The movie’s compromised tone, wavering between emo introspection and rom-com cuteness, is awkward in all the wrong ways.

The Distinguished Gentleman isn't - distinguished, that is - but it's a notable cut above Eddie Murphy's recent ventures. [04 Dec 1992]

Even without a chronological point of reference, Outland has an intriguingly realistic look. Unfortunately, both the realism and the intrigue begin and end with the sets. [25 May 1981]

A bad-cop, worse-cop movie.

What a shame that The Spirit isn't nearly as good as it looks.

Wants keenly to be hip and modern, but really it's just an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy.

David Lynch's eye-popping imagery is buried under an avalanche of self-indulgence.

Big Wednesday is American writer-director John Milius' attempt to use surfing as a metaphor for life. It doesn't work. [27 June 1978]

With the two American actresses miscast, and the two young British lads behaving like a couple of "Brideshead Revisited" rejects, most of the dramatic heavy lifting is left to veteran English actor Wilkinson.

As an actor, Kirk Douglas still has more to give; too bad he didn't have more to work with.

The contrived script is stretched to the breaking point by Reiner's listless direction.

For all that Silence is a gorgeous film filled with imagery that is sometimes startling and often compelling, the director sadly fails in a passion project decades in the making: This is a long and dull costume drama that seems to think a contemporary audience can picture faith as easily as it does a cassock, cross or kimono.

Joe Pytka does display an occasional nice touch with mood and atmosphere - at its infrequent best, the humor here is almost wry. But his editing is as jumpy as a mare in heat. [19 Aug 1989]

A movie about con artists that turns out to be a con job, and guess who's getting played for a sucker?

National Lampoon's European Vacation is directed by Amy Heckerling, whose career began with the spunky if not inventive Fast Times at Ridgemont High and continued with the inventive if not spunky Johnny Dangerously; this time, she's responsible for a picture that's neither inventive nor spunky. [29 July 1985]

The best sequence is a five-minute set-piece where Clouseau struggles with an accent coach to learn how to order a hamburger like an American.

Pathfinder is aimed more at the action-figure crowd than the history buffs.

3 Men and a Cradle is in fact a dated farce with designer cinematography. [25 April 1986, p.D1]

Too terrifying for children, too boring for adults and arriving far too soon after a nearly identical project, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a frustrating, fascinating mess.

Over all, the movie is just funny enough to make you wish it were much better than it is.

Smith’s charisma isn’t always an asset to the movie though. Unlike the unknown Macchio in the original Kid, there’s nothing vulnerable about Smith except for his diminutive size, which is its own problem.

Stern pledges to just listen rather than argue, and though what he hears is often bonkers and wholly unsupported by facts, he has compassion, at least for those who are not nakedly racist.

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.

Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.

The climax, a 20-minute dramatization of the crucial contest, lacks both suspense and poetry -- essentially, we're left to watch a clumsy recreation of a game whose outcome we already know. That's a sort of resurrection, I suppose, but miraculous it assuredly ain't.

Never as spectacular as it promises, often funnier than it intends, Clash of the Titans is a harmless diversion - neither bad enough to annoy nor good enough to admire. [15 June 1981]

Though Shark Tale will make waves at the multiplexes and move a lot of plastic toys at Burger King, the movie lacks real heart. It feels like a cold-blooded, always moving, profit-making machine.

Things you will not find in State Of Grace: a script that makes a modicum of psychological sense; a performance that isn't either desperately overwrought or numbly underplayed; and anything resembling grace. [18 Sep 1990]

This is a guy movie, a gothic creepshow.

The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.

A Canadian-made werewolf thriller, Skinwalkers occasionally rises above its station as a standard-issue horror flick to deliver some enjoyably cheeseball thrills.

It's a bright, busy imitation of independent moviemaking. But it's hardly an independent film. Hopefully, next time out, director Crowley, a promising storyteller, will find his own story to tell.

Finally, it's more a cautionary tale about the dangers of what can happen when a bad movie happens to a popular novelist than a keeper for the ages.

As Whatever Works creaks along, the attention-getting nastiness of the first half dissipates and it turns into just another Woody Allen overacted sex farce. Of all the insults hurled about in the film, perhaps the worst is its pandering conclusion. What exactly does Allen take his audience for? A bunch of mindless zombies?

Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.

This is a film that dearly wants to be important, that wants to do for Holland what Irene Nemirovsky's "Suite Française" does for France - examine the German occupation through a prism of painful honesty. Yet the lofty ambition comes dressed in cheap attire; Verhoeven can't seem to stop himself from shopping downmarket.

Those Hollywood tricksters have managed to shorten the story while slowing the pace -- all of a sudden, minutes are passing like hours.

In the Scotland of Young Adam, love is getting dragged through the mud.

To watch Charlie as merely a character in a film is maybe not enough. His overwhelming encroachment on the lives of the Russell family is, however repetitive on screen, a physical embodiment of the agony of knowing something that other people refuse to see, of knowing too much and not being believed.

As the title loudly hints, ultimate victory assumes the flawless shape of the star pitcher’s perfect game, a rarity anywhere yet especially at the Little League level. In getting to that climax, the recreated game action is a bit tepid and the child actors too precociously cute, but the true tale in the midst of the fabrication remains a guaranteed heart-warmer.

DELIGHTING the senses but leaving the emotions unscathed, a stylish thriller delivers exactly the same punch as a frantic roller-coaster ride - ambling up here, speeding down there, twisting, turning, big finish and off. The goal is nothing more (or less) than fun pure and simple. [16 Jan 1987]

By the time the film reaches its obvious conclusion – by the time Hart expends more energy than Bugs Bunny, by the time the espionage plot twists itself into corners too convoluted for even "Homeland" fans, by the time Thurber exhausts the audience by unleashing cameo after cameo – it’s only Johnson who remains standing tall.

A potentially incisive character study is buried under layers of fluff in The English Teacher.

Between the swash and the buckle, Reynolds comes up completely dry - the connecting scenes lack any rhythm or pace. And Costner looks every bit as uncomfortable as he sounds - the British actors, especially Rickman, blow him off the screen. [24 June 1991]

In an irony, Godard’s certainly aware of (after all, he constructed it), Goodbye is noteworthy for being shot in 3-D, a calling card of the cookie-cutter Hollywood movies it couldn’t have less to do with.

A high-pedigree, low-interest affair that serves mostly as an exercise in postmortem speculation: Why is a project with so many prominent names attached to it so sterile and lifeless?

Robert Downey Jr., the kid who holds his own against James Woods in "True Believer", gives Chances Are what charm it has, but there's no saving this mystical romantic mess. It's fitting that the sexy and funny Downey has been cast as a soul trapped in another body - in Chances Are, he's imprisoned in a sitcom that's all situation and no comedy. [10 March 1989]

The whole picture plays like a pop-up book in a welfare agency.

No one knows why bad things happen to good people. But we do know why bad things happen to good film ideas. They get ruined by poor scripts and indifferent direction. The evidence desemaine– Shrink.

Mediocre movie.

Coming from writers responsible for such material as "Snow Dogs" and "The 6th Day," National Treasure is not so much a no-brainer as a brain-stunner, so audaciously ridiculous you are initially intrigued, then soon irritated by its incoherence.

Not nearly as smart as it should be.

Beneath the polished surface, Dead Poets Society is moribund at the core - too pat, too safe and too hypocritical, as conformist as the conformity it so easily decries.

A mere action suspense adventure lacking the depths of the original. [14 July 1989]

Pretty routine, pretty forgettable. Don't know how else to say this, so best to be frank: I'm just not that into He's Just Not That Into You.

There's a whole lot of "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm" packed into Lymelife.

The result is nothing if not a curiosity piece.

Leaves us with is sporadic showers of laughs for kids under 10. That's a shame, because the film could have been a delight for everyone, if only it hadn't learned to behave.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus takes us deep into the imagination of Terry Gilliam, which once was a splendid place to visit. And might prove so again. But not here, because this film is less a coherent exercise of imagination than a haphazard lecture on its importance, a lecture that eventually dwindles into self-indulgence.

The Super Bowl MVP is awarded a trip to Disneyland. Maybe in the future, he should be awarded a part in an Adam Sandler movie. There is no bigger male fantasy land.

The scenes between Stewart and co-star Nicholas Hoult tend to be long and lingering, even bordering on dull, and the melodramatic music grows bothersome. By the time it reaches its abrupt ending, the only emotion audiences might be left with is boredom.

