They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

A football story that deserves a penalty flag every other play for piling on the sentiment.

The Program makes passing references to the power of celebrity and the Live Strong narrative – the cyclist admits to telling people what they wanted to hear – but it never goes deep on what it was that produced the awfulness that is Lance Armstrong.

Soul Surfer is a true story that plays like bad fiction.

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

If you're a five-year-old, or the mental equivalent thereof, and love Saturday morning cartoons, the more violent the better, then Mouse Hunt may just be the movie for you.

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

Directed by Brian Percival, best known for his work on "Downton Abbey," the film has the similar quality of a well-appointed historical soap opera.

In the Mouth of Madness may leave your spine a little short on tingle (any amount of irony always dissipates the scares), but it compensates by neither insulting your grey matter nor sparing your funny bone. In a genre more brain-dead than not, that's an awfully attractive trade-off. [03 Feb 1995]

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

Most impressively, Lemercier manages to make Dion/Aline’s not-terribly-dramatic hardships – she has trouble conceiving with her husband, she misses her family while on the road, she feels exhausted by her Las Vegas schedule – feel relatable and compelling. Part of that is Lemercier’s full-throttle commitment to the bit.

This is a dumb action flick that pretends to have a brain, a spot of affectation that plunges the audience into double jeopardy -- forcing us to traipse through not just the standard litter of bloody corpses but (oh, damn) the added trash of bloodless ideas.

Already being decried as either self-parody or half-assed nonsense, the drama is in fact just as challenging and rewarding as Malick’s previous work, though with a more modern and caustic edge than one-time acolytes might be used to.

Like most kiddies games, this one starts out fun and then gets tired. Inevitably, that's when Slade tries to revive our interest by upping the gore quotient.

Not merely a bore, it’s excruciating.

Baby Boom has the fluffy amiability of an innocuous sitcom. In their rightful place on the shrunken sets of the small screen, its teeny characters would seem comfortably at home. But blown up to feature dimensions, they betray their flimsy origins, looking thin and transparent, just a bunch of under-considered ideas decked out in over-sized finery. [10 Oct 1987]

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.

So much of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is pulled from what has come before, and so much of it carries the wear and tear of repetition.

As is often the case in these caper flicks, there’s too much plot for insufficient dramatic effect, and alert viewers will suss out where it’s all heading in the first five minutes.

The less-than-original theme is illuminated with grace and insight, with sensuality and spirituality, and Oshima stumbles only twice. Unfortunately, the missteps are major. [16 Sep 1983]

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

This is a profoundly disturbing work. It should be essential viewing, particularly in high schools and universities, whence the next generation of policy makers will one day emerge, hopefully more enlightened than we have been.

Jeunet’s major achievement is to capture the book’s complicated museum clutter and hothouse-flower sensitivity.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.

Give Quarantine credit: Without resorting to computer-generated monsters or supernatural explanations, it uses consistent logic and confinement to find new ways of being scary.

In this tale of two lives, Being Flynn gets the emphasis wrong. The success that has many fathers is altogether predictable; it's the despicable orphan of failure who has us in his thrall.

The proverbial seems awfully pale here. Fans of Q.T. will find it patently derivative. Fans of Elmore will find it, well, El-less.

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

Nasty in its narrative and nifty in its aesthetic, Stephen Susco’s new film is a solid argument against doing anything remotely illicit online.

Like most modern action films, Shooter is too explicit, more interested in mayhem than motive.

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

What follows is excellent, uncomplicated and well-wrought house-of-horrors fun, complete with a message about self-blame and the real things that haunt us. Gary Dauberman is a first-time director, but don’t worry, Mom and Dad, your kids (and everyone else) are in good hands with him.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

The apocalyptic vision of the heartland created by Sutton and his cast (based on the novel by Frank Bill) is impressively convincing, even if the themes are often overstated and the film itself is very hard to watch.

By the final act, involving possibly the most far-fetched scheme since Dr. Evil aimed his death ray at Earth in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," the indifference has become completely contagious.

You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more.

