While the world of competitive cycling can be extremely exciting, not every one of its events is captivating. A well-intentioned biopic about Scottish cycling maverick Graeme Obree, The Flying Scotsman is hampered by the fact that its hero earned his greatest renown for riding around and around on a velodrome … alone … for an hour.

Ultimately, Next is just the next Nic Cage vehicle, another quirky story that allows him to do his patented neurotic balancing act in an askew world. The problem here is not just that Cage's shtick is wearing as thin as his hair; the role is a bad fit.

Miss Sloane is a powerfully conceived thriller with something dead at its centre: there is no reason a female protagonist must be good or well-behaved, but she must at least be interesting.

First Blood is a gung-ho action flick fast enough and brutal enough to become Stallone's first non-Rocky hit; on the profound sympathetic levels it seeks to address, however, it is an emission of profound stupidity. [22 Oct 1982]

An inferior "Napoleon Dynamite." Call it Napoleon Firecracker. The film steals one of the best laughs of Jon Heder's surprise 2004 hit, the scene where Napoleon nosedives over a bicycle jump, and stretches the gag into an 86-minute movie.

Screenwriter Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) is the real culprit here, creating a crude paint-by-numbers fiction that keeps yelling about the importance of the truth while hurtling in the opposite direction.

The clever lines and themes of friendship and finding home are almost completely overwhelmed here by the breathless pace and sensory overload.

Only Lange is a powerful enough presence to raise a flicker of realistic emotion from this kind of stuff.

There's potential here for a macabre cult favourite touching on themes of technology and the body-mind split, but the movie's progression into rambling incoherence gives new meaning to the phrase "fatal script error."

There is one bright spot, though: Jason Momoa (Game of Thrones) shows up as the town baddie, bringing a much-needed injection of scariness.

YET another movie about a woman who is Trouble, French director Louis Malle's lushly shot Damage wants to be Last Tango in Paris for the nineties, but it is structurally and psychologically so unsound - despite several excellent performances - that it is less arousing than soporific. [22 Jan 1993]

With no previous acting experience, she's (Stilley) a natural between the sheets but a rank amateur between the vowels.

Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.

Black comedy often asks viewers, in exchange for the hilarity, to suspend their moral objections along with their disbelief...Here, we keep our part of the bargain only to be cheated of our payoff.

Where's 007 when you need him? Neither shaken nor stirred, The Good Shepherd is a flat draft of history that looks at the Central Intelligence Agency's early years through the horn-rimmed gaze of a fictional spook.

So the big question for the new Disney adaptation of The Nutcracker, sure to ride the wave of the ballet’s seasonal popularity: What’s to be done with the cumbersome story?

Both original and good; the problem is the original parts aren't good and the good parts aren't original.

Cold Souls begins to lose its comic focus, however, when Giamatti comes to realize that he needs his soul back.

The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.

Poehler’s Parks and Rec co-star Adam Scott is there, playing a sound engineer and so is John Stamos from "Full House," because, you know, that’s funny. Until it’s tiresome.

It’s only mildly entertaining, never funny enough nor smart enough to summarize the cultural moment in the manner of a "Working Girl" or "The Social Network."

Fort Apache, The Bronx, set primarily in a precinct house, is the S & M Barney Miller... One comes away from the film exhausted, both by the excess of incident in the script and by the reality in which the excess is so obviously grounded. [7 Feb 1981]

Doesn't work because it isn't much of a ride. The action scenes are strictly by rote. The incidental characters are all incidental.

The mutations never stop. But that won't upset those 8-year-olds; changing so rapidly themselves, kids love tales of metamorphosis, the more the merrier. For them, caught in the commercial grip of the latest craze, it matters only that their cute little mutants have taken the giant step onto the big screen. That's probably all they need; that's definitely all they're given. [30 Mar 1990]

Don Taylor, a director who specializes in sequels and imitations dutifully puts image to celluloid without distinction. [10 June 1978]

Unfortunately, Hart and her co-writer/husband Jordan Horowitz don’t have much more to offer than a different perspective – and no POV shift can compensate for a film that looks otherwise so familiar in its twists and turns.

Biggs, in particular, seems positively frozen by his imitative efforts -- less Woody than wooden. Ricci is a bit looser, and has the added advantage of hiding behind those saucer-eyes.

Ocean's Twelve lacks the courage of its star-driven convictions. Next time, Steven and George and Brad and Matt should ditch the hypocrisy and just shoot themselves shooting the breeze, poking fun at each other from within the smug sanctuary of their precious celebrity.