As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.

There’s a scene in a members-only club where Wyatt and Goddard meet, giving the two veteran actors the chance to go eyeball to eyeball for a couple of minutes of barbed dialogue. It almost makes the movie worth it.

Despite some fine performances, what should be a crystalline epic is a sloppy and sentimental tale of family life. Sterling performances in a leaden script. [05 Oct 1990]

Somewhere between its loutish humour and laudable sentiments are the traces of a good buddy movie that could, at the very least, have been harmless summer fun.

The plot and most action sequences here are as cookie-cutter as the community homes Quan’s Gable is selling.

A bizarre and flawed movie. It serves up the 1991 siege of Vukovar with a crazed Balkan bloodthirstiness that is shocking and sickening to watch, far beyond anything usually seen in an American movie.

The movie meanders on and on, like a bad sexual dream, until you finally wake up mumbling: Stella, please: leave that groove thang alone.

We also know the last time Keanu and Sandra shared the screen together. That was yesterday and Speed. This is today and Snail. I'm not betting on a tomorrow.

This is a fairly well-made picture that's just been fairly well-made too many times before, a knock-off of a thousand other knock-offs.

Notorious isn't, not even remotely.

The movie, directed by Marek Kanievska (Another Country), does have an ending, but it belongs on a lectern. It mechanically begs a lengthy list of questions in favor of a finger-wagging warning that purports to reveal the fate lying in wait for those who play with snow indoors, along with the rewards assigned to those who study hard back East, where it only snows outdoors. [6 Nov 1987]

The script wants desperately to be about the unfathomable nature of love. The best it can deliver is this: “Love is loving someone who is covered in snot.” It’s all quirked up, but goes nowhere.

Only an actor of Moore's calibre could begin to add a bit of credible flesh to these hallowed bones.

A critic needs only two words to dispense with The Grinch; the first one is bah.

How to Eat Fried Worms arrives just in time to placate preteen boys who resent being unable to see the frankly more adult though equally immature "Snakes on a Plane."

Just a mediocre action franchise with a solid actor at the head and a travelogue in its heart.

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]

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 defence, the movie means to incorporate Jet's conversion into its theme, serving up his new pacifism as a choice morsel of irony. But it doesn't taste ironic, just bland, and we aren't biting either.

Hard-working to a fault, this is a movie that's all effort and no direction, a movie completely lacking in what its hero eventually finds -- a sense of identity.

Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to. But there is also a very real danger that the film’s sloppy plotting and watered down set-pieces might also make you so disoriented and frustrated that your socks will end up in mismatched little balls.

Your basic and basically predictable by-the-numbers picture.

The best moments of Like a Boss are just that – moments. The film has an obvious deficit of story – instead of any sort of satisfying sense of development, the audience gets 83 minutes of the same problem repeated over and over.

So it's a pretty faded experience. I suggest you get out the books, which for once can truly be said to be more spectacular than the movie.

A movie with a confident sense of its own worthlessness, it speeds by in a flurry of candy-coloured cars, bare midriffs, screaming engines and a pulsing rap soundtrack.

A meagre, occasionally funny affair.

Has a deliberately minimalist, retro look to it as well.

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

By turns raw, naturalistic and indebted to John Cassavetes, both stylistically and thematically.

Coming from a major director like Spike Lee, this is a colossal disappointment. And a surprising one.

Yes, it's "The Devil Wears Prada," redux.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

The 3-D is a pain, and the excitable editing, slo-mo and speeded-up action frustrate attempts to watch the athleticism on display, but the last half-hour takes it up a notch.

An intermittently watchable movie. Not because the plot is any less silly, or the theme any more mature, but for the simple reason that, on the margins of this marginal picture, there are several wonderful faces -- sometimes belonging to actors who know how to use them, and sometimes attached to folks who merely inhabit them. In either case, however, the visual result is an incongruous slice of vintage Americana pared off the usual slab of Hollywood mediocrity. [9 Sept 1997]

Even though the presence of such political and social nuances is largely inconceivable in an American romantic comedy, they only make this busy, blustery film seem more muddled.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

What promised to be a teen screwball comedy with a supernatural twist soon descends into special-effects overkill and camp acting from the overqualified supporting cast.