The movie espouses a kind of Unitarian ecumenical egalitarianism that has about as much to do with medieval times as quantum physics. No one should be offended except -- of course -- those who like movies that excite the mind as well as the pulse.

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.

But don't worry about remembering the characters - the movie certainly doesn't.

The premise, nearly miraculous in its banality, is not failed by the execution, which unblushingly operates at the level of somnambulism. [13 July 1981]

Sadly, the movie’s lack of a clear identity – is it a thriller, soap, legal drama or action chase movie? – makes it difficult to understand why anyone should care.

The result is a metaphor run amok, with a limp plot, implausible action and three barely sketched characters played drearily.

The Good Girl isn't really the title of this movie at all. Instead, it's now widely known as The Movie That Proves Jennifer Can Act.

Even with dyed hair, heavy makeup and a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, Portman still looks like a schoolgirl pretending to be somebody's mom.

A mish-mash that is further hindered by Howard's trite ideas of directing. Plot and camera moves are entirely predictable, with Howard so out of his depth that he often resorts to blackouts, or rather greenouts, when he doesn't know how to curtail a scene.

While The Queen of My Dreams works in some places, it’s too disjointed a narrative to truly immerse the viewer into the technicolor universe.

Touch, adapted from Olafur Johann Olafsson’s novel, is handsome, sentimental and restrained (admirably, in parts). But it also leaves a lot to be desired – yes, a movie about yearning left me yearning – chiefly when it comes to the central romance, which is presented as more ornamental than passionate.

Mostly, Cuba is boring. [24 Dec 1979]

The humour in Accepted is maddeningly safe.

What a big cheat of a movie. Wanting to be everything to everybody – a tough gambling picture, a revenge-of-the-nerds fantasy, a Vegas caper flick, a sweet little romance, a simple morality tale – 21 is just a bet-hedger dealing from multiple decks, designed to leave you with an occasional tidbit to like but nothing at all to love.

The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.

But at heart, the terrain mapped by Map of the Human Heart is emotionally shameless; it's a forties movie tossed into the nineties. It should find a lot of fans. [14 May 1993]

What if Holden Caulfield turned into Charles Bronson? That piquant premise underlies the lively but confused teen exploitation film, Tuff Turf.

Credit Madagascar with negotiating a hopeful truce in the ongoing battle between the computer and the animation. Judged merely by appearances, its look is a lovely compromise. Too bad everything else has been compromised right out of existence.

Broadening the original script out to a cinematic thriller of the prey-and-predator variety, Dolan’s direction is not imaginative enough to carry the day.

Although possessed of a laudable desire not to be yet another run-of-the-mill, wacky-impediment, I'm-nobody-and-you're-the-Prez's-daughter romance comedy, damned if the picture can figure out how to be an anti-romance comedy.

The presence of some genuine feeling distinguishes Saw III from its predecessors. That said, it has plenty of the blood, torture and dismemberment that moviegoers demand from their Halloween weekend entertainment.

Writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace is not, as can be gathered, a born auteur, but he is crafty at timing the jumpies - despite a silliness that increases as the movie goes on, there are enough left-field shocks to please even the most discriminating fan of what American Film has dubbed the "genre non grata. [25 Oct 1982]

Without Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World would be an absolute bore.

Sadly, Bacon is only intermittently convincing as a man hell-bent on revenge or a father tortured by what he has unleashed on his family.

It's refreshing to have a movie assume that its viewers are also readers, yet this one takes that assumption to testing lengths. To those fearful of flunking the test, my advice is simple: Bring along the book as your cheat-sheet.

A movie with a double-crossing intelligence plot that's so generic it's an irritating intrusion in a lively chase through the streets and shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa.

It's odd, how these high-concept films, knowing that the central gimmick has a way of wearing out its welcome, are all so short – a mere 84 minutes in this case. Why odd? Because short always ends up feeling so damn long. This is no exception. Quick to start and painfully slow to finish, Chronicle is the same old chronicle.

Alas, the news is mixed: Thor ain't much of a movie but it's a great career move. Both movie and move belong to director Kenneth Branagh.

Directed by veteran "Chariots of Fire" filmmaker Hugh Hudson, the semi-compelling Finding Altamira is let down by ordinary acting, way too many scholarly adages and a perplexing level of inaction.