Grumpy, dopey and wheezy. In this dispiriting spectacle of feuding codgers, two of the finer comic actors of their genration are reduced to being cute and talking dirty. [31 Dec 1993, p.C3]

While Macdonald manages to come up with one of the most impressively brutal cut-to-black endings in recent memory, the rest of this feature cannot hope to match the power of his cast.

Rather than invoke sympathy, the technique creates annoyance with Harris's writing: Sure, these characters may be clichés, but haven't they suffered enough?

Each frame is drowning in vibrant colours and packed with so many decked-out extras that Aladdin’s environment seems less like a typical CGI-enabled sound stage, and more like a tangible, if bombastically stylish, world of its own.

Black comedy often asks viewers, in exchange for the hilarity, to suspend their moral objections along with their disbelief...Here, we keep our part of the bargain only to be cheated of our payoff.

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!

Sound the alarm, hide the children and lock the doors: another Purge movie is here. And it’s deadlier, and dumber, than ever.

Through it all, Smith’s performance grounds the horror in a place of courage, heart and soul.

Unfortunately, more often than not, Ma settles into its lack of a refined generic vision and stalls out just before it’s able to hit most of its horror talking points squarely on the head.

The most sentimental Italian movie about surviving the war since "Life is Beautiful."

This might be tolerable if Nair hadn't missed the central point, that Becky Sharp isn't sharp like spice, she's sharp like a razor.

Although it has a few technical flaws, mostly in pacing and tone, these are more than made up for by an intelligently funny and unsentimental script, and several noteworthy performances. [24 Nov 1992]

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

A modest and charmingly genuine youth movie. Mischief doesn't, to be sure, fall squarely into the latter, uncrowded category that includes Diner, The Flamingo Kid, and Puberty Blues. But it has a lot more going for it than Porky's.[9 Feb 1985]

Timberlake fares fine enough in his strong-and-mostly-silent role, displaying genuine chemistry with Wainwright (though let’s not bring in whatever the tabloids and gossip sites have to say about the matter). Allen is delightful in that refreshing way that only newcomers can be. And in terms of Apple TV+’s bid to become a more family-friendly competitor to Netflix, Palmer makes good, decent sense.

Palindromes is a cracked American picaresque.

We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.

The reboot is sure to delight the young ones in your care, especially over the summer. As for the older ones? There are enough throwbacks to reminisce – and then revisit the offbeat classic.

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

She Came to Me is overstuffed to be sure, but in an admirable way that underlines Miller’s fierce desire to enchant and entertain an audience looking for stories about people, not intellectual property.

Watching a merely adequate thriller is like eating an ungarnished hot dog - it goes down all right, but where's the spice and what's the point? Narrow Margin combines a solid cast with workmanlike direction and a decent if undistinguished script. Add it up and...you guessed it...all dog and no garnish. [24 Sep 1990]

Hartley gives us quirkiness in place of connection and usually forgets to put the thrill in the thriller, which is precisely what's endearing about this Amateur. [12 May 1995]

The cinematic strategies are energetic without being vulgar, the words are plain-spoken, and moony Mel's melancholy is what matinee idols are made of. [18 Jan 1991]

Unfortunately, Hysteria is much closer in its effects to a more significant and much larger 19th-century invention. Like the locomotive, this costume drama proceeds noisily and methodically toward a destination that is agreed upon from the outset. Good orgasms and good movies generally offer surprises; good trains do not.

An enjoyable time-waster, distinguished by an unexpectedly sharp comic turn by McConaughey, lots of boisterous horseplay and some stirring emotional clinches. All in all, an entirely serviceable night out for buddies looking to locate hidden feelings.

Alas, in the third instalment of the C.S. Lewis odyssey, the devolution continues with the inexorability of a fairy tale thrust in reverse – the sublime first film morphed into the routine second and now this wispy banality.

Any kids’ cartoon that opens with narration by the mondo eccentric German filmmaker Werner Herzog is bound to bring comfort to hearts of certain parents in the house.

Ultimately, She's The One is about less than it seems -- Burns is quite willing to trade off emotional credibility to an easy gag and a neat resolution. Yes, the film's apparent sensitivity comes with a high commercial gloss, but so what -- the lightness is breezy enough to cool our objections. Burns may well be an unabashed entertainer in the guise of an auteur, yet that's an awfully potent combination. Just ask a certain Woody Allen. [23 Aug 1996]

The challenge of watching Fatherhood is that it’s tough to make out what sort of a narrative it’s trying to tell.

