Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.

What The Kitchen serves is a first film sorely in need of a basic primer on how to go about constructing a movie.

A promising premise simply devolves into just another "Definitely, Maybe" or "The Proposal."

To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.

Director Joel Schumacher has fashioned a film foul enough to qualify as an inadvertent satire - it's obvious Schumacher (D.C. Cab) wants the audience to care about the septet, but the writing is so rocky, the situations so contrived, the acting so awkward and the characters so self-centred, witless and amoral, it's almost as if St. Elmo's Fire had been conceived as a vicious anti-youth movie, a calculated attempt to destroy en masse the reputations of some of Hollywood's hottest young actors. [28 June 1985]

If Leguizamo imports a hint of pathos into his performance, Waterston adds a dollop of menace to hers, delivering another of Ross's attacks on what separates girls from men. In this world, women are their own worst enemy.

McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.

This one is headed straight for star Tommy Lee Jones's career-blooper reel.

It is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate “guilty pleasure” box.

A brutal and brutally stupid thriller about brutal and brutally stupid people,[16 Feb 1990]

The plot is a mishmash of murder, cute pets, lost luggage, compulsive gambling and domestic disharmony, and has holes in it you could pilot a yacht through. [10 March 1992]

Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.

Like Frankenstein's monster before the lightning strikes, it's all recycled cold flesh and bolts, without a twitch of originality.

There is no pot smoking, no pill popping, no booze guzzling and decidedly no laughs...Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong can be skilful comedians. They should stop wasting their talents writing and directing this "more-adventures-of" dross. [31 July 1984]

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.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

It doesn't take a foolish romantic to hope that Myles and Elisabeth live happily ever after. The world just isn't ready for 20 More Dates.

The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.

The chance to say something new or revealing about school shooters is squandered, and all the urgent reality runs out.

Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.

An achingly sincere but often staggeringly inept attempt to introduce Walsch's message to movie audiences.

Once again Anna Faris manages to be the best thing in another not very good Anna Faris movie.

An occasionally inventive but ultimately plodding horror film.

It's all meant, I suppose, to conjure up cold visions of Terminators and Robocops past, or, in this post-9/11 world, of bin Ladens and Bushes present. If so, conjure at will.

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.

Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.

This time out, writer and director Mark Steven Johnson has bounced back with a movie so full of camp spirit it should come with tents and a marshmallow roast.

While the outdoor sequences were filmed in New Zealand's Woodhill State Forest – the movie's most stunning 3-D moments – Yogi Bear does feature notable "Canadian content" via two Ottawa-born thespians.

Filled with visual potential, yet Levinson can't tap it. He's just a whole lot more comfortable trying to tame the human software than the technical hardware.

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.

The missing ingredient, of course, is script.

This so-called comedy unfolds with embarrassing desperation and mind-numbing vulgarity.

It's a con, a movie that tries to lure unsuspecting teen-age audiences into the theatres with the promise of offensiveness, stupidity and puerility - which, after all, are almost traditions in summer teen entertainment - and then ambushes them with a clumsy, unfunny movie that, rather than revel in its own potential for bad taste, attempts to cram messages about growing up and being responsible down the teenage gullet.

Not quite repellent enough to avoid tedium, Hannibal Rising is both too familiar in portraying Hannibal as a Dracula-like aristocrat monster, and crud in its exploitation of wartime atrocities.

The narrative is schlocky and groaningly over-familiar, but the film is also uncharacteristically drab visually, with a washed-out colour palette and anemic pacing.

With no help from the dialogue, Kidman doesn't have a clue how to make clueless interesting. Not for lack of trying. Her efforts, which often consist of channelling Elizabeth Montgomery by way of Marilyn Monroe, are painful but insistent.

Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.

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.

If you’re up for mild startles and unchallenging entertainment, a trip into The Forest should be right up your alley, if not your path.

This is a story of villainous oppression, unfortunately told with oppressive earnestness.

Isn't just ordinarily lame, it easily exceeds any normal requirements for witless sleaze.

Formula sequel right down to its zany subtitle -- Armed and Fabulous. Bullock deserves better. We deserve better. Rev up that '57 Chevy.

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

This paint-by-numbers romantic comedy is chock-a-block with jokey stereotypes – Americans are obnoxious, Canadians polite, and the Greeks just dance – yet lacking in any real drama, only occasionally mustering enough charm or humour to rise above a predictable formula.

Being risibly bad, The Happening is at least worth a laugh. Exactly one laugh, by my reckoning, and completely unintended but no less full-throated for that.

The Dark Tower is King’s ultimate roller coaster – twisting and stomach-clenching and terrifying but, above all, fun. If only this version was as thrilling a ride.

The Last Witch Hunter is redeemed through complex visual-effects work that aptly illuminates Goodman’s netherworld. Further, Diesel’s stolid performance is balanced through the supporting star power of Caine – even with criminally limited scenes – and Rose Leslie’s “dream walker,” whose earnestness makes even the world of a macho witch hunter seem entirely plausible.

A horror-less horror flick where the monstrous Thing doesn't even put in an appearance until well past the two-thirds mark. Sorry, ugly guy, but that goes way beyond fashionably late. [18 Jan 1989]

Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.

Wayans will do anything for a laugh, and twice if necessary. If Carrey wears a broken front tooth in Dumb and Dumber, Wayans has two front teeth capped with gold. If Carrey sells a dead bird to a blind child, Wayans shaves the heads of a blind boy and his seeing-eye dog. [24 March 1995]

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.

