The Killer goes on too long and never properly stitches together into the plot its strands of suspense and romance, but it never lacks for ballistic racket. A few scenes in recent movies have seen the firepower under which that whitewashed church disintegrates at movie's end; a few, but not many. [12 July 1991]

Consequently, your reaction to the film will pretty much hinge on your opinion of the play. Ho-hum is my humble verdict.

With a plethora of archival material and strong interviews, this documentary argues that the exuberant Julia Child was a protofeminist who invented the profession of TV chef as she introduced the notion that food should taste good to the land of the Jell-O salad.

You don't mess with a sure thing. So Smokey and the Bandit II is carefully designed to cash in on the same box office bonanza as its namesake. The plot - about transporting an elephant to the Republican Convention - is obviously just an excuse to get this cartoon show on the road, where the cast can ham it up unashamedly.

The most disturbing aspect of the movie is not the sex scenes (shot from the waist up) but her face, especially in her porn-star persona: a frozen little smiling mask that suggests a paradoxically intense vacancy.

Ultimately, Weekes’s story, which pivots on a minor-key twist that doesn’t quite earn its intended gasps, falls just short of justifying its feature-film length. There is an excellent short film hiding in the corridors of His House – it just needs a slight renovation.

Bird Box could easily be reduced to, “It’s A Quiet Place meets Blindness crossed with The Happening!” And that high-concept pitch wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

The result is a road movie with a lofty message that too frequently gets lost in its own thematic barrens.

Give it an A for concept -- a bizarre marionette version of a Jerry Bruckheimer-style action movie; B for its occasional moments of convulsively funny comedy; and D for the politics, for pandering to exactly the kind of reactionary sentiments it purports to satirize.

Once again, Candy does his slob-with-a-heart-of-gold number. He's good at it. He can be a funny fellow. He can even carry a mediocre picture all by his lonesome, squeezing a lot out of a little. What he can't do is squeeze that much out of this little. [16 Aug 1989]

Ultimately, Little Voice comes to us from an indeterminate place that is no longer the theatre but not quite the movies. Let's call it music videoland -- best just to sit back and enjoy golden-oldie tunes belted out by a quicksilver mimic.

Operation Dumbo Drop is at times lost on four-year-olds, but it serves up what Disney summer flicks should - adrenalin and sugar. [28 Jul 1995]

A movie that feels a bit like digging a hole in the ground -- an exercise that may build character but doesn't seem to accomplish much else.

This is a prequel superior to its predecessor – we’re not bored with board-game ghoulishness yet.

Almost Christmas isn’t likely destined for holiday mainstay status, but it’s a comfortably watchable family film, buoyed by a strong cast, and very few saccharine moments. Like Walter’s pie, it might be impossible to digest were it any more sweet.

There's almost a perverse pleasure in watching occasionally weak performers mar an essentially sound screenplay. That's the saving grace of Saving Face -- Wu gets the hard part right.

This is amusing, and even poignant in the final moments.

Whereas the psychology is surreal and wonderfully fluid, the action is too real and surprisingly listless, displaying little of the kinetic zip, or the sheer lyricism, that Lee brought with such memorable effect to "Crouching Tiger."

The Returned can’t transcend its packaging as a genre piece: It swaps out an entire set of horror-movie manoeuvres for trite, TV-style thriller tricks.

It's like watching a man trying to scratch an itch by eating an egg. It doesn't address the problem. It's also the sort of thing that Europeans love to think about America -- everybody looking, nobody finding -- and it might explain why this decent, but by no means great, film won the Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

It's hard to say how much the talking-head segments are based on the actors' real-life eating experiences, but they save the film by displaying a depth of emotion, candour and ironic good humour that - unlike many of the scenes in Eating - appears to be genuinely felt. [12 Jul 1991]

It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.

Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.

Who would have guessed that, among all the cutesy curves in Around the Bend, the guy walking the straightest line is Christopher Walken?

So, if you must celebrate Bill Murray Day this year, pour yourself a Suntory Whisky and watch "Lost in Translation" instead. And make that drink neat.

Realism will only take you so far, and Stronger eventually opts for a conventional tale of rekindled romance and resurgent resilience.

The Unbelievable Truth is just that - epistemology served up with pop panache and a comic twist. [27 Jul 1990]

Franco’s outlandish Laird dude is fascinatingly unfiltered, either when it comes to his non-stop F-bombs or his love-seeking shenanigans. It’s all a bit rompy, with a touch of the-world-is-a-changin’ commentary.

A good model of how superheroes can save the world without forced gravitas, and have fun doing it.

Hoary, rather than whore-y, Irina Palm is shameless only in its mawkish sincerity.

Always well-meaning, not always well-executed, In This World ends by suffocating us in its good intentions.

Low, mean and depressingly plausible.

EXistenZ, unlike existence, just lacks that certain mystique.

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting – Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.

