Fontaine’s flirtatious pastiche stands on its own. For Flaubertians, however, it offers up even more droll entertainment. Though admittedly some of the laughs will be from recognizing their own cleverness.

The frantic pleasures of this film add up to what used to be considered good fun; good Saturday morning fun; good Saturday morning fun to eat pancakes and pour maple syrup by; good fun that, once the day begins, is good fun soon forgotten. It's a pity Flash Gordon can't be screened at the breakfast table. [6 Dec 1980, p.E7]

The gamble of casting Misses Tomlin and Fonda in what would seem to be the wrong roles (Violet is the strong, efficient, hard-edged secretary; Judy the frilly, "feminine," inexperienced employee) pays off handsomely, especially with Miss Tomlin. When she is handed a memo by a senior secretary and smilingly snarls, "Thanks, Roz, I know just where to stick it," her line reading is worth the price of admission. The pneumatic Miss Parton sings the theme song with greater confidence than she brings to her acting: she is a sweet little thing, but she's no thespian. [20 Dec 1980]

The One and Only Ivan elevates its babbling baboons and erudite elephants to a level of graceful storytelling and emotional catharsis. The film might only be available to stream in the emptiness of your own home, but it has enough big-screen ambition that you can easily imagine it holding an entire theatre’s audience rapt.

Director Cameron Crowe who, not having made a dramatic feature since his 2005 stinker "Elizabethtown," seems bound and determined to crank out a crowd-pleaser here.

Two jazz films won awards at Sundance this year. One of them was "Whiplash"; the other was Low Down, an expressive but somewhat lacklustre first feature from Jeff Preiss. Neither movie is about jazz.

The Indian in the Cupboard unfolds with absorbing logic to tell a tale in the best of children's story tradition. [17 July 1995]

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

Long underutilized and certainly undervalued, Canadian actress Pill is a pure delight here as Charlotte, anchoring and then elevating every single scene that she is in.

Schreiber has one major casting coup in Eugene Hutz, the New York-based Ukrainian/Gypsy/Punk musician who plays Alex.

No, the trouble isn't with them but with a screenplay (by Angus MacLachlan) that loads their characters with too much symbolic baggage and then points them off in obscure directions.

There is only one Spielberg, so the result is an adventure that sands away the edges of its own taste for danger, with the destination – those gobs of cash – mattering far more than the journey.

That plot gets lost in these desaturated Wicked movies. They look less like The Wizard of Oz and more like Fruit Loops that had been left sitting in a bowl of milk for too long – those bright solid colours bleeding out and leaving nothing but a soggy mess.

The result is an erratically funny but often frustrating comedy, with an interesting premise hobbled by internal inconsistencies and uneven writing.

Heartfelt in tone, imaginative in scope and rendered with a seemingly endless well of aesthetic wit, the romantic-comedy is a worthy addition to the Pixar canon … until the characters start speaking.

With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]

Gordon-Levitt, absent from the big screen since 2016′s "Snowden," oscillates nicely between maintaining an air of remarkable calm and then breaking down completely, and he pretends to know what all those airplane buttons do quite well.

Some viewers will decide that Benny & Joon strays too far from the brink; they will find its sentimentality cloying. Other viewers will applaud the classic silent film humour and will emerge with a glow they'll want to show off to their friends. Both camps can agree, however, that Mary Stuart Masterson, Aidan Quinn and Johnny Depp are quite good. [16 Apr 1993]

Wayne's World has been engineered to amuse people who are mirror images of its heroes, but it goes wickedly wrong: It's so dumb it talks down to the stupid.

So blatantly contrived it could be called The Fast and the Spurious, Crank has the small saving grace of being intentionally ridiculous. The action sequences are more notable for their outrageousness than their visceral power.

More often than not, Heads of State feels as if it is missing its own leader, as if the director was simply a package lost in the Prime delivery mail.

The humour may not be wickedly black, but once in a while it’s amusingly beige.

The movie ends up exactly what it sounds like: a good film for filling the midnight slot at a review cinema or genre festival.

The symbolism is about as subtle as a fang to the neck. Really, Daybreakers is more fun than foreboding; it's fright-lite, yet that's par for the bloody course in these busy apocalyptic days.

Trishna, in short, seems to occur at too much of a remove; it's too fate-filled.

The Gorge is half a smouldering romance, half a zombified venture into overkilled horror-movie tropes.

Heartbreaking, compelling and terrifying, The Cured is a quick way to re-examine our capacity for forgiveness, tolerance and above all, fear.

Next time, don’t ask indie directors who will work for cheap to tackle the King. I would’ve loved to see the Pet Sematary Lynne Ramsay would’ve made instead.