Maybe Brooks has lost his touch, maybe some of us are getting too old to revel in toilet humour or maybe Robin Hood - Prince of Thieves was just too lousy a picture for Mel to bounce his manic slapstick from. Either way, Kevin Costner's earnestly self-important Robin Hood remains distinctly funnier, laugh for unintentional laugh, than Mel Brook's satirical one.[29 July 1993]

A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.

Feels like a five-year-old with a megaphone, excitedly yelling about his latest bulldozer-soldier-dinosaur smash-kill-squash-everything game.

This is a 3-D film sorely lacking in dimension. Hit me hard, hit me soft, Cameron, but hit me with something.

Kubrick certainly doesn't fail small. One could fast forget The Shining as an overreaching, multi-levelled botch were it not for Jack Nicholson. Nicholson, one of the few actors capable of getting the audience to love him no matter what he does, is an ideal vehicle for Kubrick. [14 Jun 1980, p.E1]

Even by Marvel’s own standards of serviceable mediocrity, Infinity War fails.

Is Kazaam racist? In effect, yes. But it'sracism linked to bad marketing: You can't really mix a black-pride rap film with a revamped version of "Free Willie" and expect them to magically jibe.

Falls somewhere on that aesthetic scale between mediocre and flat-out bad.

What's amazing is how far McConaughey carries this nonsense despite his total lack of chemistry with Parker and almost Zen-like indifference to his circumstances.

This is just another generic war movie of the kind that revels in combat's greater glories. You know the type - the camaraderie that never quite rings true, the plot that never once makes sense. In short, the whole bombs-bursting- in-air, truth-through-the-night jive. [21 Oct 1988]

There is an occasional sense of self-awareness that this is all pointless and silly, but 139 minutes is a long time for a film to forgo even delayed gratification.

Riding that fine line between misjudged and deliberately anti-p.c., Get Hard is lewd, crude and rude but, despite its disastrous reception at SxSW, not entirely unfunny.

Aloha is a marshmallow of a film: soft on the inside, soft on the outside and wholly devoid of substance.

While this may all sound seductively warped to those who enjoy movies featuring sexually deviant confinement and torture, blasphemous rants and rampaging rednecks, The Devil's Rejects does not live up to its sick, twisted and campy intentions. "Straw Dogs" meets "Smokey And The Bandit" for the new millennium it ain't.

An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.

After a great start, Wolfgang Petersen's intelligent medical thriller is infected by some nasty germs, resulting in the all-too-common Actionitis. [10 Mar 1995]

Chetwynd fumbles the job badly. [2 May 1987]

Scrape off its grimy exterior, and it too is a fairy tale, but one with ambitions of realism, one that tries to co-exist in our world, one that pretends to be something it isn't. Frankie & Johnny ends up lost in limboland, stumbling onto a whole new genre - call it kitchen-sink unrealism. [11 Oct 1991]

What Death Hunt is a piece of is neither entertaining nor educational. [18 Apr 1981]

THE dead end of desperation comes about three-quarters of the way into the joyless, uphill slog that is Wayne's World 2. [11 Dec 1993]

There is a terrific little movie making the rounds, Repo Man, that demonstrates what can be done with vision, no money and faith in the audience; Buckaroo Banzai demonstrates what can be done with a lot of money, no faith in the audience, and a vision that begins and ends in the cash register. [13 Aug 1984]

Barely a chuckle in sight.

Where Corneau flirted with erotic tension, De Palma flaunts it. Where Corneau went for nightmarish reality, De Palma does noirish dreams.

That’s what Shazam!, and all these endless superhero action epics, amount to: hollow toys smashing against other hollow toys.

The characters are reluctant to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence, mostly because writer-director Scott Stewart doesn’t want to play his hand too early. By the time the movie is over, it’s easy to see why he kept his cards close to his chest. He’s not really holding anything.

In time, we may look back at Lost River as a fascinating mess or a misunderstood miss. As for his promise, I’d be fine if Gosling promises to never make a film like this again.

There, in its midst, stands a freeze-dried Arthur -- stripped of his legend, shivering in the cold and wondering, like the rest of us, where in hell the magic went.

It's Footloose Loose In The Third Reich and, even with your expectations kept knee-high to a kindergarten, you might have at least hoped for some finger-poppin' music and a few great dance scenes. Sorry. Here, too, things come up short. [05 Mar 1993]

This denouement, even without its obviously reprehensible politics, is weak; it's also extremely confusing and confused. It does, however, manage to catch that nebulous ideological zone where white man's guilt, which decries the technological greed of our dog-eat-dog world, can go overboard in justifying the natural appetite of dog-eat-man. [27 July 1981]

The script is definitely mediocrity mixed with complication.

