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Amsterdam (2022)   A critically lambasted box-office bomb, David O Russell’s latest falls victim to that most difficult of recipes to get right, unless you’re a natural (Wes Anderson): self-conscious quirk. It looks as if he’s going for a mixture in the vein of his earlier hit American Hustle, throwing a starry cast at a very loosely based-on-fact tale – “A lot of this really happened”, Christian Bale’s protagonist tell us at the outset – but where that movie, whatever its faults, maintained a degree of pace and purpose, Amsterdam is simply all over the shop. Even its nondescript, indifferent

The Adventures of Pluto Nash (2002)   How many times did Eddie Murphy’s strategy of bringing the funny to a straight movie actually bear fruit? Twice, as I count it, and both right near the beginning of his big-screen career (48 Hrs and Beverly Hills Cop). And how many sci-fi comedies have been big hits? Which makes it easy to assume giving the greenlight to The Adventures of Pluto Nash, its budget eventually clocking in around $100m, was reckless in the extreme. But who knows? Maybe, if funny Eddie Murphy, Eddie bringing his A-game, had shown up on Ron Underwood’s

Cuba (1979)   Cuba-based movies don’t have a great track record at the box office, unless Bad Boys II counts. I guess The Godfather Part II does qualify. Steven Soderbergh, who could later speak to box-office bombs revolving around Castro’s revolution, called Richard Lester’s Cuba fascinating but flawed. Which is generous of him. Soderbergh particularly rated its “refusal to play to the idea of a war-torn romance. An absolute refusal to be sentimental or easy about anything”. But an area he cites as bucking trends is really symptomatic of a movie that doesn’t know what it wants to be. At any rate, if Charles Wood knew when

Doctor Dolittle (1967)   If there’s an obvious and immediate contender for the crown of least-justified Best Picture Oscar nominee, it’s surely Doctor Dolittle. Infamous for the campaigning this box-office bomb received, leading to nine nominations and two wins, the ignominy is understandable and deserved, even if it’s simply a worst-case and highest-profile example of the kind of behaviour that’s par for the course in the Oscar business. As for the film itself? It isn’t terrible, but it’s so sedate as to be almost inert, a killer for a two-and-a-half-hour family musical. There are all sorts of problems in that regard.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)   A huge box-office bomb for Warner Bros, but unlike the later Escape from L.A., its problems can’t really be laid at director John Carpenter’s door. Indeed, it sounds as if he brought exactly the right instincts to the project (“North by Northwest meets Starman”); it’s almost entirely the presence of Chevy Chase that does for Memoirs of an Invisible Man, a vanity project the star had nurtured but which proved entirely ill-fitting and scuppered his serious thesping designs as quickly as they took form. Perhaps Chevy envied the success of the likes of Bruce Willis

Legend (1985)   (Director’s Cut) Despite being nearly as much of a creative and financial bust as the majority of family fantasy epics made during the ’80s (Willow, Krull, Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, Dragonslayer, Ladyhawke) – the lustre of sepia-tinged childhood nostalgia notwithstanding – I’m fairly charitably inclined towards Legend. It doesn’t really work, but I can’t help but admire (Sir) Ridley Scott’s attempts to make it float. Part of the problem is his lead, a whippersnappery Tom Cruise on the cusp of mega-stardom who just cannot make anything of such a bland character and so whose perma-curtained hair and cheese-devouring grin become continually irksome