For all of its intermittent, crowd-pleasing charm, oenophiles (and cinephiles, for that matter) might be better off putting their money toward a good bottle of Robert Mondavi.

The mistake filmmakers Tucker and Epperlein (Gunner Palace) make here is assuming that fighters reveal their true characters in discussing their craft, when in fact just the opposite occurs.

This thing's got more plot than an Alliance convention. Unfortunately (to extend the comparison), not a whole lot of it makes a lick of common sense.

Ultimately, Just Cause is just middling. And that's a shame because, for two blistering acts, it promises to be a suspense thriller worthy of the name. [17 Feb 1995]

None of it is new, nor is the recycled stuff presented in a newly revealing context.

What is puzzling is how Edward Zwick has taken an extraordinary real-life story about a handful of people who defied huge odds, and turned it into an utterly conventional war movie.

Delgo is blocky and hastily coloured in. Characters are stiff; there is little variety in movement. It's a cheapo product ideally suited for a Saturday-morning pyjama vigil in front of a small screen. And the film suffers from a poverty of imagination to boot.

Costner is Coach White, in every way imaginable.

So much of Poor Things, both in its conception and maturation, feels self-satisfyingly provocative instead of imaginatively profound.

So much of its script is frustratingly trite, its perspective on grief never rising above grade-school emotions, with thin characters forced to carry its surface-level themes.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Eternals is shockingly, depressingly lifeless.

While Nicholas Hytner’s new film The Choral is, above all, exceedingly polite, there is no need to be genteel about the movie’s qualities. This is a period piece of insignificant impact and distressingly drippy intentions, its filmmakers so concerned with their project being considered handsome and respectable that they fail to spark any emotional response beyond the most passive of shoulder shrugs.

The corporate-synergy-ness of it all is both deeply distressing and unintentionally fascinating.

When Ben Wheatley is having a laugh, he can make for a perversely pleasant genre tour-guide. When he starts to get high off his own supply, though, it’s best to hike back to civilization.

A movie so dumb that it has tricked itself into thinking it is smart enough to be self-knowingly stupid, the new astronaut thriller, I.S.S., is a true waste of inner and outer space.

At least Without Remorse gets one thing right: casting onscreen dynamo Michael B. Jordan as the out-for-blood hero.

Ares is a mostly disposable and thoroughly dumb product of lazy franchise fetishism from filmmakers who could not seem to care less about what story they are trying to tell. But as a two-hour visual screensaver to a thunderous and hypnotic Nine Inch Nails soundtrack, Ares rules.

A pharmaceutical-industry satire so flaccid that it’s in desperate need of Cialis, Death of a Unicorn is destined to fade into the mythical margins of cinematic history, with future moviegoers convinced that – like its title creature – the film never really existed at all.

There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.

Silent Night is all needlessly protracted foreplay, a true “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” tease of an action movie. And when Woo finally does light things up with only 15 minutes to go, the result is a limp pop of sparks, easily extinguishable.

Eventually, The Unholy reveals itself not to be an entertaining ride to Hell but an earnest sales pitch for the power of Christ. Fair enough. But for Easter 2021, I was hoping for something a little more enjoyably demonic and less been-there-redeemed-that. Let us pray.

If you’re going to make a movie in which a psycho slices away at both campers and counsellors in direct homage to the age of Jason Voorhees, you need to go scuzzy or go home. A proper slasher movie should make you want to take a shower. Here, I felt sparkling clean.

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

While Ed Harris, as the cruel patriarch of the Redfellows, is not so much phoning his role in as he is sending it by carrier pigeon, it is Margaret Qualley and Glen Powell who do the most unintentional damage.

While there are several moments in the film, including two extended monologues, that remind audiences just how ferociously committed a performer Daniel can be, so much of Anemone feels a few dozen workshops away from being camera-ready.

The worst side effect of Hall’s thin and sizzle-free script is that it encourages Johnson and Penn to go overboard in a bid to compensate.

The film’s heart may be in the right place, but a melodramatic score, pastoral cinematography and deeply sentimental character arcs make for an altogether mediocre drama, not an urgent thriller.