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| Sex Lives of the Potato Men (2004) |
| Vegas and Crook are a sleazy dream-team and brilliantly cast as the soft-core spud men... After several pints and a curry it could be the lads’ film of the year. |
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A masterclass in film-making ineptitude, a squalid waste of lottery money, and an inexcusable gaffe by the British Film Council. |
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(James Christopher, Times) |
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Johnny Vegas and Mackenzie Crook star in this smut for morons, part-funded by your and my lottery money. The government is being accused of brutal philistinism in withdrawing tax help from British film. Judged by movies like this, they are merely handing extra bullets to a man determined to blow his brains out. |
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(Nigel Andrews, Financial Times) |
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This vile, grubby little film must surely be the year’s worst. |
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(David Gritten, Daily Telegraph) |
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Mirthless, worthless, toothless, useless. |
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(Will Self, Evening Standard) |
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Less a film than an appetite suppressant. |
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(Catherine Shoard, Sunday Telegraph) |
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If ever a movie testified to the utter cynicism, tastelessness and moral corruption of those who commission and make British movies, it is this abomination. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Malice in Wonderland (2009) |
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| Stylish and engaging. |
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Pointless and heavy-handed. |
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(Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
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Too laddish for art-house tastes, but too arty to be much good as a cockney gangster caper. |
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(Edward Porter, Sunday Times) |
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Hopelessly broad. |
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(Jason Solomons, Mail on Sunday) |
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Diabolical nonsense… a cinematic abomination devoid of point, humour and entertainment value. Imagine a talent-free fan of Guy Ritchie trying to turn Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into a British gangster comedy, and you have some idea of the torture in store. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| St Trinian's 2: The Legend of Fritton's Gold (2009) |
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| Fun, frothy and frantic... Rollicking good fun. |
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"Oh, for Christ's sake, this is interminable" says [David] Tennant at one point in this follow up to the 2007 effort. You're not wrong, boyo. |
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(Doug Cooper, Screenjabber) |
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A cavalcade of schoolgirls filled out the press screening of this movie, and very welcome to it they were... Would the film-makers be surprised to learn that those schoolgirls, eager in anticipation, were far from raucous by the end? |
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(Anthony Quinn, Independent) |
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Another panto for 10 year-old girls, in which any given scene could - with only the addition of canned laughter - pass for something from children’s television. |
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(Edward Porter, Sunday Times) |
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This jaw-droppingly hopeless sequel deserves to be packed off for a one-way exchange trip to Columbine. |
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(Robbie Collin, News of the World) |
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St Trinians 2 achieves the near-impossible, by being even cruder, messier and more amateurish than the first outing. Sending this out to compete in cinemas is like fielding a reserve team against Manchester United: plucky but doomed. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Holy Water (2010) |
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| A good-natured comedy romp... Strong cast. |
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Fantastically depressing, unfunny and embarrassing. |
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(Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
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It’s staggeringly unfunny and skin-crawlingly unsexy, so as sex comedies go, this rather misses the mark. |
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(Wendy Ide, Times) |
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One of the most cack-handedly amateur films I've ever ground my teeth through. |
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(Robbie Collin, News of the World) |
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Holy crap, more like. This dismal "oirish" comedy fails to raise a single laugh from its limp premise. |
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(Alistair Harkness, Scotsman) |
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A weak, floppy affair entirely lacking in comic potency. |
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(Edward Porter, Sunday Times) |
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Subtitled “An Arousing Comedy”, the only emotions it’s likely to arouse in most people are boredom and contempt, with a dash of pity. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Valentine's Day (2010) |
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| The ultimate date movie for Valentine’s Day. |
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It’s grim grim grim. This might not be the Titanic of romantic comedies (it’s tugboat size), but it’s a disaster: cynically made, barely directed, terribly written. |
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(Manohla Dargis, The New York Times) |
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Teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring. |
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(Andrew O’Hehir, Salon) |
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This is many lousy movies for the price of one. |
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(Wesley Morris, Boston Globe) |
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Valentine’s Day is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do NOT date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date. |
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(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) |
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A brutal St Valentine’s Day massacre of comedy, of love, of believable human emotion... It makes Love, Actually look like Citizen Kane. |
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(Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
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| Hereafter (2010) |
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| Compelling and thoughtful. |
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I sincerely cannot help but worry, with no snarkiness intended whatsoever, whether Clint Eastwood has gone senile… There’s no story, there’s no philosophy, there’s just an endless void. |
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(MaryAnn Johanson, The Flick Filosopher) |
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When an 80-year-old director turns his attention to death, you hope for some insight, or gravitas, or even whimsy or anger. Hereafter has none of that. |
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(Kyle Smith, New York Post) |
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Hereafter occupies some muzzy twilight zone, too woo-woo sentimental to be real, too limp to make for even a halfway decent ghost story. |
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(David Edelstein, New York Magazine) |
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How did this inert piece of silliness see the light of day? |
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(Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
