Next time, don’t ask indie directors who will work for cheap to tackle the King. I would’ve loved to see the Pet Sematary Lynne Ramsay would’ve made instead.

The heroic irony that was hilarious in Raiders is merely ridiculous here, and the half-tribute/half-parody of the adventure genre is toyed with to threadbare extremes. [23 May 1984]

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.

It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.

None of this quite gets off the ground, and I found myself wanting to bid farewell to Yvan and Charlotte quite a while before the final credits rolled. Not every wannabe Woody Allen is Woody Allen.

Here's something you don't see every day: a high-school comedy for old poops.

In 96 minutes, Soderbergh presents a series of vignettes underlining humanity’s subservience to greed. Some of the segments work – especially one involving an African business titan who decides to teach his daughter an expensive family lesson – and some are too thin (maybe there is a downside to that brisk 96-minute runtime after all).

As her oddly unengaged zoologist husband, the Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh appears to be working in a different movie altogether.

Starring De Niro and Bobby Cannavale as two generations of “whaddya talking about!?” Noo Yawkers and directed by sometimes actor Tony Goldwyn, so much of Ezra feels like a “favour” film – a good excuse for a well-liked director to persuade friends to hang out with each other for a few weeks of shooting, without delivering something worthy of their collected talents.

There’s a kind of procedural nostalgia at work here. It’s not as newborn ridiculous, and certainly not as innovative, but the film knows the game it’s playing – or, in Tap’s case, the music it has to keep hammering out. It doesn’t hit eleven, but it doesn’t have to.

On the whole, it’s fine for what it is, and outside of baby panda cubs remaining some of the cutest things on the planet, the real attraction here is a glimpse at the reclusive snow leopard in its natural habitat.

The Woman in the Fifth is an interesting chameleon until it runs out of disguises, and all that was transitory just looks transparent.

Despite a few wrong turns early on, the movie gathers graceful momentum and heads straight to the warm heart of the book - that fond spot located just on the safe side of sentimentality, a feel- good place that doesn't leave any feel-stupid fallout.

Ragtime itself twinkles with delight - perhaps only an immigrant, and a recent one, could have made this film, which looks squarely at the social problems gnawing at North America but which finds, within them and without them, cause for hope. [20 Nov 1981]

Demanding a full audience of sickos to unlock the film’s true communal madness, Dicks: The Musical is destined for midnight-movie deification. Worship its transgressive power, or denounce it as unholy. The film thankfully offers no in-between.

Yet -- and this must be said in all fairness -- as things progress, the magic of the story asserts itself over the audience.

Francis Ford Coppola's adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, is decadent, overpoweringly erotic campiness coupled with soft-core pornography - blood, breasts, buttocks and big teeth. It's daring and those with a taste for the sexily sanguine will find it delightful. But it's not for the prudish. [13 Nov 1992, p.C1]

Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, is still offbeat, but more in the sense of unco-ordinated than syncopated.

The Intouchables works as a crowd-pleaser not because it's true, but because it's a plausible enchantment.

Alas, the news is mixed: Thor ain't much of a movie but it's a great career move. Both movie and move belong to director Kenneth Branagh.

Permanent Midnight is a slick, entertaining, show-biz saga whose worst fault may be that it has a happy ending. Stahl has not only recovered from debauchery, he's making a ton of cash with his book and the movie. In fact, this may be as quintessential a morality tale for the nineties as the Monica Lewinsky story. [25 Sep 1998, p.D9]

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]

The sickly feeling that Body of Lies leaves at its conclusion isn't just about the brutality of its subject; it's the realization that real-life barbarism translates so easily into adrenaline kicks for the multiplex.

Russell, Plemons and especially the young Thomas excel at highlighting the emotional and spiritual fissures that can result from living in an easy-to-ignore, easier-to-disdain community. But there is a ultimately a hollow sickness to Antlers – a film intended to provoke gasps and gags, but at the same time so superficially produced that it chokes on its own ambitions.

The challenge for a filmmaker attempting to adapt the Agota Kristof novella The Notebook is how much of its startlingly amoral world can actually be shown.

Liman makes the most of what most would assume are flaws. He leans into the simplicity and familiarity of Road House’s premise, keeping the space open for big personalities to make it cartoonishly good fun.

As sweet as the film can be (a burgeoning romance between Kitsch’s doctor and Liane Balaban’s hard-to-get local borders on the adorable), The Grand Seduction is also deeply cynical.

In the rap-music, slam-dunk, hysterical tumult of visual clutter that makes up most of Space Jam, the traditional Warner Bros. 'toons get scant attention. In this marriage of corporate logos, the manic little characters serve simply as more names to be dropped. What Space Jam really lacks is respect for an irreverent tradition. [15 Nov 1996, p.C4]

A thoughtful, unsurprising dramatic comedy executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass. If you know the indie filmmaking siblings from their HBO show Togetherness, you will be comfortable with the wry, understated Adult Beginners.

Instead, you get a nominal character study that boasts a single mighty performance and one nifty scene; alas, both performance and scene exist in a narrative vacuum - the plot is non-existent and the pace makes the ice age seem hasty.

