Lacks the energy and vibrancy of the best films to come out of the city in the past few years.

There is also a parallel subplot following the fate of two Ukrainian girls caught in the sex-slave ring Kathy targets. This storyline isn't dramatically satisfying, but it does provide context and ensures the victims in this story are not portrayed simply as faces in the dark.

In a big, engrossing performance that is the film’s chief delight, the reliable Australian actress Toni Collette plays Milly.

More Than a Game is less than a movie.

Humanistic and anti-war, Memphis Belle is predictably uplifting, as is the wont of producer Puttnam, but not at the expense of good sense. These were fine kids, this exciting and intelligent film says, and it wasn't their fault society couldn't find anything better for them to do than kill or be killed. Memphis Belle is a dance of life tapped out on a tombstone. [12 Oct 1990]

Those Who Wish Me Dead is solid meat-and-potatoes fun – it knows its job, gets it done with minimal fuss and leaves its audiences full and satisfied.

This film’s charm – and it does have some – lies in the fun it has with Smith and Lawrence’s aging.

[A] soulful, fluently told, low-key comedy.

THE Lover is lyrical and sensuous, very pretty and strangely hollow. Deliberately hollow, I think - the flatness at the centre of this film is meant to correspond to the emptiness at the heart of its young protagonist. And the audience is supposed to fall into that void and hear its echo, feel the residual ache. Yet we don't - we're content to comprehend the theme without feeling it. Our emotions are spared, and, as a result, we watch the proceedings at a safe remove - appreciative yet detached, admiring yet unmoved. There's much to love about The Lover, but not enough to love passionately. [30 Oct 1992]

Exploiting a mere sliver of story from John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Ballerina concocts an especially dull origin story for an ancillary piece of Wickian lore.

The first 45 minutes of this film feel like far too much normal and not nearly enough para.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to guess which gal became the wife, which gal should have become the wife and which gal is there just to play with our heads. It's exactly like that old shell game – mildly diverting, pea-sized and otherwise hollow.

Joker reveals itself as very expensive cosplay: effective at first glance, but at its seams superficial, disposable and dishonest.

The ensemble cast clicks, and the ribbon-tied ending is always in doubt.

Never as spectacular as it promises, often funnier than it intends, Clash of the Titans is a harmless diversion - neither bad enough to annoy nor good enough to admire. [15 June 1981]

This is a movie which makes its viewers feel ripped-off just for expending a snicker. Camp, satire, sci-fi all have their own rules, rigorous ones at that, but Night of the Comet violates even the codes of trash. Point of view shots point to the wrong views, the cutting is as blunt as stone and the way Eberhardt bleeds the sex appeal out of the sex is the film's only real vision of the end of the world. [16 Nov 1984]

A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.

Carmen is a wild and unrestrained attempt to empty its director’s entire brain onto the screen, and for that it deserves recognition. But the ultimate result slips too easily between heroic effort and hot mess.

I love this movie like a person. It pierced my heart the way certain paintings or pieces of music do. The way standing at the foot of a mountain does. The first time I saw it, I had to stay in my cinema seat for five minutes after it ended, to finish crying. The second time, I vowed to watch it more analytically, but ended up crying all over again.

Much like the heroes of this story, The Retreat manages to defy expectations. And while some gory clichés still abound, it makes for a gruesome, gritty thriller that lets its leads shine.

Certainly not a stinker. Yet despite its squeaky-clean appearance, this family flick has a pervasive and decidedly stale aroma.

Fortunately, director-writer Marc Lawrence (he also created the Hugh Grant-Sandra Bullock comedy "Two Weeks Notice") manages saccharine saturation by tempering his stars' familiar appeal with enough dry wit to make this low-key romantic comedy a not-too-sticky Valentine's Day offering.

Perhaps Gabriadze has created a new genre here, but do we want to sit all day in front of an office computer and then go out and spend dollars to watch a small screen on a bigger screen for entertainment?

The Trotsky goes down easily and, for what it’s worth, is better mannered than most contemporary youth comedies.

There could be a fascinating and illuminating movie in this.

Apatow rescued big-screen comedy from its lengthy wallow in the trough of dumb-and-dumber – we have good reason to thank the guy. Until now. In This Is 40, his fingerprints are still identifiable, but not nearly as crisp. They're starting to look smudged.

As slow as Eastwood appears onscreen, he's learned a thing or two about fast pacing as a director. The action is frequent, occasionally inventive, and, aided by some searing trumpet playing on the soundtrack by Art Pepper, fairly tense. Unfortunately, he overdoes it. [23 Dec 1977]

As directed by Renny Harlin (the director of Die Hard 2), Cliffhanger passes the principal tests of an action movie - it has truly awe-inspiring stunts and special effects and many of its suspense sequences will leave you with your heart in your mouth.

