What should have been the trickiest parts of this enterprise – elucidating the warm relationship between Essrog (Norton) and Minna (Bruce Willis), and Essrog’s Tourette syndrome – Norton handles with aplomb. The rest is a murky mess, unnecessarily dense and confusing for two hours, and then in the last 20 minutes, way too obvious.

Despite its unique premise, Eat Wheaties! is easy to embrace.

Facial prosthetics, Inside Hoops humour and "Barbershop"-styled trash talk ensue. Pepsi is one of film’s producers, but painkiller Aleve gets better product placement. Spare some for the arthritic plot, please.

Down in the Valley is one of those pictures you root for even when it goes badly wrong.

The Butler may be a sanctimonious cartoon, but it points to events in the civil rights struggle that were as grotesque and extraordinary as any fiction can invent.

Isn't exactly what you'd call fresh. But although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

Ferdinand is not going to be the next "Frozen" or "Lion King" or even the fourth or fifth "Ice Age" movie, but there's a reason the story is still being told some 81 years after it was first published. Its lessons – be true to yourself, go your own way, and don't let society tell you what you should or shouldn't be – are just as applicable today as they were then. And that's no pile of bull.

A drawing-room murder mystery that had some extremely funny moments. [24 June 1978]

With a plot focus on the exotic, ever-more anachronistic Edwardian manners and mores occasioned by royal protocol, it’s like a crossover episode with "The Crown."

The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.

In a contest between passion and pretension, Laurence Anyways reaches a kind of draw. What holds up here isn’t Dolan’s overly decorative filmmaking, but what he gets from his performers.

Overall, The Salt of Life has more bite but less charm than "Mid-August Lunch."

The foundation of a much better movie is buried somewhere beneath the debris that’s too quickly piled on to The Kings of Summer, but there’s something at least strangely organic in its abandonment of a sturdier architectural project.

Of course, this is social satire and some bits are very funny...but the message is too obvious and the humour too gentle for the whole affair not to feel like so much white male whining.

Antibirth follows in the tradition of "Alien," "Prometheus" and "Rosemary’s Baby" rejoicing in an abject fear of childbirth. Lovers of horror will likely be into this fertile homage and will appreciate Perez’s new takes on horror’s tried-and-true tropes and plot twists.

Postcards From The Edge, is long on witty one-liners but woefully short on coherent structure. [13 Sep 1990, p.C5]

Shag bounces through elements of farce and satire, music and romance without straining too hard and with a few more laughs than one would expect from a picture that seems patched together from such a wide variety of genre films. Like a perfect Southern belle, Shag is smarter and funnier than you expect it to be, but never smarter and funnier than it has to be.[21 July 1989]

The film lays emotions on thick, with strong performances and dreamy cinematography. The high points are devastating and show off Chon’s empathetic storytelling. But at its ebb, the film tries to do too much at once, spilling every which way.

The Canyons is actually anything but gratuitously sensational. On the contrary, it’s rather restrained, even conservative affair, far more interested in expositional conversation and a sustained tone of bleached-out melancholy than cranking up the heat.

So when it comes to rawness, realness or any other signifier of urban authenticity, Step Up 2 The Streets doesn't measure up, especially when compared with a grittier dance flick still in theatres, the Toronto-made "How She Move."

Watchable as ever.

Here, Soderbergh's visual additions -- gimmicky lighting, surreal backdrops, all cued to the monologue's changing rhythms -- are more distracting than enhancing. Or maybe not. In a way, the camera's empty gimmickry points to the same tendency in Gray's verbal canters -- diverting enough but, ultimately, isn't it just sleight-of-mouth? [18 April 1997, p.C5]

Co-directed by James D. Stern (who made another NBA promotional documentary, "Michael Jordan to the Max") and Adam Del Deo, the story of the Americanization of Yao is determinedly upbeat.

Constant is the very thing The Constant Gardener is not. Attractive yet fickle, the movie beckons enticingly one moment and wanders off the next.

Would that the movie had gone the next step, and possibly imagined that this bright, shiny little E.T. had figured out how to get kids to do its sinister work for him by providing free WiFi and endless smartphone upgrades in exchange for undying loyalty, we might have had something altogether different on our hands.

Not woeful, not wonderful, merely watchable.

Clichés abound and you think you know where this is going. But in her feature debut, Canadian director Lina Roessler manages some genuine surprises. Caine is wonderful, Plaza is charming. The film has its moments, but one for the books this ain’t.

Begin Again is a not-entirely-successful movie about not selling out; it’s a theme that must concern Carney deeply.