Wrong Is Right shows the comic subtlety of The Jeffersons on a slow night. Everything else may be topsy-turvy in the world, but unfunny still isn't funny even in the Oval Office. [15 May 1982]

The only surprise here is the real star of the show, who turns out to be not Halle Berry, not even Bruce Willis, but a flat computer screen in all its hard-driven glory.

In the original Jumanji, young characters are caught inside a board game come to life; in the new sequel, it's a video game they adventure within – a rigid construct of one-note humour, special-effect shenanigans, relentless quest-based action and sledge-hammered messaging.

Another stroke of casting fortune was landing Scott as the disturbing Miles. I hesitate to applaud any business decision that encourages a kid to channel the spirit of a rapist and murderer, but the young actor accomplishes what I can only assume The Prodigy set out to do: make you reconsider parenthood, and just how much paprika you should stock.

Thanks to a tight script and brisk pacing from director Steve Carr (Daddy Day Care, Dr. Doolittle 2), there's little fat in Mall Cop, save the a yawn-inducing parade of fat-guy jokes.

What should have sizzled fizzles.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

While its penultimate scene returns to its affections for shock and gore, there remains a feeling that it’s been apologetically tacked on to a final act that is, overall, lacking in any other sort of fun or thrilling narrative twists and turns.

Fried Green Tomatoes was obviously cooked up with the best of intentions but, like the dish to which it refers, it's rudimentary eats - not quite junk food, but not quite nourishing, either. [03 Jan 1992]

Malin Buska – the Swedish Kirsten Dunst? – is highly watchable as the Descartes-loving ruler, but Canada’s Sarah Gadon as the sheet-warming lady-in-waiting is given little to do but look naive and dumbstruck.

This half-throttle documentary might better be called The Fast and the Uneventful.

Gran Torino skids into the narrative ditch. By the time it jolts to an ending, followed by Clint rasping a tune to the closing credits, you're more likely to be rolling your eyes than dabbing them.

While The Vow will give heart palpitations to fans of its charming co-stars Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, this amnesia-themed romance is the kind of featherweight fare that is enjoyed in the moment and forgotten soon after the end credits roll.

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.

From that title on down, White Irish Drinkers is a compendium of clichés struggling to upgrade its status and become a respectable archetype.

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

The movie features Eddie Murphy as a vampire who is both cool and sucks. The same evaluation might apply to the entire film, which is neither as good as it might be nor as bad as you might expect. The long- in-the-tooth Dracula story, which has been updated and set in the black community of contemporary Brooklyn, is a pulpy mishmash of horror and comedy, equal parts the product of its comedian star and its creepshow director, Wes Craven. [1 Nov 1995, p.C2]

The pocketing of tired bills headed for the shredder, the producing of tired movies headed for the theatre -- it's all just recycling.

The performances in Cutter's Way are devastated by the script. [18 Sept 1981]

It's a movie about a nice guy with a lot of friends who dies. It's not really about the wider tragedy the film aspires to represent.

Superficial but giddily entertaining backstage documentary.

Were it not for the fine engaging performances of both Dancy and Byrne, Adam would be sickly sweet.

Pearce pumps a surprising amount of levity into his one-liners – sure, it's still hot air, but at least the banter comes fully inflated.

Godzilla – both the movie and the big guy – is otherwise something of a lumpy, lumbering great beast of a thing, lurching from city to city, continent to continent, smackdown to smackdown and plot point to plot point with singularly graceless indifference to anything other than those take-home jaw-dropper shots.

While there's some decent fun to be had in this fantasy world, The Change-Up drags on so long you may need to "visit the fountain" before Dave and Mitch become themselves again.

There's one, and only one, good reason to rent this movie - the music. [08 Sep 1990]

For the first 45 minutes, it's a listless and humourless comedy. But, after Mike Myers clobbers viewers over and over again with his open, eager-to-please style, the movie slowly lurches to life So I managed a few laughs. [3 Aug 1993]

But Eurotrip has no provocative central characters, an absolute must for a gross-out teen comedy. As their names suggest, Scott, Coop, Jenny and Jamie are wusses. "Animal House"'s Bluto Blutarsky would've swallowed them whole without belching.

A great-looking, fast-paced film and, to his credit, Bouchareb doesn't bathe the F.L.N. in a completely flattering light. But narrowing the focus to one central conflicted character and tightening the time frame might have given the audience something more to ponder than the action of a historical revenge thriller.

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.

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.

No one can dismiss 16 Blocks as a mere formula flick -- it's a mere two or three formula flicks all fighting for top billing.

