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]

Sitting through this 100 or so minutes of painfully loud sound, and ham-fisted editing might best be likened to being slapped about the head repeatedly. It is insulting; it will give you a headache; and it should make you very angry. [21 Jul 1984]

Frankly, 2 Hearts is the drama this year deserves. One that starts with promise before descending into madness.

The 3-D is a pain, and the excitable editing, slo-mo and speeded-up action frustrate attempts to watch the athleticism on display, but the last half-hour takes it up a notch.

It is a slow-moving, self-insistent and exhausting trip. The end can’t come soon enough.

The boorish, juvenile Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is the proverbial turd in the Jacuzzi – you can’t pin down who’s responsible, but it’s a floater that ruins the party.

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.

With his heavy features and grimacing shyness, Dante provides the best entertainment in Swimfan.

The script wants desperately to be about the unfathomable nature of love. The best it can deliver is this: “Love is loving someone who is covered in snot.” It’s all quirked up, but goes nowhere.

The manner in which the writer, Richard Matheson, and Jeannot Szwarc, in his glory days the director of Jaws II, conspire to tell the story should not only render the audience tearless, but speechless as well. [11 Oct 1980, p.E7]

Pathfinder is aimed more at the action-figure crowd than the history buffs.

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.

The film makes up for any shortcomings with witty writing and vivid, brightly coloured set pieces. Children will be entertained, and parents won’t regret tagging along.

Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.

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

Baby it’s a wild film, but not Murray’s best and not Levinson’s either.

Regrettably, and predictably, Force of Nature isn’t interestingly bad – it’s just bad.

Just my luck that I saw the trailer for the film several times and already knew all of this, which made the long-form version of the movie redundant.

It's the sort of visual joke you would wince at in a 1940s movie; to see it nowadays, you're tempted to dismiss it as unintentional.

It's doubtful that today's children would have any patience for the stagy 1956 version, so the current animated offering, despite its flaws, at least opens a door to the music.

Tedious, baffling and ultimately laughable.

Sparks’s preposterous approach has crystalized into cliché.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

A crashing bore.

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]

It’s tempting to think Hitman undermines any beauty it musters with its habit of ridiculousness.

Zeroville features a lot of fancy cuts, freeze frames and buried imagery because it is, well, about a film editor. It will either make you feel like you’re having an anxiety attack after overindulging at our country’s legalized cannabis buffet or you can roll with it. Either way, please hydrate.

The movie is, however, generous in its condescension: Given enough tolerance, cash and a good sex manual, it says, even the mentally handicapped can be just as middle-class and cute as you or me.

Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.

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!

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

Perhaps explanations for all these improbable scenarios were lost on the cutting-room floor during Dolan’s notoriously prolonged editing process.

Writer/director Gus Van Sant, who's built his reputation on the romantic decadence of "Drugstore Cowboy" and "My Own Private Idaho," completely misses the poetry and the irony of the book. [20 May 1994]

The movie is so relentlessly self-congratulatory, you can't help becoming thoroughly sick of it.

Howard the Duck is the end of the line: any more infantile than this, and the filmmakers are going to vanish into the nearest womb. As a comedy, Howard the Duck is less humorous than that well- known Lucas laugh riot, Return of the Jedi, but it is good at one thing - wasting money. [02 Aug 1986, p.D9]

The film is a popcorn-crowd pleaser, but a “yippee ki-yay” or two away from something more memorable.

In the end, a few genuinely funny moments aside, the script is simply too predictable and unvarying to earn the viewer's loyalty.

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]

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

Farrah Fawcett offers to this corrupt "entertainment" a small measure of the fresh innocence Marilyn Monroe used to bring to her movies; watching her work under these circumstances is like watching a maiden being thrown to Moloch. [22 June 1981]

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.

Handsomely mounted, emotionally involving sci-fi movies don't often show up in the darkened galaxies of our theatre chains. So Alvart's English-language debut is definitely a film you want to catch on the big screen. Just don't sit too close, lest you end up with a dose of pandorum.

It’s just such a shining example of a dull studio comedy.

It's not a winner and not quite a loser either. Like many a beauty contestant, it's glib instead of serious, stylish instead of substantial. Miss Universe, it could never be. Homecoming queen, maybe.

The young couple is far less compelling, which is one reason why the remake is only intermittently effective. Bland and dim-witted, it's hard to see why they'd attract Ryder's wrath.

After the first hour or so of strained puns and wisecracks, you start feeling that the sooner the ending comes, the happier it will be.

