Leatherhead's a comedy of stock setups and kooky digressions in which nothing really comes to a head, and running at close to two hours, it lacks the essential brevity of the form.

Fans expecting more than a routine coming-of-age story had better prepare for a paper movie.

While Spinster works well enough as a showcase for Peretti’s talents, Dorfman never matches the power of her star. With a bare-bones production design and most of its scenes blocked in a pedestrian manner, Spinster looks like a TV show that simply goes on too long.

A clear case of huevos con hubris.

Antibirth follows in the tradition of "Alien," "Prometheus" and "Rosemary’s Baby" rejoicing in an abject fear of childbirth. Lovers of horror will likely be into this fertile homage and will appreciate Perez’s new takes on horror’s tried-and-true tropes and plot twists.

OH DEAR, what grade to assign The Rachel Papers? Hmmm, seems this is a British coming-of-age flick that turns out to be a whole lot like the U.S. coming-of-age flicks we've seen a whole lot of. Sure, better cast, earthier language, niftier accents, but the same paint-by-number formula punctuated by the same tacked-on "be true to yourself" moral. Heck, let's be generous: passing, barely passing. [12 May 1989]

If the fate of the Furious series is to grow somehow both wearier and dumber with age, then the eighth film is proof of a mission firmly accomplished. And there’s no shame, Vin, in hanging it all up after a job well done.

An acquired taste that you may not acquire. I did, but it took me a while.

As a movie for today's girls, it's more than offensive. It's cheap. [11 May 1985]

Delightfully inventive, consistently funny, clever but not slick, brisk yet never antic, Quick Change is the perfect cinematic date - a summer film for all seasons, the kind of sharp-edged picture that gives lightweight a good name. [14 Jul 1990, p.C3]

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.

Every joke here hits its target, and while many of them will soar over the heads of youngsters, it will still send everyone home happy and satisfied.

The result is a fairly co-ordinated effort that, despite a few miscues, yields a consistently watchable film.

This is still a seriously entertaining horror movie, one that will please newcomers as well as fans of the original oddity. But by the end of the film, I was wishing the filmmakers had left us wondering about precisely who and what these critters were just a little bit longer.

A lascivious comedy that might have been produced by The Big Lebowski’s fictional pornographer Jackie Treehorn were he given far too much money, Drive-Away Dolls proves that there is a yawning gap between “a Coen Brothers film” and a “film by a Coen brother.”

All that starring talent isn’t exactly wasted here; it’s just diluted, watered down enough to demote “really funny” to sort of funny, now and then, here and there, some of the time. Hey, it’s the movie biz.

For all its treacly excesses of the post- "Full Monty" era, British comedy hasn't entirely lost its teeth yet.

The film belongs to Whitman, who, fresh off a five-year stint on the now-defunct TV series "Parenthood," infuses her first big-screen leading role with a unique charm. If Whitman looks familiar, but you can’t quite place her, that’s about right.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

Sylvia the movie competently shows us how; but, as always, it's Sylvia the writer who brilliantly tells us why -- then, now and tomorrow, her foreboding words are her finest legacy.

The gradual ramping up of both the camera calisthenics and the gore quotient suggests a movie that’s been very deliberately paced, but that doesn’t mean that Afflicted really gets anywhere, except back to the very basics its state-of-the-art presentation is supposed to transcend.

À la vie is a gentle toast – the film sticks to its subtle tone, which is both its strength and its weakness.

A little less fascination with computer tricks, and a little more application of human intelligence could have done The Arrival a world of good. [31 May 1996]

The spectacular Italian locations, jazzy score and vehicular action finally go somewhere in the third act, when Ritchie riffs a few stylistic conventions of the era. Mesmerizing and clever, but more style than substance.

The film moves from cliché to cliché and hemorrhages blood and logic at an alarming rate.

While it's not exactly the kind of movie many will feel like catching during a holiday break, fans of the horror genre will appreciate the fresh take on a killer's hunt for fresh meat.

The film is visually bland, with only a couple of bookending outdoor sequences around a handful of interior sets.

With its episodic stream of slapstick gags, Minions has moment of piquant absurdity, but mostly it’s shrill-but-cutesy anarchy works as a visual sugar rush for the preschool set.

Despite some casting problems, director paints a convincing portrait of a frenzied world. [11 Dec 1987, p.D1]

It's a combination that seems ideal for 10-year-old boys who adore violence, and could well be the cornerstone of the next DreamWorks franchise.

Unfortunately, For No Good Reason sidelines Steadman’s own bona fides, functioning primarily as a second-hand documentary of Thompson, stoking the hagiography of the late hipster icon.

The art of the classic Hitchcockian thriller is about style, pace and misdirection – and though Unknown is occasionally baffling and involves running and car chases, the film rarely manages to thrill.

