It's no fun looking after a determined, self-justified alcoholic; or even watching him waste away. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life accepts its subject on his own terms. And the compromise feels like capitulation before its hero's last record spins to a close. The death of a ladies man is pretty grim sport after the ladies have gone.

The narrative meanders on occasion, the conceit can seem repetitious, the editing is loose. Nevertheless, buoyed by the naturalism of its exclusively young cast, the picture effectively gets into your head and under your skin.

Come Play’s themes, characters and story are too strong to lump the film in with the wave of sub-tier horror flooding the market this month.

From time to time, as Alexandre Desplat's insistent score surged yet again while the characters rushed by, I found myself wanting the movie to slow down. Some of these images are too beautiful to disappear so quickly.

From a technical standpoint, this might be Clooney’s finest work as a director. . . . But as a storyteller, The Midnight Sky is an irritating experience.

There is also a capable, wisecracking stewardess (Julianna Margulies) and, what a surprise, a steward who appears to be doing a Paul Lynde impersonation.

When a Stranger Calls manages to scare the stuffing out of the audience - the film is authentically terrifying - without pouring more than a demi-carafe of gore. [22 Oct 1979]

Like most simplifications, Lean On Me's genially despotic approach has its attractions, and it works fine as a movie. Simplification worked fine in Rocky and in The Karate Kid, too, but unlike those essentially simple films, Lean On Me oversimplifies a very complex issue. And unlike those films, Lean On Me leaves one pondering the fact that, in real life, things aren't ever simple. [9 March 1989]

Ferdinand is not going to be the next "Frozen" or "Lion King" or even the fourth or fifth "Ice Age" movie, but there's a reason the story is still being told some 81 years after it was first published. Its lessons – be true to yourself, go your own way, and don't let society tell you what you should or shouldn't be – are just as applicable today as they were then. And that's no pile of bull.

When the larger question cannot be answered, the lesser one -- "What would you have done?" -- seems beside the point.

The movie becomes an American salute to military patriotism, anybody's military patriotism. Think of it as "A Few Good Reds."

Features an excellent cast, in particular the child actors. These elements, as well as the director's light unsentimental touch, make the struggles and triumphs in Small Voices ring truthful.

Shot in country fields and interiors of fading Georgian glory, Easy Virtue has enough traces of Coward's wit to keep you hoping for the first hour or so, but then the film collapses under the weight of too many misguided innovations.

An interrogation session involving a psychotropic drug is just too weird for words and some will find the film sentimental and too naked in its Academy baiting. That said, 13 Minutes works like clockwork as an artful (if not terribly ambitious) take on a grotesque era.

In the end, F*CK is at most a compendium of opinions and examples, and never feels like a story. Still, great casting and inventive visuals make it an entertaining big-screen experience -- and don't expect to catch it later on network television (otherwise it would have to be retitled BL**P).

Jojo Rabbit excels with at least a sincerely attempted – if not exactly precise – balance of humour and horror, absurdity and tragedy.

Any one of these narrative components might have made for a worthy picture. But that would have taken a more imaginative writer than Charles Leavitt and a more sensitive director than Gary Fleder.

With the bigger story and more fully developed relationships than the previous films, this is the first Twilight film that feels like a real movie in its own right.

En route, the plot gimmick degenerates from clever to dumb, then gets forgotten entirely, and the last act simply poops out - the climax is a Bigger Bang that plays like the saddest of whimpers.

Best of all, it’s tight at 81 minutes, which means a 7 p.m. screening gets you out of the theatre while it’s still light out, thank God.

On the one hand, you gotta give it to the man. He’s got grit. But surely, there are other cowboys whose stories are just as worth telling.

This is Sweeney’s show, and when she’s not framed in its dead centre, the movie’s blood cannot help but drip down the drain. The star deserves whatever awards might be coming her way. Don’t make her put up a fight.

It’s saved, first by strong performances from Buckley, always effortlessly believable, and Colman, expert at laying bare the clammy soul of easily dismissible women. And second, by the letters themselves.

It's a movie located in an interesting place, but without quite enough self-confidence really to inhabit it.

Actually a pretty entertaining movie, in a kick-you-in-the-pants kind of way. A relative rarity -- a solid no-brow comedy.

Spiritual V-8 juice.

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]

Delight, a modest yet palpable measure of the stuff, is restored.

The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.

Truth be told, Wrong isn’t as funny as "Rubber," which played kamikaze games with horror-movie tropes. The tone here is flatter and more meandering, and more than a few of Dupieux’s digressions feel like dead ends. At the same time, there’s a winning confidence to the filmmaking, which is deceptively stylish.

This is just another generic war movie of the kind that revels in combat's greater glories. You know the type - the camaraderie that never quite rings true, the plot that never once makes sense. In short, the whole bombs-bursting- in-air, truth-through-the-night jive. [21 Oct 1988]

It attempts to take local history of the illegal whisky trade and raise it to the level of myth.

As the frequency of this particular nightmare ratchets up in volume, The Antenna proves a worthy successor to the work of David Cronenberg, Ben Wheatley and the many other filmmakers who delight in the meaty material of rancid subjects.

