Winkler is a singularly boring director, forever telegraphing his scenes by tracking the camera behind a rustling bush or pulling the lens up close on his villain's eyes or gun. As a result, the film feels enervated and predictable when it should be energetic and surprising. It's a testimony to the abilities of the perky Bullock that she's entirely believable, but even she can't paper over the movie's many holes of logic. [28 July 1995]

This fluffy escape flick, directed by Ivan Reitman, is a TV sitcom plot grafted onto a travel brochure.

While it’s fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it. Instead, Jack the Giant Slayer, while well-crafted, feels entirely generic.

Middling gets downgraded to muddling. Of course, on such slippery slopes, reputations are made. Damned if the original isn’t looking like a comparative gem.

This is a movie that will make you scream – in confusion, in delight, in anger, in ecstasy. Sometimes all at once.

The chipper tale is admittedly interesting, though not “fascinating,” as self-advertised.

Bird Box could easily be reduced to, “It’s A Quiet Place meets Blindness crossed with The Happening!” And that high-concept pitch wouldn’t exactly be wrong.

Rare is the movie that arrives without fanfare -- that sneaks between the cracks, pops up relatively unheralded on the big screen, and takes the viewer by delighted surprise. Well, check the moon for blue because Birthday Girl is just such a picture.

Feels like a period film in clumsy modern-day dressup.

Although there are definite lags here, those "glittering" set-pieces are funny enough (at least one is hilarious) to stave off any prolonged yawns.

Pakula's screenplay looks to bulldoze a clear path through the narrative thickets, but this stuff is impenetrable - meant to be complicated, it's just confusing.

This is the kind of pitchur where if somebody gets his foot blowed off (somebody do), it makes everybody laugh, yuk yuk. Rip Torn (he's a sheriff) says, "The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." It's mighty fine to get that kind of perspective. Makes you realize Extreme Prejudice ain't so bad after all. [24 Apr 1987]

Taken for what it is – a fluffy, intergenerational farce as a frame for some seventies musical nostalgia – Mamma Mia! just gets away with it, in spite of director Lloyd's lack of cinematic inexperience.

From its lazy title down to its yes-we-all-saw-that-coming third-act twist, Dangerous Lies offers a particularly boring kind of last-resort viewing.

The mutations never stop. But that won't upset those 8-year-olds; changing so rapidly themselves, kids love tales of metamorphosis, the more the merrier. For them, caught in the commercial grip of the latest craze, it matters only that their cute little mutants have taken the giant step onto the big screen. That's probably all they need; that's definitely all they're given. [30 Mar 1990]

Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.

Most of the film’s action happens at night, so we really don’t get a good look at the colourful city. Why hire New Orleans as a location if you’re not going to show it off?

As flicks go, She's All That ain't very much. But as high-school flicks go, this thing is a trite classic. [29 Jan 1999, p.C3]

What doesn’t go in Skyscraper is watching Sawyer and his family face staggering calamity and danger with barely a concern raised or a sweat broken. As for the actors portraying them, they’re the brave ones. And if they were scared, they didn’t show it.

Simultaneously salacious and sugary.

The documentary My Date with Drew is "Don Quixote" meets "Bowfinger" meets "Swingers" for the reality-TV generation.

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

Some films, like "Shrek," "The Incredibles" and "Finding Nemo," manage to strike the right balance. Others, like Everyone's Hero -- opening today -- do not.

The Final Countdown is an action picture, not a thoughtful rumination on time travel, nor even (per Time After Time) a picture with a puzzle - everything is subordinate here to the sweep and grandeur of an awe-inspiring, ocean-going masterpiece of American technology. [02 Aug 1980]

Technically, the picture is a mess, but the ineptitudes in the editing and cinematography actually add to the charm, and the Bushman family is wondrous to watch. The Gods Must Be Crazy II is an old dog sans new tricks, but the friendly mutt's familiar repertoire is varied enough to fill a few hours with undemanding fun. [13 Apr 1990]

An integrated work whose form clearly mirrors its content. Often, looking into that mirror is dreadful; but, often enough, it's also dreadfully revealing.

Any hope that the clever concept behind Risen might produce a clever movie is thrown to the ground, where it lies quivering for the next hour or so, before expiring noisily in the film’s second half.

