The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.

For some reason that shall forever remain a mystery to all those but director Ben Wheatley and the almighty Netflix algorithm, 2020 has delivered one of the most unnecessary remakes in the history of an industry built upon revisitation: Rebecca.

Although the film and the actors keep on looking good, this solemn, soppy, fantasy has nothing to say about science or faith.

Mangold's larger problem is trying to hold together a movie that jerks about in tone as much as it does location, veering between grisly humour and cutesy sentiments.

Marks the emergence of a talented young actress. Not Britney -- who has the amateur's tendency to stand looking awkward after delivering her lines -- but Manning (Crazy/Beautiful), who plays Mimi with the gusto of a young Holly Hunter. Though she has little competition here, when she's on the screen she pretty much owns it.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie is not the heart-warming, life-affirming, feel-good hit of the summer. Let Pocahantas and Casper provide the hugs and lessons. The Power Rangers, as usual, are on hand to kick intergalactic butt. [30 June 1995]

Made In America is not the humanist triumph it wants to be, but, thanks to Goldberg and Danson, it's a Pyrrhic victory at least - the movie marks the dubious ascendancy of acting over writing, the talent emphasizing the mediocrity in the very process of vanquishing it. [28 May 1993]

In the future, as recorded in the bible of British cinema, it will be written that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" begat "The Full Monty" which begat "Billy Elliot" which begat way too many pale imitations struggling to peddle the same brand of sloppy sentimentality. Amen.

This is the brand of sentimentality that comes with a high concentration of saccharine and every taste of bitterness safely removed.

Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.

The disappointment here is that an intriguing psychological premise about a personality swap is never used to do anything more than provide the juice for a run-of-the-mill action movie.

In your typical subpar Hollywood romcom, there’s only one tedious love story to put up with. Well, Valentine’s Day (such a clever title) does a whole lot better than that: It offers 10 tedious love stories to put up with.

En route, the plot gimmick degenerates from clever to dumb, then gets forgotten entirely, and the last act simply poops out - the climax is a Bigger Bang that plays like the saddest of whimpers.

It’s a story where sex and being over 60 aren’t treated as mutual exclusives, which is pretty great in its own way.

In the end, F*CK is at most a compendium of opinions and examples, and never feels like a story. Still, great casting and inventive visuals make it an entertaining big-screen experience -- and don't expect to catch it later on network television (otherwise it would have to be retitled BL**P).

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.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

The result is that, rather than tragedy, this unfolds like a plodding morality tale in which Wrath and Cowardice play out their respective parts.

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]

An ill-considered, utterly unnecessary remake of the 1941 pulp classic "The Wolf Man" starring Lon Chaney Jr.

While the performances are memorable (Gonthier-Hyndman especially), there is an indifference in the writing, particularly around Florence’s mental health, that feels off-putting while impersonating compassionate comedy. Here and there, some gags work, but one is liable to emerge from the whole exercise feeling weary rather than liberated.

With a plot that thickens like congealed stew, this movie about a harmless nutbar, an attorney and a cabal can leave you lost in banality.

They’re back for an entertaining enough 3-D sequel to their 2014 franchise revival, and so is the rest of the cast that includes foxy Megan Fox and her ability to wear a naughty schoolgirl outfit.

Although the film doesn’t fully deliver on the political-thriller element, it asks some powerful questions: How does violence become intimate, blurring the line of morals and ethics?

A Master Builder really doesn’t work, hampered by odd casting, theatrical performances and a reductive interpretation of Ibsen’s play.

Big, lavish and dumb as camel spit -- is proof that sometimes it's better to let sleeping genres lie.

A rags-to-riches tale that is inspirational in the most sentimental and predictable of fashions, Bigger squanders most of the potential that comes with dissecting such an underexplored world as the nascent body-building industry. At least he nails the casting, with the intimidatingly fit Tyler Hoechlin and Aneurin Barnard as the Weider brothers, the charismatic Julianne Hough as Joe’s wife.

The two actors at the centre of these high-concept comedies are good, giving and game, but they’ve been cut a raw deal by trite material that belittles their very existence.

More rant than rollick, it's just ain't funny enough.

The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.

The script is terrible - a confounding mish-mash of action-thriller chases, sci-fi travelogue and phony political intrigue.

