The larger shell game here is that Edge of Darkness is offered as a political thriller, but with real-world politics removed. What we’re left with is a familiar mechanism for delivering a vicarious, violent, wish-fulfilment fantasy, with Mel in a familiar position, in the driver’s seat, pedal to the metal.

Whom is this movie for, really? It's too tame for the whooping crowds of women who made hits of the "Sex and the City" movies and "Bridesmaids." And for sure it isn't for parents with kids. You can probably find them, diaper bags in the aisles and toddlers on their laps, watching "Dr. Seuss: The Lorax."

Here are a few adjectives that do not apply to the new Superman movie: Beguiling. Frisky. Nuanced. Quiet. Even the title, Man of Steel, sounds too flighty for this film. Man of Lead, or Man of Plutonium, maybe.

Ultimately, Potter's fable is about how a catastrophe forces us to ask what we believe and why.

Feels like one of those misguided high-school-teacher exercises in making literary history sound contemporary.

For all the talent involved, The Eye of the Storm is an incident-stuffed but lacklustre affair – a case of lots of sturm, but not enough drang – that reaches for a satiric sting and emotional depth it never achieves.

The old carnival phrase "Close, but no cigar" comes to mind when watching The Brothers Bloom , a globetrotting heist film that starts off terrifically and then progressively deflates.

Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.

The title – Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel – is fine as far as it goes. But if you leave out "octogenarian mammophile" and "calendar fetishist," you leave something essential out of the story.

In the end, Eagle vs. Shark represents a convincing triumph for Dumb.

An efficiently engineered piece of studio product, enjoyable enough at times, but with an unmistakable assembly-line quality.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

Forman's treatment is another matter entirely - infinitely more subtle and, using the intrinsic bias of film, far more naturalistic. [18 Nov 1989]

With a multiracial cast, an international spy-caper flick with "Mission Impossible" and John Woo overtones, and a series of comic turns, fantasy sequences and sly humour, it should be a fresh delight. Unfortunately, it's not.

The movie's dated, stereotypical comedy often contradicts its wholesome intentions, coming across as laboriously cutesy and occasionally perverse.

As it exists, Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny is strictly for the tenaciously devoted.

Hoary, rather than whore-y, Irina Palm is shameless only in its mawkish sincerity.

Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.

There are flashes of excitement in this film, mostly from the verbal play and sulphurous humour of Welsh's perspective, but there's a lot that makes you wonder why you're sitting through it.

There's a surprising sweetness in the bond between the two cops. The gay subtext of the partnership is used for humour but it's never sniggering or mean.

Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.

While paying lip service to the spirit of invention and adventure, the movie doesn’t do much for the evolution of children’s animated entertainment.

In its mocking but acutely observed style, Hobo is a well-designed cinematic mess: There are whiplash jump cuts, patches where the sound almost disappears, and the whole thing is projected in a queasy, faded Technicolor.

The whole thing has all the spontaneity of high-school morning announcements.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

In the world of pulp movies, where horror, westerns and Asian exploitation borrow and blend with each other, there's a point where the cross-genre mishmash begins to feel like gobbledegook. That's definitely the case with Sukiyaki Western Django.

In a few sound bites, we get the picture and the picture's motto: the smug and selfish coast is an order of disaster-flick toast waiting to burn.

Redford hasn't moved too far here from an earlier political-thriller template: With its skulduggery, late-night meetings and the contemptuous political cabal out to thwart justice, The Conspirator can be thought of as "All the President's Men – The Lincoln Edition."

Rarely have I seen a movie which made me feel more skeptically Canadian. Please -- it's not true that you can do anything. Stop trying. You might make things worse.

Invincible lacks Herzog's usual visual and intellectual panache, and is afflicted by weak English-language acting, which makes it more of a career curio than a major work.

It might better be titled The Awkward.

Grandly overblown and deeply cornball.

A painfully predictable movie.

