The result is a well-meaning bore, which isn't sure whether to play it for laughs or to make a serious point, and ends up missing out on both fronts.

It’s as sickly-sweet as an eggnog tsunami, but Bing’s brandy-butter baritone and Kaye’s incessant, proto-Jim Carrey clowning always manage to raise a smile.

Nice to see Poitier back and full of pep, albeit in a routine thriller.

No amount of emotional ballast in the film can make up for the tedium and repetition inevitable when a murder is shown and then dissected in two separate court hearings.

A lot of history gets horned into this undeniably inspirational parable, though slick execution and simplistic storytelling make it a lesson suitable only for easily impressed elementary-school students.

With all its faults, an engaging oddity.

Savoca skilfully negotiates the nastiness of the opening scenes: four Marines organise a party, the object of which is to see who can bring along the most unattractive date. She is almost as successful with the potentially maudlin central section, after Phoenix has picked up Taylor, and remorse segues into affection and tenderness.

Crowned 'The Worst Film Ever Made' at New York's Worst Film Festival in 1980, this deserves its niche in history for featuring the last screen performance of Bela Lugosi, as a ghoul resurrected by space visitors for use against scientists destroying the world with their nuclear tests.

Both Robert and Gus seem defined purely by their eccentric speech patterns, and it takes a while for the duo to register as anything other than acting-exercise conceits. But once the story takes a defiantly odd turn into thriller territory (really an excuse to hole up two talented thespians in a single location), the affected nature of the performances becomes a virtue.

Heady with cordite fumes and high on its violent spectacle, this Chris Hemsworth-fronted action-thriller makes for a surprise-free but passable lockdown watch.

Kabakov’s life story reads like a Pasternak novel, from his hardscrabble upbringing in Stalinist Russia to his double life as a government-sanctioned “official” artist and an underground cultural revolutionary.

Short on plot, long on silliness, the return of the little yellow troublemakers is a fun but fleeting helium high.

The film has three amiable leads and doesn't overstay its welcome.

It’s a zingy set-up but just as quickly, it hits the skids.

Leaving is a tawdry potboiler slathered riotously in portent, complete with a lamebrained detour into vengeance that only Claude Chabrol would be able to pull off.

An attempt to detail the plight of North Koreans in their new homeland, The Journals of Musan doesn't soft-pedal the hardship; Park, however, apparently felt obligated to stack the deck against the film's passive protagonist to a ridiculous degree.

Trivialising the theme, saddled with some terrible dialogue, needlessly tricked out with a lot of countdown-style dates, it founders into innocuous routine.

A combination of brilliantly edited car chases and existential thriller which recalls the sombreness of Melville and the spareness of Leone in a context which is the 'classical' economy of directors like Hawks and Walsh.

Given only hints of personalities and the thinnest strands of stories, we’re left with a hum of tinny snippets instead of anything that resembles the glorious noise of people putting on show after show after show.

The overall hipness is a little too forced--it’s damn funny when it could’ve been poignant.

Writer-director Nathan Morlando leeches every last bit of color from the frame, until the world around Boyd looks so dreary and drab you can almost understand his desire to liven the place up with a little theatrical mayhem.

You can’t help but feel all the palpable joy is eliding some darker realities that would lend the copious musical performances a deeper resonance.

The wealth of sketched-in technical detail is fairly engrossing, and the energy of this Halicki production (he also wrote, directed, stars and supplied the vehicles) is arresting. It's a pity that it had to descend into such routine carnage.

It's rare that any film follows through its chosen themes with such attention to detail, much less leavening the package with a truly anarchic blend of black humour.

A fine sense of yuppie suffocation—Spin-class listlessness and workaholic disconnection—sets up this indie as a potential suburban satire.

Any insight into Escobar’s relationship with the people of his country is sacrificed in the trade-off — Nick sees him as a charismatic Robin Hood who showers the poor in blood money that’s still dripping wet, but the film forgets the complexity of Escobar’s politics as soon as Nick realizes that he needs to escape. If only Paradise Lost gave us a better sense of what he was leaving behind.

Occasionally, the movie italicizes its points with heavy musical drones, but its tone is remarkably even and concentrated: It makes sense that Jolie excels at stewarding the scenes she usually tears apart onscreen: two people struggling in an emotional death grip, the camera up close.

Flat, generally laughable hokum, and the film ends up nowhere near as interesting a comment on the psychological aspects of disaster as Juggernaut.