Barbara VanDenburgh

Inexpert execution, lazy attention to detail and a lackluster lead performance conspire to render a juicy mystery rather boring.

There’s daring in the film’s slow unfurling. The problem, though, isn’t one of patience but of payoff. Woodshock is beautiful but it’s all chassis, a root-dead tree that crumbles beneath the ax.

Movie-release schedules are set by studios months in advance, and many are the movie that had the misfortune to open at an inopportune time. But Hotel Mumbai is responsible for myriad other poor creative decisions that make a spectacle of misery.

Rebel in the Rye is Hollywood regular Danny Strong’s feature-film directorial debut, and it fumbles for a voice in tracking the life of a writer renowned for his.

Austenland plays out like an overly elaborate excuse to have people act silly in corsets and bloomers.

That it chooses to waste a capable cast of mature actors by trotting out tired sex jokes as the enfeebled old men plot the world's most needlessly convoluted bank heist solves the mystery of why it took the film two years to limp its way to American cinemas.

For 90 minutes we’re presented with idiot characters who do terrible things to themselves and each other, and in its final gasp the movie tries to retrofit them into heroes.

If you’re just going to rip off the action movies of yore, why not rip off more of the good stuff?

The problem isn’t that it pokes fun at romantic comedies, it’s that it itself isn’t a terribly good one.

It’s a juicy story squandered by the poor telling. It’s got all the trappings of a good ol’-fashioned Merchant Ivory pic — lush locales, exotic period trappings — but none of the soul.

Except where “The Conjuring” invigorated horror-movie tropes with inventive application and strong characters, Insidious only wallows in them.

3 Generations feels focus-grouped into existence, like its every development was fine-tuned to be as inoffensively on-message as possible in its treatment of trans issues. That’s good for take-home pamphlets and afterschool specials, but deadly to dramas.

It all has the air of a community theater troupe performing in a Disney parade, overeager in the exaggerated artifice. That's well enough for an amusement park, but on film it's embarrassing.

Storks is charmless with rote obligation. This is a kid’s film for hire, with none of the creativity, emotion and design that elevate the genre to art, or even simply a fun time at the movies.

You can't get close to Bennett — not because he's a morally ambiguous character, as the movie would have you believe, but because he never puts anything on the table. He struts through every consequence, a man with nothing to lose because he never had anything worth losing in the first place.

The report is important. Its findings and the attempts to undermine them and the investigators, shouldn’t be forgotten. That The Report tries to keep these lessons in a fickle public’s consciousness is a good thing. If only anything committed to screen here were memorable.

Aside from Dance and some hazy views of impaled bodies, the film is low on shock and gore. It's aiming more for sweeping historical epic, but it doesn't work on either level.

You'd learn a lot more if you went out and, well, actually met a Mormon.

It’s befuddling that such a barrier-breaking filmmaker would make a biopic about a woman who shares similar daring qualities that’s so … ordinary. To make boring the revelries of 19th century literati is no mean feat, but it is Mary Shelley's chief accomplishment.

Its real accomplishment is that, with so much money behind it and a true visionary at the helm, it manages to feel so dated.

The characters aren’t the only things painted in broad strokes. Sweetwater is rife with gauche symbolism and imagery.

The script feels structurally inept, building up scenes and characters then cutting them off, never to be revisited. The end result is a film that feels full of staircases that lead nowhere.

The film is packed with moments of rank idiocy.

There are brief bursts of hilarity, and they are all, without exception, owed to McCarthy’s innate charisma and comedic timing.

There is the occasional cool visual and clever world-building detail, like jellyfish couture and eye-popping underwater physics, but Aquaman never fully commits to its lunacy.

When all the parts are sewn together, the end result proves as crude and slapdash as the monster itself.

Perhaps the problem isn’t one of too little ambition, but of too much. The Spy Who Dumped Me is, after all, trying earnestly to be about half a dozen different things: a buddy comedy, a spy drama, a raunch fest, a thrilling action film. It’s just that it doesn't have the focus to do any of those things particularly well.

For anyone familiar with the original Peter Rabbit, it’s a little depressing to see its storybook charm reduced to slapstick. You can only see a person get electrocuted so many times before the gag wears thin, and with it the movie’s welcome.

It’s a stumble down the catwalk not even Blue Steel can save.

All pleasures in Last Christmas are as slight. Like the Christmas shop and its baubles, it’s shiny and attractive and intermittently distracting, but it’s all just so much glitter on cheap plastic. It’s angling hard for holiday cheer, but there’s nothing more joyless than forced whimsy.

Black or White is more remarkable for what it isn't than for what it is. For example, it isn't ripe with drama. It isn't a thoughtful exploration of racial identity in America. It isn't a compelling look at judicial bias and class conflict. It is, instead, a movie that's every bit as oversimplified and obvious as its title.

The imagery is romantically period, with textured scenes staged in handsomely lit smoke-filled rooms, its newsreels and baseball stadiums suffused with charming Americana. But you can’t root for set design or feel empathy for colored filters. You need human beings for that, and The Catcher Was a Spy keeps its heart under lock and key.

It’s not the moms that are bad — it’s the movie.

For a film that purports to love dinosaurs, this bigger, flashier Walking With Dinosaurs sure doesn’t trust them to be interesting enough to carry five minutes of a movie without the copious aid of slapstick and bathroom humor in a screenplay so rote it makes creatures that have been dead for 65 million years feel less fossilized than the jokes.

For a movie filled with amateur porn, sex toys, cocaine and Cameron Diaz's butt, "Sex Tape" is awfully tame. You're in greater danger of taking a nap than needing a safe word.

Another entry in a long line of good video games adapted into terrible movies, Assassin’s Creed is ragingly stupid. That its incoherent plotline is treated with the utmost reverence by skilled thespians only brings its idiocy into sharper relief.

There is nothing brave about Bravetown, a film so paint-by-the-numbers bland that its efforts to piggyback the sacrifice of American servicemen and women for emotional depth is downright craven.

It’s a spectacularly wrong-headed, chemistry-free romance, and too dumb to know how sexist it is.

Director and co-writer Jeremy Garelick doesn't even reach high enough to pick the low-hanging fruit, opting instead to gather half-rotted, fly-infested jokes off the ground and expect Kevin Hart to make them funny by virtue of being Kevin Hart. Only grudgingly will I acknowledge that he sometimes does.

The Snowman is like if aliens studied humanity and tried to make their own movie in an attempt to communicate with us. This simulacrum contains all the requisite pieces of a movie, but humanity got lost in translation.

If there’s any social commentary being made here, it doesn’t come through in performances so wooden you can’t tell if the actors are that bad or the characters that vapid.

A by-the-numbers thriller that wouldn’t even have made for a particularly good hourlong episode of a weekly crime procedural, never mind an honest-to-God feature-length movie.

While its audacity is laudable, the film ultimately has all the thrill of watching someone else play a first-person-shooter video game.

It just feels desperate.

Landais certainly brought little cinematic verve to The Aspern Papers, telling the story largely in turgid literary voiceover lifted directly from the original source material.

The title Acts of Violence has less to do with the storyline of the movie it graces and more about what’s perpetrated against the audience watching it.

It's an unpleasant way to pass a couple summer hours.

It fails to offer as single compelling character as a sacrifice to the angry volcano.

The dialogue is agony.

I predict that within a decade, Mother’s and Daughters will be mandatory viewing at film schools across the country. There are precious few such perfect examples of how not to make a film.

There is no substance, legal or otherwise, that can make this tolerable.