Right from the opening sequence the film is a clumsy catalogue of pain and death, from the mutilated victims of the torturer to the trail of wasted baddies who were foolish enough to incur Bronson's wrath.

It's fun intermittently, but a bit of a stretch at two hours, and Matthau's Cockney accent is about as convincing as the rubber sharks. Perhaps the key to understanding what it's about lies in considering Polanski's displacement: of Polish extraction, exiled in Paris, faced with arrest should he return to the US. The only flag he could comfortably wrap himself in was the Jolly Roger.

Wish Upon claims to be based on the classic 1902 supernatural short story "The Monkey's Paw." In reality, it’s a mix of "Mean Girls," "Final Destination" and the "Insidious" franchise, the latter on which director John R. Leonetti worked as a cinematographer. You'll be wishing you were watching any of those other films.

Though the credits include an impressive roster of names, this low-stakes poker hand feels like an undiscovered relic from the early ’90s, and that’s not a good thing.

If, as some critics have claimed, "The Cabin in the Woods" made the horror genre obsolete, someone forgot to tell screenwriter Oren Peli.

A tedious example of speculative fiction.

An experience so vacuous it's almost frightening.

Eventually, the self-regarding acting clan admits they're only human after all. By then, the audience may want to disown them.

It’s an engrossing, overstuffed disaster—sometimes captivating, sometimes too ingeniously terrible to turn away from; it’s like watching a car wreck in slow motion, if both cars were stuffed with confetti.

Third and last in the Bad News series, with Curtis as a Hollywood hustler trying to make a buck exploiting the sad sack little league baseballers, but suffering the obligatory change of heart. Dire.

This sequel to House offers another blend of humour and horror, but the gags aren't particularly sweet, the chills aren't particularly spicy. On the whole an indigestible affair, which fortunately passes quickly through the system.

There's no pleasure in watching the repeated sexual exploitation of the eponymous heroine in Dan Ireland's adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's short story; that there's little purpose to this abuse, however, is absolutely unforgivable.

Evans and Eve are always charming, but Brooke’s real-world problems ring false in a story held together by chintzy fatalism and the logic of a first draft.

The sex scenes are, save the occasional bit of exposed flesh or brandished toy, fairly mild—Freed is probably the least provocative film of the trilogy.

Raffill's heavy-handed direction is jam-packed with product placement, and interrupted every ten seconds with yet another plug for a boring MOR rock song.

Utterly inessential, this slightly cheap-looking reboot of the Turtles franchise is froth too — it might even be too tame for the kids who make up the target audience.

Never mind the unreliable Angeleno characters; it’s the director-actor who’s the flakiest, as he’s unable to decide if Fix is a real-time saga of a rebel, a loser or a victim. How many face-lifts can you give a single film?

Rosenberg here confuses seriousness with tedious solemnity, and with the star glut has produced a compacted TV series.

The belly laughs do come, many of them courtesy of the mechanical bird companion.

As proven by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Final Destination 3 or the spunky Jessica Rothe in Happy Death Day, these fate-driven, high-concept horror flicks can be redeemed by a committed central performance. Countdown’s Elizabeth Lail, as a nurse who wants to get to the bottom of things, joins their company; she’s got a certain Jennifer Lawrence scrappiness.

Charmless and histrionic, this mean-spirited movie takes place in the toyscape of McG (Charlie's Angels), a monomonikered director who makes Michael Bay seem thoughtful.

Worth a few cheap pubescent laughs, but Exorcist fans will doubtless feel cheated.

Depending on your POV, it's either the ne plus ultra of Hollywood calculation or a comedy simply intent on pushing its crassness to the point of surrealism.

The hard fact, though, is that Harlin's instincts - always toward the massive and slo-mo - make him a fairly dunderheaded political analyst.

This is mostly all reefer, no madness.

The script is formula and so is the direction, which leaves the acting. According to the credits, Danson had an acting coach, but he's a warm enough presence to be able to carry a film as slight as this without needing one; instead the coach should have worked with Culkin, who can't even eat a sandwich convincingly.

Hauer's Parker, shambling, shrewd and powerful, is humorous and appealing, and Noyce skilfully orchestrates a hilarious army of gurning baddies. It thunders along admirably, if rather unbelievably, and to counter the sickly moments with the cute kid (Call), there's plenty of pleasurable ass-kicking.

There’s the odd nifty camera move but the action sequences are often messy and rote. The self-healing Hellboy is able to withstand endless punishment, which may be faithful to Mignola’s source material but hardly ups the stakes. The audience is not so lucky. Hellboy? Just hell, actually.

A typically loony English-country-house horror from the pen of Jimmy Sangster, which dumps its statutory American leads (Katharine Ross and Sam Elliott) into a hardly-stirred plot-pot of diabolic conspiracy - and slowly congeals.

