Admittedly, it's been a long time since Kelly McGillis was being hyped as "the next Grace Kelly." But of all the films in all the world for whom the former Top Gun lust object could have done a walk-on, this lacklustre haunted-house feature is the one she chooses?

For the already faithful, believing in John’s miraculous recovery demands not a leap of faith, but a small hop. The film tells them absolutely nothing that they don’t already presume themselves to know. So what, then, is its point?

Casting Eastwood in a friendly, bumbling, light romantic lead is like asking Ethel Merman to sing a lullaby: in the end, nothing is forthcoming but overkill. Clint Eastwood was already famous for that. [16 June 1980]

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

An underdog's breakfast of a movie, with some quite funny characters and set pieces mixed with some excruciating "moral lessons," but at least it moves along at a brisk pace.

What’s ironic (and frustrating) is that in an era defined by a constant feeling of doom, a story that could actually capitalize on it makes us feel that way only when we all realize it’s been nearly an hour in to the story and we’re still meeting new characters.

A slasher movie about gay panic, a nasty piece of homophobic angst for the age of AIDs. [25 Feb 1986]

That's the allure of the genre. Succeed, and you're artful, thoughtful, and popular all at the same time. But fail, and you're the King of New York. As failures go, this is typical enough, smugly dividing the world into good gangsters and bad ones. [9 Nov 1990]

Cranked up at double speed, the plot of Flashdance could almost be a satirical fantasy about dance students. Although Flashdance doesn't admit it's a fantasy, neither does it succeed in looking realistic. [16 Apr 1983, p.E5]

The ads give this a Lamborghini label, but under the hood, it's just a clunker that putzes along like a suburban sedan. [26 Aug 1989]

Bad Teacher should be a hoot. But it isn't. Love the theory here, hate the practice.

A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.

If the art of a true hustler is, as Joe puts it, "beating a man out of his money and making him like it," Callahan blows it big-time with any mark who shells out to see his film.

Like kudzu vine, killer bees and herpes, we may never be rid of it.

Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]

Made of Honor should come with a bar code and a Wal-Mart display - this isn't a movie, it's a commodity. The generic brand is the romantic comedy, and the manufacturer's material of choice is recycled plastic, smoothly glued together to assure the consumer that the purchase is risk-free and thoroughly predictable.

Runaway is a Dinky Toy of a film: tiny, shiny, and about half as well-made. [15 Dec 1984]

The weak plot means that the picture is governed totally by its gadgetry, the equivalent of those James Bond sequels that limp awkwardly from one showoff sequence to the next. [10 May 1991]

The Green Inferno offers up extreme gore, unlikable characters and seriously confused themes (is it a pro-environment film, an ode to imperialism, a satire of social-justice warriors or a poorly sketched combination of all three?).

If the viewer squirms with embarrassment, it's not over how Petrie has directed his camera or his excellent young cast - it's his heavy-handed material that's beyond redemption, and since he co-wrote that material he has a lot to answer for. [26 Apr 1991]

There is one egregious misstep: the photographs of mutilated Vietnamese bodies which appear on the screen during the song, Time Is On My Side, which is grotesque and fundamentally dishonest. No major band has been less interested in politics than The Rolling Stones, and that's what makes Let's Spend The Night Together so infuriating. It purports to be about something momentous, but has absolutely nothing to say. In that, at least, Ashby's film captures perfectly the spirit of the Stones' 1981 tour. [11 March 1993]

Characters already too wicked to be credible start doing stuff simply too stupid to be believed, with no help from a cast way too overmatched to be useful.

Obviously a great respecter of rules, John Badham directs with a metronome, here some glossy action, there some witless banter, dispensing the two like different colored Smarties popped from the box. The bird in Bird On A Wire is a turkey. [19 May 1990]

Most of The Fog will seem drearily perfunctory even to those viewers who don't know Carpenter's version, which itself emulated the elegant gloom of Val Lewton's horror pics of the 1940s.

Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within.

While the pale skin tones (bronzer is selectively applied) and haphazard mix of American and British accents is distracting, it barely scratches the surface of Exodus’s ungainly artificiality.

A slice of advice, then: Take the film’s 102 minutes to visit the actual Little Italy and enjoy a leisurely meal. Or make your own pie at home. Or stay home and do nothing. Basta!

It transforms that bottom line into a saccharine border, framing the picture with enough faux inspiration to keep Hallmark in cards for a month of Mother's Days. [03 Jun 1994]

With the performers given zilch to perform, the result is a picture that's all chassis and no engine, or, in the parlance of the genre, a bunch of pointy hats in search of a transporting broomstick.

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

A View to a Kill is much too long (nearly 2 1/4 hours); it cheats (a subplot involving the KGB comes and goes at leisure); and it has yet another extended section full of dumb cops and smashed cars. [24 May 1985]

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

The film might be pretty to look at, but narratively speaking, it is a disaster.

