The Frisco Kid, billed as a comedy, is about a gentle Polish rabbi of 1850 who is instructed to cross America and become spiritual leader of an eagerly awaiting congregation in San Francisco. But the movie is propelled more by violence - in action, in dialogue and in editing - than by humor. No wonder there are so few good kosher westerns. [24 July 1979]

My Science Project leaves you wishing it was a better movie, and that's a commendation. It has something that allows you to hope for more, namely a performance by John Stockwell (Christine) that earns him a spot among the fine young actors in Hollywood. [13 Aug 1985]

Had Crossing Over chosen to tell one of them well, rather than seven badly, it would have made for a fine movie. Instead, all we get is a mess of good liberal intentions loosely anchored to a mass of pure Hollywood hokum.

As the new Ben-Hur unspools into insignificance and sentimentality, there are fleeting moments that suggest someone behind this $100-million movie was actually thinking hard about how to replay a schlocky biblical epic for a secular audience in 2016.

After almost two and a half hours, all of it glued together with plot-vomiting dialogue and characters that only vaguely resemble the ones Spielberg carefully built, Dominion becomes its very own Jurassic Park: Designed to thrill and enchant, it instead becomes a ride to survive.

What Porky's II has gained in sophistication from its "expanded view" it has lost in raunchy, anarchistic energy. Who wants a socially respectable pig out? [25 June 1983]

Tulip Fever is a film a-swirl in what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. The years-long anticipation of its arrival has only heightened the stakes for what is – and what maybe always would have been – a harmless historical romp through some flowers.

The new movie is dumb, pointless and completely bereft of laughs. It wastes a talented cast and all of your time. Worst of all, though, it is unconscionably lazy, starting with its generic title (again, who is naming these things?) and ending with its shrug-of-the-shoulders climax.

Make no mistake: Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is a bad film, inert and clichéd and largely devoid of cinematic imagination. But it is not a problematic film.

Trying to be off-the-wall, Amos & Andrew never gets off the ground. It ends up as politically correct as its title, and that ain't funny. [05 Mar 1993]

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is not faring well as a horror-movie scream queen. Gone are the attitude, wit and verve she used to routinely display in the title role of TV's "Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

This is a miserable sequel to the modestly well-reviewed Final Destination.

There must be something about the thriller/horror genre that attracts writers with exactly the same dysfunctional tendencies: They're all great at the foreplay but keep on messing up the climax.

For a movie aimed at children, Shark Boy and Lava Girl is gloomy.

Outré love stories are great, as are love stories that make viewers squirm. But they have to ring true emotionally, and despite its talented cast, Adore does not.

The Addams Family 2 allowed me a couple of nostalgic chuckles, while the kids were entertained by the antics. It wasn’t entirely a snooze, but I can’t say it was particularly memorable for either of us.

The Words suggests that a story, whether true or not, can help get us through, if we believe it enough. Though this film can't quite pull it off, a good enough thief can get away with it.

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Except for The Fat Boys, who have some deft comic passes, nobody is required to act, or seems capable of it. But for what Krush Groove is - an unambitious film directed at a black teenage audience - it has its good points. [26 Nov 1985]

Amelia is the Mack truck of flight. Heavy and lumbering, it delivers the goods, but there's not an ounce of magic in the thing.

Trespass is at least a suitable rest stop for his (Cage) anguish. An unapologetic B-movie that comes with lots of flashbacks, gunplay and shouting, it can easily be savoured and forgotten inside 90 minutes.

The plot is as incomprehensible as the dubbing and many of the special effects are neither special nor effective.

Distinctly humdrum, The Last Legion, a boy's adventure story that seems to have been dragged out of the vaults of some early-sixties TV series.

Winnie begins as hagiography and ends in hellish confusion.

Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.

A pointless thriller.

As it giggles away at its campy self, at least you can groan along with it.

In what is surely a tribute to the dazzling mediocrity of director Luis Llosa, the real jungle looks as bland as the fake jungle.

If 1911 doesn't impress as historical spectacle, neither does it rank high as a Jackie Chan film.

