It ain't hell and it ain't heaven; it's just, more or less, another two-star movie. [4 March 1994]

While it’s fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it. Instead, Jack the Giant Slayer, while well-crafted, feels entirely generic.

It’s been not so much remade as restrained – tamed and dumbed-down and with any sharp political edges safely filed off.

What they've created is a movie that, lacking any resonance, is a soulless clone of a more vibrant original. [04 Feb 1994]

While Tom Tykwer's lavish and lively screen adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is certainly not a stinker, there is something decidedly off about it.

Runaway Train, which could have been Kurosawa's Wages of Fear, has been re- written by a committee and does not explore the theme so much as hold it up for ridicule: Runaway Train is an also-Ran. [23 Dec 1985]

It definitely seems attractive on paper, what with a sterling cast to gaze upon, a script by none other than the late and legendary John Cassavetes, along with direction courtesy of the legend's son Nick. But up on the screen, under the glare of the lights, the film never really captures our eye or our interest. [29 Aug 1997, p.D3]

More than merely stale and dated, Hollywood Ending seems lazy and careless -- the structure is loose to the point of crumbling.

In its component parts, then, Love Liza is essentially a battle between opposing clichés.

Lewy’s script doesn’t cop out with any sentimental redemption, but neither does it establish why the self-destructive Lachlan deserves our sympathy.

As a statement on capitalism or anything else, Capitalism: A Love Story is often embarrassingly simplistic, self-contradictory.

A football story that deserves a penalty flag every other play for piling on the sentiment.

If the title is half-familiar, the contents are wholly surprising. Happily, all of the bitterness is gone. Sadly, so has most of the humor. What remains is a conclusion startling but unmistakable - Woody Allen has grown bland. [16 July 1982]

Perhaps a first-time director can be forgiven, like those teenage puppeteers, for not knowing how to get a message across without wearing it on his sleeve.

Queen Latifah's energy may be winning and her self-reliance message righteous, but Last Holiday grossly overextends her credit

The film is primarily an excuse for Chase to demonstrate that though he may be a movie star he has yet to learn how to create, let alone sustain, a character, and for director Harold (Caddyshack) Ramis and screenwriter John (National Lampoon's Class Reunion) Hughes to demonstrate that some movie stars get the colleagues they deserve. [2 Aug 1983]

If you're looking for a screwball comedy about bipolar disorder -- and who among us is not? -- then this picture fits the bill fine. However, if you're picky enough to want a good screwball comedy about bipolar disorder, well, I'm afraid the wait continues.

The movie never actually gets to winter: The title is just a clumsy play on the family's surname.

Yes, it's up to the older generation to provide the comedy here, and they do it fairly consistently, with the delicious Christine Baranski carrying most of the movie as Amy's mom.

Director Rob Reiner is betting that their star power alone will blind us to the holes in this cheesecloth of a script. It proves a fool's bet – no star shines that brightly.

Conducting another symphony in action, Spielberg seems a bit bored – always competent but never inspired – and who can really blame him? He tries to fire his interest by swiping a few tropes from the fifties pop bin, not-so-sly allusions to teen-trash movies and those McCarthy-era horror flicks. After that, there's really nowhere to go but inwards, which is when Spielberg starts looting Spielberg.

In what's meant to be a French take on "The Big Chill" - comedy meets pathos as friends gather at a country house in the wake of a tragedy - writer-director Guillaume Canet has wrought a meandering script that exercises everything except restraint.

Speaking of funny things, director Todd Phillips has been down this path before in "Road Trip." There, toiling in the same lame genre, he actually showed a hint of comic ingenuity. Here, the hint has dwindled to a hoarse whisper.

Housebroken and prettified, this boxed version of White Fang comes ready for prime-time - safe enough for the living room, docile enough for the couch. But don't let your guard down: it just might gum you to sleep. [25 Jan 1991]

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

The movie is like a glass of Sprite that has been left on the counter too long: transparent, sweet and flat.

To her credit, Nadda is a solid actors’ director – the performances here are competent even when the writing isn’t. The exception is South Africa which, although a logistically necessary shooting location, ain’t much of a thespian.

It's an action-comedy. It's in 3-D. There's a video-game tie-in. Throw in a fluorescent Slushie from the candy counter and your eight-year-old will be in heaven.