It is mighty impressive, in a stupefying way, just how close Cruella’s filmmakers get to pulling the dang thing off. This isn’t to say that the movie is a success – it is embarrassing on many levels, and seems to be frequently at odds with its presumed family-friendly audience – but as far as movies that have no business existing outside sketch-comedy land go, it could’ve been worse.

It's a brilliant opening, but the difficulty with the familiar plot formula wherein a special stranger wins over a difficult household is that once the spell has been cast, all the plot tension, and much of the movie magic, dissipates.

While Bettany and Dunst are both appealing, their chemistry lacks much fizz. As it is, the pair seem less like lovers than bouncy transatlantic cousins.

Three years in the making, seems fussed over and, occasionally, a little dull.

As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.

The Roses is not nearly acrimonious, or funny, enough to justify its peculiar existence. If DeVito’s original was the cinematic equivalent of going through the divorce from hell, this new break-up feels more like a trial separation.

A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.

It helps that Quaid is so good at landing every punchline, if not punch. His Nathan may not have any sense of pain, but Quaid gives him a great sense of humour.

The initially cynical Naim suggests Tal's project is insignificant, nothing but a bottle of hope bobbing about in a sea of enmity – and so too this film.

Complete Unknown is the perfect case study of what happens when bad movies rope in good actors. In this case, it’s Rachel Weisz and Michael Shannon, two of the most talented performers working today, who get sucked into writer-director Joshua Marston’s vortex of nothingness.

A bit of a docu-mess.

Alongside a peculiar and overly saccharine intergenerational internal monologue that guides the film, The Glorias doesn’t seem to have learned from the important lessons evoked by its subject.

Think of this stylish, quirky and quite grisly feature from Marjane Satrapi as a meeting of "Psycho," "Dexter" and "Dr. Doolittle."

A gorgeous, witty, seductive movie.

First a bit about the movie, which really isn't one -- more like a 48-minute press release promoting the glories of NASCAR.

In the original Jumanji, young characters are caught inside a board game come to life; in the new sequel, it's a video game they adventure within – a rigid construct of one-note humour, special-effect shenanigans, relentless quest-based action and sledge-hammered messaging.

God Help the Girl is about aspirations and goals, musical or otherwise. Murdoch is working some things out here, gracefully on the whole. His own band has toggled between frail sincerity and pop mastery itself over the years. The former is more endearing and original, but it’s not for everyone. Which is how I might describe his film.

This is the one Murakami work that would seem an ideal candidate for the leap from page to screen. It should be a good movie. But it isn't.

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.

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]

If you like your skiing extreme but your documentaries safe, then carve a sharp turn over to Steep.

The easy back-and-forth chemistry between Affleck and Bernthal as they paint the town blood-red provides certain dividends.

The movie's last two minutes, in which they all do goofy dances and have no dialogue or script to get in their way, is easily the highlight. It's the previous 113 minutes of plot that cause problems.

Only an actor of Moore's calibre could begin to add a bit of credible flesh to these hallowed bones.

Before I Fall takes the premise of Harold Ramis’s rom-com and drains it of soul, soft touches and humorous pathos, plodding through its message of being a better person with all the sprightly grace of a sedated subterranean rodent being dragged out of a pretend hibernation den.

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.

Although a couple of performances here may earn Oscar nominations, by the time you’ve sat through the wreckage, you’re left with the sense that this really must have worked better onstage.

It Chapter Two is a film in need of a good ending. How badly it needs that ending is never in question, either. Hell, the movie cries out for help on the subject.

I wouldn't say this is laugh-out-loud risible, but there are definitely moments. Still, you might want to consider sitting through the uneven thing just to get to the ending, because that's quite something. You may love it, you may hate it, but forget it you won't.

F9 is a welcome blast of fizzy action glee. You won’t come out of it a better or smarter person – quite possibly dumber! – but you will leave satisfied that your summer movie season wasn’t a completely life- and joy-less bore.

With more superheroes, more action and more stuff blowing up than ever before, X-Men: The Last Stand has the climactic oomph that suggests a finale, though not the gravitas to suggest a resolution.

This is filmmaking as a minor feat of engineering, the kind where even the gossamer emotions seem like prefab components -- charm, whimsy, serendipity, all so many discs plugged into the hard drive.

The result is a war picture that, trying to pass off fidelity to the book as objectivity, sacrifices any voice of its own, and ends up not knowing what to think.

The trouble with Cosmopolis, David Cronenberg's faithful-to-a-fault adaptation from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel, is that it's more metaphor than meat.

It's an undemanding yet bright delight. [16 Mar 1991]

While dance sequences are not particularly well edited compared to the new breed of dance flick, Wormald and Hough are exciting hoofers to watch.

While Jason Bourne isn’t half-bad as an action movie, it is a nakedly hollow exercise in resuscitating brand loyalty.

In its component parts, then, Love Liza is essentially a battle between opposing clichés.