It's deeply flawed by Reynolds' less than lustruous but screen-hogging performance, by a tortuous but dull plot, and by leaden direction. One for completists only.

A new Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)

With a gung ho script, sometimes rudimentary editing and uninvolving relationships, the whole effect is rather flat. None of the aerial sequences boast the visual thrills of Top Gun, while even the attempt to inject controversy in the shape of Hollywood's first female combatant is half-realised.

Pornography: A Thriller may have a few interesting things to say about porn. But thrills? Not so much.

Watching people play a board game ain’t ever going to be scary, and that’s essentially what we have here.

It's an odd plot-potty, frenetic movie, shot at some snow-blown Canadian location with irrelevant panache. Cage looks cold most of the time, and has retractable stubble. The rest of the cast look like they're waiting for summer.

The film's final moments, in which we discover the source of the film’s intrusive, patronizing voiceover, are simply vile. The result is like stuffing yourself with Christmas pudding: sweet, glutinous, a bit too much.

Time to fire up the critical Black & Decker: Somebody-there are six credited screenwriters-really wasn't clear on the concept.

This trite road-trip comedy can be so lazy that it squanders the goodwill of a premise that ought to be self-evident.

There is the usual gamut of silly voices and gang of goody-goody creatures, including a gluttonous green tiger, but the cuteness is kept to a minimum. The amalgam of fairytale, sci-fi and Greek mythology is exciting, the backgrounds dynamic, the music catchy, the pace furious: kids will love it.

Desperation oozes from every frame of Cop Out, which front-loads its best joke -- then spends the rest of its running time endlessly spinning its wheels.

Utterly incompetent psychological thriller.

Those willing to indulge regardless will find a surprisingly satisfying character study, woozily shot and elliptically cut to mimic booze-filled blackouts.

Leaden, laden with effects, short on imagination.

The idea of pitting karate champion Norris against a virtually indestructible psychopath is intriguing, but the resulting confusion of clichés proves disappointingly incompetent.

Since this marks the directorial debut of Hollywood hack Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind), there’s a heavy foot applied to the era-skipping leaps made by source novelist Mark Helprin.

One only hopes that Ruby Dee, Michael K. Williams and the late, great Pinetop Perkins were paid well for their wasted time.

In drag or out of it, the soft-spoken star has rarely been less convincing than when locking and loading from his home arsenal or dangling from a decaying Detroit edifice.

Too many digital effects ruin the spell of a tactile world of evil objects scheming your demise. But even a mediocre FD is better than more Jigsaw.

The paeans about national pride and brotherhood may be regional, but constant slow-motion battle scenes and squishy sentimentality are strictly wanna-be Tinseltown.

The film strives to cinematically reanimate that shabby underground lair; instead, it proves to be the most bastardized souvenir bauble of all.

There’s still too much flashback material here about apprentices and evil cops. But if you’ve ever raged at nameless, insensitive service people, you won’t mind seeing them strapped into a rotating turret, the shotgun cocking.

Munn has proved on TV that she has solid timing, but she does little here other than look pretty and, when the plot calls for it, outraged. As for the likable Schneider, the "All the Real Girls" actor demonstrates that he's better off as a straight man than as a physical comedian.

Can a single guitar riff tell you everything you need to know about a movie? The dreadful Kill Me Three Times, which has nothing to offer beyond some aerial looks at the white-and-turquoise beaches of Western Australia, opens with a power chord so cheesy and generic that it immediately identifies this story of amateur criminals as the charmless ’90s throwback that it is.

The results are often tasteless moments, like Hugh Jackman cackling over footage of an Australian aboriginal ritual scored to techno.

A risibly inadequate disaster movie.

An amiable and humorous fantasy-cum-Faery tale in the Gremlins mould... The whole thing is jogged along nicely by the cast (especially the excellent Moriarty, jigging around manically to his '60s records), and has exactly the right balance between child-like wonder and gentle self-parody.

Unbelievable tosh.

A relentlessly sadistic and worryingly amusing movie, which will entertain and offend in equal measure.

Teenagers are jerks (it’s a scientific fact) but if you have one as your protagonist, they need a redeeming quality or two.

It’s truly a milquetoast Scooby Snack for pet-friendly families who thrill to computer-generated mouth movements on real-life four-legged critters.

Take the last train to anywhere but here.

No viewer goes into this movie expecting John Cassavetes's "Husbands," least of all from soft-serve director Denis Dugan (You Don't Mess with the Zohan).

Smurftastic! Now where's that noose?

It's the wooden plotting and cornball sentimentality--and, most unpleasant of all, the full-frontal nudity of Jamie Kennedy--that truly make this AVN-themed fairy tale, ahem, hard to swallow

Give this literally and figuratively bloodless spooker a pass.

