This might be tolerable if Nair hadn't missed the central point, that Becky Sharp isn't sharp like spice, she's sharp like a razor.

Big, annoying, and mostly pointless.

The Love Punch feels like a remake of an old MGM caper comedy. It’s not, but it feels that way, which will certainly set it apart from the Disney villains, X-people and radioactive sea monsters of the summer movie schedule.

Nope, this picture doesn't bear thinking about, but, if you resist that nasty temptation, setting all your mental gauges at Dead Slow, the flow of the action will see you through.

This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.

A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.

It's scary how unfunny this flick is.

Middling gets downgraded to muddling. Of course, on such slippery slopes, reputations are made. Damned if the original isn’t looking like a comparative gem.

A lot more cutting would have made this movie much funnier – but it should have taken place in the editing room, not on the screen.

Until the movie stumbles under the weight of its noble intentions and its tediously formulaic story, it delivers a few lively, well-shot dance sequences and some winning moments.

For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.

Clearly, Avary wrote himself into a tight corner and, unlike his mentor, lacks the narrative imagination - the clever shifting of time planes, the neat overlapping of incident - to extricate himself. Instead, quite literally, he blasts his way out and, in the process, shoots his picture in the foot. Killing Zoe starts life as a vigorous wannabe, but pulls up dead lame. [04 Nov 1994]

A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.

All in all, it’s many prayers short of a revelation.

Maybe Bee Movie is another ground-breaking show about nothing – a hornet's nest of hype for a fat hive of nothing. If so, pay up and get stung.

Quaid and Whitaker, who serve more or less as the designated humans in this clockwork contraption of a film, are capable in corny roles, but otherwise Vantage Point is as stuffed with cardboard performances and expositional speeches as any seventies disaster flick.

If Corman productions are lacking originality, ideas and expertise, they are at least devoted to the proposition that the attention span of the modern audience is shorter than the time it takes to soft boil an egg, and they are paced accordingly. Galaxy of Terror is one of the few films in existence that actually moves faster than its trailer. [26 Apr 1982]

Except in the performances of John Savage, as Hettinger, and James Woods, as Powell, there is little attempt to probe the reasons for behavior, and except in the stylized filming of the murder, there is little attempt to assign special importance to one event over another. The picture is a textbook example of the limits of objective reporting. [06 Oct 1979]

Love the kid though, and Statham too – it takes a star with quality to be so rock solid in a crumbling yarn.

The narrative of Lonesome Jim pokes about aimlessly, trying to mine nuggets of amusement.

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.

A farther-fetched fantasy: In addition to asking we believe our loosely packed academic can play Rocky, Here Comes the Boom imagines a world in which butterball Everyman Scott and the fabulously lush Bella (Salma Hayek) might argue and bill and coo and eventually fall in love.

It all feels arbitrary and aimless, especially when the filmmakers decide to wrap things up with a long, wanly executed shootout whose stakes couldn’t feel lower.

Perhaps Nemes was hoping to let the precision of his intricately staged images artfully clash with the absurdity of a chaotic plot. But the result is more tedious than tense.

Accepting the final twist of The Girl From Monaco depends on whether you're in the mood.

The audience is left, then, submerged in two very different movies where the protagonists are going to sink or swim – but unsatisfyingly – not together.

Awkward in ways both intended and not, the fourth feature from author and director Rebecca Miller is an attempt at a comic change of pace for the usually earnest Miller.

A dull, formulaic romance comedy with an ulterior motive and a sly message. Remarkably, the message is this: "Please Re-elect George Bush."