Christmas on the Square lets the viewer kick back and indulge in all things Parton.

If you're going to a no-frills action film, though, at least you want the action to be entertaining, which is where Transporter 3 falls down.

Mainly, this movie chatters when it should sing.

The result is less a screenplay than a manic quote machine.

A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.

The facts really get in the way of the portrait here, and we are left hungry for more Spacey and more insight into a man with the hubris to wonder if he has disappointed God.

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

This picture breaks through the limits and goes way beyond the pale -- it seems to enjoy irking us for the sheer hell of it.

All of which is to say that Dumbo feels totally consistent with Burton’s late-period slump. Abysmally scripted and hammily acted – and not, for the most part, in an interesting or ironic way – Dumbo recasts Disney’s animated classic in the trappings and suits of Burton’s pinstripe-and-pinwheel upholstery.

Tropes are necessary for comedy. But tropes alone aren’t funny. What’s funny is a singular point of view that rises up to show us what’s absurd about our embedded expectations. Until more movies starring women are allowed to be truly audacious, we’re in for a lot of rough nights at the cinema.

The movie is absolutely not your grandparents' beloved book. But like Peter himself, you learn to grow with this update. Because this is a new generation's version of Peter Rabbit: one that honours the original while still being itself.

The Mosquito Coast is a work of consummate craftsmanship and it's spectacularly acted, down to the smallest roles (Martha Plimpton as a classically obstreperous preacher's daughter, for example), but its field of vision is as narrow and eventually as claustrophobic as Allie's. [28 Nov 1986]

Once in a long while, it even comes tantalizingly close to that rarest of modern film commodities -- ribald wit.

Audiences can watch any number of similarly talented comics on late-night television or, even better, get close to the action at a downtown comedy club.

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

There is, buried deep somewhere in Linklater’s film or however many edits it may have undergone – the thing reeks of indecision – an insightful, even invigorating story about what happens to a creative genius once they stop creating. But the actual work presents a good argument that, for some artists, it might be best to quit while you’re ahead.

Director Simon Curtis milks the predictable drama, thrills and heartache of the Holocaust-era story, but it’s a paint-by-numbers triumph, a copy of something we’ve seen many times before.

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

As angst-filled as if it were "Amadeus" and "Lust for Life" rolled into one.

Alas, the perfect Steve Martin vehicle will probably never be the perfect film, no matter how endearing the silver-haired actor makes himself. And so it is with Father of the Bride; good, but by no means great. [20 Dec 1991, p.C3]

It is as if every time Forster is presented with an opportunity to do something mildly unconventional – or even, gasp, European in sensibility – he defaults to the easy and cheap Hollywood option.

Despite its $20-million budget, Me Before You is cheap; and just like a person who has more money than he knows what to do with, this film equates wealth with value and vulnerability with death.

A meditation of life, death, reincarnation and biblical symbolism that feels peculiarly like a head-shop poster, blown up to feature-movie size.

The movie is less a sequel to the original, in fact, than it is a remake - a more energetic, more absurd and possibly more entertaining remake. [17 Dec 1980]

Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen- agers. [7 Aug 1981]

Is it worth seeing? Yes. The ability to charm in the modern world is rare, and Ishtar does charm. Essentially, it's a teen film for adults, which is to say, it's mindless but not stupid good fun. And there are at least four times when the audience laughs out loud.

The victory of The Accountant is in the tone. The title character isn’t presented as a superfreak – this isn’t "Rain Man," in which autistic gifts are presented as powers for parlour tricks – but as a prototype and a beautiful mutant, maybe even a superhero.

Miss Johnson may not be an actress, but her lack of emotional resources and her bland ingenuousness conspire to give the manipulative, sentimental, unconvincing conceit of Ice Castles a naive force that occasionally approaches the simple pleasures of Rocky. [29 Jan 1979]

It’s zippy and distracting enough to keep you and your brood entertained for half an afternoon, but don’t get too comfortable – I can see the soundtrack eventually grating if you ever find your kids demanding to watch it over and over again. Which is inevitable.

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.

