Like most modern action films, Shooter is too explicit, more interested in mayhem than motive.

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

What follows is excellent, uncomplicated and well-wrought house-of-horrors fun, complete with a message about self-blame and the real things that haunt us. Gary Dauberman is a first-time director, but don’t worry, Mom and Dad, your kids (and everyone else) are in good hands with him.

Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.

The apocalyptic vision of the heartland created by Sutton and his cast (based on the novel by Frank Bill) is impressively convincing, even if the themes are often overstated and the film itself is very hard to watch.

By the final act, involving possibly the most far-fetched scheme since Dr. Evil aimed his death ray at Earth in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," the indifference has become completely contagious.

You may well hate Crash, but if intensity is what you seek in a darkened theatre, you'll hate missing it even more.

Grumpy, dopey and wheezy. In this dispiriting spectacle of feuding codgers, two of the finer comic actors of their genration are reduced to being cute and talking dirty. [31 Dec 1993, p.C3]

While Macdonald manages to come up with one of the most impressively brutal cut-to-black endings in recent memory, the rest of this feature cannot hope to match the power of his cast.

Rather than invoke sympathy, the technique creates annoyance with Harris's writing: Sure, these characters may be clichés, but haven't they suffered enough?

Each frame is drowning in vibrant colours and packed with so many decked-out extras that Aladdin’s environment seems less like a typical CGI-enabled sound stage, and more like a tangible, if bombastically stylish, world of its own.

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.

Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is a taut little suspense yarn. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa is an engaging blend of character deftly revealed and plot-twists nicely unravelled. Right up until the final climactic scene, Lisa succeeds. And then . . . [14 May 1990]

Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!

Sound the alarm, hide the children and lock the doors: another Purge movie is here. And it’s deadlier, and dumber, than ever.

Through it all, Smith’s performance grounds the horror in a place of courage, heart and soul.

Unfortunately, more often than not, Ma settles into its lack of a refined generic vision and stalls out just before it’s able to hit most of its horror talking points squarely on the head.

The most sentimental Italian movie about surviving the war since "Life is Beautiful."

This might be tolerable if Nair hadn't missed the central point, that Becky Sharp isn't sharp like spice, she's sharp like a razor.

Although it has a few technical flaws, mostly in pacing and tone, these are more than made up for by an intelligently funny and unsentimental script, and several noteworthy performances. [24 Nov 1992]

The violent but impressive Bad Boys doesn't waste much time getting down to business. Bad Boys is about a generation of teen-agers who have learned from television to want the biggest and the best, and it's about a generation in the process of angrily learning that it's going to be forced to settle for the littlest and the least. [22 Apr 1983]

A modest and charmingly genuine youth movie. Mischief doesn't, to be sure, fall squarely into the latter, uncrowded category that includes Diner, The Flamingo Kid, and Puberty Blues. But it has a lot more going for it than Porky's.[9 Feb 1985]

Timberlake fares fine enough in his strong-and-mostly-silent role, displaying genuine chemistry with Wainwright (though let’s not bring in whatever the tabloids and gossip sites have to say about the matter). Allen is delightful in that refreshing way that only newcomers can be. And in terms of Apple TV+’s bid to become a more family-friendly competitor to Netflix, Palmer makes good, decent sense.

Palindromes is a cracked American picaresque.

We Have a Ghost is a desperate mix of feel-good sentimentality, watered-down surreality, and comedy as transparent in its hackiness as the film’s title spook.

The reboot is sure to delight the young ones in your care, especially over the summer. As for the older ones? There are enough throwbacks to reminisce – and then revisit the offbeat classic.

David Lynch's eye-popping imagery is buried under an avalanche of self-indulgence.

She Came to Me is overstuffed to be sure, but in an admirable way that underlines Miller’s fierce desire to enchant and entertain an audience looking for stories about people, not intellectual property.