The film never weaves together its various strands as tightly as the soundtrack does, and it’s unlikely that those unfamiliar with the cultures of the Caribbean will understand where everyone is coming from.

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]

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.

There isn’t a single genuinely sharp sequence in the entire movie. The casting of Robert De Niro as an ex-Mafioso hiding in witness protection is witty in only the silliest, most superficial way. It’s a joke with its own tinny, built-in laugh track.

Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.

A stunningly unnecessary comedy, Fist Fight perpetuates unoriginal characters, a preposterous premise and a half-hearted stand-up-for-yourself message.

At 70 minutes, this groin and groan comedy seems almost dismissively short, but don't believe the myths you've been told: longer is not always better.

FALLING Down is a nasty bit of business, a two-faced manipulator that condones what it pretends to condemn. Cluttered and often downright silly, it's not much of a movie, but it is a fascinating sign of the times - a litmus test for every prejudice and fear harboured by the white middle class in ailing, urban America. [26 Feb 1993, p.C6]

If there is a one-word skeleton key to unlocking Guns Akimbo, it might simply be: “sloppy.”

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

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

It's too dumb for adults and too sophisticated for kids. Or vice-versa. [9 June 1993]

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

The result plays like an extended Pepsi commercial without the Pepsi.

Veers between crude and cloying.

Wayne's World has been engineered to amuse people who are mirror images of its heroes, but it goes wickedly wrong: It's so dumb it talks down to the stupid.

A cheap pickup from the Playboy Channel that was too soft for Playboy but appropriately raunchy for the college movie crowd. [27 Apr 1984]

About as endearing as unanesthetized gum surgery.

Barely dusted off, the humourless stuff is served up straight - damned if it isn't a Hillbillies homage. [19 Oct 1993]

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

Ho, ho, horrible.

Even the emotional foundations of the Entourage franchise, those oaths of fealty, family and friendship, have rotted, hollowed out by the characters’ tendencies toward flippant sexism, homophobia and straight obnoxiousness.

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

The entire endeavour is so crass, sloppy, and infuriating (especially the “twist” ending, although the film contains no real ending at all) that it treads close to zero-star, brand-killing territory. But then Jude Law pops up all-too-briefly as a younger, sexier version of Albus Dumbledore, and everything seems mostly right with the Potter-verse. But the magic, it’s fleeting.

Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.

Hollow to the core. [14 Feb 1987]

Grumpy, dopey and wheezy. In this dispiriting spectacle of feuding codgers, two of the finer comic actors of their genration are reduced to being cute and talking dirty. [31 Dec 1993, p.C3]

Death Wish 3 is a little like granddad yelling, You kids better get out of my yard, and then following up his threat by tossing a grenade onto the patio and turning the kids into human hamburger. [01 Nov 1985]

Pretty limp, and works far better in theory than practice.

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

Sounds promising. What a disappointment then to report that Just Like Heaven is more like purgatory, a sweating, straining attempt to marry the wisecracking fury of the modern sitcom to the classic Rock-Doris, Cary-Kate romantic comedy.

What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.

In the case of When in Rome, oh to do what the Romans used to do: Toss the bloody thing to the lions.

It's a going-through-the-motions domestic comedy that makes, say, "Cheaper By The Dozen" look like a heart-warming, cutting-edge laugh riot.

Aside from uninspired movie-parody gags, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore suffers from gadget overload.

Why are movies about sophisticated technology and hidden persuaders and subliminal seduction - Agency is the other example that springs immediately to mind - so technically sloppy, so incapable of persuading even the smallest child of their plausibility and so utterly unable to seduce someone dying to be ravished by a well-made thriller? [2 Nov 1981]

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

Norbit was memorably offensive. Coming 2 America is merely offensively forgettable.

The movie feels like a form of aversion therapy designed to take the fun out of dumb.

The plot, for instance, doesn’t make all that much sense, what with its heroic space chimps and evil space apes and sly space foxes, all of whom don’t seem to realize what a half-baked narrative they’re operating in.

Horror at Christmas might work, but tedium doesn't.

On film, Bennett's bouncing brainchild is Richard Attenborough's Workout Tape, love story attached; the specificity is gone. The 16 auditioning dancers could be any people or all people. [11 Dec 1985]

One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).

So here’s an idea: Maybe filmmakers should shoot what Ashton’s up to off-camera, because not many laughs are making it to the screen.

Space Chimps might have been saved, in fact, by using real monkeys in the astronaut roles. Or, better yet, by having a monkey in the director's chair.

Anything but a seasonal treat. This special-effects-heavy, big-budget musical from expatriate Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky (Runaway Train, Tango & Cash) ranks as one of the most misguided children's films ever made.

The plot-turns are mounting by the minute, but they're not making a lick of sense. In fact, they're smacking of desperation, the sort of desperation that incites a writer to pull "taut" so tightly that all logic snaps, the sort that drives the movie on and on and on in search of a convincing third act and a resolving climax. [10 Feb 1992]

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

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

Its pedestrian execution and the general sense that you’re watching a facsimile of something so much better is overwhelming – meaning it’s beyond underwhelming.

This is a miserable sequel to the modestly well-reviewed Final Destination.

I hope that in the name of her decades-spanning career and six Academy Award nominations (plus one win), we might do MacLaine the small courtesy of forgetting that this pedestrian and dull comedy ever happened.

