Filmmaker Evan Jackson Leong, who began following Lin when he played for Harvard, also emphasizes the importance of Lin’s tight bonds with his family and the importance of his evangelical Christianity (“I only play for God,” Lin says).

The film makes up for any shortcomings with witty writing and vivid, brightly coloured set pieces. Children will be entertained, and parents won’t regret tagging along.

Oblivion is an okay blockbuster, a multimillion-dollar exercise in competence.

Jurassic World never breaks out of its own confines of homage and imitation. The movie ends up as an awkward, ungainly hybrid: large, but inconsequential.

Like most of Simon's work, the situation is gaggy and mechanical and predictable, but Miss Hawn may succeed in persuading you it's a screwball classic. [19 Dec 1980]

While directors Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion want to have their laughs and horror, too, the film is something of a zombie itself: half-alive and bloody, but lacking any heart.

Assassination Tango is about one commanding performance, fascinating to watch but not strong enough to redeem the muddled story line on which it hangs.

Bring on the sequel please, because, as fine as Denzel is, director Antoine Fuqua’s The Equalizer is not so good – a self-consciously stylized, stop-and-start hodgepodge of Death Wish street vengeance, Bond-style Russian villainy, and moodily shot Boston locale.

The humour may not be wickedly black, but once in a while it’s amusingly beige.

The movie takes its time to get going, which can be frustrating given how thin the material feels along the way. But that patience also works in its favour during a lovely final act that doesn’t come off as maudlin and forced as this sort of melodrama usually tends to.

There's the roller-disco music and skating, which isn't so much hot as a hoot.

Judged by the standards of the comedies that preceded it (and only by those standards), Ghostbusters is relatively sophisticated: it substitutes the silly for the gross, and even manages at the odd moment to take silliness into the sublime. [9 June 1984]

Even the worst homophobes are viewed as simply potholes on the highway to enlightenment, and Maggie herself appears on TV only long enough to get the channel changed.

Ultimately the film is as much about the mother and parenting as it is on the hot-plating Doogie Howser. It’s good food for thought, even if the film doesn’t quite come together.

Fitfully daring, Pumpkin isn't quite sure what it's about -- the tone bounces between thudding satire and toothless camp parody -- but it's definitely a bad-mannered child of our times.

If you appreciate a writer/director and actor who swing for the fences and chase after big questions (Are we cogs in the machine of the universe? If so, can we alter our fate? Or is everything super random?), this has a dreamlike beauty that may catch you in its spell.

For those who don't know his (Lelouch's) work, And Now Ladies and Gentlemen will be fun because his style is unique and unpredictable. But for those who have known him in better form, this one is not a must-see.

In a virtuoso turn, Tommy Lee Jones delivers an over-the-top performance, but it works for the obvious reason that everything about Cobb is oversized. Except for one commodity - there's not an ounce of sentimentality on the guy (nor in this film - it too is unlikely to please the crowd). [23 Dec 1994]

If the external threat in the plot were a little more credible, this would be an annoying distraction. But in the context of the rest of Gloria, it's a safe strategy: When not watching Sharon Stone act, audiences can fall back on just watching Sharon Stone.

At two hours, After the Wedding stretches out family flux too thinly and waits too long to reveal the final, devastating secret that we already know.

The important things first: It's always a relief to come out of an Adam Sandler movie without a case of hives, and you can comfortably attend Anger Management without prophylactic antihistamines.

Schroeder’s film makes a convincing case that the fact that the characters have never been licensed has a lot to do with why it is still so precious to so many people.

First things first: As one of my wise editors noted, no person who can flash as many teeth as Julia Roberts should ever star in a movie called Mona Lisa Smile.

Well-intentioned but emotionally straitjacketed.

A third of the way into Soul Plane, maybe earlier if you're in the right mood or with the wrong company, you might actually start to enjoy disliking the movie. Like, say, Prince's "Purple Rain," certain Joan Crawford movies, and Leslie Nielsen at his best worst, the film inspires cathartic ridicule.

The plot is bare-bones stuff, weak in story line and bereft of motivation.

At its most heightened state of geek arousal, Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune imagines an alternate pop-cultural universe where an unmade movie changed everything.

Apparently, whole layers of the projected storyline did not survive the editing suite. Actors Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Barry Pepper and Amanda Peet were all part of the original script. Their footage ended on the cutting-room floor. Lucky them.

In real life, of course, nobody can be hypnotized against their will. To be mesmerized is to willingly succumb. Just keep that in mind when you head off to see something like Now You See Me 2.

Around the World is stuffed with charming moments, yet often feels disjointed or purposeless.

