As Playing With Fire progressed, it became increasingly clear that the target audience was not respected. This was made by people who seem to think kids are stupid.

By throwing herself headfirst into scenes that a more cautious actress might beg off, Green earns herself a citation for valour – a Purple Heart in a movie that’s otherwise way too grim and grey for its own good.

Who wants to watch any film where Sarandon, the sexiest 60-year-old woman alive, is first prize in a corn-eating contest?

While the elements are there, the spirit isn't. The film is too predictable (oops, missed her again) to be exciting, and it's too fond of its pilfered Treasure Island roots to have fun with them.[13 May 1987]

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

The action, when it does arrive, is quiet enough to send the most insomnia-plagued of audiences to sleep.

It is all so intentionally ridiculous that it gets boring, and you just wait for the next big cornball revelation to momentarily jolt you awake, like Sofia Vergara strapping on her machine-gun bra, or Lady Gaga’s appearance as a hit woman. Machete kills, sure. Unfortunately, he overkills.

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

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.

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.

Diesel’s "Fast & Furious" movies have heart. His "Riddick" movies have weirdness. His "XXX" entries have lunacy. (Can we pause to admire how many franchises this man has to his name?) Bloodshot, though, only offers mere generic mediocrity.

Steers can compose and capture a shot fine enough, but seems otherwise bored to be here. Each of his scenes collide lazily against the next; transitions are rushed and often ugly, and the director never seems to know what emotions he should be steering his cast toward.

The storyline is a sinkhole that swallows up any sense and suspense.

A Michael Bay-branded time-travel fiasco, made for teens and seemingly by them, too.

House of Games is so bad it seems reasonable to conclude that God was out of town and Mamet's muse was in a coma. [16 Oct 1987]

All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.

Zoolander 2 feels like a hasty collection of last-minute comedy panic attacks.

A twisted, but not particularly clever, black comedy.

As far as the preaching-to-the-choir genre goes, though, I Still Believe is a far more tolerable exercise than, say, last year’s anti-abortion screed "Unplanned" or any recent movie with the word “Heaven” in the title (Heaven Is for Real, Miracles from Heaven).

Sadly, 2010 is not going to make it any easier for the uninitiated to grasp the reasons its predecessor thrilled a generation: the only people 2010 is likely to thrill are the agents of the actors in the cast. [7 Dec 1984]

With its stilted dialogue, fragments of voice-over and over-busy camera, Red Riding Hood feels off-kilter from the start.

It pains that this documentary was so tedious, since the New York Public Library is the crown jewel of public institutions, deserving of every accolade. If you want to spend three hours finding out what the library has to offer, save yourself the price of a movie ticket and head down to your local branch.

Definition of redundant: A formulaic Hollywood pic that calls itself Déjà Vu.

Simply put, Touch dies, with nary a resurrective hand in sight. [14 Feb 1997, p.C5]

Scott means for his entertainment package to be hip, hysterical fun. But his stylistic embellishments and indiscriminate appetite for sensation crowds his title character right out of the film.

Sorta-kinda based on the true story of astronaut Lisa Nowak, Noah Hawley’s directorial debut may have started out as a feminist-forward film decrying the fact that women have to work five times as hard to succeed in the workplace, but it ends up being a movie whose message boils down to, “Ladies be crazy.”

Despite being set in 1958 Cuba, Havana Nights sticks to the formula. This would be perfectly acceptable if the dancing was "dirtier" and if there was a spark between the young couple.

Kinnaman, a Swede, is good in small doses – say, as Mireille Enos’s sidekick in the TV series The Killing – but he’s no leading man. He gives us zero insight into Elliot, so he never makes us care about him. This film will be remembered (if at all) as one of the things Holland did before he was Spider-Man.

There are a few laughs at the start of This Is the End, and a couple more at the end of This is the End. As for the endless middle, it’s middling.

The director’s pedestrian tactics are most evident in his command, or lack thereof, over his cast. While Parker knows how to expertly play to the camera – he all but winks at the audience, so confident is he in his admittedly captivating lead performance – he abandons his fellow actors, allowing them to exploit their worst instincts: hammy accents, wild gesticulating, uneasy line readings.

Though a few scenes drum up some intensity -- that green ham Gustave makes one last great appearance -- it's mostly grim, dull and ugly, three qualities that nobody wants in a piece of multiplex filler about a surly reptile.

This hunk of celluloid flotsam will come back sooner rather than later, washed up on the remote shelves of your local video store. My advice: shred the message, recycle the bottle.

The Peanuts Movie is a sloppy mash-up of disconnected vignettes and rehashed jokes, all lazily reverse-engineered from the premise that a Peanuts movie is a thing that people will like and will happily pay to see.