ROB REINER'S debut as a feature film director with the mock "rockumentary" This Is Spinal Tap was as invigorating as his second film, The Sure Thing, is depressing: not since Michael Cimino followed The Deer Hunter with Heaven's Gate has there been such a dramatic comedown. [1 Mar 1985]

An exercise in miserablism that, although clocking in at an ostensibly tight pace, feels never-ending.

Empire is just too intent on living up to its imperial name -- colonizing other defenceless movies, plundering their rich natural resources, and leaving us all to feel rather cruelly violated. A postscript: Somebody here -- I'm not saying who -- dies. And still keeps on talking.

Gudegast, a first-time director who wrote the script to Den of Thieves (and who has probably watched Michael Mann's "Heat" more than once) attempts to comment on humanity's complexities. But all he does with his soulless, hollow characters is make a solid case that men are violent sleazes.

In lieu of a movie, we get a series of car chases rudely interrupted by the occasional smattering of dialogue.

Smith and Lawrence enjoyed some amusing chemistry in the '95 original, but their molecules sure aren't jibing here. It's a full hour into this behemoth before there's anything resembling a belly laugh.

This briefly inspired bit of surreality quickly descends into gratuitous bondage, mayhem and dumb humour, marking the usual progression from mildly absurd premise to gratingly idiotic conclusion.

If it weren't for Mo'Nique's fresh, appealing screen presence, Phat Girlz would fall flat.

100% Wolf will leave you howling – not with laughter or delight but in despair for some semblance of a plot in its mercifully short run time.

A crashing bore.

In its neediness to be liked, the new Shaft – the third of five films in the series to be titled, simply, Shaft – says everything and nothing.

There are small spurts of creativity ... but everything else about the production feels more watered down than the landscape our four interchangeable leads find themselves flailing about in.

For all its high-speed car chases and extravagant stunts, director Camille Delamarre’s reboot of the Transporter franchise is as punctilious as Frank himself – glossy in finish but a little uptight.

Rocky III, unlike its twin predecessors, is a charmlessly manipulative movie. The magic is kaput. [28 May 1982]

Highlander's flashy style is the cinematic equivalent of a Las Vegas chorus line: always kicking. Without Lambert, who displays an unexpected comic talent along with intensely photogenic passive-aggressive eyes, and Roxanne Hart, whose knowledgeable portrayal of a New York detective is undercut by the symphony of screams extracted from her toward the end, and Connery, who wears a pearl-drop earring and is supposed to be Spanish but still has the burr and brio of James Bond, Highlander would be little more than an everlasting video; it's not much more than that, as it is. [10 Mar 1986, p.C9]

Dull Blade just doesn't cut it.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

I Feel Pretty paints the most garish and unflattering portrait of contemporary female culture.

Candy and Moranis are real talents, but they're completely wasted, like everyone else here, sacrificed to the grade-school inanities of that self-indulgent script. [26 Jun 1987, p.D6]

The Public is writer-director Emilio Estevez’s grand, well-meaning and extremely dumb vanity project/tribute to the public-library system.

A confusing, muddled, sloppy mess of bad intentions and worse execution.

If TMNT the franchise is going to reach the same lofty heights of blockbuster-dom, it still needs to find its own inner hero.

While computer games can boast an abundance of nifty graphics and odious villains and plucky protagonists on long journeys, they're invariably a tad wanting in the cinematic essentials -- you know, stuff like plot and characterization and theme.

Some films, like some people, wear their artsy pretensions on their sleeve, and there really isn't much going on beneath – it's just a posturing armband wrapped around a plain arm. Welcome, then, to the emptiness of Mister Lonely, a movie that goes to extraordinary lengths to say ordinary things.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

A lamentably slack and dishonest genre exercise.

It wants to make an important political statement, which might have been dandy if it had anything remotely cogent to say.

About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.

Virtue aside, however, Red Tails is a lousy film. Not wincingly bad, mind you, just mediocre.

The bad news is that Stella is an unintentionally hilarious mess, handily summed up by what Haskell sees as "the lowest level" of the woman's film - "(It) fills a masturbatory need, it is soft-core emotional porn for the frustrated housewife. [2 Feb 1990]

On his own, Dangerfield is still a buoyant presence. But the cliche tells us that movie-making is a collaborative exercise, and the price for Easy Money must be paid. Ultimately, Captain Rodney goes down with his film and sinks without a trace. [20 Aug 1983]

If anybody should know how to make a good Lubitsch farce, it’s Bogdanovich. Luckily, he already has: You should just watch his classic What’s Up, Doc? instead.