The film is so incessant on bolstering Cave’s repute and noble struggle with the art of songwriting that it can’t help but seem bloated and self-important. Sometimes seriousness should speak for itself.

The film's best and most carefully shaded performance belongs to Bacon.

As a dystopian teen movie, Macdonald’s adaptation of Meg Rosoff’s young adult novel is refreshingly free of digital apocalyptics and unnervingly prone to random violence.

Short on wrenching passion, but never less than competent, Les Misérables is merely passable. It might have been titled Les Compétents. [01 May 1998, p.C4]

Having managed Berlin rather gracefully, Race often plods along the home front.

There is a Hitchcockian creepiness in Finley's mad-as-hell teen drama.

The problem with Flash of Genius is that a windshield wiper is an awfully thin mechanism on which to hang a feature movie.

Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.

Just as John Carpenter seems to generate box-office smashes incidentally to his search for intriguing shades of blue, Miller is so enthused with his camera angles that the movie has ended before he's aware there's only 20 lines of dialogue in it and not a single character better defined than Max's mutt. [22 May 1982]

This solid intellectual biography painstakingly follows the development of Arendt’s thought as she was forced to flee her privileged surroundings in German academia, where she was Martin Heidegger’s student and lover, to France and then the United States.

The action half of the action-comedy tends to lean more towards slapstick than shoot-’em-up, even when heads are exploding, and while it’s capably handled, the movie is at its best when its two leads are bickering in the car. Stuber is probably the only ride share where talking should be strongly encouraged.

That there are no surprises (jumps, yes, surprises, no) should surprise no one – Will Smith movies must uplift the human spirit and reaffirm our best instincts while reassuring us that our ticket money has been well invested.

There's a quaintness about the film, from the animation style to the wholesome jokes – there's not much in the way of asides for the adults in the audience – that is refreshing for this pop-culture-obsessed animation era.

We feel the death on the platform so acutely not because it’s a stupid act of randomness, but hardly untypical racist violence, but because we’ve come to love this man.

What benefits the picture early on, giving it a casual air, becomes cloying in the later going, making it feel like a smug exercise in mutual admiration.

A drama with honourable intentions that feels like a bit of a fib.

Dalio’s script doesn’t always flow as smoothly as the camera work, but an air of calm authenticity should leave audiences touched, in a good way.

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.

As Jamie, an American drug tourist desperately seeking a hallucinogenic cactus, Michael Cera pours kerosene on his wet blanket slacker persona.

In a film where two leads are alone on screen for almost the full running time, that is the true catastrophe. When at last Alex and Ben lock eyes, we should not be looking around them to see what the dog is up to.

Nevertheless, in mid-reverie, there's no denying the pleasure in falling under its little spell -- till human voices wake us, and we frown.

Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra’s reimagining of the lives of lost peoples is compelling, but, despite many languorous images of river and jungle, this remains a bookish examination of the themes.

A typically hypnotic, slow-coiling drama from 80-year-old French filmmaker, Jacques Rivette.

It’s frequently funny and entertaining enough, but its insights are far from revolutionary.

At its most interesting when it shows the lives of women and children prisoners, the film has the feel of a movie-of-the-week cliché when it returns to Julia's improbable crime.

Since there's no evidence in the film that Green teaches his students how to compose, improvise or experiment with the music, presumably the next wave will come from somewhere else.

It’s all fun enough to watch for the sheer over-the-topness of the performances, and Horovitz does his level best at working around some heavy spatial limitations, but there’s no getting around the fact that, ultimately, My Old Lady feels as stubbornly stuck in that expansive and underlit apartment as Madame Girard herself, and you may find yourself bolting for a lungful of relief.

Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

Part revisionist history and part deeply grim fairy tale, writer-director Mirrah Foulkes’s feature debut wants to be as clever as it is fiendish, as funny as it is dark, and as progressive as it is exploitative – but such goals collide instead of coalesce.

Johnny Dangerously belongs to the comic genre known as the Dumb Movie, but it's a pretty smart example of how to be stupid. [22 Dec 1984]

If you suspend your disbelief for some of the weaker plot points and unnecessary use of the c-word, the film is palatable.

The stunts in Hooper resemble a collection of greatest hits. It's nice to have all those great songs together but the emotional impact of the first time you heard the single on the radio is gone. [25 July 1978]

Political thrillers with flawed heroes demand a different potion, one that mixes the grit of reality with the seeds of excitement until they reach a critical mass and explode. In that sense, for all its strengths and good intentions, The Debt owes a debt to the wrong genre – Birkenau wasn't fantasy; too often, this movie is.

