Alan Parker has directed the film as if he were a sniper: you never know when you're going to get hit next, but from the first moments you know you're being aimed at. The opening, with Hayes taping hash to his chest only to be apprehended at the airport, must have looked like standard stuff in Oliver Stone's script, but on screen it's unadulterated adrenalin, filmed with fast cuts timed in counterpoint to the sound of Hayes' pounding heart. [25 Oct 1978]

In a smartly written, evenly wrought drama, the newly discovered wunderkind Rod Paradot stunningly portrays a troubled youth who makes Eminem’s 8 Mile protagonist look like a boy scout in comparison.

Some of these scenes are masterful – and sometimes difficult to watch. But the real horror – mass revenge killings by the Nazis, including the obliteration of the entire village of Lidice – takes place off-screen.

Pugh’s fierceness and Garfield’s ready access to emotion make them a good match; the dialogue is witty and it’s a pleasure just to listen to them talk. Most importantly, everyone involved is serious about and committed to and yes, in love with the story.

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.

If the arrival of Beowulf is any indication, movie actors will soon all be replaced by lifelike, digitally animated facsimiles. The good news is that some of them might still sound like John Malkovich.

An unusually charming dark comedy about an actor teetering on the edges of reality, fantasy and career. The subject of dementia is explored and mined, not made fun of.

It’s a working-class story, albeit one that doesn’t involve officially recognized "work,” which raises questions about police corruption and racially slanted drug policies. Speaking of questions, why is a white character being held up as a shining symbol of the black man’s plight? Something to consider. Otherwise, White Boy Rick has much to say yes to.

The latest adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel is not necessarily a bad film, just an unnecessary one. Given that we’ve already been treated to about a dozen film and TV (and anime!) adaptations, there is little that Munden and his creative team offer that is essential.

So that great start turns all clunky and dull and, you know, mediocre. Still, you'll love Emma. Emma is about as cute as a kid can get.

Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.

The main flaw is an over-abundance of villains, a bout of narrative greediness that sees them marching out of their lairs like so many evil-doers-on-parade.

In keeping with the purloining spirit of sequeldom, Woo plunders his own past. [24 May 2000, p.R1]

By this point in his career, star Nicolas Cage does crazy like no one else, but his descent into insanity here – not too far from how his character acts at the beginning of the film, really – can't elevate Taylor's juvenile take on adulthood.

A beautifully shot, well-acted, and worthy-to-a-fault Second World War survivor story that only intermittently achieves the kind of emotional impact for which it aims.

Both Page and Wood hand in tough yet delicate performances as, over the course of a year, adversity shapes their characters.

It is the kind of screenplay that erases itself with one minute of second thought.

Will she give up? Or will she fight? Ah, who cares. Sharknado isn’t Shakespeare and The Shallows isn’t deep. School’s out, schlock’s in – no lessons here.

This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.

Farrell looks so stymied we feel for the guy -- and when the door closes on A Home at the End of the World, that's the only feeling in town.

Traditionally, Christmas movies are about the power of the holiday spirit to conquer all in the name of seasonal detente, and The Best Man Holiday, although sprinkled with bad behaviour and salty bon mots, is traditional right to the twinkly-tipped top of the tree.

Director David Mackenzie (Pine's collaborator on Hell or High Water) dabbles in some interesting aesthetic experiments – including a doozy of a single-take scene in the film's opening minutes – but the narrative is cut, dried and left to rot under the soggy Scottish skies.

What always feels genuine, movingly so, are the faces of the school children caught up in their account of the unforgotten past.

A great-looking, fast-paced film and, to his credit, Bouchareb doesn't bathe the F.L.N. in a completely flattering light. But narrowing the focus to one central conflicted character and tightening the time frame might have given the audience something more to ponder than the action of a historical revenge thriller.

Tower Heist is as over-inflated as those Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that are featured in the movie's climax. Also similarly, it's entertaining in its own predictable way.