The Escape Artist looks as if it may be intended for children, but it's so fuzzy in detail and character that it fails in its premise as either adventure or fantasy. [29 May 1982]

This is a movie that was made not because the director had anything to say, but because she wanted to get a movie made. Even at that, the script is slapdash. Only one character has any dimension (Frances O'Connor's Mia), the plotting is the usual sub-screwball comedy with obligatory pranks and misunderstandings, and the overall tone is bland, smug and connivingly cute. [11 Apr 1997, p.C6]

It tries too hard too early.

This time, Tykwer somehow manages to turn Eggers’s attempt at an era-defining story into a weird little cross-cultural comedy with romantic overtones while remaining largely faithful to the original plot and dialogue. Here, globalization’s economic devastation is just a nice backdrop for some amusing – and, thankfully, inoffensive – observation of one American abroad.

There's a spunky charm to the Scream-meets-Groundhog Day thing, and the film is well-built. The problem is its chipper message.

This is still a light and frothy rom-com, predictable and charming in equal measure, and most comfortable when it fits the efficient mold of genre obligations. But when it wants to, it can really crank that charm up to 11.

Director Michael Apted's Thunderheart is a fleetly-paced murder mystery cum conspiracy thriller marred only by an 'inspirational' Hollywood ending at odds with the trajectory of the plot. [3 Apr 1992]

This tale of a visiting feline from outer space is liable to send anyone over the mental age of eight scurrying to the refuge of the candy bar. [17 Aug 1978]

Prime seems aimed at prime-time television, with endless iterations on the same theme of "frustrated relationship" that will finally get resolved during sweeps week in the season before cancellation. Call it: My Mama, the Shrink.

The Rock is just typical big American dumb fun.

The Next Level works precisely for the same reasons why Welcome to the Jungle did. It’s never boring, it’s genuinely funny in a way that’s family friendly but still clever, and the cast’s chemistry is outstanding – it just works.

The big, disappointment here are the flat musical numbers that bide time between adventures and fail to sink Maui’s hook in us.

Rapp, who originated the role of Regina on Broadway, is a force-of-nature knockout, honouring but not imitating Rachel McAdams’s beautiful bullying from the first film with a sly kind of menace.

Musically, it's a mixed bag -- The concert remains more of an historical curiosity than a must-see rock film.

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

A bittersweet salute, appraisal and explanation of the early-nineties Saturday Night Live troupe mainstay.

This story, like many of Towne's own, does not come with a happy ending. Or beginning, for that matter, because it's almost immediately clear that Ask the Dust bites the dust -- his dream movie is stillborn.

Can't find it in your vast collection of Fleming first editions? Not to worry. Seems the producers - a.k.a. the Cubby Broccoli Cottage Industry - have run plumb out of titles. And everything else too. [14 July 1989]

First Snow is, above all else, one man's particular journey. Pearce is a valid and compelling guide but he can't carry the full load of the movie's excess baggage. For the movie to completely resonate it has to strike the spiritual-angst note through his performance. Pearce comes close but no ... well, you know.

The film’s central problem is that it takes Fuqua forever to make the inevitable happen, and when he gets around to it, the entire set-piece arrives with all the refined taste of an overcooked noodle swimming in a bowl of ketchup.

In this fitfully engaging, but often patience-straining preamble to Hobbit adventures to come, there is one transporting 10 minutes of screen time. It happens when Bilbo meets the freakish, ring-obsessed creature Gollum.

The only thing majestic about Shrek the Third is the title.

There’s nothing subtle about The Finest Hours, but much that is satisfying.

Under Don Siegel's flag, no new territory is surveyed and the destination is familiar, but the journey proves to be a comfortable one and the victory waiting at the end is far from Pyrrhic. [19 June 1980]

A rancid, violent police picture starring and directed by Burt Reynolds who, like bad news, is everywhere this year. [19 Dec 1981]

Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

The premise of Explorers, directed by Joe Dante, who in the past (The Howling, the TV cartoon sequence of Twilight Zone - The Movie, Gremlins) has had style and ingenuity to spare, is equally promising, but it's worked out with the style and ingenuity of an indolent slug making its way across a slab of hot concrete in hell. [12 July 1985]

And so you will get no Scorsesian tracking shots of firecracker trading floors, no giddy frat boy Champagne-shaking antics; this is a slow-boil thriller coursing with melancholy.

By the time we reach the climactic ending, the script clearly calls for an exorcist with a chainsaw to trim back this metaphor run amok.

As film, the results are often fabulous. They begin with a deft use of flashback from the action’s dark conclusion; they continue with wonderfully detailed and lively camera work that catches the sparkle in Annette Bening’s eye as she plays the actress Irina dominating her many dependants, and follows the seduction of the ingénue Nina (Saoirse Ronan) as it moves out onto a rowboat in the middle of a lake.

The movie begs for a a third-act showdown but, instead, the dramatic tension is allowed to leak away.

Writer-director Drew Pearce’s Hotel Artemis, however, manages to make the most intriguingly bonkers premise a boring and flat exercise.