Much of Dodgeball feels competent but lazy. The nerds are barely distinguishable, except for one who thinks he's a pirate and says arghh a lot to no humorous effect.

Artistic originality is not so common a commodity that you can afford to get too fussy about the details.

These Stooges-like antics are more about showing what good sports his stars are than honing any real satiric edge.

Director Joel Schumacher has pulled no mawkish punches, wringing every drop of emotional potential from the script (adapted by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman from John Grisham's popular novel) down to the last manipulative glance and close-up. Call it A Time to Overkill.

Though it's a good-looking flick with some smart acting and a few flashy runs, it barely breaks even dramatically, and feels, overall, like a good chance wasted.

The current postcard from abroad is not great, but not grating.

An Eddie Murphy comedy that's actually endearing.

The narrative of Lonesome Jim pokes about aimlessly, trying to mine nuggets of amusement.

Near the end of the movie, Django jokes that, after the protests, people may still not know what the WTO is, but "they know it's bad." That's a fair summation of how much insight Battle in Seattle provides for its viewers.

The director veers off course and heads straight for mediocrity. It's a disappointing ride.

Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill.

Allen's best effort since 1999's "Sweet and Lowdown," but that's not saying a lot.

Mixes broad slapstick and off-hand one-liners in a sometimes surprisingly funny mixture.

As a psychological thriller, it's not so much either thrilling or psychological as it is wonderfully absurd. [25 Mar 1982]

Fascinating, even when it's fascinatingly bad.

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

The Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.

But it is bright, smart, sometimes wickedly funny, and crisply performed to the point where the acting seems richer than the script.

Somewhere between profound and ludicrous, kind of like a cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Dude, Where's My Car?"

One of those comedies that is more peculiar than actually funny.

The problem is that director Wayne Wang seems deaf to the tonal differences between coming-of-age, magic realism and children's comedy.

This is a no-cable, no-wake-up-call, cash-only dump of a film, where you breathe through a hankie and bring your own Lysol.

There's are nagging problems with the script, which feels like it has lost a few pages during its rewrites. Instead of an orderly, inexorable pressure of events, we get a surfeit of red herrings, followed by the rather uninteresting killer simply stepping out of hiding.

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

Gospel music not only saves Darrin's plastic yuppie soul -- Praise the Lord -- it also gives an otherwise wasted hour and a half some warmth and buoyancy.

The principle suspense is wondering when the suspense is going to start, as you scan the darkly-lit screen looking for any hint of imminent horror.

A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.

The movie is a freakish creature, with lush, painterly animation inspired by Dutch and Flemish masters, attached to a convoluted, gloomy narrative punctuated with scenes of sadism that rival "The Dark Knight."

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

To be very generous toward the filmmakers' intentions, Beowulf & Grendel might be seen as a misguided attempt to lend some modern nuance to a traditional tale of good and emphatic evil. But why pussyfoot? The movie is a lumbering and ludicrous mess.

On the downside, Rosebraugh’s own film is too self-righteous and his attempts to play a humour-challenged, lightweight version of Michael Moore in front of the camera is a misfire. The climate-change deniers are comforting, though obviously wrong. Greedy Lying Bastards is grating, even if it’s right.

They are singing the jingle in the bath, in bed, in the car, ready to send you, like George, smack into a tree.

Hathaway may be in a royal rut, but the tiara seems to fit.

Call it Nancy Drew and the Case of the Confused Adaptation.

Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.

Give Quarantine credit: Without resorting to computer-generated monsters or supernatural explanations, it uses consistent logic and confinement to find new ways of being scary.

By the final act, involving possibly the most far-fetched scheme since Dr. Evil aimed his death ray at Earth in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," the indifference has become completely contagious.

Rather than invoke sympathy, the technique creates annoyance with Harris's writing: Sure, these characters may be clichés, but haven't they suffered enough?

Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!

This might be tolerable if Nair hadn't missed the central point, that Becky Sharp isn't sharp like spice, she's sharp like a razor.

Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.

