Jumping the Broom also benefits from a great soundtrack (Al Green, Aretha, El DeBarge, Curtis Mayfield).

Allen's best effort since 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown," but that's not saying a lot.

At no time is Urban Cowboy especially well-directed - Bridges, director of The China Syndrome and The Paper Chase, has yet to learn where to put a camera and when to move it. But the performances are so fresh, the dialogue so prickly and arid, and the milieu observed with such accuracy, that one's reservations regarding the cinematography, editing and a raft of other technical matters are held in check. [07 June 1980]

The Greatest Game Ever Played is far too inconsistent to be great, but at least Paxton has made an honourable attempt to treat this piece of sports history with the gravity it deserves.

This is a monument that should be visited, but it is a monument of importance only as a reminder of the thing it seeks to memorialize. Gandhi may not be a hagiographic embarrassment to its subject, but it's a waxworks movie, a victory for British reserve. [08 Dec 1982]

It is fun, though, to spot the differences a female director brings to the genre.

It's a shame that Levinson's pace is so stately and that his staid directorial choices fall short of the risky work undertaken by his actors and scriptwriter. Bugsy's life cheated his own genius; this movie cheats the genius who would embody that life. [13 Dec 1991]

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

The background designs are beautiful and there are plenty of lively sight gags, but magic isn’t in the cards.

The plot's larcenous resolution is something of a cheat, tying things up dramatically if unethically.

Occasionally feels like a Neil Simon rewrite of "In the Bedroom," as it see-saws between hard truths and quirky humour.

That's not to say Terminator 3 is terminally awful -- just banal, merely humdrum, more conventional horror flick than science-fiction myth, and a whole lot less than what came before.

Ultimately, the movie is a perfect mirror of its star -- looks great, seems empty.

Director Dan Algrant’s conceit here is to take an actual event – a tribute concert for Tim held at a Brooklyn church in 1991, the concert that sparked Jeff’s own career – and wrap a fictionalized drama around it.

While the gender-based farmhouse siege is suspenseful and bloody, director Daniel Barber weighs in too heavily with extended silences that slow down the goings-on of a film that has darkly lit tension, lovely scenery and fiercely presented ideas on feminism.

A sprawling prison drama that seeks, by turns, to endear itself and then traumatize its audience.

Whedon can’t quite work the same miracle twice. Age of Ultron also bears the familiar stretch marks characteristic of middle movies in franchise series.

A film in which every single character is despicable, but some are more despicable than others, could have run into a sympathy problem. Yet thanks to J. Blakeson’s zippy direction and a chillier-than-thou lead performance from Rosamund Pike, the movie is immensely watchable. Just not especially memorable.

It's not so much a movie in three acts as three movies stuffed into a single casing, and often showing the strain.

Anyone who has ever watched a movie about young love and the C-word (no, not Clouds) will know exactly where the film is headed, as well as the obligatory narrative beats that stretch out the inevitable. But for a sob story, Clouds is not nearly as watery as it could have been.

The Schlondorff version of The Tin Drum is never more than an intelligent reduction and simplification of an enormous and complex work of art. [26 Apr 1980]

The promise is dangled yet never developed. Rather, the narrative slips into a backstory that alternates between confusing and contradictory.

Though Radcliffe occasionally seems too stiffly callow to be completely convincing in this grown-up role, the movie is a proficient thriller with a potential appeal beyond the star's fan-girl audience.

The problem is that the film, despite an attempt to examine the intellectual pollution of pervasive marketing, can't help coming off as one big smirk.

Eventually, Typhoon succumbs to the usual special-effects bombast and plot overkill.

When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.

Vivarium is an exercise in wringing dry the audience’s emotions until we’re nothing but husks. For some, that could be appreciatively cathartic right about now. Myself, I felt little other than a deep and nagging depression.

Luckily for us, the flawed but charming Mr. Malcolm’s List has Indian actress Freida Pinto as a winsome romantic lead, finally receiving her flowers in a perfectly matched role.