One more Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, done badly, even if the novel was written by Stephen-can-do-no-commercial-wrong-King, is not what the world needs. [23 Apr 1993]

The restaurant story is wonderfully taut, with Egoyan in full control of his always extravagant imagery.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

Would that the movie had gone the next step, and possibly imagined that this bright, shiny little E.T. had figured out how to get kids to do its sinister work for him by providing free WiFi and endless smartphone upgrades in exchange for undying loyalty, we might have had something altogether different on our hands.

The formula is a bit too neat and the dialogue is often painfully expository, but there are some fine performances – especially from Gillian Anderson as the earnest Lady Mountbatten – and plenty of compelling drama.

While some of the more conventional genre beats could use more specificity, Klein gets such wrenching, charismatic performances that you’d forgive him of anything. This film will stay with you for a long, long time.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

Astro Boy definitely sets himself up for a sequel, and the overall scenario is ripe to explore many current issues. But let's hope the creators trade in the well-used parts for some fresh material.

The U.S. invasion of Grenada is treated with Highway's gung-ho simplicity as a flag-waving American triumph. That may make the conclusion of Heartbreak Ridge a personal victory for Highway, but it makes the film's heartfelt patriotism pathetic. [6 Dec 1986]

I like the way McLeod handles the genre. The easiest thing to do would be for her to write Feore’s Elon Musk-y space-or-bust character as a villain, thus making it impossible not to root for her protagonist (who warns of a potential load-bearing problem with the space-plane’s runway). McLeod resists that urge though.

The shipwreck comes too late to rescue movie from endless banalities. [02 Feb 1996]

Again, as with "Star Wars," the interest lies at least as much in the set design and costumes as the narrative.

A technically slavish and totally atrocious Hollywood remake. [19 March 1993]

As a 21st-century account of the soldier’s enduring alienation from the home front, Billy Lynn is highly effective. It’s what surrounds that account that doesn’t work.

A splendid adventure sure to thrill children and fantasy buffs, while leaving everyone else passably entertained.

Overboard is overdrawn and overblown: a lean romantic comedy has been enveloped in obesity. Garry Marshall's direction is worthy of a not very good television sitcom and John A. Alonzo's appalling cinematography gives the picture the appearance of having been shot through a cloud of mosquitoes. [18 Dec 1987]

Even though William Safire doesn't fit in the target demographic, Stick It is more valuable as a survey of modern American teen argot than as a movie.

So if you're in the mood for a scary flick, the kind where people can't resist going into the huge hole in the wall where the family Pekinese just disappeared to the sounds of being masticated, this is the one.

There is a rich movie to be made about this culture of fake seers and gullible marks, but it isn't The Awakening, a dull British import that never lives up to the pretensions of its period setting.

Never brilliant but always solid and often wry, Marley & Me is what it celebrates -- an amiable overachiever.

It’s not half-bad. I mean, don’t get too excited – this is still a bad movie. But it is the kind of better-than-it-should-be bad instead of merely bad-bad.

[The soundtrack] manages to serve up new rock, eighties dance music, rap and Barry Manilow -- a combination custom-made to annoy audiences of all ages.

A movie so dumb that it has tricked itself into thinking it is smart enough to be self-knowingly stupid, the new astronaut thriller, I.S.S., is a true waste of inner and outer space.

In the role, Lawrence dominates. Red Sparrow is stylish and tense enough, but the writing is run-of-the-mill and the film lacks the soul of something like the Nikita movies. The watchability comes from Lawrence.

No matter how you judge it -- as a strict morality play or simply a psychological thriller -- Apt Pupil just doesn't make the grade.

There's probably a good film to be made about the judgmental world of figure skating, but The Cutting Edge isn't it. Nor does it try to be. Instead, it's the sort of movie that aims low - somewhere in the region of competent pulp - and pretty much hits the mark. [31 March 1992]

The film spins off into several tonally unsteady directions.

With high seas and crashing waves created by Canadian special-effects company Fusion CIS, there's nothing wrong with the nail-biting side of the equation featuring a sequence of distinct maritime accidents; it's the rest of the plot that is taking on water.

Along the way there are definitely some pleasing distractions, just not enough to obscure the growing realization that a much better picture could have been made, and wasn't. Many films never have a chance, but this one did – it's an opportunity wasted.

