So you figure, what the hell, go with it and enjoy it for what it is, which is C-plus, but A-minus for effort and B-plus for honesty, and since you gave the book a D-minus, you decide you're going to tell your friends to skip the book and see the movie. Then you're left with only one nagging question as you walk out of the theatre into the bright lights of whatever big city you happen to be in: how is Pepsi going to feel about Michael J. Fox doing so much coke? [1 Apr 1988]

Predators never gives us the satisfaction of knowing what motivates the alien hunters to use humans for sport, but at least it has fun showing us that humans can, indeed, be the most dangerous game.

It's like flipping through five years of dog calendars.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

Assassination Tango is about one commanding performance, fascinating to watch but not strong enough to redeem the muddled story line on which it hangs.

Wants keenly to be hip and modern, but really it's just an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy.

Ultimately, the movie is not, to paraphrase the U.S. Army slogan, all that it could be. The climax is uninvolving generic eye candy, and the sequel-friendly coda is unconvincing.

The ending can be read as conclusively upbeat or as corrosively ironic. Still, Youngblood is never less than fascinating, and it's a bit like the game it explores: the times you don't want to look at it are the times you can't look away. [31 Jan 1986, p.D1]

What we have here is a piece of comic fluff that, in the hands of these actors, gets turned into an occasionally charming piece of comic fluff. [29 May 1992]

Finally, there’s Colin Farrell, who plays a boxing coach called Coach, who tries to keep his Jamaican-English charges on, if not the straight and narrow, the straighter and narrower. He and his lads all wear plaid tracksuits, and it’s a testament to Farrell that he makes this feel entirely natural rather than stunty. He is an underrated master who can do no wrong, and I wish this movie starred him.

Of course, the result is forgettable, but at least it's efficiently and breezily forgettable. What's more, there are laughs too and here's the best part – one or two of them are actually intentional.

Once again, perhaps the most impressive effect is Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, using his Shakespearean training to make long mouthfuls of nonsense sound almost persuasive.

Despite its trappings, despite its style, Birth is just a tall tale with a short reach.

Poor Cattrall is caught in a script that, much like the white teddy, is an impossibly tight squeeze, obliging her to hit the farcical laughs while still playing the cellulite realism.

For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.

Only read the bottom line of the accountants' review, after your generic masterpiece has gone the distance from theatrical release to video stores to the nethermost regions of the cable dial. If the accountants' judgment proves kind, head to the bank and feel free to enjoy precisely what you've denied so many others – a really good laugh.

Too terrifying for children, too boring for adults and arriving far too soon after a nearly identical project, Andy Serkis’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle is a frustrating, fascinating mess.

You may think I’m being too hard on this film. It’s possible I saw it on the wrong night, in the wrong mood. But I’m fed up with the cheap laziness of this strain of comedy. When I was eight, I found it side-splitting that Ken’s doll hand was moulded in a curve that fit perfectly over Barbie’s breast. But then I grew up.

Even though the presence of such political and social nuances is largely inconceivable in an American romantic comedy, they only make this busy, blustery film seem more muddled.

As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.

The scriptwriters did Perry no favours. Lengthy swaths of dialogue are consumed by tedious exposition on vampire types and the ways they can be killed.

Once it becomes clear that the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid is an equal-opportunity offender, and that it is the politically correct modern family that is being picked on, rather than young Greg, the film becomes cheerfully mischievous fun for everyone.

Ironically, Middle School’s message is about encouraging kids and grown-ups to think outside the box and yet, the filmmakers themselves do precisely the opposite.

It should be a better, more authentic movie, considering that screenwriters Maupin and his ex-partner, Terry Anderson, are retelling parts of their own story here.

There’s enough action to keep things moving along, but the drama is ho-hum, juiced up with a turgid soundtrack and sirens howling in the night. It’s all just so average.

The scenes of Traynor threatening and battering his wife feel just as phony and unconvincing as the sunnier stuff that preceded them, partly because Sarsgaard – usually a fine and subtle actor – flies so over the top in his depiction of a creepy Svengali.

Quotation forthcoming.