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.

Surprisingly entertaining.

Here's a truly novel sports film: It actually has a script, decent acting, sympathetic characters. And it's fun.

It's possible to insult even a teenager's intelligence.

So energized by the subject that it overflows with inventiveness.

If this rings distant Laurel-and-Hardy, or even Crosby-and-Hope bells, it's on purpose. Gooding's and Sanz's performances are almost a tribute to vaudeville-influenced two-guy comedy.

It is, alas, très twee. A muchness of silliness. Beautifully filmed silliness, and fetchingly acted tweeness. But give me Cruella de Vil any time.

One of Stephen Chow's extravagant and very funny martial-arts spoof movies.

This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.

For those who don't know his (Lelouch's) work, And Now Ladies and Gentlemen will be fun because his style is unique and unpredictable. But for those who have known him in better form, this one is not a must-see.

What's singular is that it was funded by the current Thai royal family and directed by a royal prince, Chatrichalerm Yukol.

This is a film whose sunny and insipid storytelling style is at odds with its material.

Isn't quite funny enough to make it as a comedy, or touching enough to make it as a romance. It's a pleasant effort that doesn't hit any of its targets.

There's an alchemy that can transform personal experience into a great film, but it was nowhere nearby when Tamara Jenkins wrote and directed this lacklustre first feature.

This engaging documentary is an excursion into the immense "art" form of hip-hop.

This concoction, so bizarre to the adult mind, is actually a charming triumph where its intended under-12 audience is concerned.

A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.

Rarely does a fine movie like this have so awkward a title, or so off-putting an opening scene. But there is method in both these madnesses, and a searchingly intelligent and moving story to be told.

This is a miserable sequel to the modestly well-reviewed Final Destination.

Considering that the original story managed to be scarier without people's hair spontaneously restyling itself into dragons, it's worth asking why this kind of film has become the norm. Is it because filmgoers demand it, or is it because filmmakers leaning on technological crutches can't be bothered to learn their craft? More and more, I'm leaning to the latter. [23 July 1999, p.C3]

Like many of his (young) generation, Villeneuve is front and centre with the visual and musical language. He doesn't always hit the mark, but he is already trying for a symbolic allusiveness that is entirely beyond the reach of many filmmakers.

The best thing the film does is to show us not only what that mind looks like, but how the creative process itself operates: messily, erratically, outside of most people's morality, but with a force and purposiveness that makes the machinations of the rest of us look irresolute by comparison.

It's a turning-the-tables story a five-year-old could appreciate -- except for the confusing crowd scenes and haphazard camera work. Technically speaking, Waters' skills haven't improved much over the years.

There's not a scrap of imagination in the script.

Comes as a pleasure. It's a comic drama set in a Chicago hair salon where the characters are engaging and the story has a bustling richness.

Gripping to watch but ultimately misses the target. [29 Apr 1978]

Sinbad lacks, alas, the sparkle and inventiveness of the stories that inspired it.

The producers of Hidden in Plain Sight decided that they couldn't deal with Sept. 11 in the film without losing focus on its principal subject. The result is that the film stands as a testimonial to the world as it existed before that date, a world very different from the one we now live in.

The difficulty with the film starts with the amount of improbability one must swallow. [24 Dec. 1998, p.D10]

It's an enjoyable film, carried along by the perennial strength of the story... But it won't have the staying power of the original.

You don't need to have seen a lot of art films to love The Diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky. All it takes is compassionate curiosity and perhaps some lingering memory of the world as a child experiences it.

Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

Properly handled, any one of these characters could be made, just barely, believable. But here they simply go off, like rockets, exploding out of nowhere and racing across the screen, one after the other.

Spartan is all good. Then it isn't. Then it isn't at all good. Not at all.

It uses violence as a drug, injecting it into the audience and hoping to addict it. Once the dependence is created, it is simple to feed it with formulaic films.

A beguiling, slow-moving parable.