Contains too little of the original's campy spirit and too many whistles, bells, explosions and screams.

It's a seriously withholding action comedy, stingy on the wit, charm, jokes, narrative satisfactions and animals with personalities sharp enough for the big screen, either in 2-D or 3-D.

A movie just begging to go up in the flames of camp. If only somebody had brought a match.

Envy is a shaggy dog-poop story that'll make you wish you could spray something at the screen to make it disappear.

Broken Horses raises the question of what is cockamamie, and what is cockamamie and outlandish and ridiculous yet a perfectly swell time for those very reasons. This one's just cockamamie without the swell part.

Sniggery sex, adolescent male-bonding, casual drug use, the agonies of growing up, mistrust [to put it mildly] of the adult world, a yearning for material success and a corresponding distaste for anything that smacks of the "committed" 1960s - it's all here, supporting a plot so lunatic that it could have been assembled only in the backwards fashion outlined above. [22 July 1983, p.3-3]

Only the architecturally refined bone structure of Kristin Scott Thomas' face rescues Keeping Mum from full-on tedium.

Instead of an escape from Hollywood’s cookie-cutter plots, it’s a retreat back into them, only the sexes have been changed.

It's a real shame that most new boxing movies try to copy the crowd-pleasing, sentiment-choked tactics of "Rocky" rather than the stark drama of "Raging Bull" or the realistic grit of "On the Waterfront" and "The Harder They Fall." Against the Ropes is only the latest sorry example. The sad thing is that, with this real-life story and subject, it could have been a contender.

Cheerful but mind-numbing.

The film doesn’t begin to know what to do with the reincarnation idea beyond a few sharply edited micro-flashbacks. Is the look on Wahlberg’s face the character thinking What is going on? Or is it the actor thinking Am I in the next ‘Matrix’ or the silliest movie of 2021?

Even if the movie's only goal is to preach to the choir, its fondness for hyperbole and lack of discernment is more insult than rallying cry.

The Last Airbender (they couldn't use the series' "Avatar" title because another film got there first, without all the bending) is more about marshaling extras and interpolating tons of computer-generated effects and keeping the factions straight. It's a tough sit.

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together.

Leans on just as many stereotypes as it tweaks.

While there’s some payoff in the many visual callbacks to ’80s-and-earlier genre movies, at some point the filmmaker lost sight of how to best serve Goth a third time.

It stars Tom Hanks in his first genuinely dull screen performance.

Ritchie, who shoots and cuts everything in RocknRolla like an ad for a particularly greasy brand of fragrance for men, delivers the beatings and killings in his trademark atmosphere of morally weightless flash.

Might be justified as "mindless fun" if it weren't for the acute lack of fun in its 93 minutes.

Shapiro has constructed a by-the-numbers script that telegraphs every plot twist with the exertion of its setups. We know that a hive of yellow jackets in the orchard, a carousel in the attic and Darian's fondness for horses will somehow make it into the final minutes of the film. It is hard to work up the curiosity to stick it out and find out how. [6 Apr 1993, p.7]

Stick is quite awful.

This comedy-romance about a mermaid who falls in love with a man does have one thing going for it, the lithe shape and pleasant underwater smile of actress Daryl Hannah. Otherwise, it's a desperately unfunny film that wastes the talents of SCTV favorites John Candy and Eugene Levy. [08 June 1984, p.12]

There’s nothing wrong with All About Steve that a rewrite couldn’t fix, as long as the rewrite involved a different writer, a different character and a different story.

The Good German is just stiff. When Soderbergh tries one of those patented swoop-in-on-the-diagonal moves at a key dramatic moment, the effect is comic. And at that precise moment, the story starts dying a slow, oxygen-deprived death.

Strange as it seems, if you choose to set aside the female roles in The Ridiculous 6 reducing women to cleavage or to mute humiliation, the movie is a long, long way from the worst Sandler movie ever made.

The Boss has zero finesse as a comedy.

Jakes' characters are points to be made, flesh and blood cautionary tales that don't particularly feel human. His dialogue, even in the mouths of Michelle and her troubled mother, sounds as if it comes straight from the pulpit.

I can only hope that this film was a lot of fun to make. That way, someone will have enjoyed the experience.