Of course, bad writing can undo the best actor. If you doubt that, check out De Niro's soliloquy at the film's climax. He's acting the heck out of the words, but they're still dragging him down with them.

Yet these are precisely the sort of pictures that divide audiences over a central question: Are those strings being honestly played or just shamefully pulled? Of course, the answer determines whether you feel moved or merely manipulated.

Does not disappoint expectations: This is not a case of dumbing down literature; it's mediocrity aimed for and successfully achieved.

Almost a comedy, though not an entirely successful one: It's too acerbic to be funny and too detached to be really moving.

The treat in Trick or Treat is that the film has a sense of humor about itself, and a genuine feeling for the travails that follow puberty. [29 Oct 1986, p.D10]

Bushwick is an unpolished work, but there's an adrenalin charge, sure thing. It's close combat and it's closer than most Americans might wish to believe.

Suspense picture veteran Curtis Hanson (he directed The Bedroom Window and Bad Influence and wrote The Silent Partner) disguises the contrivances with energy and admirable performances, and the audience squeals and cheers on cue. [13 Jan 1992]

There's a continuing delicacy to [Singer's] direction that gives the audience room to breathe and reason to linger. This may not be a grownup movie but -- unlike the Star Wars franchise or the Batman sequels -- it is a movie that grownups can watch minus the requisite bottle of Excedrin.

The brazenness of her actions and opacity of her emotions suggest a tragic heroine in the grand tradition – the novel is the basis for the Shostakovich opera of the same title – but the film lacks the propulsive drive to make her fate moving.

Hathaway may be in a royal rut, but the tiara seems to fit.

It’s high quality sweetness, as carefully prepped and prettily presented as any of the meals, cocktails and home decorating binges partaken of our quartet of love-locked converts to the way of the heart.

You'll laugh, though you might hate yourself in the morning.

Some of the later scenes capture the spirit of majestic sweetness of "Close Encouners of the Third Kind" and "E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial" period, but the elevated moments don't last. They're relentlessly undermined by the f-bombs, groin kicks, and anal-probing jokes.

What's singular is that it was funded by the current Thai royal family and directed by a royal prince, Chatrichalerm Yukol.

Like a lot of well-staged parties, though, the affair peaks shortly after the introductions, and then devolves into intrigues, fights and mayhem.

Yet, for all that's wrong here, one thing is wonderfully, blissfully right, and his name is Tom Hanks.

An amiable action-comedy, amiable enough that the laughs come in a steady drizzle if not a torrent, and that the action is something blissfully less than the usual full-out assault on our battered senses.

A little bit like a barroom brawl: noisy, senseless, silly but somehow watchable.

A typical mixture of the artful and the repellent.

There is one thing you can say for the new horror film Phantasm (at the York): it certainly has its moment. [5 May 1979]

The director veers off course and heads straight for mediocrity. It's a disappointing ride.

An overdose of sympathy makes for a wispy picture, likeable certainly but lacking in crispness and clarity.

Even if the effect of watching two mega-screen icons banter back and forth for an hour and change doesn’t add up to much, Clooney and Roberts still have a sort of sparkle between them. It is the exact sort of wholly inoffensive, if bland, charisma that’s perfect for low-key, weekend watching (made even better in your pyjamas and on your couch).

The Dark Tower is King’s ultimate roller coaster – twisting and stomach-clenching and terrifying but, above all, fun. If only this version was as thrilling a ride.

Galifianakis grounds the film with a guileless sensitivity and bursts of ingenuity beneath his character’s buffoonish nature. Wiig and Wilson struggle at times with the offbeat tone, but the stacked supporting cast pick up the slack. Kate McKinnon shines as Galifianakis’s dead-eyed fiancée with all the personality of fresh roadkill, and Jason Sudeikis’s pencil-moustached hitman and Leslie Jones’s FBI agent steal their scenes.

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.

Cotton Club lacks the resonance of The Godfather; it's similar stylistically, but everything is coarsened, caricatured. What Coppola has achieved, however, is what Sergio Leone was after in Once Upon a Time in America when he tried to celebrate America by recycling the cliches of its gangster films. [14 Dec 1984]

One Hour Photo is two-thirds of a movie -- the last act is a bit of a shambles.

Yes, it's all quite mad, Max, with a shaggy-dog ending to boot. But this giddiness, its go-for-broke/what-the-hellness, also is the film's strength.

Overall, it’s a film that is not great but just fine. Its biggest limitations are the ones it places on its own characters.

It's the sort of big thought that makes a small point, which is precisely the problem with Life in a Day. A documentary that looks to give this notion visual form, it strives awfully hard for depth but, more often than not, comes off too shallow.

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

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]