Easily the daffiest movie you've ever seen that also references incestuous role-playing games.

This time, though, Zemeckis has another technical trick up his sleeve – 3-D – and for once the gimmick succeeds.

Take nothing seriously - not the action, not the gore, not the plot, not the theme. Instead, view Desperado as it's meant to be seen - a comedy - and you're in for an unalloyed treat; heck, you're in for one of the funniest flicks of the year.

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

Much less painful than a walk in the summer heat, but not quite as pleasant as a swim in a cool pool. [15 Aug 1984]

It’s all too silly to arouse, but too garish and annoying to be thoughtful. It feels as if Fennell is torn between having her cake and eating it out, too.

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.

Feels like one of those misguided high-school-teacher exercises in making literary history sound contemporary.

Ultimately, even Lee appears to lose interest, flashing none of his usual visual panache and, at the end, content to forego any considered conclusion for a hunk of lumpy irony.

They're not much company, our Marcus and Esca. But there we are, mucking through crazy Scotland with them.

For all the talent involved, The Eye of the Storm is an incident-stuffed but lacklustre affair – a case of lots of sturm, but not enough drang – that reaches for a satiric sting and emotional depth it never achieves.

Yet the performances are just sturdy boats against the narrative current - the plot is altogether too calculated and wholly without surprises, either pleasant or unpleasant... The painting is just fine; too bad the numbers show through.

The result is that the particularly cruel delights of Pollock’s writing get lost in an adaptation that can never nail any of its sprawling cast of characters, or escape the Southern-fried clichés that the novel transcends.

The old carnival phrase "Close, but no cigar" comes to mind when watching The Brothers Bloom , a globetrotting heist film that starts off terrifically and then progressively deflates.

Although 18 minutes shorter than the 126-minute original, this picture drags unashamedly, and its conflicts are repeated so predictably that the action becomes a kind of water torture. [24 June 1986]

Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.

The filmmakers have leapt over franchise concerns to somehow deliver a movie that engages kids and entertainingly puzzles adults.

Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.

Yet despite the efforts of its stars and the inherent juiciness of its source material, the film falls flat when it should bounce with surreal glee. Perhaps it’s because Kelly is only telling half a story here.

The relationship between reporter and subject is always a tricky one, but in Resurrecting the Champ it's downright delusional.

Ostensibly an homage to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis C.K.’s “secret” movie – it comes to TIFF only a few months after it was shot, with no prior publicity – is more an overlong rebuke to allegations of the filmmaker’s own sexual misconduct.

As for Daisy, her inflated role is problematic. Although at the periphery of the action, the woman stands at the centre of the film, doubling as the compromised love interest and our voice-over narrator. But even Linney can't bring her to life.

The title – Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel – is fine as far as it goes. But if you leave out "octogenarian mammophile" and "calendar fetishist," you leave something essential out of the story.

The movie, and I don’t think I’m over- or under-selling this, is pure chaos. From its rib-poking opening to its magnificently messy conclusion, Old is a feverishly earnest look at mortality, responsibility and, um, well … I wish that I could explain just what I think Shyamalan is getting at in his final 15 minutes

Dark Shadows only meaningful relationship is between Depp and his audience. He's a persona now, no longer an actor. And the kick here, as always, is watching him try on funny accents and hairdos.

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

The core trio are smooth and amusing in their roles, but the larger plot is filled with painful stereotypes, from a tough female cop to various black gangsters. Meanwhile, as the sympathetic criminals try to outwit police, the social theme remains unfocused – despite heartfelt pleas for street people, especially the homeless Inuit of Montreal.

Director Marc Meyers’s sometimes funny, but more often creaky, spin on devil worship, murder and good ol’ fashioned religion has only one or two nifty ideas – all of which are sacrificed early on, leaving about an hour of footage in desperate need of divine intervention.

In the end, Eagle vs. Shark represents a convincing triumph for Dumb.

An efficiently engineered piece of studio product, enjoyable enough at times, but with an unmistakable assembly-line quality.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.

Union Square's biggest flaw is its predictability.

Foster, recovering nicely from her last directorial outing in the surprisingly unfunny "The Beaver," proves her smarts by managing to balance these different strands of humour while keeping the action ticking along.