The pretty good stuff comes early, when Nic and Ron, weary of wasting women and children, suffer an attack of conscience and desert the Crusades.

Veers between crude and cloying.

Isn't exactly what you'd call fresh. But although it borrows ingredients from many familiar Christmas flicks, it's got a sly twinkle of its own.

There's a lesson behind Gentlemen Broncos , the new film from director Jared Hess: Don't try to mock above your talent level.

There is not really anything that could be called suspense in Amityville 3-D, at least, any more than the suspense involved in waiting for a pop tart to pop. [22 Nov 1983]

Pixels is a movie without wit, without jokes, with nothing to say but plenty to regurgitate.

But for a lightweight summer romantic comedy, The Perfect Man delivers the goods and includes a couple of scenes that are, surprisingly, fresh and quite funny, both of which, incidentally, involve the music of Styx.

Familiar in its outline but unusual in the details, Last Knights feels like a year’s worth of post-midnight cable TV viewing run through a blender and served warm for your viewing amusement.

Delgo is blocky and hastily coloured in. Characters are stiff; there is little variety in movement. It's a cheapo product ideally suited for a Saturday-morning pyjama vigil in front of a small screen. And the film suffers from a poverty of imagination to boot.

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.

Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.

The movie features Eddie Murphy as a vampire who is both cool and sucks. The same evaluation might apply to the entire film, which is neither as good as it might be nor as bad as you might expect. The long- in-the-tooth Dracula story, which has been updated and set in the black community of contemporary Brooklyn, is a pulpy mishmash of horror and comedy, equal parts the product of its comedian star and its creepshow director, Wes Craven. [1 Nov 1995, p.C2]

Uh oh, pull over, I think I'm gonna be carsick.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

If you are expecting a pleasant evening of escapism, you will be cruelly fooled. The editor responsible for the trailer is clearly a genius.

Marks the emergence of a talented young actress. Not Britney -- who has the amateur's tendency to stand looking awkward after delivering her lines -- but Manning (Crazy/Beautiful), who plays Mimi with the gusto of a young Holly Hunter. Though she has little competition here, when she's on the screen she pretty much owns it.

You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

Much as I have enjoyed the actor’s embrace of scuzzy revenge-thrillers, he may have hit the point of diminishing returns. Put it this way: Blacklight is a movie that Bruce Willis would deem below his standards.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

Chan's comedic gifts and still-nimble moves are wasted in a string of unimaginative household calamities and practical jokes.

For all its current political incorrectness, the original film at least attacked hypocrisy; this one practises it.

Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.

Any chance the film might have had is trashed at the outset by Chase's disengaged style of non- acting and blas approach to pants-dropping. [28 Dec 1981]

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.

It makes "Little Man," "Scary Movie 3" and "Beerfest" look like comic masterpieces.

Very little of it works.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

A rip-off and a rerun.

Awkwardly constructed with laughable romantic suggestions, sword-based gore and a whimsical approach to chronological accuracy, the story involves the Indian uprising against the British East India Company.

Norbit is pretty much a bad-taste sinkhole.

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

Both actors seem too callow and shallow to actually feel all those emotional raptures they are supposedly experiencing. This is a problem exacerbated by the talent of the supporting cast.

Warning: If you are experiencing nausea, headache, fatigue or vomiting, you might have just watched Songbird.

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.

Apparently Fantastic Four doesn’t want to be another dumb superhero action flick, but try as they might to turn it into a movingly realistic drama, director Josh Trank and a pair of screenwriters never succeed, creating instead a comic book movie that is bizarrely short on humour and action.

It's always rather sad to watch gifted performers stranded in a tepid thriller. You can see them, as professional pretenders, trying to believe that they're creating a character, but the lie is transparent -- all they're really doing is advancing a retarded plot.

Little Man will probably satisfy fans of the Wayans.

A 105-minute cringe-a-thon that reduces the Katharine Hepburn of her generation to a sitcom harpy presiding over a brood of Valley Girl chicks.

The faith-based War Room is so named because life is a battle to be strategized, with, in the case of God’s infomercial of a film, a large bedroom closet serving as scripture-plastered command centre.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

If the muddled plot and aesthetic chaos of Dolittle leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, seek the antidote – an episode of "Planet Earth."

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

The Choice’s best attractions are the talented Benjamin Walker and the watery, small-town North Carolina scenery.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive.

I can’t imagine that the filmmakers behind the new horror film Isabelle were thinking about anything other than cold, hard cash while producing this utterly disposable work.

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]

Basic Instinct 2 is double trouble -- the femme is to die for, the film is to die from.

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