Essentially an affectionate and personal project to honour Thompson's memory, The Rum Diary occasionally strains to evoke the journalist's surreal black humour.

Corbett (of Sex and the City fame) is oddly cast, but still a lovable, if dorky, dad, capable of saving the day.

Stylistically, Baird seems keen to position Filth as a spiritual sequel to "Trainspotting."

Minghella is a smart guy with splendid intentions but, ultimately, he's a victim here of his own liberal contrivances.

At his best, Spike Lee is too brave to be subtle.

Although it’s a kick to see the rough conditions and the full-on roughhousing of old-world golf, the scenes on the links are repetitive. And while the ending takes a severe dogleg turn to soft-focus sentimentality and the soundtrack hounds us to take this thing seriously, the movie is easily resistible.

Hereafter is unpredictable enough to be consistently watchable.

It mostly all comes together in the end, but you still cannot help but watch the film and wonder why the need for just so much of everything.

This wildly black comedy says that in Hollywood, death becomes everyone. [03 Aug 1992]

CQ has a modicum of IQ and a dash of style -- the jury's still out on the extent of the inheritance, but the kid clearly learned something at his pater'sknee.

The film's best players can all be found in the supporting cast.

Can't spoil the ending, except to say that it spoils itself.

The overstuffed farce remains, but the caustic leanness and meanness of the original are gone with the Mississippi wind. That leaves us to settle for occasionally funny moments in an otherwise uneven picture.

All costume and scant drama, the result is a curiously flat spectacle, neither offensive nor compelling.

If family is everything to the Fast & Furious films – as lead lunkhead Vin Diesel would surely posit – then Fast X is a nuclear family reunion that goes atomic.

In truth, you just can’t wait until the wicked Jolie returns to the screen. Whether a malevolent twinkle illuminates her beady eye or a heartbreaking tear rolls down her alabaster cheek, she is the film’s power.

That it all works is a tribute to Stu Silver's gaggy but never vulgar script and to DeVito's imaginative direction, but the movie would be unthinkable without its trio of funny folk. [11 Dec 1987]

Simply put, Touch dies, with nary a resurrective hand in sight. [14 Feb 1997, p.C5]

For all of its intermittent, crowd-pleasing charm, oenophiles (and cinephiles, for that matter) might be better off putting their money toward a good bottle of Robert Mondavi.

Shag bounces through elements of farce and satire, music and romance without straining too hard and with a few more laughs than one would expect from a picture that seems patched together from such a wide variety of genre films. Like a perfect Southern belle, Shag is smarter and funnier than you expect it to be, but never smarter and funnier than it has to be.[21 July 1989]

The movie made me so happy, and here I am back on the subway with Nerdo, and there's this jerk across the aisle who's like ancient, 30 at least, and he's got the nerve to look right into my see-through Madonna lace outfit. And he winks. Oh, barf- ola.

It’s bloody, brutal, stupid fun – until it isn’t. Either running out of ideas or running into budgetary problems, Carnahan slows things down about halfway in, stopping the madness in its tracks to give Roy some humanity (not needed here, but thanks!) and to give audiences some yadda-yadda villainy from a bored-looking, here-for-the-paycheque Gibson (also, no thank you!).

No, there isn't anything wrong with comfort entertainment. Then She Found Me could have, should have been something special - a "Knocked Up" for weary boomers. The only hitch is that it isn't all that entertaining. Nor comforting for that matter.

When one of the most enlightening moments of a film comes during the postscript (black holes!), you know there’s a problem – one that has nothing to do with math.

Ghostbusters II is a comfy experience for all concerned - easy bucks for the producers, easier yuks for the consumers; nothing ventured, money gained. [19 Jun 1989, p.D9]

Presented with every opportunity to say or do something remotely new or compelling, Wright, typically a talented stylist, elects to shrug his shoulders, delivering a wafer-thin confection that is aggressively disinterested in both ideas and action.

As box-office packages go, My Girl may well become a big hit. The wrapping is colourful, even charming in spots, and that circle of black ribbon is a gravely clever touch. Get closer, though, and it's like those Christmas presents stacked around the department store tree - apparently real but really empty. [28 Nov 1991]

There's plenty here to keep summer comedy fans satiated, if not entirely satisfied.

Not even Pacino can save it.

In his directorial debut, comedian and Flirting with Disaster star Ben Stiller struggles to filter out a coherent story line around a fibre-optic-thin plot line and the expansive, anarchic comic talents of Jim Carrey. Too often the movie ends up lost in the snow and static between two films fighting for the same bandwidth. [14 June 1996, p.C1]

Even though Frank Marshall's latest film Alive is based on a true story of survival, it lacks the very qualities it means to celebrate - spark, imagination and spirit. [16 Jan 1993]

If his direction is erratic, the script he wrote with Annie Mumolo (Bridesmaids) has gaps you could drive a truck through and dialogue filled with painfully obvious exposition of plot, motive and theme.

