Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.

It makes no sense that this fun, feel-good movie about senior citizen cheerleaders should waste so much precious screen time on miserly Keaton hacking up her Metamucil or whatever. If you’re going to make a movie about elderly cheerleaders, bring some brio and physicality to it.

The Secret Of My Success succeeds only on its very limited terms, asking us to forget the flick and remember the star, that cute little package with the endearing Canadian stamp, the flawless comic timing, and the freshest face this side of Care Bear county. Michael J. Fox. So the script is content simply to put your basic romance-comedy through some mighty conventional paces. [04 Apr 1987]

In pairing the two icons, Righteous Kill is definitely an event. What it isn't is much of a movie. Such a waste.

When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.

All of this is interesting, but not all that entertaining.

It’s dreadfully boring to anyone over the age of 4, but at least it isn’t trying to sell kids anything. I guess that’s a plus.

Never before have such acting heavyweights been so misused on screen.

In today's cultural climate, any remake of Conan the Barbarian can only be considered (a) redundant or (b) a cruel case of rubbing salt in our cinematic wounds. Either way, it ain't a pretty sight – in fact, it's downright barbaric.

Crazy as this might sound, it turns out that self-indulgent ramblings designed to put your children to sleep are pretty much the opposite of art.

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

Sadly, Bacon is only intermittently convincing as a man hell-bent on revenge or a father tortured by what he has unleashed on his family.

A film that should be shamelessly soaked in passion and thrusting erotic delirium is instead posed and prettified, to the point where “camp” comes to mean more than the place where lumberjacks work – it’s also the movie’s defining vibe.

Alig's superficiality seems to have been his only talent. His banality is a problem that the film can't overcome.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

The overall mood of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may be one of good-natured idiocy, but it's hard to fault a movie for being stupid when stupidity is its one and only raison d'etre. [23 Aug 1991]

Inventive and vibrant action sequences boasting exceptional 3-D effects and inspired voice casting (including Jackie Chan as a warrior mouse and Peter Stormare as a deranged exterminator) help to elevate this to something better than vaporous.

The script (by Robert Reneau) is snappier than the movie deserves, and supplies a dose of wise-guy humor to director Craig R. Baxley's idiot version of James Bond Gets Down in Motown. [15 Feb 1988]

It works best when it doesn't take itself seriously, and some of the ways in which ESP is faked are briefly engaging, like short con games or magic tricks revealed. But, finally, the film doesn't offer the sense of release, or of surprise, that it seems to take for granted.

Sparks fly and so do private helicopters, but will true love prevail? Are you paying attention?

Isn't so much a movie as a 90-minute Trivial Pursuit contest to name bit players from TV's distant past.

Sorta-kinda based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, Noah Hawley’s directorial debut may have started out as a feminist-forward film decrying the fact that women have to work five times as hard to succeed in the workplace, but it ends up being a movie whose message boils down to, “Ladies be crazy.”

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

There are a couple of minutes of unscheduled surgery to put this in the sadistic fantasy genre of "Saw" and "Hostel," but mostly the movie plays out like a cheap survivalist copy of the television series "Lost."

If you have kids who are easily frightened, bring them to Alpha and Omega, a 3-D movie with training wheels. Kids may not like it, but they'll never fall off the ride.

You know a movie has taken a very strange turn when you find yourself eagerly awaiting the next appearance by Donny Osmond.

Without a thin tether to credibility, this fussy, morbid fantasy simply slides off into the void.

Well acted and crisply directed, this latest version can at least make a claim to competence.