With the two American actresses miscast, and the two young British lads behaving like a couple of "Brideshead Revisited" rejects, most of the dramatic heavy lifting is left to veteran English actor Wilkinson.

Silly, and unashamedly second-hand, the movie is essentially a Jack Black movie without Jack Black, which is, arguably, an improvement.

The movie is nothing if not anxious to please. There's a big, diverse, celebrity voice cast – Maggie Smith, Hulk Hogan and Dolly Parton as well as Caine and Osbourne.

All in all, Australia is so damnably eager to please that it feels like being pinned down by a giant overfriendly dingo and having your face licked for about three hours: theoretically endearing but, honestly, kind of gross.

All this holding back is a bad idea, especially as the subject of an entire movie.

The results are so listless, dated and characterless.

The shipwreck comes too late to rescue movie from endless banalities. [02 Feb 1996]

Again, as with "Star Wars," the interest lies at least as much in the set design and costumes as the narrative.

[The soundtrack] manages to serve up new rock, eighties dance music, rap and Barry Manilow -- a combination custom-made to annoy audiences of all ages.

The movie is a series of ever more elaborate fight sequences and increasingly more and larger opponents.

Tilting between a teen sex comedy and a more sensitive tale about male bonding, The Wood is too anxious to please to quite make up its mind what it is.

This is one of those ludicrous, semi-offensive, semi-entertaining potboilers that feels as if the script were dragged out from someone's naughty-book stash.

Though superior to the original Blade, the superiority is mostly in the myriad ways the "suck-head" enemies can be blown up, melted and dismembered.

Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.

A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.

There are scenes that may make your stomach feel uncomfortable for a moment but rarely stories that will upset your equilibrium.

Ultimately, the performances carry the film.

He [Salles] has managed to create a movie that's pretty bleak for a Hollywood -- especially Disney -- thriller. His theme, as a director, is the indignities of poverty and, in his way, he pays more attention to that agenda than he does in generating any real thrills.

Queen Latifah's energy may be winning and her self-reliance message righteous, but Last Holiday grossly overextends her credit

Throughout, Wilson and Byrne play these parts straightforward and there's an undercurrent of real anguish in the struggle of parents coping with a child's long-term care.

A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.

The important things first: It's always a relief to come out of an Adam Sandler movie without a case of hives, and you can comfortably attend Anger Management without prophylactic antihistamines.

One of those headed-for-cable oddities that must have sounded like a good idea at the time.

A well-cast drama that switches between sweetness and menace, the film goes down easily, thanks to a talented cast.

Though competent in its B-movie way, Terminator Salvation lacks the humour, heart-tugging moments and visual pleasure that made the first two movies of the series modern pop masterpieces.

This is the stage experience documented on film, from the perspective of someone sitting front row centre watching actors pitching for the back rows of the balcony.

This is a comedy at cross-purposes -- by turns low-key, bombastic, mildly amusing, manically slapstick. At least there are the fart jokes as a connecting thread.

Too silly to be taken seriously, it's not silly enough to overcome skepticism.

While both the scenery and star Diane Lane are highly watchable, the movie is pure froth, a plate-sized helping of zabaglione.

A movie with a double-crossing intelligence plot that's so generic it's an irritating intrusion in a lively chase through the streets and shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa.

Even with dyed hair, heavy makeup and a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, Portman still looks like a schoolgirl pretending to be somebody's mom.

Sincere performances and the beautiful gold-and-grey Donegal landscape can only go so far in A Shine of Rainbows, a family film that risks drowning in its own syrup.

What promised to be a teen screwball comedy with a supernatural twist soon descends into special-effects overkill and camp acting from the overqualified supporting cast.

A demanding blend of spectacle, drama and exposition of ideas.

Though it is shaped as a woman-in-peril thriller about obsession, Cherish is about being winningly kooky, not violently insane.

For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.

The movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.