Untamed Heart is a gentle fable, a contemporary re-working of myths that will always cut close to the bone - myths about love and magic, about the silence that speaks volumes and the peace that surpasses understanding. It's certainly not a perfect film, but there's a sweet integrity to the writing and a stern refusal to compromise itself, to bow to the dictates of formula. [12 Feb 1993]

Five Armies only feels truly entertaining when it embraces the arch silliness of its material; like when 92-year-old actor Christopher Lee whirls about in combat with a handful of ghosts.

Don't Move comes to seem as static as its title -- we just don't learn enough to compensate for feeling so little.

Unfortunately no amount of self-confidence can sustain All Is True, Branagh’s stab at filling in the blanks of Shakespeare’s retirement, about which there is little officially known.

The movie never actually gets to winter: The title is just a clumsy play on the family's surname.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

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.

Cronenberg offers a light touch to the material, spiking the deeply depressing dystopia with a sibling-rivalry battle royale that eagerly, if sometimes wobblily, shifts between sharp humour and slippery sentimentality.

Unfortunately, the film promises more fun and laughs than it delivers, and this meal tastes like too many that have gone before it.

The script, despite doses of irreverent humour, feels manipulative, and the music is oblivious to nuance, with a spectacular misuse of Johnny Cash singing "Hurt."

Godzilla vs. Kong is a ridiculous movie made even more ridiculous by a distinct lack of care in its conception and execution. But it is also the kind of cinematic assault that delivers just the right jolt to the most base sensibilities hiding within our lizard brains. You walk away dazed but bemused.

It is probably silly and certainly counterproductive to reject what Cry Freedom is merely because of what it is not. If it is not a great political film, it is an honorable attempt to add to political debate; if it is not a definitive biography of a great man, it does contain a mesmerizing incarnation of Biko in the person of U.S. actor Denzel Washington. [06 Nov 1987]

We leave this movie hoping to see Miller and Lewis together again soon.

No Hard Feelings tries so very hard to shock – to score that collective audience gasp – that it ends up clutching its own pearls.

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.

Inoffensive in its simplicity; its high, if naive, spirits send viewers out into the all too real streets clothed in the glow of a fantasy well-spun.

It's the perfect sort of movie to have playing on a television in the corner of a rec room during a low-key beer and pizza party.

Most of the cast (along with director Joe Mantello) have been recruited from the stage play, and they all do a fine job of trimming their performances for the screen.

The Bostonians, from the novel by Henry James, is the story of their relationship, one of the strangest in literature. Unfortunately, that strangeness has survived the transfer to the screen less than intact, and satiric oddity has been replaced by romantic banality. Redgrave's performance - red-eyed, quivering, opalescent - is peerless, the one incontrovertible reason to see the film. [23 Nov 1984]

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.

Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 1984]

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

In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the times may be hard but the apocalypse is soft. Welcome to the anti-"Melancholia."

In the final frames, and the final analysis, Alien gets the worst of both worlds - it's boring and it's messy. The title may be "cubed," but the movie looks awfully square. [22 May 1992]

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.

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

The main attraction here are the characters: well-observed animals of the zoo or the barnyard.

Definition of redundant: A formulaic Hollywood pic that calls itself Déjà Vu.

There are only two erotic scenes between the two women, and Macneill, Sevigny and Stewart handle them with conviction: For all the horror of her situation, Lizzie needed some larger motivation to wield her axe. Lizzie dramatically provides it.

The film never catches fire, but White and Strong do their very best to give it a spark.

Creepshow is probably not everything the fans of each horrormeister hoped it would be (it is not, for example, in the same league as Cavalcanti's great anthology film, Dead of Night), but it's probably enough.[10 Nov 1982]

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.

Mr. Holland's Opus is all heart. I suppose a brain cell or two might have helped to win over laggards such as me, but no matter. It sure means well and, in a note-perfect world, strikes its basic chords with a naif's true conviction. [19 Jan 1996]

The film’s middling but good intentions might be enough for the work to skate by unnoticed – but then Leder constructs an unforgivably sentimental finale that builds to a cameo from Bader Ginsburg herself. At that point, we must object.

