Perhaps Nemes was hoping to let the precision of his intricately staged images artfully clash with the absurdity of a chaotic plot. But the result is more tedious than tense.

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

The audience is left, then, submerged in two very different movies where the protagonists are going to sink or swim – but unsatisfyingly – not together.

Awkward in ways both intended and not, the fourth feature from author and director Rebecca Miller is an attempt at a comic change of pace for the usually earnest Miller.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."

The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"

The ideal: It hopes to be a suspenseful political yarn carrying a lofty message of peace and understanding. The reality: It's just a flabby thriller that gets completely lost in translation.

The specifics of Hill's movie - and despite its straining for universality, it is all specifics - come approximately a decade too late; in the wake of Who'll Stop the Rain and Apocalypse Now (and even that great B-movie anti-war movie, The Big Red One), it sinks like an insignificant stone. [24 Oct 1981]

Although much of the bloat can be traced to the script, via the Jennifer Weiner novel, let's not absolve director Curtis Hanson from his fat share of the blame.

I could watch the background environmental action here for hours. But then the second thought of my Frozen 2 experience hit: I really wish I was listening to Let it Go right now.

Army life sugar-coated in self-serving memoir. [25 Mar 1988]

In the rap-music, slam-dunk, hysterical tumult of visual clutter that makes up most of Space Jam, the traditional Warner Bros. 'toons get scant attention. In this marriage of corporate logos, the manic little characters serve simply as more names to be dropped. What Space Jam really lacks is respect for an irreverent tradition. [15 Nov 1996, p.C4]

Thanks for Sharing might best be described as being like Steve McQueen’s sex-addiction drama, "Shame," if it were rewritten by Neil Simon at his most schmaltzy.

Wildly energetic performances could perhaps disguise some of these problems – or at least keep an audience entertained during a slow ride – but Priestley does not draw from his performers the work we all know they can do.

It’s light research, worn heavily, and the romance that ensues feels just as about as studied and slight.

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

There's plenty here to keep summer comedy fans satiated, if not entirely satisfied.

A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.

It might better be titled The Awkward.

An action thriller with some decent action and a few thrills, but all embedded in a yarn so hopelessly tangled that even the loose threads have knots.

Though it is shaped as a woman-in-peril thriller about obsession, Cherish is about being winningly kooky, not violently insane.

Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad.

It's not the subject matter itself that's offensive -- pedophilia is as worthy a topic of investigation as any other. Instead, it's the subject's non-treatment -- we don't learn a thing that rings true.

Despite the arid direction, Chalamet’s Dylan – described in the film as “a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” – comes from the heart.

So much of Ready Player One is assembled from the detritus of our past that it is less a film and more an overstuffed cultural recycling bin. A shiny, expensive, well-cast and professionally assembled recycling bin, sure, but a trash heap all the same.

Shot in country fields and interiors of fading Georgian glory, Easy Virtue has enough traces of Coward's wit to keep you hoping for the first hour or so, but then the film collapses under the weight of too many misguided innovations.

Revenge of the Nerds has some very funny moments and sturdy premise, but the revenge, when it comes, is not nearly as definitive as even the non-nerds in the audience would hope for. [25 July 1984]

One part satire, two parts allegory, and several parts dreary sermon on the pernicious effects of America's gun culture.

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

A mess of a movie – a sprawling PowerPoint argument that covers too much ground way too fast, dispensing Wikipedia-calibre essays on a variety of subjects, from a blurred bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb, to an unsatisfying sidebar on A.Q. Khan, the world's first door-to-door nuke salesmen.

For most of the movie, Murray desperately throws in schtick after schtick to try to keep the film afloat (Meatballs doesn't deserve him, and he certainly doesn't deserve it), but when facing Makepeace, who isn't allowed to do anything but trade a petulant pout for a wait-'til-the-sun-shines-Nellie smile, he caves in under the sentimental good cheer and becomes a nice guy, a role he is not especially suited to play. [2 July 1979]

Aniston's constituency will enjoy seeing her again in Love Happens . She's lovely and fun to be with, as always.

With seemingly twice as much action, a whole new complex of villainy, competing Iron Man suits, robots and love interests, Iron Man 2 sequel cashes in hard on the unexpected success of the first Iron Man from 2007 and somehow loses much of its soul in the process.

The young couple is far less compelling, which is one reason why the remake is only intermittently effective. Bland and dim-witted, it's hard to see why they'd attract Ryder's wrath.

