A thoroughly pointless cash grab of a thing, this new Little Mermaid is one of the most uninspired films to slither out of Disney since the company started raiding its own vault.

A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

This is spaghetti-brained moviemaking, more interested in goosing empty-calorie nostalgia than telling an original or thrilling story.

Whereas Jang’s original film was driven by a funky visual inventiveness that embraced wacky comedy over repellent and snide creepiness, Lanthimos’s version merely doubles down on the filmmakers’ most annoying tendencies: obvious observations about power dynamics, ostensibly outrageous acts of violence that underline a juvenile affinity for shock humour, and an overall contemptuous view of humanity that is played for easy, repetitive yuks.

If you squint hard and focus most of your mental energy on folding your laundry, yeah, Army of Thieves is kinda cool. But it’s also kinda bland, kinda formulaic, and kinda sad. If this is the sort of instantly franchisable content that the streaming giant thinks its audiences want or need, then we’re truly doomed.

Hardy’s use-it-or-lose-it charm very nearly drowns out the dreadfulness all around him, but ultimately it’s not enough to sustain life. And given that the actor has a “story by” credit here, he deserves more blame than praise.

This is regurgitated shoot-’em-up nothingness fetishistically dressed in the cosplay of equality. The women are not characters to care about, but props to kill and be killed.

This is a movie that is one giant Easter Egg, cracked and rotten and sulphurous in its stink.

The insult begins with casting Cage, a patently American actor who makes no effort to Canadianize himself, as a Canadian legend: the role could have made a Canadian a star. It continues with races so sloppily edited the relative positions of the skiffs change dramatically during two-second reaction shots. [17 Jan 1986, p.C1]

Soderbergh’s film tosses the many lessons of its predecessors, leaving us with a movie that is utterly devoid of its own magic.

The condescending vibe and the whatever-ness of it all are disappointing given the collective calibre of the stars, revered, funny veterans who deserve better.

With the exception of a few demented scenes teleported over from a stranger, better comedy . . . Thunder Force is as sloppy and disappointing as the label “A Ben Falcone Film” previously suggested.

Outrageous Fortune is a genuine waste of talent (Midler, Long and Coyote all have it) and time (the standard 90 minutes' worth). [30 Jan 1987]

The Son is a film that is very cruel to its characters, and by extension to its long-suffering audience.

Simply put, I didn’t care for a single person or situation on-screen, and Jacobs’s curiously unconfident and drab direction, which is in desperate need of tighter editing, only hastened my growing annoyance.

If Minecraft is the game where kids exercise their creativity by building new digital worlds full of tunnels and fortresses, A Minecraft Movie is where that creativity goes to die.

Non-existent direction, inane plot, inflated acting. [30 Sep 1987]

Once it is said that the helicopters are good and the movie is bad, there isn't much left to say about Fire Birds. [26 May 1990]

Honorable, instructive, courageous: Fat Man and Little Boy, the true story of the creation of the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., is admirable in every respect save one - it's a lousy movie. [20 Oct 1989]

If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]

Trying to be off-the-wall, Amos & Andrew never gets off the ground. It ends up as politically correct as its title, and that ain't funny. [05 Mar 1993]

A series of implausable adventures, everything from killer cockroaches to world-tilting flash floods, punctuate this otherwise stupid action picture about Third World War survivors. [16 Nov 1977]

Sentimentality exceeds the bounds of the seasonal fantasy in Trapped in Paradise and ends up with all the charm of winter slush. [03 Dec 1994]

Not that Harbour is the reason that Violent Night lands like a lump of coal. He does what he can in a witless movie that is too easily satisfied with its own premise and often feels like it’s elbowing you in the ribs trying to get you to laugh along with it.

The premise - a crazed killer abused years before returns to wreak vengeance on the young - is so familiar that the audience can predict (and does: loudly) every "shock." [15 Oct 1980]

Dad, showcasing Jack Lemmon in a rubber wrinkle mask (he looks like an elderly E.T.), would no doubt have won more Emmy awards for Goldberg had it aired on the tube, but on screen, it's a tearjerking embarrassment.

One of the gorier and more witless horror films in recent memory. [19 Apr 1982]

There is so much action in the animated feature, The Transformers: The Movie, that you can't wait to get back into one of those Chrysler products whose vocabulary is limited to "A door is ajar," and "Thank you." [12 Aug 1986, p.C10]