The two actors at the centre of these high-concept comedies are good, giving and game, but they’ve been cut a raw deal by trite material that belittles their very existence.

More rant than rollick, it's just ain't funny enough.

The star turns are Red's raison d'être, with the winking performances filling the place of any credible dramatic tension.

The script is terrible - a confounding mish-mash of action-thriller chases, sci-fi travelogue and phony political intrigue.

The problem is, while alluding to the depressing state of things, the gleeful fun Gunn insists on having, with his kitschy aesthetic and silly humour, can feel forced.

This parade of admiration is almost as exhausting as the experience of a Motörhead concert.

But wouldn't it be heavenly if a like proportion of Tinseltown producers believed in an existing need for a good script. Because this one ain't good; in fact, it's hellishly mediocre, the kind that aims for holiday charm and settles for workaday torpor.

As compared to both X and Pearl, West’s bag of cinema tricks in MaXXXine reaches a level of engagement that feels both compulsive and abridged.

Cry-Baby is snifflingly nice. By going too far with its teardrop motif, it does the soggily unthinkable: it waters John Waters down. [6 Apr 1990]

Running Scared's relationship to "The Cooler" is roughly that of industrial metal to a quaint torch song.

Puerile and idiotic it may be, but Superhero Movie is nonetheless smarter than most of its lowbrow brethren in the Hollywood sub-sub-category known as the spoof movie.

Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.

Like "Everest," Adrift is a movie throbbing with an audience’s anxiety – and yet it is not particularly dramatic.

And veteran director Costa-Gavras, whose early work ("Z", "State Of Siege", "Missing") proves that he's no stranger to sociopolitical complexities, might well have been the man to make it. But not from this script -- it starts off as puerile and then regresses.

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.

No longer content with simple conservatism, this horror is downright totalitarian.

No, the trouble isn't with them but with a screenplay (by Angus MacLachlan) that loads their characters with too much symbolic baggage and then points them off in obscure directions.

ONE THING about The Pick-up Artist : it's fast. Crazy fast, like a manic 2-year-old in a major pout - all energy and no direction. This is a picture for the channel-hopping set, something to watch with half an eye while all your mind is coasting elsewhere, less a movie than a feature- length trailer, a series of short, cluttered scenes cut to a rock 'n' roll score and leading . . . . Well, that's the other thing about The Pick-up Artist: it leads precisely nowhere. [18 Sept 1987]

Apparently, the idea of their passion is enough to save them from a life of boredom - if only it had the same happy effect on us.

What hurts Miles Ahead, though, is a lack of imagination.

If it weren’t for Binoche’s warmth, the film might easily sink beneath the stereotype of French culture as overly talky and sex obsessed.

When the picture is good, it inspires hope and affection; when it's bad, it calls forth sighs and whispers. Lookin' To Get Out is a failure, but it's the kind of failure you feel sorry for. [11 Oct 1982]

A story based on exceptional facts gets converted into an unexceptional movie.

Never before have the demands of my inner man-child been so stirred, though, than while experiencing Deadpool 2, a movie that feels scribbled in pencil crayon, drenched in Jolt cola and coated with the dust of a thousand discarded bags of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

About 45 minutes worth of funny stuff awkwardly stretched to 84 minutes.

The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.

The wee mousie is fun, all right, yet like the occasionally ragged editing, the fun just gets haphazardly wedged in.

Heavy Metal is a first-class entertainment for the class of people whose eardrums are as strong as the pans of a steel band, whose nerves could be used to conduct electricity and whose fantasies tend to the leathery: it is, in other words, a movie for horny, hell-raising teen- agers. [7 Aug 1981]