The achievement of Educating Rita is a function of the distinguished performances, the agreeably archetypal situation and the scissor-sharp lines. [23 Sep 1983]

Gospel music not only saves Darrin's plastic yuppie soul -- Praise the Lord -- it also gives an otherwise wasted hour and a half some warmth and buoyancy.

Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

It’s humanizing and heartbreaking.

The fact that these atrocities are not well known in the West is a good reason for this film to exist.

Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

It's a rom-com, it's a road movie, it's "Cars" without the animation, it's "A History of Violence" played for yuks. It's all that and less because, really, Hit & Run is awfully hit & miss.

Scarface is a B- movie with singularly silly psychological pretensions: its neo-primitivism is to the complex moral cosmos of Francis Coppola's "Godfather" saga as Disney is to Dickens. [09 Dec 1983]

Inasmuch as Cholodenko has an agenda in her two movies so far -- what appears to be a lesbian-positive theme of openness to experimentation and its accompanying emotional costs -- she's found a model in McDormand's portrayal of Jane.

Very charming but very slight.

Moderately witty children's entertainment.

A few plot contrivances aside, the unspectacular Bad Samaritan is tense and disturbing enough, and worth its weight in popcorn.

The film is small-scale, cleverly crafted and feels like a more expensive version of the sort of "dramedy" they produce by the truckload at the BBC.

The first half hour of the film, showing the school auditions, is superb. But it's hard to care when every tear-stained monologue is no more moving than an audition piece. Michael Seresin's photography is so beautiful that everybody in the film looks as if they could be famous, and the surface glossiness serves only to falsify the emotions further. [23 May 1980]

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

This is a contemporary war-is-hell account in which hell burns so intensely that it scorches the firewalls of the mundane world around it. But it doesn’t burn them down.

Aster’s considerable discipline in matters of plot, acting, and exactingly manicured mise-en-scène resulted in a film that, for all its shocks and bravura performances, felt a little too controlled, as if its borderline braggadocious style was compensating for a lack of genuine terror.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.

Although the film is raw, intense and even beautiful at times, the queasy knowledge of how it all came together constantly threatens to uproot any artistry. This doesn’t mean Heaven Knows What is a failure – just hopelessly complicated.

It's your standard coming-of-age tune set to a top-40 beat. [24 Oct 1997]

For all the talk of Smith’s strong performance, one wonders if the subject matter couldn’t have been tackled with less sentimentality and heartfelt biography.

Semi-wonderful at best.

At its best points, Sharp Stick functions like a cinematic mixtape of every Taylor Swift song, presenting romantic clichés and immediately pulverizing them into dust. At its worst points, Sharp Stick is a twee, porn-ified Napoleon Dynamite, humiliating the very heroine who we should empathize with the most.

So why does the thing play like a mediocre sitcom stripped of its laugh-track?

Fans expecting more than a routine coming-of-age story had better prepare for a paper movie.

It borders on deification. Yet Tupac: Resurrection is still a strong film, with some genuinely revealing insights into the life of its charismatic and paradoxical subject.