Nothing if not inconsistent

As someone who has been being paid for his opinions for some four decades, it is inevitable that over the years, Mark Kermode will have said things that either don't tally or directly contradict each other. When he accused Marley And Me of being "sentimentality porn", listeners were not long in pointing out that Mark had spent much of 2007 and 2008 complaining that too much was being made of so-called Torture porn and that it didn't actually exist. When it was queried how sentimentality porn could exist but torture porn couldn't, Mark conceded that it was because "I am nothing if not inconsistent."

This is why he can criticise The Incredibles for not having anything for the kids and then complain that Wall E does not have enough misery and loneliness.

It is also why he complained during the review of Batman Begins that it gave up at the end and turned into a big smashy action movie, but later criticised films like Hancock and Iron Man for doing precisely the same thing, and saying that Batman Begins was a film that had "the courage of its convictions" and had not thrown its hand in and become Transformers.

And it is also why he can recommend that films like Meet The Robinsons or My Bloody Valentine 3D have to be seen in three'd, only to later spend years decrying the existence of 3D films at all.

Mark has a theory that directors make their best work when it's something they are forced to, rather than their dream project. The ne plus ultra - Paul Andrew Williams's London To Brighton being far superior than The Cottage; also see endless references to Roger Corman ordering creative visions to be put aside to make Stripped To Kill 3. Except that Mark also theorises that directors make their best work when it's something they really care about, rather than something they are forced to do by a studio - Exhibit 1 being Garth Jennings' Son of Rambow being an infinitely superior film to his "something of a Horlicks" The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

At the time - perhaps as a result of a chastening experience with Titanic, in which one of the film's executives listened calmly to Mark's endless list of complaints, before patiently saying to him, "your problem is that you're not a teenage girl" - he actually thought Pearl Harbor was alright and that the critics who panned it were just being sniffy. He later revised this view somewhat too.

But, in fairness - and speaking of Michael Bay - Mark said while reviewing Kingsman: The Golden Syrup that if Bay had included the sort of humour in his movies that Matthew Vaughn had put in the Kingsman sequel, he would "never have forgiven" him. As he is often accused of favouring directors that he likes over ones he doesn't, Mark had to concede that he could not forgive Vaughn for it either.

Mark also notoriously once said that "computer games are rubbish", then denied ever saying it, only for it to be proved that he did when a clip of it was played during the Rant in the kitchen Christmas countdown. At which point, he said he was "right the first time".