The script, written by neophyte Alex von Tunzelmann, is appalling, its plot simplistic and its dialogue alternating between misplaced bits of contemporary psycho-babble and improbable grandiloquence.

If this movie doesn’t leave you howling at the very idea of demonic possession, you’re in dire need of an exorcist.

Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]

When Dune is not inept, confusing, ridiculous or unpleasant, it's boring. [14 Dec 1984]

Despite its $20-million budget, Me Before You is cheap; and just like a person who has more money than he knows what to do with, this film equates wealth with value and vulnerability with death.

In a picture that begins with a torching scene and goes on to mine the burning question of the rights of abused women to strike back, Provoked never ignites the screen with clear argument or noble passion.

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.

Reportedly, the movie began life as a short film, and if it actually ran for 22 minutes with a few commercial breaks, like a good sitcom should, Filth and Wisdom could be bearable. At 84 minutes, the movie feels both overpadded and underdeveloped.

The film is a mawkish mess, only occasionally alleviated by the performances or Shange's poetry.

In its entirety, Miss Bala seems to exist merely for one shot near its end: Rodriguez strutting in slow-motion across the screen while wearing an evening gown and brandishing an assault rifle. And while yes, she does look bad-ass, there’s no way in hell it makes up for the film’s preceding 90 minutes of patchy plotting and lifeless writing.

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

And De Bont's effects are wildly over the top, devoid of the stylish cuts and intriguing angles that enriched the original. In fact, there's so little panache in his destructive action that it begins to seem like a weird act of self-destruction.

Eventful, polished, and knuckle-bitingly dull, the 10th film adapted from a novel by Nicholas Sparks, combines fate, bull riding and some powerful Hollywood bloodlines among its young cast.

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

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

Poor genre efforts like Backstabbing for Beginners hurt cinema’s chance to survive and thrive as the greatest medium for storytelling.

It's a turning-the-tables story a five-year-old could appreciate -- except for the confusing crowd scenes and haphazard camera work. Technically speaking, Waters' skills haven't improved much over the years.

A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.

Richard Pryor can be a funny man, but not in his latest film. As static as moving pictures can get, Moving chronicles the adventures of a relentlessly middle-class family forced to relocate from choice New Jersey to nowhere Idaho. [10 Mar 1988]

There is no acting to speak of (and to speak of Cruise's performance at all would be embarrassing) but there is a point of view. This is yet another Ramboesque instalment in the current American obsession with might making right. As a movie, Top Gun is negligible and near ridiculous; as a cultural phenomenon, it is sobering and faintly frightening. [16 May 1986, p.C5]

Ostensibly an homage to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, Louis C.K.’s “secret” movie – it comes to TIFF only a few months after it was shot, with no prior publicity – is more an overlong rebuke to allegations of the filmmaker’s own sexual misconduct.

Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.

A Cinderella Story has little of the smarts that distinguished this spring's big teen hit, "Mean Girls", which starred Duff's arch-rival, Lindsay Lohan. Whereas that film presented a genuinely complex and enjoyably snarky portrait of modern teen life, this effort is content to be another candy-coloured fantasy.

Yes, Virginia, there is a poop fairy, which is why studio heads persist in tucking the likes of RV under their pillows, confident they'll awaken Monday morning to find all that brown turned straight to green.

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

More manipulative, maudlin trash from the Disney-Pixar content farm.

Old Dogs is offensive mostly because it wastes time.

McAvoy and Paulson fight as hard as they can against Shyamalan’s instincts – even though, as with "Split," it’s gross to watch dissociative identity disorder played for horror and laughs – but theirs' is a pointless battle. The somnambulist Willis and Jackson have the better idea, dozing through their scenes until the cheques clear. (Jackson, to be fair, has the benefit of his character being literally asleep for the film’s first hour.)

Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.

There is no energy here. No sense of movie invention or fun.

So why are they divorcing, you ask. Who knows? Certainly not the creators of the very confused Celeste and Jesse Forever.

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

Plot ain't where it's at here. An Innocent Man is guilty as charged and innocent as hell. [06 Oct 1989]

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.

Jefferson in Paris isn't merely wooden; it's concrete. Nor is it simply bad; the thing is astonishingly bad. Sure looks pretty though. [08 Apr 1995]

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

The film is a howler of illogical, overwrought emotion, inexplicable actions and sudden bursts of bloody violence. [03 Mar 1984]

Occasionally a movie comes along that’s such an awkward compilation of ideas it fascinates: The Forger, a Boston-set melodrama involving cancer, Impressionist art and deadbeat dads, is only about half that good.

There may be something to Kenan and Kel,but you see only hints of it in this movie, which is pretty much standard-issue, French-fries-up-the-nose stuff. [26 July 1997, p.C7]

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]

There is no narrative tension in the film, however, just a variety of grisly crucifixions. And the morality tales are blood-stained window dressing.

The Love Guru is a comedy like the Leafs are a hockey team.

Anyone interested in the contemporary debate between atheists and religious believers will gain nothing of value from the documentary The Unbelievers.

Winterbottom is not out to thrill, but to lecture on the truth, which, he believes, can only be found in fiction.

The Family is running from The Hun (Malcolm McDowell). The Family is not running as fast as I would like to have run from The Passage. [29 Mar 1979]

The Wicker Man is one of those "what were they thinking?" movies.