To her credit, Nadda is a solid actors’ director – the performances here are competent even when the writing isn’t. The exception is South Africa which, although a logistically necessary shooting location, ain’t much of a thespian.

There are many plot lines here, but little tension.

Too much chatting, not enough chills.

To reduce Leonard to shtick makes about as much sense as using a scalpel for a butter knife — even when the job gets done, it's just such a dull waste of a sharp implement.

Brewster's Millions never gets breathless, as it absolutely must. [22 May 1985]

Brings on a wave of nostalgia accompanied, unfortunately, by a great big yawn that will surely be experienced by parents hoping for a spark of irreverence à la Pippi or the broad comic appeal found in most theatrical family fare these days.

So yes, if you’ve seen "The Bible," you’ve already seen most of Son of God – but if there’s one story where spoilers just don’t apply, it’s the Greatest One Ever Told.

From its intense beginnings to its what-really-c’mon-no-reallllllly-c’mon mid-film twist to its defiantly and successfully sentimental finale, the new Matthew McConaughey vehicle is playing by its own demented rules. When it deigns to care about rules.

What should have sizzled fizzles.

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.

Scott means for his entertainment package to be hip, hysterical fun. But his stylistic embellishments and indiscriminate appetite for sensation crowds his title character right out of the film.

The most gratifying thing about xXx: State of the Union is that nobody wastes much time on character, motivation, plausibility, dialogue or sex -- all that slow stuff that drags down ordinary movies.

Ye gods, there's a lot of hacking and many seismic eruptions in The Wrath of the Titans, the latest 3-D action film that treats the Greek gods as action figures.

Eccentric and misguided enough to be almost perversely fascinating, the film doesn’t lack nerve; it’s just not very good.

Though far from a disaster of Biblical proportions, Evan Almighty is a mild, sporadically funny comedy in an oversized sentimental frame.

Winterbottom is not out to thrill, but to lecture on the truth, which, he believes, can only be found in fiction.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

Unfortunately, the only thing that dies harder in the movies than natural selection is careworn cliché, and Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale’s movie about a plucky, lovestruck pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi subjects our long defunct earthly ancestors to a fate arguably worse than extinction: a life lived in a world of cheese.

Throughout, Terence Blanchard's score swells and sweeps, reminding us, at every moment, what we're supposed to feel. If only we knew what we were supposed to think of this trite mess.

Feels stale, bloated and willing to get by on sheer familiarity.

The music, at least, is welcome.

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

Somewhere between its loutish humour and laudable sentiments are the traces of a good buddy movie that could, at the very least, have been harmless summer fun.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

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.

Everything about Are You Here feels like a bottom-drawer script idea that was put together too casually and carelessly.

Some performances carry a picture, this one bench-presses it. Sean Penn's work here is so mesmerizing, so intense, so guaranteed to put him front and centre when Oscar reads out the nominees, as to almost obscure the multiple failings of the misguided movie around it.

Barely dusted off, the humourless stuff is served up straight - damned if it isn't a Hillbillies homage. [19 Oct 1993]

A stunningly unnecessary comedy, Fist Fight perpetuates unoriginal characters, a preposterous premise and a half-hearted stand-up-for-yourself message.

Willis has a gift for turning formulaic action flicks -- Die Hard, even Hudson Hawk -- into something with an identifiable personality, but much of Mercury Rising challenges even his charms. [3 Apr 1998, p.C5]

The most disturbing aspect of the movie is not the sex scenes (shot from the waist up) but her face, especially in her porn-star persona: a frozen little smiling mask that suggests a paradoxically intense vacancy.

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

Here, one begins to suspect that the major impediment is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves. They don't believe in this stuff, in its unavoidable sentimentality, and that attitude filters down to a perplexed cast.

Sure, the food looks good and the prayers are worth hearing, but there just isn't enough wine in the world to tempt the prophet Elijah into dropping by this household when this is the company he'll get.

The stellar array of British talent (voicing the various farm animals) and Murray (whom one suspects has rewritten Garfield's lines to be Murray-esque) give Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties all its energy and make the human actors -- even comedian Connolly -- look and sound like square panels in a two-dimensional comic strip.

