The scriptwriters did Perry no favours. Lengthy swaths of dialogue are consumed by tedious exposition on vampire types and the ways they can be killed.

American Heist, I want my 94 minutes back.

There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.

A hypnotic, black hole of a movie that sucks reputations, careers and goodwill down its vortex. Rarely has a movie that doesn't star Madonna achieved such a skin-crawling mixture of deluded preening and bungled humour.

A painfully contrived romantic comedy/thriller that may (or may not) have brought Gerard Butler and Jennifer Aniston together as a real-life couple.

Wisdom lies in taking a pass on Hall Pass, but bravery demands something else, something far more instructive: Watch it, every vacuous frame, if only to measure the precise aesthetic distance from blessing to curse.

So what's Hanson exploring this time? His boring side, apparently.

This one's just painful.

What Cruising does have, then, is a claim to narrow truth and limited verisimilitude. What it does not have is a mind. [15 Feb 1980]

It’s the kind of film that can’t even bother to commit to its own cynicism, which makes it the most deeply cynical kind of film there is.

In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

Although rich in cast, the bad-boy-chef dramedy Burnt is unremarkable otherwise.

No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.

The same covey of kids assemble at a summer camp to meet their predictable fate. Once again, their thespian talents defy assessment, since most hang around just long enough to take off the limited clothes of the American teen-ager and take on the limited role of the bloody victim - both acts performed just once, always in that order. [04 May 1981]

Not merely a bore, it’s excruciating.

Apparently pitched somewhere between a farce and a fable, this flick is neither. Just foolish. And frustrating. And, mostly, damned annoying.

Growing-up films are bad enough without a shameless all-girl rip off of Stand By Me. [20 Oct 1995]

Predator 2, an alien-monster movie that is racist and violent, not to mention atrociously acted and ham-handedly directed, has everything going for it a bad movie needs to be dismissed with a quip. But this is too ugly to be funny about. [23 Nov 1990]

Hart’s irritating character desperately seeks approval, but his idiocy is too much. The comedian makes Jerry Lewis look like Benedict Cumberbum – and if you think that line is funny, Ride Along 2 is your kind of jam.

At least Adams and Goode are always watchable, even when you occasionally feel embarrassed for them.

Lazy, perfunctory and free of tension, the new version will satisfy neither the admirers of the original nor anyone looking for a gory respite from seasonal good cheer.

Condescending, self-righteous and sloppy, Truth is simply a bad film for which there are no excuses.

The problem with Sucka is that the film is more clumsy and lifeless as a comedy than most of those blaxploitation pictures were as drama. Sucka instead is so awkward as to take two steps back for every one step forward: the film uses black women, for example, as rudely as did the movies it sends up. [17 Feb 1989, p.C3]

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

The sisterhood is already grumbling about a movie that suggests women will happily choose a mate over friendship, but actually it's the stereotypes of good behaviour rather than bad that bring this rom com crashing down.

Farrah Fawcett offers to this corrupt "entertainment" a small measure of the fresh innocence Marilyn Monroe used to bring to her movies; watching her work under these circumstances is like watching a maiden being thrown to Moloch. [22 June 1981]

The flames sure look real, but everything else in Backdraft, director Ron Howard's inflatable ode to firefighters, seems about as genuine as a plastic log in an electric hearth. Howard's particular type of schmaltz works well enough in small dabs on comic canvases (Splash, Cocoon, even Parenthood), but pumped up to heroic proportions, the sentimentality is just plain silly - in this case, cheap melodrama on a two-hour jag.