A curiously indigestible phenomenon, like being forced to eat five courses of avocado by an overbearing dinner-party host.

No amount of eccentric Americana (or slyly marginal inventiveness) can salvage this strangely lifeless - and largely laughless - gonzo comedy, which is doomed by a flimsy script, one-dimensional characterizations and distractingly inept child acting.

A standard extremist farce, lazily written and fumblingly directed.

A real mess.

After several tedious jump scares and boneheaded escape plans, a bag over your head won't seem like such a bad idea. Or the noose.

Fans of the spectacle of Kevin James falling over (nine times in 104 minutes!) and shockingly brazen product placement ("Is T.G.I. Friday's as incredible as it looks?") may dig this deranged comedy; everyone else will be scratching their heads.

From "Police Academy" to "Hot Fuzz," there are satires to be made about undisciplined law enforcement; this will not join their ranks, try as it might.

Wrong, wrong and wrong again; this Loaded Weapon fires only dumb-dumb bullets.

Who knew entering a belated adulthood could be so easy-and so utterly joyless?

Performances barely meet a junior-collegiate theater-troupe level, the narration hits maxi-fromage heights, and just when you think it can't get any more derivative, out comes a glowing suitcase à la "Pulp Fiction." Rock bottom has now been firmly established.

It’s hard to know if this clunky comedy is part of Mel Gibson’s redemption arc or some strange new form of karmic retribution.

No Retreat, No Surrender borrows heavily from the likes of The Last Dragon, Karate Kid and even Rocky IV, but makes them look like masterpieces by comparison.

Endless? It's interminable...As excruciating as the Diana Ross/Lionel Richie title tune.

Save your pennies and watch the GoBots on TV instead.

There's bondage, buggery, and a clothes-ripping chase up the stairs. Apart from that, there's a bit of verbal back-and-forth in court between the DA (Mantegna) and defence about whether she used her body as a lethal weapon to kill her millionaire lover and inherit; a brace of shifty witnesses (Archer and Prochnow); no tension; and Portland, Oregon in the rain.

The filmmaker throws in a strangely irrelevant twist before he’s through, but despite a lavish dose of gothic style, The Condemned’s trek toward absolution is pretty familiar.

It's flat, unfunny, and full of slavish borrowings.

Aside from some character-defining flashbacks, a godawful score and sweat-enhancing color photography, it's the same movie as before - a divertingly tense yet superficial time-waster.

The only thing Peppermint does accomplish, after Proud Mary, Traffik and Breaking In, is to cement 2018 as the year Hollywood proved itself incapable of turning out a decent female-led action film.

What happened? With Ashby, Bridges, Arquette and a script co-written by Oliver Stone, you expect the result to be better than a long drawn-out episode of The Equalizer.

Not one single character strikes you as being anything but a mouthpiece for writer-director Matthew Leutwyler's simplistic views on socio-emotional problems (racial self-hatred! post-rehab guilt!) or an excuse for self-satisfied, back-patting acting exercises. The title is an understatement.

A dismally unfunny shambles.

Bastardizing his own 2007 doc, "Planet B-Boy," Benson Lee throws street cred to the breeze with this unspeakably rote Hollywood mockery of its deft nonfiction predecessor, with clueless bigotry as shrill as the squeak of new kicks on a stage floor.

It's stone cold dead on the slab.

Look, the movie didn't have to cure cancer or anything. But sans the original's redemptive nostalgia or any newfound cleverness, it's just a manic, flop-sweat-drenched mess.

Leaden, xenophobic, and utterly stupid, it's far more offensive than Rambo and far less well executed.

[Viewers] won’t find much here besides Langella’s typically austere performance, some lazy character sketches...and the sensation one gets after having watched paint dry, painfully slowly, on a canvas.

The highlight, though, is Julie Christie as Grandma, whose GILFy gorgeousness (especially in the "better to eat you with" scene) is the only thing in this overblown campfest with real teeth.

Movies this silly, crass and manipulative really shouldn’t be allowed to exist in 2014. But we’re guiltily glad that they do.

Since love and boys fall strictly to the side, we can't tell if this wrongheaded caper was intended as a feminist indictment of female competition or a plain old girl-fight flick.

At the end, the door is left open for a sequel, but Agent 47 doesn’t feel like a character who’s got what it takes to be a franchise hero. He, and the film, are lacking in personality.

Bunraku aspires to be "Kill Bill: Vol 3"; it's more like an ornate pitch for a "Dick Tracy" reboot.

Like a sex education film made by semi-liberated nuns, the movie keeps its sticky truths hidden beneath a veneer of leering cleanliness.