The condescending vibe and the whatever-ness of it all are disappointing given the collective calibre of the stars, revered, funny veterans who deserve better.

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.

Outrageous Fortune is a genuine waste of talent (Midler, Long and Coyote all have it) and time (the standard 90 minutes' worth). [30 Jan 1987]

The Son is a film that is very cruel to its characters, and by extension to its long-suffering audience.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

If Minecraft is the game where kids exercise their creativity by building new digital worlds full of tunnels and fortresses, A Minecraft Movie is where that creativity goes to die.

Non-existent direction, inane plot, inflated acting. [30 Sep 1987]

Once it is said that the helicopters are good and the movie is bad, there isn't much left to say about Fire Birds. [26 May 1990]

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

Trying to be off-the-wall, Amos & Andrew never gets off the ground. It ends up as politically correct as its title, and that ain't funny. [05 Mar 1993]

A series of implausable adventures, everything from killer cockroaches to world-tilting flash floods, punctuate this otherwise stupid action picture about Third World War survivors. [16 Nov 1977]

Sentimentality exceeds the bounds of the seasonal fantasy in Trapped in Paradise and ends up with all the charm of winter slush. [03 Dec 1994]

Not that Harbour is the reason that Violent Night lands like a lump of coal. He does what he can in a witless movie that is too easily satisfied with its own premise and often feels like it’s elbowing you in the ribs trying to get you to laugh along with it.

The premise - a crazed killer abused years before returns to wreak vengeance on the young - is so familiar that the audience can predict (and does: loudly) every "shock." [15 Oct 1980]

Dad, showcasing Jack Lemmon in a rubber wrinkle mask (he looks like an elderly E.T.), would no doubt have won more Emmy awards for Goldberg had it aired on the tube, but on screen, it's a tearjerking embarrassment.

One of the gorier and more witless horror films in recent memory. [19 Apr 1982]

There is so much action in the animated feature, The Transformers: The Movie, that you can't wait to get back into one of those Chrysler products whose vocabulary is limited to "A door is ajar," and "Thank you." [12 Aug 1986, p.C10]

While worse films have, no doubt, touched the heart of the general public, Mac and Me is not only crass, it's boring and insulting to children's intelligence. [16 Aug 1988]

Ross’s formulaic direction could have been delivered by a robot or algorithm and nobody would have noticed. Watching Father Stu feels like enduring a B-movie that would never see the inside of a cinema (the film is playing exclusively in theatres) and be instead relegated to the bottom of a streaming or VOD queue – only it holds the star power and charisma of Wahlberg.

From the projectionist played by Toby Jones who regularly pops up to vocalize what everyone onscreen and the audience is already well aware of – movies are an escape, of course! – to its eye-rolling treatment of Hilary’s mental health, Empire of Light is the most noxious kind of faux-benevolent “prestige” cinema.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Johnson, who is also a producer here, having shepherded Black Adam through a decade and a half of development, gets off relatively easy. The real victim, or perhaps perpetrator, is Collet-Serra.

If you can’t Smurf anything nice, then don’t Smurf anything at all. Such is the key lesson to be taken away by discerning parents this weekend after being dragged by their children to yet another big-screen adaptation of everyone’s second-favourite blue-man group.

It is all very, very stupid, But first-time director Simon McQuoid regrettably refuses to embrace that stupidity.

So many of Rebirth’s images and set pieces are lifeless, and no amount of on-location filming in Thailand – versus the soundstage green screenery so favoured by most of Jurassic’s blockbuster contemporaries – can hide the fact that very little in the screenplay makes logistical, narrative or emotional sense.

A three-hour oration, rambling and familiar and repetitive, during which director Oliver Stone uses the assassination of John Kennedy as an elaborate pretext for delivering a dull sermon. [20 Dec 1991]

In Scrooged, a sub-Saturday Night Live re-make parody of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Ghostbuster Bill Murray busts up two of the festive ghosts (Christmas Past and Future) and mugs more than Mr. Magoo. [24 Nov 1988, p.C19]

View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.