The problem is, while alluding to the depressing state of things, the gleeful fun Gunn insists on having, with his kitschy aesthetic and silly humour, can feel forced.

This parade of admiration is almost as exhausting as the experience of a Motörhead concert.

But wouldn't it be heavenly if a like proportion of Tinseltown producers believed in an existing need for a good script. Because this one ain't good; in fact, it's hellishly mediocre, the kind that aims for holiday charm and settles for workaday torpor.

As compared to both X and Pearl, West’s bag of cinema tricks in MaXXXine reaches a level of engagement that feels both compulsive and abridged.

Cry-Baby is snifflingly nice. By going too far with its teardrop motif, it does the soggily unthinkable: it waters John Waters down. [6 Apr 1990]

Running Scared's relationship to "The Cooler" is roughly that of industrial metal to a quaint torch song.

Puerile and idiotic it may be, but Superhero Movie is nonetheless smarter than most of its lowbrow brethren in the Hollywood sub-sub-category known as the spoof movie.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

And veteran director Costa-Gavras, whose early work ("Z", "State Of Siege", "Missing") proves that he's no stranger to sociopolitical complexities, might well have been the man to make it. But not from this script -- it starts off as puerile and then regresses.

After the first hour or so of strained puns and wisecracks, you start feeling that the sooner the ending comes, the happier it will be.

No longer content with simple conservatism, this horror is downright totalitarian.

No, the trouble isn't with them but with a screenplay (by Angus MacLachlan) that loads their characters with too much symbolic baggage and then points them off in obscure directions.

ONE THING about The Pick-up Artist : it's fast. Crazy fast, like a manic 2-year-old in a major pout - all energy and no direction. This is a picture for the channel-hopping set, something to watch with half an eye while all your mind is coasting elsewhere, less a movie than a feature- length trailer, a series of short, cluttered scenes cut to a rock 'n' roll score and leading . . . . Well, that's the other thing about The Pick-up Artist: it leads precisely nowhere. [18 Sept 1987]

Apparently, the idea of their passion is enough to save them from a life of boredom - if only it had the same happy effect on us.

What hurts Miles Ahead, though, is a lack of imagination.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

When the picture is good, it inspires hope and affection; when it's bad, it calls forth sighs and whispers. Lookin' To Get Out is a failure, but it's the kind of failure you feel sorry for. [11 Oct 1982]

A story based on exceptional facts gets converted into an unexceptional movie.

Never before have the demands of my inner man-child been so stirred, though, than while experiencing Deadpool 2, a movie that feels scribbled in pencil crayon, drenched in Jolt cola and coated with the dust of a thousand discarded bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

About 45 minutes worth of funny stuff awkwardly stretched to 84 minutes.

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

The wee mousie is fun, all right, yet like the occasionally ragged editing, the fun just gets haphazardly wedged in.

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]

Hereafter is unpredictable enough to be consistently watchable.

It tries too hard too early.

It’s a goofy, confusing mess of a sequel, a cautionary tale of what happens when a filmmaker lives too long inside his own franchise to realize that no one takes it nearly as seriously as he does.

In a kind of perverse alchemy, this film manages to turn that narrative gold into dross, and reduce the daunting perils of a 4,300-mile voyage to a ho-hum checklist. Welcome to the reverse magic of the movies.

FOR BATTERIES Not Included, intelligence is not required. [18 Dec 1987]

A paint-by-numbers vigilante movie with the usual rogue cop, murdered wife and trail of vengeance.

While dance sequences are not particularly well edited compared to the new breed of dance flick, Wormald and Hough are exciting hoofers to watch.

The concept might work for especially patient gamers, but rendered cinematically by director Genki Kawamura, the result is a frustrating and ultimately boring exercise in audience endurance.

A sequel that immediately picks up the plot of its predecessor, and then proceeds to drive the redeemed franchise right off the deep, dark end.

Maybe this stuff works on the page, in Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic novel, but Choke is awfully tough to digest on the screen.

Seems overstuffed and, in its own way, preachy.

It’s just such a shining example of a dull studio comedy.

Love Ranch bounces between tongue-in-cheek wackiness and soapy melodrama while rarely hitting a true note.

