Alan Scherstuhl

The Assassin's Creed movie is about all the parts you might skip in the games.

The story demands journalism rather than hagiography.

Some viewers, perhaps, might be shocked at the association of Mr. Rainbow Connection with scenes set in porno shops, strip clubs, and drug dens. What jolted me, though, was seeing the Henson name all over a project that’s so often bland and listless, so tame in its designs, so limited in its imagination, so joyless in its execution.

Walking Dead isn't the model, here — it's Lost, specifically the business involving that buried bunker with the outdated tech and the mystery button that must be mashed every time a Rolodex-style flip-clock counts down to zero. All of that has been copy-pasted into Air, which, sadly, doesn't even improve on Lost's resolutions.

Found-footage horror flicks laboriously source the provenance of every shot, letting us know which camera each image comes from, but they demand that we never wonder who has edited those images together — and to what purpose.

Greutert's savvy enough to sprinkle some white folks among his houngans and mambos, but Jessabelle still plays out as Haitian traditions ruining the life of a nice-ish white lady.

The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.

The story feels shapeless, un-tailored, defiantly off the rack.

It doesn't come close to working, but it's sweet that they tried.

Jaden is fine at running, jumping, fearful trembling, and affecting steely resolution. He doesn't yet have his father's charisma; perhaps to help him out, dad opted not to bring that charisma to the set.

Carl Deal and Tia Lessin's scattershot agitprop doc takes the perfidy of the billionaire Koch brothers as its given, offering up montages of Tea Party screamers rather than investigative reporting or rigorous argumentation.

Here's two hours of grimly serious puzzle-box dramatics and beat-downs starring Ben Affleck as an Affleck-shaped void.

The acting is stiff, the pacing sluggish, the framing uncertain, the music an intrusive mush and the scenario schematic. But it’s an interesting schematic, at least, complete with thoughtful/exhaustive discussion of the difference between justice, revenge and forgiveness.

The film is dismayingly formless, every point is made too many times, and there's too little drama or revelation here.

The script is based on screenwriter Denne Bart Petitclerc's actual experience befriending the author, but words that might have lived in real life here die on the screen.

Is Mojave's twisty purposelessness showing how producers ruin the work of screenwriters, or is it evidence that screenwriters often need another set of eyes?

In the end, all NOW reveals is that talented people did a difficult thing in far-off places — and that now they have a video scrapbook.

In short, Warcraft is the most wearying kind of bad movie, a dull and sad one that's less engaging a watch than just seeing the studio's millions run bill by bill through a shredder for two hours.

Cameron Crowe writes movies like he's calling us in eighth grade with his heart on fire.

I almost admire the laziness of the scripting. In this overworked, underpaid country of ours, why begrudge a screenwriter seizing the chance to knock off early?

Dante took what could have been B-movie exploitation, and he turned it into jokes Charlie Sheen would shoot down.

[A] goof/stunt of a movie.

Too much of the movie is just people being crabby (or, later, dumb!) in fascinating places, which is less enthralling than the places themselves.

What’s lost in comedy is not matched by a gain in emotional engagement.

Some of the movie isn't bad.

Before it descends into Percy Jackson and the Things That Happen in Movies Like This, the adventure at times clicks into the inventive groove of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson novels, which at their best are touched with the high strangeness of the ancient tales that inspire them.

It’s all rote, dashed through, and somewhat detestable.

This Hungarian-shot bore is so indistinct it reeks of no place more than Hollywood, where the fascinating specifics of history and legend are ground into universal mush.