An overqualified cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio and an uncredited Nick Nolte) brings more gravity than required to repeated “this is me staring you down” confrontations.

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

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."

Essentially a journey from point A to point B, a simple classic plotline on which to hang a collection of set pieces -- some delightful, some wacky, some tediously hackneyed.

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

At this point, the effect of Myers' one-man Sixties love-in already feels less shagadelic than just shagged out.

Shot mostly at night, in high-contrast images, punctuated by rock-video collages, Intacto is nothing if not hip, but its questions are more coffee-shop hypothetical than genuinely profound.

With its exotic setting and its beautiful cast, this Dangerous Liaisons is lovely rather than wicked.

Thanks to Iseman and Kwiatkowski’s heartwarming chemistry, Collins’ sharp dialogue and Vuckovic’s pointed direction, you find yourself running in step with two young women who are smart, interesting, brave and brilliantly capable. And that makes confronting the realities of their mission a little less terrifying.

So despite the conventionalism of the film’s final minutes, I’d like to raise a glass of Chardonnay and toast Bridget Jones’s Baby on its (mostly) hilarious, and long-anticipated, homecoming.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

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

Finding deep meaning and satisfaction from this story will be difficult, but if it’s style over substance you’re after, then you’ll revel in the comedic chic.

Even those more neutral about Pearl Jam will find it impossible not to enjoy director Cameron Crowe's driving retrospective of the band's stage-diving 20 years, at least on some level.

So why does Savages feel so calculated, cutesy, free of suspense and trashy only in the uninteresting sense? No doubt, Stone is trying... but it all feels more like flexing atrophied muscles rather than creating a believable experience.

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

The result is as off-putting as biting into a confection in which the sugar has been replaced by salt.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make heads or tails of this Byzantine thing. [22 May 1996]

Emmerich succeeds only in making his previous venture, the marginal Stargate, look positively inspired by comparison.

Ultimately, Sliding Doors becomes a victim of its own cleverness, shutting down all that early promise.

There will be occasional tears, there must be frequent laughs and the whole contrived structure has the calculated quaintness of Ye Olde Pub at a EuroDisney theme park.

There is some drama here, all right. But the curtain can’t draw down soon enough.

This time the script makes scant metaphoric use of the mall. In fact, metaphors are generally in short supply here. Scares too.

Though often fascinating and beautiful to look at, Surviving Progress falls into the adapting-a-book-into-a-movie trap. Trying to do too much too fast.

There are some genuinely witty lines, but The Hand is no comedy. In the end, it must rank as one of the more original efforts to find danger in mundane places. [18 May 1981]

Bold, intelligent and provocative.

A drawing-room murder mystery that had some extremely funny moments. [24 June 1978]

Add it all up, including the nifty twist at the end, and what we have here is a fun Hollywood flick with a good head on its shoulders.

As the medley of violence continues, Stone’s mugging goes from giddily sinister to hammy and exhausting. Same goes for Nobody 2, and also the post-John Wick wave of action movies it’s part of.

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.

Ranks as one of the most elaborate, stunt- and effects-filled summer movies currently in the theatres. Unfortunately for its box-office prospects, it's also in Russian, which narrows its audience to action junkies with a foreign film bent.

Though it's undoubtedly ingenious, for such a clever movie, it's a shame Rubber couldn't be more fun.

A happy, healthy, bouncing baby of a movie. [23 Nov 1994]

A post-tour lawsuit levelled against “motherly” Madonna by two dancers is barely dealt with; the Express Yourself singer herself isn’t interviewed. As a result, the affecting film is absent of the truth or dare it had the potential for.

Intended as food for thought, but all we really get is a light snack -- the kind that's heavier in presentation than in substance.

Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.

Truly strange, and often captivating.

Think of it as "Cheers" without the beer, or "Friends'" Central Perk with razors and sharper dialogue.

A movie of its kind and of its time -- functional, professional, slickly manufactured and slouching toward consciousness -- I, Robot is a perfect slave to mechanical convention.