It's outstandingly obnoxious.

The sisterhood is already grumbling about a movie that suggests women will happily choose a mate over friendship, but actually it's the stereotypes of good behaviour rather than bad that bring this rom com crashing down.

Brings on a wave of nostalgia accompanied, unfortunately, by a great big yawn that will surely be experienced by parents hoping for a spark of irreverence à la Pippi or the broad comic appeal found in most theatrical family fare these days.

The Art of Getting By is distinguished by a dullness that's almost akin to being in high school again.

Gomez, who turns 20 next year, looks much younger than her age and has the thankless task of playing three roles...It feels like a struggle and the screenplay doesn't help.

Unfortunately, nobody had the good sense to call the comedy authorities and shut this Zookeeper down.

It's a going-through-the-motions domestic comedy that makes, say, "Cheaper By The Dozen" look like a heart-warming, cutting-edge laugh riot.

Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.

And yes, the super effects are fantastic. But overall, Ra.One fails to impress.

A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.

Like the recent Adam Sandler dud "Jack and Jill," a sizable chunk of Chip-Wrecked was shot on the newest ship in the fleet of a major cruise company – the ultimate in movie product placement!

An unholy mess.

Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.

Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.

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

Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.

Unfortunately, Hysteria is much closer in its effects to a more significant and much larger 19th-century invention. Like the locomotive, this costume drama proceeds noisily and methodically toward a destination that is agreed upon from the outset. Good orgasms and good movies generally offer surprises; good trains do not.

Will be construed by the faithful as an embarrassment of riches and by the rest of us as cruel and unusual punishment.

It's a dumb-ass comedy done strictly for a seriously large paycheque.

So why are they divorcing, you ask. Who knows? Certainly not the creators of the very confused Celeste and Jesse Forever.

2 Days in New York plays like 2 years in Attica. You don't watch this movie so much as serve it out, a light comedy doled out as a heavy sentence.

The film is basically a compendium of possessed-child clichés.

Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.

Means and ends meet briefly, shrug and disappear under a torrent of self-flattering clichés.

Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.

The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.

Given Part II's quality, the final sequence, a series of clips from next summer's Part III, may be a major miscalculation. "To be concluded," reads the final title. Sounds more like a threat than a promise. [22 Nov 1989, p.C9]

Soderbergh has bathed the Depression in lovely, golden-brown hues - so lovely, so golden, that the flick seems to be unfolding from inside the delicious core of a burnished bran muffin. [20 August 1993]

Meant to be a nodding aside to the film buff, with plenty of in-jokes for the cognoscenti, Crimewave ends up as a random list in dire need of a good file-clerk. [3 July 1987]

Like Jerry Springer, it's loaded with class bias, offering a condescending fantasy that sees the poor as exotically grotesque, promiscuous, violent, and spiritually doomed. [17 Oct. 1997, p.D9]

Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.

Ronan, youthfully elegant as always, tries hard, but the material defeats her.

Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]

Guilty of gross mellerdrammer & innocent of sophistication... Guilty of being dumber than WWF wrestling & innocent of hypocrisy about its cartoon violence.

I think the guy who exited the advance screening after less than 15 minutes said it best. "This movie's garbage," he hollered, as the audience members tittered and shuffled their feet, which they continued to do throughout this humourless, hackneyed yawnfest.

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

[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.

Billy Madison is so singularly stupid that "Dumb and Dumber" looks (almost) like a beacon of braininess and taste in comparison.

What ends up on screen is confused storytelling that tries to solve too many social and family problems, sends mixed messages and, even worse, makes you laugh during parts when it's trying to be dead serious.

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

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

The film is significantly inept even when Crawford is not on the screen. [03 Nov 1995]

It's not a bomb at all. A dud is more like it - Last Action Hero isn't interesting enough to be explosively bad. For all the inflated pyrotechnics on the screen, the picture seems consistently grey and almost pitiably small. [18 Jun 1993, p.D1]

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]

Consequently, as star vehicles go, Ford Fairlane runs straight over the very guy it's meant to transport. Some will see that as the movie's greatest fault, others as its only virtue. Take your pick, and come out swinging. [13 Jul 1990, p.C1]

The manner in which the writer, Richard Matheson, and Jeannot Szwarc, in his glory days the director of Jaws II, conspire to tell the story should not only render the audience tearless, but speechless as well. [11 Oct 1980, p.E7]

At the end of The Comebacks, Coach is offered job with a college basketball team called The Sequels - a joke perhaps, but all too horrifying a prospect after watching this dull fumble.