It’s the kind of film that can’t even bother to commit to its own cynicism, which makes it the most deeply cynical kind of film there is.

Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.

The colourful film of course is allegorical: Peace is tough and tedious; war is an easy solution. And while the kids’ enthusiasm for battle wanes, pint-sized audiences will likely remain engaged.

The movie delivers, if you're looking for a big-screen, big-stunt, action blockbuster that happens to have the Bond brand name on it. If you're looking for a movie with narrative coherence that recreates, or develops, the Bond mythology that first came to screen in the early sixties, go back to your video store: The current Bond franchise is a Van Damme movie with a bigger budget and British accents. [19 Dec 1997, p.C6]

Formula action films don’t come much more formulaic that this.

Ambitious but generic martial-arts movie.

Bruised is a well-directed debut: Berry understands how to make a competent sports drama complete with all the emotional training montages and passion that viewers expect. Plot-wise, though, Bruised doesn’t offer more than the genre has delivered time and time again, which is a shame because the film contains some remarkable performances.

There is a delicate touch deployed here, and not only with Julie, but those surrounding her. Depression, Koppleman seems to be saying, is not a one-person battle. It can swallow everyone in a victim’s orbit.

Don't expect a Caravaggio, but if your taste turns to Hallmark, this is a good bet -- a straight-up Nativity story as safe as death and taxes.

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.

Coogan brings a delightfully sardonic deadpan to the role of the bemused bystander observing the antics of penguins, adolescents and … military dictatorships.

The important things first: It's always a relief to come out of an Adam Sandler movie without a case of hives, and you can comfortably attend Anger Management without prophylactic antihistamines.

The content is eminently forgettable but the thing has definitely got style.

The movie is a series of ever more elaborate fight sequences and increasingly more and larger opponents.

The real lesson of Zorro the Gay Blade is that Melvin Simon Production had a huge budget to play with - and a lonely little pun to spend it on. [18 July 1981]

It’s all fun enough to watch for the sheer over-the-topness of the performances, and Horovitz does his level best at working around some heavy spatial limitations, but there’s no getting around the fact that, ultimately, My Old Lady feels as stubbornly stuck in that expansive and underlit apartment as Madame Girard herself, and you may find yourself bolting for a lungful of relief.

Certainly, whatever surgery the script doctors performed, it didn't take. The limp result is a picture that is epic in intention and Lilliputian everywhere else.

Tilting between a teen sex comedy and a more sensitive tale about male bonding, The Wood is too anxious to please to quite make up its mind what it is.

A bit like having a detached retina. One keeps blinking and trying to get it into focus, but it never quite does. What, one wonders, is this movie doing here?

Rarely does a fine movie like this have so awkward a title, or so off-putting an opening scene. But there is method in both these madnesses, and a searchingly intelligent and moving story to be told.

Whoopi Goldberg can make you laugh and make you cry, and she's attractive and kind of come-hithery in her own bug-eyed way. [10 Oct 1986, p.D1]

For some (okay, me), The Holiday, like the holidays, will require some girding up, and is best met halfway with a self-immunizing smile. Otherwise, the good cheer may ring false; worse, it might even seem to sell love cheap, and lovers short.

Director Maggs tells a tough, sympathetic story in an imaginative way that makes Goalie feel like a war story.

The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with.

This is one of those ludicrous, semi-offensive, semi-entertaining potboilers that feels as if the script were dragged out from someone's naughty-book stash.

Accepting the final twist of The Girl From Monaco depends on whether you're in the mood.

It’s probably accurate in its portrayal of her general good humour. Detractors would be surprised at how genuinely funny she can be.

The movie wears its situational zaniness lightly and depends on the rapid-fire dialogue, charm and killer chemistry of its romantic duo. Just enjoy its loopy pleasures.

Interminable techno-dud.

In most every frame, Hartley takes pains to tilt his camera at odd angles – in other words, he's gone literally off-kilter, and it's just off-putting. What's worse, a further hallmark of the Hartley canon, his self-reflexivity, has begun to smack of self-promotion.

Though superior to the original Blade, the superiority is mostly in the myriad ways the "suck-head" enemies can be blown up, melted and dismembered.