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A fate only slightly preferable to death. The whole thing’s presumably intended to be profound and spiritual. I’m afraid the reality is that it’s depressing, pretentious dopiness on an epic scale, as though 80 year-old Clint has suddenly become possessed by the befuddled spirit of M. Night Shyamalan. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon (2011) |
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| A fantastic feast of all-action entertainment... The first big summer blockbuster is one worth catching. |
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A work of ineffable soullessness and persistent moral idiocy. |
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(Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune) |
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The picture isn’t just poorly written, with streams of cliché that one can only hope are intended as send-ups of wretched dialogue, but also badly shot and edited. |
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(Frank Swietek, One Guy’s Opinion) |
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A visually ugly film with an incoherent plot, wooden characters and inane dialog. It provided me with one of the more unpleasant experiences I've had at the movies. |
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(Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) |
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One small step for action movies, one giant leap into the abyss of mindlessness. |
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(Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch) |
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In which director Michael Bay perpetrates another junkyard fiasco that turns the volume up to 11 and the IQ to -1. |
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(Anthony Quinn, Independent) |
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The ethos is perfectly captured in a scene where Ms Huntington-Whiteley poses next to a classic car, and the camera explores her body while another character waxes lyrical about the curves of the chassis. It’s a hi-tech Benny Hill Show, minus the laughs. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Sucker Punch (2011) |
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| Stylish, sexy and seriously cool, Sucker Punch is a knockout. |
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I walked out of this movie in a state of depression. Depressed that so much technical bravura could be thrown away. Depressed that someone mistook this empty, nihilistic sketch for a substantive and meaningful project. Depressed that I had been bamboozled into paying $10 to be subjected to it. At least, however, I understood the meaning of the title. I had been sucker punched. |
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(James Berardinelli, Reelviews) |
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Sucker Punch never pretends to be anything more than a money-making spectacle, but Zack Snyder could have hid his cynicism better. |
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(Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News) |
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I don't doubt that Mr Snyder is possessed of an imagination; it's just that what he imagines is hackneyed, meretricious and boring. |
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(Anthony Quinn, Independent) |
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Proves that while masturbating over your cast may not make you blind, it can impair directorial vision. |
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(Catherine Bray, Film4) |
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Bewilderingly pointless. |
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(Edward Porter, Sunday Times) |
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Soul-suckingly putrid… It seems to have been made for 12 year-old boys by a sad middle-aged man whose only experience of life is from violent comics, shoot-‘em-up video games and online pornography. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Love's Kitchen (2011) |
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| A nicely staged British rom-com, which features a brief cameo from Gordon Ramsay. Dougray Scott is charming as the gruff chef who finds love (for both cooking and a sultry critic who’s nicely played by Claire Forlani) at his new country restaurant. An unpretentious film with a fine cast. |
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Quite possibly the worst film of the year. |
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(Simon Reynolds, Digitalspy) |
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It's quite astonishingly amateur and awful. |
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(Henry Fitzherbert, Sunday Express) |
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Here is a new British film with an eternal, timeless kind of embarrassing awfulness… a script so poisonously naff it could have been bred in a Petri dish in Porton Down. |
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(Peter Bradshaw, Guardian) |
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The cast perform as if they had never acted before in their lives. Gordon Ramsay, who has never acted before, can't even do a convincing impersonation of himself. |
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(Anthony Quinn, Independent) |
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Love’s Kitchen is a rural British romcom that appears to have been painstakingly assembled by a committee of village idiots. |
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(Chris Tookey, Daily Mail) |
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| Zatoichi (2003) |
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| ***** Quite, quite brilliant. |
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| Shaun of the Dead (2004) |
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| A wonderful five-star romantic comedy...with zombies. |
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| Starsky & Hutch (2004) |
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| Wonderful crime bustin’ comedy action. |
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| Wimbledon (2004) |
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| Great British romantic comedy... a winner! |
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| Alfie (2004) |
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| Sexy, stylish and smart... a great British film. |
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| 300 (2007) |
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| Stunning... a real movie experience. **** |
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| Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) |
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| Magnificent. ***** |
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| Bunny and the Bull (2009) |
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| A wonderfully surreal road trip... bizarre and quite brilliant. |
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| Inglourious Basterds (2009) |
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| Brutal, bloody and brilliant. |
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| The Lovely Bones (2009) |
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| Moving and intriguing... ultimately beautiful. |
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| My Last Five Girlfriends (2009) |
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| A clever and witty twist in the British rom-com - there’s a new talent in town. |
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| Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (2010) |
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| This action-packed fantasy adventure, based on Rick Riordan's hit Percy Jackson and the Olympians series of books, is great fun, and deserves to find an audience with teens now bereft of any Harry Potter magic... Young fans of the books will be the main targets for the film, but in truth it is darn good family entertainment for everyone. |
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| The Interpreter (2005) |
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| Best thriller of the year. |
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| Ocean's 13 (2007) |
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| Back to their sleek and stylish best. A high-rolling hit... Great fun. |
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