The word "arachnid," as it's said so contemptuously in the movie, begins to sound suspiciously like "Iraqi," and indeed, we soon see the elite bugs are hunkered down in their desert fortress, resisting the mighty air assaults of the Federation. The conclusion of our story involves unearthing the chief bug.

While it’s fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it. Instead, Jack the Giant Slayer, while well-crafted, feels entirely generic.

Feels like a period film in clumsy modern-day dressup.

Taken for what it is – a fluffy, intergenerational farce as a frame for some seventies musical nostalgia – Mamma Mia! just gets away with it, in spite of director Lloyd's lack of cinematic inexperience.

Simultaneously salacious and sugary.

If you're going to a no-frills action film, though, at least you want the action to be entertaining, which is where Transporter 3 falls down.

A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.

Audiences can watch any number of similarly talented comics on late-night television or, even better, get close to the action at a downtown comedy club.

The film walks the fine line between exploitation and empathy to cast a chilly, memorable spell.

As angst-filled as if it were "Amadeus" and "Lust for Life" rolled into one.

A meditation of life, death, reincarnation and biblical symbolism that feels peculiarly like a head-shop poster, blown up to feature-movie size.

This fluffy escape flick, directed by Ivan Reitman, is a TV sitcom plot grafted onto a travel brochure.

Once again, perhaps the most impressive effect is Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, using his Shakespearean training to make long mouthfuls of nonsense sound almost persuasive.

The less you know about Shakespeare, the more you're likely to enjoy Anonymous.

For a screwball comedy, it takes a long time to wind up, and Kline's Frenchman is an outright cartoon. But Ryan manages to hold attention. [6 Oct 1995, p.C2]

Duke rarely operates at more than a TV movie-of-the-week level of originality, but Hoodlum is still an easy movie to enjoy.

Periodically, thanks to the 3-D, a long and pointy object emerges from the screen, threatening to impale the viewers through their eyeballs, enhancing the movie's guilty pleasure by reminding us that we, too, are made of vulnerable flesh and bone.

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

A passable romantic dish, a good-looking, old-fashioned date movie set in an idealized Greenwich Village, evocative of the better Woody Allen films.

The script's attempt to splice together a fumbling love story with a portrait of toxic personality disorder feels incongruous, like a serving of porridge flambé au whisky.

Every character is like the hyperactive rat-squirrel Scrat, and the audience is bounced around like his elusive acorn.

More entertaining than Mission: Impossible or the last Bond film, Goldeneye, it brings back the humour and sang-froid that makes the genre work.

There’s a fine line sometimes, as "This is Spinal Tap" reminded us, between stupid and clever. Now You See Me wobbles along that tightrope for much of its running time.

The question is, is the interspecies wrestling match really worth the ineptly acted spy antics, the big flatulence jokes and Steve-o's endless grandstanding? Not without a handy remote control with a mute button, it isn't.

Not terribly funny. When it does strain for humour, it opts for Farrelly brothers-style gross-outs -- vomit and chewed food and blocked drains -- which makes the movie itself seem like some kind of undigested expulsion rather than a well thought-out idea.

World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.

Most of the cast range from tolerable to appealing (especially Molina and Pena), with a conspicuous exception. Debra Messing, as the career-driven outsider, is consistently stilted.

This is the kind of film where the audience has to sort through the sequences, like visiting the green grocer's: liked that bit, can do without those.

By the head-scratching dénouement, the "perfect" in the title seems particularly misplaced. How about Dial M for Muddle.

Though Lillard's excitable tone keeps promising wild comic adventures, the sequences are uniformly flat and humour-free.

As the careening cars go splat, splat, splat, the director's vision of the future looks like a cheerfully mindless combination of two extremes of carnival entertainment: demolition derby and whack-a-mole.

Whatever the narrative shortcomings, these characters have the warmth of antique painted storybooks, unlike the eerie plastic simulation of Pixar characters.

What doesn't work so persuasively is Elkoff's script, particularly the overuse of voice-over.

Low, mean and depressingly plausible.

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

Seems overstuffed and, in its own way, preachy.

