Here's the title: Couples Retreat. And here's the review: Couples, Retreat. Yep, just find the verb, treat it as a command, and vamoose, unless you harbour an abiding curiosity about how eternally long 100 minutes can feel.

The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.

The film's up-yours attitude toward authority is cheering, but as personified by Robert Culp (he's the mayor of New York), authority is so comic-strip in its hideousness that fighting it is beside the point. If the audience can't believe in the reality of the opponent, it can't believe in the reality of the fight. [15 Feb 1985]

A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.

It is hard to say what is more despicable about The Condemned: the overtly racist portrayal of Brekel-Goldman as Jewish-media bloodsuckers, or the film's sleazeball attempt to pass off lovingly attentive sequences of ritual torture - often scenes of incredible hulks bashing cowering women - as a critique of media violence.

God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.

Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.

A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

American Heist, I want my 94 minutes back.

Naturally, Brooklyn is the setting for the type of old-fashioned brand of fairy-tale film this stinker aspires to be, but each time the inspirational Brooklyn Bridge is shown the desire to jump off it is doubled.

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

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

The comedy is limp; a sentimental, existential ending is cut-rate and unearned.

The plot, for instance, doesn’t make all that much sense, what with its heroic space chimps and evil space apes and sly space foxes, all of whom don’t seem to realize what a half-baked narrative they’re operating in.

Good Landis work looks like a comically heightened reality, and it scores with sharp moments in which the world is ridiculous and being American is possibly just as ridiculous. Spies Like Us, his latest, ranks with his poorest efforts, in which strange people start out in extraordinary situations and the lead characters have a pig-out; pushing for wildness, Landis gets mired in crudity (as in Animal House). [09 Dec 1985]

Judging by Friday the 13th, Sean S. Cunningham is not a great, not a good, not even a barely competent director. He has said that "a filmmaker must be part magician, part gypsy and part huckster." On the basis of this effort, Cunningham has conveniently overlooked the first two components and settled for a complete mastery of the third. [14 May 1980]

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.

New Year's Eve. It's big and shiny and crowded and no matter how much you might look forward to it, it never lives up to the hype. The movie is even worse.

The Villain is itself an extended cartoon, a cartoon with live actors as its director Hal Needham redundantly describes it. The result: while we still guffaw once or twice, our suffering increases proportionately as we are made to sit through a full 80 minutes of numbing mindlessness. [25 July 1979]

What Boll gives us is a boring beating over the head.

By the time the movie actually arrives at its finest moment – a nearly two-minute single shot from the Mustang’s hood as it chases the villain’s van through dense traffic – you’ve become so numb to speed and sensation that you may barely notice.

In this new era of McG movies, you can simply turn his film off, walk a few steps to your bedroom and go to sleep.

Blame It On Rio is still a lot of fun. The colorful locations help out when the situations in them begin to pall. [17 Feb 1984]

Ho, ho, horrible.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

If anything, this film is a cautionary tale for those who clamour for the driverless car.

Hollow to the core. [14 Feb 1987]