The Peanuts Movie is a sloppy mash-up of disconnected vignettes and rehashed jokes, all lazily reverse-engineered from the premise that a Peanuts movie is a thing that people will like and will happily pay to see.

What an impeccably crafted film this is -- slightly impoverished in theme, perhaps, but so rich everywhere else that it seems rude to notice.

Momoa and Bautista are having an unhinged blast in The Wrecking Crew, as eager to rip each other a new one as they are to compare themselves (unfavourably and intentionally) to such contemporaries as John Cena and Dwayne Johnson.

A feisty domestic comedy about a curmudgeon with a heart, looking back over his misspent life.

The film is also peppered with animation, mid-century kitsch and a touch of whimsy, making Sometimes Always Never seem more like an intimate stage production than an exercise in cinematic self-seriousness.

Though the animation is solid and the writing reasonably clever, Over the Hedge is clearly more about packaging than freshness or substance.

The resulting tale is a wicked, gory and even occasionally funny take on George A. Romero.

There is certainly much to celebrate and remember about the former U.S. president’s tenure, but Souza, and Porter, don’t seem much interested in anything approaching nuance.

Fred Schepisi's sensuously staged film version of John le Carre's spy thriller, is energetic but thoughtful, a virtually perfect adapatation of a virtually perfect novel. [18 Dec 1990]

That level of acting-without-words demands the likes of a Bruno Ganz or a Klaus Maria Brandauer, not a Clooney. Even when flashing his bare derrière in a sex scene, he isn't revealing nearly enough -- his work is just skin deep.

The result takes the audience on a screwball odyssey that mixes engaging twists with off-putting turns -- often fun, always watchable, but never quite as good as it could be.

It's really a lazy comedy that is content telling a crude and corny Hollywood story with a Mexican accent.

Hartley manages to spin grim-sounding material into an uplifting - and funny - story dealing with love, responsibility, the dynamics of family life and, yes, trust. [09 Aug 1991]

A wistfulness hangs over the proceedings: Viewers can't help but realize that, just after the final scene, which takes place on the early morning of Donald Trump's inauguration, the new president's administration began to feverishly reverse all the delicate, passionate work we had just observed.

Without either the effect of a full concert spectacle, or up close and personal backstage intimacy, This Is It is neither one thing nor the other.

Throughout, Dorff is doggedly credible as an obtuse actor, but the richer performance here is from Fanning, and it might have been a stronger movie told from her character's point of view.

Dracula may not be as big a success as it should be - we don't like our myths dissected, after all, and there is an uneasy (but workable) truce in the film between subtle stylization and the demands of the contemporary horror audience for gore. [14 Jul 1979]

Just as it is possible to make a compelling doc without telling an entire life’s story end to end, Lost Girls proves that you can make a substantial thriller that doesn’t rely on a comforting real-world conclusion.

While the film is well meaning and the joshing crew at Calvin’s Barbershop is a hoot, the Malcolm D. Lee-directed comedy is plagued by relentless mawkishness, indifferent storytelling, willful naiveté and clunky seriousness.

The enlightening and necessary film, narrated by an adoring Denny, is very much in the vein of 2002’s "Standing in the Shadows of Motown," a documentary that celebrated the Funk Brothers, the criminally unheralded house band at Berry Gordy Jr.’s hit-making studio in Detroit. But where "Standing in the Shadows" of Motown used re-enactments and new live performances, The Wrecking Crew is composed mostly of archival footage and newish interviews.

The secret of the film's success is performance, performance, performance.

With razor-sharp precision, Dumont interweaves scenes of battle with the unravelling of a young woman back home, involved with two of the soldiers. But this is not bleakness just for the sake of it. When it arrives, the ray of hope rings perfectly true for being so devoid of artifice.

The Unbelievable Truth is just that - epistemology served up with pop panache and a comic twist. [27 Jul 1990]

It can definitely grate on your nerves but, at best, it also gets into your mind, and sticks fast.

Like its titular fairy tale heroine, Cinderella is sincere, not an ironic bone in it.

Alice Tate seems at first to be no more than a grimly sweet nothing, but she evolves into a giddily sweet something. So does her movie. [25 Jan 1991]

The meta-fiction concept of characters interacting with their creator is hardly original, but it's neatly packaged here by Kazan herself, who wrote the script for this clever little charmer.

Since there's no evidence in the film that Green teaches his students how to compose, improvise or experiment with the music, presumably the next wave will come from somewhere else.