Amy Nicholson

I've rarely seen so much effort for so little thrill.

The film doesn't demonstrate belief in much of anything except that audiences must be so desperate for a peek into these stars' private lives that we'll invest energy in their mopey fictional counterparts, who can't even invest in themselves.

McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.

The only reason to root for Riddick is that his name is on the ticket stub. But he's so dull and the hunters so weird that we're literally cheering for the movie to kill off its personality, one throat slash at a time.

This TMNT is bigger and emptier, a wasteland of pixels.

All that's missing from Just Like a Woman, Rachid Bouchareb's salute to "Thelma & Louise," is the quality.

It’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance.

The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog.

We're not sure what director Michelle Danner, who plays Herman's defensive mother in an uncredited role, wants us to get besides a reminder that angry boys act out for a host of half-defined reasons.

Just because a film holds back the truth doesn't make the truth suspenseful. It merely shortchanges the filmmaker and the audience from exploring what that truth means.

Jurassic World Rebirth is a straight monster movie with zero awe or prestige. It’s incurious about its stomping creatures and barely invested in the humans either, tasking Johansson and most of the cast to play fairly similar shades of hardy and determined.

The script has plot twists so cuckoo they make soap operas look cowardly.

While Kiriya can shoot a sword fight, his preferred pace is glacial. He wants to make sure the audience feels every plot point.

The movie comes across as a deliberately, almost defensively, inane trifle; a cupcake whose icing reads, “Enjoy the tooth decay.”

The problem isn't that these lustbirds suffer no delusions about their temporary affair. It's that Nichols and screenwriter Mark Hammer can't commit to the cynicism.

The ancient Greeks wrote tragedy after tragedy warning against hubris. Yet, Vardalos’s flailing crowd-pleaser needs a shot of self-confidence and logic.

Is it good? No. Is it fun? A little. Is there a makeover montage? Of course.

No one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.

Wolf Man is a boring body-horror endurance test that mostly takes place in one home from sundown to sunrise. There’s so much interior creaking and panting, and so little dialogue or plot, that if you closed your eyes, the projectionist could have swapped reels with a different genre of doggy style.

Labor Day is so self-conscious and phony, it must be the work of a pod person. Humans, film lovers, and fans of Reitman's till-now-flawless filmography: We've gotta fight back.

A cardboard cutout of a movie.

Apatow has drifted further and further from comedy with every film, but This is 40 is the first where he hasn't even bothered to write any jokes. Instead of snappy dialogue, we get lazy exchanges.

San Andreas can't wait for the carnage. The problem is, it's too chicken to ask us to comprehend it. It's all big, distant, unfathomable wreckage -- all shattering skyscrapers and rippling cityscapes -- with no sense of the human cost.

The disarray is baffling for the audience, and downright punishing for Hart, whose lead character is forced to shape-shift between scenes, veering from milquetoast to petty to tyrannical to pushed-around.

Let's not blame Vince Vaughn for this stale cupcake. He's halfway through his Alec Baldwin-like transition from underbaked hunk to charismatic character actor.

Lone Survivor just reads like a quasi-political exaggeration of a slasher film: the cellphones that don't work, the rescuers just out of reach, the killers chasing our victims through the woods.

When the head-scratching impossibilities are more irritating than intriguing, does the last-second explanation outweigh the two hours we've spent rolling our eyes?

Forget going soft — Ride Along proves Ice Cube's got bigger image problems than kiddie movies and Coors Light commercials.