Fear strikes out in slasher flick This movie is laced with enough gratuitous bloodshed and reactionary zeal to warm the heart of a Montana militiaman. [12 Apr 1996]

Despite being sumptuously shot and competently assembled, it provides no real insight into the tortured mind of its subject or the creative process in general.

Fanning acquits herself, but Amina’s story as a single mother of two and a survivor of brutal sexual violence is the far more necessary story to tell. A main romantic subplot is slighter still.

It does the job just fine. That job, as director George Lucas freely admits, is quite simply to thrill the beating hearts and the inquiring minds of 12-year-old boys.

So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

Predators never gives us the satisfaction of knowing what motivates the alien hunters to use humans for sport, but at least it has fun showing us that humans can, indeed, be the most dangerous game.

It's like flipping through five years of dog calendars.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

Assassination Tango is about one commanding performance, fascinating to watch but not strong enough to redeem the muddled story line on which it hangs.

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

Ultimately, the movie is not, to paraphrase the U.S. Army slogan, all that it could be. The climax is uninvolving generic eye candy, and the sequel-friendly coda is unconvincing.

The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]

What we have here is a piece of comic fluff that, in the hands of these actors, gets turned into an occasionally charming piece of comic fluff. [29 May 1992]

Finally, there’s Colin Farrell, who plays a boxing coach called Coach, who tries to keep his Jamaican-English charges on, if not the straight and narrow, the straighter and narrower. He and his lads all wear plaid tracksuits, and it’s a testament to Farrell that he makes this feel entirely natural rather than stunty. He is an underrated master who can do no wrong, and I wish this movie starred him.

Of course, the result is forgettable, but at least it's efficiently and breezily forgettable. What's more, there are laughs too and here's the best part – one or two of them are actually intentional.

Once again, perhaps the most impressive effect is Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, using his Shakespearean training to make long mouthfuls of nonsense sound almost persuasive.

Despite its trappings, despite its style, Birth is just a tall tale with a short reach.

Poor Cattrall is caught in a script that, much like the white teddy, is an impossibly tight squeeze, obliging her to hit the farcical laughs while still playing the cellulite realism.

For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.

Only read the bottom line of the accountants' review, after your generic masterpiece has gone the distance from theatrical release to video stores to the nethermost regions of the cable dial. If the accountants' judgment proves kind, head to the bank and feel free to enjoy precisely what you've denied so many others – a really good laugh.

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.

You may think I’m being too hard on this film. It’s possible I saw it on the wrong night, in the wrong mood. But I’m fed up with the cheap laziness of this strain of comedy. When I was eight, I found it side-splitting that Ken’s doll hand was moulded in a curve that fit perfectly over Barbie’s breast. But then I grew up.

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.

As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.

The scriptwriters did Perry no favours. Lengthy swaths of dialogue are consumed by tedious exposition on vampire types and the ways they can be killed.

Once it becomes clear that the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an equal-opportunity offender, and that it is the politically correct modern family that is being picked on, rather than young Greg, the film becomes cheerfully mischievous fun for everyone.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

It should be a better, more authentic movie, considering that screenwriters Maupin and his ex-partner, Terry Anderson, are retelling parts of their own story here.

There’s enough action to keep things moving along, but the drama is ho-hum, juiced up with a turgid soundtrack and sirens howling in the night. It’s all just so average.

The scenes of Traynor threatening and battering his wife feel just as phony and unconvincing as the sunnier stuff that preceded them, partly because Sarsgaard – usually a fine and subtle actor – flies so over the top in his depiction of a creepy Svengali.

Quotation forthcoming.

Is it much of a movie? Not really. It’s more of an experience – a passive sort of virtual reality – that uses a bare-bones narrative as a vehicle for a big-time body count.

Epically fantastic would be a welcome change, although epically awful would at least keep the symmetry. Alas, epically bland will have to do.

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.

A meagre, occasionally funny affair.

The less you know about Shakespeare, the more you're likely to enjoy Anonymous.

Though it leaves no sex and danger cliche unturned, Lassiter is a lightweight, but briskly entertaining and stylish genre film. [20 Feb 1984]

World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.

It ain't hell and it ain't heaven; it's just, more or less, another two-star movie. [4 March 1994]

The Human Scale uses plenty of globe-hopping examples to make up for what it sometimes lacks in depth.