Each assassination sequence is so ridiculously protracted and inefficiently constructed that it would make a good running gag if the violence wasn’t the one thing the film seemed to take seriously.

Here, we can find a damning summary of modern Hollywood’s default mode – a nostalgia object, drained of personality and fitted into a dully palatable mold, custom-made for a fandom that worships everything and respects nothing.

The combination of WTF casting and glaring technical limitation proves so distracting you can barely focus on the script’s new intel.

Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.

The mystery has been dialled down, the treacle dialled up, and what we are left with is basically Eat Pray Love 2.

This movie is ridiculous.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

The core issues of the film – its numbing swirls of rainbow light popping out every which way, the excruciating pop-culture catchphrases passed off as humor, LeBron’s stilted, if game, acting, the half-assedness with which it delivers the dusty moral to be yourself, the fact that it is unaccountably one half-hour longer than its predecessor – all seem minor in comparison with the insidious ulterior intentions that power this fandom dynamo.

The Aquaman franchise is just flatlining, floating through the dreary depths like the kind of discarded plastic bag which is going to choke the last remaining vaquita porpoise.

It really is such a blatant copycat job, ripping off Cars note for note and lifting so many elements – from talking driverless cars to the dim-witted, buck-toothed sidekick – they might as well have called it Carz.

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.

The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.

The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

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

It’s a nonsensical premise and a pretty incoherent, painfully inept film.

It purports to be a “cinematic meditation” on the havoc humans have wreaked on the environment, yet the style-over-substance approach reduces these eco-conscious contemplations to a mere exercise in aesthetics, without any social or political context.

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.

Everything about this clunks.

There are no insights to be had – and no laughs.

It would be risible if it weren’t so offensive, mean-spirited and, frankly, nasty.

It can’t end well. In fact, it ends badly. In every sense. The mystery of Myers has long since become deflated and inert, and when he is unmasked, the camera can’t quite be bothered to show us his pointless old face (unlike the unhelmeting of Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi, which did at least show us what the great villain looked like). The only thing that’s scary is the thought of how long this has all been going on.

A clunking underdog/redemption sports movie with a horribly perfunctory and unconvincing script, and a ponderous, half-awake performance from the bearded and stolid Ben Affleck.

It’s a deafening misfire, like the most unbearable, unwatchable daytime TV soap filled with the most awful self-conscious hamminess, parodic emoting and pointless shouting-at-each-other acting.

It’s an unwieldy and messy thing, drearily directed and boringly written, taking its agenda seriously yet not providing a robust enough framework to surround it.

Synchronic is frankly just silly and tedious, with faintly absurd and jeopardy-free time-travel scenes and a dramatic focus hopelessly split between Dennis and Steve’s separate but equally tiresome lives.

Rather than screaming for them to go the other way, you'll be urging them to accept fate and die instead.

Oldman delivers his lines with a strange lethargy and tonelessness, as if – just before speaking – he has just realised that income tax will have to be deducted from his fee.

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

The supposed satirical attitude of Irresistible can’t conceal the fact that it’s contrived, unfunny and redundant.

This is a muddled, leaden fantasy adventure for Christmas which feels as if someone put all the Quality Streets in a saucepan and melted them together, with the wrappers still on.

Revolving around of group of multi-ethnic Gen Z-ers in the American south, this message-heavy film tries hard to tackle urgent issues such as social media, familial conflicts and, above all, gun violence. The film only succeeds at peddling barely tolerable coming-of-age cliches.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

It’s all so rushed and half-assed, like it was cobbled together on the fly rather than intricately plotted out, stupidly written and worst of all increasingly dull, a fitting end to a rotten pile of guts that’s less book of Saw and more novelisation. Game over.

This is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly acted, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.

There are some comedies that seem to have been rubbed all over with an anti-funny, anti-romance Kryptonite. This is one. It’s the cinematic equivalent of elevator muzak – a festival of glam-smug with zero chemistry between any of its three leads.

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

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.

Cue all sorts of strangely tired, laugh-free goofiness, with none of the funny lines and wit that come as standard with Pixar/Disney films. I guess it would pacify very young children.

There are no left turns or bumps along the way, just a smooth straightforward journey from cliche to cliche, boredom setting in fast.

Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long 98 minutes.

A defiantly unbelievable and drably directed heap of quirk that’s as overstuffed as it is underpowered, a head-scratching failure for all involved.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

Semen cocktails, broken testicles and dancefloor laxatives are among myriad reasons to avoid this grim grossout comedy.

The film left me shaking with anger more than fear.

Watching this film is a nightmare in all the wrong ways.

The denouement when it comes is meant to be shriek of pure sci-fi horror; but really, you’d find better entertainment – and more energetic acting – watching a fish tank.

Even the vocal presence of Sean Connery can't lend interest to this tedious, crudely animated, bafflingly conceived cartoon feature, liable to please neither children nor adults, developed from a 2006 short film to which Connery also contributed.

With the addition of some decent jump-scares, Smiley Face Killers might have passed muster as a gender-swapped slasher flick, but it’s too under-researched to take seriously as true crime.

A head-smashingly redundant waste of time, talent, energy and resources, a shockingly early yet entirely convincing contender for worst film of the year.

Every syllable of action, as we grind towards the broadly guessable finish, is jeopardy-free and interest-free. Wilson looks as if he is thinking about something else: the halting sing-song rhythms of his voice sound vapid, and Hayek is trilling, whooping and smirking away in a world of her own.