With a curiously stubborn kind of integrity, Tron: Legacy follows what did and didn't work the first time – another weak story with sub-B-movie dialogue, partly compensated for by intensely conceived geometric design and special effects.

It's no great thing, just a better Thing than expected.

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.

Awkward in ways both intended and not, the fourth feature from author and director Rebecca Miller is an attempt at a comic change of pace for the usually earnest Miller.

Performances, over all, are a mixed bag; Zeta-Jones does a fair, if incongruous, impersonation of a forties vamp, while Chandler and Pepper do well with limited screen time. As usual, Wright, as a Machiavellian police commissioner, transcends so-so-material to establish himself as the most complex character in the film.

The cast is so oddly interesting you wish you could see them doing something less wasteful

There are so many events here but no real story. Perhaps that is what's making the drowned kabuki ghost so irate: She's desperate to find a coherent script.

The trouble is that Antichrist feels progressively symptomatic of a director losing heart.

A high-pedigree, low-interest affair that serves mostly as an exercise in postmortem speculation: Why is a project with so many prominent names attached to it so sterile and lifeless?

Short, flashy and about as complex as a beer belch, Men in Black II is also brisk. The film clocks in at 88 minutes total running time, and it's loaded with new special effects and monsters.

The major problem with Around the World is that there's just not quite enough Chan, or at least the Chan we want to see, which is the acrobatic clown.

By the conclusion, the movie turns into the ursine answer to "Free Willy," veering dangerously close to New Age parody: Free your inner bear -- and begin to heal from the last time you got mauled.

One of those international co-productions full of good intentions and blandly polished results.

Lyrical, dreamy and too complicated for its own good.

Unassuming only in its title.

Having seen the TV series "Hogan's Heroes," we already know that a German prisoner of war camp can be cartooned; Hart's War goes further as a cartoon that takes itself seriously.

Has a deliberately minimalist, retro look to it as well.

The differences between the two movies are, first, that Scoop is a comedy and, second, unlike "Match Point," it's not very good, as Allen also returns to pre-Match Point mediocre form.

Too often, the script collapses into what feels like improvisation, in which the characters find a kind of common ground: Infantilism.

Aside from Jones’s broadly entertaining performance as the egotistical Supreme Commander, the movie, directed by Peter Webber (The Girl with the Pearl Earring), is a dud.

A high-school talent show, no doubt, but, at its best, well worth glorifying.

Ultimately, his (Silver) film settles for a queasy mix of high-toned intentions and commercial compromises.

At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses with a series of swing-and-miss gags, often with an abusive twist.

At least as perplexing as it is creepy, with a time-jumping narrative, a chain of barely connected characters and an enraged shape-shifting ghost.

With its jazzy saxophone noodlings during the opening credits and its bruised black-and-blue look, it's so quaintly and conventionally pulp that you feel like filing a report with the cliché police.

The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.

Chloe is director Atom Egoyan’s foray into the realm of what might be called artful trash. This is a high-toned erotic thriller, handled with style and some emotionally raw scenes, aiming for an effect that’s pleasingly unnerving, if not outright arousing.

The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?

Frankly, if I were Mrs. Claus, I might be looking for Santa Clause 3, outlining the grounds for annulment.

Big, lavish and dumb as camel spit -- is proof that sometimes it's better to let sleeping genres lie.

Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.

Though complete redemption of Brown's fiction may not be possible, Howard's new film at least represents an upgrade from a mortal to a venal movie sin.

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

Though Sandler's resemblance to a pro athlete is indiscernible, his mockery of authority and his penchant for buffoonery and slapstick violence make him more of an heir to Reynolds than might be expected.

A first film from director Mark Palansky, written by sitcom veteran Leslie Caveny (Everybody Loves Raymond, Mad About You), and the two are obviously indebted to the fanciful imagination of Tim Burton.

Whatever glimmers of cleverness Martian Child offers, it all comes to Earth with a thud in the shamelessly manipulative climax.