Centred on an uxorious guy who is building a gambling palace, Live by Night invites unfortunate comparisons with Martin Scorsese’s 1995 classic "Casino," in which the hero is tortured by his dishonest business and his unstable wife. Of course, Affleck isn’t Robert De Niro – delivering what was probably the last great dramatic role of his career – and Chris Messina as Coughlin’s rather bland sidekick most definitely isn’t Joe Pesci.

The Human Scale uses plenty of globe-hopping examples to make up for what it sometimes lacks in depth.

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.

Never as good as you'd hoped or as bad as you'd feared, The Matador is one of those of up-and-down experiences -- here a sharp pica of wit, there a welcome veronica of absurdity, but, now and then, just a bit too much bull in the ring.

A passable romantic dish, a good-looking, old-fashioned date movie set in an idealized Greenwich Village, evocative of the better Woody Allen films.

Like the Irish film "Once," it’s a drama about the lives of musical performers who sing songs within the film to illustrate the emotional journey of a relationship. Broken Circle, though, is painted in much darker hues.

It’s in his cozy kitchen — wallpapered with photos of his five kids, grandchildren and his wife of a half-century, Toby – that we get to know the man: the jovial grandfather, the joke teller, the dedicated husband, the patient teacher and loyal friend, who is as excited as a child as he makes his famous “garbage” soup for his long-time pal, Alan Alda.

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.

Into the West has its admirable side - it tries oh-so-hard to be a healthy treat for the whole family, and never plies us with cheap sentimentality. [01 Oct 1993]

Street Smart is marred by dumb coincidences and by an ending that is immoral - it abruptly applauds a form of exploitation it has spent most of its considerable energy criticizing - but its texture is grittily realistic and its psychosexual sophistication is surprising in an American potboiler. [17 Apr 1987]

Given Waller's experience and budget, one might expect he could upgrade the B-movie acting and stock situations. He doesn't. The pay-off comes not in the story or acting, but the camera play and movement.

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]

All this is more amusing in theory than practice, partly because Leonard’s world of wiseguys and slapstick violence has become so familiar – the caper-movie default mode.

Although it always moves and rarely labours, the film truly comes alive only in those fleeting moments when it departs from the safe formula -- that is, only when Murphy draws on his personal talents to kick this baby into something resembling a higher gear. The rest of the time, well, here's the key to your Metro -- a renter with some mileage on it.

If the downbeat plot is depressingly familiar, it’s partly salvaged by the quality of the performances.

Despite a number of plot twists, In the Family is more about its constant blanks and dead time, its silence and inert camerawork, which require a viewer to fill in the gaps with one's own perceptions of what's happening.

Touchy Feely seems poised to explore the same issues of embarrassing intimacy Shelton mined in her two last films, Humpday and Your Sister’s Sister. But here there’s a new fantastical element, the kind of magical device that might pop up in a minor Woody Allen film.

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.

Yet another smoothly produced doc for the foodie set.

A sputtering marathon of a movie. It starts, it stops, it sprints, it stumbles, occasionally following a straight narrative line, frequently darting off on colourful if pointless tangents, often commanding our attention yet never sparking our imagination.

The hardship of it is immediate, but it never feels forced or exploitative. Hepburn cares for her characters too much to force matters in such a way

If only Moretti had had the faith in his story and its gentle, organic comedy, and done away with the forced silliness.

Walks a line between didactic allegory and realistic drama.

“I have a theory that less becomes more,” Halston purrs in one early interview. The opposite may well be true, and the same could be said for this documentary.

As it dips in and out of the boys' lives, and occasionally wanders back to the contemporary Dito surveying the old neighbourhood, Saints never really integrates its two time periods.

No disrespect to Le Bon, who is pleasant enough, but this kind of part should be a career-definer. Where is today’s Ingrid Bergman, Julie Christie or Diane Keaton? Blame those damned superhero pics, which, in appealing only to adolescent boys, have cost us a generation of actresses.

Compared to many of last year's documentaries (Pina, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Cave of Forgotten Dreams or The Interrupters), this film is distinctly minor league. But it does provide the thumbs-up emotional lift of a bumper-sticker message on game day.

You know a movie has taken a very strange turn when you find yourself eagerly awaiting the next appearance by Donny Osmond.

Tarantino's approach is so enamoured of the exploitation cinema he emulates, there is a serious risk that noble intentions get smothered in juvenile comedy and cinematic grandstanding.

Patterns itself after the Greek model -- that is, more ethnic humour with a contemporary twist.

Spartan is all good. Then it isn't. Then it isn't at all good. Not at all.

Low on nuance and high on body count, the movie is primarily of interest to fans of Asian action spectacles and followers of the charismatic Chow Yun-fat (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), here cast as both a dandyish villain and his idiotic double.