Appropriately for a film about art forgery, every cast member in The Last Vermeer seems to be attempting their best impression of someone else.

Some of the special effects are chilling, but Fright Night lacks depth, wit and humor, and hence is neither absorbing, intelligent, nor funny. [08 Aug 1985]

A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.

Most everyone who watches The Perfection will instead be staring at the screen slack-jawed, dumbfounded at the gory silliness they endured.

The deal with the new Hotel Transylvania animated comedy is that Count Dracula needs a vacation, but, really, it’s the creative team behind the franchise who could use the time off.

Seidelman isn't that exclusive - any cliche will do, the cruder the better. [8 Dec 1989]

All of this is interesting, but not all that entertaining.

Very little of it works.

Up the Academy, directed by Robert Downey, combines Little Darlings, Meatballs and Animal House into a crude concoction that holds out the promise of approximating Mad Magazine's cheerful, sophomoric vulgarity. [09 June 1980]

Nighthawks, a cops 'n' robbers thriller with terrorists where the robbers should be and cops as counter-terrorists, has a dirty job to do and does it. That is not an endorsement. Thumbscrews and cattle prods are real good at what they do, too. [11 Apr 1981]

In-jokes for horror-film fans abound (the dog is named Jason, the monster in the Friday the 13th series; a cafe is the Craven Inn - Wes Craven directed the first Nightmare on Elm Street), and it's possible that those fans will be satisfied with the expensive, surreal special effects unleashed by director Renny Harlin. Everyone else is apt to agree with the teen-ager who dismisses Freddy by saying, "We all got better things to dream about." [19 Aug 1988]

Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.

[Law] talks straight to the camera like the young Michael Caine, but this time our hunk has got zilch to say. That's because a bastard's candour is off-limits in today's politically correct market — it just wouldn't be polite.

Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.

And that’s how Detroit unfolds: like a horror film. The film flattens its historical personages and its particularities of time-and-place into excruciating exploitation – somewhere between a Straw Dogs-style “survive the night” home invasion narrative, Milgram experiment moral problem play and racial torture porn.

Although it’s a kick to see the rough conditions and the full-on roughhousing of old-world golf, the scenes on the links are repetitive. And while the ending takes a severe dogleg turn to soft-focus sentimentality and the soundtrack hounds us to take this thing seriously, the movie is easily resistible.

One of Blomkamp’s most unlikely conceits is a machine – apparently standard-issue in all of Elysium’s made-to-order McMansions – that can heal all injuries and infections at the flick of a switch. He could have used one to fix Elysium’s battered and broken screenplay.

By then, the lofty ambitions can't disguise the sad reality - it's long, it's cluttered, and it's trite.

It wants so much to cover everything, and do so in a way that is so laudatory of Salinger's genius and purity that it never really delves into anything interesting or complex. It merely skims.

What we have here is a romp, a funny romp at times, with a clear satiric intent and the expected quota of outrageous style - likable enough, yes, but a rather flimsy thing, a zany fest with its mind on cruise control. [17 June 1994]

Anyone who has seen "Dream Girls," "What's Love Got To Do With It?" or even "The Doors" will find themselves in familiar (if inferior) territory here.

Before immediately handing the movie an F and sending it off to summer school, give the filmmakers, and especially co-star Jason Schwartzman, credit for their anarchic willingness to try anything to shock a laugh loose from an audience.

Xia's humble sifu lends more gravitas than this dreck deserves, and a rousing, improbable finale in which Lee and Man take on the mob together offers some great fight choreography, but it's all too little, too late.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make heads or tails of this Byzantine thing. [22 May 1996]

Both cautionary and comforting (yes, some kids today prefer conversation to cybersexting), Men, Women & Children is as anxious to seem contemporary as any after-school special.

It's a satire inferior to the thing it satirizes. [3 July 1981]

That the producer thinks Beals plus Sting equals big bucks at the box office may be the biggest contrivance of all. [19 Aug 1985]

As entertainment, the film is pedantic and over-dramatic, with the string section working overtime on the soundtrack.

Director Marc Webb proved he could do youthful love and heartbreak as well as anyone in his debut feature (500) Days of Summer. Here, working with a script by Allan Loeb (The Space Between Us, Collateral Beauty), he puts all the pieces together, but can't make the magic happen.

Dark Places lacks the gloomy meditative quality that Gone Girl rode to success on, with none of the grace or subtlety necessary in making a convoluted thriller a watchable enterprise.

The laughs are lame in this annoyingly outdated spoof of political correctness. [5 May 1994]

After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?

The makers of The Meg may have gone to school on Spielberg, but the big-budget deep-sea thriller is nothing but bloodless summer filler. Unsure if he wants to have some fun and jump the Sharknado or make a seriously gory fish fest, director Jon Turteltaub has surfaced with nets empty.