Isn't unequivocally bad. Rather, this is what's known in the boxing world as an "opponent" -- shows up on the weekend just to fill out the card, to do battle with its betters, earn a little cash and be completely forgotten come Monday morning.

Ocean's Twelve lacks the courage of its star-driven convictions. Next time, Steven and George and Brad and Matt should ditch the hypocrisy and just shoot themselves shooting the breeze, poking fun at each other from within the smug sanctuary of their precious celebrity.

The film lays emotions on thick, with strong performances and dreamy cinematography. The high points are devastating and show off Chon’s empathetic storytelling. But at its ebb, the film tries to do too much at once, spilling every which way.

There's something genuinely exploratory and original here in the depiction of people being pushed into adulthood before they're ready.

The preposterousness of this plot marks Fading Gigolo as a vanity project, but it’s hard to take Turturro too much to task when he hits so many other grace notes in between blowing his own horn.

The film, shot in black-and-white at canted angles, suggests an R-rated Twilight Zone episode with a twist of Fellini-lite, in a trite film school kind of way. Mickey Mouse is unlikely to be shaking in his big yellow shoes.

If the facts of the story are essentially true, their presentation is as formulaic as ever.

Sometimes, the animators find an expressive style to match difficult content – a suicide, a mercy killing and several sex scenes – and sometimes they just make the images of Salomon and the refugee with whom she falls in love seem leaden in comparison to the artist’s sprightly line.

Fontaine’s flirtatious pastiche stands on its own. For Flaubertians, however, it offers up even more droll entertainment. Though admittedly some of the laughs will be from recognizing their own cleverness.

The frantic pleasures of this film add up to what used to be considered good fun; good Saturday morning fun; good Saturday morning fun to eat pancakes and pour maple syrup by; good fun that, once the day begins, is good fun soon forgotten. It's a pity Flash Gordon can't be screened at the breakfast table. [6 Dec 1980, p.E7]

The gamble of casting Misses Tomlin and Fonda in what would seem to be the wrong roles (Violet is the strong, efficient, hard-edged secretary; Judy the frilly, "feminine," inexperienced employee) pays off handsomely, especially with Miss Tomlin. When she is handed a memo by a senior secretary and smilingly snarls, "Thanks, Roz, I know just where to stick it," her line reading is worth the price of admission. The pneumatic Miss Parton sings the theme song with greater confidence than she brings to her acting: she is a sweet little thing, but she's no thespian. [20 Dec 1980]

The One and Only Ivan elevates its babbling baboons and erudite elephants to a level of graceful storytelling and emotional catharsis. The film might only be available to stream in the emptiness of your own home, but it has enough big-screen ambition that you can easily imagine it holding an entire theatre’s audience rapt.

Director Cameron Crowe who, not having made a dramatic feature since his 2005 stinker "Elizabethtown," seems bound and determined to crank out a crowd-pleaser here.

Two jazz films won awards at Sundance this year. One of them was "Whiplash"; the other was Low Down, an expressive but somewhat lacklustre first feature from Jeff Preiss. Neither movie is about jazz.

The Indian in the Cupboard unfolds with absorbing logic to tell a tale in the best of children's story tradition. [17 July 1995]

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

No, the trouble isn't with them but with a screenplay (by Angus MacLachlan) that loads their characters with too much symbolic baggage and then points them off in obscure directions.

There is only one Spielberg, so the result is an adventure that sands away the edges of its own taste for danger, with the destination – those gobs of cash – mattering far more than the journey.

That plot gets lost in these desaturated Wicked movies. They look less like The Wizard of Oz and more like Fruit Loops that had been left sitting in a bowl of milk for too long – those bright solid colours bleeding out and leaving nothing but a soggy mess.

The result is an erratically funny but often frustrating comedy, with an interesting premise hobbled by internal inconsistencies and uneven writing.

Heartfelt in tone, imaginative in scope and rendered with a seemingly endless well of aesthetic wit, the romantic-comedy is a worthy addition to the Pixar canon … until the characters start speaking.

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

Gordon-Levitt, absent from the big screen since 2016′s "Snowden," oscillates nicely between maintaining an air of remarkable calm and then breaking down completely, and he pretends to know what all those airplane buttons do quite well.

Some viewers will decide that Benny & Joon strays too far from the brink; they will find its sentimentality cloying. Other viewers will applaud the classic silent film humour and will emerge with a glow they'll want to show off to their friends. Both camps can agree, however, that Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Johnny Depp are quite good. [16 Apr 1993]

Wayne's World has been engineered to amuse people who are mirror images of its heroes, but it goes wickedly wrong: It's so dumb it talks down to the stupid.

So blatantly contrived it could be called The Fast and the Spurious, Crank has the small saving grace of being intentionally ridiculous. The action sequences are more notable for their outrageousness than their visceral power.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

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

The movie ends up exactly what it sounds like: a good film for filling the midnight slot at a review cinema or genre festival.

The symbolism is about as subtle as a fang to the neck. Really, Daybreakers is more fun than foreboding; it's fright-lite, yet that's par for the bloody course in these busy apocalyptic days.

Trishna, in short, seems to occur at too much of a remove; it's too fate-filled.