An achingly sincere but often staggeringly inept attempt to introduce Walsch's message to movie audiences.

Once again Anna Faris manages to be the best thing in another not very good Anna Faris movie.

An occasionally inventive but ultimately plodding horror film.

It's all meant, I suppose, to conjure up cold visions of Terminators and Robocops past, or, in this post-9/11 world, of bin Ladens and Bushes present. If so, conjure at will.

Though a few scenes drum up some intensity -- that green ham Gustave makes one last great appearance -- it's mostly grim, dull and ugly, three qualities that nobody wants in a piece of multiplex filler about a surly reptile.

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

This time out, writer and director Mark Steven Johnson has bounced back with a movie so full of camp spirit it should come with tents and a marshmallow roast.

While the outdoor sequences were filmed in New Zealand's Woodhill State Forest – the movie's most stunning 3-D moments – Yogi Bear does feature notable "Canadian content" via two Ottawa-born thespians.

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

The missing ingredient, of course, is script.

This so-called comedy unfolds with embarrassing desperation and mind-numbing vulgarity.

It's a con, a movie that tries to lure unsuspecting teen-age audiences into the theatres with the promise of offensiveness, stupidity and puerility - which, after all, are almost traditions in summer teen entertainment - and then ambushes them with a clumsy, unfunny movie that, rather than revel in its own potential for bad taste, attempts to cram messages about growing up and being responsible down the teenage gullet.

Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

The narrative is schlocky and groaningly over-familiar, but the film is also uncharacteristically drab visually, with a washed-out colour palette and anemic pacing.

With no help from the dialogue, Kidman doesn't have a clue how to make clueless interesting. Not for lack of trying. Her efforts, which often consist of channelling Elizabeth Montgomery by way of Marilyn Monroe, are painful but insistent.

Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.

Mottola’s film is the unfortunate result of too much talent met with a clunky script – and the movie crumples under the weight of the cast’s star power.

If you’re up for mild startles and unchallenging entertainment, a trip into The Forest should be right up your alley, if not your path.

This is a story of villainous oppression, unfortunately told with oppressive earnestness.

Isn't just ordinarily lame, it easily exceeds any normal requirements for witless sleaze.

Formula sequel right down to its zany subtitle -- Armed and Fabulous. Bullock deserves better. We deserve better. Rev up that '57 Chevy.

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

This paint-by-numbers romantic comedy is chock-a-block with jokey stereotypes – Americans are obnoxious, Canadians polite, and the Greeks just dance – yet lacking in any real drama, only occasionally mustering enough charm or humour to rise above a predictable formula.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

The Dark Tower is King’s ultimate roller coaster – twisting and stomach-clenching and terrifying but, above all, fun. If only this version was as thrilling a ride.

The Last Witch Hunter is redeemed through complex visual-effects work that aptly illuminates Goodman’s netherworld. Further, Diesel’s stolid performance is balanced through the supporting star power of Caine – even with criminally limited scenes – and Rose Leslie’s “dream walker,” whose earnestness makes even the world of a macho witch hunter seem entirely plausible.

A horror-less horror flick where the monstrous Thing doesn't even put in an appearance until well past the two-thirds mark. Sorry, ugly guy, but that goes way beyond fashionably late. [18 Jan 1989]