Although the entire film is beautifully framed and shot, especially the surreal sequences, precious little coheres into anything resembling a compelling narrative.

Though the threat of exposure and incarceration lurk behind every story, the characters' ingenuity and humour serve as impudent alternatives to authoritarian stupidity and brutality.

When Anita Hill took her seat before an all-white Senate committee in 1991, the optics said nearly as much about the systemic dynamics of race, gender and power in American politics as any of the specifics of the case at hand.

Fonda and Hepburn work gallantly against the mythic: Norman and Ethel are specific people, New Englanders, a middle-class pair without any special abilities or beliefs that might ease their slide into the oblivion at the end of life. They are Every Couple, delineated with a sharpness that only two consummate professionals working at the peak of their powers could provide. [18 Dec 1981]

The film is a respectable, claustrophobic and slick piece of work, and cinematographer Nestor Almendros' color strategies - Rembrandt-like light at night, lemony tones during the day, desaturated sepia at Auschwitz - are arty to a fault. [14 Dec 1982]

Despite some fine performances, what should be a crystalline epic is a sloppy and sentimental tale of family life. Sterling performances in a leaden script. [05 Oct 1990]

The running time is efficient, the direction is clean, the story is simple but resonant, the effects are understated yet impressive, and the near-wordless star of the show puts on an acting clinic. Damned if the risen one doesn't lift us out of our seats.

What starts off as a possible Argentine "American Beauty" reeks like a room stacked with pungent flowers.

Holofcener's work is character and dialogue-driven, with a keen sense of prickly female competitiveness and intimacy that a man couldn't, and probably wouldn't, dare portray.

Executed with more energy than either of Guy Ritchie’s recent blockbusters, and with Henry Cavill acting as a more suave Sherlock than Robert Downey Jr., director Harry Bradbeer’s adventure is a perfectly fine piece of Holmes-ian content, if not a work of actual, you know, cinema.

Based on the true-life graphic novel by John Backderf (who went to high school with Dahmer), the film ponders whether Dahmer was born a sick puppy or if his environment made him that way. It's a conundrum.

Hair is entertaining - even fabulously entertaining - because it is so strange, so young, so innocent, so beneficent and adolescent, so lovable and so loving; it is entertaining because it is - all of it is - so impossible, so remote, so inconceivable in any place anywhere outside of a Hollywood musical. [28 Mar 1979]

As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”

Not much of Sam and Eric’s journey is all that compelling, or even makes sense . . . but at least they’re nudged along by Sam’s emotional support cat, easily the cutest MVP (Most Valuable Pet) since Messi the dog from last year’s Anatomy of a Fall.

Whereas Michael Mann gave Heat the perfect narrative offramp, Crime 101 tends to circle the block toward the end.

There's a continuing delicacy to [Singer's] direction that gives the audience room to breathe and reason to linger. This may not be a grownup movie but -- unlike the Star Wars franchise or the Batman sequels -- it is a movie that grownups can watch minus the requisite bottle of Excedrin.

Fittingly, it’s finally a film about transience and continuity.

An odd and irresistible documentary.

IN THE BEGINNING, Ivan Reitman begat Animal House and Animal House begat Meatballs and Meatballs begat Stripes. In the end, the box-office deity surveyed this handiwork and pronounced it good. Good and stale. For you can tamper with the setting, you can fiddle with the cast but, by all that's holy in the land of the cash flow, don't ever mess with a lucrative premise. [27 June 1981]

It is both eager to distinguish itself from the series’ shaggiest shenanigans but also happy to embrace them whenever it feels things threaten to get too heavy. The result is an overlong and conceptually loopy thing – but when it works, which let’s say is, oh, I dunno, 83 per cent of the time, it offers one helluva view … to kill!

It's perfectly admirable, absolutely controlled, and fully understandable. [09 Oct 1992]

A contemplative fable, Honeydripper locates the moment but misses the heart-pounding, gut-wrenching explosion -- the history is there, the thrill isn't.

The film’s bleakness is almost satirical. It’s "Brazil" drained of the daydreams.

Although Ritchie has blown Semi-Tough as a film, many individual moments are very funny and worthy of praise. [18 Nov 1977]

The dancing is lovely, the story is secondary. [17 Nov 1977]

Jordan and Foxx take the little material they’re given and play it as deep as possible, turning in memorable, eventually gut-punching performances.

Once again, Cianfrance handles the individual scenes with menacing aplomb but, once again, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts.

In the slow coast down Notting Hill, we approach the blessed land of Nodding Off.