So, is Yesterday a one-trick Dig a Pony or did renowned British screenwriter Richard Curtis and the great British filmmaker Danny Boyle turn a cute hook into something meaningful? The answer is that the duo tries for the latter, but doesn’t quite nail it.

Ambulance is here to remind you of the head-spinning delights of watching a genuine cinematic madman at work. This is eye-popping, ear-splitting, guffaw-inducing stuff that makes Red Notice look like the dumpster juice it truly is.

The problem with the Purge films is they feel like they’re made for people who would actually take part in the purge.

The sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes frustrating film proves that Stone, ever the professional provocateur, still has what it takes to rile an audience. Or at least make your head spin round so many times that you’ll be backward thankful for the migraine.

There are jump-scares aplenty, and a great deal of barely visible shots of its monster, culminating in a full-on creature reveal that’s nicely gross. The characters are sketched out just enough to make you care whether they live or die, with solid performances from all involved, including a rare star turn from Messina.

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

Yet after half an hour in Wendy’s world, it is clear that Zeitlin has exhausted both his visual imagination and whatever narrative interest he had in Barrie’s tale other than “kids, they grow up fast.”

The Greatest Game Ever Played is far too inconsistent to be great, but at least Paxton has made an honourable attempt to treat this piece of sports history with the gravity it deserves.

The cast is proficient, with Balk especially adroit at giving her demonic gifts a gleeful twist. And director Andrew Fleming keeps the special effects on a low boil, effective yet not ostentatious, while taking allusive advantage of the competing (and sometimes complementing) tension between the school's Catholic imagery and the girl's pagan icons. But as our heroines lose their grip, so does he. [03 May 1996]

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]

The result isn't meant to be an historical document transmuted into fiction; instead, it's fiction turned into a fable, a dark fable.

With a multiracial cast, an international spy-caper flick with "Mission Impossible" and John Woo overtones, and a series of comic turns, fantasy sequences and sly humour, it should be a fresh delight. Unfortunately, it's not.

P.S.'s ending, a cautiously happy conclusion, feels like an afterthought.

Speaking of that deadly finale, it's easily the best part of the picture. Beautifully edited, shot in fluid slow-motion, scored to a traditional Irish ballad crooned in a child's tremulous voice, the violence of the climax is anthemic. The whole sequence is undeniably moving.

Makin has a knack for comic jolts, and, apparently, little interest in the longer narrative arc that movies, no matter how unorthodox, require. [13 Apr 1996]

Wahlberg, whose dim-bulb act was over-exposed in Pain and Gain, fares better here in a more heroic role. Stig is a hothead and a narcissist, but he’s also just a little bit smarter than he looks. The same goes for 2 Guns as a whole.

Only Lange is a powerful enough presence to raise a flicker of realistic emotion from this kind of stuff.

There are the usual gaggle of embarrassing friends, a lot of voice-over and montages, a wedding, a funeral and wait … something’s missing. Oh, right. Hugh Grant.

Alas, around about the third act, the idea grows tired and the whole thing gets derailed. Too bad, because it's a good ride until it isn't.

The delight of this film isn't so much in the tale as the telling.

Love the kid though, and Statham too – it takes a star with quality to be so rock solid in a crumbling yarn.

It’s a genuinely fun affair – let’s not write it off as a cult classic just yet – with the smirking air of a confidant and mischievous filmmaker.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

In making the first DC superhero film in a long time to aspire to anything like levity, Wan finds a way to catalyze what might have been yet another dust-dry origin story. The secret? Just add water.

As it exists, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny is strictly for the tenaciously devoted.

Not that Harbour is the reason that Violent Night lands like a lump of coal. He does what he can in a witless movie that is too easily satisfied with its own premise and often feels like it’s elbowing you in the ribs trying to get you to laugh along with it.

Knuckleball does not flutter; its pace and tone is lean, mean and eerie. Luca Villacis plays the home-alone little hero, a Rambo MacGyver Jr. in the making. Not all the kid’s ingenuity and wits are plausible, though, and a late-plot throw-in is a bit much. Still, there’s Ironside and enough cold-weather tension to make Knuckleball a swing-and-hit deal.

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

Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.

Full of post-hippie fatalism and cynical macho barroom existentialism, the original film feels very much of its era, and the remake anachronistic.

