Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) is no stranger to cornball excess but Stealth is his chef-d'oeuvre, a movie so audaciously preposterous and jingoistic it plays like a parody of the genre.

The same studio has aimed a remake at the same family market. Translation: The once-modest piece has been redesigned as a vehicle (a lumbering SUV) for Steve Martin, stripped of any vestigial charm, and then thrown into neutral, where its manic engine does nothing but roar loudly and pointlessly for the duration.

Teen Spirit is a dizzying exercise in the "Bohemian Rhapsody" school of nonsensical editing. Perhaps it is fitting that Teen Spirit is badly made. It would be more disappointing if a work of such lazy sexism were a formal triumph.

Rock 'n’ roll biopics can be mindless fun, but they never deserve to be this empty-headed.

For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.

A raunchy, fast-paced comedy that, nevertheless, is as flat as the tires on the old Volvo gathering dust in my garage.

The Marvels is just that kind of production, a white board of sticky notes that magically coalesces, slowly and grudgingly, into a feature-length motion picture that merely acts as a long advertisement for the next.

Coloured wall-to-fake-wall with cheap-looking CGI, the film looks like it was shot from inside the guts of a first-generation iPhone – there is an aesthetic emptiness to it all that is soul-crushing.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

It is a slow-moving, self-insistent and exhausting trip. The end can’t come soon enough.

It’s not like the premise isn’t intriguing. It’s just that the result is the kind of soulless response you’d expect from AI, should it be prompted to make a “screenlife” version of Minority Report, with some elements from Speed.

Nothing in Shadow Force surprises, delights or even attempts to raise your pulse above a twitch.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

A truly torturous experience for almost everyone involved – up to and including the starry cast of Lanthimos regulars, who must now surely realize they have been duped by a master cinematic con artist – the film is an aggressively juvenile and tedious dissection of the notion of free will.

A stupendously dull action-comedy that is devoid of both thrills and humour.

Watching Snake Eyes (full title: Snake Eyes – G.I. Joe Origins) is not a physically painful ordeal. But it is an emotionally harmful one – a soul-deadening exercise that approximates satire, minus the self-awareness.

Chaos Walking is, in its own way, a masterclass in everything that contemporary filmmakers should avoid doing.

This new Garfield outing is a true feat in shoulder-shrugging nothingness.

Much as I have enjoyed the actor’s embrace of scuzzy revenge-thrillers, he may have hit the point of diminishing returns. Put it this way: Blacklight is a movie that Bruce Willis would deem below his standards.

Malcolm & Marie is the worst kind of self-indulgent nonsense. It is an obnoxious gripe about everything and anything that is so devoid of wit and imagination that it ends up being about nothing at all.

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

The problem is that for all its R-rated ambitions, none of the kills in Expend4bles is particularly inventive, memorable, or even base-level fun. For a movie centred on the cathartic pleasures of mercenary murder, the only death wish that audiences will walk away muttering is one directed straight at the screen.

There are movies that are on-the-nose and then there is Ruben Ostlund’s Triangle of Sadness, a satire™ that is so pharyngeal that it is the cinematic equivalent of a COVID-19 swab.

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.

But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.

TARZAN The Ape Man, in which Bo Derek (the 10 of 10) is Jane to newcomer Miles O'Keeffe's mute Tarzan (his chests are bigger than hers), takes 45 minutes to get to the reasons the film may have attracted an audience. As nearly as I can figure, based on the soft-core porn of the advertisements, the reasons are three: two belong to Miss Derek, one to O'Keeffe. But although Miss Derek's reasons do receive screen time (O'Keeffe's reason remains unviewed, to the vocal scorn of women in the audience), this topless Tarzan is not soft-core porn, which might justify, on a utilitarian basis, its existence. It's not that good. [25 July 1981]

The Real Cancun is no crime; at worst, it's a kind of staged tribute to "Porky's" done by amateur actors.

It makes "Little Man," "Scary Movie 3" and "Beerfest" look like comic masterpieces.