Bill Goodykoontz

Without Lohan, Falling for Christmas would be another of the near-anonymous morass of holiday movies so prevalent during the season. Even with her it’s not much more.

Too often the jokes don’t land. Neither does the physical comedy. The story doesn’t really hold. It’s clear that Schneider and his daughter love each other, and this film is a way to express that. But it’s a lot to ask of the rest of us to watch it.

It’s not clear that the movie has anything to say, new or otherwise. . . . Other than that it’s just blood and guts, and lots of it.

In fairness, you can say that Mortal Kombat is pretty much exactly what you expect it to be. It’s clearly meant as the first film in a renewed franchise. But for me, it’s game over.

Maybe there’s a place in the film world for El Coyote as a cult artifact, something that years from now enthusiasts will defend as a kind of dada experiment. In the moment, though, as you suffer through it, it’s just an ill-conceived mess.

D'Souza fans and Trump apologists will flock to this, misguided moths to a misleading flame. In that way, it's a perfect representation of the current climate. In every other way, it's a mess.

These supremely talented women are put through embarrassing paces by director and co-writer Bill Holderman. It’s meant to be a film about a reawakening of desire, and thus life. It turns out to be a wince-inducing mess.

Johnson and Dornan retain the chemistry of two mannequins knocked into each other in a department-store storage closet; the actual sex scenes play more like aerobics videos than anything actually steamy.

The Dark Tower is a near-total whiff, a mess of a movie that took forever to get made and by the look of things should have taken about twice that long. Or maybe just never have been made at all.

It's bigger and louder and, if not longer (checking in at a mere two hours and 28 minutes), certainly stupider than ever before.

What a mess. Its meandering plot draws attention to the alarming lack of laughs — not what you look for in a supposed comedy.

CHIPS is a miserable movie, an exercise in stupidity that takes whatever nostalgia one had for the late-1970s television series – this assumes anyone actually had nostalgia for it — and beats it to death on a bed of idiocy. The action scenes, though, are pretty well-directed.

This is a horrible movie. Which makes it not a lot different from the first film.

In the past, I’ve given D’Souza the benefit of the doubt, going out of my way to be extra objective. I actually gave “2016: Obama’s America” a somewhat positive review in 2012 (3 out of 5 stars). But this thing is madness.

Director Jessie Nelson shoots it all like a Hallmark card that comes to life, which sounds like a cliche, which it is, which is the point.

On the plus side, Jones is a really good makeup artist, and he is adept at creating gross-out dead people and wounds, and violent acts intense enough that they make you want to look away. On the minus side, the acting and story are so bad you want to look away anyway. Follow that instinct.

The purpose of San Andreas is not to make us think, but to make us gape, to pummel us with effect and effect until we finally give in. Fair enough. Uncle. I need a Tylenol anyway.

A relentlessly unfunny comedy, it wastes the talents of Reese Witherspoon and Sofia Vergara as egregiously as one could possibly imagine, resorting to lame jokes, cliches and incompetent storytelling to pass the time.

Aside from the waste of talent, the frustrating thing about The Lazarus Effect is how it cheats. Good horror movies work on internal logic.

Hot Tub Time Machine 2 is a movie that didn't need to be made, and certainly doesn't need to be seen — not when you can rent the original and still feel good about yourself afterward.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be swept away — about as much as you would be by artificial roses. Movies like this may look like the real thing, but they're not.

Left Behind is a terrible movie, bad in almost every way, not even qualifying as so-bad-it's-good material.

We get it, we get it: Capitalism is good, government is bad. But Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? is worse.

Vincent Grashaw's film, although well-meaning (as a postscript reminds us), tries too hard, both in content and form.

There is very little on the screen to capture your attention.

Dinesh D'Souza's America: Imagine a World Without Her paints a genuinely troublesome portrait of the country — just not at all in the way he intends.

It's big, it's loud and it's all over the place, never really making a lick of sense. To his credit, sort of, director Michael Bay tries to insert a little story into the film early on, even a little humor, but that's overrun at some point by explosions and plot digressions.

If nothing else, it's consistent — consistently stupid, with things like character development and story advancement never getting in the way of another parkour stunt.