This mix of titillation and sentimentality can pass as family entertainment because 17 Again is so weightless, a succession of one-liners, sincere monologues and logical absurdities.

This one's just painful.

May be well-trod territory, but worth a walk down the movie aisle.

Though Shark Tale will make waves at the multiplexes and move a lot of plastic toys at Burger King, the movie lacks real heart. It feels like a cold-blooded, always moving, profit-making machine.

As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.

None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.

At its best the movie is still innocent enough to slide past your guard, and inventive and lively enough to make the average Hollywood comedy seem to be on heavy tranquilizers.

The mainstream prominence of pornography gets a shove forward with the teen comedy, The Girl Next Door, an improbably-not-terrible teen sex comedy.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

With its wry tone and mild emotional disturbances, In the Land of Women is less a chick flick than a chick flicker.

Lions for Lambs appears to have taken its inspiration from Al Gore's stolid "An Inconvenient Truth," using the stage lecture and Power Point presentation in lieu of dramatic momentum.

Falling in the pillowy cleavage between mildly awful and slightly entertaining, Burlesque is a clichéd rags-to-diva story that culminates in a series of Christina Aguilera videos.

Relentlessly twee as all this is, Wasikowska's warmth and Hopper's off-beat timing (he's the son of the late Dennis Hopper) are appealing to watch.

The lower orders seem to have been left out of The Lost City -- there just aren't any poor characters -- which for a movie about a workers' revolution seems downright slipshod.

As far as story is concerned, the whole thing feels like a rerun of a raucous Saturday-morning television show aimed at hell-raising five-year-olds.

If Pee-Wee wasn't the most engaging physical comedian since Dick Van Dyke, it would be disastrous. As it is, the opening works well enough to have viewers completely hooked by the time he sets out on the road, like Huck Finn, with his clothes wrapped up in a handerchief on a stick. [10 Aug 1985, p.E9]

A big bloated bore-o. Think of a combination of "Wild Wild West" and "Spy Kids."

Almost everything about this starring vehicle for Katharine Heigl feels borrowed from some previous romantic comedy.

An entertaining takeoff and a high-altitude ride eventually runs into some bumpy weather and a clumsy landing in Mike Newell's new comedy.

After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.

Where this PG-rated adaptation of a hit Broadway show, adapted by Adam Shankman falls down is by being far too mild for its supposedly outrageous subject.

The story is shockingly ordinary. The movie plays like an extended mediocre episode of the X-Files TV show or, for that matter, even a contemporary crime series such as CSI.

It's not so much a movie as a joint promotion for the National Basketball Association and teenaged rap and adolescent poster-boy Lil' Bow Wow.

Who really wants to go to an escape movie and have to work this hard to figure it out?

Rousing? Sort of. Never before, one feels, have so few given so much for so much real estate.

Here's a vote of gratitude for Samuel L. Jackson, who has become a specialist in making mediocre movies far more entertaining than they should be.

A welcome antidote to the usual seasonal sweetness.

Narrative-driven and determinedly unpredictable, The Disappearance of Finbar is true to its mandate as a mystery story to a fault. [18 Jul 1987]

The updated Dickensian sensibility of writer Craig Bartlett's story is appealing.

Even the visions of attractive half-dressed bodies lolling about in various Madrid bedrooms or leaping into spontaneous music videos don't prove compelling for long.

Eventually, Typhoon succumbs to the usual special-effects bombast and plot overkill.

In the last third, Payback turns into a joke.

While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.

Where it stumbles is in the script by Matt Healy, which is often clever, but never quite takes hold.

More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.

The result is that, rather than tragedy, this unfolds like a plodding morality tale in which Wrath and Cowardice play out their respective parts.

A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.

The resolution includes an overlong and underfunny chase scene.

The goal is apparently a double exercise in heartfelt lessons and deep hilarity, but it's hard to tell because the pace feels so lethargic. Director and screenwriter Wil Shriner is a TV-sitcom veteran (Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond) whose idea of directing a movie is to make another sitcom, only four times as long.