The movie isn't painfully bad, something to be "fully experienced"; it's just tediously bad, something to be fully forgotten.

Rarely have I seen a movie which made me feel more skeptically Canadian. Please -- it's not true that you can do anything. Stop trying. You might make things worse.

Unfortunately, the film promises more fun and laughs than it delivers, and this meal tastes like too many that have gone before it.

Could have taken a witty scalpel to baby-boomer posturings. But Dolman, whose instrument of choice is the rubber mallet of smarm, just isn't the man for the job -- he ends up enshrining the very hypocrisy that should be dissected.

Glamorously tragic, Betty Blue is sensually shot and persuasively performed, but a solitary thought dropped into boy genius Beineix's colorfully bedecked wishing well of a movie would echo emptily into eternity. [12 Sep 1986, p.D1]

The script's attempt to splice together a fumbling love story with a portrait of toxic personality disorder feels incongruous, like a serving of porridge flambé au whisky.

It’s plagued from start to finish by wavering intentions that result in an unfocused, unfunny film.

The Loveless is neither trashy nor fun. It's art - or so it thinks, but its self-consciousness is grating and its congratulation of the audience for getting the camp is patronizing. [10 Sep 1982]

On the most rudimentary levels - basic believability and coherent exposition - Hardcore is a joke without a punch line. [03 Mar 1979]

It’s a sweeping story, but for those already enamoured with “the people’s tenor," Pavarotti is unlikely to offer any new insights into his life.

As well-meaning elegies go, especially ones to working stiffs prematurely ripped from their subterranean roots, Brassed Off is the pits: It's a miner opus in a minor key.

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.

The plot is simple, the character development is lazy and the use of the oh-my-God-there’s-someone-right-behind-you device is tiring. Still, the premise is sound. Evil in the church – who would have thought? Duh-duh!

Killer Elite's major problem: motion at the expense of emotion.

Clumsy, derivative, mildly amusing and ultimately forgettable.

The Traitor is an exploration of betrayal, according to Bellocchio. He seems to be asking, can a man truly change the course of his life, or is it just a pretense? Unfortunately, this account of Buscetta’s story doesn’t really give us any answers.

When the movie climactically reproduces that exhilarating Belmont, the fiction is just a pale shadow of the fact, and the realized myth that lives in our memory dies on the screen.

Typically, this sort of film is an earnest tear-jerker with moments of levity. Instead, what we have here is a raucous rib-tickler with occasional pauses for a little dramatic relief.

What a featherweight epic this is, the kind of uniformed period piece where the watchword is pretty. Pretty costumes, pretty soldiers, pretty battles; pretty silly.

Big Fat Liar becomes a progression of increasingly elaborate slapstick stunts, in the brutal, noisy "Home Alone" vein, in which the complexity of the pranks rarely yields a commensurate comic reward.

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.

By removing the delicacy of the technique and the adept use of flashbacks, and by explaining the characters in the lexicon of Psych. 101, what was once an unconventional and unforgettably terrifying thriller has become a conventional, mildly scary melodrama. The Vanishing has gone up in Hollywood smoke. [08 Feb 1993]

By the time we reach the climactic ending, the script clearly calls for an exorcist with a chainsaw to trim back this metaphor run amok.

Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.

The process of remembering that drives the book is gone from the film, boiled away until all that's left is the mundane residue of memory - mere incidents strung together as plot.

Conclusions and answers are perhaps luxuries that Sharma's film can't afford.

The Nut Job has a certain lo-fi charm, but it’s hardly a world-beater; with all due respect to Surly, Rocky J. Squirrel’s place in the pantheon would seem to be safe for another 50 years.

Yes, Mikhalkov has set himself quite the agenda, but in the end the film is too much of a piece with its topic, intensely fascinating yet seriously flawed. The verdict? Guilty, with extenuating circumstances.

The premise of Explorers, directed by Joe Dante, who in the past (The Howling, the TV cartoon sequence of Twilight Zone - The Movie, Gremlins) has had style and ingenuity to spare, is equally promising, but it's worked out with the style and ingenuity of an indolent slug making its way across a slab of hot concrete in hell. [12 July 1985]

As the medley of violence continues, Stone’s mugging goes from giddily sinister to hammy and exhausting. Same goes for Nobody 2, and also the post-John Wick wave of action movies it’s part of.

All outrageous stuff. Gatien's story is worth telling. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that director Billy Corben presents it in such a methodical fashion.

