Like most simplifications, Lean On Me's genially despotic approach has its attractions, and it works fine as a movie. Simplification worked fine in Rocky and in The Karate Kid, too, but unlike those essentially simple films, Lean On Me oversimplifies a very complex issue. And unlike those films, Lean On Me leaves one pondering the fact that, in real life, things aren't ever simple. [9 March 1989]

The charm of the movie's first 20 minutes soon turns shrill and manic, as invention is piled upon invention.

There are moments of salty wit to its teen TV sensibility, and the story offers proof, once again, than there are few stories that can't be adapted to the theme of teenaged popularity politics.

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 revisiting of George Pal's 1960 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel. Pal's take on the book was visually delightful and occasionally clever; this one is always workmanlike and mainly pedestrian.

Paine does offer something of a heroine in Chelsea Sexton; the attractive EV1 sales specialist was laid off in 2001, became an EV1 activist and is now executive director of Plug In America.

So that great start turns all clunky and dull and, you know, mediocre. Still, you'll love Emma. Emma is about as cute as a kid can get.

The Woman in the Fifth is an interesting chameleon until it runs out of disguises, and all that was transitory just looks transparent.

Flashy camera work, a clattering techno soundtrack and impressive synchronized stunt work fill where the plot goes AWOL.

The movie makes for quite a hike. It's also, at times, a bit of a slog.

The film doesn’t feel like homework. Still, while its description of the problem is convincing, you wish it could offer more of a prescription.

Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.

It soars, all right, but it does it on automatic pilot. [10 June 1983]

Despite (or maybe because of) its showy cleverness, Full Frontal merely seems full of itself -- it's a small film made by a big ego pretending to a modesty he no longer feels.

Of Course A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is repulsive. That is its primary attraction. All right-thinking people will steer clear. But wrong-thinkers with a taste for the grotesque will be in heaven, or the nearest satanic equivalent. [27 Feb 1987]

It's doubtful that today's children would have any patience for the stagy 1956 version, so the current animated offering, despite its flaws, at least opens a door to the music.

The picture is actually watchable. What's more, as romance comedies go, it's something of a novelty.

Only a few of the characters are well-developed enough to sustain the movie's interest, while the rest speak in obscure, poetic dialogue that repeats the central thesis ad nauseam.

Features an excellent cast, in particular the child actors. These elements, as well as the director's light unsentimental touch, make the struggles and triumphs in Small Voices ring truthful.

Not an extraordinary portrait, but it does portray an extraordinary man.

A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.

The documentary seeks only to make a joyful noise, and is sometimes laboured in the love it so keenly wants to express. Then again, as Leonard would be the first to concede, there are worse sins than flawed worship.

Shaping the rhetoric of black activism and black liberation into accessible and demographic-spanning prose is no easy task. It is work which must be undertaken with intelligence, care and, above all, experience. It is no surprise then that the adaptation of Angie Thomas’s debut young-adult novel, The Hate U Give, into a big-budget studio picture loses much of its import in translation.

The result is good gossip, entertainingly delivered, yet with a distinctly musty odour, its expiry date long gone.

Death Race is our unshaven Brit hero's inevitable comeuppance: The Prison Job.

A thoughtful, unsurprising dramatic comedy executive produced by Jay and Mark Duplass. If you know the indie filmmaking siblings from their HBO show Togetherness, you will be comfortable with the wry, understated Adult Beginners.

With the notable exception of Martin Scorsese's opus, most boxing flicks suffer form a certain amount of raw-boned sentimentality, the sort of easy melodrama that pits naive underdogs against corrupt overlords, or age against youth, or purity against prejudice. Even the recent "Million Dollar Baby" succumbed in the final act. But this one, where "Rocky" meets "The Waltons," has us reeling under its saccharine weight.

The film ends with the mention of Schrager’s full pardon in 2017 by President Obama. If the discotheque was non-judgmental, so is the film.