Done up strictly for laughs, this might have been fine. But the picture actually starts taking itself seriously, and that spells instant yawns. [16 Dec 1989]

This is a comedy at cross-purposes -- by turns low-key, bombastic, mildly amusing, manically slapstick. At least there are the fart jokes as a connecting thread.

It doesn't actually explain much, throwing a bunch of names and seemingly arbitrary incidents at the screen in the hope that everyone watching the film happened to work at the Washington Post back in the day.

It attempts to take local history of the illegal whisky trade and raise it to the level of myth.

The dogs and the snow and the flag-waving and the choo-choos are all reduced to TV-sized portions. Just as well, I suppose - think of it as audio-visual aerobics, forced training for next month's big bout in our living-rooms. [14 Jan 1994]

Plays precariously close to an unfunny sociopathic case study.

A pleasant flick, more suitable for families than football fans.

Lives down to its title -- what an odd and gauzy reverie this is, a strangely muted picture that unfolds at a distinct remove from the reality around it.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.

The well-acted Clara lacks clarity, and there’s nothing worse than an out-of-focus telescope.

Zeroville features a lot of fancy cuts, freeze frames and buried imagery because it is, well, about a film editor. It will either make you feel like you’re having an anxiety attack after overindulging at our country’s legalized cannabis buffet or you can roll with it. Either way, please hydrate.

When it comes to retelling the tale of Tristan and Isolde, give us a movie that makes love. Or even a movie that makes war. Anything, just anything, but a movie that makes nice.

21 years later, in the wake of "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "The Lego Movie," another movie about a kid rebelling against socially imposed “sameness” is a case of the same old, same old.

Although Tom Stoppard's script lifts Ballard's spare dialogue directly from the page, the context in which it is placed is kitsch. [11 Dec 1987]

Rob Reiner's not up to it: when the movie is meant to be romantic, the tone is frequently mushy and sexless, and when it's meant to be anachronistic and satiric, it's vaudeville-vulgar.

It's not a winner and not quite a loser either. Like many a beauty contestant, it's glib instead of serious, stylish instead of substantial. Miss Universe, it could never be. Homecoming queen, maybe.

What the film needs more than anything is Perry's alter ego, Medea – a rampaging bowling ball who might knock all these stiff, upright characters spinning.

More Than a Game is less than a movie.

At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

This movie wants to be a horse but, even measured in box-office millions, it's just another nag.

How to Be Single at least marshals its surfeit of incident in service of a point of view that prizes individual fulfillment – in whatever form that may take – over idealized portrayals of courtship and coupledom. However clumsily delivered, it remains a message worth taking to heart.

Ultimately, the best thing about (500) Days of Summer isn't its gimmicky script. It's the constant performance of Gordon-Levitt, who shifts, scene-by-scene, from moments of ebullience to abject dejection.

Wonderfully theatrical in conceit and frequently beautiful to look at, Archangel is nevertheless choppy and listless in pace, and has little of the surrealist zing of the earlier film (Tales from the Gimli Hospital). [03 Sep 1990]

This thing can take pride of place in a long tradition of Hollywood howlers.

Ruthless People is a farce rather than a satire and it's far less ambivalent toward the behavior it depicts than All in the Family was - it actively encourages the audience to tee-hee over people being horrible to each other. Dale Launer's script is often extremely funny, especially when Midler is around, but it's an extended sick joke that doesn't realize it's got a disease. [27 June 1986, p.D1]

Cancer, ironically, turns out to be a hard subject to dramatize. We spend the majority of the doc accompanying Jones to doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy sessions. As compelling as this is to the person going through it, it’s not fascinating to watch.