Like Pretty Woman, Green Card doesn't aim high - comedy, sentimentality, sex and pathos are sufficient for its scheme of fantasy things - but with the exception of MacDowell, it achieves its modest aims unerringly. [11 Jan 1991, p.C1]

For a stylish thriller that hinges on the titillating theme of voyeurism, this movie is surprisingly innocuos. [22 May 1993]

The time Bogdanovich spends with Rusty and Rocky, and the time Rocky spends at a summer camp for the blind with a gorgeous blonde (Laura Dern) who falls in love with him, is time that is priceless. The time Bogdanovich spends with the cuddly bikers, especially the time he spends with Sam Elliott in a dismally ingratiating, cockeyed performance as Rusty's boy friend, is time that exacts a terrible toll: credibility. [08 Mar 1985]

All of the story is so absurdly humourless that it is dramatically inert, as if Nolan had decided the only way to make the Batman character more substantial was to put weights on his wings.

Natali’s aesthetic exercise eventually outgrows his narrative trappings, and he’s forced to add unnecessary and foggy backstory to the source of the overgrown greenery.

To his credit, Beatty has designed Bulworth along the classic lines of Shakespeare's Fool -- the antic truth-speaker who has the ear of the court.

Strictly a middle-aged comedy, which consists of more easy lobs than sharp smacks, but manages to get the job done.

A political parody that is almost as ridiculous as actual American politics.

Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.

The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the clichés of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.

No character goes unscathed in this brutally violent movie, but Amirpour is especially careless with her black subjects – a painful misstep in an otherwise clear-eyed, unflinching critique of American despotism.

Needless to say, Belle is a handsome piece of selectively reupholstered history, but its lesson on the victories of social progress in England seems almost as narrowly perceived as Dido’s own view of the world from the immaculately trimmed Mansfield lawns.

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

This is Austen as chick-lit, not too deep, but with some integrity and the worthy goal of reaching a younger audience by offering a starch-free version of the story.

Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.

The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.

No matter how strange it gets, or how distorted for political gain or refined for religious purposes, its essence is hard to pin down, even after a 2 1/2 -hour search.

Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

As a motion picture, Fever Pitch is merely competent.

The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.

It’s Thompson who carries the film, both literally – she’s rarely off-screen – and emotionally.

Still: the Soronprfbs may be the best fake on-screen punk band since the Stains.

Essentially an affectionate and personal project to honour Thompson's memory, The Rum Diary occasionally strains to evoke the journalist's surreal black humour.

The bloody narrative has an oddly bloodless effect. But that's not surprising – not when a film is so eager to double as a lecture.

Filmmaker Evan Jackson Leong, who began following Lin when he played for Harvard, also emphasizes the importance of Lin’s tight bonds with his family and the importance of his evangelical Christianity (“I only play for God,” Lin says).

The film makes up for any shortcomings with witty writing and vivid, brightly coloured set pieces. Children will be entertained, and parents won’t regret tagging along.