There is no radical reinterpretation of Romeo and Juliet here, and the staging, costumes and performances look as if they come from something as trad as Zeffirelli’s 60s version … only it’s modern-language. Not worth the two hours’ traffic of their stage.

This is such twaddle it becomes kind of fun, except that there’s an uncomfortable feeling – as with many vigilante movies – that the film is revelling in the sexual violence and covering itself with the fig leaf of justice-seeking.

Every implausible scene, every unconvincing character, every contrived dollop of symbolism, every toe-curlingly misjudged and unearned emotional climax seems as if it has been concocted in some secret bio-warfare lab for assaulting your mind with pure, toxic nonsense.

This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.

It proves very much un film de Sandler: so lazy you feel unconscionably guilty for snorting at the three jokes in its two hours that merit any response.

The characters are paper-thin and, even on paper, their motivations don’t make much sense.

The film left me shaking with anger more than fear.

Amid all this holiday melancholia, Wilde bursts into the film with an intensity that feels held over from another, better movie.

I can’t believe just how dumb Hot Pursuit is. Moreover I can’t believe just how much I laughed.

In its pure misjudged ickiness, bad-acting ropiness, and its quirksy, smirksy passive-aggressive tweeness, this insidiously terrible film could hardly get any more skin-crawling.

A huge amount of talent here, including Joanna Lumley and Eddie Izzard. Sadly it goes nowhere.

Crispian Mills's London-based horror-comedy is so spectacularly bungled that it leaves the viewer in a state of advanced petrification.

The public and private Rachel are, at first, quite different, until her eventual decision to be an out-of-the-closet believer. Even with this rancid script and amateurish direction, McLain sells this inherently undramatic turn as an emotional triumph.

It’s slickly made but shoddily scripted, with sub-reality TV dialogue...and a range of unengaged, soapy performances. There is some fun to be had from the loud and nasty death scenes though, which allow us the pleasure of seeing self-absorbed Facebook addicts get gruesomely murdered.

Images and characters bounce around like shapes on a screensaver and only McDonnell and Gad’s performances have any fizz. This is a YA-franchise by numbers.

It’s genuinely startling just how utterly wretched the finished product is and how unfit it is for a wide release.

It’s by no means impossible to carve a challenging, meaningful story out of difficult interchanges between the east and west. To return to Scorsese, consider Silence, a fine film about European men slowly realizing just how little they understand of Japan. But neither Zandvliet, Baldwin, nor Leto care to look beyond themselves. They’re worse than the simple gaijin, or the over-affectionate weeaboo – they’re tourists who think they own the place.

This is less a caper than a trudge; a linear adventure that proceeds in fits and starts, with few surprises and fewer laughs. There's barely even a hangover.

Script and acting are equally shaky. [27 Sep 2008, p.55]

Jason Statham is the only bit of genuine oomph in a tired tale whose digital effects could have been shot on an iPhone.

Despite the surface sheen, and some enterprising plot twists, it doesn’t entirely convince.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

Sprinkled among the desultory morass are occasional firecrackers of brilliant schtick-based comedy.

The film clunks on, acted with no flair or charisma by anyone in the cast and no energy or interest in the direction. A Rodriguez or a Tarantino – or, indeed, a Schrader – might have found something in the film’s episodic structure and its gallery of grotesques, but, as it is, this is just leaden.

It is a story seemingly meant to be funny but only fitfully successful in this mission, and way too pleased with its own brand of deadpan wisecracking.

An outrageously misjudged drama that flirts with the story of the birth of the gay rights movement.

The exuberant comic talents of Will Ferrell and Amy Poehler are largely wasted in this uninspired addition to the frat movie canon, which resembles reheated leftovers of the Hangover, albeit with a curious detour into some heavy bloodletting.

As this narrative advances out of the YA-industrial complex and into the harsher environment of general scrutiny, however, a whole curriculum’s worth of faults become visible to an audience not so readily pandered to, who want for more than worn-out teen-lit tropes to fill some inner content maw.

If you thought the bogeyman was slender, wait till you see the film.

A certain doofy sincerity – all fairy lights and lakeside kisses – and Wilde's nervy, natural responses keep matters semi-watchable. As a romance, though, it's by-the-book.

For all the faith-based platitudes baked into the script, it has to be conceded that directing brothers Andrew and Jon Erwin steer the ship steadily and draw out sincere and persuasive performances from Finley, who really can sing gloriously well, and Quaid, who even with a now ravaged visage is still just as dangerous, compelling and sexy as ever.

It’s a test of one’s tolerance for watching predominantly empty frames – the anonymous performers scarcely count – in the hope something will jolt us from mounting tedium.

