The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with.

This is one of those ludicrous, semi-offensive, semi-entertaining potboilers that feels as if the script were dragged out from someone's naughty-book stash.

Accepting the final twist of The Girl From Monaco depends on whether you're in the mood.

It’s probably accurate in its portrayal of her general good humour. Detractors would be surprised at how genuinely funny she can be.

The movie wears its situational zaniness lightly and depends on the rapid-fire dialogue, charm and killer chemistry of its romantic duo. Just enjoy its loopy pleasures.

Interminable techno-dud.

In most every frame, Hartley takes pains to tilt his camera at odd angles – in other words, he's gone literally off-kilter, and it's just off-putting. What's worse, a further hallmark of the Hartley canon, his self-reflexivity, has begun to smack of self-promotion.

Though superior to the original Blade, the superiority is mostly in the myriad ways the "suck-head" enemies can be blown up, melted and dismembered.

The result is a minor picture with a major identity crisis -- it's sort of true and it's sort of bogus and it's ho-hum all the way through.

With its grainy images, amateurish acting and homemade sets, there's nothing slick about Neil Young's new movie. Then again, that's the beauty of it.

More an extreme theatre-school exercise than a substantive act of filmmaking, the new drama Wolf is one wild, rabid mess.

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

The wonder here is that Bateman and the child actor spark off each other quite delightfully. For a few precious scenes, when father and son are alone, the movie is actually amusing, even touching.

If you like your sports movies, especially your football movies, larded with more clichés than a politician's stump speech, Gridiron Gang begs to be seen.

The dialogue is to the point without being eye-rolling, the action is meaty and mostly CGI-free (the highlight is a night-vision firefight) and the performances are committed, even touching.

We also know the last time Keanu and Sandra shared the screen together. That was yesterday and Speed. This is today and Snail. I'm not betting on a tomorrow.

Solid performances from veterans Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson as Jay's parents, and Treat Williams as the sheriff, anchor the older generation, but the characters do tend to conform to stereotypes of hard, unforgiving men and loving, patient women.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.

Visually the film is a knockout. I'm not sure this will matter to the young adult audience, but the film is philosophically confusing.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

There are some tense moments, and Moore and Holt’s performances are about as good as could be hoped for considering they are behind scuba masks most of the time. But even at 89 minutes, you can feel the oxygen running out of this movie.

An okay thriller with lots of smart flourishes, The Next Three Days has us hooked early on but never quite gets us in the boat.

It doesn't prick the social conscience or offer insights into the human condition, but it does well what it sets out to do: tell a loopy love story and make audiences feel good. This is summer entertainment - and long-shelf-life video - of the first order. [12 June 1992]

A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.

This is insubstantial stuff, light as laughter, and every bit as fleeting. [13 Feb 1982]

There are scenes that may make your stomach feel uncomfortable for a moment but rarely stories that will upset your equilibrium.

Branagh finally concludes that business with another determined tapping on Poirot's own moral compass but, as his suspects face him, lined up at a trestle table across the entrance to a railway tunnel, the situation, his revelations and theirs, all feel flat and forced. Both suspense and emotion are curiously absent.