Over the Moon is far more interesting than its animated contemporaries, if only for the parsing of its back story.

No, there's no shortage of interesting characters with intriguing powers on display here, but there's frustratingly little space to tell their individual stories and, biggest problem of all, they lack a worthy opponent.

Radio Days, is an occasionally charming trifle, a cinematic bauble that - held up to just the right light, soft and undemanding - sparkles quite prettily. But add just a hint of the glare cast by a raised expectation, and this lightweight thing fades right out of view. [30 Jan 1987]

As Sara and Julien bide their time in the barn, escaping into their imagination, Forster keeps himself interested by turning the movie into an ode to cinema.

As for De Niro, he seems to have licence to do what he wants here, without much help from the writers.

Like an over-ambitious freshman with a term paper, Singleton raises every issue and illuminates none. And, again, this film is better when the combative heat rises, particularly when the long-telegraphed confrontation between Malik and the neo-Nazi finally comes to a (skin)head. [13 Jan 1995, p.C3]

Venom: The Last Dance remains steadfast in the franchise’s commitment to storytelling that, like a pot of water that never quite hits boiling point, is neither so-bad-it’s-good nor so bad it’s raucously entertaining, even if only unintentionally so.

Elevated to some vague level of importance, not on merit but by circumstance.

Burdened with a needlessly complex conceit, flat character design, limp jokes, and a soundtrack completely absent a single ear-worm (unless you count an overreliance on Madonna’s Lucky Star), Luck feels dredged from the bottom of Pixar’s few lows (Cars comes to mind) than plucked from its many highs (Inside Out would like a word).

Plays out like a 1950s B-movie with a fat special-effects budget. Brain-numbing dialogue, incoherent action and glaring improbabilities aside, it's a bearable combination of sci-fi paranoia and historical fantasy that drags modern viewers, and the robotic hero of "The Fast and the Furious" movies, Paul Walker, back to the centre of the Hundred Years War.

Piously posing as providing a public service, The Krays is little more than an artsy simulacrum of America's Most Wanted. [25 Jan 1991]

Exuberantly campy.

If this sounds intriguing, we should add that System of a Down is a lousy live band. And director Garapedian, for all her public-minded zeal, isn't capable of corralling her interviews and opinions into a coherent polemic.

I wouldn't say this is laugh-out-loud risible, but there are definitely moments. Still, you might want to consider sitting through the uneven thing just to get to the ending, because that's quite something. You may love it, you may hate it, but forget it you won't.

Though competent in its B-movie way, Terminator Salvation lacks the humour, heart-tugging moments and visual pleasure that made the first two movies of the series modern pop masterpieces.

Despite the predictable plot, there are moments of genuine delight – and they all come from the fresh talent.

Yes Man puts him back in the same old quandary and, once again, Carrey lacks an identity. Alas, this time, he also lacks a script.

As for the locals, they speak like extras from "Fargo," although, on this go-round, that weird Swedish accent has somehow lost its power to amuse.

Stop the Pounding Heart is the last of Minervini’s “Texas trilogy,” so this isn’t his first rodeo. Indulgently, he explores a world that is near-fascinating for its insularity, but one that probably calls for photographs instead of this film.

Listen, Will: The film, your first with streaming giant Netflix (which maybe says something about the state of your brand of big-screen comedies, or maybe not), isn’t a total disaster. There are moments where you and Dobkin embrace the surreal . . . that hint at a better, more interesting kind of absurdist comedy.

The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

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.

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

As Laurel and Hardy learn by the end of the film, every gig is an opportunity. Good on Coogan and Reilly for possessing the same workhorse mentality – and better luck next time, boys.

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

Like its characters, That Awkward Moment has commitment issues: It lacks the courage of its bad taste.

An efficiently engineered piece of studio product, enjoyable enough at times, but with an unmistakable assembly-line quality.

A ghoul's dinner of undigested indelicacies pilfered from other horror feasts; the undeniable ability of the chef, director David K. Lynch, has been utilized to create a cream sauce in which the victuals cook without ever cooking together. [18 Sep 1979]

The French director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, "The Artist," is everything "The Artist" was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

If you’ve already been to Fargo, or at least visited the place via movies or TV, you’ve got scant reason to go to Cut Bank.