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.

New Year's Eve. It's big and shiny and crowded and no matter how much you might look forward to it, it never lives up to the hype. The movie is even worse.

An actual film of unrelenting silliness. Far from being a "miracle of rare device" (yes, the movie even quotes Coleridge), this is a disaster of common occurrence - a poorly directed, ineptly edited, badly photographed bundle of celluloid. [14 Aug 1980]

This one is a big, big disappointment. [27 July 1987]

Calls itself a movie. It has words and pictures like a movie, and will appear in theatres like a movie, and will damn sure charge admission like a movie. But, truth be told, that's pretty much where the resemblance stops.

A flawed fraud, a youth movie so disjointed, witless and condescending that it's painful to watch.

The incomprehensible leads to the inexplicable which ends in the indecipherable.

The whole mess turns nuttier by the second. A black comedy, you ask? I wish. There are plenty of laughs here, but nary a one is intentional.

A perverse, lame-brained thriller that is pornographic, misogynist and homophobic. If that makes it sound appealing, I should also add that it's silly, boring and intellectually insulting.

Watching inept American actors and wishing they were badly dubbed into Japanese isn't any fun at all.

A two- hour-plus surrealistic bummer - it makes the audience feel as if it is coming down from a virulent drug. (The pacing, the images, the music and the endemic menace recall clinical descriptions of cocaine-induced paranoia.)...A disgusting, misanthropic movie.

Mind-numbing, soul-testing, character-defiling experience that offers not one nanosecond of comic relief.

There's nothing even mildly intriguing, or remotely galvanizing, about Showgirls.

Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.

The product of a first-time director and writers who have no sense of scene structure or shape, or even a discernible sense of humour.

The plot is as incomprehensible as the dubbing and many of the special effects are neither special nor effective.

Just how dumb is Senseless? So dumb it even takes the fun out of stupid.

Brain-melting, head-spinning rank toxicity that shows no evidence of intelligence as we know it.

Simply put, this is a bad, bad film, this summer's answer to last summer's "The League of Extraordinary Gentleman." A dog for the dog days of summer.

Campy costumes can't disguise the incoherent plot, confused performances and lame script that send this star vehicle spiralling downward.

Just as the book is usually better than the film, one suspects the video game is probably more entertaining and coherent than the movie. In the case of Alone in the Dark, this is a certainty.

A sustained if wildly uncoordinated assault on our senses, complementing those feverish jump cuts with a cliché of equally stunning proportions

Shamelessly cross-promotional "extreme" sports flick.

Date Movie is a good date movie in one sense: If you're still speaking to the person who brought you to see this, you just might have a future together.

How bad does a film have to be to get the death doughnut? Disgracefully bad.

A 0-star Comedy that is nonetheless guaranteed to rake in multimillions.

Director Marshall ( Pretty Woman) has created a comic drama so confused in tone, the actors often seem to be acting in different movies.

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

The first 48 HRS. was similiarly nasty and violent, and it too was emptier than the inside of an efficient bell jar, but it was funny. Eight years later, director Walter Hill can find nothing to laugh about - the violence in this appalling picture is played out in a mirthlessly misanthropic vacuum. [8 Jun 1990, p.C1]

In past celluloid lives Eddie Murphy has been responsible for a handful of the most popular movies ever made, which explains why he has been able to bring Coming to America to your neighborhood theatre with its misogyny, technical ineptitude and witlessness intact.

There is no reality here, and no style: Cocktail waters down the philosophy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale and serves it in a shot glass to hustlers. High school hustlers. [29 Jul 1988, p.C11]

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]

Despite an inspired central section involving Robin Williams as the King of the Moon and Valentina Cortese as his Queen, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a near-disaster of Ishtarish proportions. [11 Mar 1989, p.C3]

About as much fun as being given a wedgie and hung from the camp flagpole, Daddy Day Camp is an unnecessary sequel.

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.

A bland, timid and thoroughly un-thrilling teen thriller.

Bad summer films, full of furious hype and signifying nothing, are hardly exceptional these days, nor is the sound they typically make: the dull scrape of a culture hitting rock bottom. Yet this one seems uniquely bad; this one is a threshold-breaker with a different sound, the crack of rock-bottom giving way to a whole deeper layer of magma.

Just when you thought this movie had run out of bad ideas, this last-minute outpouring of sanctimony feels like a whole new way of being slimed. Some movies come with parental warnings; this one feels as though it should come with a mandatory biohazard suit.