In the hands of director Christopher N Rowley and an assortment of screenwriters (including Byng), the result is a rebarbative mess – mirthless and shoddy like a disposable Christmas stocking novelty.

Somehow the tacky piano score amplifies the ineptitude of Mary McGuckian’s direction, but even so one can’t fail to be impressed by a scene where Brady’s Gray literally dances about architecture, proving that it really is possible.

Paradox is choppy and directionless, better seen as an experimental concert film that attempted to do something more ambitious than the average music video.

It’s so punishingly dull to watch, filled with dry, perfunctory dialogue from Stacey Menear’s consistently uninventive script and shot without even a glimmer of style, that even at a brisk 86 minutes, it feels like unending torture.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

Tomorrow is too murky, meandering and self-indulgent an inside joke for audiences to remember it for more than its smirking moments. In time the Weeknd may come to regret this too, a missed opportunity.

If there was just one extended sequence that crackled with originality you could at least say it has its moments, but, truly, there’s nothing besides repeated use of swear words in lieu of wit.

Grant plays it with manic glee and full-throated gusto.

There’s a special variety of infuriating that comes from a bad movie by talented people.

For all its flaws, Bright is still a headlong leap into a bracingly different new world. Cinema could do with more of that.

Whatever enlightenment there is here proves far too easily gained. Keep looking, folks.

This is a Rocky Horror Picture Show of cluelessness and misjudged Judy Garlandification. I can imagine masochists getting together for Diana: The Musical parties, just to sing the most nightmarish lines along with the cast. The rest of us will need a long lie down.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

It’s too sloppily written and edited for even the least discerning of horror fans to really enjoy, a patchwork of nonsense confusingly stitched together by someone, who at one point, knew better.

This vaguely science-fiction action picture based on a video game (and not a sequel to 2007’s Hitman) is an idiotic mess with a bafflingly dense prologue, an endless final battle, lifeless performances and anticlimactic twists, but it does have a degree of visual flair.

It’s the worst kind of soulless committee-made product, lazy and risk-free, that need never and will never be thought of again. Infinite? Not even close.

I don't think it knows where it's going. I'm not even sure it cares.

None of it rings remotely true and his insistence on playing out so many scenes at such a high level can make it an excruciating watch.

Hollywood's latest play for the growing Asian market revisits the ancient Japanese legend of self-sacrifice, hoping to offset its garbled narrative and grinding humourlessness with 3D and Keanu Reeves as a samurai Jesus.

There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.

Is it a psychological thriller or a giddy horror of the evil-in-them-there-hills persuasion? This split-personality number can't quite decide.

This is basically a studied and serious film, but there's a feyness to its tone, and a lethargy to its pacing that make it difficult to warm to, even if the principal actors give it their all.

A staggeringly pointless supernatural non-chiller featuring some very tiresome jump scares.

It’s a lumberingly dated kind of spy thriller, convoluted without ever being intriguing – and an insufficient number of bangs for your buck.

Pixels is a casually sexist, awkwardly structured, bro-centric comedy, starring some of Sandler’s buddies. The only difference this time is that state-of-the-art CGI has been added to the mix.

The entertainingly frazzled presence of Nicolas Cage provides a reason to pay some attention – but not much – to this otherwise uninspired and by-the-numbers martial-arts action-sci-fi crossover.

As well as its plot being eerily similar to that of Demolition, it’s just as misguided.

As with all overwhelmingly poor movies, it’s the delicate confluence of many varied factors that creates the critic’s familiar feeling of despairing hopelessness in the cinema.

This splatterfest horror feature is better than its predecessor much in the same way succeeding Covid variants are better than the early, more lethal strains.

Alas, you have to sit through a lot of turgid Bible studies dramatisations of bits of scripture to get to the good stuff.

The final explosive showdown seems to be competing with Marvel movies for spectacle. But Marvel brings wit and fun. As far as those factors go, the Transformers franchise is in very short supply.

Bacon, Mitchell and especially young Lucy Fry are all quite effective in these dramatic scenes. But this isn’t a drama. It’s a dumbass, inexpensive horror flick which means anything real is thrown away so that poorly rendered CG ghosts can hover about and smash up windows.

Though it’s positioned in the early days of the summer movie reason, Shadow Force winds up as an unintentional advertisement for staying home.

Appreciation for the artistry of the John Wick series redoubles frame by crummy frame.

Songbird is an acceptably watchable thriller that’s more notable for what it achieves technically than anything else. For many, the topical gimmick will prove irresistible but for others, it will be repellent, making the decision to avoid an expensive, anti-escapist rental all too easy. Either way, it’s headed to the history books.