The result, which could be entitled There's Something About Curly, is an unabashedly moronic celebration of slap shtick.

The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]

Glamorously tragic, Betty Blue is sensually shot and persuasively performed, but a solitary thought dropped into boy genius Beineix's colorfully bedecked wishing well of a movie would echo emptily into eternity. [12 Sep 1986, p.D1]

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.

Just as the promising parody of prison films begins to catch fire, Friedman and Poitier douse it with a bucketful of realism. [13 Dec 1980]

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

Black Rain is really an extended exercise in pure style, a pretty picture in constant motion painted by a very commercial artist. In fact, the style is so uncontaminated by substance that everything here - plot, character, theme - gets subordinated to the glitzy sights and ambient sounds. [22 Sep 1989]

Despite the 3-D gadgetry, there's a musty odour to the script.

Like the comic stars of the silent era, Mr. Bean's character transcends language barriers.

None of it is new, nor is the recycled stuff presented in a newly revealing context.

An exercise in naive commentary and globe-trotting magical realism, the film dares viewers to take it seriously.

Like a lot of things about Zack and Miri, the porn title feels like it's trying too hard.

Sometimes sensitive and often silly but really, essentially, beneath his pallor and her panting and their intertwined frustrations, it's just two long hours of coitus interruptus.

The whole film occupies pretty much the same continuuum -- glimmers of intelligence followed by moments of outright hysteria punctuated by bouts of sheer haplessness.

For all the talk of Smith’s strong performance, one wonders if the subject matter couldn’t have been tackled with less sentimentality and heartfelt biography.

The larger shell game here is that Edge of Darkness is offered as a political thriller, but with real-world politics removed. What we’re left with is a familiar mechanism for delivering a vicarious, violent, wish-fulfilment fantasy, with Mel in a familiar position, in the driver’s seat, pedal to the metal.

The Beach Bum feels like a similar display of prized possessions – only that one of you (Matthew) is taking us on a tour of his bongo- and bong-filled bedroom, while the other (hi, Harmony) is just leading us to his toilet.

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.

The Face is her face, the mannerisms are her mannerisms and Miss Dunaway manages magnificently to depict a woman whose acting off- screen is no better than her acting on.This is theoretically a modern horror movie about mother love but it is actually one of the funniest movies about how not to make a movie ever made. [25 Sept 1981]

Conclusions and answers are perhaps luxuries that Sharma's film can't afford.

This is an Affair to forget. [21 Oct 1994]

It’s Dano who floats away with the most goodwill, giving Hanus a tender, ultimately haunting air despite being, you know, a horrendously frightening creature that, in a parallel universe, might’ve inspired Stephen King to write It.

The intrigue is high and the action is furious, but a sort of meta subplot is also at work: Sextagenerian action-film hero Chan against onetime 007er Brosnan.

A movie that tries to do to real estate what Fatal Attraction did to adultery. It fails - the script isn't half as convincing or the suspense nearly as taut, but the aim is the same. [28 Sept 1990]

In terms of psychology, it's an abysmal failure, too real to be symbolic, too symbolic to be realistic. [25 May 1990]

Exuberantly campy.

The Israeli author’s melancholy work might on the surface be an odd choice for Portman, but as writer, director and star, she takes to it with a fierce sense of devotion and even protection, creating a Hebrew-language drama about the tight, complex bond between a mother (Portman) and her son (Amir Tessler).

If nothing else (and there isn't much else), Part III rises above the wholesale clutter of its immediate predecessor, then contents itself with settling into an easy commercial groove. What remains is amiable kid's stuff, as sweetly forgettable as an orange Popsicle on a summer's day. [25 May 1990, p.C4]

The net result is a few shaky laughs and one unwavering sensation -- that The Terminal is interminable.

Nothing more or less than an outright bodice-ripper -- it should have ditched the artsy pretensions and revelled in the entertaining shallows.

For his feature film debut, Brandon Cronenberg has taken the decidedly uneasy route in more ways than one. First of all, Antiviral is a virtual panoply of high wooziness, replete with sweating, shakes, vomiting, rot-infected food and more needles piercing skin than rush hour at a free flu clinic.

It must be the only movie ever made in which the hero's immediate goal in life is to wrestle in a different weight class. The film treats this event with all the fake reverence tabloid feature writers use to describe disabled people who learn to paint with their feet or mother dogs who swim across lakes to rescue endangered litters. [15 Feb 1985]

Whom is this movie for, really? It's too tame for the whooping crowds of women who made hits of the "Sex and the City" movies and "Bridesmaids." And for sure it isn't for parents with kids. You can probably find them, diaper bags in the aisles and toddlers on their laps, watching "Dr. Seuss: The Lorax."