Whether because of Madea's on-screen absence or the abilities of the two lead actors, Daddy's Little Girls is still a step up for Perry, boasting moments of charm that transcend the usual mess.

Sporadically funny, twisted for sure, it risks becoming as repetitive and shrill as the kinds of programs it satirizes.

Otherwise, Brody, Scott and Jenifer Lewis (as Montana’s imperious oft-married mom) give this formulaic material maximum comic spin.

If you feel you might already have seen City of Ghosts, but can't quite place it, you'd be forgiven. Hollywood, never afraid of working a cliché to death, has turned out dozens of "City of . . ." films over the years.

It might be called "It's Kind of a Thin Movie."

Bronson is one of those “based on a true story” dramatizations where the theatrically staged drama only gets in the way of the more interesting truth.

Perhaps sensing that the rest of his story - mostly focusing around the earnest do-goodery of Golja's aide - falls emotionally flat, Navarretta lavishes attention on his two marquee players, creating tiny moments of poignancy.

Still, the thing is almost watchable until a ridiculous reveal spoils whatever chances this film had at succeeding.

So if you can get through this headache of a script and Lee’s unwavering commitment to choreographed dance numbers, there are some funny times in store.

A potentially appealing story about a rescued disabled dolphin gets smothered with inspirational family values guff.

A crusty screed against many facets of modern life – the internet, smartphones, insurance companies, pecans – but kinda ho-hum on the subject of drug violence, Clint Eastwood’s The Mule is one of the more confounding films of the year.

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

Leong’s documentary realism is powerful – if tough on an audience – but his fiction skills are erratic in a film that relies too heavily on Sister Tse’s narration, much repeated flashbacks and heavy exposition of the characters’ motivations.

Makin has a knack for comic jolts, and, apparently, little interest in the longer narrative arc that movies, no matter how unorthodox, require. [13 Apr 1996]

What's curious about the film, in an anthropological way, is that it's made up of a series of false human moments yet remains entirely predictable.

Positively hops with jolts and frights but they're the cheap kind.

One can lodge the complaint that Last Summer is redundant, though Breillat’s aims differ significantly from el-Toukhy’s. The trouble lies instead with the inconsistency and loathsomeness of these aims.

In short, it's much fatter with less matter and a distressing shrinkage in thought.

There could be a fascinating and illuminating movie in this.

The verdict is easy: Pfeiffer terrific, movie not.

Except for one memorable interlude, the film just doesn't have near enough fun blasting spitballs at "Pirates of the Caribbean."

Bedtime Stories does divide into two types of comedy: There's the story comedy, in which Skeeter dresses in costume when he performs slapstick and insults people, and then there are the real-life scenes, when he does the same things in regular clothes.

Judged esthetically -- the only yardstick worth applying -- it can be safely placed in that long line of indistinguishable Hollywood mediocrities, all of them trying in vain to resurrect an awfully weary genre.

This paint-by-numbers romantic comedy is chock-a-block with jokey stereotypes – Americans are obnoxious, Canadians polite, and the Greeks just dance – yet lacking in any real drama, only occasionally mustering enough charm or humour to rise above a predictable formula.

The film’s examination feels shallow.

While not as edgy or funny as "The Mask," the popular 1994 "original" starring Jim Carrey, the movie offers eye-popping animation high-jinks and a warm-and-fuzzy story that reinforces what some would call family values.

A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.

Maybe Rapoport’s script from way back when was fiercer, sharper, and funnier, and the sands of time have simply eroded any of its interesting edges down to mere nubs of gross-out nothingness. But watching it today on Netflix, it can’t help but feel highly algorithmic.

With Redford, less is not more, less is nigh on to nothing. He's natural in The Natural, but he's artless: it has been years since he played the politician in The Candidate, but he's still running for office on screen. The gig he wants is God, and that's what he gets to play in The Natural, a Greek deity with an arm made of home runs and a halo made of Sun-In. [11 May 1984]

Just as the promising parody of prison films begins to catch fire, Friedman and Poitier douse it with a bucketful of realism. [13 Dec 1980]

Frankly, 2 Hearts is the drama this year deserves. One that starts with promise before descending into madness.

Mostly I laughed at the idea that Steve Martin could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy, and that Arthur Hiller, who directed this, or Neil Simon, who adapted it, or Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, who wrote it, could ever understand what it means to be a lonely guy. [28 Jan 1984]

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.