Partly because of Alda's comedy training on television, he has succeeded in making, for two thirds of its length, an amusing and very commercial film. But the last part shows him failing at what he really wanted to do. [23 May 1981]

It becomes clear that there’s just not enough meat on the bones of Craig’s film to justify all the dismemberment.

This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.

There are flashes of excitement in this film, mostly from the verbal play and sulphurous humour of Welsh's perspective, but there's a lot that makes you wonder why you're sitting through it.

John Sayles's heartrending new film is a many-splendoured thing.

There's a surprising sweetness in the bond between the two cops. The gay subtext of the partnership is used for humour but it's never sniggering or mean.

You may well watch this film and not buy into a single frame. Me, I couldn't help myself.

Double Tap tries to emulate the exact feelings of its predecessor, but the stakes aren’t anywhere close to high enough to warrant any real touching moments.

Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.

It’s the type of film that was birthed with 1997′s "The Full Monty," which shares a director with Military Wives in Peter Cattaneo – as well as a flat, incurious sensibility that lacks any hint of complexity in the layers of its world or the inner lives of its characters.

While paying lip service to the spirit of invention and adventure, the movie doesn’t do much for the evolution of children’s animated entertainment.

So I didn't Huckabees, nor did I entirely not it. Rather, when the end draws nigh and judgment beckons, I'm doomed again to dither in the tepid netherworld, that vast limbo where movies are only half-decent and movie-going is merely half-ed.

Yes, from "Blonde" to "Bunny," it's abundantly evident that the two scribes have mastered, truly mastered, the serious art of self-plagiarism.

A rarity – a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.

Despite the tiresome story, it’s a hard film to dislike.

Wagner Moura (Narcos’s Pablo Escobar himself) does what he can as the sturdy Sergio, and the actor has strong, near-instant chemistry with a love interest played by Ana de Armas.

Powered by a Scottish writer, a Scottish director, and the rugged beauty of the Scottish Highlands, this is clearly a labour of love, and the passion gets right up on the screen.

Trachtenberg gives a sweetly compelling performance as Casey, as does the wonderfully kooky Cusack as her mother, but their charms are not enough to save this painfully unoriginal movie from coming out of a triple toe loop and landing flat on its bottom.

In its mocking but acutely observed style, Hobo is a well-designed cinematic mess: There are whiplash jump cuts, patches where the sound almost disappears, and the whole thing is projected in a queasy, faded Technicolor.

Do you need to see this film? No. But if you want to see it, you’re in for a treat.

A happy surprise, a sweet and silly combination of the cheesy special effects of Japanese sci-fi movies and the witty slapstick of American silent films. [20 Apr 1981]

Love & Other Drugs is quite the little cocktail of mood-brighteners, a movie narcotic easy to take and, since the effects wear off quickly, even easier to forget.

Despite an impressive array of acting talent, nothing quite rings true -- all those sharp pieces fit beautifully together without adding up to much. [22 Jan 1999, p.D6]

The whole thing has all the spontaneity of high-school morning announcements.

Though Zoom skillfully weaves together animation and live action, I was not stoned when I watched it, and I’m not a fan of plot-plot-plot. So it left me meh.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

In the world of pulp movies, where horror, westerns and Asian exploitation borrow and blend with each other, there's a point where the cross-genre mishmash begins to feel like gobbledegook. That's definitely the case with Sukiyaki Western Django.

Hausner is clearly talented, and I’m all for a film without easy answers. But I wish this one was less insistently opaque.

Rocky V, for all its faults, is not awful. It is inferior to the charmingly naive, Cinderella-in-sweat-pants opener of 14 years ago, but it's far superior to every other overdetermined installment. [21 Nov 1990, p.C1]

It's the small, smelly details that elevate this Indian-fusion retelling of Jane Austen's classic novel from trifle to bona-fide delight.

Typical themes (redemption, forgiveness) are laid out with little imagination.

This means that Someone to Watch Over Me is a much more interesting movie (than "Fatal Attraction").[9 Oct 1987]

Anyone who has ever watched a movie about young love and the C-word (no, not Clouds) will know exactly where the film is headed, as well as the obligatory narrative beats that stretch out the inevitable. But for a sob story, Clouds is not nearly as watery as it could have been.