It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

As a consumer, it is simply your responsibility to see it, just so that many more Love, Simons can be made. There are worse things to spend your money on than this adorable teen gay comedy whose worst quality is its boring straight man.

Lanthumos's accomplished and fascinating Dogtooth pushes the notion of parents screwing up their kids into seriously disturbing and darkly comic terrain.

Absurd fun with a tortured relationship, Prick Up Your Ears follows facts with farcical fidelity. [01 May 1987]

There is a semi-frustrating sense that Frias hasn’t quite made the movie that he wanted to – that either time was not on his side or that he fussed too much in the editing booth.

Gold is important because Gold is a great writer. No further argument necessary.

It is a highly entertaining romp that doesn’t take itself too seriously and is unapologetic in both its self-awareness and sense of humour.

Against all odds and historical improbabilities, God Grew Tired of Us is a pleasant, uplifting documentary about genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Men may be gay by nature, but women are lesbians by choice -- for them, it's a simple matter of trading up. Such is the implied message of Kissing Jessica Stein.

Seabiscuit is a good enough movie, in the sense that it's a well-crafted assemblage of pathos and rousing moments, solidly acted and handsomely shot -- but it's far from champion material.

The entire spectacle is so unabashedly outrageous that you cannot help but side with its many excesses.

As a writer-director, he's (Kim Ki-Duk) a wizard with the camera but a plebe with a pen. His latest, 3-Iron, continues the frustrating trend.

Tender, topical and well-crafted, No Ordinary Man is no ordinary film.

Haneke's ensemble is uniformly excellent – the film is packed with intriguing and provocative encounters between its various oppositional characters – and the actors succeed in the difficult task of making these unpleasant people engaging enough that we stick with them throughout a film that the director successfully balances on a knife edge between satire and drama until its final (hilarious) conclusion.

Ultimately, Weekes’s story, which pivots on a minor-key twist that doesn’t quite earn its intended gasps, falls just short of justifying its feature-film length. There is an excellent short film hiding in the corridors of His House – it just needs a slight renovation.

By hiring James Earl Jones to narrate, Disney has prepared youngsters to understand that man is equally capable of heroism and villainy.

There’s no doubt that the world needs more iconoclasts, whistle-blowers and anti-authoritarian rabble-rousers. But it deserves better than Julian Assange.

The film’s many tiny dramas add up to a thoughtful, though sometimes shaggy, study of hopes and regrets, aspirations and reality. It is not groundbreaking, but it is funny and sad and completely relatable.

There is one thing you can say for the new horror film Phantasm (at the York): it certainly has its moment. [5 May 1979]

Defining a politician’s titan legacy in a singularly unexpected way, Meeting Gorbachev meets its expectations.

Belkin floats the notion that Wallace’s sharp-tongued style paved the way for the lying loudmouths who now populate our fractured media landscape (he flicks at Bill O’Reilly, Alex Jones and the U.S. President), but it feels like a half-hearted bid for contemporary relevance. At least his prickishness had purpose.

Superman returns, and he's far from inconsequential yet considerably less than super - just a demi-god content to forfeit our love for our like.

Sonnenfeld moves things along with alacrity and panache, serving up the exotic visuals quietly, blending in the sprightly humour efficiently, and keeping the mix at a rolling boil.

There are so many elements that seduce and beguile – including the rusted-out Brutalism of the Li Tolqan prison where the cloning procedure takes place, and Goth’s supremely unhinged work as James’s seductress, a performance more Looney Tunes than human – that the entire thing swallows you whole. There is no more delightful way to drown.

The treatment of the Sioux is not only sympathetic, it's ethnographically exact. Neither Noble Savages nor Red Injuns, the natives in Dances With Wolves are differentiated human beings about to undergo cultural genocide.

Audacious and bursting with ideas, the paranoid little sci-fi independent film Pi marks an auspicious debut for New York writer Darren Aronofsky.

Good Hair is also about how African-Americans spend $9-billion annually chemically treating and straightening their hair, buying 80 per cent of America's hair products. It's such a fascinating, complex tale that you hope one day some probing filmmaker will make a conclusive documentary on the subject.