There are some nice touches, but it unwinds into dullness and silliness and the hi-tech conceit is basically abandoned in favour of low-tech analogue violence and punch-ups.

The cast are some of the most promising actors of their generation, but what chemistry there is between them is swept away by wave after wave of expository dialogue and ludicrous exclamation.

One can always keep praying that the next of these films will be a little better.

What Sheen, born in Gwent, makes of Downey’s accent can only be imagined. It really is horribly inert, and every time Downey opens his mouth to say something unintelligible, the film dies a bit more.

It’s a preposterous plot, with a damp-squib ending, and like an episode of Dallas, the dialogue gets phonier and phonier.

With its juvenile humor, fast pace and shaky handle on grownup feelings, Borderlands winds up resembling nothing so much as a children’s film that’s too violent for children to actually watch.

Meet the Blacks is an asinine film (though with a kernel of seriousness) but whenever it feels like it is running out of steam, something strange and surreal will happen to elevate it above a typical spoof movie.

The vague ending may be a bit of a cheat; but with its sly asides and unembarrassed absurdities, this Outer Limits-style yarn, directed in suitably plain fashion by the veteran Michael Anderson, manages to be more self-convinced, and more diverting, than a mega-buck offering like The Abyss. [19 Oct 1989]

There is nothing gritty or believable about any of it. The film is as dumb and schlocky as the worst of the genre, with lousy network TV effects, uninvolving action and unfunny and inelegant dialogue, its characters drowning in poorly written exposition (even if the much-memed viral line from the trailer is sadly not in the movie itself).

Plotkin’s relentless button-pushing, coupled to the script’s cringe-inducing yooftalk, instead mark Hell Fest as unmistakably the work of middle-aged execs trying to jab suggestible teenagers back into cinemas.

Despite the heavyweight cast, the film’s production values are those of a kids’ TV show that might go out on a weekday afternoon.

Brie and Cena look lifeless and blank-faced; they’ve got no chemistry, and the objectionable dynamics of him manfully rescuing her shrieking from the clutches of the bad guys on repeat feel like a satire of the genre – which this isn’t.

Like a lot of movies, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has its own souvenir popcorn bucket. This may be the first one where the bucket is more entertaining than the feature.

Director Ryuhei Kitamura ladles on the entrails like a ghoulish dinnerlady, but his three-way narrative strategies lead nowhere.

It’s difficult to know what subtitle to give this. Taken 3: Not Again, or Taken 3: Seriously? or Taken 3: This Is Getting a Bit Much Frankly.

There might be just about enough competence to Polone’s film-making to ensure this won’t be the worst horror film of the year, but it’ll probably be the least necessary.

Cringemakingly written and clunkily directed, and even the final action sequence runs out of steam after a minute or so.

Disappointingly, it is a borderline dopey, sentimental children’s adventure mostly without the wit and spark that converted grownups and kids to the Lego films.

The corn in The Identical is as tall as an elephant’s eye – but there’s nothing that says the story of a man torn between his religious upbringing and his desire to be a musician can’t make for a good movie. In fact, considering a little movie called "The Jazz Singer," there’s ample proof that it can be groundbreaking.

This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.

Even by the standards of allowance-snatching half-term filler, this is pretty indifferent.

This offshoot is essentially a well-produced, easily accessed B-movie. Still, it wouldn’t kill you to watch it, and it does more than expected to reinvent its particular wheel.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

The film dies an agonising death long before it ever reaches Valhalla.

Maybe it’s the last great mainstream exploitation picture, a film which owns and flaunts its crassness; a bi-curious catfight version of All About Eve or Pretty Woman.

It’s low-key and modestly budgeted, but perfectly well made, and Watts maintains a cool and steady presence.

The whole thing is shot and lit in that dull flat way that is mandatory for Hollywood family comedies, and the script is mainly dull, though I concede Key has some nice lines as he gets cross with Brynn’s sarcastic attitude.

You wouldn’t want to overstate the film’s achievements, given that a lot of it comes across as weird, self-pitying flapdoodle. But this is, as they say, progress of a kind.

The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.

There's a lot wrong with The Brave, with a pace that may be intended to evoke desert languor, but is often plain leaden. Yet The Brave is oddly haunting, if only for its eccentricity. [13 May 1997, p.2]

Levasseur understands the claustrophobia of being locked inside a stuffy pyramid with collapsing floors and sand traps. Unfortunately for him, Indiana Jones turns out to be incompatible with Alien, and the bad acting and atrocious script don’t help.