Here's one thing about Marie Antoinette: It sure is easy to watch. And here's another: It's even easier to forget.

Although director Barbet Schroeder (Single White Female, Reversal of Fortune, Barfly) does a workmanlike job of stirring in the grimy New York atmosphere, the picture only surges to life when Cage strides on camera. [21 Apr 1995]

It's better than 2, but not nearly as good as 1. On the slippery slope of sequel-land, that's an okay average. [15 May 1992]

Velvet Buzzsaw is ultimately a matter of taste – and mine was to spit it right back out.

The story, of course, is a line on which to pin the comic set-pieces, and that's where Pink Panther 2 comes up lustreless. Zwart has no discernible sense of comic rhythm, beyond managing to punctuate scenes with a wall crashing in.

Brian and Dom could drive from L.A. to Mexico City and back blindfolded, but would require a GPS to find the zipper of a dress. The only time they smile here is when they are alone in a garage, tinkering with their dream cars.

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.

The movie has a better sense of flow than his past efforts, and a few lengthy travelling Steadicam shots and some decent mountain scenery (supplied by B.C. rather than Colorado) help dispel the feeling that Perry has merely filmed another of his plays.

Any picture in which Burt Reynolds is a man unable to find a woman willing to have his child is quite clearly a limber farce and, sure enough, the most thoroughly stretched joke in Paternity, written by Charlie Peters and directed by Winnipeg comedian David Steinberg, is how utterly wrong Reynolds is for the role of Buddy Evans. [3 Oct 1981]

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.

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.

The movie does offer one historical first: Ferrell, who previously appeared with comedian Sacha Baron Cohen ( Borat) in "Talladega Nights," now appears with skater Sasha Cohen (one point).

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

If you have an appetite for well-made treacle, then Bella should go down a treat.

The film's biggest flaw -- aside from the lapses of credibility, which are almost obligatory in escapist summer movies -- is that it flies on and on until its power to hold us simply peters out.

One of the best things about this film is that ultimately nobody in it is attractive.

Typically, Whitaker can lend the sloppiest assignment some much-needed dignity, but here he gives far more than the easy and lazy script ever demands, so much so that you begin to feel sorry that he took the time and energy to do so.

As shrill, partly-animated musicals about singing vermin go, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel really isn't all that bad.

El Bulli barely registers a pulse stronger than a book's. There is no narration, there are no interviews and forget about any apron-ripping drama, as presented nightly on the Food Network.

Are any of his stunts funny? Yes, one scene is worthy of Borat and Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops.

The effortless richness of character that so thoroughly grounded Haigh’s Oscar-nominated "45 Years" and his critical darling "Weekend" is half-heartedly formed in Pete. There is a disquieting sense that the director has fallen prey to the poetics of space at the expense of the lives within it.

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

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]

There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle.

The ensemble is unwieldy and the attendant yarn much too cluttered.

Despite its title, the movie admirably sticks to its game plan of ennobling the everyman as opposed to turning Papale into some kind of Superman.

It's a movie intent on telling us the hotshots were heroes, without sufficiently dramatizing either their professional decisions or their private lives.

Film noir is a style, but self-conscious film noir is just a stylistic tic, less a genre than an ailment. And The Black Dahlia has got a really bad case -- this thing is so mannered it convulses.

Even the visions of attractive half-dressed bodies lolling about in various Madrid bedrooms or leaping into spontaneous music videos don't prove compelling for long.

Isn't nearly as much fun as the original. For one thing, Lara having a boyfriend wrecks everything.

A clear case of huevos con hubris.

While Baron Cohen's lanky physical slapstick and verbal manglings are funny, the movie begins to feel like one of the later, worn-out Pink Panther movies.

The fiction that follows can be safely regarded as much more than a war movie -- hell, this is a pro-war movie. Were it a politician, it would be Donald Rumsfeld.

Trading in his thinker's cap for a craftsman's apron, Lee is content to carve a little something out of nothing much - the result is as dismissible as it is diverting. [Apr 12, 1996. pg. C.2]

Delicatessen is a carniverous sausage - lots of fat, a few meaty bits. [10 Apr 1992]

A talented cast and moments of brutal violence can't dislodge a sense of ho-hum predictability in Pride and Glory.

By the time the film reaches its big mushy climax, in which the slackers discover their inner caring during a dopey medieval role-playing battle, the movie starts to feel something like a pleasure again.