Liam Lacey

Unfortunately, the script, based on Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel "These Foolish Things," might better be described as pure British stodge: high-starch English comfort food of more sentimental than nutritional value.

There's a big budget, big cast and big themes about religion, science and life on other planets. But Contact, which aims for awe, ends up with piffle.

The dread in the film is so quickly forgotten. What remains is an urge to fly to Italy, rent an apartment in a medieval city and invent your own adventure.

History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce, Karl Marx said. That might explain the possibility of even making a movie such as Stuck.

A lazy and mediocre movie, a sort of tepid parody blend of "The Breakfast Club" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Kenneth Lonergan's new film, Margaret, finally released six years after it was shot, now seems destined to become part of film history as one of the more stunning examples of a filmmaker's sophomore slump.

As a drama, The Soloist is stuck before it starts.

As a statement on capitalism or anything else, Capitalism: A Love Story is often embarrassingly simplistic, self-contradictory.

A larger discomfort with Extract is an ambivalent attitude about comedy and social class. Mocking an officious middle-manager is always fair game; ridiculing blue-collar workers who resent their mindless jobs just feels mean.

By the time the film reaches its big mushy climax, in which the slackers discover their inner caring during a dopey medieval role-playing battle, the movie starts to feel something like a pleasure again.

Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.

Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.

What remains “indie” about At Any Price is that this is an unabashed social-message film – one that plays out like a cross between the agribusiness exposé "Food, Inc." and Arthur Miller’s "Death of a Salesman."

Smith’s charisma isn’t always an asset to the movie though. Unlike the unknown Macchio in the original Kid, there’s nothing vulnerable about Smith except for his diminutive size, which is its own problem.

This bare-bones adaptation is more of a sop to the musical’s fans than a fully imagined movie musical.

A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.

Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.

Unfortunately, this reverent and old-fashioned biopic is a prime example of the kind of inspirational movie that is, itself, uninspired.

The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.

In the rap-music, slam-dunk, hysterical tumult of visual clutter that makes up most of Space Jam, the traditional Warner Bros. 'toons get scant attention. In this marriage of corporate logos, the manic little characters serve simply as more names to be dropped. What Space Jam really lacks is respect for an irreverent tradition. [15 Nov 1996, p.C4]

Finally, an Adam Sandler comedy that you can sit through without wanting to throw a mallet through the screen.

Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody.

The movie never actually gets to winter: The title is just a clumsy play on the family's surname.

The script, despite doses of irreverent humour, feels manipulative, and the music is oblivious to nuance, with a spectacular misuse of Johnny Cash singing "Hurt."

Fans of Allen, the comedian, will be glad to hear there are more chuckles here than in his last film, "Bullets Over Broadway." Fans of Allen, the plot craftsman, will find a lot less discipline and imagination in the writing. In truth, Mighty Aphrodite is mighty slight.

At this point, the effect of Myers' one-man Sixties love-in already feels less shagadelic than just shagged out.

So why does Savages feel so calculated, cutesy, free of suspense and trashy only in the uninteresting sense? No doubt, Stone is trying... but it all feels more like flexing atrophied muscles rather than creating a believable experience.

Though it's undoubtedly ingenious, for such a clever movie, it's a shame Rubber couldn't be more fun.