Soul Surfer is a true story that plays like bad fiction.

The problem with Paradise Alley is that it has been made by the character Stallone was playing in Rocky: it has the cinematic mind of a 14-year-old in the glossy body of a major movie. [14 Nov 1978]

If you're a five-year-old, or the mental equivalent thereof, and love Saturday morning cartoons, the more violent the better, then Mouse Hunt may just be the movie for you.

Viewed in the despairing environment of the big-budget sci-fi blockbuster, Alita is likely to find a cult of core fans drawn in by the persuasive digital animation, and pick-and-choose, smorgasbord world-building. In the longview, though, it’s likely to enjoy much the same fate as 2000s cine-technological milestone Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. And that, perhaps, is the ultimate case of damning with faint, highly relative praise.

Directed by Brian Percival, best known for his work on "Downton Abbey," the film has the similar quality of a well-appointed historical soap opera.

In the Mouth of Madness may leave your spine a little short on tingle (any amount of irony always dissipates the scares), but it compensates by neither insulting your grey matter nor sparing your funny bone. In a genre more brain-dead than not, that's an awfully attractive trade-off. [03 Feb 1995]

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

Most impressively, Lemercier manages to make Dion/Aline’s not-terribly-dramatic hardships – she has trouble conceiving with her husband, she misses her family while on the road, she feels exhausted by her Las Vegas schedule – feel relatable and compelling. Part of that is Lemercier’s full-throttle commitment to the bit.

This is a dumb action flick that pretends to have a brain, a spot of affectation that plunges the audience into double jeopardy -- forcing us to traipse through not just the standard litter of bloody corpses but (oh, damn) the added trash of bloodless ideas.

Already being decried as either self-parody or half-assed nonsense, the drama is in fact just as challenging and rewarding as Malick’s previous work, though with a more modern and caustic edge than one-time acolytes might be used to.

Like most kiddies games, this one starts out fun and then gets tired. Inevitably, that's when Slade tries to revive our interest by upping the gore quotient.

Not merely a bore, it’s excruciating.

Baby Boom has the fluffy amiability of an innocuous sitcom. In their rightful place on the shrunken sets of the small screen, its teeny characters would seem comfortably at home. But blown up to feature dimensions, they betray their flimsy origins, looking thin and transparent, just a bunch of under-considered ideas decked out in over-sized finery. [10 Oct 1987]

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

Dafoe is captivating as always, but not even his slinking, slippery presence can save the film from turning into a rather torturous endurance test.

In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.

So much of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is pulled from what has come before, and so much of it carries the wear and tear of repetition.

As is often the case in these caper flicks, there’s too much plot for insufficient dramatic effect, and alert viewers will suss out where it’s all heading in the first five minutes.

The less-than-original theme is illuminated with grace and insight, with sensuality and spirituality, and Oshima stumbles only twice. Unfortunately, the missteps are major. [16 Sep 1983]

As a film, The Handmaid's Tale, effectively compressed in Pinter's terse screenplay and heightened by Schldondorff's Teutonic thriller techniques, both subtracts from and adds to Atwood's novel, while scrupulously preserving its interior paradox. [09 Mar 1990]

This is a profoundly disturbing work. It should be essential viewing, particularly in high schools and universities, whence the next generation of policy makers will one day emerge, hopefully more enlightened than we have been.

Jeunet’s major achievement is to capture the book’s complicated museum clutter and hothouse-flower sensitivity.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.

Give Quarantine credit: Without resorting to computer-generated monsters or supernatural explanations, it uses consistent logic and confinement to find new ways of being scary.

In this tale of two lives, Being Flynn gets the emphasis wrong. The success that has many fathers is altogether predictable; it's the despicable orphan of failure who has us in his thrall.

The proverbial seems awfully pale here. Fans of Q.T. will find it patently derivative. Fans of Elmore will find it, well, El-less.