The difficulty with the film starts with the amount of improbability one must swallow. [24 Dec. 1998, p.D10]

Pandora’s Promise is less an exploration of the subject than a well-constructed sales pitch.

From the script to the title character to the direction, the watchwords here are three: Play it safe. The whole thing reeks of the formulaic.

The obvious problem with The Whole Ten Yards is that it begins with the wrong kidnapping. Instead of taking Oz's wife, the criminals should have grabbed the authors of the original movie.

Brüno is likely to be the funniest thing you'll see on a screen this summer. Which is precisely its problem: it's a thing , not a movie – if, that is, you believe a movie should be more than an accumulation of prankish set-pieces flimsily strung over 80 skimpy minutes.

The word "arachnid," as it's said so contemptuously in the movie, begins to sound suspiciously like "Iraqi," and indeed, we soon see the elite bugs are hunkered down in their desert fortress, resisting the mighty air assaults of the Federation. The conclusion of our story involves unearthing the chief bug.

It's not so much a movie as a joint promotion for the National Basketball Association and teenaged rap and adolescent poster-boy Lil' Bow Wow.

By the time the movie actually arrives at its finest moment – a nearly two-minute single shot from the Mustang’s hood as it chases the villain’s van through dense traffic – you’ve become so numb to speed and sensation that you may barely notice.

Keen to be both really romantic and romantically real, the movie is neither, and falls between the cracks of its twin-ambitions. The result? Call it l'amour phooey.

When I walked out of the movie theatre screening Padmaavat, I was shaking in rage.

But the stuff looks like what it is -- trite imagery grafted over the narrative barrens, like a bad weave on a balding pate.

To their credit, both Meirelles and his cast infuse as much realism into the artifice as they can muster, but it's not nearly enough. The too-neat script boxes them in, and leave us out. In that sense, 360 doesn't so much connect our shrunken world as strangle the life from it – the circle feels like a noose.

The film is, true to Sorrentino’s style, breathtakingly shot. It is a vibrant, arresting love letter to Naples complemented by the choices of costume artistic director Anthony Vaccarello for Saint Laurent. Every shot is intentional, every close-up serves a purpose. The problem, however, is that the purpose is as surface deep as the characters Parthenope consistently reckons with.

The plot is rich, the execution poor.

In a wink to Canada, the most urgent emotion is a throwaway bit in the movie when they bicker on whether to call the board game’s plastic scoring piece a wedge, cheese or pie, an indelible argument for the ages.

Rather than invoke sympathy, the technique creates annoyance with Harris's writing: Sure, these characters may be clichés, but haven't they suffered enough?

Yes, Final Destination 3 is a roller-coaster ride of a movie from start to -- well, only about 10 minutes later. The fun part is over and we settle down to watch a sadistic assembly line of characters making premature exits.

An ambitious, if uneven, experimental sci-fi romance that is less a thought-provoker than a dazzling juggling act.

The Two Jakes itself is less tragic than petulant, mired in a self-pitying remembrance of things past. [10 Aug 1990]

The pilgrimage is still long but, even with the crosses they bear, these are pilgrims lite – perhaps it's the modern way.

Just like the film’s half-hearted conceit, take comfort in knowing that you’ll be able to divorce yourself from the proceedings with the click of a button.

If you're going to a no-frills action film, though, at least you want the action to be entertaining, which is where Transporter 3 falls down.

There's an easy familiarity and charm in the creased, middle-aged faces of Nimoy, Shatner and DeForest Kelly (the perpetually irascible Dr. McCoy), all of whom now play their parts with an ever-present twinkle. Their behavior rarely has anything to do with the motives provided by the plot; rather, they wear their characters like old habits, as they boldly go where they've always gone before. [26 Nov. 1986, p.C5]

It is a film that skips the huge dance numbers but not the dewy closeups; a film that can countenance premarital sex and doesn’t end in a wedding, but dissolves into melodrama nonetheless.

A movie about a robot policeman given a childlike conscience, Chappie is one of those incongruous Franken-films that’s simultaneously bombastically brutal and treacly. Like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial crossed with Transformers, or RoboCop starring Jar Jar Binks, it’s a recipe guaranteed to produce aesthetic indigestion.

Hatchet is further evidence of the decline of Western civilization.

As the film progresses and positions itself closer and closer to visualizing what Adrian might look like, it also becomes more cartoonish. Adrian comes to be rendered almost as if he were a comic-book villain, which severely undermines the weight of the story.

At two hours and 34 minutes, CC2C is too much by a half: too much dancing and fighting and too much footage of the Great Wall of China. It does, however, have a vulgar energy and many of the jokes work.