This mannered, muddled drama about journalistic lapses and worse, crimes, stars comic buddies Jonah Hill and James Franco (This is the End) in a decidedly unfunny story.

It’s a shame that two gifted comedians weren’t given better material to work with.

Alongside a peculiar and overly saccharine intergenerational internal monologue that guides the film, The Glorias doesn’t seem to have learned from the important lessons evoked by its subject.

Let's just say that, when the parody looks indistinguishable from the parodied, something's gone awry.

While his sincerity is admirable, Pellington is reluctant to offer any ideas that are more theologically complex than 'Faith is valuable' and 'Life is for living.'

A convincing, reasonably co-ordinated action movie. Nothing special, but lovers of the genre will enjoy the workouts, especially if they bring night-vision glasses.

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.

A lazy and mediocre movie, a sort of tepid parody blend of "The Breakfast Club" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

The film shifts its tone like an evasive minnow, at once circling the familiar visual grammar of true crime media and the slapstick fancies of a buddy comedy.

Today, the 1985 novel is the No. 1-selling paperback in North America. Sadly, the movie is a bonfire where the novel was a blaze of fireworks.

Fur does what an Arbus photograph never would -- it leaves no room to imagine and removes any reason for doubt.

It may be charming and unpretentious, but the script of this little film could have used more attention. [18 Nov 1992]

Out of Time is severely out of whack, and the problem isn't hard to locate: It's all that flab in the thriller. It's a suspense flick so pillowy soft that the star gets bumped from the centre of the frame and the comic relief sneaks in to swipe the picture.

What doesn't work so persuasively is Elkoff's script, particularly the overuse of voice-over.

These Stooges-like antics are more about showing what good sports his stars are than honing any real satiric edge.

What remains “indie” about At Any Price is that this is an unabashed social-message film – one that plays out like a cross between the agribusiness exposé "Food, Inc." and Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman."

Too often, the script collapses into what feels like improvisation, in which the characters find a kind of common ground: Infantilism.

Strictly for the midnight-movie crowd, Drive Angry serves up a non-stop stream of female nudity, flying body parts, gun battles and smart-alecky dialogue.

No one can doubt there's a consistency of vision in Russell's work, though at times it seems more the vision of a great set designer than a great film director. [8 Oct 1988]

Despite the too-twisty story and drippy characters, Larney does extremely impressive work with a limited budget, creating an entire world (or two) as if he had the resources of a Marvel escapade, or at the very least a Terminator entry. It’s only a shame that his performers don’t quite match his aesthetic ingenuity, especially Smit-McPhee, who wails and garbles with grating abandon.

While oil is still synonymous with unmitigated catastrophe, the documentary Gasland warns of the dangers lurking in natural-gas wells.

The film has enough laughs to stock a 90-minute entertainment. Unfortunately it throws out enough material to fill five comedies. And most of the jokes die in silence, throwing off a flop-sweat tsunami that carries away Short's best work.

Has a provocative, ticklish premise – five North England Muslims become suicide bombers, but can't decide who or what to take with them.

Feels like one of those misguided high-school-teacher exercises in making literary history sound contemporary.

As cinematic flops go, nothing falls quite as hard as a failed black comedy.

All in all, Australia is so damnably eager to please that it feels like being pinned down by a giant overfriendly dingo and having your face licked for about three hours: theoretically endearing but, honestly, kind of gross.

For his feature film debut, Brandon Cronenberg has taken the decidedly uneasy route in more ways than one. First of all, Antiviral is a virtual panoply of high wooziness, replete with sweating, shakes, vomiting, rot-infected food and more needles piercing skin than rush hour at a free flu clinic.

The stark direction, the brittle performances, the impoverished setting, the scatological dialogue, everything about the film screams out "Gritty social realism." Everything, that is, except the plot, which shouts "Eye-rolling melodrama."