An entertaining, moderately irreverent comedy that launches the silly movie season on a sure foot.

This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.

In the end, Eagle vs. Shark represents a convincing triumph for Dumb.

Mescal and Pascal are both fine; though they often seem too overwhelmed by the tired plot machinations to really make an impression beyond how fine they both look in Roman garb.

Spenser Confidential makes far more narrative and visual sense than the incomprehensible "Mile 22," and carries less of an America First odour than any of the pair’s previous partnerships. But it also proves that it is finally time that Berg and Wahlberg explored a trial separation. If you really love someone, guys, set them free.

At least tries to disturb us, rather than shock us or gross us out, and that is admirable. But it doesn't pull it off, and the movie is indicative of the trouble Hollywood has these days making that most frightening kind of movie -- the kind that lets the audience frighten itself.

Its peculiar strain of anti-Americanism aside, Run, Fat Boy, Run tries to bridge the gap between self-deprecating Brits and self-aggrandizing Yanks, settling down somewhere between the two. Don't ask me where, exactly, but this mid-Atlantic meeting point is an ultra-neutral zone.

There are so many missteps that Hancock and screenwriter John Fusco make here, but to list a few briefly: The dialogue is 85-per-cent clumsy exposition, the heroes are given exactly one character trait each (Gault’s a drunk, Hamer’s a jerk) and the film’s politics read as MAGA-esque vigilante evangelicalism (the movie is perpetually on the verge of having Hamer say, directly to the camera, something along the lines of, “the only good criminal is a dead criminal”).

Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.

This shiny and progressive and golly-gee packaging misrepresents how Captain Marvel made its way into the world, and what it is actually about. Namely: money, the easy exploitation of intellectual-property, artistic conformity and queasy politics that undermine whatever liberal notions it’s peddling.

The emotional underpinnings of the story feel incomplete, to the extent that the film is too busy with death-defying survival scenes and pointed guns to truly reckon with Lara’s abandonment as a child.

Mainly bad, and a shockingly bland departure from a hitherto spunky guy.

Apparently Fantastic Four doesn’t want to be another dumb superhero action flick, but try as they might to turn it into a movingly realistic drama, director Josh Trank and a pair of screenwriters never succeed, creating instead a comic book movie that is bizarrely short on humour and action.

Altman shakes the camera like a two-bit horror director, and it seems a different sort of signature - less masterful than weary, less signed than resigned. Zero-sum, indeed.

For all its built-in cynicism and tired tropes, Red One is not as insufferable as you’d expect. At the least you can count on Evans and Johnson committing to the bit and selling all the broad gags they can, which should be enough to win over the elves in your family.

Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

If you like your sentimentality sweet and sticky, then The Secret Life of Bees is definitely your jar of honey.

Apatow wants to be taken seriously. Funny People is the attempt to raise his game a notch – and it fails.

Okay, some of this is mildly diverting.

As long as it remains within the carefully constructed, peaceful and innocent cosmos of its opening, it's nonpareil. When it goes to war, it goes to hell. [18 Dec 1992]

If you like your archetypes writ large and your sentiment over easy, then Unstrung Heroes is the flick for you. [15 Sep 1995]

The truth is you can find more entertaining absurdities and thrilling nihilism from watching the average episode of Melrose Place or Beverly Hills, 90210 and, at least on those shows, they don't confuse dumb with doomed. [13 June 1997, p.C6]

Leatherhead's a comedy of stock setups and kooky digressions in which nothing really comes to a head, and running at close to two hours, it lacks the essential brevity of the form.

The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.

Guess who sings tired old tune.

The unruly pack of subplots make The Shaggy Dog much more convoluted than it needs to be. But Allen's physical comedy as man-becoming-dog, and his non-stop monologue as man-dog, are definitely worth a trip to the matinee.

Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.

Everything Terms of Endearment's detractors accused Terms of being: a synthetic, manipulative tragi-comedy with performances more appropriate to a proscenium arch - or to a drag show - than to the wide screen. And yet, there are moments in the movie of high comedy and sequences of searing truth. At its worst, Steel Magnolias is vastly inferior to Designing Women; at its best, it brings to mind (but never equals) Tennessee Williams. [20 Nov 1989]