Director Gary Sherman, a special effects maven who also co-wrote the movie, soon gives in to heavy-handed cliche.

Moving Violations is mentally inert, another sawdust-filled sausage for the adolescent market.

Irresistible is toothless, it is weak-willed and it is depressingly unaware of either of these facts. If this is indeed Stewart’s response to the madness of the Trump era, then we should all be glad that he decided to depart The Daily Show when he did. It is clear that he didn’t have anything left to say.

Stripped of absolutely everything Absolute Beginners has borrowed from absolutely everything else, the entire film would fit absolutely snugly into a cockroach's shoe. [19 Apr 1986]

Supergirl is made by people who can make a woman fly halfway around the world and can't get a plot to walk around the block. [22 Dec 1984]

It's like flipping through five years of dog calendars.

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]

Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.

Occasionally, Murphy cuts loose with an ad-libbed riff that's almost funny, but then it's back to the slim-fast plot and the stick-on crudities. [03 Jul 1992]

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

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

Rad has the best opening credits sequence since the last James Bond picture, but it has nowhere to go from there. It doesn't even try. [3 Apr 1986, p.D6]

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

For a film insistent upon getting the dramaturgically correct 1985 Pepsi logo into the frame, very little effort seems to have been applied to exactitude elsewhere. Freddie Mercury deserves better.

The performers are powerless to bring life to this moribund courtroom drama...a snoozer.

The visual big top is the scourging and the crucifixion -- again and again, Gibson returns to the blood-letting. Again and again, we're exposed to the clinical repetition of a single act, until an alleged act of passion comes to seem boring and passionless. Is that not a definition of pornography?

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]

Office Christmas Party is a hopeless muddle. A joyless, laughless – that’s right, not even one laugh – affair that proves how indulgent and (worse) boring ensemble comedies such as this become when the ensemble has next to no natural chemistry and even less of a script to riff off of.

It's a comic-book idea that might have been fun. But it's beyond the reach of first-time feature director Kevin Donovan, who squanders his main asset, Jackie Chan, and fumbles the vital action sequences.

Today, homophobia may still blight many a queen’s family relations, but Stage Mother feels dated and formulaic.

Don't look for logic here. But if gore is your game, a motherlode awaits.

WITH the russet beauty of New Mexico as the setting, White Sands sports a nice look. With the angular Willem Dafoe in the lead role, White Sands boasts a solid performance. And with director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out) behind the camera, White Sands maintains a brisk pace. Now if it only had a script that made a lick of sense, White Sands might have been a good movie. It doesn't; it isn't. [24 Apr 1992]

Fails as a comedy-drama because it’s neither funny nor involving. But it fails as a buddy movie because Willis and Morgan make for a dull couple.

A kind of dumbed-down, souped-up action thriller in a quasi-"Lethal Weapon" mode.

Miracles from Heaven is mostly an embarrassment.

Phar Lap is another Australian horsy movie starring an American actor, Ron Leibman (Norma Rae), but this time the American's performance is the only redeeming feature in this otherwise tedious, slow-moving Down-Under tale about a fast-moving horse that should have been named Rocky. [20 Jul 1984]

Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.

Patch Adams is a flawed visionary, but surely he deserves better than this crass and manipulative movie.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

As a movie for today's girls, it's more than offensive. It's cheap. [11 May 1985]

Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.

If ever there's been a martial-arts movie that makes you feel as if you've been kicked in the head, surely it's Kung Pow! Enter the Fist.

I do see one bright future for this film: the Deep Water drinking game, where the Bingo squares read “Melinda’s dress falls off,” “Vic clenches his jaw,” and “Naked breast.” Everyone will end up very, very drunk

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Spoof chokes on the impossibility of ridiculing what was already ridiculous. [1 Nov 1993]

Can anyone still be rooting for Rocky or Rambo?

Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.

As always in Emmerich's rollicking Armageddons, the cannon speaks with an expensive bang, while the fodder gets afforded nary a whimper. Of course, that's just part of disaster's simple recipe: Blow us up, then blow us off.

