Alan Scherstuhl

Mathew Cullen’s calamitous film adaptation of Martin Amis’ London Fields plays like the hazy recollection of someone who hated the book, an incomprehensible jumble of misogynistic claptrap. It dashes joylessly through dense material, too quickly for individual moments to register, much less resonate.

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.

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

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?

The sequel is so profound a buzzkill they could sell it at GNC as a detox kit. No high can survive it. It slays fun dead, grinds cannabinoids to dust, and maybe even wipes the mind of the warmth you might hold for the original Super Troopers.

The Bellas aren’t invested in the film’s competition, and the filmmakers’ aren’t invested in it, and you probably won’t be, either.

Don't expect style or invention, much less satire. Its only interest as an experiment is that, out of duty, the roomful of critics I saw it with all stuck around until the end.

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

Maybe you'll be at a dinner. Maybe nobody will believe you. Or maybe they will, and someone will say, "Hollywood is terrible at making movies about trauma.”

The country songs that play over the credits offer more arresting detail about life on the line than the film manages in 100 minutes.

Jaye acknowledges in the opening and closing minutes that MRAs sometimes spew nasty garbage online, but she never presses them on this in her many interviews. Instead, she lets them moan about how hard it is to be a dude in 2016.

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

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.

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?

Rockwell is charmless in a role that seems to be written that way.

Stonewall aspires to be a sweeping tale of social change and hardscrabble street life, but at every moment it feels like a musical whose numbers have been cut.

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.

The story demands journalism rather than hagiography.

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

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

Even if, like me, you agree with the points that it's fumbling toward, The True Cost will likely read as dopey and insulting.

Examinations of faith on film don't have to be noxious.

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.

[A] goof/stunt of a movie.

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.

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.

The movie's so slipshod and half-assed that I almost feel for Rand, whose ideas have proved enduring enough that they at least deserve a fair representation, if only for the sake of refutation.