Yeah, it’s not good. Writer/director Ricky Tollman has turned the true story of Rob Ford’s crack video into a fake cris du coeur for millennials.

A tart-coated sugar pill of a movie.

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

The plot's larcenous resolution is something of a cheat, tying things up dramatically if unethically.

The lanky action star of the cult television series "Alias" is assigned a tired playbook in this film, but she finds room to manoeuvre in a performance that exceeds expectations.

Predictable but highly entertaining.

For all its generally judicious choices, there's one device in The Boys Are Back that may test the patience of some viewers. Every once in a while, the late Katy pops up in a scene to offer Joe wifely advice.

The dialogue is sour, the politics problematic (Broadway veterans as Afghan locals? Why not?!), and the sentiments sometimes eye-rolling. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, indeed.

It's a pretty fine film, thanks largely to the performances (and look) of its crackerjack cast, as well as Jonathan Freeman's restless, gritty cinematography and a lickety-split script.

It’s a film that considers young heartbreak so earnestly, it risks taking itself too seriously, too.

But viewed from another, more cynical angle, The Broken Hearts Gallery reveals itself as just another lightweight Saturday-night diversion – zippy and heartfelt, certainly, but hardly reinventing or even seasonally rotating the rom-com wheel.

Army of the Dead is exactly the kind of uber-stylish, ridiculously muscular, exceptionally juvenile storytelling that he’s made his bones on. Some audiences will make a meal of it. Some will gag. You’ll know which viewer you are after those first 15 minutes, guaranteed.

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.

Don't think for a second that Hollywood has cornered the market on formula flicks. Ever since the prototypical success of "The Full Monty," those crafty Brits have been running their own mimeograph machine.

Scratch off Lewis as a contender for the new Bond actor. As for McGregor, he may have failed his audition as well. Our Kind of Traitor is tense enough, but lacks lustre and pizzazz. Perhaps a better-utilized Harris could have popped things up.

Except for the ending (more about that in a minute), Brainstorm is near the pinnacle of popular entertainment, just below "WarGames". [30 Sept 1983]

Quaid doesn't have much to work with, and so deflects the portrayal away from the mind toward the body – consistently giving the coot a hunched, pigeon-toed gait. Nice try, but that bird won't fly.

The laughs in this film are all mean-spirited or just frat-boy gross.

Facial prosthetics, Inside Hoops humour and "Barbershop"-styled trash talk ensue. Pepsi is one of film’s producers, but painkiller Aleve gets better product placement. Spare some for the arthritic plot, please.

Victory, the new film by 74-year-old John Huston, is a civilized, professional, old-fashioned entertainment about men in groups. The picture is being hyped as a story of human spirit, prevailing against impossible odds, but it's a lot more low-key and a great deal more enjoyable than that. It's the story of the wake left by a great director sailing smoothly at half-mast. [31 July 1981]

Thematically, structurally, narratively (hell, pick your adverb), this effort goes way past thin - Flesh And Bone is anorexic. [05 Nov 1993]

On the flimsy wings of this familiar fairy tale, Linklater tries to fly himself a movie, dressing up the quartet (and the strapping he-men cast to portray them) in the audience-friendly vestments of picaresque charm.

What makes The Grand a memorable comedy is that the main stories are really about families – how they screw you up and how they save you. And you don't have to understand poker to know the rules of that game.

Although veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping ( Kill Bill, The Matrix) handles the wire action, the camera work is merely okay and the sequences are on the familiar side. Still, it's fun to see Chan resurrect his loopy, staggering "drunken master" fighting style.

The film surrounding the performance is not always as strong, but the centre holds, and magnificently so.

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

In its second half, the movie tips into familiar Gallic farce territory before settling for a formulaic sentimental kicker. As middling comedies go, the French approach has certain virtues. If good wine and long talks with friends can't prevent the inevitable, at least they make the waiting more tolerable.

Blend sound with sight, though, and the package becomes more difficult to take.

Teen Spirit is a dizzying exercise in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" school of nonsensical editing. Perhaps it is fitting that Teen Spirit is badly made. It would be more disappointing if a work of such lazy sexism were a formal triumph.

The melodrama is uncomfortably high; the checked-box plot is manipulative.

At two hours, Instant Family is shorter than a Judd Apatow joint but far less funny or complex. It’s Sean Anders’s best movie.

Once Land of Bad establishes its stakes – one man versus an army – the film settles all too comfortably into war-machine territory, minus any particularly inventive kills or sense of style.

Writer-director Christopher Landon’s quick-turnaround sequel is pure self-knowing nonsense – a smoothly executed, briskly paced mash-up of horror tropes, time-travel paradoxes and silly campus slapstick.

Actor Liev Schreiber’s voice-over narration is filled with sonorous urgency, but as the film’s commentators acknowledge, some ideas are a hard sell: How do politicians and regulators convince the public on the benefits of a financial diet when a spending spree sounds much more fun?

If you like your sentimentality sweet and sticky, then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely your jar of honey.