Time and again, the story simply stops for another tune from the band. Then again, without the buoyant sounds of Moten Swing, Tickle Toe, Yeah Man and the rest, Kansas City would be an even less appealing film than it already is. [16 Aug 1996, p.D5]

Disclosure is a well-acted, slickly directed shell of a picture. The veneer is so polished that you look on with something approaching genuine satisfaction, and only after the final credits roll do you begin to feel the void.

Frears has attempted to fashion a contemporary message of diversity and inclusion delivered by a tolerant and culturally inquisitive Queen in opposition to her hide-bound and racist courtiers, but in the end that theme is undercut by the film's own Eurocentric realities.

As much as Stanley wants to believe in binaries – good honest work versus cheating, respect versus irresponsibility – Cohn’s low-key narrative undercuts such disingenuous naivety. Combine that with Jenkins’s slow-burn performance, and you have a film that speaks to, rather than talks down to, its audience.

Altered States can be accused of many things, but never of harboring a new idea. Because the script's lessons have been drowned in fruity religious imagery, Altered States is at most an accomplished horror film, the kind of stomach-churning movie to which people like David Cronenberg aspire. [23 Jan 1981]

Richard Curtis, the writer of "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill" and "Love, Actually," goes off-shore and out of his depth with Pirate Radio .

So why, despite everyone's best efforts, does all this bigness seem so small and unfocused and simply not up to the task?

Freaky Tales has neither the patience nor the depth to imagine any one person or story with a legitimate hook.

Ultimately, Benigni's comic refinery merely transforms the banality of evil into a lesser sin -- the evil of banality.

The premise of Child's Play, in which the murderer is a much-merchandised doll patterned after cartoon characters known as Good Guys, is long overdue. Unfortunately, the package in which the present arrives is often too little, sometimes too much, and always too late. [11 Nov 1988]

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

Park is busy treating every frame like a runway model, dressing it up in self-conscious layers of cinematic haute couture. It’s gorgeous to gaze upon but otherwise dessicated – listless, juiceless and ultimately pointless. For all his exemplary camera work, there’s no motion, or emotion, in the picture.

Along with its allegorical elements, The King is also impressively specific in naturalistic detail.

Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.

Hard Candy not only trips along a tightrope line between exploitation and art; in some ways, that line is its subject.

What is puzzling is how Edward Zwick has taken an extraordinary real-life story about a handful of people who defied huge odds, and turned it into an utterly conventional war movie.

Nerve looks fabulous and the pace is evenly adrenalized, which makes up for clichéd characters, a concocted premise and commentary that is a bit on the nose.

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.

There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each (Gault’s a drunk, Hamer’s a jerk) and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism (the movie is perpetually on the verge of having Hamer say, directly to the camera, something along the lines of, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”).

While Rich’s script misses a few trickier opportunities to further dig into questions of religion and history – Herschel sleeps his way through the entirety of the Second World War, yet there’s never any discussion of how the Holocaust has irrevocably changed the world he wakes up in – An American Pickle is a movie that your bubbe will love.

They deliver precisely enough guffaws to give you your money’s worth, with a couple of sweet moments about how daughters break their parents’ hearts tossed in. I guess they had to hold something back for "Neighbors 3: Suburbia, a.k.a. The Cat Catches the Tinfoil."

Exist as extended videos for the accompanying soul and rap soundtrack.

The low-budget effort from Vancouver writer-director Scooter Corkle is earnest and methodical, with a tone-setting murkiness to it.

A crusty screed against many facets of modern life – the internet, smartphones, insurance companies, pecans – but kinda ho-hum on the subject of drug violence, Clint Eastwood’s The Mule is one of the more confounding films of the year.

Letting Shrek get grumpy again has freshly animated this cartoon series.

Most of all, though, it comes off as unsure, even afraid, of just what it wants to say about America today, resulting in a sometimes amusing, sometimes stilted lecture that indicts everyone, and no one.

Jonathan Demme's potent adaptation of Morrison's novel may be substantial, but it is also engrossing, a movie that plays at times like a combination of “Gone With The Wind” and “The Exorcist.”

Psycho III, directed by Perkins himself, is years behind the Hitchcock original in quality, it's light years ahead of Psycho II. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Fortunately, Sisters doesn’t collapse into total absurdity in the same way that many house-party movies do – the film is slapstick and at moments teeters on the edge of too much, but it quickly snaps back before losing its audience.

In its defence, the movie means to incorporate Jet's conversion into its theme, serving up his new pacifism as a choice morsel of irony. But it doesn't taste ironic, just bland, and we aren't biting either.

In this vast balloon of a film, Bardem is the ballast – that Manichean face is a movie onto itself.

While Baron Cohen's lanky physical slapstick and verbal manglings are funny, the movie begins to feel like one of the later, worn-out Pink Panther movies.