At times a bit plodding, Voyage of the Damned certainly succeeds in making its point, as did the conniving Hitler: It's harder to condemn the perpetrators of racism when you turn away their victims at your door. [17 Sep 2005, p.12]

Taken as a psychological parable, Paul Schrader's Patty Hearst is thoughtful and provocative. Taken as a political parable, it is gallingly reactionary, but it is also right, in more than one sense of the word. [28 Oct 1988]

Tulip Fever is a film a-swirl in what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. The years-long anticipation of its arrival has only heightened the stakes for what is – and what maybe always would have been – a harmless historical romp through some flowers.

Though far from a disaster of Biblical proportions, Evan Almighty is a mild, sporadically funny comedy in an oversized sentimental frame.

Shutter has the look and feel of a proper J-horror film. Tokyo is seen as a series of gloomy gun metal skies. And the acting is more subdued than in Hollywood horror movies.

Feels like a missed opportunity to do a country romantic melodrama in grand style.

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

Eastwood keeps retracing the same pattern, intercutting from the battlefield to the bond circuit, from the appalling chaos where no one feels heroic to the catered dinners where heroism is the dessert that sweetens the mood and opens the chequebooks. By now, though, the twinned structure seems fragmented, and neither half gets a chance to gather any emotional momentum or to further develop the theme.

What's missing, in the direction no less than the script, is any real sense of dramatic urgency.

Conventional and erratic in tone as The Eye is, the film has some real visual (and auditory) style going for it.

The laughter does build. But there's precious little risk in the comedy -- even the rough edges seem calculated. These guys are preaching to the converted, and their careful sermons keep the faith. Skilled they are, but original or kingly they definitely are not -- just solid knights working the round table.

In this Willy Wonka-like animated world where multihued candies move about on assembly lines, the constant introduction to Rube Goldberg-style devices and slapstick action grows increasingly tiresome.

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.

Summerland may not be the greatest show on Earth, but it is firmly Arterton’s show – and deserves more attention than most anyone on these shores will likely give it.

Wilder's created world is alive with his erudition, his sympathy for his characters in their loneliness and flawed goodness. This film doesn't do him justice but it's a gesture in the right direction.

Inevitably, all this seems just too diffuse, and a set of uniformly adept performances (even Harrelson puts a leash on his usual histrionics) tends to be wasted in an only intermittently engaging movie.

Gass-Donnelly is good at capturing stalled rural lives, from church hymn-sings populated by the elderly, their voices fragile as April snow, to dead-end afternoons at corner cafés, where bored patrons stretch lunch hours with coffee and gossip.

Speaking as one of the mourners, did I mention how pleasant it is to revisit footage of John Lennon? And to listen to his music which, in this case, comes either in taped performances or laid onto the soundtrack, no fewer than 40 songs drawn almost exclusively from the post-Beatle, pro-Ono phase of his career.

The Dead Zone, from the book by Stephen King, a horror novelist whose prolific output is the scariest thing about him, is academic filmmaking all the way, a crafty Establishment tour de force. [21 Oct 1983]

Wright's Darkest Hour is filled with many lush examples of the pathetic fallacy, which doesn't totally disguise the awkward truth that this is a film mainly about meetings.

When it sticks to its strengths - broad physical comedy, Pryor's poetic profanity, Wilder's finely tuned panic - See No Evil, Hear No Evil is a modestly amusing comedy. Were it not so concerned about Speaking No Evil, it might be a good deal more. [13 May 1989]

True, this film is a suspense exercise with a frightened woman trapped in a house where she stands to lose her life. Some people would not call this kind of thing entertainment, and no one can blame them. Some people would find this story entertaining no matter how shabbily it was produced. [07 Feb 1987]

Artistic originality is not so common a commodity that you can afford to get too fussy about the details.

The Summit is a mixture of the inventive and the misguided in its attempt to recreate the circumstances of the August, 2008, disaster on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, when 11 climbers were killed.

The mild but affable story of an ad man's midlife crisis, King of the Corner is an actor's film in every way.

In a summer of low movie expectations and worse results, Fantastic Four is a not-so-bad mindless bit of camp escapism that doesn't try to eclipse its dime-store comic book roots.

Harsh Times opens with a deadly nightmare and ends with a vast bloodbath -- in between, things get a little gruesome.

What began as discomfiting satire soon devolves into silly farce. By the time Friends star Jennifer Aniston pops up as a waitress-cum-love-interest (quite a stretch for her), it's a sure sign we're back within the smug confines of the Tinseltown formula flick.

Based on the true-life graphic novel by John Backderf (who went to high school with Dahmer), the film ponders whether Dahmer was born a sick puppy or if his environment made him that way. It's a conundrum.

Unfortunately, not even all of McConaughey’s substantial powers can overcome director Stephen Gaghan’s lacklustre vision or the screenwriters’ muddy narrative.

This is a movie guaranteed to turn you into a vacillating commitment-phobe, embracing it passionately one moment and then backing off cautiously the next.