Finally, it's more a cautionary tale about the dangers of what can happen when a bad movie happens to a popular novelist than a keeper for the ages.

A meagre, occasionally funny affair.

The less you know about Shakespeare, the more you're likely to enjoy Anonymous.

Though it leaves no sex and danger cliche unturned, Lassiter is a lightweight, but briskly entertaining and stylish genre film. [20 Feb 1984]

World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.

It ain't hell and it ain't heaven; it's just, more or less, another two-star movie. [4 March 1994]

The Human Scale uses plenty of globe-hopping examples to make up for what it sometimes lacks in depth.

For a screwball comedy, it takes a long time to wind up, and Kline's Frenchman is an outright cartoon. But Ryan manages to hold attention. [6 Oct 1995, p.C2]

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

It would be nice to say the drama redeems itself with a scene of Fassbender absconding with the cutest puppy ever captured on film, but even that cannot save almost two hours’ worth of narrative dithering and four-letter conversations.

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeve with 9-year-old actress Drew Barrymore: the movie might easily be retitled The Scene Stealer. Barrymore's performance as Charlie McGee has something of the pint-sized coquetry of a Shirley Temple, and something of the shoulders-back, chin- in-the-air hauteur of a Bette Davis, but she seems incapable of hitting a false, precocious or calculating note. She virtually acts her co-stars off the screen. [14 May 1984]

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

It's too dumb for adults and too sophisticated for kids. Or vice-versa. [9 June 1993]

As sincere and sentimental as his approach is, Whannell struggles to marry the emotional beats to the schlockey thrills the genre demands. Instead, these two competing modes tend to cancel each other out, but not so much as to disregard what the ambitious director is going for.

A big, bloated, though frequently engaging gangster movie, Kill the Irishman should properly be viewed late night on TV, flipping back and forth between the film, David Letterman and a west-coast ball game.

The other thing that sets this movie apart from the current crop of tongue-in-cheek screamers (I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream) is that it's actually perversely intriguing, rather than just clever. [03 Nov 1997, p.C2]

Of course, bad writing can undo the best actor. If you doubt that, check out De Niro's soliloquy at the film's climax. He's acting the heck out of the words, but they're still dragging him down with them.

Duke rarely operates at more than a TV movie-of-the-week level of originality, but Hoodlum is still an easy movie to enjoy.

Cadillac Man starts slowly, makes a sharp right turn, accelerates hard, then coasts to a limp finish. The verdict: not a bad run. Stacked up against the typical field of Hollywood comedies, this one places a respectable second - definitely short of the top rank, but a mile ahead of the mirthless pack. [18 May 1990]

We’re still a long, long way from the heights of animation titan Pixar. But you (parents, that is, not whichever five-year-old might have a Globe subscription) might also put your phone down for a stretch to see just what’s happening on-screen. At the very least, you’ll see which toys you’ll soon have to buy. Yelp!

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.

Even Clarkson's work on the intriguingly ambiguous Paige is starting to wear thin this time out; the combination of flat characters, a young cast and a director whose strengths lie elsewhere means that the overall level of performance is painfully low.

Road Hard is funny enough, and if its hum is predictable at times, its humanness is a welcome zinger.

Pitt and Damon deliver the best lines (wisecracks about the food chain, predators and evolution, etc.) but their characters also represent most of us.

This familiar and formulaic holiday tale has its pleasures, unless your name is Ebenezer – and in the end, even he was mollified.

Alec Baldwin, star of The Shadow, looks great in his tux, and maybe he can even act, but the script doesn't give him the chance. It can't decide whether it's in the humour department or the thrills business. [01 Jul 1994]

But just as Anzac troops had quite a go of it in Gallipoli, Crowe (who also stars as the doggedly bereaved father and exceptional well-digger here) is in tough with critic-historians aghast at The Water Diviner’s pro-Turkish slant.