One of the most chaotically stupid action movies to torture audiences in ages.

The Hustle should’ve been a comedy that served equal parts wit and social commentary – otherwise, why gender-swap? It should’ve given Wilson and Hathaway a means through which to shine. These are talented, seasoned, capable women. And for their experience to be wasted in a production that is below them, below their director’s filmography and below the original material is tragic.

Taken on its own, this is a masterful little slice of computer-generated animation, but it gets lost here in the visual racket.

Fabulous idea/faulty execution is the review.

Mostly, the plot is busy and incomprehensible and the action sequences directed with all the art of a detonation.

From the base-model script to the assembly-line thrills, everything about Hide and Seek is generic except its star.

Narratively, the film strikes all the sentimental chords that audiences typically find so reassuring, but the music grates here, sounding mechanical and flat, lacking the single ingredient indispensable to any uplifting fable - a charming belief in its own sweet nature. [19 Apr 1996, p. C1]

Because while Stardust covers the period of Bowie’s life just before he released his breakthrough 1972 album, the film doesn’t feature a single track from the record. Or any Bowie music at all.

Since the movie has so little conviction, or personality of its own, it's a walk you can easily forget.

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

Contraryto its exciting advertising, Event Horizon is not the most frightening movie ever made. If anything, the conventional pop-up scares and gross-out effects of this British haunted-space-ship story seem less terrifying than quaint.

What The Kitchen serves is a first film sorely in need of a basic primer on how to go about constructing a movie.

A promising premise simply devolves into just another "Definitely, Maybe" or "The Proposal."

To be fair, the movie is nothing if not consistent -- the idea is every bit as dumb as the execution.

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]

If Leguizamo imports a hint of pathos into his performance, Waterston adds a dollop of menace to hers, delivering another of Ross's attacks on what separates girls from men. In this world, women are their own worst enemy.

McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.

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

It is charmless, incoherent, ugly and so aggressively stupid that it defies any attempt to shove it into the desperate “guilty pleasure” box.

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

The plot is a mishmash of murder, cute pets, lost luggage, compulsive gambling and domestic disharmony, and has holes in it you could pilot a yacht through. [10 March 1992]

Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.

Like Frankenstein's monster before the lightning strikes, it's all recycled cold flesh and bolts, without a twitch of originality.

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]

But there's no sign of the writerly derring-do that is really essential to daisy-chain storytelling. 200 Cigarettes burns itself out well before midnight.

The latest iteration of Sylvester Stallone’s aging warrior franchise, The Expendables 3, is proof that sometimes even your low expectations can be far too high.

It doesn't take a foolish romantic to hope that Myles and Elisabeth live happily ever after. The world just isn't ready for 20 More Dates.

The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.