The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

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.

No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.

As Laurel and Hardy learn by the end of the film, every gig is an opportunity. Good on Coogan and Reilly for possessing the same workhorse mentality – and better luck next time, boys.

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

Like its characters, That Awkward Moment has commitment issues: It lacks the courage of its bad taste.

An efficiently engineered piece of studio product, enjoyable enough at times, but with an unmistakable assembly-line quality.

A ghoul's dinner of undigested indelicacies pilfered from other horror feasts; the undeniable ability of the chef, director David K. Lynch, has been utilized to create a cream sauce in which the victuals cook without ever cooking together. [18 Sep 1979]

The French director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning silent movie comedy, "The Artist," is everything "The Artist" was not: long, unoriginal and heavy-handed.

If you’ve already been to Fargo, or at least visited the place via movies or TV, you’ve got scant reason to go to Cut Bank.

Upside Down is no more than one big-budget, gussied-up fairy tale – a topsy-turvy Romeo and Juliet.

An uneven but intriguing piece of whimsy that veers from powerfully symbolic cinematography into self parody.

Feels a little like the new "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- a similar wet fizzle of a sequel for sequel's sake -- but what do we know?

In dramatizing the rigours of the ghetto, Yakin stoops to hyperbolic plot devices that tend to erode the very empathy he's striving to create. Things are surely bad, but not that bad - unwittingly, he's demonizing people who deserve better, who are better. [02 Sep 1994]

The lively verbal sparring between the good and evil sorcerer-apprentice pairs sustains the movie, but, with a predictable plot, by-the-numbers action-movie jolts and no real sense of wonder, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is really just a pumpkin.

Gripping to watch but ultimately misses the target. [29 Apr 1978]

Theodore Braun's work may well reach and convert one thousand more Adam Sterlings. Here's hoping it does. There is, however, a difference between a worthy cause and a worthy film.

Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to guess which gal became the wife, which gal should have become the wife and which gal is there just to play with our heads. It's exactly like that old shell game – mildly diverting, pea-sized and otherwise hollow.

Lush, loud and sparkling, and not nearly as innocent as you might imagine.

I can’t pardon Labor Day’s mush, not just because it’s mush, but because it comes with an unappetizing side order of condescension and contempt.

Unassuming only in its title.

As the middle part of a proposed trilogy, Tai Chi Hero may ultimately look better in light of its own sequel (which, based on the evidence here, will double-down on the steampunk stuff), but now, its pitched battle between silliness and solemnity feels like a split decision.

The script, despite doses of irreverent humour, feels manipulative, and the music is oblivious to nuance, with a spectacular misuse of Johnny Cash singing "Hurt."

Cyrano De Bergerac, the latest cinematic adaptation of the Edmond Rostand classic, is a lavishly appointed film, a decidedly handsome film, a film that wears its money on its sleeve, a film whose beauty is skin deep. The movie always moves, but it's never moving. [30 Nov 1990]

The pedigree is impressive and so is the start, but in the long run, White Men Can't Jump lives down to its title - it doesn't even get off the ground. [27 Mar 1992]

With its confined setting and its existential predicament, the picture owes an ostensible debt to the likes of Pinter and Kafka and Pirandello -- you know, Six Characters in Search of an Author, or, failing that, just getting the hell out of this weird place.

This is Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote territory. How are we to reconcile such images with righteous vengeance wreaked on a genocidal war criminal? Not even a busload of popes could make moral sense of this one.

Director Peter Hyams strives hard to maintain a light and entertaining touch, lifting Timecop slightly above its formulaic restraints. On the one hand, there's a pleasing freshness to the movie, thanks to lots of energy and a little playful wit. On the other, there's something deeply fatiguing about this picture. Maybe it's the formula, maybe it's all that time travel, but you just can't help thinking you've seen it all before. Must be deja vu. [21 Sep 1994]