Phantom still an auditory lobotomy.

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

The film’s ruse is a snooze. The only thing jacked here is the hour and a half wasted watching this film.

The heavy-handed score, narrow performances (Nicole Munoz as the repeatedly terrified daughter; Laurie Holden as the dense mum) and weak dialogue all fail to justify a provocative ending that overturns the exorcising conventions of the genre.

The message the movie preaches? The ills of a consumer society, I guess - all those needful things needlessly bought. And the best way to put that preaching into practice? Shut your wallet and pass on this little treat. [27 Aug 1993]

As the teenage new-waver in a land of corn-fed farmers, Bacon has an aggressive, nervous edginess, but is ultimately too limited an actor, or too poorly directed, to carry the leaden weight of the script. [20 Feb 1984]

It comes across, however, as a 90-minute flirtation with a quarter of an idea, the gist of which barely impinges on the consciousness. [24 Aug 1987]

The tedious, tortuous storyline and lifeless cast are two larger problems.

HAT in the name of artsy pretension do we have here? That Arizona Dream is a nightmare is beyond dispute - it's the sort of murky, symbol-laden trap that European directors often fall into when they cross the pond to take on the entire social stratum of the United States. The culprit in question is Emir Kusturica - Yugoslavian born, Czech trained, and now American buffaloed. This thing makes The Red Desert look coherent. [19 Nov 1994]

Sappy and predictable.

An awkward, needlessly dark, atrocious mess whose visual tics courtesy of director Tomas Alfredson amount to, basically, snow. So. Much. Snow. Shockingly, a fetish for the white stuff in no way overcomes any clunky narrative obstacles here – and they are legion.

This picture breaks through the limits and goes way beyond the pale -- it seems to enjoy irking us for the sheer hell of it.

It's unclear whether any of the actors here have promising political careers since their only purposes are to serve as prey, adversaries and involuntary incubators to their guests.

His take on metaphor is painfully literal, his approach to style is hilariously Hollywood. In lieu of black-and-white realism, we're given visual shtick. [02 May 1995]

There are easily 54 reasons to dis 54, but let's start and finish with the obvious: The script plays like a proud offering from the lead hand at the Cliché Factory.

The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.

Somewhere in literary afterlife, dear reader, Jane Austen has just rolled over and reached for her musket.

The Virginity Hit is another slice of "American Pie," one more youth comedy that encourages its cast (and audience) to ridicule a fumbling, well-meaning teenager.

Land of the Lost is one of those films so caught up in its concept it has forgotten its audience.

Delta Farce is so relentlessly racist (and homophobic), without ever having the intelligence to pass that bigotry off as satire, that viewers will be left thinking "Borat" has a soft touch.

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

Where the hell is the movie?

From his limp, liberal feminist pulpit (from which he also spews sexist jokes), Moore makes a condescending case for why Clinton isn’t only the least-bad choice, but an actually good choice. His thesis? Basically: she’s the pantsuit Beyoncé!

The madness of Madhouse simply eludes me. [16 Feb 1990]

A shamelessly commercial and determinedly vulgar director, such as Flash Gordon's Mike Hodges, might have made the film work; it might have succeeded on one level instead of failing on many. [13 Dec 1980, p.E7]

The filmmakers have also advertised that their new movie eliminates the "Pow! Right in the kisser!" threats of spousal abuse that permeated the original series. The question of audience abuse has yet to be addressed.

C'mon, in matters of haunted-house inhabitation, settling into an ex-mortuary is like renting above a dentist's office -- ashen faces and ghastly screams come with the territory.

More than merely another bad movie, it's the most depressing development yet in Coppola's career. It's a would-be cash cow bred cynically to excrete money, the arty answer to "Child's Play 2" or "Back to the Future III."

Just when you think it's going to rollick, this lazy movie rolls over and plays dead When Honeymoon's ends, it's not a moment too soon. [28 Aug 1992]

One of the most preposterous efforts by any major director in recent memory.

Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.