Great cast, too bad about the movie.

Mangold's larger problem is trying to hold together a movie that jerks about in tone as much as it does location, veering between grisly humour and cutesy sentiments.

Here's the kind of movie thriller that can make you scream (in annoyance) and bite your nails (to pass the time) and sit on the edge of your seat (ready to bolt the theatre).

This remake is distinctly a Farrelly brothers' flick -- sentimental, rambling and raunchy.

Fitfully daring, Pumpkin isn't quite sure what it's about -- the tone bounces between thudding satire and toothless camp parody -- but it's definitely a bad-mannered child of our times.

The characters, full of blue-blood archness and angst, are partial to self-conscious speechifying.

The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.

What big ambitions you have, Grandma. And what a disappointingly modest follow-through.

It's the most jumbled and tonally confused movie yet.

As Whatever Works creaks along, the attention-getting nastiness of the first half dissipates and it turns into just another Woody Allen overacted sex farce. Of all the insults hurled about in the film, perhaps the worst is its pandering conclusion. What exactly does Allen take his audience for? A bunch of mindless zombies?

Blade doesn't manage to work up a whole lot of suspense.

It's more like a filmed allegory.

A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.

A talented cast and moments of brutal violence can't dislodge a sense of ho-hum predictability in Pride and Glory.

Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.

The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."

The movie is a competent formula kid flick stuffed to the dimples with movie deja vu, a sop to those Hollywood-bashing politicians who want old-fashioned family values on their celluloid. [17 Nov 1995]

For all these references to the fairytale, Sydney White soon takes an easier path, recycling familiar "Mean Girls" and "Revenge of the Nerds" scenarios.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

Never comes together as a persuasive whole. Instead of moral complexity, we get an overfamiliar pursuit tale and investigation story. Worse, the movie fails the first test of a thriller: It lacks any significant suspense.

The questions the movie raises have less to do with science than movie execution: Do the actors sound so robotic because they are playing robots well or humans badly? And did a machine write this dialogue? If so, could we please apply for an upgrade?

The Lost Skeleton also reminds you that real filmmaking -- the illusion of one event following another -- is actually a skill.

Director Steve Oedekerk, who also wrote the script, simply provides a frame for the string of Carrey sight gags, which come fast and constantly. Some work, some fall flat, but the overall momentum is never allowed to flag seriously.

The style here is much more in the spirit of the smash and slash of the Conan movies than the banter and computer-generated monsters of the Mummy movies.

A redemption allegory so poker-faced you might forget that redemption is supposed to be a good thing.

Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.

It's the same package with new wrapping.

When you watch Canadian actor Ryan Reynolds, there's often a sense that you're not just watching him perform in a movie, you're watching the next stage of his unfolding career plan.

Strictly for the midnight-movie crowd, Drive Angry serves up a non-stop stream of female nudity, flying body parts, gun battles and smart-alecky dialogue.

Actress Kristen Stewart – coolly intense, androgynous, and intelligent – remains the series' strongest asset, as Bela, the emotional centre of the story.

The plot is stale though some of the moves are fresh.

Estela Bravo's film Fidel, The Untold Story has the kitsch appeal of a farm implement on a restaurant wall, or an Andy Warhol Mao poster: Interesting, but not for its original purpose.

The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

Watts evokes a classic Hitchcockian virgin-whore duality.

The script’s occasional gestures toward making this an allegory of the failed American dream are extremely unconvincing in the context of a movie that revels in the excesses of macho culture while laughing at the hapless and stupid who can’t get it right.

Vardalos has a talent, and there is one sequence in the movie that works. In the romantic subplot, Connie falls for Peaches' brother Jeff (David Duchovny, as Vardalos's sleepy, hunk replacement for John Corbett in Greek Wedding).

Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable, a shopworn gothic plot focusing on stereotypical characters with disabilities, with no ambitions beyond playing a simple-minded audience head game.

