Chaplin is a mediocre movie that you can't take your eyes off. Your wandering mind is telling you one thing: This is a standard check-list biography, the kind of glossy whitewash that treats a man's accomplishments like so many vegetables from the produce aisle - toss 'em in, tick 'em off, and move on. But those riveted eyes are saying something else entirely - they're watching Robert Downey, Jr. with rapt attention, marvelling at his every move, pondering his every gesture.

TERRIFIC cast, imaginative direction - Patriot Games is such an enjoyable film that you keep hoping it will go the extra mile, that it will transcend the action-genre and progress from an intelligently made picture to an intelligently themed picture, That it doesn't - not quite, anyway - is mildly disappointing but easily forgiven; there's a lot to be grateful for here. [9 June 1992]

An immersive, compact and unpolished documentary from the Kurdish-born, Oslo-based filmmaker Zaradasht Ahmed.

Here’s a layered, nuanced film whose only goal is to tell a story of real people and real heartache, not to act as a crass marketing plank for a series of hopeful sequels and spinoffs (hi and bye, Baywatch and CHIPS).

A splashy ending does something to redeem the action before setting up the characters for a potential sequel but who needs more Dru?

The Beguiled is Coppola’s bloodiest, most visceral movie to date, and it is also one of her best.

Even as he cuts confusingly between talking heads and time periods, Kastner elides key details that might have given viewers a more complex portrait of both the setting and his anti-hero’s role in the drama.

WHEN you go to see a film by those wild and crazy filmmakers who brought you Airplane!, Police Squad!, The Naked Gun and The Naked Gun 2, you pretty much know what you're going to get: puns visual and spoken, sight gags and pratfalls, parodies of other films and mockery of film conventions. It's just a question of how well they do it this time, and in Hot Shots!, which opens today in theatres across Canada, the answer is: not bad, not bad at all. The plot is the usual silly trifle, but the actors are good and the production is slick.[31 July 1991]

Murphy's brand of crude is studied and sleek, all high-polish and sheer calculation. As a performer, he's stylishly smooth; as a comic, that very smoothness is both his greatest strength and his abiding weakness. [22 Dec 1987]

Masters of impersonation all, Martin, Chase and Short are a rivetting trio. All seem perfectly at home in the wacky rhythm of this picture and in contributing their individual talents to the very funny whole. For the folks who see them, the Amigos' enthusiasm will likely be contagious. [12 Dec 1986, p.D4]

A more inspired director might have salvaged something else, but Dante's point-of-view camera and consciously quirky angles just don't cut it. His horror-genre shots are stylized but not stylish, a by-the-numbers parody without any redeeming individuality. [17 Feb 1989]

The doc, similar to the Oscar-winning The White Helmets but a subtler portrait of heroism, reveals accurate information as the first weapon of resistance.

Blame It On Rio is still a lot of fun. The colorful locations help out when the situations in them begin to pall. [17 Feb 1984]

Whoopi Goldberg can make you laugh and make you cry, and she's attractive and kind of come-hithery in her own bug-eyed way. [10 Oct 1986, p.D1]

There is a terrific little movie making the rounds, Repo Man, that demonstrates what can be done with vision, no money and faith in the audience; Buckaroo Banzai demonstrates what can be done with a lot of money, no faith in the audience, and a vision that begins and ends in the cash register. [13 Aug 1984]

This broad farce about a group of soap-opera stars is played at a hysterical pitch, but there are some real chuckles amid the mayhem. [31 May 1991]

Baby Driver is fast and furious and fun as hell, but its cinema of cool may melt down in the coming years, another artifact of reckless, headstrong youth.

If this is the film that is destined to divide the movie business, it’s as weird and imperfect a choice as could possibly be.

No character goes unscathed in this brutally violent movie, but Amirpour is especially careless with her black subjects – a painful misstep in an otherwise clear-eyed, unflinching critique of American despotism.

If this doc is sometimes elegiac in tone, there is nothing mournful about it. Dorfman is too much the odd-ball optimist, telling funny anecdotes – a lifelong friendship with poet Allen Ginsberg began when she was a young publishing-house secretary and he asked for some mysterious thing called “the can” – and tossing off provocative insights into the nature of photography and life.

The best thing about the film is the bromance between Lee and his weed dealer, Jeremy (Nick Offerman), which deepens into loveliness in one memorable scene.

There are some tense moments, and Moore and Holt’s performances are about as good as could be hoped for considering they are behind scuba masks most of the time. But even at 89 minutes, you can feel the oxygen running out of this movie.

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

Beatriz at Dinner works well beyond both lecture or lesson because of the care and attention everyone has put into the people that play them out.

Tropes are necessary for comedy. But tropes alone aren’t funny. What’s funny is a singular point of view that rises up to show us what’s absurd about our embedded expectations. Until more movies starring women are allowed to be truly audacious, we’re in for a lot of rough nights at the cinema.

A cheap, lazy exercise in myth-making. The goods, as it were, will have to be found elsewhere.

The car-as-human idea was never Pixar’s biggest brain wave and as Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) hits the track for a third outing, the Disney animated franchise is running on fumes.

This story soon turns excessively maudlin.