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.

Mary Reilly comes across as too much brooding atmosphere and too little story. [23 Feb 1996]

The Keep has opened just in time - if it had waited another couple of weeks, it would have been the worst horror movie of 1984 and there wouldn't have been anything to look forward to all year. [17 Dec 1983]

Despite the talents involved, including Steve Martin and director and co-writer Nora Ephron, the result is a messy, almost desperately mirthless thing Mixed Nuts an empty shell. [23 Dec 1994, p.C6]

[Pitof's] managed to create an entire digitalized city that has all the allure of an underground parking garage. And his action, it's cluttered; his editing, it's confused. The result: blandness butchered, hamburger chopped, kitty littered.

Who needs original stars Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones when you have, um ... well, what does this new Men in Black Cinematic Universe offer, exactly? As evidenced by MiB:I, absolutely nothing of value.

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]

It is the best anti-cat propaganda in the world. It could make you hate Garfield. Because the biggest sin of Cats, other than all its writhing sexuality and the heinous hairball filmmaking, is that it is supremely boring.

It's not fair in a film like this, a shambles from beginning to end, to judge the performances, but as Tom Cruise has now become a big star, something should probably be said of his characterization. Something. [21 Apr 1986, p.C12]

John Wick is the most blatant attempt to establish a character’s name recognition since the Angelina Jolie actioneer "Salt."

It’s not uniquely bad, nor so bad it’s good. It’s factually, quantifiably bad. Overcooked, underdressed, sloppy, indigestible: just your classic crap hamburger of a movie.

The scenes of Traynor threatening and battering his wife feel just as phony and unconvincing as the sunnier stuff that preceded them, partly because Sarsgaard – usually a fine and subtle actor – flies so over the top in his depiction of a creepy Svengali.

Set aside the fact that Sugar’s screenplay is filled with holes, that its characters are as loathsome as they are thinly sketched, that its budget is as bare-bones as your local No Frills, and we are still left with a movie that is barely competent on a technical level.

Completely miscast, egregiously plotted and ludicrous in absolutely every single other way, Bliss is a true cinematic disasterpiece.

This is a movie of pussyfooting and sidestepping, unconcerned with race, history, heroism or really any idea at all beyond “Hulk smash.”

A C-grade thriller that is further dumbed down to dunce-cap calibre, Flight Risk might have worked as an enjoyably grimy piece of genre trash had Gibson not made every single wrong directorial decision along the way.

Rest assured that the story is as nonsensical as it is disposable, a cocktail-napkin of an idea brought to digital life with hundreds of millions of dollars of the emptiest-looking CG animation ever produced.

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

The movie degenerates from the merely farcical to the appallingly tasteless...As the end draws mercifully near, one character proclaims: "This ship needs blood to survive." A film needs more than that. [22 May 1980]

Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive.

The vibe isn't mellow, nor predictably, affably dumb. Rather, this is a slapdash effort whose faux-Farrelly brothers humour is papered over with an unremitting, distasteful malice, featuring a cast that's completely wasted, in both senses of the word.

Obviously, commercial film has a proud history of appealing to our less noble instincts. But why does this particular thing fail so provocatively, going beyond mere stupidity into downright offensive? #2. Not just because it is charmless, humorless, cynical and mean- minded. Lots of movies are that. Yet Garbage Pail crosses the fine line where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. In fact, it invents a brand new genre: kiddie nihilism, a callow theatre of disgust. Antonin Artaud, meet Mr. Dressup. [26 Aug 1987]

As should be obvious by now, Harvey Keitel is a lucky man indeed: how many actors, stuck in an atrocious film, have so many immortal lines? [20 Feb 1980]

It's just a shrunken case of large-screen aspirations wedded to a small-screen mentality. [22 May 1992]

It is not so much lazy filmmaking as it is a very expensive middle finger to common sense and the basic concept of entertainment.

Ratner’s film commits too many cinematic sins to count.

As it stands, Murphy has put his idols and friends in front of a camera, given them a watered down version of The Sting and hoped they'd make the best of it. They don't. [23 Nov 1989, p.C12]

This is the sort of movie that ends up awash in sincere revelations, and not a moment of it feels remotely believable.