Some of the most memorable performances from great actors are also their worst: Add to that list Anthony Hopkins's turn as a sinister old Jesuit.

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.

[An] occasionally cute romantic comedy.

Unsane culminates in a nauseating crescendo of violence, with women sexually assaulted, their necks snapped and their bodies chucked into garbage bags and trunks. After #MeToo, this stuff is feeling not just unpalatable, but suspect.

In the end the taste of the brew is inferior to the bouquet, and while it's true that the cauldron is a splendiferous container, the dregs at the bottom are bitter. How 12 years and $25- million could be lavished on a movie with narrative holes big enough to swallow the film's major creation, a prophetic pig, is a conundrum that must have Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic crypt: this is a movie that knows how to do everything but tell a story. [26 July 1985]

The whole d--- thing can be summed up in three little words: yo ho hum.

The United States of Leland has a resonance of "Elephant" without the visual poetry or structural sophistication, or "American Beauty" without the leavening comedy, but it's neither an insightful nor well-made film.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.

In the right hands, Good Boy! might have been a ripe bit of mischief. But except for an endless drum roll of fart jokes, what we get is stuffy liberal humanism that would bore the Oshkoshes off Al Gore's littlest nieces and nephews.

By comparison to this effort, "Pineapple Express" seems like a model of thoughtful maturity.

This is the kind of pitchur where if somebody gets his foot blowed off (somebody do), it makes everybody laugh, yuk yuk. Rip Torn (he's a sheriff) says, "The only thing worse than a politician is a child molester." It's mighty fine to get that kind of perspective. Makes you realize Extreme Prejudice ain't so bad after all. [24 Apr 1987]

Crowley knows his way from adaptations thanks to 2015′s Brooklyn, but as this 149-minute mess proves, The Goldfinch should have never flown away from its literary perch.

Runner Runner is a bad run of cliché clichés.

Throughout all this, Cage's lazy, dull performance – who knew there were so many ways to express smugness? – is enlivened only by poorly timed bursts of exuberance.

The filmmakers score half a point for at least avoiding the old “hero-who’s-constantly-filming” device, but fail to add anything else to the proceedings, except, perhaps, the movie’s unique setting.

Dan Aykroyd has been consistently disappointing since he left the Saturday Night Live television show to work in feature films. His latest film, Doctor Detroit is more evidence that Aykroyd's comedic talent, which was brilliantly spontaneous when feeding off a live studio audience, isn't suited to the big screen. [9 May 1983]

The movie seems much, much longer than its 90-minute running time. [15 June 1998]

Soulless and idiotic and abysmally scripted as it is, Anarchy, like its predecessor, feels mournfully relevant.

It’s a stew so thick with brand loyalty that you just might choke on all the intellectual property and consequential commerce.

For about 20 minutes, Phantoms, based on Dean Koontz's bestseller, keeps you guessing. After that, it barely keeps you awake.

The comedy is sophomoric and sort-of spoofy; satire happens here and there.

No matter how many nifty shots he inserts of Major’s hologram-ridden metropolis, the director cannot shake the impression he simply does not care about his creation. At least Johansson makes an effort.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with kid-friendly Fire & Rescue – the movie offers enough jokes and glitzy animation to capture its target audience as well as a few witty puns for their accompanying adult – it just doesn’t introduce any new ideas or compelling characters, traits that we’ve come to expect from high-level animated films.

Outré love stories are great, as are love stories that make viewers squirm. But they have to ring true emotionally, and despite its talented cast, Adore does not.

Cheney remains an enigma throughout, less a character than another anonymous object for McKay to smash in his cinematic rage room.

There ain't much to You Got Served, but at least this teensploitation flick is bookended by two frenzied sequences that fully exploit the visual potential of street dancing.

All the special effects in the universe don't make up for a lame plot, though. There's something foul about a Star Trek movie so apparently slapdash: the creators know that legions of fans will show up, no matter what. [18 Nov. 1994]

Most of the time the film is simply stupid; not offensive, just silly. [03 May 1983]

Everyone here is simply a mismanaged thing to be moved around an isn’t-that-shocking storyboard as needed.

Deep inside the new Charlie’s Angels movie, there is a fun film struggling to breathe. There are momentary flashes of energy, of wit, of something sorta-kinda-maybe resembling entertainment. But every time writer-director Elizabeth Banks’s reboot threatens to come alive, it immediately falls to the floor, leaden and lifeless.

It's difficult to give a damn about this collection of whiners, autocrats and philanderers. [4 Aug 1995]

Spun is so hip it hurts.

Unfortunately, the only thing that dies harder in the movies than natural selection is careworn cliché, and Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale’s movie about a plucky, lovestruck pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi subjects our long defunct earthly ancestors to a fate arguably worse than extinction: a life lived in a world of cheese.

