If children will be entertained by the unwilling roommates’ narrow escape from cats, dog catchers and the Flushed Pets, it is the mass of surrounding detail, from the glittering Manhattan skyline and Gidget’s sleek modernist pad to the animals’ remarkable mastery of domestic technology, that will impress the adults.

It’s a stacked lineup, and considering the profound un-funniness of so many Hollywood comedies, the fact that the film bats somewhere around .300 for its two-hour duration makes it feel like a genuine all-star event.

Director Carl Reiner has put it together so that the character (hardly) ever becomes boring, and the Martin-Carl Gottlieb-Michael Elias screenplay has just enough genuinely witty moments to keep the story rolling past its flat parts. What more can anyone say? If you like Steve Martin, you'll love this movie. If you don't, you'll laugh sometimes but wish you'd gone elsewhere. [17 Dec 1979]

El Bulli barely registers a pulse stronger than a book's. There is no narration, there are no interviews and forget about any apron-ripping drama, as presented nightly on the Food Network.

The kind of full-throated, barrel-chested, more-more-more exercise in gusto and ambition that comes around once a decade, Babylon might either take Chazelle’s impressive career to new heights, or sink it to the bottom of the La Brea Tar Pits. Either way, the filmmaker deserves attention for throwing his entire self into making a delirious, lurid and sprawling concoction whose magnificent reach just about meets its grasp.

Jam-packed but never disorienting, Cool It will definitely get your head spinning.

Red Heat, a terrifically funny and always frantic flick that hides a fascinating subtext beneath its commercial veneer. Very commercial - this should be a boffo hit; and very fascinating - the premise that props up the hit speaks volumes about America in the twilight of Reagan. [17 Jun 1988, p.C1]

How do you get revenge on an inanimate object? That’s the quandary facing the characters in Oculus, a deeply silly and mildly effective horror movie.

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.

Though Brooks is tasteless as usual in To Be Or Not To Be, his remake of Ernest Lubitsch's 1942 comedy of the same name may be his best work since his debut film, The Producers. [19 Dec 1983]

As an examination of social psychosis, the subject is skinhead but the treatment is skin deep. [03 Dec 1993]

A movie about con artists that turns out to be a con job, and guess who's getting played for a sucker?

There are two ways to look at Tightrope: as a Clint Eastwood Hollywood vehicle, or as a world-class movie that deserves to be judged with the best. By the first standard, Tightrope is an exceptionally realized thriller; by the second, it is an interesting failure, a movie that loses its nerve and resolves its contradictions in the slam-bang heroics of formula moviemaking. [18 Aug 1984]

Somewhere inside Hero, there's a good movie trying awfully hard to get out, and not making it. Not even close. [03 Oct 1992]

A well-crafted, well-acted anomaly: a film good enough to raise its aim and our expectations but not to score a direct hit. So one leaves simultaneously pleased and disappointed, asking the right question - "What if?" - but for all the wrong reasons. [25 July 1981]

Batra has drawn delicate performances from his ensemble in this adaptation of what was always an elliptical novel, but as a film, The Sense of an Ending leaves you hungry for something more than just the sense of an ending.

Cat People, a remake by the not noticeably gifted director Paul Schrader, of a 1942 RKO mood piece about a lady who thought herself capable of turning into a panther, is many things, not every one of them bad: as a B-movie, this fantasy of a young woman who develops the distressing habit of changing shape after sex is moderately entertaining. [05 Apr 1982]

The Karate Kid is too long and lyrical, with several tedious scenes between Macchio and Morita as youth and experience. Avildsen is sometimes unsure whether he wants to be tough or forgiving, and the film has a big build-up for the fight scene, but an ending so abrupt it downplays the outcome. [22 June 1984]

The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.

When The Big Chill is busy being funny, it's a great comedy, but when it goes for depth, it hits bottom an inch down. [30 Sep 1983, p.E1]

While the performances are memorable (Gonthier-Hyndman especially), there is an indifference in the writing, particularly around Florence’s mental health, that feels off-putting while impersonating compassionate comedy. Here and there, some gags work, but one is liable to emerge from the whole exercise feeling weary rather than liberated.

Cynical, stylish and witty. [21 Feb 1997]

It’s the tortured artist trope, handled in unexpected ways.

What struck me most about Spoiler Alert was its nuanced look at a loving relationship.

If the publicity release can be believed, he worked an entire year "undercover as a student to research teenage life". On the basis of what surfaces here - one stock phrase (the kids say "Go for it]" a lot) and a multitude of stock characters - Crowe might better have spent the time curled up with re-runs of Ozzie and Harriet. Give this intrepid researcher 12 months at General Motors and he might just discover the wheel.

The film -- written as well as directed by Arteta -- has plenty of raw energy, a strikingly fresh Latino viewpoint and successfully contrasting moods of dark humour, high drama and deep despair. What it lacks in finesse, Star Maps more than makes up for in gutsy creativity. [29 Aug 1997, p.D4]

Visually, this movie is exquisite. Narratively, well, that's a more banal story.

Quitting begins to seem intriguing in concept. Now comes the best news: It's just as compelling in execution.