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

The Sinners’ sexy-schoolgirl-corpse aesthetic – part Twin Peaks, part Ariana Grande music video – is too ineptly executed to truly offend.

Altogether, this is a dim affair, lacking Hollywood's usual, gooey efforts to convince one of the benefits of family values. [04 Aug 1994, p.T7]

The low stakes of the camp drama and the soundtrack’s indistinguishably familiar pop (adaptations of contemporary Christian hits, plus four original songs) aim for easy, catchy, comfortable fun – a breezy intention which casts some of the script’s insensitive moments in even harsher light.

The acting and directing are entirely terrible, the editing and pacing are so sluggish you’ll feel as if you’re going into a persistent vegetative state, the plot is tiresomely unthought-through, the split-screen shots don’t work and the musical score is so pointless and undifferentiated it sounds like elevator muzak.

If the devil did exist then surely he’d have the power to destroy films as dull as this.

There’s no doubting that this film was more fun to make than it is to watch, although there is a sort of guilty pleasure in the spectacle of ruins and decay and wondering whether the film-makers actually found a real abandoned resort, or if it’s all a set.

Ski Patrol is produced by Paul Maslansky, who was responsible for the Police Academy series. Substitute a ski lodge in Utah for the well-known Academy and you have the film in one the kind of baleful adolescent material that would knock the warts straight off Cromwell's face. [14 Jun 1990]

It’s all torturously uninteresting, a plodding retread that never once explains or justifies why it made the leap from “what if?” to actual full-length movie.

It’s a relentless surge of solemnly ridiculous nonsense in the style of romdram maestro Nicholas Sparks (creator of The Notebook and Message in a Bottle) culminating in a courtroom trial with Edgar-Jones’s free-spirited heroine in the dock as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Murder Suspect.

Don’t Breathe 2 is not only struggling for air but it’s struggling for purpose and meaning and hopefully this weekend, audiences too.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

A dead-eyed Chris Pratt presides over this convoluted mess of Bond-style villains and toothless action that even the original cast can’t save from extinction.

There’s nothing quite so naff and depressing as a British comedy misfire, and Me, Myself and Di is the real deal: a miserably unfunny romcom about Bolton’s answer to Bridget Jones.

An attempt to revive the Hasbro franchise is a careless fumble put together without a hint of effort or interest.

The acting is daytime-soap standard and the tasteful, softcore sex is shot in such a way as to not look like actual sex. It’s unerotic, unsweaty and performed with expressionless faces. It feels like the film-makers know they have to do the sex bits, but don’t really want to actually do them.

A film full of people smiling knowingly and laughing delightedly at each other’s not-especially-funny-or-interesting remarks, and it’s all the more insufferable for things the film gets fundamentally and structurally wrong.

Some French films, like wine, don’t travel. This one turns to vinegar.

Hard to believe that this barely watchable animated cash-in from the heyday of those Robots In Disguise was the cinematic swansong of Orson Welles. [05 May 2007, p.17]

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 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.

Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.

An Italian-American man in late middle age rejects the rat race and embarks on a voyage of self-discovery and winemaking in this lifelessly unfunny comedy.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is not funny, not insightful about children, and it costs much more time and money to see than simply reading the books that it tries to turn into a meta-text. It makes imagination seem like a garish endurance test.

Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller.

It’s pretty much a laugh-free film to make you appreciate the work of Nancy Meyers or Richard Curtis; their films may look easy or corny but they have something this doesn’t, a kind of buoyancy or a way of alchemising all the luxury tourist incidentals into something entertaining.

There’s a definite sense that the makers couldn’t keep up with an ever-shifting case but wanted to meet a deadline nonetheless.

[A] cheap and cheerless sci-fi action film.

There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

The Commando contains a number of egregious implausibilities and cliches.

Black church is all about feeling – the building, the people, the message. But Honk has none of that soul. At best, the film is an abstract commentary on a culture it doesn’t fully understand; at worst, it’s half-hearted creative license. And at this late stage, sadly, not even Jevus could save it.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

It’s Kid Cudi who salvages the picture playing an even more deadpan version of himself. And he carries the second half of the story through a macabre twist that at least makes the 100-minute feature worth finishing.

The saving grace here should be the win for the Filipino community, commanding a big-screen moment with a cast of undervalued Asian stars. But they’re all short-changed by a hypocritical sense of heritage and pride.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

Running a little bit over an hour, it feels like an underdeveloped short that has overstayed its welcome.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.

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).

Tradition of course demands that the pert teen sacrifices in such gore fodder be satisfyingly dislikable. It isn’t easy, though, to make stupidity interesting, and Shark Bait is always one-note in its exploitation of its characters.

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.

This movie finally ties itself into various knots to prefigure the later world of Katniss, but the time to end the Games came long ago.

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.

This feels like something LaBute wrote in an afternoon on the notes app on his smartphone while thinking about something else.

In neglecting to vary her routine, she is not unlike the film-makers behind this ninth visit to the Conjuring universe – although “universe” is a misleadingly large word for a franchise that is impoverished in all but its box-office gross.

If the underlying message is to be decent before it’s too late, then be nice to yourself and queue up the berserk and brilliant Muppets Christmas Carol, why don’t you? You only live once.