The Nut Job has a certain lo-fi charm, but it’s hardly a world-beater; with all due respect to Surly, Rocky J. Squirrel’s place in the pantheon would seem to be safe for another 50 years.

Don't mean to boast, but I can suspend my disbelief as willingly as any credulous moviegoer. Yet not even an industrial crane would have helped here.

The story is bland, the action incoherent, the surprises detestably nonsensical, the humour never rising above the level of a half-smirk. And for a movie that gathers the world’s most perfectly sculpted denizens, everything is bafflingly sexless. If Red Notice is the future of the big and shiny movie, then we are now in the era of the neutered blockbuster.

His first visit was bad, this is worse. [09 Nov 1990]

The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.

The trouble is that the plot is so elliptical to be almost unfollowable (though it helps to have seen the trailer).

Refn’s expectation-defying choice is laudable in theory, but Only God Forgives is a pretty awful drama.

Based on the picture book co-authored by Power of Now superstar Eckhart Tolle, Milton’s Secret carries a powerful and important message, but the film feels ham-fisted, clichéd and overearnest at times, especially for adult viewers.

Uziel's screenplay has some clever geopolitical ideas – though it's hard to tell how many of those came before or after it was Cloververse-ified via a tour through Abrams's magical mystery factory – but its twists feel routine, its narrative spine limp and its conclusion especially rushed.

Malin Buska – the Swedish Kirsten Dunst? – is highly watchable as the Descartes-loving ruler, but Canada’s Sarah Gadon as the sheet-warming lady-in-waiting is given little to do but look naive and dumbstruck.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

In the future, as recorded in the bible of British cinema, it will be written that "Four Weddings and a Funeral" begat "The Full Monty" which begat "Billy Elliot" which begat way too many pale imitations struggling to peddle the same brand of sloppy sentimentality. Amen.

There ain't much to You Got Served, but at least this teensploitation flick is bookended by two frenzied sequences that fully exploit the visual potential of street dancing.

A swashbuckler that plays like an over-dressed serial on a slow Saturday afternoon. [22 Dec 1995]

There's something here for everyone to dislike - the whole clan can have fun making fun of this thing.

W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.

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]

Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form. While it is refreshing to see the groundedness with which the director approaches his newest project, his larger-than-life ideas still seem to have trouble finding their exact footing.

There's a head-pounding, gob-smacking literalness to this flick, extending from the title right through to the recurring imagery.

If the art of a true hustler is, as Joe puts it, "beating a man out of his money and making him like it," Callahan blows it big-time with any mark who shells out to see his film.

The finale just seems hypocritical, even nonsensical in a comedy that derives its few laughs from a farting dog and an accidental gynecological exam. This book is better left closed.

Despite some clever, winking nods to the original, including appearances by Cook herself and Matthew Lillard, He’s All That fails to deliver on what She’s All That did so well: a sweet, lighthearted romance that hinges on the chemistry between its two leads.

3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy fails to live up to either its promise or title.

The premise of Paris-Manhattan is simple enough; unfortunately, so is everything else about writer-director Sophie Lellouche’s debut feature film.

Hanks doesn't quite manage a miracle this time, but thanks to a competent (if sometimes scatter-brained) script and a co-star who looks like a cross between Orson Welles and a spawn of the devil and who produces saliva like OPEC produces oil, Turner and Hooch ends up an amusing diversion that sprays gags - messy gags, wise-ass gags - as often as Hooch sprays the furniture with his excess spittle. Which is very often indeed. [28 July 1989]

Sorry to disappoint anyone who saw the cast list of this film and presumed Julie Andrews was going to play the horrific serial killer Tooth Fairy from the Hannibal Lecter movies.

It's all so geekily gorgeous, it hardly matters that the narrative lapses in and out of incoherence and the dialogue is functional at best.

Apparently, somebody thought it was time for a remake. Clearly, somebody was dead wrong.