The result is a minor picture with a major identity crisis -- it's sort of true and it's sort of bogus and it's ho-hum all the way through.

With its grainy images, amateurish acting and homemade sets, there's nothing slick about Neil Young's new movie. Then again, that's the beauty of it.

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

The wonder here is that Bateman and the child actor spark off each other quite delightfully. For a few precious scenes, when father and son are alone, the movie is actually amusing, even touching.

If you like your sports movies, especially your football movies, larded with more clichés than a politician's stump speech, Gridiron Gang begs to be seen.

The dialogue is to the point without being eye-rolling, the action is meaty and mostly CGI-free (the highlight is a night-vision firefight) and the performances are committed, even touching.

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.

Solid performances from veterans Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson as Jay's parents, and Treat Williams as the sheriff, anchor the older generation, but the characters do tend to conform to stereotypes of hard, unforgiving men and loving, patient women.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.

Visually the film is a knockout. I'm not sure this will matter to the young adult audience, but the film is philosophically confusing.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

There are some tense moments, and Moore and Holt’s performances are about as good as could be hoped for considering they are behind scuba masks most of the time. But even at 89 minutes, you can feel the oxygen running out of this movie.

An okay thriller with lots of smart flourishes, The Next Three Days has us hooked early on but never quite gets us in the boat.

It doesn't prick the social conscience or offer insights into the human condition, but it does well what it sets out to do: tell a loopy love story and make audiences feel good. This is summer entertainment - and long-shelf-life video - of the first order. [12 June 1992]

A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

There are scenes that may make your stomach feel uncomfortable for a moment but rarely stories that will upset your equilibrium.

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.

Ultimately, the performances carry the film.

It's an unpredictable, mesmerizing journey nearly every shady second of the way.

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

Masters of impersonation all, Martin, Chase and Short are a rivetting trio. All seem perfectly at home in the wacky rhythm of this picture and in contributing their individual talents to the very funny whole. For the folks who see them, the Amigos' enthusiasm will likely be contagious. [12 Dec 1986, p.D4]

Some books just aren't meant to be movies -- what once was confidently distinguished now seems merely average and a tiny bit desperate.

Fables should be succinct, and Konchalovsky lets his run on too long.

Steve Miner is no Carpenter. A directing veteran of the Friday the 13th saga (parts II and III, in case you care), he's a plodder who favours long, dull buildups to short, dull climaxes -- it's slaughter by the numbers.

Neither Nicholson nor the talented Miss Steenburgen, in her film debut, could rise above the patched-together script. The promising parody of anti-mythic Westerns, and of mellerdrammers (the railroad wants to snitch Julia's land), decays into a love story whose parameters are all too narrow and all too familiar. [07 Oct 1978]

Deep inside the new Charlie’s Angels movie, there is a fun film struggling to breathe. There are momentary flashes of energy, of wit, of something sorta-kinda-maybe resembling entertainment. But every time writer-director Elizabeth Banks’s reboot threatens to come alive, it immediately falls to the floor, leaden and lifeless.

It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.

Greed’s antihero is known as “Rich" to his intimates and his surname earns him the moniker “greedy McCreadie.” It’s not subtle stuff but then, investigative journalism, censure, documentary exposés, and empathy haven’t worked so far to cure our rapacious fast-fashion appetite – so why not a movie?

Employing the unapologetic pomp of rap videos and enough heart to transition stereotypical characters into complex, dynamic subjects, Superfly is a visual treat that embellishes Director X’s signature kaleidoscopic visuals with an uncanny knack for storytelling.

Falls into the category of heart-warming sports yarns, and, if television still made movies-of-the-week, it would enjoy a rightful home.

A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

He [Salles] has managed to create a movie that's pretty bleak for a Hollywood -- especially Disney -- thriller. His theme, as a director, is the indignities of poverty and, in his way, he pays more attention to that agenda than he does in generating any real thrills.

A flashy nineties flick with a campy fifties feel -- it's playful, naive, clever, silly, often inventive, occasionally uneven and, compared to studio offerings to date, the best present under this year's cinematic tree.

The movie unreels like a depressive in a manic phase, a frenzy of lightning-fast cuts, cuts, cuts.

There’s a zaniness to this film that feels refreshing, a going-for-broke energy reminiscent of an Adam Sandler movie at its peak.