It's unclear as to how we are supposed to feel about these monologuists, the majority of whom are twentysomething; nothing is how I felt about them, but perhaps I was tired. [27 Sept. 1991]

The problem with Kidnapping Mr. Heineken, which is the second movie in four years about the sensational 1983 crime (the other was a Dutch production with Rutger Hauer as the dapper snatchee), is that it follows the kidnappers out the door instead of sticking with the coolly composed man behind it.

The vulgarity and jingoism of Iron Eagle prevent it from functioning even as breezy entertainment. [17 Jan 1986, p.C10]

Little Man will probably satisfy fans of the Wayans.

This time the action takes us out of the usual campgrounds and girls in underwear into the realm of outer space, where no one can hear you screaming "Enough already."

What could have made Noah work is the same sense of urgency – of fateful craziness – that made "Pi" so memorable, and which also factored into the fatal obsessions of "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan" (two very flawed movies that admittedly benefited from stronger lead performances than the one here).

Mottola’s film is the unfortunate result of too much talent met with a clunky script – and the movie crumples under the weight of the cast’s star power.

Not surprisingly, the menage breaks down in the first few frames, depriving us on two counts - we get neither the smart-aleck naivete of yesterday nor the self-conscious slickness of today. [6 July 1990]

But hey, at least Zwick and company carve out some time for Tom Cruise to run, with Reacher dashing across a busy avenue for about 18 seconds or so. It’ll make for a great supercut one day.

From its eccentric score (a mix of spaghetti western and funky blues) to its bizarre casting (ex-wrestlemanaic Roddy Piper in the lead role), the flick leaves us off-balance and guessing. By the time we figure out there's not much to guess at, the credits roll by and the jig is up. [5 Nov 1988]

This is clearly a film that favours concept over narrative expansion, and it suffers for this.

Instead of story or suspense, Double Team offers a busy sampling of eye candy. [4 Apr 1997, p.C6]

Last Night is a New York morality play: A film in love with (lower) Manhattan that is suspicious of real romance. What it lacks is Allen's sense of horseplay; his appetite for lunatic adventure. When you take a bite of the Big Apple, you're not supposed to nibble.

The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.

Give this call a miss.

Okay, it's just a movie, but his "reward" just doesn't cut it, even on a basic storytelling level. A crooked casino and a nephew's experiment with drugs are not enough justification for the hero's violent acts of vengeance.

Nevertheless, as the sort of rote horror movie that’s fun to laugh at, The Recall has its moments.

White Nights is too ponderous to have the pizzazz of trash and too dumb to have the insight of art - it's a lumbering behemoth of a film in which the extraordinary talent of its one authentic star, Mikhail Baryshnikov, is exploited in a Cold War cartoon that suggests a musical adaptation of Ayn Rand's anti- Soviet novel, We The Living. [22 Nov 1985]

It's all very pat and, ultimately, annoying.

Fatal Affair will live up to the first half of its name, and you’ll be bored to death.

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.

Port Dundas remains snoozy and depopulated even when throats are cut and stomachs thrown to the sheepdogs, and so does the movie.

Fat and sassless Champ a loser on all counts. [09 Apr 1979]

Just the umpteenth replay of the girl-meets-boy/boy-loses-girl/boy-gets-girl story.

A run-of-the-mill movie hero.

It is harmless, frighty fun for teenage audiences, but adults will leave theatres with their bejeebers intact.

It adds nothing to our understanding of "Howl," and the movie is exactly what the poem isn’t: ordinary.

There is the overwhelming sense that Domino was not directed by any one person at all, but rather spliced and diced by committee into something barely watchable.

There is no pleasure in watching a child suffer. Just embarrassment and a vague sense of shame. Watching Trapped simply makes us feel guilty.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

A bunch of scenes in need of a tighter narrative and, more importantly, a raison d'être.

In the final frames, and the final analysis, Alien gets the worst of both worlds - it's boring and it's messy. The title may be "cubed," but the movie looks awfully square. [22 May 1992]

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

Inflated production numbers come lumbering ludicrously onto the screen like so many boozy pink elephants from a demented circus. [26 Nov 1980]

For a movie about an assassin charged with killing Santa Claus (!) on the orders of a Richie Rich-like brat (!!), and starring Mel Gibson (!!!) as Kris Kringle himself, Fatman is astoundingly boring.

