, is all surface. Its implicit claim is that by doing nothing, it is doing everything. But there are times, and this is one of them, when less is merely less. [27 Mar 1993]

Poehler’s Parks and Rec co-star Adam Scott is there, playing a sound engineer and so is John Stamos from "Full House," because, you know, that’s funny. Until it’s tiresome.

The two actors at the centre of these high-concept comedies are good, giving and game, but they’ve been cut a raw deal by trite material that belittles their very existence.

Our time is plagued with primitive directors toiling in the name of entertainment, and protected by an industry that rewards competence over excellence. They're the reason why this movie is simply average, and why all the Red Dragons look so uniformly beige.

Clearly, the screenplay is looking for some black comedy here, but Foster's direction is too earnest to locate it.

Both Mirren and Walters are successfully cast against type.

Here, Soderbergh's visual additions -- gimmicky lighting, surreal backdrops, all cued to the monologue's changing rhythms -- are more distracting than enhancing. Or maybe not. In a way, the camera's empty gimmickry points to the same tendency in Gray's verbal canters -- diverting enough but, ultimately, isn't it just sleight-of-mouth? [18 April 1997, p.C5]

Michael Shannon is an overpowering actor, and in The Iceman, the best that he can do is wrestle the movie around him to a stalemate.

Fans of Allen, the comedian, will be glad to hear there are more chuckles here than in his last film, "Bullets Over Broadway." Fans of Allen, the plot craftsman, will find a lot less discipline and imagination in the writing. In truth, Mighty Aphrodite is mighty slight.

All Day and a Night offers renewed hope for Wright acolytes, all while reaffirming a new star in Sanders.

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

There is an occasional sense of self-awareness that this is all pointless and silly, but 139 minutes is a long time for a film to forgo even delayed gratification.

But there's still Murray, who drives the idea further than it has any right to go. He energizes the loony schtick of the opening scenes. [17 May 1991]

So for now, I’m going to go lay down, chuckle at the film’s inventive ridiculousness and try not to think too hard about anything at all. It’s what Hobbs and Shaw would want.

The clever lines and themes of friendship and finding home are almost completely overwhelmed here by the breathless pace and sensory overload.

THE dead end of desperation comes about three-quarters of the way into the joyless, uphill slog that is Wayne's World 2. [11 Dec 1993]

The resolution of that conflict is dishonestly implausible, thus ruining a perfectly mediocre movie. The worst of it is that Fred the one-eyed cat was probably winking at us the whole time.

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.

Where Smallfoot shines, though, is – like Warner’s Looney Tunes and Animaniacs before it – its slapstick physical comedy.

This concoction, so bizarre to the adult mind, is actually a charming triumph where its intended under-12 audience is concerned.

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.

With some deft trimming, Being the Ricardos could be a fine HBO Sunday night movie “event,” as they used to be (or still are?) called. But as it is, this is less a cinematic thing and more an elaborate joke without a kicker. As Lucille Ball might say: waaaaaaaah.

Although all these actors prove the shrewd casting choices of Bad Moms, it is Hahn who makes this unassuming summer blockbuster something close to stellar.

The key to the franchise is that Mamma Mia! never takes itself seriously: This time out, the joy is giddy but the sentiments are cloying; the musical scenes are mainly delightful, but quieter moments often fall flat.

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

Nell is a good movie made great by the lambent presence of Jodie Foster. [23 Dec 1994]