LawAbiding Citizen smells a bit musty these days. Indeed, in an era when the debate has shifted from too little state vigilance to too damn much, this thing seems almost quaint.

Despite an evident appetite for mayhem, however, Bay is not the right guy to produce slasher movies. Horror requires intimacy.

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.

With the exception of a few demented scenes teleported over from a stranger, better comedy . . . Thunder Force is as sloppy and disappointing as the label “A Ben Falcone Film” previously suggested.

Perhaps the best that can be said for Year One is that it aims low and hits the mark.

For all its built-in cynicism and tired tropes, Red One is not as insufferable as you’d expect. At the least you can count on Evans and Johnson committing to the bit and selling all the broad gags they can, which should be enough to win over the elves in your family.

The plot's not so hot -- it feels like it was jotted down by someone on an after-dinner napkin.

It’s not like the premise isn’t intriguing. It’s just that the result is the kind of soulless response you’d expect from AI, should it be prompted to make a “screenlife” version of Minority Report, with some elements from Speed.

Only adults with 'Smurf-holm syndrome' could love this film.

As Alice, Wasikowska, who has lost the injured look that made her so effective the first time out, creates a character who is fundamentally sweet, likeable and loyal.

A stupendously dull action-comedy that is devoid of both thrills and humour.

For those who are looking for a Capracornish sentimental tale about the Christmas spirit lost and re-discovered in the harried modern world, this holiday film is far too acerbic and frantic to play the heart strings. [22 Nov 1996, p.D6]

In truth, what follows is less disturbing than intriguing – to audiences hip to the mechanics of horror flicks, it's rare fun to be fooled, and this one is pretty damned clever.

Imaginary is as dour a slog as M3GAN was a bloody bit of self-aware camp.

Otherwise, Brody, Scott and Jenifer Lewis (as Montana’s imperious oft-married mom) give this formulaic material maximum comic spin.

Sure ain't a movie. Nope, it's a product, pure and very simple and carefully tested to sell to the widest possible market.

A formulaic thriller, treated in a style that's just shy of outright parody.

The Black Stallion Returns is not a magic monument - it's only a terrific film for kids. [26 Mar 1983]

In a franchise rife with missteps, this sequel does not dishonour its source. Hats off (and heads off) to the film’s creators.

A convincing, reasonably co-ordinated action movie. Nothing special, but lovers of the genre will enjoy the workouts, especially if they bring night-vision glasses.

Confused, and confusing.

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

No one is likely to mistake Excess Baggage for a great movie, but it is an intriguing piece of pop sociology.

The movie's uninteresting characters, boneheaded dialogue and flagrantly nonsensical narrative detract considerably from the virtues of the visual design.

If you thought "300" was silly, think of 10,000 BC as 33.333 times sillier.

Means and ends meet briefly, shrug and disappear under a torrent of self-flattering clichés.

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

In your typical subpar Hollywood romcom, there’s only one tedious love story to put up with. Well, Valentine’s Day (such a clever title) does a whole lot better than that: It offers 10 tedious love stories to put up with.

This is a movie fantasy, folks -- like James Bond, without the smarm and martinis.

Certainty, then, is the watchword, and you can be certain of three things: There will be plenty of juvenile energy to power the vehicle; there will be a few mild chuckles en route; there will be no reason to remember the ride the instant it ends.

Director Roger Goldby tinkers with important issues around aging, only to steamroll it all with a slipshod script.

It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?

Graham Baker, a British director of television commercials, makes a debut that is technically auspicious, and Robert Paynter and Phil Meheux, the cinematographers, have approximated the rich, chocolaty chiaroscuro of The Godfather saga. Does anyone care? [24 Mar 1981]

Toddlers will dig the shenanigans, but bewildered adults should root for the annihilation of this tapped-out series.

Not only is it mindless, it is also racist. Not only is it racist, it is also incompetent. Not only is it incompetent, it is also unfunny. [17 Dec 1979]

The Real Cancun is no crime; at worst, it's a kind of staged tribute to "Porky's" done by amateur actors.

Critic-proof, devoid of plot or acting, and quick to mock anyone who might make something of it.

“Bodhi,” in Sanskrit, is short for “being of wisdom.” In Hawaii, “Keanu” means “cool mountain breeze.” And, in Hollywood, Point Break means never having to bother with a plausible plot.

Erased, I predict, is a word that will be used to describe what happens to your memory of this cloned facsimile of a movie immediately after watching it.

For the better part of this movie, Elektra appears to be a sensible, stylish young superhero.

Mr. Destiny is a sedated puppy of a movie - meant to be all warm and cuddly, it just lies there like a furry lump, waiting for an invigorating spark that never comes. You almost feel sorry for the inert thing - it wants so much to be loved, and does so little to earn it. [16 Oct 1990]

And the living are pretty lifeless themselves. As led by the often wooden Tom Cruise playing the U.S. soldier who inadvertently wakes the dead, and directed by an indecisive Alex Kurtzman, the cast is offered some passable action sequences but struggles with weak dialogue and uneven comedy.

Unlike Griswold vacations past, the peril in which the family finds itself isn’t leavened by anything funny.

The plot and most action sequences here are as cookie-cutter as the community homes Quan’s Gable is selling.

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

There is semi-purpose and not insignificant pleasure to be had in Apatow’s experiment. The Netflix production isn’t the comedy kingmaker’s best film by a wide margin (though it is his shortest, which still isn’t saying much), but it works in spite of itself.