Ray Conlogue

None of this quite gets off the ground, and I found myself wanting to bid farewell to Yvan and Charlotte quite a while before the final credits rolled. Not every wannabe Woody Allen is Woody Allen.

It's a movie located in an interesting place, but without quite enough self-confidence really to inhabit it.

It's a long time since I've heard a press screening audience applaud a foreign film, but then it's a long time since a French movie has been as funny as The Dinner Game.

If you're in the mood for tears and triumph, with a dash of exoticism, Together may well be the film for you.

It's a comic-book idea that might have been fun. But it's beyond the reach of first-time feature director Kevin Donovan, who squanders his main asset, Jackie Chan, and fumbles the vital action sequences.

Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.

This is a great film for those who share the disabused French view of grownup life, but more particularly for those who want to see one of the great actresses of her generation at the height of her powers.

Patch Adams is a flawed visionary, but surely he deserves better than this crass and manipulative movie.

A mere action suspense adventure lacking the depths of the original. [14 July 1989]

So it's a pretty faded experience. I suggest you get out the books, which for once can truly be said to be more spectacular than the movie.

It's a good film. But its exotic allure may lead some to mistake it for a great one.

Director Carl Reiner has put it together so that the character (hardly) ever becomes boring, and the Martin-Carl Gottlieb-Michael Elias screenplay has just enough genuinely witty moments to keep the story rolling past its flat parts. What more can anyone say? If you like Steve Martin, you'll love this movie. If you don't, you'll laugh sometimes but wish you'd gone elsewhere. [17 Dec 1979]

What a graceful movie this is.

Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.

This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.

Speaking personally, I wouldn't voluntarily go to this flick. But for those with a greater gross-out threshold, it's a better film than anyone should normally expect in this genre.

But uneven acting isn't fatal here, since Andrew Bergman's screenplay is strong enough and Andrew Fleming's direction seamless enough to carry it forward.

A clear case of huevos con hubris.

But there's no sign of the writerly derring-do that is really essential to daisy-chain storytelling. 200 Cigarettes burns itself out well before midnight.

For those who have been waiting for movies to catch up with the graphic possibilities of comic books, wait no longer: The Matrix is among us.

There's a lot to like in this film. As in the original, it has more than a few echoes of Animal Farm in its portrayal of humanity as the exploiter species. It respects both its child audience, by permitting Babe and his sunny decency to win out, and its adult audience, by generating more wit than the average dozen Hollywood films.

Clever and confident use of limited resources in an unfamiliar medium. Kenneth Branagh has made the right choice nine out of 10 times, and the tenth is easily forgiven because of the youthful ardor of that bright face and that bright talent. [10 Nov 1989]

Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.

Visually the film is a knockout. I'm not sure this will matter to the young adult audience, but the film is philosophically confusing.

Perhaps too much energy was spent on being stylish rather than simply low-rent horrifying. The upshot is not very stylish and not very scary.

Although filmmaker Pan Nalin is a believer in Ayurveda,there is little in the film to convince anybody else.

A bit like having a detached retina. One keeps blinking and trying to get it into focus, but it never quite does. What, one wonders, is this movie doing here?

Though the Disney logo is on this movie, there is -- possibly excepting little Nemo himself -- not a single cloying, sentimental Disneyesque creature in it. There is, instead, wit and flair in concept and writing, the trademark of the Pixar people who drove the project.