Very much a superhero film – "X-Men" as imagined by Edward Gorey. But it’s not populated with the sorts of characters we’ve come to expect – tormented anti-heroes or wisecrackin’ daredevils or noble demi-gods. Rather, it’s a film about a group of broken children, not off saving the world but being saved from the world.

With its tasteful palette and twee charm, Miss Potter is the china plate of movies, a Peter Rabbit collectible entirely suitable for mounting on the nursery wall.

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

All outrageous stuff. Gatien's story is worth telling. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that director Billy Corben presents it in such a methodical fashion.

Perhaps if Rossi had begun where he ends, with the bold assertion that this project is not about raising money for art but about using celebs to sell magazines, The First Monday in May might prove as enlightening as it is titillating. What does Rihanna get paid? We don’t know because, as a staffer names the actual sum, the filmmaker bleeps the words.

So long as you grit your teeth and keep your eyes on the screen, it’s an enjoyable, if almost academic, exercise in bad taste.

Ultimately, Thor: Love and Thunder will leave you feeling sad, empty, deadened. Which is what frequently happens in the MCU these days – it is an enterprise built with an Axl Rose-sized appetite for destruction, but no stomach for genuine risk or imagination.

Credit Madagascar with negotiating a hopeful truce in the ongoing battle between the computer and the animation. Judged merely by appearances, its look is a lovely compromise. Too bad everything else has been compromised right out of existence.

The international cast manage to acquit themselves fine enough, with Jagger in particular having a ball as an energetic rapscallion.

If you feel you might already have seen City of Ghosts, but can't quite place it, you'd be forgiven. Hollywood, never afraid of working a cliché to death, has turned out dozens of "City of . . ." films over the years.

There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.

It all contributes to a vision of the future that is as haunting as it is dispiriting.

No political tract, but it can be surprisingly bold.

At least The Infidel is an equal-opportunity blasphemer, and God bless it for that. Otherwise, this thing plays like a cheeky Brit-com blown up to feature length, with a thin coat rack of plot to hang the ethnic humour on, and a wish to offend without being offensive.

Directed by veteran "Chariots of Fire" filmmaker Hugh Hudson, the semi-compelling Finding Altamira is let down by ordinary acting, way too many scholarly adages and a perplexing level of inaction.

In a demanding role light on dialogue, Sutherland’s rangy, loping physicality serves both the character and the action well – camera and fugitive are seldom at rest, and on the move in tense, extended bursts whenever an opportunity presents itself.

Somewhat incredibly, the buildings come to life: Kaspar Astrup Schröder puts Ingels's remarkable communication skills to work through a series of sketches and chats, and then shows us the finished products.

Except in the performances of John Savage, as Hettinger, and James Woods, as Powell, there is little attempt to probe the reasons for behavior, and except in the stylized filming of the murder, there is little attempt to assign special importance to one event over another. The picture is a textbook example of the limits of objective reporting. [06 Oct 1979]

With seemingly twice as much action, a whole new complex of villainy, competing Iron Man suits, robots and love interests, Iron Man 2 sequel cashes in hard on the unexpected success of the first Iron Man from 2007 and somehow loses much of its soul in the process.

The resulting film, while sporadically affecting, is ultimately a slog of gooey sentiment and needlessly long death rattles.

Just who is Pixar aiming this movie at? Contemporary children or their great-grandparents?

Not exactly a movie in the usual sense, not exactly a ride, Journey is more of a virtual theme-park simulation and possibly a milestone of immersive entertainment.

Hatchet is further evidence of the decline of Western civilization.

It all feels arbitrary and aimless, especially when the filmmakers decide to wrap things up with a long, wanly executed shootout whose stakes couldn’t feel lower.

A fantastical adventure, dandy ode to weirdos, and accessible anti-war allegory for all ages, especially 10-year-old boys.

When it comes to rude comedy, one person's caviar is another's smelly fish gunk. A case in point is Strangers With Candy.

The humour is based entirely on inversion which worked in your cartoons, and even on the TV show, but it's not enough to hold up a movie, even with the helping hand provided by a disembodied hand. [22 Nov 1991]

The Arthurian legend has received a wide variety of treatments over the years, but this safe, sanitized American version drains the juice smack out of a notorious romantic triangle. [07 Jul 1995]

Yes, there are many splendid reasons to see Snow White and the Huntsman – enough, maybe, not to care that neither Snow White nor the Huntsman rank high among them.

Director Dan Algrant’s conceit here is to take an actual event – a tribute concert for Tim held at a Brooklyn church in 1991, the concert that sparked Jeff’s own career – and wrap a fictionalized drama around it.

John Frankenheimer does an excellent job of maintaining tension in an implausible situation in Black Sunday. Good performance by Bruce Dern as the loony. [31 Dec 1977]

Sapochnik (Game of Thrones) wisely puts Hanks at the centre of nearly every scene, letting the actor’s ceaseless charisma carry audiences through the End Times. We attach ourselves to Finch partly because of the character, but also because we’re rooting for Hanks to escape the island, oops, I mean the apocalypse.