How to Eat Fried Worms arrives just in time to placate preteen boys who resent being unable to see the frankly more adult though equally immature "Snakes on a Plane."

Just a mediocre action franchise with a solid actor at the head and a travelogue in its heart.

When Christine's on the warpath, she foams at the grille. But her movie doesn't do right by her snottiness. Her movie, never scary but campily entertaining for about an hour, loses compression toward the end and the grumpy old thing finally sputters to a stall - gets flattened, poops out. [09 Dec 1983]

Trachtenberg gives a sweetly compelling performance as Casey, as does the wonderfully kooky Cusack as her mother, but their charms are not enough to save this painfully unoriginal movie from coming out of a triple toe loop and landing flat on its bottom.

In its defence, the movie means to incorporate Jet's conversion into its theme, serving up his new pacifism as a choice morsel of irony. But it doesn't taste ironic, just bland, and we aren't biting either.

Hard-working to a fault, this is a movie that's all effort and no direction, a movie completely lacking in what its hero eventually finds -- a sense of identity.

Hafstrom’s feature might be fine background noise to fold your laundry to. But there is also a very real danger that the film’s sloppy plotting and watered down set-pieces might also make you so disoriented and frustrated that your socks will end up in mismatched little balls.

Your basic and basically predictable by-the-numbers picture.

The best moments of Like a Boss are just that – moments. The film has an obvious deficit of story – instead of any sort of satisfying sense of development, the audience gets 83 minutes of the same problem repeated over and over.

So it's a pretty faded experience. I suggest you get out the books, which for once can truly be said to be more spectacular than the movie.

A movie with a confident sense of its own worthlessness, it speeds by in a flurry of candy-coloured cars, bare midriffs, screaming engines and a pulsing rap soundtrack.

A meagre, occasionally funny affair.

Has a deliberately minimalist, retro look to it as well.

They're not much company, our Marcus and Esca. But there we are, mucking through crazy Scotland with them.

By turns raw, naturalistic and indebted to John Cassavetes, both stylistically and thematically.

Coming from a major director like Spike Lee, this is a colossal disappointment. And a surprising one.

Yes, it's "The Devil Wears Prada," redux.

Regrettably, the film’s place-setting opening lays the scene for a different, more exciting film that never really unfolds.

The 3-D is a pain, and the excitable editing, slo-mo and speeded-up action frustrate attempts to watch the athleticism on display, but the last half-hour takes it up a notch.

An intermittently watchable movie. Not because the plot is any less silly, or the theme any more mature, but for the simple reason that, on the margins of this marginal picture, there are several wonderful faces -- sometimes belonging to actors who know how to use them, and sometimes attached to folks who merely inhabit them. In either case, however, the visual result is an incongruous slice of vintage Americana pared off the usual slab of Hollywood mediocrity. [9 Sept 1997]

Even though the presence of such political and social nuances is largely inconceivable in an American romantic comedy, they only make this busy, blustery film seem more muddled.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

What promised to be a teen screwball comedy with a supernatural twist soon descends into special-effects overkill and camp acting from the overqualified supporting cast.

Falling in the pillowy cleavage between mildly awful and slightly entertaining, Burlesque is a clichéd rags-to-diva story that culminates in a series of Christina Aguilera videos.

Only a few events happen in this minimalist film, and most of them keep getting repeated through most of its running time.

Certainty, then, is the watchword, and you can be certain of three things: There will be plenty of juvenile energy to power the vehicle; there will be a few mild chuckles en route; there will be no reason to remember the ride the instant it ends.

The movie is nothing if not anxious to please. There's a big, diverse, celebrity voice cast – Maggie Smith, Hulk Hogan and Dolly Parton as well as Caine and Osbourne.

The result is that the particularly cruel delights of Pollock’s writing get lost in an adaptation that can never nail any of its sprawling cast of characters, or escape the Southern-fried clichés that the novel transcends.