Providing expectations are kept low, there’s some fun to be had in the elaborately preposterous action set-pieces, and especially Jason Patric’s campy performance as the movie’s villain.

[Hoffman] gives gross-out comedy a whole new depth.

Though by no means a good movie, The Internship floats along for fairly well for about half its length, thanks to the easy interplay between the two stars and a certain melancholic topicality.

The movie, which is roughly as predictable as the attraction of flies to dung, is a hackneyed mix of sentimentality and anarchic comedy.

With less expensive actors, it might just have been called Chase Movie, and played for laughs.

Sad news for Bard watchers: Julie Taymor's adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is not such stuff as dreams are made on.

Compared to Al Gore's new global-warming documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," The Omen makes the Apocalypse look comforting and child-friendly.

For most of its duration, Suicide Kings turns into something like a hoary murder-mystery theatre piece in the Agatha Christie/Clue tradition.

Slick and slight.

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

Price has written a screenplay that may be complex and ambitious to a fault.

The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.

Director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out," "Species"), working from a script by Leslie Bohem ("Daylight"),does a serviceable job, wrapping his narrative around the big kabooms, but the real interest comes from the extraordinary barrage of sound and spectacle.

Each of the actors has strong moments but the relentless intensity becomes monotonous.

Breezy, sleazy and a little bit wheezy, The Big Bounce combines a short running time, a portrait of island-life corruption, and a retro surf-and-scam plot. Throw in a vintage, funky-soul soundtrack and you have the ingredients of ever so many bad television shows.

As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

It's a movie about a nice guy with a lot of friends who dies. It's not really about the wider tragedy the film aspires to represent.

Crude, rude, nasty fun.

There is no tonal consistency from scene to scene, swinging from domestic drama to farce. Most of the actors -- especially Matthew Broderick -- look lost.

The film is too slapdash and self-serving to take seriously (it’s release is timed to the precede thesame-named album’s release next month), but it’s a casually entertaining trip, aimed at fans of the charismatic rapper and his recreational substance of choice.

The one thing that’s briefly enjoyable about From Paris with Love is John Travolta’s appearance. In a black leather jacket, with a shaved bald head and a goatee and a perpetual scarf to hide his jowls, he looks like a well-fed pimp or a gay bear.

Trying to pick faults with a sound-and-spectacle juggernaut like Armageddon is like taking an ant gun to an elephant: All the movie's staggering conventional weaknesses -- ludicrous plot, weak characterization, incomprehensible staging and ambient racket -- are irrelevant.

All of this is accomplished with buckets of blood, but almost no sense of flesh: It's hard to recall a more sexless vampire flick.

But don't worry about remembering the characters - the movie certainly doesn't.

Ultimately, Next is just the next Nic Cage vehicle, another quirky story that allows him to do his patented neurotic balancing act in an askew world. The problem here is not just that Cage's shtick is wearing as thin as his hair; the role is a bad fit.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence is not bad, as in the sense of inept; it's artful enough to show how truly trite it is.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

Talky, crude and sexist, Mallrats is significantly less funny, a flatulent sequel to the director's small start.

As shrill, partly-animated musicals about singing vermin go, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel really isn't all that bad.

Remember Pam? Lost in the Himalayas of big egos and overacting, she's the invisible character here. If they create a special Oscar for the most thankless part in an ensemble comedy, Teri Polo is a shoe-in.

The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.

Korean-American actor and former model Yune (who played a similar role in "Die Another Day," the last Pierce Brosnan James Bond film) makes a colourful villain – handsome and insufferably assured, and also an unchivalrous sadist who kicks around the Secretary of Defense (Melissa Leo in a pageboy wig) as though she’s a hacky sack.

In a film that offers itself as a Gump-esque moral fable, Phenomenon could serve as a case study of When Smart Films Fail.

Most of the personality work in the film is left to Steve Zahn.

Only a few events happen in this minimalist film, and most of them keep getting repeated through most of its running time.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.