A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including the starry cast of Lanthimos regulars, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will.

That feelgood story of a long dormant musical dream finally realized was enough to earn major press attention, but is it enough for a feature-length film? Probably not, which is why writer-director Pohlad piled on the melodrama and leaned into clichés.

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.

Rather than build on the new momentum, this one's a bit more of a cruise-control effort.

The result, like so many stout travellers from stage to screen, is respectable. Stolidly, bloodlessly, yawningly respectable.

Despite the Spielberg trademarks, a lavish attention to period detail and the occasional flash of visual potency, this is a picture you never get caught up in.

Jack Goes Boating barely stays afloat – it's a deep disappointment.

YOU'VE gotta love the casting. Defying the skeptics, The Great Gonzo keeps his furious urges in check and transforms himself into none other than the prolific Charles Dickens, popping up on camera to act as our narrative guide through his Christmas Carol classic. For the feisty one, it's a remarkable stretch. [15 Dec 1992]

Rosen has not so much adapted Watership Down as he has intelligently condensed it, and compensated for the simplifications with pleasures books can't provide. [20 Jan 1979]

While The Lodge isn’t as hearty as the horror films it desperately wants to emulate, the filmmakers have concocted a heavy stew of emotions, left on a low simmer. In the cold winter season of "IT" children orphan horror movies, it will have to suffice our cravings.

Gorgeously shot by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who takes much delight in exposing the blinding sunlight and dusky interiors of old Hollywood, the film is lightly entertaining but largely pointless.

Lush, loud and sparkling, and not nearly as innocent as you might imagine.

Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.

Designer babies rule dystopia in stylish SF thriller filled with recycled plot devices.

Sure, it's a bit mechanical, but what did you expect? The important thing is that the characters and jokes don't prevent you from grooving on the pleasures of the moving parts.

The film lacks flow, unfolding in a rat-a-tat series of short, artfully lensed scenes -- individually nice but collectively jerky.

There is nothing dry about Last Call at the Oasis, Jessica Yu's engaging, informative and fast-flowing documentary exploring the global water crisis.

Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

But Schneider, whose only other directing credit is the extremely low-key 2009 family drama "Get Low," finds a way to portray the nautical action with clarity and precision. You might not know what Krause and his crew are saying at all times, but you definitely know what they’re witnessing.

A mildly enjoyable if toothless adaptation of a much better book.

By the end of Trekkies,you almost feel the best way to bring peace to the Middle East would be to hold a Star Trek convention there.

At his best, Clint directed as he acted -- sparely, laconically, but concisely, with a clean precision. There are flashes of that trademark style early on, but it soon degenerates badly.

The movie is entertaining on a rudimentary, never-to-be-taken-seriously level. On the rare occasions when it does rise above the material, it's because Pierce Brosnan is chillingly effective as an assassin with the body temperature of a snake. [26 Aug 1987]

Not that The Nutty Professor should ever be confused with a good movie, but it is a perfect vehicle for the redisplay of Murphy's neglected talents, steering him away from the smug persona of his recent disasters and whisking him back to the cozy locale of his Saturday Night Live roots.

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

There's a whole lot of "American Beauty" and "The Ice Storm" packed into Lymelife.

Takes its viewers on a bouncing high-wire act between intense violence and sugar-sweet tenderness, with some light-hearted comedy along the way.

For all the carnality on offer here, Mitchell and his cast seem ambivalent about sex.