A.A. Dowd

The real shame is that Joey King got yanked into this cut-rate crap.

This time around, Leatherface is just a run-of-the-mill bogeyman, slaughtering a new generation of lambs for the sins of our age. It’s a sequel as pretentious as its chainsaw fodder: an act of genre gentrification.

There’s absence here, all right—of scares, of imagination, and of a good reason to pick up that camera in the first place.

Definitively establishing that “state-of-the-art” and “chintzy” are not mutually exclusive qualities, Warcraft is a perplexing multiplex boondoggle: Rarely is so much time, money, and cutting-edge technology expended on a spectacle so devoid of wonder.

What’s really been withheld, in this dreary drag of a movie, is a reason to care.

A nattering chore of a “family” comedy that feels written by committee and directed by indifferent machine.

Move over, "Rudy." Hit the showers, "Brian’s Song." There’s a new tearjerking true story of gridiron triumph, one that combines those male-weepie favorites in a way no focus group could possibly resist.

Making audiences care about the characters is always a more effective fear-generating strategy than just knocking off a bunch of dimwits in the dark.

Whether uncritically brought over in remake translation or genuinely reaffirmed, the movie’s fucked-up politics poison the fun. By the end, which creates an unmistakably symmetrical arc for Paul, Death Wish has all but devolved into a scare-tactics advertisement for locked-and-loaded home protection.

Ultimately, only Billy Eichner and Seth Rogen, as slacker sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa, make much of an impression; their funny, possibly ad-libbed banter feels both fresh and true to the spirit of the characters—the perfect remake recipe. Just don’t look too hard at their character designs. They’re realistic, hideously.

It’s the weirdest film of his (Zemeckis) career. One of the worst, too.

Dumb And Dumber To is crueler, crasser, grosser, lazier, creepier, and, yes, dumber than the first film.

A generic and frankly very tedious compendium of YA clichés.

In practice, it’s also really tedious: a slow death by nostalgia.

A sequel so slapdash and ineffectual that its army of directors — six of them total, counting the poor sucker whose contribution got axed — might well be accused of intentionally burying the franchise. More charitably, perhaps they were trying to put a nail in the coffin of all found-footage horror. Some good must come from this much bad.

Redeeming Love is a kinky power fantasy in the halfway convincing disguise of wholesome faith-based entertainment.

Perhaps one of the two already-in-the-works Planes sequels will crack one of these unholy machines open. That’d be about the only reason to return to this nose-diving franchise.

In Countdown, it’s the audience that really gets cheated.

The movie surrounds its mismatched stars with a whole lot of shockingly inconsistent special effects, preaching a sentimental yuletide message even as it looks like the height of soulless commercialization.

Hardcore genre fans might appreciate a few of the gorier moments, but they also might agree that a movie called Beaten to Death should not be as drearily maudlin as this.

The Wedding Ringer has so many gay jokes that some of them apparently didn’t even make the final cut.

How bad is No One Lives, the new bottom-feeding schlock-fest from WWE Studios? Simply put: It’s bad enough to make some of the studio’s other offerings, like the Steve Austin deathmatch movie "The Condemned" and the Kane-starring slasher flick "See No Evil," look like genre gems.

Zombie’s new movie, 31, is all attitude. It’s also the worst thing he’s ever made—interminable, incoherent, and devoid of suspense.

Scene for scene, line for line, gag for gag, it’s basically the same movie. And the original was no masterpiece to begin with.

There’s nothing remotely clever about this web-based fright flick, visually or conceptually. It’s flimsy genre junk of the most generic variety, just with a really groan-worthy Facebook spin.

Costner, by contrast, is too laidback to intimidate; he seems less battle-wearied than simply weary, nailing only half of the profitable “aging ass-kicker” equation. Firefights and car chases just don’t suit this movie star of advancing years.

This is a memory we’re watching, so of course it’s going to be vaguely distorted, its cracks plugged by cliché. Even if you buy that, though, American Pastoral still gives off the strong impression of a rich, complicated story that’s been flattened of its nuance.

To turn Leatherface into a tragic figure, twisted by traumatic upbringing into a monster, is to forget that he’s scariest as a force of nature, which tend to be tough to diagnose. Remember, no one cares what the shark from Jaws was like as a tortured guppy.