It's the perfect sort of movie to have playing on a television in the corner of a rec room during a low-key beer and pizza party.

Kids certainly won’t learn anything here, but they’re not likely to mistake it for entertainment, either.

Films about haunted houses have come a long way since the days when things simply went bump in the night, but The Amityville Horror may make you wish things would get back to basics. Peppered with visual red herrings, fast editing and cheap shocks, this is a product that promises an apocalypse of horror, delivers a few vague samples, but trails to an ending without providing a meaty climax. [28 July 1979]

The disturbing thing in this preposterous piece of family fluff from writer-director Steve Oedekerk (Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, the Oscar-nominated Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) is the sight of bulls with udders.

The first hour of Club Paradise is enjoyable and more or less adult, thanks in large part to the comic contributions of Williams, O'Toole and the SCTV alumni. But he has not learned structure. Toward the end, the island having been tossed into a civil war invented solely to give the movie one of the helter skelter farcical endings Ramis and Reitman regularly affix to their films, Club Paradise falls apart like a piece of cheap luggage. [4 July 1986]

Try not to be in the same room as Jesus Henry Christ. At the very least run when the first fire alarm sounds.

Like a little boy playing with his first chemistry set, Hughes has thrown together the labelled contents of just about every teen-film cliche. And the experiment is a failure of excess - like a furious potion that bubbles up, fizzes briefly, and then fizzles out before expectant, and then disappointed, eyes. [3 Aug 1985]

Although Wonder Wheel begins with a few of the witty ruptures of the fourth wall that have often enlivened Allen's work, it soon descends into a bleak melodrama that is little more than warmed-over Tennessee Williams.

There's no doubt the cast is driven and talented; some day, it might be interesting to watch a film about what such kids are really like.

Director Guillermin has got a film that's alternately cloying and crude, sometimes needlessly violent (Kong still kills in self- defence, but now he breaks human victims in half). It's even less suitable for kids than for adults. [24 Dec 1986, p.D5]

A perfunctory gore fest and quite possibly the year's worst date movie.

With Things Are Tough All Over their once well-oiled comedy has rusted firmly into place. Now, the erstwhile darlings of the counter-culture seem about as raucously rebellious as a senescent Lucy Ricardo. [2 Aug 1982]

General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.

True appreciation must be paid to Melissa McCarthy, who does a so-very-loud version of her usual shtick – foul-mouthed wrecking-ball – to keep audiences awake when director Brian Henson (yes, son of Muppet creator Jim) resorts to having his puppets drop F-bombs instead of delivering actual jokes.

Through it all, actress Posey strikes attitudes and preens across the glib surface of the film, and though her campy excesses are tolerable for a brief time, the performance becomes an exercise in overkill. [13 Oct 1995]

The problem with this spinoff is, like homework, you’d rather be doing something else with your time.

Bailey’s journey through space and time and life and death to reunite with Ethan only seems to reinforce the notion that a dog’s purpose is to be man’s best friend. And we knew that already.

Never before have such acting heavyweights been so misused on screen.

A rip-off of The Birds, but not as scary. [21 July 1990]

The problem here isn't how the figures look; rather, it's what they do and say -- the story is lame and the dialogue no better.

Instead of funnelling his inspirations into one singular vision that he could call his own, Boone has made a Frankenstein of a franchise movie, a giant elevator pitch that leads directly to the sub-basement of originality.

Unwilling to offend, the scribes have committed the greatest offence of all - they've neglected to tell a story, airbrushing out anything remotely dramatic.

The resulting film, while sporadically affecting, is ultimately a slog of gooey sentiment and needlessly long death rattles.

Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.

The screenplay feels like the feverish byproduct of an all-nighter pulled off the very first day back from a writers' strike.

A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.

A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

If you squint hard and focus most of your mental energy on folding your laundry, yeah, Army of Thieves is kinda cool. But it’s also kinda bland, kinda formulaic, and kinda sad. If this is the sort of instantly franchisable content that the streaming giant thinks its audiences want or need, then we’re truly doomed.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.

This is regurgitated shoot-’em-up nothingness fetishistically dressed in the cosplay of equality. The women are not characters to care about, but props to kill and be killed.

This is a movie that is one giant Easter Egg, cracked and rotten and sulphurous in its stink.