The Coen brothers have made the A-list of writer/directors with their big-budget replicants of Hollywood genres, but the wisecracking Hudsucker Proxy is all comic sound and fury signifying nothing All talk, no substance. [11 Mar 1994, p.C3]

Sandburg’s "The Prairie Years" is a source behind The Better Angels, a gorgeous look at the raw, wooded Indiana of the early 1800s and a dreamy study of the boy Lincoln who was destined to leave it behind.

Less “amazing” than persistent.

The film is dialogue-heavy, easily imaginable as a two-hander for the stage, but watching the ice-thawing process between the two enemies is less compelling on screen.

Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

Everyone is back for Another Stakeout but, without the laughs-and-thrills mix of the original, this sequel just doesn't work. [24 July 1993]

The trouble with Renfield, though, is the fact that it’s called Renfield and not Dracula. Snivelling when not stiff, the title character is a bore, as is Hoult’s shoulder-shrug of a performance.

Instead of captivating us with swagger, McConaughey chooses to go grim and dogged. Director Ross does the same.

At its best points, Sharp Stick functions like a cinematic mixtape of every Taylor Swift song, presenting romantic clichés and immediately pulverizing them into dust. At its worst points, Sharp Stick is a twee, porn-ified Napoleon Dynamite, humiliating the very heroine who we should empathize with the most.

By happy coincidence, their names – Bitey, Loudy, Stinky, Lovey and Nimrod – pretty much double as a plot summary.

So, the safely scary and often amusing formula holds. Meanwhile, the movie’s conclusion includes enough plot about Stine’s fate to suggest Goosebumps 3 will feature more of the elusive Black and that can only be a good thing.

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.

Silly, and unashamedly second-hand, the movie is essentially a Jack Black movie without Jack Black, which is, arguably, an improvement.

The whole thing should be harmless enough – the actors are such old hands, they can pull off this plucky stuff in their sleep. Except for one ruinous thing: The dance sequences are unforgivably awful.

Eisenberg does an admirable job porting his typically nervous energy into Marceau, a man who’s not portrayed as a full-blooded hero so much as a sincere, if naive, nebbish constantly wrestling with his fears and doubts.

At this point in his career, Clooney is more than a seasoned director, yet The Tender Bar lacks any artistic vision. We’re left with the type of movie that you snooze through on a Sunday afternoon – or in a high-school English class.

Director Martin Ritt (Hud) keeps the movie powerful and tense until the ending, which is crudely manipulative. [22 Aug 1998, p.11]

Nelson seems content to just swing one giant axe after another, hoping that he busts as many guts as he does brains. His intentions are naughty, and the result isn’t so nice. Even for those who prefer a little blood on their snow boots this time of year.

The movie is nothing if not anxious to please. There's a big, diverse, celebrity voice cast – Maggie Smith, Hulk Hogan and Dolly Parton as well as Caine and Osbourne.

The Devil Made Me Do It is a resolutely pedestrian kind of horror.

The film commands our attention again as more connections emerge -- not enough to fully solve the mystery, but sufficient to convince us that Café de Flore amounts to more than the triumph of style over substance.

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

American Underdog is a film so disjointed, so boring and so deeply uninspiring that it is difficult to root for anyone, or even think of Warner as a genuine underdog.

Five Feet Apart is an infuriating and unenjoyable take on first love.

I do see one bright future for this film: the Deep Water drinking game, where the Bingo squares read “Melinda’s dress falls off,” “Vic clenches his jaw,” and “Naked breast.” Everyone will end up very, very drunk

Detective Pikachu is unrelentingly weird. Thankfully, unlike Mario Bros., it’s also breezily watchable, if slightly insubstantial beyond its strangeness.

If this is meant to look fresh while still being sensitive, it doesn't and it isn't.

So we're back on "The Road ," but this time Eli's coming – better hide your heart and, while you're at it, put your brain on hold, the easier to enjoy the action-filled sermon to come.