It's difficult to say who is more misguided here: the men (director, screenwriter and producer) who made the movie, or the women who signed on to play the parts.

Unless you are a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce, or perhaps part of the Macfayden clan, you’re better off letting this particular version of history get lost in the sands of time.

There are two movies in Superman III, one a witless and obvious and often cruel comic strip, the other a blithe and subtle and often amusing exercise in middle-brow camp. Not only do the two halves never come together, they are in active opposition. [17 June 1983]

Beyond the Reach, adapted from the same Robb White Deathwatch novel that spawned the 1974 Andy Griffith-starring television movie "Savages," is a deadly, desert-set game of cat and mouse that is tired and beyond plausibility.

There are good intentions lurking here, especially in star Louis Garrel’s performance, but the film consistently fails to engage on an even basic level.

Here's a movie that tries to be a video game but is less entertaining than a vending machine.

The monster isn't very interesting (or scary) to look at: he's just an oily, overgrown gremlin.

A plot so preposterous it could only have emerged from the underground comic world.

The manipulative Star Wars-style score is the only novelty on tap in Silverado, which has a plot too drearily complicated and arid to summarize and an attitude almost unbearable in its dryly smirky assurance that it knows what you want from a Western, which is to say, action that never quits, emotion that's never felt, characters that are never real and situations that are never sensible. [10 Jul 1985, p.S7]

The film preaches the gospel of unpredictable change, of ironic metamorphosis, of a psychological ebb and flow from love to lust, hope to despair, good to evil. But if the message is fluid, the medium is static at best and chaotic at worst - there's very little controlled motion in this picture. [19 June 1992]

Why bother suffering through 90 minutes of bad company for a few moments of holiday cheer? Especially when you can still stay home alone and watch "A Charlie Brown Christmas" somewhere on TV.

Stallone's sequel has almost nothing to do with the original film except that it's about dancing; otherwise, it's Rocky IV with legwarmers. [16 Jul 1983]

It’s disappointing that the film takes that well-worn trope of a big family get-together and just lazily adds a Filipino layer to it.

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

As for the old and graceful Jackie, he's completely missing in action, his supple talents sacrificed on the high altar of movie technology -- that frenetic place where superheroes are a colossal bore and real ones are sadly impotent.

The Hustle should’ve been a comedy that served equal parts wit and social commentary – otherwise, why gender-swap? It should’ve given Wilson and Hathaway a means through which to shine. These are talented, seasoned, capable women. And for their experience to be wasted in a production that is below them, below their director’s filmography and below the original material is tragic.

On the whole, the film is content to lumber awkwardly between the condemned man on death row and the intrepid reporter on his save-a-life beat -- there's about as much rhythm in the style as there is sense in the plot.

The photography is elegant, but nothing else is. With action that is standard and not at all tense, the melodrama is much higher than the reward.

Dragonfly has more plot than a figure-skating competition, and just about as much credibility.

To report that Always will make you cry is not esthetically saying much; slicing up onions has the same effect. Leslie Halliwell's one-word summation of the forties version applies to Spielberg's update for the nineties: "icky." [26 Dec. 1989]

The Arthurian legend has received a wide variety of treatments over the years, but this safe, sanitized American version drains the juice smack out of a notorious romantic triangle. [07 Jul 1995]

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

The cast is equally strong (especially McDonnell), but the vast subject and the shifting settings force Kasdan all over the map. [10 Jan 1992]

The countdown begins with the first negative integer — an amped-up score that overpowers the proceedings like a bad band at a high-school dance.

Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.

Welcome to Marwen is the ultimate Robert Zemeckis movie. This is not intended as a compliment. The film – not quite comedy, not quite drama, but definitely indigestible – finds Zemeckis embracing his worst late-career indulgences.

Too much chatting, not enough chills.

The dialogue is sour, the politics problematic (Broadway veterans as Afghan locals? Why not?!), and the sentiments sometimes eye-rolling. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, indeed.

As for Keitel, he pops up in a brief cameo as a housing contractor, with a dump-truck full of sand, the one that De Niro is standing right behind. The pair engage in a heated argument, as they once did so memorably those many years ago, and then the truck dumps that load exactly where you know it must. An esteemed actor gets buried but, what-the-fock, the franchise laughs on.

The devil is back in Exorcist: The Beginning, and he is more disgusting than ever. Not more scary, just really yucky, in a kind of maggots-on-a-pizza-slice way.

In its attempts to revisit the original film’s discrepancies, DaCosta’s film ends up only retracing its narrative inconsistencies with full force and even deeper perplexity. Gone is the alluring entanglement of erotics and fright, replaced here by flat characters limply stumbling over a script intent on hitting us over the head with its social commentary.