Both Speedman and Tyler deliver solid, nuanced performances as a couple caught at the most fragile moment in their relationship.

All dull thunder without a spark of illumination.

Simien is no doubt a talented storyteller – his work on Dear White People, both the film and Netflix series, is evidence enough. But his vision here is clouded by corporate obligations and a woefully weak script by Katie Dippold, who herself is much funnier in every one of her other projects.

Parents seeking comfort in death to stay close to a lost child, as in Don’t Look Now, or being emotionally exhausted providing care in impossible circumstances, as in The Exorcist, feel like items being checked off in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, not genuinely felt or grappled with.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

If you have an appetite for well-made treacle, then Bella should go down a treat.

Writer Andy Breckman and director Jonathan Lynn (My Cousin Vinnie ) don't even try to recapture or eclipse the past. Instead, they offer the movie a comfortable plug-in-and-play system for their well-known comic stars to be all that they can be. [29 Mar 1996]

The humour in Accepted is maddeningly safe.

Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.

Yes, the Empire may be crumbling, and the natives getting restless, but it's all happening with such lyrical loveliness - even the corpses look good. Consequently, when the rains in Before the Rains finally arrive, there's nothing to cleanse, no real dirt to wash away - not with history already so neatly packaged and polished to a dull shine.

Chaplin is a mediocre movie that you can't take your eyes off. Your wandering mind is telling you one thing: This is a standard check-list biography, the kind of glossy whitewash that treats a man's accomplishments like so many vegetables from the produce aisle - toss 'em in, tick 'em off, and move on. But those riveted eyes are saying something else entirely - they're watching Robert Downey, Jr. with rapt attention, marvelling at his every move, pondering his every gesture.

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

The movie was partially shot in beautiful British Columbia. And Carrey brings a madcap mashup of his previous avatars to this turn as Dr. Robotnik.

It is all extraordinarily interminable, even if Yates and company had the good sense to swap out Johnny Depp for Mikkelsen this time around.

AT the end of the preview screening of Regarding Henry earlier this week, I sat with one tear welling in the corner of my left eye and a nagging feeling of annoyance at having been so shamelessly manipulated. [10 July 1991]

Fans of both Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe should not be too bummed with the mild sedative that is A Good Year.

How many Oscar winners does it take to save the world? Red 2 gathers together a collection of lauded thespians – from A(nthony Hopkins) to (Catherine) Z(eta-Jones) – and leaves them to float on a sea of action-flick clichés.

Using Dass’s theory that one is only free once they become nobody, the film will undoubtedly resonate with anyone who exists on the same spiritual plane or hopes to transcend to it.

What's amazing is how far McConaughey carries this nonsense despite his total lack of chemistry with Parker and almost Zen-like indifference to his circumstances.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

The mainstream prominence of pornography gets a shove forward with the teen comedy, The Girl Next Door, an improbably-not-terrible teen sex comedy.

At its best the movie is still innocent enough to slide past your guard, and inventive and lively enough to make the average Hollywood comedy seem to be on heavy tranquilizers.

The SFX set pieces are pretty lame, mostly involving a lot of weary running around and tense, ticking-clock urgency. What elevates Secret of the Tomb is the classicism of its humour.

Radwanski creates a visceral, impossible-to-ignore document of one man’s fraught reality. It is creative, bold and even dangerous filmmaking.

Pretty routine, pretty forgettable. Don't know how else to say this, so best to be frank: I'm just not that into He's Just Not That Into You.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

With its wry tone and mild emotional disturbances, In the Land of Women is less a chick flick than a chick flicker.

At the heart of the problem with this period piece is an absence of a riveting scene or a memorable slice of dialogue.