Dirty Girl isn't. Sorry, but it's just faux grime, a thin layer of bad behaviour that wipes clean with a two-ply tissue to reveal the real movie beneath – all shiny sentimentality.

About a third of the way along, there's a shocking revelation that definitely packs a punch. Problem is, it's followed by a near-immediate return to familiar narrative convention, where the noir ante rises exponentially toward a climax that arrives too hastily and ends too neatly.

Shutter has the look and feel of a proper J-horror film. Tokyo is seen as a series of gloomy gun metal skies. And the acting is more subdued than in Hollywood horror movies.

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

The Golden Child is certainly not a Michael Ritchie movie - the talented director of Smile and The Candidate is never more than a referee in the war between the special effects and the star. The special effects win, which is no victory, but the star is not knocked out. [13 Dec 1986, p.F5]

The last thing I want is this: Yet another instance of black culture diluting itself by imitating a white model. Hell, Honey is hip-hop by way of Andy Hardy.

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.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

The story is bland, the action incoherent, the surprises detestably nonsensical, the humour never rising above the level of a half-smirk. And for a movie that gathers the world’s most perfectly sculpted denizens, everything is bafflingly sexless. If Red Notice is the future of the big and shiny movie, then we are now in the era of the neutered blockbuster.

His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

The trouble is that the plot is so elliptical to be almost unfollowable (though it helps to have seen the trailer).

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

Based on the picture book co-authored by Power of Now superstar Eckhart Tolle, Milton’s Secret carries a powerful and important message, but the film feels ham-fisted, clichéd and overearnest at times, especially for adult viewers.

Uziel's screenplay has some clever geopolitical ideas – though it's hard to tell how many of those came before or after it was Cloververse-ified via a tour through Abrams's magical mystery factory – but its twists feel routine, its narrative spine limp and its conclusion especially rushed.

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.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

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.

There ain't much to You Got Served, but at least this teensploitation flick is bookended by two frenzied sequences that fully exploit the visual potential of street dancing.

A swashbuckler that plays like an over-dressed serial on a slow Saturday afternoon. [22 Dec 1995]

There's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

Richard Pryor can be a funny man, but not in his latest film. As static as moving pictures can get, Moving chronicles the adventures of a relentlessly middle-class family forced to relocate from choice New Jersey to nowhere Idaho. [10 Mar 1988]

Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form. While it is refreshing to see the groundedness with which the director approaches his newest project, his larger-than-life ideas still seem to have trouble finding their exact footing.

There's a head-pounding, gob-smacking literalness to this flick, extending from the title right through to the recurring imagery.

If the art of a true hustler is, as Joe puts it, "beating a man out of his money and making him like it," Callahan blows it big-time with any mark who shells out to see his film.

The finale just seems hypocritical, even nonsensical in a comedy that derives its few laughs from a farting dog and an accidental gynecological exam. This book is better left closed.

Despite some clever, winking nods to the original, including appearances by Cook herself and Matthew Lillard, He’s All That fails to deliver on what She’s All That did so well: a sweet, lighthearted romance that hinges on the chemistry between its two leads.

3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy fails to live up to either its promise or title.

The premise of Paris-Manhattan is simple enough; unfortunately, so is everything else about writer-director Sophie Lellouche’s debut feature film.

Hanks doesn't quite manage a miracle this time, but thanks to a competent (if sometimes scatter-brained) script and a co-star who looks like a cross between Orson Welles and a spawn of the devil and who produces saliva like OPEC produces oil, Turner and Hooch ends up an amusing diversion that sprays gags - messy gags, wise-ass gags - as often as Hooch sprays the furniture with his excess spittle. Which is very often indeed. [28 July 1989]

Sorry to disappoint anyone who saw the cast list of this film and presumed Julie Andrews was going to play the horrific serial killer Tooth Fairy from the Hannibal Lecter movies.

It's all so geekily gorgeous, it hardly matters that the narrative lapses in and out of incoherence and the dialogue is functional at best.